by Brad Meltzer
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Kamille added.
She had. Nola was up all night, debating what to do. For sure, she’d seen him—but had he seen her? No, not yet. That was her advantage…and the only way to keep it was to stick to her schedule. Get on the plane. Avoid attention. Now that she knew where he was, she could track him easily, even come back for him. Prepared.
It was a fine plan, especially considering what she almost did last night with the shovel she found in a supply room. Yet now, as the Librarian of Congress climbed aboard the plane, and the pilot walked around it, doing his final preflight checks…just the thought of Royall leaving…of losing him again… No. After all these years, no way could she risk that.
“I need to go,” Nola said, still staring at Royall, who was out on the runway and loading a final box, a small suitcase, onto the plane.
“Because of him?” Kamille asked, following Nola’s gaze.
Nola turned. The girl was sharp, had a nose for details. Nola realized it yesterday while she was doing her portrait. It’s why Nola had spent the past few years painting those who tried to take their own lives. People saw them as victims. And they were. But they were also much stronger than everyone thought.
“How do you know him?” Kamille asked.
Nola didn’t answer.
“Bad history, huh?” Kamille said.
“Something like that.”
Kamille nodded, more to herself, as Royall climbed into his snow-camouflaged Hummer. “He looks old,” Kamille said. “Doesn’t even look that tough.”
“You have no idea,” Nola blurted, hating herself for even saying something so stupid.
Kamille watched the way Nola stepped sideways, out of his line of sight. “You’re really scared of him, huh?” Kamille asked.
Nola didn’t even hear the question. In her pocket, she was fidgeting with the colored pencils she carried everywhere. It was in that moment that Nola realized just how many of her old fears had settled back onto her chest. She didn’t like it. “I need to go,” Nola said, sidestepping Kamille.
“Wait, wait, wait. Before you— What about your seat?”
“What?”
“Your seat. On the plane. You know how the Air Force guys are. They said they already filed the manifest—that the plane was full. But if you let me take your spot…”
“I don’t think so,” Nola said.
Right there, Royall glanced their way. For barely a second. Nola turned her head, making sure he didn’t get a good look.
Kamille stood there, watching. Finally, she whispered, “What’d he do to you?”
Nola shook her head like it was nothing.
Kamille didn’t believe her. Soldiers were masters at hiding it, but just from her body language, Nola wasn’t just looking at Royall. She was running from him.
“Is he on the flight?”
Nola shook her head no, her back still to Royall.
“Then c’mon—switch with me. The next flight isn’t for three days. I’ll be back before you leave.”
“Passengers, last call!” the young airman shouted from inside. Unlike on commercial flights, once you check in, the military rarely rechecked IDs. They just looked to see if your name was on the manifest.
“Please, Sergeant Brown? After everything that happ— Let me say it like this: I need a good weekend. Desperately. I’ve got a fiancé I haven’t seen in weeks. He doesn’t even know what I—” She stopped herself again. “I know it’s stupid, but I’m trying to surprise him. It’s his birthday.”
Nola was about to say no. Then she noticed Kamille’s backpack. Sticking out of the top of it was a rolled poster. Not a poster, a canvas—the painting Nola did. Kamille was taking it with her, to show her fiancé.
Twelve days ago, Kamille Williams did a Whip-It full of bug spray in the hopes of taking her own life. Today, she was bouncing anxiously on her heels, a pleading smile on her face.
“Here,” Nola said, handing over the boarding pass.
For the next ten seconds, Kamille squeezed Nola in an exuberant hug—the happiest Nola had seen her. Kamille didn’t even realize Nola was just standing there, arms at her side, not hugging back.
“You won’t regret it!” Kamille said, darting toward the airplane hangar. As she plowed through the clear plastic strips, she took a final glance at Nola, who was still standing in the cold, her back to Royall.
“Last call!” the airman with the clipboard shouted. “I’m looking for Nola Brown!”
“That’s me! Sorry! Here I am,” Kamille added, running for the plane and waving her boarding pass like she’d just won the lottery. “I’m Nola Brown!”
84
Dover Air Force Base, Delaware
Today
You’re never leaving this building. I’m gonna write your death in fire.”
“Death in fire? That’s how you start our reunion?” Royall asked, a thin grin still on his lips. “After all these years… Surely, in your head, you practiced something better than that?”
Nola kept her gun pointed at him. Just seeing her father again…getting a clear and close look at him… Royall was never a handsome man, but now, with his hair gray, the color of smoke—the way his face was thicker and puffier from age— Life worked hard to wear him down. But as always, Royall fought against it. His knuckles were worn and red from those fights. He had the survival instincts of a rat, hustling and clawing his way out of whatever trap he was in.
She saw it in his posture. Shoulders back, chest out. Someone taught him how to stand at attention. It gave him an air of authority, respectability. But Nola quickly tightened her glance. His feet weren’t together; he carried all his weight on his left leg. Plus the way he cocked his camouflage cap, like John Wayne rather than the proper placement… No, whoever he stole that uniform from, Royall wasn’t proper military. Most likely a contractor.
“You look tired, Nola. And angry as ever,” Royall said, trying to make it sound like a compliment. Age brought a calmness to his tone. He no longer clenched his fists when he spoke. But there are only so many things you can unlearn. As he turned her way, a glint of light hit his eyes. He always had such greedy eyes.
“You really should let go of that anger,” Royall added, taking a step toward her. “It’ll eat you up f—”
“Don’t. Don’t move. Not another damn inch,” she said, aiming her gun.
He didn’t put his hands up. He just stood there, a few feet from Dino’s lifeless body. “How many years has it been, Nola? A dozen? If it makes you feel better, I’m not the man I used to be.”
“You tried to kill me.”
“No. You brought this on yourself.”
“Royall, this isn’t— In Alaska— You did something to the plane, didn’t you? You murdered those people. You killed Kamille, and the Librarian of Congress. You took seven people’s lives when you put that airplane down. And for what? Because you thought I was on it?”
“Did you hear what I said? This is on you, Nola. You’re the one who came sniffing for trouble. I made something of myself. Do you have any idea how much we’d invested in Bluebook?”
She did. She learned two days ago, during her interrogation of Markus on the boat. Blue Book was an old Harry Houdini trick—the way he’d reveal fake fortune-tellers and also communicate with other magicians. Zig knew that. But what he didn’t know, and what Nola didn’t tell him, was that Bluebook’s real moment came when one of Houdini’s friends, a guy named John Elbert Wilkie, was put in charge of the US Secret Service. Wilkie was a magician himself—and he admired the way Houdini used his own Blue Book to separate truth from lies when it came to the great beyond. Of course, the real secret of Houdini’s Blue Book had nothing to do with speaking to the dead or returning from it. Its real power came from Houdini’s people, who covertly found it and exposed it—the people who worked with Houdini and hid so perfectly in his audience during the show. It was a private corps made up of friends like Rose Mackenberg, Clifford Eddy, and Amedeo
Vacca. The ultimate insiders.
Over time, Wilkie turned Bluebook into a full-fledged government program, sneaking undercover agents and troops into key locations. It started during the Spanish-American War. When Teddy Roosevelt rode into battle, three US sharpshooters were right there, secretly dressed as Cuban rebels, protecting Roosevelt and catching the Spanish army by surprise. A perfect trick. And a sure way to avoid death.
By World War II, Bluebook had grown to three dozen Marines, all of them embedded in German physics labs, secretly reporting on the development of German weaponry. And by the 1980s, at the height of the Cold War, Bluebook had put thirty Navy SEALs into Russian language programs at universities around the country, since that’s where the KGB did most of their recruiting.
Today, Bluebook was still kept purposefully small—and had a permanent home on that university path, secretly enrolling our best soldiers in the nation’s top university computer programs, from MIT to Caltech. Filled with students (and easily influenced social misfits), those programs were top targets for hacking and cyberterrorism recruiting.
When Nola first learned of Bluebook, she was doubtful that the government would put that much energy into infiltrating civilian life. Then she started checking class rosters in the computer science labs at Stanford, Berkeley, and the University of Michigan. Among the skinny brainiacs and future Mark Zuckerbergs, she kept finding a beefy thirty-year-old who’d spend every day getting great technical training while trying to hide his muscles in a cheap button-down shirt. Some blended in better than others. But one thing was clear: Even in the military, not all fighting happens with guns.
In the end, to keep an eye on potential terrorists and to infiltrate anyone who would recruit them, the Bluebook soldiers were the ultimate observers, hiding in plain sight, just like Harry Houdini’s hidden assistants. And to keep the program a secret, they’d run the entire operation out of the Library of Congress.
Zig was right about that. That’s why the President appointed a friend to manage the program. Just like Houdini, he needed someone he could trust. Also, with Rookstool on the plane, it provided the perfect cover story that the rest of the “students” could hide behind. With the Librarian of Congress on board, the last thing anyone suspected was an undercover operation. The big move covered the small one. But like any good magic trick, it only worked if everyone in the military kept their mouths shut.
“How’d you pull it off, Royall? Bluebook was classified at the topmost levels. So who was so dumb that they’d tell you about it?”
“You’re making assumptions, Nola. Like I said, I’m not the man I used to be.”
Nola wanted to rush at him right there, wanted to stuff her thumbs into his venous return and starve his heart as she told him he was full of shit. Not yet, though. Not until she got her answers.
The day after she ran away, Royall changed his name. She knew that for sure. That’s how he’d disappeared. “New name, new driver’s license—you must’ve loved using your skills on yourself. The thing is, you’re still—”
“You don’t know anything about me,” Royall said. “You have no idea who I became—or what I gave up when I left you. My home, my contacts, my relationships…everything I built… Your damn art teacher sent the cops to Mr. Wesley! You took my life!” he shouted, his voice ricocheting through the metal warehouse.
“All those years creating new identities, I helped give people a second chance. But to start my own life from scratch… You think you know what it’s like, but you don’t. I took you in; I gave you food. But to truly be out there alone? To leave my car behind because I couldn’t fill it up? It was death,” Royall said, swallowing hard, finding his calm.
“After a year, I eventually reached out to Mr. Wesley. My timing was perfect. He had a new job for me—a big one—three hundred IDs plus backup documents. The group was coming in on a boat. It was my chance to rebuild. But neither of us knew that the Feds were listening in. They never went away. They nabbed us both. It’s a federal crime, so I—”
“You snitched,” Nola said.
“I made a deal.”
“You gave up Wesley and testified against him. Then the government what? They liked your work?”
“They loved my work. When the Feds saw what I could do… They realized I didn’t just forge documents—I forged lives. Do you have any idea how many uses the military has for that? They tested me at first. I was better than anyone they’d ever seen. Over time, they assigned me to Bluebook. I made new lives for our ‘students,’ hiding Marines at universities around the country, providing them with a paperwork trail that was so untraceable, you’d never guess we planted them there.
“This was my calling. I became a new man. I was resurrected, Nola. But do you know what my real trick was for coming back? Even now, when I look at the shitty life we had together, and compare it with the new one I built—do you know what the difference was between the two?
“You, Nola. Once you were gone from my life, that’s where I found success. And you want to know why? Because you’re a fungus—you infect everything you touch. On my darkest days, I would spend hours focused on shedding my old life and making it disappear. But the truth was, all I needed to shed was you. And that’s the great irony, Nola. Everything that’s happened here…everything I’ve built…even everything I found with Bluebook and the death of that girl Kamille…it’s all thanks to you.”
Nola shook her head. He was still the same manipulative ass. “Y’know, for a few seconds, Royall, I almost believed you. I thought maybe you actually did make something of yourself with Bluebook. But no matter how high you rise, you’re still just that lowlife hustler, aren’t you?” she asked, her finger still tight on the trigger.
“Watch your mouth.”
“Or what? You won’t tell me how you blew it all up in your own face? It’s not hard, Royall. Maybe at Bluebook, you were doing good work for a while. But you were forever keeping your eye out, looking for an opening that you could jump all over. That’s how you always operated, always working an angle. So lemme guess: One day, you found out the name of their paying agent—a guy they nicknamed Houdini.”
The warehouse was quiet now, Royall just standing there. He was no longer smiling.
“I’m right, aren’t I?” Nola added. “Usually, Houdini moved money to make the government’s disasters disappear. But in this case, he became the disaster. Houdini was supposed to reach out to the undercover ‘students,’ doling out little bits of money so no one could trace their funding back to Uncle Sam. But you realized he was dirty. And then you saw it, Royall. An opportunity.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Royall said coldly.
“And you have no idea how predictable you are. Every few months, there’s a greedy paying agent who gets arrested for skimming cash from all the money he’s carrying around. That’s who Houdini was, wasn’t he? It’s hard to make thirty grand a year—especially while he’s trying to ignore the few million that he’s dragging everywhere. For Houdini, who made things vanish, no one would notice if some extra cash flowed into his wallet as well—especially when a brand-new pile of money was set to arrive.”
Nola knew that like any other military endeavor, Bluebook had its own operational requirements. At least twice a year, they’d bring their undercover agents together—to debrief and compare notes—usually in some isolated location, like an abandoned military base or—in the case where specialists from Russia were brought in to talk about Putin’s latest infiltration attempts—one that was tucked away in Alaska’s nearby national park. That was where Houdini had planned to make his move.
“You found out about him, though, didn’t you? You figured out that Houdini was skimming money from the cash that he was carrying around. Maybe you confronted him and asked for a piece of the action—though knowing you, you went in like a hammer, threatening to tattle on him unless he slid some of it your way. Maybe Houdini started cutting you in—or maybe that’s when he panicked and told
you about the brand-new pile of money they were about to send him for this special event in Alaska. Now you saw the chance for your favorite thing of all—the big payday—life-changing money, Royall. That’s what you used to call it, right? And with all that cash suddenly coming, you couldn’t resist. You’re far too greedy.
“From there, you started using the nickname Horatio, and you and Houdini joined forces to take—some?—all?—whatever it was, you were eyeing the massive pile of cash that was about to arrive in Alaska. Maybe you even called in a few of your old scumbag friends, Lord knows you always had plenty of those. The irony is, your Bluebook bosses were so busy bringing the Bluebook ‘students’ in, they didn’t even realize that Houdini and you—their paying agent and some greedy parasite who specialized in fake IDs—were about to rob them blind.”
“That’s enough.”
“Was it your idea to go for the big haul? Or did you have enough dirt on Houdini that you talked him into it?”
“I said, that’s enough,” Royall growled, his head cocked just enough that Nola realized he was no longer making eye contact. Something was wrong, though her brain still hadn’t registered it. Royall was looking past her. Like he was talking to someone else. Someone behind her.
Oh, shit.
Nola was in mid-turn, cursing herself. He’d never come here by himsel—
There was a snap, like a chicken wing being ripped apart. Nola heard the noise before she felt the pain—a red-hot fire in her leg—as a sharp blade sliced the cord of her hamstring behind her knee. She fell backward instantly, like her body was a bike and her kickstand had been knocked over.
Her head slammed into the concrete with a muted thud. The world went black, filled with stars. Don’t pass out! She’d lived through plenty of pain, but not like this. Don’t pass out! Her body twisted uncontrollably. She grabbed at her knee, writhing, rolling on her side. She blinked hard, trying to clear away the stars, but they were still twinkling.
