Steve Berry - The Alexandria Link

“Now I’m getting sick.”

Daley shook his head. “It was about a month later when the VP’s chief of staff and I were alone. Asshole that he is, he still likes to brag. That’s what usually gets guys like that in trouble. We’d had a few drinks and he made some comments. By then I was suspicious, so I kept a pocket recorder on me. I got some good stuff that night.”

Cassiopeia stood from her table and walked toward the glass wall. Outside, cars came and went in the shaded parking lot.

“He talked about the Twenty-fifth Amendment. How he’d been studying it, learning details. He asked me what I knew about it, which wasn’t much. I acted disinterested and drunk, though I was neither.”

She knew what the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution said.

In case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become President.

SINAI PENINSULA

MALONE CHECKED HIS WATCH: 11:58 AM. HE’D ALREADY glanced through the two openings once and seen nothing. Pam and McCollum stood below him as he balanced atop the fourteen stones.

Noon arrived and a carillon of bells pealed in the distance.

“That’s eerie,” Pam said. “Out here in the middle of nowhere.”

He agreed. “Sounds a ways off.” Like from heaven, he thought.

The sun blazed overhead. His body and fatigues were damp with perspiration.

He stared back through the openings.

Point after point, stretching down the backbone of the ridge, came into view. What may have been hermit caves dotted the rock wall like black eyes. Then he noticed something. A stony trail etched up one of the mounds. A camel track? He’d checked in Lisbon before they left and learned that the mountains of this region concealed fertile hollows the local Bedouins called farsh. Usually that meant a water source and drew whatever few inhabitants the land enjoyed. St. Catherine’s monastery to the south, near Moses Mountain, occupied a farsh. He’d assumed more surrounded him.

He watched as shadows disappeared and the color of the granite mountains transformed from pewter to beet red. The twisting course of the path up the hillside, now maroon, assumed the shape of a serpent. The two openings framed the view like a painting.

See the endless coil of the serpent red with anger.

“Anything?” Pam asked him.

“Everything.”

STEPHANIE GLARED AT LARRY DALEY. “YOU’RE TELLING ME that the vice president is planning to murder the president?”

“That’s exactly what I think is happening.”

“And how are you the only one on the planet who’s noticed this?”

“I don’t know, Stephanie. Maybe I’m just a smart guy. But I know something is happening.”

She needed to learn more. That’s why Daniels had sent her.

“Larry, you’re just trying to save your ass.”

“Stephanie, you’re like the fellow who’s searching for a lost quarter beneath a streetlight. A guy comes along and asks what’s he doing. He says, ”I’m looking for my lost quarter.“ Guy says, ”Where did you lose it?“ The fellow points off in the distance and says, ”Over there.“ The guy’s puzzled, so he asks, ”Why are you looking here?“ And the man says, ”Because this is where the light is.“ That’s you, Stephanie. Quit looking where the light is and look where you need to.”

“Then give me something concrete.”

“Wish I could. It’s just the little things that all add up. Meetings the VP has avoided that a candidate would not. Pissing off people whom he’s going to need. Unconcerned with the party. Nothing overt. Little things that a political junkie like me would notice. There’s only a few of us on the inside who would even be privy to these things. These men keep things close.”

“Is Brent Green one of those men?”

“I have no idea. Brent’s a strange one. The outsider to everyone. I tried to push him yesterday. Threatened him. But he didn’t rattle. I wanted to see how he’d react. Then when you appeared in my house and found that book, I knew you had to be my ally.”

“You may have chosen wrong, Larry. I don’t believe a word you say. Killing a president is not easy.”

“I don’t know about that. Every presidential assassin, whether actual or would-be, was either deranged, loony, or lucky. Imagine what professionals could do.”

He had a point there.

“Where are those flash drives?” he asked.

“I have them.”

“I hope so, because if anyone else does we’re in trouble. They’ll know I’m on to them. Me recording those conversations with the VP’s chief of staff would be impossible to explain. I need those back, Stephanie.”

“Not going to happen. I have a suggestion, Larry. Why don’t you just turn yourself in, confess to bribing Congress, and ask for federal protection? Then you can spout all this bullshit to anyone who’ll listen.”

He sat back in his chair. “You know, I thought for once you and I might have a civil conversation. But no, you want to be a smug-ass. I did what I had to, Stephanie, because that’s what the president wanted.”

Now she was interested.

“He knew what you were doing with Congress?”

“How else do you think my stock rose so fast in the White House? He wanted things passed and I made sure that happened. This president has been successful in Congress, which also explains how he easily managed a second term.”

“You have proof of his involvement?”

“Like I taped Daniels? No. Just reality, Stephanie. Somebody has to make things happen. It’s the way of the world. I’m Daniels’s guy. I know it, and he knows it.”

She glanced over at Cassiopeia and recalled what the other woman had said on the way over. They truly did not know who to trust, including the president.

Daley stood from the table and tossed down a couple of dollars for the tip. “The other day you and Green thought this was all about Daniels’s legacy. I told you what you wanted to hear to rock you to sleep.” Daley shook his head. “This is about Daniels continuing to breathe. You’re a waste of time. I’ll handle this another way.”

MALONE LED THE WAY UP THE GAUNT ESCARPMENT. EAGLES and buzzards patrolled overhead. The golden sunlight penetrated his brain and suffused his sweaty body. A light wash of rock littered the trail, the parched topsoil a loamy deposit of sand and silt.

He followed the serpentine path to the top, where three massive boulders had long ago toppled and created a tunnel across the crown. Fine dust, sounding like water splashing, rained off the stones. Despite the sun, the corridor was cool. He welcomed the shade. The other side loomed thirty feet away.

Ahead, he suddenly spotted a flash of red.

“You see that?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Pam said.

They stopped and watched as it happened again.

Then he realized what was occurring. The noonday sun, as it found gaps between the three fallen stones, played itself off the red granite and colored the tunnel crimson.

Interesting phenomenon.

See the endless coil of the serpent red with anger .

“Apparently,” he said, “there’s lots of angry red serpents around here.”

Halfway through he noticed words etched into the granite. He stopped and read the Latin, translating out loud.

“Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.” He knew the passage. “From Exodus. What God said to Moses from the Burning Bush.”

“Is this where that happened?” Pam asked.

“No one knows. The mountain about twenty miles south of here, Jebel Musa, is accepted by all three religions as the place. But who knows?”