Richard Doetsch - The 13th Hour

“Julia, I love you.” Nick directed her into the driver’s seat. “You’ve got sixty seconds to get out of here.”

He turned and walked to the house.

“Where are you going?” Julia called out as she rolled down the window.

Nick looked over his shoulder at her as he walked through the garage. “I think I know how to stop this madness.” He didn’t dare say that he was going to kill the son of a bitch who killed her.

He grabbed the door handle to the mudroom, pulled open the door-

– and found himself standing in his library. He shook off the cold, his body growing more accustomed to the jump. He didn’t need to look at the watch to know what had happened. He felt for the gun at the small of his back, confirming its presence.

He walked out of the room through the foyer and into the kitchen.

“Can I make you something to eat?” Julia said as she looked into the darkened fridge, smiling, not knowing what lay ahead.

“I’ll be back in a little while,” Nick said, surprised to see her home.

“Don’t forget about dinner.”

As much as he didn’t want to have dinner with the Mullers, and despite the fact that he had gotten so angry about it, he would gladly have dinner with the annoying Mullers for the next month if he could just get through this upside-down day and be assured that Julia would be dining at his side.

Everything revolved around the robbery that had occurred this morning. That’s where the answers lay, that’s where he would find and stop Julia’s killer.

Nick quietly walked through the mudroom and reached into Julia’s purse hanging on the wall. He grabbed her PDA, quickly searched for and found a security card and set of keys. He slipped them into his pocket and headed out the garage door.

4:03 P.M.

THE WHITE COLONIAL HOUSE on Maple Avenue was just one of several homes owned by Shamus Hennicot, who, for the past thirty years, had summered with his family at their home on Martha’s Vineyard. The house had traditionally remained vacant during July and August but for Julia Quinn, who would stop by upon request to attend to any matters concerning Hennicot’s art collection and charitable contributions.

Unofficially known as Washington House, Hennicot’s home had been built at the beginning of the twentieth century, long after George Washington could ever have slept there. While it was considered a historic landmark of the town, a home from the hamlet’s infancy, in actuality, it retained only two exterior walls from its original design.

At the time of its construction in 1901, at just over ten thousand square feet, it was the largest house in all of the county. What was once the centerpiece of the quaint town of Byram Hills had, like the town surrounding it, become lost in a myriad of development over the last century. But unlike many of the neighboring homes and buildings that had been torn down for the sake of progress, Washington House had adapted with the times. With the advent of cars, garages were added. It had been the first home in town with hot and cold running water. The sixties brought air-conditioning and insulated, double-paned windows. The interior was in a constant flux, walls built, removed, expanded; rooms added, subtracted, combined; modern kitchens designed, starting with 1930s dishwashers and moving on to present-day Sub-Zero refrigerators and Viking stoves.

Wireless broadband, satellite television, energy-efficient heating, and multiroom entertainment systems were installed, all of which saw little use by the elderly Shamus Hennicot and his family.

But its greatest modification, one not known by the town planning board, or by the utility companies, or by any local contractor, was the elaborate renovation of the lower level, fondly referred to by the family as Dante’s Vault-reinforced concrete walls, a half-inch steel ceiling and floor, all covered in a dark walnut sheathing of coffered ceilings, wainscoting, and ornamental trim. It was an elegant vault of enormous proportions, giving an aesthetically pleasing English Manor feel to a fortress that was thought to be impenetrable.

The securing of the basement was the brainchild of Shamus Hennicot. While he was considered the most benevolent and charitable of a long line of misers, making frequent anonymous gifts and loans from his father’s art collection, it was he who had thought there were some things too tempting to modern man, things that needed to be hidden away for reasons that only he could explain.

Nick parked his Audi at the back of the house, grabbed his flashlight off the seat, and used Julia’s keys and pass card to open the heavy steel fire door in the back. Once in the small vestibule, he used the magna-card to gain access to the magnetically sealed inner door. All the lights were out, the batteries on the emergency lights having died out hours ago, while the basics of the security system remained operational with a twenty-four-battery backup continuing to operate the pass system and locks.

Nick made the once-over of the first floor, the afternoon light more than sufficient to see by. It had all the trappings of a modern home: living room, dining room, kitchen, family room while in a separate wing was a library, billiard room, and music room.

Nick bypassed the upper level and, using the encrypted pass card, opened a large, heavy cellar door, its whitewashed wood veneer covering a three-inch steel core, that led to a dark set of stairs. Nick flipped on his flashlight, surprised to see the expensive green fleur-de-lis wallpaper and thickly carpeted stairs. Nick headed down the fifteen steps, arriving at another door. But this one was different, made of brushed steel and lacking doorknobs and hinges. He pulled out the oddly shaped key from Julia’s purse. She had told him of the eight-sided key and explained the security system earlier-or later, depending on which time line he was riding on.

Octagonal in shape, the key could be inserted eight different ways, with only one providing access. Each face was labeled with a letter that corresponded to a rotating specific date of the year. If the key was inserted the wrong way twice you would be locked out for twenty-four hours. But even worse, the door behind you would seal shut, trapping you until someone arrived. The entire basement was truly worthy of being called a safe.

Nick punched in Julia’s Social Security number on the keypad below the card reader, swiped the magna-card three times, and inserted the key with the D side up as Julia had mentioned. Finally, with a turn of the key, the door silently swung open.

Nick was greeted by a table-case display in the center of a large museum-like lobby, the beam of his flashlight refracting off its clear surface, its glass top conspicuously violated by a large perfect circle cut out of its center. The case, no doubt once the repository for some of the antique weapons Julia had described to him, was empty.

What struck him as odd was the picture of water lilies on the near wall. There was no question whose hand had rendered it. With its visible brush strokes and blurred images of flowers upon the water, the piece had a strong impressionist flavor. And while its beauty was beyond compare, it stood out like an albatross as it stared down upon the broken glass. For while the antique weapons snatched from this level were of staggering value, they no way near approached the value of one of Claude Monet’s finest pieces, a work whose sister had recently sold for $80 million.

Going through the lower level, he found conference rooms, art restoration labs, humidity-controlled storage spaces filled with hundreds of crates with addresses to and from the world’s finest museums: the Smithsonian, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre, the Vatican. Crates of all shapes and sizes containing who knew what.