Valhalla

by Robert J. Mrazek

  Hitting the ground, he ran after Barnaby and Lexy, who had almost reached the next block. A taxi was coming slowly up the street toward Brattle. Barnaby stepped in front of it to flag it down. He could see fear in the turbaned driver’s eyes as he took in the sight of him, but he stopped short, giving Lexy the time to reach the door and swing it open.

  A few moments later, they were inside the cab and Barnaby was exhorting the terrified driver to make a U-turn away from Brattle Street. As they accelerated away, Macaulay looked back and saw three men converging from both sides of the street. One of them raised his rifle, but by then they were in the busy traffic pattern on JFK Street.

  “State Street metro station,” said Barnaby to the driver, who continued to stare ahead as if not wanting to accept the reality of the enormous figure stuffed into the passenger seat next to him.

  Barnaby told him to pull over to the curb in front of the subway station. He turned to Macaulay and said, “You have any money?”

  “About twenty bucks,” said Macaulay, handing it up to him.

  “That’s enough,” replied Barnaby. “I have plenty where we’re going.”

  Barnaby watched the cab disappear into traffic.

  “It struck me that if our erstwhile driver is picked up any time soon, he should have as little information as possible,” said Barnaby.

  “Wise assumption,” agreed Macaulay. “You’re learning.”

  Barnaby bought their tickets and they boarded a blue line train. None of the other commuters appeared to take notice of him in his nightshirt, slippers, and raincoat. It was Boston.

  When they arrived at the New England Aquarium station, Barnaby got up from his seat and led them off the train. Lexy noted that one of the exit signs read CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS PARK. She had to smile at the irony of it.

  A hundred feet away from the station, they came to a pedestrian promenade that appeared to connect the old wharves along the harbor. Barnaby led the way, keeping up a brisk pace.

  They passed a tourist restaurant, then the Boston Marriott Long Wharf hotel, then more restaurants. Up ahead, Boston Harbor was a dark, gunmetal gray. Lexy noticed a boat marina off to the left. With December approaching, most of the slips were empty. She could smell a rank fish odor.

  “John Singleton Copley grew up here,” said Barnaby as they passed the Custom House.

  Increasingly nervous, Macaulay just wanted to get off the street to plan their next move. They were walking past a granite-and-brick building that looked like a small warehouse, when Barnaby suddenly turned toward it and descended a set of stone steps.

  A solid steel door met them at the bottom. It had no knob or handle. Barnaby pulled a set of keys from within the folds of his nightshirt and inserted one of them into the tumbler of a dead bolt. Unlocked, the door swung open and he led them inside.

  A stone staircase rose up through an arched brick corridor to the next level. Barnaby kept going to the third floor and then headed down a windowless passageway until he arrived at another steel door and inserted a second key.

  “My personal lair,” said Barnaby as he stepped through the opening.

  Inside, it was black as a crypt until he turned on a series of overhead lights, bathing the enormous brick-walled chamber in bright light. About fifty feet by fifty feet in area, it had a twenty-foot ceiling and rough-hewn oak beams that arched across the whole expanse. Window openings that once looked out over the harbor were clad with iron shutters.

  “This location must have cost a fortune,” said Lexy.

  “My second wife was a Carnegie,” said Barnaby. “She breathed money from the womb. It had no importance to her. When she asked me for a divorce, this place was a parting gift.”

  “If your name is on the deed, the people who tracked us to your apartment will track us here,” said Macaulay. “They’re securing all of your personal information as we speak. With the resources of the White House security apparatus behind them, we probably have less than ten minutes to get out of here.”

  “Relax,” said Barnaby. “It’s still in her name, one of a hundred properties owned by her trust. I never bothered to change it, and no other soul has been within these walls in ten years. It is solely a place for me to work without distraction. There isn’t even a telephone here. They won’t find us.”

  One quarter of the loft was living space. The kitchen area was equipped with commercial appliances and a granite-surfaced island with sinks and work spaces. Copper pots and pans hung from an iron rack. Nearby, an elevated sleeping loft constructed from raw timbers stretched along the outer wall, adorned with sheepskin coverlets. Beneath it, a doorway led into a small guest bedroom.

  “A Viking sleeping pallet,” said Lexy admiringly. It was not only a man cave, she thought. In many respects, it could have been the lair of a Norseman of old.

  The next section looked like the joint laboratories of a scientist and a pathologist, with traditional Bunsen burners, vats of acid, and jars full of chemicals interspersed with forceps, clamps, bone drills, and chisels on a long workbench.

  The third quarter consisted of a digital photography and computer lab, with printers, cameras, recorders, and other equipment sitting under a seventy-two-inch flat-screen television monitor.

  Macaulay now understood why there was nothing related to the Norsemen in Barnaby’s Brattle Street apartment. It was all here. The last section was Barnaby’s Norse library, with documents, books, diaries, and letter folders stacked almost floor to ceiling. A carved trestle table was covered with old vellum manuscripts and rune tablets. Mounted on the wall was an assemblage of Viking swords, tools, shields, knives, and other equipment.

  Lexy began examining one of the vellum manuscripts as Barnaby took Macaulay back to the kitchen and filled a teapot with cold water. Going over to the deep freezer, he pulled out a large stoneware tureen and set it on the granite countertop to thaw.

  “We could live here comfortably for a month without leaving,” said Barnaby. Raising his voice to be heard across the room, he called out, “Let’s get to work, Dr. Vaughan.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  30 November

  SB-18

  U.S. Capitol

  Washington, DC

  When Jessica Birdwell’s cell phone began vibrating on her belt clip, the deputy Homeland Security adviser was giving a top secret briefing to the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee in his hideaway office in the depths of the U.S. Capitol building.

  “It’s Ira Dusenberry, Senator,” she said. “I need to take the call.”

  “Jess,” she said into the phone.

  “Where are you?” Dusenberry demanded. “All hell has broken loose.”

  “I’m up on the hill,” she said.

  “So am I,” growled Dusenberry, “and Ad Kingship is on his way up here from the FBI building. Meet me in the senate majority leader’s conference room as soon as you can get here.”

  “Check,” she said, ending the call.

  She apologized for having to cut the briefing short and headed upstairs through the labyrinth of underground corridors. Dusenberry and Kingship were waiting for her in the majority leader’s office.

  “Jim Langdon has been shot and killed,” said Dusenberry without any preliminaries.

  “My God,” said Kingship.

  “How did it . . . What . . . ?” blurted Jessica.

  “Jim and a young FBI field agent from the Portland office flew up to Bangor to meet the plane carrying Macaulay and an archaeologist named Alexandra Vaughan,” said Dusenberry. “In response to Jim’s request for a protective cordon, the county sheriff’s office ringed the private aviation terminal with deputies. The four of them then went up to a conference room to get statements. From there on, it’s all conjecture. Two hours after they went up, the senior deputy sheriff knocked on the door of the conference room and no one answered.”

  “W
hy did it take him so long?” asked Jess.

  “The private terminal had been shut down by a snowstorm and was deserted. Jim had told the deputy to wait until the statements were completed, which he said could take quite a while. When the deputy finally decided something might be wrong and entered the room, Jim and this agent, Gallagher, were lying dead on the floor. Macaulay and Vaughan were missing. We don’t have ballistics yet, but it looks like Jim was shot twice with Gallagher’s pistol and Gallagher was killed with Jim’s gun.”

  “That doesn’t mean they fired the bullets,” said Kingship, his voice rising.

  “No,” agreed Dusenberry.

  “What else do we have?” asked Jess.

  “A video camera was set up on the table to record their statements, but there was no disc drive in it,” said Dusenberry. “Also Jim’s credentials and his iPad were missing. Whoever killed him presumably took them.”

  “Who is handling the investigation at this point?” asked Jess.

  “The bureau,” said Kingship. “We’ll take it over as a national security matter, and our forensic team can be there in a couple hours. We should have a plausible reconstruction of what took place by tomorrow.”

  “We need an immediate and comprehensive background check on Macaulay and the archaeologist,” said Jessica. “I know he’s a retired air force brigadier, but he could be suffering from some post-traumatic stress condition; he could be psychopathic; he could be anything, including a mass murderer.”

  “What motive would he have had to kill our agents?” asked Dusenberry. “He was seeking federal protection from the people who wiped out Hancock’s team in Greenland.”

  “All we have to go on so far is the story Macaulay told Mark Devlin at Anschutz in Dallas,” said Kingship. “What if it’s all a lie?”

  “So we can’t rule out anything at this point,” said Dusenberry. “It’s also possible that the people who did this somehow got word of Macaulay’s and Vaughan’s arrival in Bangor and went after them, killing Jim and the FBI agent in the process. Macaulay could be dead by now too.”

  “There’s one more piece of information that may be relevant to what we’re dealing with,” said Kingship. “Our Boston office reported that early this morning a group of men armed with suppressed assault rifles entered an apartment house near Harvard Square in Cambridge and terrorized several of the residents. Their apparent target was a Harvard professor who lived on the top floor.”

  “Half the street gangs in the country are armed with assault rifles and machine guns,” said Jessica.

  “The professor was identified as an English expat named Barnaby Finchem, and he is apparently a leading authority on Viking archaeology. Alexandra Vaughan received her doctorate in Norse archaeology from Harvard.”

  Dusenberry took it in.

  “Where is Finchem now?” asked Jessica.

  “None of the victims knows what happened to him. The armed men were inside less than ten minutes, just long enough to search his apartment and carry out a computer and several boxes of unidentified material.”

  “Any description of the men?”

  “They wore masks. According to one witness, two of the men had European accents.”

  “That’s a big help.”

  “So . . . what does all this tell us?” said Dusenberry.

  “One possibility is that they’re kidnapping or murdering renowned archaeologists who have expertise in Norse history,” said Jessica, “which brings us back to what happened on the Greenland ice cap.”

  “We have a team in place up there right now,” said Dusenberry. “They reached the coordinates supplied by Anschutz and have discovered traces of an encampment at the site. They’re working in total darkness and have requested more staging equipment to broaden the search. I informed the president and he authorized me to do whatever it takes to locate Hancock and his party.”

  “Here’s another possibility,” said Kingship. “Macaulay and Vaughan escaped from whatever occurred up there in Bangor. Not knowing whom they could trust, they drove to Boston to seek refuge from her mentor, Finchem.”

  “Or maybe they went to Boston to eliminate Finchem,” said Jessica.

  “That’s possible too,” agreed Dusenberry.

  “It could be just a dispute over an archaeological discovery,” said Jessica. “I know John Lee Hancock was a friend of the president’s, but that shouldn’t trigger the same response as tracking down a suicide bomber with a nuclear bomb in his suitcase.”

  “Either way, we need to find them,” said Dusenberry. “Suggestions?”

  Kingship scrolled down his iPad.

  “I can put out an APB for both Macaulay and Vaughan as persons of interest to all the law enforcement agencies in New England,” he said. “The bureau can also compile a list of Macaulay’s and Vaughan’s family members, friends, and business associates in case they try to reach out to them. We’ll also gather the data on their credit card records, cell phone numbers, and bank information.”

  “If they’re on the run, they’re not likely to use their credit cards to help us track them,” said Jessica.

  “Who knows where they’ll slip up?” responded Kingship. “With all the surveillance technology at our disposal, it isn’t easy to disappear these days.”

  “As soon as we’re finished here,” said Dusenberry, “I’ll order the NSA to demand video from the TSA of every transit facility in New England for the last twenty-four hours, and then place NSA agents with the subjects’ photographs in positions to monitor airports, concourses, train stations, and bus and metro terminals going forward. All those facilities are now equipped with cameras that provide sequential overlapping fields of vision. Incidentally, did anyone bother to ask for video from the Bangor private terminal or its parking lot? Unless the snow blotted out the coverage, we might be able to get the license plate number of the vehicle they used to leave the airport. Anything else?”

  “If Macaulay and Vaughan have gone to ground in the Boston area, Finchem could be the key to their whereabouts,” said Kingship. I would recommend we identify and track all of his family, friends, and colleagues . . . all of his students too, or at least the current ones.”

  “He probably has hundreds of them,” said Jessica. “That would shift an enormous amount of manpower from other priorities.”

  “We have the manpower if you don’t,” said Kingship, “and a lot of them are sitting on their ass. If nothing else, this will be good practice. Once we have the names, we’ll monitor their cell phones, e-mails, Facebook postings, and everything else they do.”

  “You’re talking about hundreds of people who have no connection to this,” said Jessica. “What about First Amendment rights?”

  “We’re covered under Section 215 of the Patriot Act,” said Dusenberry. “For our purposes, our three subjects of interest have triggered the tangibility requirement relevant to a terrorism investigation. Let’s get going.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  30 November

  The Long Wharf

  Boston, Massachusetts

  Barnaby flipped the switch that turned on a bank of television monitors in his computer lab. After inserting Falconer’s memory card into the port of a digital reading device, he downloaded the material on the card onto two laptop computers on the console table.

  Lexy sat down in front of one of them as he began projecting the photographs onto the seventy-two-inch flat-screen television monitor mounted above the table on the brick wall.

  She had expected to see a succession of photographs of the Viking cave, but the first set of images consisted of a video sequence apparently filmed in a hotel room in which a red-headed woman was performing sex on the man holding the camera.

  “Our late young Casanova, Dr. Falconer, I presume,” said Barnaby.

  “Let’s move on,” said Lexy.

  The next set of images inc
luded still shots taken by Falconer aboard the helicopter on his way to the Greenland base camp. There were candid views of Sir Dorian and Hjalmar Jensen, followed by several of Hancock and Macaulay. The final series of shots began with a view of the ice-covered entrance to the deep cave.

  “Here’s what we’re looking for,” said Lexy.

  Falconer had filmed close-ups of the faces of all the Viking corpses, followed by shots of their equipment and clothing, and then more than a dozen photographs of the rune tablet from different angles.

  “He obviously wanted to make sure he had it all,” said Barnaby.

  To Macaulay, the crude rune markings looked like nothing but little stick figures intersected with horizontal dashes and circles. There were twelve separate lines of them, each one full of the incomprehensible symbols.

  Barnaby joined Lexy at the console table in front of the television monitors and began furiously typing on his laptop. A moment later, the larger television monitor above them lit up with a brilliantly clear image of the complete text of the stonecutter’s inscription.

  Three smaller flat-screen television monitors were mounted beneath the big one. As Barnaby continued typing, a spate of English words began to appear on the small screen to the left.

  “I’ll use this one for my first take at a translation of each passage,” said Barnaby to Lexy. “You’ll have the middle screen for your interpretation. Once we’re agreed on the exact wording of a passage, we’ll project the final cut onto the third screen.”

  Macaulay looked on with fascination as they began trading thoughts on possible definitions and meanings for the first row of symbols. To Macaulay, they might as well have been hoofprints around a muddy water hole in west Texas.

  “Definitely early eleventh century,” said Barnaby. “The ancient futhork with a few added wrinkles.”

  “Wrinkles?” asked Macaulay.

  “Each early stonecutter had his own personal style, unique to his training and experience,” said Barnaby, “just like the early telegraphers when they were mastering the Morse code.”