Дэвид Балдаччи - The Collectors

Milton looked away while Caleb turned pale and seemed wobbly on his feet. Annabelle’s and Reuben’s gazes were locked on the mortally wounded man.

Stone looked down at the dying man without a trace of pity. “If you’re going to kill someone, kill him, don’t have a conversation with him.”

As Roger Seagraves quietly expired, they heard sirens in the distance. “I called Alex Ford when I realized that Chambers’ house backed up to the bookshop,” Stone explained.

“That’s why I did this, you know,” Chambers said, finally pulling his gaze away from the now dead Seagraves. “For books. To acquire them, keep them safe for the next generation. With the money I earned I’ve purchased some amazing specimens. I really have.” He looked up to see them all staring at him in disgust.

Chambers slowly rose. “I have something to give you, Caleb.”

A suspicious Stone followed him over to the counter. When he reached in a drawer, Stone grabbed his hand. “I’ll do that.”

“It’s not a weapon,” Chambers protested.

“We’ll see, won’t we?” Stone pulled out a small box, opened it, glanced inside and closed it. He handed it over to Caleb. Inside was the first-edition Bay Psalm Book.

“Thank you, God!” Caleb screamed in relief. Then he looked at Chambers in amazement. “How did you get this? You didn’t have the code or key to the vault.”

“You recall that I felt ill as we were about to leave the vault and you offered to fetch me a glass of water from the bathroom down there? As soon as you left, I opened the small safe. I’d watched you unlock it and saw what the code was: the number of the reading room. I took the book and put it in my jacket. When you came back with the water, you closed up the vault and we left.”

Reuben groaned. “You dork; you left him in the vault all by himself?”

Caleb snapped, “Well, I didn’t expect him to steal the damn thing.”

Chambers stared down at his hands. “It was just an impulse on my part. Once I’d taken it, I was both terrified and thrilled. I’d never done anything like that before; I’m scrupulously honest with my clients. But that book. To even hold it!” His eyes gleamed for an instant and then dulled just as fast. “At least I can say I had it, if only for a little while. I kept pushing you to get the book evaluated because I thought that would throw suspicion away from me when the loss was discovered.”

Annabelle looked in the box. “Oh, that book! So he did keep it.”

Caleb stared at her in disbelief. “What? You know about this?” he demanded.

“Oh, it’s a long story,” she said hastily.

Alex Ford and an army of agents arrived a minute later. Surprisingly, Albert Trent was still alive, though badly wounded. His bundle of travel documents inside his jacket pocket had partially blocked the bullet. He was taken away in an ambulance. Chambers gave a detailed statement to the police, recounting all that he had already told the others. As Chambers was being led away, he said to Caleb, “Please take care of the Psalm Book. ”

Caleb’s reply surprised everyone, maybe himself most of all. “It’s just a damn book, Monty or Vincent or whoever the hell you really are. I’d much prefer to have Jonathan alive and well over this lump of old paper.” He held up the priceless Psalm Book before dropping it unceremoniously in the box.

As the story unfolded over time, most of the deductions made by Stone and the others proved correct. Bradley was killed because he was about to force Trent to leave the committee staff, making it impossible for him and Seagraves to continue their seemingly innocent relationship. And Behan was murdered because he’d uncovered that Jonathan had been killed using the CO 2stolen from his company.

They also learned from Chambers’ account that one of Trent’s men, who had gotten a job at Fire Control, Inc., had gone into the reading room vault and placed a small camera in the air duct under the pretense of adjusting the gas nozzle located there. Annabelle and Caleb hadn’t seen this on the tape they’d reviewed because it occurred on a Saturday, when the room was closed, and the tape machine wasn’t turned on. Yet they, of course, had seen something even more critical: Jewell English’s sleight of hand with the glasses, which had ultimately led them to the truth.

A man had been posted in the basement halon storage room waiting for DeHaven to draw into the kill zone. On the second day he unfortunately had, and his life ended before he told anyone what he’d seen. Chambers had admitted to having gone into the vault later and retrieving the camera.

Milton had given the coded letters to representatives from the NSA, and they had already decrypted it. From the little Stone and the others learned, the code was based on a centuries-old encryption formula. It was easily breakable by modern-day decryption techniques with their massive computing power, but Seagraves had no doubt assumed that no one would ever suspect Monty Chambers, Norman Janklow and Jewell English of being spies. And modern-day ciphertexts were all electronically generated, requiring keys consisting of massively long numbers to remain secure against brute-force assaults and other attacks by computers, which would have been impossible to replicate in an old book.

Trent had recovered from his wounds and was busily talking, especially when he learned that the government was trying mightily to pin the death penalty on him. This information included Roger Seagraves’ prominent role as the head of the spy ring. Now that they knew of Seagraves’ involvement, the FBI was investigating everyone remotely connected to him; other arrests seemed imminent.

They’d also searched Seagraves’ house and found his “collection” room. While they hadn’t quite figured out what these items represented yet, when they eventually did, things would really get complicated, since many of them belonged to victims killed by Seagraves as part of his past CIA duties.

Stone had met at length with Ford, members of the FBI and the same two D.C. detectives who’d confronted Caleb at the library.

An FBI agent said, “We knew there was a spy ring operating in the city, but we could never run it down to its source. We certainly never figured the Library of Congress to be involved.”

Stone said, “Well, we had an asset you didn’t.”

The agent looked surprised. “What was that?”

Alex Ford answered, “A highly skilled librarian named Caleb Shaw, that’s who.”

One of the D.C. detectives’ eyes twinkled. “Right, Shaw. Good, is he? He struck me as a little, uh, nervous.”

Stone replied, “Let’s just say his lack of personal courage is more than outweighed by his—”

The detective cut in, “Dumb luck?”

“Attention to detail.”

They’d thanked Stone for his help and left the door open for future cooperation.

“You ever need any help, just let us know,” one of the FBI agents had said, handing Stone a card with a phone number on it.

Stone put the card in his pocket thinking, I hope to God I never need help that badly.

After things had calmed somewhat, they all met at Stone’s cottage. And that’s when Caleb had held up the Psalm Book and demanded that Annabelle tell him the truth.

She took a deep breath and started explaining. “I knew how much Jonathan loved books, and one day I asked him that if he could have any book in the world, which one would it be? He said the Bay Psalm Book. Well, I read up on it and found that all of them were in institutions, but one seemed the best choice to hit.”

“Let me guess, Old South Church in Boston?” Caleb prompted.