Steve Berry - The Alexandria Link

Unlike her, though, he’d managed to seize every one that had come his way.

The army. Special forces. Europe. The Chairs.

For sixteen years he’d labored for others, doing their bidding, accepting their tokens, satisfied with their meager praise.

Now it was time to labor for himself.

Risky? Certainly.

But the Circle respected power, admired cleverness, and negotiated only with strength. He wanted a membership. Perhaps even a Chair. Even more, if the lost Library of Alexandria contained what Alfred Hermann believed, he might well be able to affect the world.

That meant Power.

In his hands.

He had to find the library.

And the man sitting across the aisle on the TAP flight from London to Lisbon was going to lead the way.

Cotton Malone and his ex-wife had solved the first part of the hero’s quest in only a few minutes. He was confident they could decipher the rest and, once that was done, he’d eliminate them both.

But he wasn’t stupid. Malone would certainly be wary.

He’d just have to be unpredictable.

STEPHANIE WATCHED AS CASSIOPEIA TRIPPED THE LOCK ON the back door to Larry Daley’s house.

“Less than a minute,” she said. “Not bad. They teach you that at Oxford?”

“Actually, I did learn to pick my first lock there. A liquor cabinet, if I recall.”

She opened the door and listened.

Beeps dinged from an adjacent hall. Stephanie raced to the keypad and punched in a four-digit code, hoping the fool hadn’t altered the sequence.

The beeping stopped and the indicator light changed from red to green.

“How did you know?”

“My girl watched him enter it.”

Cassiopeia shook her head. “Is he an idiot?”

“It’s called thinking with the wrong head. He thought she was there only to please him.”

She studied the sunlit interior. A modern décor. Lots of black, silver, white, and gray. Abstract art dotted the walls. No meaning anywhere. No feeling. How fitting.

“What are we after?” Cassiopeia asked.

“This way.”

She followed a short hall to an alcove that, she knew, served as an office. Her agent had reported that Daley downloaded everything onto password-secured flash drives, never keeping any data on either his laptop or White House computer. The call girl her agent had hired to seduce Daley spotted that idiosyncracy one evening while Daley worked on the computer and she worked on him.

She told Cassiopeia what she knew. “Unfortunately, she didn’t actually see his hiding place.”

“Too busy?”

She smiled. “We all have our jobs. And don’t knock it. Call girls are some of the most productive sources.”

“And you say I’m twisted.”

“We need to find his hiding place.”

Cassiopeia plopped down into a wooden desk chair that accepted her meager weight with squeaks and groans. “Has to be in easy reach.”

Stephanie inventoried the alcove. The desk supported a blotter, a pen-and-pencil holder, and pictures of Daley with the president and vice president, along with a reading lamp. A narrow set of floor-to-ceiling shelves consumed two of the walls. The whole alcove was about six feet square. The floor, like the rest of the house, was hardwood.

Not many hiding places.

The books on the shelves drew her attention. Daley seemed to love political treatises. There weren’t many-a hundred or so. Paperbacks and hardcovers mixed, many of the bindings veined with cracks, indicating that the pages had been read. She shook her head. “A connoisseur of modern politics, and he reads all sides.”

“Why do you have such an attitude toward him?”

“Just always felt like I need to take a shower after being around him. Not to mention he tried to fire me from day one.” She paused. “And finally succeeded.”

A key scraped in the front-door lock.

Stephanie’s head whirled. She stared back down the hall toward the front of the house.

The door opened and she heard Larry Daley’s voice. Then she heard another person. Female.

Heather Dixon.

She motioned and they darted down the hall into one of the bedrooms.

“Let me get the alarm,” Daley said.

A few seconds of silence.

“That’s strange,” Daley said.

“Problem?”

Stephanie immediately knew. She’d neglected to reset the system after they’d entered.

“I’m sure I set that alarm before I left,” Daley said.

A few moments of silence, then she heard the click of a bullet being chambered.

“Let’s take a look around,” Dixon said.

LISBON

3:30 PM

MALONE STARED AT THE MONASTERY OF SANTA MARIA DE Belém. He, Pam, and Jimmy McCollum had flown from London to Lisbon then taken a cab from the airport to the waterfront.

Lisbon sat perched on a broad switchback of hills that overlooked the sea-like Tejo estuary, a place of wide symmetrical boulevards and handsome tree-filled squares. One of the world’s grandest suspension bridges spanned the mighty river and led to a towering statue of Christ, arms outstretched, which embraced the city from the eastern shore. Malone had visited many times and was always reminded of San Francisco, both in physical makeup and in the city’s propensity for earthquakes. Several had left their mark.

All countries possessed splendid things. Egypt, the pyramids. Italy, St. Peter’s. England, Westminster. France, Versailles. Listening to the cabdriver on the ride from the airport, he knew that, for Portugal, national pride came from the abbey that sprawled out before him. Its white limestone façade stretched longer than a football field, aged like old ivory, and combined Moorish, Byzantine, and French Gothic in an exuberance of decorations that seemed to breathe life into the towering walls.

People crowded everywhere. A camera-toting parade streamed in and out from the entrances. Across a busy boulevard and train tracks that fronted the impressive south façade, tourist buses waited in an angled line, like ships moored in a harbor. A sign informed visitors of how the abbey was first erected in 1500 to satisfy a promise made by King Manuel I to the Virgin Mary and was built on the site of an old mariners’ hospice first constructed by Prince Henry the Navigator. Columbus, da Gama, and Magellan had all prayed here before their journeys. Through the centuries the massive structure had served as a religious house, a retirement home, and an orphanage. Now it was a World Heritage Site, restored to much of its former glory.

“The church and abbey are dedicated to St. Jerome,” he heard one of the tour guides say to a crowd in Italian. “Symbolic in that both Jerome and this monastery represented new points of departure for Christianity. Ships left here to discover the New World and bring them Christ. Jerome translated the ancient Bible into Latin, so more could discover its wonder.” He could tell that McCollum understood the woman, too.

“Italian one of your languages?” he asked.

“I know enough.”

“A man of many talents.”

“Whatever’s necessary.”

He caught the surly attitude. “So what’s next in this quest?”

McCollum produced another slip of paper upon which was written some of the first excerpt and more of the cryptic phrases.

It is a mystery, but visit the chapel beside the Tejo, in Bethlehem, dedicated to our patron saint. Begin the journey in the shadows and complete it in the light, where a retreating star finds a rose, pierces a wooden cross, and converts silver to gold. Find the place that forms an address with no place, where is found an other place. Then, like the shepherds of the painter Poussin, puzzled by the enigma, you will be flooded with the light of inspiration.

He handed the sheet to Pam and said, “Okay. Let’s take a visit and see what’s there.”