Finding North

by Christian, Claudia Hall

  “Why have you come?” Ben asked.

  He indicated to a red-velvet, gilded, high-backed chair, and sat down in its twin.

  “Dom asked us to look at the bookstore,” Alex said and sat down next to him. “You probably don’t remember, but Jesse and I used to go there all the time and look at maps. Dom thinks the map I liked is still there. It may be nothing, but because it was my link to the store, he thinks we need to find it.”

  “They’ve stopped two arson attempts,” Ben said.

  “That’s why Dom thinks there’s something there,” Alex said. “He also wants a big show of US military presence. He thinks that might shake something loose.”

  “Anything’s possible,” Ben said.

  “The bookstore owner’s assistant will be there in the morning,” Alex said.

  “What’s her name?” Ben asked.

  “Eloise Le Grande,” Alex said. “Know her?”

  Ben shook his head.

  “I can’t believe it’s been right there, in front of my nose . . .” Ben said.

  “Yeah,” Alex said. “Like I said, Jesse and I used to go there all the time. How is the bookstore owner?”

  “Alive,” Ben said. “Recovering. You were right about the poison.”

  “MJ,” Alex said.

  “They gave him the antidote in time,” Ben said. “He should make a full recovery.”

  “Did he do it to himself?” Alex asked.

  “He denies it,” Ben said. “He had no idea how much trouble he was in, so I tend to believe him.”

  Alex nodded.

  “Why have you come?” Ben asked. “Josh left after dinner. Your team is out enjoying a night in Paris. And yet, you are here. Forgive me if I’m suspicious.”

  “I have a few questions for you,” Alex asked.

  “You can ask questions anytime,” Ben said. “Why come all this way?”

  “They are important questions,” Alex said. “Personal questions.”

  Ben nodded. Alex fell silent. After a few minutes, Ben got up and poured two glasses of grande champagne cognac. Alex took the glass from him.

  “This vineyard will be yours and Max’s one day,” Ben said.

  “Max is already setting himself up as the overlord of brandy,” Alex said. “But I think Helene wants in on the business.”

  “Do you see much of her?” Ben asked as he sat down.

  “No,” Alex said. “With school and her new boyfriend, she’s pretty busy. When I do see her, she’s . . .”

  Alex smiled.

  “Is there a word that describes beautiful, happy, bubbly, mentally stimulated?” Alex asked.

  “For you?” Ben grinned. “‘Coffee.’”

  “It’s like a switch has been turned on inside her,” Alex said. “She’s blossoming.”

  “And you think it’s this guy?” Ben asked.

  Alex gave him a wry smile, and Ben laughed.

  “Yes, in fact, I am aware that my daughter will likely marry Fionn Drayson,” Ben said.

  Alex laughed.

  “I’m guessing you don’t see much of him, either,” Ben said.

  “Between school and his new girlfriend,” Alex smiled.

  “Yes,” Ben said. “Would you mind if Helene joined you in the cognac business?”

  “She’s a joy,” Alex shrugged. “Frederec is well on his way as a designer. You’ve launched your first two children well.”

  “My first two?” Ben smiled.

  “Second two?” Alex laughed. “Four down, four to go?”

  “God, I have a lot of children.”

  He shook his head and laughed. They sipped their cognac and watched the fire in silence.

  “This line of cognac was created to woo your grandmother,” Ben said and looked at his glass.

  “It’s very good,” Alex smiled and took a sip.

  Ben nodded as if that were obvious.

  “You’d better ask your questions before we’re too tired or drunk to talk,” Ben said.

  Alex nodded. He gestured for her to go ahead.

  “It’s occurred to us that our mother, Rebecca, might have been induced to leave her husband, and . . .” Alex stopped talking to let him fill in the blanks. Ben blinked as he thought it through. He scowled. “We’re wondering what you were working on at that time.”

  Ben opened his mouth and then closed it.

  “IVF was invented by the US Navy,” Ben said.

  “They practiced primarily on military wives stationed in and around Fort Bragg,” Alex said. “Mostly by consent, but not always.”

  “You and Max were . . .” Ben looked confused. “How?”

  “It’s possible that she was given a kind of fertility drug,” Alex said. “Possibly something similar to what I was given when they harvested my eggs for a surrogate. At least half of my eggs had two X chromosomes.”

  Ben nodded. Alex watched the fire for a while until he was ready to talk again.

  “When she became pregnant by me, I would be required to marry her,” Ben said. “At the very least. I’d have to leave the agency . . .”

  “Would that have happened if Dad hadn’t . . .?” Alex asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Ben said.

  “Dad foiled their plan to sideline you,” Alex said.

  “Worse than that,” Ben said. “He befriended me. ‘If we’re going to have children in common, we should at least be friends,’ he said. He’s a great friend.”

  “Could that have been the plan?” Alex asked.

  “No,” Ben said. “No way. No one would have believed that the great Patrick Hargreaves would raise another man’s children as his own. But then again, no one really knows what he will or won’t do.”

  “Love’s never a factor when considering someone else’s motives,” Alex said.

  Ben nodded.

  “What were you working on?” Alex asked.

  Ben took a sip of cognac to avoid the question for a moment. Unable to find a reason not to tell her, he nodded.

  “I was working on the other side of the equation you are working on,” Ben said.

  “What does that mean?” Alex asked.

  “You are looking into the possibility of a group of individuals who want to see the world burn for no other reason than to profit from the recovery,” Ben said. “Correct?”

  “Sure,” Alex said.

  “I was looking at the men and women, families really, who fight them,” Ben said.

  “You know about the ‘watch the world burn’ crowd?” Alex asked.

  “No,” Ben said. “Yes.”

  Ben shrugged and looked at the fire for a long time. When Alex was sure she was going to throttle him, he looked at her and nodded.

  “I know that look,” Ben said. “I give it myself.”

  Alex smiled.

  “I’m not holding out,” Ben said. “What would be the point of that?”

  “I was just wondering that myself.” Alex said.

  She gave him an irritated look, and he chuckled.

  “I’m trying to put all the pieces together,” Ben said. “At the time, I didn’t know what I was looking at. I had found a few old families who’d kept key pieces of property in large cities. The Zenos, for example. They owned a small farm just outside of the Dutch settlement of New York. The farm became a workshop, and the workshop turned into a fashionable Tribeca home now owned by Joshua Peretz’s NYPD partner Dex Zeno.”

  “There are others?” Alex asked.

  “Not a lot,” Ben said. “Maybe twenty families worldwide. Maybe five.”

  He shook his head and shrugged. Alex nodded that she understood.

  “In the process of discovering these properties, looking into the plans on file for the renovations, I realized that these properties were more like museums than homes,” Ben said. “At the time, everyone was hot on the trail of Nazi sympathizers. I needed to be sure these museums weren’t filled with Nazi loot.”

  “Were they?” Alex asked.

  “No, but I didn’t know
that at the time,” Ben shook his head. “At the time, I thought I’d stumbled upon a Nazi stash. It wasn’t until years later that I learned that these bunkers are repositories of historical photos and documents. They are a kind of catalog of human existence.”

  “You’ve been inside Dex’s basement?” Alex raised her eyebrows in surprise.

  “Not the Zeno estate,” Ben said. “Another family. In China with Steve. Someone Fong worked with. But at the time we’re talking about, I had no idea what I was looking at.”

  “They seem to be collecting clues as to when and where the world will burn again,” Alex said. “From the boards, Dex appears to believe the next time of upheaval will happen in the next year or so. We haven’t had a chance to ask him because he’s been so ill.”

  “I never got that close,” Ben said. “Everything happened with Rebecca, and I met your father and . . . I was just starting to look at these families. After meeting your father, I was assigned to something else. I didn’t get back to it until . . . maybe ten years later.”

  “If you’d just discovered these families’ existence, is it safe to say that inducing Rebecca to leave Fort Bragg didn’t have anything to do with this?” Alex asked.

  Ben looked at her for a long moment, before his head went up and down.

  “What were you working on when you discovered these old families?” Alex asked.

  “What was I . . . uh . . .” Ben fell silent. “Did you look it up?”

  Alex gave a small nod.

  “And?” Ben asked.

  “You were in between assignments,” Alex said. “You’d just left south-east Asia. Over the next few years, you bounced all over the globe.”

  Ben nodded.

  “Did something happen in south-east Asia that . . .”

  “Philippe died.”

  The words popped out of Ben. Alex was so surprised by his spontaneous words that she stared at him. Ben’s eyes were filled with tears, and his head went up and down. He glanced at Alex.

  “Philippe died,” Ben said. “No one could have predicted that. No one.”

  “That was years before . . .,” Alex said.

  “I met your mother when Philippe died,” Ben said. “I flew home immediately. My mother was . . . inconsolable. My father retreated into cruelty. Dominic . . .”

  Ben shook his head.

  “Philippe’s suicide was the worst thing that had ever happened to me,” Ben said. “You speak of Helene blossoming. Philippe was always the brightest blossom on any bush. He was everything light and good in this world. I’ve never met anyone like him. And, in a moment, he was gone.”

  Ben’s hand smashed down on the arm of his chair. His glass skidded off the small table between them and crashed to the stone floor. Ben put his hand to his eyes to cover his tears.

  “I’d been fighting tyranny on the other side of the world,” Ben said. “I’d wanted to destroy the evil in the world so that we could all live in light and beauty . . . But here, at home, a beautiful, light human being couldn’t exist along with people’s . . . stupidity and fear. Blot out the light. Block out beauty. Focus on our stupidity and we’ll get to heaven.”

  “You had an existential crisis,” Alex said. “‘The dark night of the soul’ you’ve warned me about.”

  Ben gave her a hard look.

  “Yes,” Ben said. “Why bother with trying to end tyranny when the good Christian people of Chicago prefer the dark?”

  Ashamed by his own loss of control, Ben looked away from her. Alex got up to clean up the cognac and glass. The glass had shattered into tiny pieces on the limestone floors. She mopped up the cognac with a towel she found in the coffee cabinet and carefully picked up the shards of glass. When she was done, she poured him another glass of cognac and sat down.

  “I miss him.” Ben gave her a look of gratitude. She smiled.

  “Mom says the same thing,” Alex said.

  “He had this way of always seeing the good,” Ben said. “He once told me, that when things seemed the most bleak, he’d look for what was missing in his perception and find the light. ‘The absence of dark is light, Benji. It’s like the moment before dawn begins. You just can’t perceive the light yet,’ he used to say.”

  “Doesn’t sound like a person who’d kill himself,” Alex said.

  Ben looked at Alex for longer than was comfortable. She knew he deserved for her to hold his gaze.

  “You’ll put Josh on this,” Ben said.

  “I will ask Agent Rasmussen to look into the suicide of Philippe Doucet,” Alex said. “It may mean exhuming his body. Are you willing to do that?”

  “Yes,” Ben said.

  “We’ll take care of it,” Alex said.

  “I’ve kept all of my files,” Ben said.

  “You what?” Alex asked.

  “As a precaution, I guess,” Ben said. “I don’t remember what I was working on when Philippe died. Nor do I remember much of the following years. I stumbled . . . I can tell you the textures and sounds of the darkness, but I don’t have any idea what exactly I was up to. Whatever they told me to do, I suppose. I think that’s why I noticed the oddity of these families. I was in an odd place, disconnected from anything that could hold my mind. What do my records say?”

  “Supporting the post-war effort,” Alex shrugged.

  “That’s got to be a lie,” Ben said. “I did help find more than a few POWs.”

  Ben’s head went up and down.

  “No, that was after I met Patrick,” Ben said. “As you know, POWs are kind of his thing.”

  Alex nodded. He shook his head and shrugged.

  “I look back and . . .” Ben smiled. “I never would have imagined getting here — to this age and life. But, wham, your mother and I got pregnant, I met Patrick, and my life started over.”

  “Sounds like Mom and everything jump-started your career,” Alex said.

  Ben gave her a puzzled look and drank his cognac.

  “Maybe,” Ben said. “Anyway, everything is documented in my files.”

  He waved his hand toward the row of filing cabinets along the long wall of his office.

  “Paper files,” Alex said.

  Ben nodded.

  “I’ll get them ready for you before you leave for Denver.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Alex said. “If it’s all right with you, I’ll send my Sergeant and Royce to scan and document the files. They’re good, and they’re fast. It’s the kind of job they love. They can be in and out in a few hours. They’ll love it down here, too.”

  “Good idea,” Ben said.

  Alex nodded her thanks.

  “Is there anything else?” Ben asked.

  “Do you have any old maps?” Alex asked.

  Ben gave her a long look.

  “You want to know about Rebecca’s father,” Ben said.

  “I remember an old map,” Alex said.

  “The one at the bookstore?” Ben asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Alex said. “This is something that was . . . around, hung on a wall somewhere . . . I’m wondering if you have it.”

  “Rebecca’s father thought I’d become his son-in-law,” Ben said. “He gifted me four antique maps. They are in the safe.”

  “May I look at them?” Alex asked.

  “If I can have them back, you can have them,” Ben said.

  “Of course,” Alex said.

  “They mean a great deal to me,” Ben said.

  He got up.

  “We’ll wash our hands,” he said.

  “Of course,” she nodded.

  They left his office to use the restroom down the hallway. When she returned, he was standing in front of his opened safe. He nodded to her and reached into the bottom shelf, where the antique maps were stored flat. He carried the maps to a table. Alex got up to look at them. One glance at the maps, and Alex knew that these were duplicates, similar to, if not exactly the same, as the four maps she’d discovered in her office. She turned them over and saw the compa
ss rose with eight black points, eight shaded points, and the now-familiar eye in the center.

  “What is it?” Ben asked.

  “These are copies of maps,” Alex said. “They were carefully and expensively made but copies nonetheless.”

  “How do you know?” Ben asked.

  “I have the same copies in my office,” Alex said. “Under the world map that hangs on my wall.”

  “What?” Ben asked.

  “Patrick gave them to me,” Alex said. “At the time, he said it was a joke. I haven’t had a chance to ask him about it. As you know, he’s hot on the Linear A trail.”

  Ben nodded and gave her a wry look. She smiled.

  “Did Patrick know the copies were there?” Ben asked.

  “I doubt it,” Alex shook her head.

  Ben’s gaze shifted away from her.

  “They have a mark on the back.” Alex pointed to the mark. “Have you seen this mark before?”

  Ben gave a vague nod. He went to his safe and took out an antique directional compass. The symbol was on the back.

  “Mom said this was her father’s symbol,” Alex said. “She said he had a ring and cufflinks with this symbol on them. Have you seen them?

  “I remember him having them,” Ben said. “They sat in a little glass case with a pocket watch. I haven’t seen them since before he died.”

  “These maps appear to have been created a thousand years before my grandfather,” Alex said. “The symbol cannot be my grandfather’s personal mark. Any idea what it means?”

  “None.”

  “I have this feeling that I’ve seen the mark before . . . somewhere . . .” Alex nodded.

  “It’s not on the map that’s hanging in your living room?” Ben asked.

  “No,” Alex said. “Not on the front or back of that map or the one in Max’s hall.”

  She looked at the fire for a moment before turning back to look at him.

  “I think I was with you,” Alex said. “You don’t remember seeing it on a map?”

  “No,” Ben shook his head. “Like Rebecca, I thought it was her father’s mark. He had this . . . old-world quality. Pocket watches, fountain-tip pens . . . It wouldn’t surprise me if he sealed his letters with wax.”

  Ben smiled.

  “You should know that Rebecca’s father recruited me to the CIA.”