Steve Berry - The Jefferson Key

He studied a diagram.

Satisfied, he stepped back outside into a beautiful late-summer morning and decided that quick and fast was the only way to get this job done.

He made his way toward where a shuttle bus would ferry him and the first group nearly nine hundred feet up the mountainside. The fifty or so people consisted of many teenagers. A life-sized bronze of Thomas Jefferson waited with them near the curb. A tall man, he noticed, over six feet. He studied the likeness with a few of the youngsters.

“This ought to be neat,” one of them said.

He agreed.

A little fun.

Like the old days.

MALONE AND CASSIOPEIA MOTORED INTO THE MONTICELLO visitor center. Edwin Davis stood at the base of a stairway, waiting for them. Cassiopeia ignored a parking attendant, who was directing her toward a vacant part of the lot, and wheeled to the curb, switching off the engine.

“I arranged for you to see the wheel,” Davis said to them. “I’ve spoken with the foundation chair, and the estate manager is here to take us up to the house.”

Malone had never before visited any former president’s home. He’d always meant to come here and Mt. Vernon, but had just never made the time. One of those father-son trips. He wondered what Gary, his sixteen-year-old, was doing today. He’d called Friday when they arrived in New York and talked with him for half an hour. Gary was growing up fast. He seemed a levelheaded kid, particularly pleased to hear that his father had finally made a move on Cassiopeia.

She’s hot, the boy had said.

That she was.

“The manager is waiting by the shuttle buses with a car,” Davis said. “Only estate vehicles are allowed to drive up. We can slip in with the first tour and see the wheel. It’s displayed on the ground floor, then we can take it upstairs where there’s privacy.”

“Cotton can go,” Cassiopeia said. “You and I need to talk.”

Malone caught the look in her eye-that something was troubling her-and one other thing.

Her suggestion was not open for debate.

“Okay,” Davis said. “You and I will stay here.”

HALE WAITED FOR BOLTON TO COW TO HIM AND, FINALLY, THE weak soul, as expected, retreated to the other side of the room.

Tensions eased but did not dissipate.

“President Daniels will not want his private life exposed,” he said. “There has never been a hint of scandal regarding him or his wife. America believes them to be the perfect couple. Can you imagine what the twenty-four-hour news channels and the Internet would do with this? Daniels would forever be known as the cuckold president. He’ll never allow that to happen. Gentlemen, we can use this.”

He saw that the other three did not necessarily agree.

“When were you going to tell us?” Cogburn asked again. “Edward is justified in being angry. We’re all angry, Quentin.”

“There was no sense speaking of it until I was sure that it could be used. Now, I am sure.”

Surcouf stepped to the bar and filled a glass with bourbon. Hale could use one himself, but decided a clear head would be better.

“We can quietly apply pressure and stop these prosecutions,” he said. “As I told all three of you a month ago, there’s no need to kill a president. The talking heads on television and bloggers of the Internet will do it for you. This president has shown us no courtesy. We owe him nothing, unless he wants to accommodate us now.”

“Who is the woman you’re holding in the prison?” Cogburn asked.

He’d wondered when they’d finally ask. “The head of an intelligence unit within the Justice Department called Magellan Billet. Stephanie Nelle.”

“Why do we have her?”

He could not tell them the truth. “She was becoming a problem for us. Investigating.”

“Isn’t she a little late?” Bolton asked. “We’ve been investigated to death.”

“I saw her watching the execution from a cell window,” Cogburn said.

Finally. One of them had paid attention. “My hope was that it would send her a message.”

“Quentin,” Surcouf said, “do you have any idea what you’re doing? It seems like you’re headed in three different directions. Taking a hostage could bring even more heat on us.”

“More so than trying to kill a president? And I truly hate to keep harping on that, but not a soul knows my prisoner is here, besides us. Right now, as far as they are concerned, she is simply missing.”

Of course, he did not include Andrea Carbonell in that disclaimer. Which brought to mind the second traitor. If that person existed, he or she could well know of Stephanie Nelle’s presence. But if that was the case, why hadn’t anyone acted to save her?

The answer to that inquiry reassured him.

Surcouf pointed at the recorder. “You could be right, Quentin. Daniels may not want this made public.”

“And the price for our silence is quite reasonable,” he said. “We simply want the American government to keep its word.”

“There’s a chance Daniels won’t give a damn,” Bolton said. “He may tell you to stick it up your ass, like they did the first time you went begging.”

He resented the comment, but there was something else that required mentioning. “Did you notice an omission during that taped conversation?”

“I did,” Cogburn said. “No name. Who’s the man the First Lady is messing around with?”

He smiled. “Now, that’s what makes this so intriguing.”

WYATT STEPPED INSIDE MONTICELLO WITH THE FIRST TOUR group of the day. He’d learned that visitors came in bunches of thirty, escorted by a guide who explained each room and answered questions. He noticed the guides were mainly older, volunteers most likely, and groups stayed clustered, spaced about five minutes apart.

He stood in what the guide called the entrance foyer, just inside the east portico. The spacious two-story room cast the appearance of a museum-which had been Jefferson’s intention, the guide explained-displaying maps, antlers, sculptures, paintings, and artifacts. The second floor was visible through a semi-octagonal balcony. Thin, closely spaced balusters topped by a mahogany rail protected the outer edge. Everyone’s attention was directed to Jefferson’s dual-faced clock, displaying time and day of the week, its cannonball-like weights traveling through holes in the floor to the cellar. He feigned interest in two Old Master paintings and the busts of Voltaire, Turgot, and Alexander Hamilton while absorbing the layout.

They drifted into a sitting room adjacent to the hall.

Jefferson’s daughter, Martha, and her family had used the cramped space as their private living quarters. He retreated to one corner so the rest of the group could enter the next room on the tour before him. He noticed that the guide would wait and close the door of the preceding room before addressing the group in the next. He assumed that was so the tour behind them could enjoy their visit uninterrupted.

“This is Jefferson’s sanctum sanctorum. His most private place,” the guide told the group in the new space.

Wyatt studied the library.

Many of the walls remained lined with shelving. In Jefferson’s time, the guide explained, they would have been fronted by pine boxes, stacked one atop the other-folios at the bottom, followed by quartos, octavos, duodecimos, with petit-formats on top. Nearly 6700 volumes at its peak, all of them eventually sold to the United States to form the Library of Congress after the British burned the capitol in 1814, destroying the nation’s first collection of books. Tall windows that opened like doors led out to a louvered porch and greenhouse.

But what drew Wyatt’s attention lay at the far end.