Curious Minds

by Janet Evanovich

  Xandy reached around and untied Riley. “We need to leave before the aliens return,” she said.

  Riley shrugged out of the ropes, got out of the car, and walked to the edge of the cliff with Emerson. They looked down at the white van. It was upside down at the bottom of the mountain. It was far away but they could see that it was smoking. There was an explosion, and the van was consumed by a fireball. Black smoke billowed off the van and was carried away on the air currents.

  Emerson wrapped his arm around Riley, hugged her into him, and kissed her on her forehead. “Crap on a cracker,” Emerson said.

  —

  Riley got behind the wheel and gripped it hard to keep her hands from shaking. She put the car into gear and very carefully drove down the mountain. She got to the highway and turned to Emerson.

  “Now what?” Riley asked.

  “I don’t mean to complain,” Günter said, “but I’d really like to see a doctor. Or at least get some more of those drugs. I’m in agony here. Sorry.”

  “We’ll get you help soon,” Emerson said. “I’d like to get out of the area first.” He turned to Riley. “Take the Saint Rose Parkway exit and turn right on Executive Terminal Drive.”

  Riley looked over at Emerson. “You have a plane?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Why didn’t we use it to get to Nevada in the first place?”

  “Aunt Myra needed it. Dr. Bauerfeind was in seclusion in Vancouver, and Aunt Myra was kind enough to pick him up in my absence. I suppose I should consider getting a backup plane, but I’ve never needed one before.”

  “But the plane is here now?”

  “Hopefully. I suspected we might need a fast getaway so I asked Aunt Myra to hop down here and wait for us once she secured Dr. Bauerfeind.”

  Riley followed Emerson’s directions to the airport and looked at Xandy in the rearview mirror.

  “What about Xandy?” Riley asked.

  “I’m going home,” Xandy said. “Put me in that fancy plane of yours and drop me off in Des Moines. The hell with aliens. I’m going back to being a dental hygienist.”

  Henderson Executive Airport had twin runways, a tower straight out of the 1940s, renovated like a museum piece, and a state-of-the-art sleek modern traffic control center.

  There were several hangars and a fleet of corporate jets sitting out on the blacktop. Riley parked at the private terminal, and they loaded Günter onto a rolling luggage rack and followed Emerson inside. Emerson found his pilot and they were escorted out to the plane, leaving everyone in the terminal open-mouthed in shock at the bedraggled, blood-splattered group.

  Emerson owned a G550 configured to comfortably seat twelve. It flew with two pilots and a flight attendant, a stocked galley, a pleasant lavatory, and a fully functioning office. The interior had high-gloss wood trim and soft cream-colored leather seats and couches. The exterior of the plane was gleaming white with a majestic royal blue “M” that swooped along the sides like an eagle flying in for the kill. The guest towels in the lavatory were also monogrammed with a royal blue “M.”

  Aunt Myra was in the open doorway of the G550, smiling at them like she was welcoming them to a barbecue.

  “Well, there you are!” she said in her Appalachian drawl. “I was getting ready to send out the bloodhounds.”

  “We were delayed,” Emerson said. “We’ve sustained some injuries, I’m afraid.”

  A couple baggage handlers hauled Günter off the luggage rack and carried him up the stairs to the plane. Aunt Myra got him settled onto one of the couches and buckled him in.

  “We’ll sit you up for now,” she said. “After takeoff we can lay you down and make you more comfortable.”

  “Alcohol would help,” Günter said.

  “We got plenty of that,” Myra said. “Pick your poison.”

  “I’d kill for a martini.”

  “I’ll pass it on to Margie. That’s the flight attendant.”

  Myra turned to Emerson. “If you don’t look a wreck. We’ve gotta get you some better people skills. Were you in another one of them bar fights?”

  Riley’s eyebrows raised an inch. “Bar fight? Emerson?”

  “I swear, him and Vernon were a trial when they were younger, and they aren’t much better now.”

  An older man with coarse gray hair and bushy eyebrows was sitting in a single seat toward the back of the plane.

  “Dr. Bauerfeind,” Emerson said. “Nice to see you again. Sorry about my appearance. We had some problems getting out of the gold vault.”

  “Understandable,” Bauerfeind said. “I had some problems as well. Fortunately Myra came and rescued me just as the Grunwalds’ henchmen were breaking down my door.”

  “There were only two of them,” Myra said, “so it wasn’t much of a problem.”

  “She kicked one of them in the privates,” Bauerfeind said. “And then she sucker-punched the other in the throat.”

  “Yeah, and then we ran like the dickens and jumped into the car and took off for the airport,” Myra said.

  “Tell the pilots that the first stop is Des Moines,” Emerson said. “After that it’s back to D.C.”

  “Sounds like a plan to me,” Myra said. “Everyone take a seat and buckle up. Soon as we’re in the air, Margie will get you all something to eat and we can take a look at the hole in the back of Emmie’s head.”

  —

  They were an hour out of Des Moines when Riley woke up and looked with longing at the iPad on the console next to her.

  “Are we still off the grid?” she asked Emerson.

  “Not effectively,” he said. “I’m sure they’re tracking my plane. Although it might take some time to determine exactly who was incinerated in the van.”

  “I’d like to tell my family I’m okay.”

  “I’d prefer that you wait until we’re on the ground in D.C. It would spoil my plan if we were met by armed guards at the airport.”

  “You have a plan?”

  “Of course.”

  “Does it involve the memory card?”

  “Not directly. The photographs are worthless without a gold sample. Unless we can trace the gold back to the Federal Reserve, we can’t prove any wrongdoing.”

  “What about the fake gold that’s in the Federal Reserve?”

  “I doubt they’re going to open the vault to us, and the chances of breaking in again are slim to none. However, there is another source of recast gold.”

  They simultaneously turned and looked at Günter passed out on the couch.

  “I think I’m seeing your plan,” Riley said.

  “How many martinis did he have?” Emerson asked.

  “Too many,” Riley said.

  “I can get the information I need verified by Vernon,” Emerson said. “He’s babysitting the house.”

  Vernon was in the kitchen when he answered his phone. “Em,” he said. “It’s like you read my mind. I got the zebra pen repaired and rounded up all the zebras, but one of them wandered into the house and I can’t get him out. He’s looking at me like I’m an idiot. I swear he’s giving me the evil eye. I offered him a carrot and some alfalfa and a can of cat food, but he’s not having any of it.”

  “That’s Willie. He’s harmless. He just talks a good game.”

  “You named him Willie?”

  “Yes, after Willie Sutton. He was a convict. The zebra has stripes. It makes sense.”

  “If you say so, cuz.”

  “Give him a salt lick and he’ll be happy.”

  “I don’t know where you keep the salt licks,” Vernon said. “He’s gonna have to be happy with potato chips. I got a big bag of those.”

  “Whatever,” Emerson said. “I need you to do something for me first.”

  “I’m on it. What do you need?”

  “Go into the library and find the plaster statue of Saint Nicholas.”

  “Okay, but Willie’s gonna follow me. He’s been following me all over the house.”

  “Yea
h, he’ll do that. He doesn’t know he’s a zebra. Call me back on the plane number when you get the statue.”

  Vernon called back ten minutes later. “I got it,” he said. “Now what?”

  “Break it open.”

  “Whoa. Isn’t that sacrilegious? I mean, busting a statue of Saint Nick? Wouldn’t that put me on the naughty list?”

  “The naughty list is a myth, Vernon.”

  “So you say. I’m not taking any chances.”

  “Vernon, break the statue. I’ll suffer the consequences.”

  “Does it work that way? How will Santa know?”

  “I’ll write him a letter.”

  Emerson and Riley listened on the other end of the line as Vernon hit Saint Nick with a meat mallet.

  “Is there anything inside it?” Emerson asked.

  “Yeah, a little bag. With coins in it.”

  “Gold coins?”

  “Uh-huh, with pictures of some guy that looks like Magneto from X-Men on it.”

  Emerson glanced at Riley, who nodded. “That would be Bertie,” she said.

  “How many coins?” Emerson asked.

  Vernon took a second to count. “Ten.”

  “Thanks, Vern,” Emerson said. “Give Willie a hug for me.”

  “So Günter was telling the truth about the coins,” Emerson said. “Let’s hope his wife didn’t find the mother lode and cash it in.”

  Irene Grunwald got up early every morning to work out. And by “work out” she meant have a pitcher of sangria while lying in a lounge chair in her backyard and watching the sun rise over the river.

  She hardly thought about Günter at all nowadays. Oh, sometimes she woke in the middle of the night and was glad for the extra space in bed. But other than that, he had disappeared from her world like the memory of an annoying summer song. One minute it had been going through her head endlessly, the next minute she couldn’t even recall it.

  Of course, she knew he’d given her all she had, and she was grateful for that, after a fashion. The house here on the Potomac. The house up on Cape Cod. The stocks and bonds.

  She spread a towel on the lounge chair on the patio and looked out at the river as the sky turned the deep blue that meant the sun was coming up. She’d miss this place when she moved. But that wouldn’t be for a while. She would hold out for the best offer on the house. And then she’d be moving to Paris or London, where Washington, D.C., would be a distant, hazy memory.

  The sky lightened and she realized her view had changed. The boat was missing. Günter’s boat should be at the dock. The boat had been stolen. Damn. Günter had paid more attention to that boat than he had paid to her. Oh, well, it was insured, she thought. Now she didn’t have to go through the annoyance of selling it. She could simply collect the insurance.

  —

  Riley, Emerson, and Vernon cruised up the Potomac, past Reagan National Airport on the left, and got ready to branch off to the Anacostia River, heading to the District Yacht Club. Vernon was down belowdecks. Emerson was at the wheel, the wind blowing his shaggy hair around his face.

  Riley tried to keep her red curls out of her eyes, but the breeze kept whipping them back around. “I still think we shouldn’t have stolen this boat,” she said.

  “We aren’t stealing it. We’re retrieving it for Günter.”

  “Yes, but we retrieved it in the dark without telling Mrs. Günter.”

  “It was simpler.”

  Riley was sure that was true.

  “I’m not much of a sailor but I’m surprised it can float, considering the weight it’s carrying,” Riley said.

  “It’s riding low,” Emerson said. “I noticed it when we went to Günter’s house that first time. The boat sat far too low in the water for a craft of this size. It bothered me, but I didn’t make too much of it. Until Günter told the story of stealing the coins and hiding them.”

  “You guessed they were in the boat even before he told us?”

  “When he first talked about the coins he said they were underwater. It was a very good clue. He has buckets and buckets and buckets of gold in the ballast. Thirty thousand one-ounce coins. Almost a ton of gold. Hidden under the murky water.”

  —

  Bertie Grunwald gazed out at the view of the Capitol. Most people looked at the blinding white dome and felt a rush of patriotism. Bertie saw it and thought only of obstruction and procrastination. Oh, the things he could have accomplished in the years he was running the Fed, if it weren’t for this damned democracy.

  He probably wouldn’t live to see things put right. Of course he’d been thinking he was at death’s door for years now. He just refused to walk across its threshold. Death would come soon enough, and when it did he would be blessed to know that his sons would carry on for him.

  Hans was the strong one. Manny was the clever one. He’d figure out all the legal niceties to make the coup seem constitutionally sound. Werner, he was the hungry one. Werner was ruthless enough to make things happen.

  Bertie thought of Günter for a second, involuntarily. Then he pushed the thought away. Günter had been a constant disappointment from his childhood on, and in the end he had relinquished his right to be a Grunwald. Günter was no longer his son. Especially since he was most likely dead. The final report wasn’t back from the coroner’s office, but Bertie felt confident of the results. There were several people in the van, but they were burned beyond recognition. Ashes and a couple molars. Rollo and his guards were also missing. Bertie assumed something went wrong and they went over the cliff with their prisoners. Not a large loss. Rollo was a screwup. Good riddance.

  Bertie was sitting in his wheelchair on the eighteenth floor of the Blane-Grunwald building on Constitution Avenue. The floor above the seventeenth floor. The floor above everything and everybody, he thought. As it should be.

  He turned his chair toward the television monitor on the wall. C-SPAN was covering the Red Mass, the Catholic ceremony blessing the Supreme Court and its newest member-to-be, Manfred Grunwald. Tomorrow was the first Monday in October, when the Supreme Court convened its new session. Then the new order would begin.

  The dignitaries were arriving in their black limousines at the front steps of the Cathedral of Saint Matthew the Apostle on Rhode Island Avenue. The redbrick building wasn’t as big as Saint John the Divine in New York or Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles, but it made up in style what it lacked in size. From its Romanesque Revival architecture to its Byzantine mosaics, it looked like an Eastern Orthodox church transplanted from Istanbul to Washington.

  Rhode Island Avenue was entirely blocked off by Secret Service agents who stood in strategic locations, their black suits bulging with unidentified weaponry. News stations were outside the church, focused on the arriving celebrities, trying desperately to find an unpredictable story in the most preplanned ceremony of the calendar year.

  One by one the movers and shakers of America made their way out of limos and up the steps into the church. The Supreme Court justices. The cabinet officials. Members of the diplomatic corps. Prominent lobbyists. Leaders of the Senate and the House. The vice president. And three Grunwalds.

  The doors to the cathedral were closed and C-SPAN cut inside. For the first time, the ceremony itself was going to be broadcast to the entire world. Or as much of the world as watched C-SPAN.

  Inside Saint Matthew’s, the Byzantine motif was even more pronounced. Red marble arches framed the mahogany pews, separating the transepts from the central nave. Statues lined the aisle in front of the apse like monumental guardians. On the floor in front of the altar, set in a circle of black marble, were the words

  HERE RESTED THE REMAINS OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY AT THE REQUEIM MASS, NOVEMBER 25, 1963, BEFORE THEIR REMOVAL TO ARLINGTON, WHERE THEY LIE IN AN EXPECTATION OF HEAVENLY RESURRECTION.

  Bertie had been teaching at Harvard when the assassination occurred and was as shocked by it as everyone else. When he moved into the circles of power in the seventies, he occasionally made an e
ffort to find out what had happened and who had been behind it. It was a source of constant disappointment to him that he had never found any concrete signs of a conspiracy.

  The archbishop of Washington began his march down the aisle wearing the startling blood-red vestments that symbolized the tongues of fire that the Holy Spirit gave to the apostles during Pentecost. He followed a priest in blindingly white robes carrying a golden cross, and another very tall one swinging a censer filled with smoking incense. A flock of cardinals in scarlet frocks with tall white miters on their heads came trailing behind him. The whole effect reminded Bertie of the circuses of his youth. He half-expected a lion tamer to come in next, followed by acrobats and tumblers and a tiny car full of clowns.

  The solemn procession passed under the red and gold dome, and sunlight streamed down. This was old-school majesty at its finest, Bertie thought. He was an atheist, but he approved of the sentiment and pageantry. Blind the people with ceremony, circuses, and red robes. Keep them happy and distracted. Power brokers like him could do whatever they wanted.

  The choir sang and the organ played and the ceremony began. There was much standing and sitting and kneeling by the congregation, and a reading from the Acts of the Apostles by a junior priest. Bertie had begun to nod off before the actual homily began. He took a sip of green tea to try to wake up. God, he hated green tea.

  Bertie stared at the flat-screen. He could see his sons sitting in the front of the church. Like the three wise monkeys. Except they could see, hear, and speak all manner of evil, Bertie thought with a laugh that shook his whole body and brought up some phlegm.

  —

  Werner shifted uncomfortably in the hard wooden pew. He couldn’t wait to hear the bishop say “Go in peace” so he could get out of there and go back to Blane-Grunwald. He glanced next to him where Hans sat ramrod straight, with no expression on his stony face, chest thrust forward to show off all his medals, as if he were in combat and shouldn’t show fear.

  Manny, on the other hand, looked like he was enjoying the hell out the show. Since he was joining the Supreme Court tomorrow, Manny considered himself the guest of honor, as if this whole ceremony was being put on solely for his amusement.