The Crimson Code

by Rachel Lee

  "You will learn all in due time. For now, it is enough that you call me Nathan."

  "All right." He felt no impulse to object, despite his anxiety. Even in the dream, he realized this was more than a dream.

  "You have been chosen," Nathan repeated. "Paloma chose you when she entrusted you with the Ruby Codex."

  "Chosen for what?"

  Nathan smiled. "To be a Guardian of Light, servant of the one true God."

  Steve considered that. He had already dedicated his life to God, so that aspect didn't disturb him. But he sensed that being chosen probably involved more trouble than he was already in.

  "Why me?" he asked.

  "Because Paloma chose you," Nathan answered. "The Guardians are few, because few have the wisdom to know what we know, what you saw when you looked into the Codex."

  "What did I see?" Steve asked, remembering the swirling symbols that almost screamed of a deeper meaning, but one he could not ascertain.

  "What do you think you saw?"

  "Secrets," Steve said without hesitation. "The secrets of the universe itself. But what did they mean?"

  "In time," Nathan said. "But first…"

  Nathan waved a hand, and suddenly Steve was standing a few feet away from his own sleeping body. As he watched in horror, a man he didn't know crept stealthily out of the woods. In moments he had silently cut the leather thong that tied the bag containing the ruby to Steve's belt.

  "I must stop him," Steve said, trying to wake himself. "I must…"

  Then he was back on the plain with the twelve. A woman stepped forward and touched his arm.

  "This must happen," the woman said, her bright blue eyes boring into him. "This was meant to be."

  "I promised!"

  "We know of your promise," Nathan said. "But one cannot promise more than that of which one is capable. This was meant to be, so that you can protect your people. With the Codex gone, you can settle your people, and they can build their lives anew. For now they are safe, and safe they will remain."

  "All of this was meant to be," the woman said, squeezing his arm. "All of it from the very first day. But now you have a mission."

  "Yes." Nathan nodded. "When your people are settled, you must return to the Vatican. Tell your friend Veltroni that the Codex has been stolen. Do not tell him of what you saw, for he is not ready to know. Tell him only what you have been told to say: that the Codex has been stolen. He will join you on the next stage of your quest."

  "Why not simply stop the thief now?" Steve pleaded. "Why don't you let me awaken?"

  "There are powers that must be laid low," Nathan said. "This is as it must be. This is the only way we can force them out of the darkness. Look now, and see…."

  The dream shifted to visions of war. Steve tossed and turned, but he could not pull himself out of the mire of horror. He knelt over charred, maimed bodies, anointing them and praying. He listened to their cries for God, for death, for relief. Women and children lay among the maimed and burned. Lifting his head, he looked around and saw that bodies stretched as far as he could see, all of them screaming in pain and terror.

  "This," Nathan said, "we cannot allow. This is what you must prevent. It is why Paloma chose you. It is why the Light has chosen you. Be ready, Priest Lorenzo. Your time has come."

  Steve shook himself awake and saw that the sun was rising. The trees above him seemed to glisten in the early light. He could not shake off the dread that had grown as he dreamed, and for long minutes he lay flat on his back, telling himself it had been only a dream. None of it was real. It could not be real. Finally he forced himself to roll onto his side, and horror shook him to his core.

  The Codex was gone.

  Washington, D.C.

  "Miriam?"

  Miriam looked up from her computer screen, in part upset to be distracted from her search of Phillip Bentley's preconfirmation background check, and in part grateful for the break. So far, she knew Bentley was linked to Jonathan Morgan, and she knew he was receiving private messages from a bank in Frankfurt. But that wasn't enough to barge into the office of the National Security Advisor and accuse him of blackmailing the President.

  "What is it?" Miriam asked.

  "You have a visitor," the secretary said. "A woman named Katherine Dixon. Were you expecting her?"

  "No," Miriam said. Katherine Dixon? In an instant, she combed her memory and connected the name. Wes Dixon's widow. "But that's not a problem. Tell her I'll see her in five minutes. And, Jessica, I want to meet her in a clean room."

  "Certainly," the secretary said.

  Miriam closed the document she was viewing and quickly opened her file on the Dixon case. Yes, she had remembered correctly. Katherine Dixon was not only Wes Dixon's wife, she was also Edward Morgan's sister and Jonathan Morgan's daughter. Scanning the file quickly, Miriam refreshed her memory on the case, then rose and walked out to the lobby.

  Katherine Morgan was a striking woman, with strong, patrician features, sandy blond hair shot through with streaks of gray, and tired eyes. She rose as Miriam approached, obviously recognizing her from the many television news reports following the Dixon affair. Her smile was artful, graceful and patently out of step with her true emotions.

  "Special Agent Anson?" she asked.

  "Yes," Miriam said. "And you're Katherine Dixon. Please come this way."

  The J. Edgar Hoover Building had several interrogation rooms, but only a few of these were classified as "clean." The clean rooms were windowless, equipped with the latest countersurveillance technology, with none of the customary video-and audio-recording equipment or two-way mirrors. Clean rooms were reserved for interviews of the most sensitive nature. Miriam couldn't imagine anything more sensitive than what she was about to discuss with Katherine Dixon.

  "Thank you for seeing me," Katherine said as she took her seat. "I remembered your name from the news. You are the woman who killed my husband."

  "Yes," Miriam agreed, feeling an unpleasant jolt. "I didn't kill him personally, but I was the scene commander. So, yes, you could say I killed him."

  Miriam didn't tell her that Wes Dixon had had a rifle trained on her when he had been shot. Or that he would almost certainly have killed her, had Tom Lawton not shot him first. There was no point in antagonizing a grieving widow, and Katherine Dixon didn't seem the type of woman who would come in just to harangue Miriam.

  "I know," Katherine said. "I also know he was as good as dead long before you ever saw him in Montana. He'd been dead for a long time."

  "How do you mean?" Miriam asked.

  "The man I met, the man I married, was a wonderful man," Katherine said. "He was intelligent, diligent, well-read. He loved his country, and he loved the army. And he loved me. Probably in that order."

  Miriam didn't respond. It was clear that Katherine intended to tell a story, and Miriam was content to listen. Later, she could ask questions to fill in the gaps. But as she had learned all the way back in her academy training: when a subject is willing to talk, don't do anything to get in the way.

  "I guess it started as soon as we got married," Katherine continued, "but I didn't notice it until after the Gulf War. Wes began to keep secrets from me. I'd been told that was fairly common for men who had seen combat. And Wes's brigade did see action south of Basra, so I thought that's all it was. Later, I told myself it was because he'd been promoted and assigned as the division intelligence officer. He couldn't talk about his work, so I figured he'd gotten into the habit of not talking at all.

  "Whenever we went back to visit my family, Wes and Edward and my father would go off fishing or trapshooting, or excuse themselves after dinner to go to my father's study and talk. I knew Wes couldn't talk about military secrets, and besides, Edward and my father weren't foreign spies, they were just bankers. Even so, when I'd ask Wes what he had talked about with them, he'd just shrug and say it was 'guy stuff.'"

  Katherine paused for a moment. To Miriam, it seemed obvious that the older woman had thought
through and planned what she was going to say. She would not have been shocked to find out that this pause had also been planned.

  "Finally," Katherine said, "I confronted him about it. I told him I didn't want state secrets, but I didn't want to be married to a ghost, either. We'd tried to have kids, but that had never worked out. I was living on army bases, and I didn't find much to talk about with most of the other wives. They resented my family's money. So many of them were barely scraping by, and Wes and I could afford to live comfortably, even when he was a junior officer. I had no reason to work. So I sat home all day waiting for a man who, when he did get home, barely said three words to me. As you can guess, we had quite a row about it."

  Miriam nodded. Everything Katherine had said so far had been preamble; that much was obvious. Setting herself up as the innocent, unknowing wife.

  "Still," Katherine said, "it got better after that. But a year later, he left the army. I asked why, and he just said he was tired of it. But he had loved the army, loved the discipline, loved the structure, loved the sense of mission and purpose. Then, when he said we were moving to Idaho, I knew something was wrong. Neither of us had ever lived out west. It made no sense. I didn't ask where the ranch hands came from. I thought they were probably illegal aliens, passing through, like migrant workers. But Wes's face slowly got tighter. Harder. The man I'd met was hardly there anymore."

  Miriam leaned forward, making eye contact, tired of the charade. "So you're saying you didn't know that the ranch you and your husband owned was just a front for a terrorist training camp?"

  "No, I didn't," Katherine said, almost convincingly. "Sometimes I heard gunshots, but I thought it was just hunters, or Wes trapshooting with his friends. I had no idea Wes was training guerillas."

  "I find that hard to believe," Miriam said, impatience clear in her voice.

  "Believe what you want," Katherine said. "My husband is dead. And my brother is dead, too. You didn't kill my husband, Special Agent Anson. Edward did, by dragging him into all of this. And when it all came apart, my father killed Edward."

  "First," Miriam said, "the FBI has no evidence that your brother is dead. For all I know, he's living the high life in Monte Carlo. And second, what is 'all of this'?"

  "I guess you wouldn't have any reason to read the New York Times obituaries," Katherine said. "Edward's body was found last week by a lobster fisherman in Maine."

  Miriam sat back, catching the momentary flicker of a smile in Katherine's eyes. Yes, Katherine had planned this entire conversation, right up to the point of saving that revelation until it would have the greatest impact.

  "How did—" Miriam began, but Katherine cut her off.

  "He was murdered, Special Agent Anson. Gunshot wound to the back of the head. Tied into a weighted canvas sack and dumped into the ocean. He might never have been found, except the sack had torn and snagged on a lobster trap."

  "How did they identify the body?"

  "My brother was wearing a Rolex wristwatch," Katherine said. "Rolex watches have serial numbers stamped on them, inside the waterproof case. The detectives in Maine sent the serial number to the Rolex offices in Switzerland, and it came back registered to my brother. After that, they checked dental records."

  It was plausible, Miriam knew. The same method had been used to identify bodies in the past, most notably in the infamous Albert Walker murder case in England. She could certainly verify the information easily enough.

  "What makes you think it was your father who killed your brother?" Miriam asked.

  "The last time my brother was seen was the day you tracked down Wes," Katherine said. "He was supposed to go fishing with my father that morning, but my father said he never arrived at the boat. I had no reason to question it at the time. I knew Wes was in trouble, and I knew it was Edward's fault. I was furious with him. Like you, I thought Edward just decided to disappear. But when his body is found, after having been dumped at sea, after he disappeared the day when he was supposed to be fishing with my father…"

  "Yes," Miriam said. "I can see where you would draw that conclusion."

  "If my father killed my brother," Katherine said, fire flashing in her eyes, "then he knew what my brother was doing. That means he also knew my husband was involved. I knew my father was a cold, ruthless man, but I never suspected…I want you to get him, Special Agent Anson. I want you to get him for all of it. And I'm willing to help. I'll tell you everything I know. Everything I've learned since Wes was killed. I'll take a polygraph. Wes was a good man, and my father turned him into an evil one. I won't forgive that. I want you to get him."

  Miriam nodded. If everything up to that moment had been scripted, that last speech had come from somewhere else. The rage was evident in Katherine Dixon's eyes, the eyes of a woman who wanted vengeance. That part, at least, was true. The case surrounding Edward Morgan had always been a bottomless pit. Now, it seemed, that might change. And Katherine Dixon's timing could not have been better.

  "Okay," Miriam said. "First, though, tell me what you know about Phillip Allen Bentley."

  "You mean Daddy's lapdog?" Katherine said. "What do you want to know?"

  "Everything," Miriam said. "Everything."

  25

  Prague, Czech Republic

  Jan Kott was a former barber who had turned to local politics after the former state of Czechoslovakia split into two nations, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, in 1993. In the years since the "velvet divorce," Jan had become a respected member of the state parliament, both campaigning on and working for an internationalist platform by which his country would meld seamlessly into the European Union.

  He was also an Office 119 intelligence asset.

  Renate had recruited him four years earlier, during her investigation of an anti-EU bomb plot. Although Jan had not been involved in the plot, he had been a married man romantically involved with a young woman who was among the conspirators. Jan had been in love, and the woman had been using him to get information on security arrangements.

  When Renate had approached him, his horror at learning that his young flame meant to ignite more than his passions far outweighed any reluctance he might have had to be a willing spy. Renate had saved both his marriage and his political career, as well as helping him to safeguard his country.

  So when he met Renate and Lawton at the train station outside of Prague, it was not with the customary reluctance and resentment that spies usually felt upon meeting their handlers. Instead, he greeted Renate with a warm smile and a long embrace. Movement on the local in-city service hadn't yet been resumed and might not be for some time. They all squeezed together into a small white Mini Cooper and headed into the city.

  "Have you learned much?" Renate asked Jan as they drove through winding lanes hardly wider than the medieval carts for which they had originally been designed.

  "Yes, the Minister of Banking and Finance was very forthcoming," Jan said. "The problem was not getting the information but keeping him from sharing it with our own police. There is considerable political pressure for a quick and local solution to this atrocity."

  "I'm sure there is," Renate said. "But this is part of a larger puzzle. I don't just want the people who set off the ricin in the subway. I want their entire network, and that includes many people who are outside the reach of the Czech police."

  Jan held up a hand. "I understand. And I gave the Minister of Banking my assurances that this matter would be handled both swiftly and effectively. I said no more than that, nor did I need to. There are advantages to chairing the committee on internal security."

  Renate nodded. "I know. That's why I recruited you."

  Jan chuckled. "Really? I thought you recruited me for my charm and good looks."

  "Those helped," Renate said. "They got you into the trouble that made you vulnerable for recruitment."

  For an instant Jan's face began to darken, because Renate's eyes were glacial. But then she offered the briefest flicker of a smile, and Jan broke into a hearty
laugh.

  "Guilty as charged," he said. Then, with a chivalrous bow of his head, he added, "And eternally grateful for your rescue."

  Lawton could see why the man had been so successful in politics. If he could extract a smile from Renate under these circumstances, he could sell ice makers in Siberia.

  "So who is the banker we are after?" Lawton asked.

  "His name is Mikael Rotel," Jan said, making eye contact with Lawton in the rearview mirror. "There's a dossier beside you in the backseat. Not that there is much to it. He comes from an old banking family. Sixth generation. His family's bank remained open through the Nazi occupation and the Soviet rule. On the surface, they appeared apolitical. In fact, they were simply shrewd businessmen, willing to make such appeasements as were needed in order to keep the bank functioning."

  "That fits," Lawton said.

  "Here is your hotel," Jan said, pulling to the curb beside a stately building that dominated the block. "The bank is two blocks down, on the left."

  "Thank you," Renate said, already reaching for the door handle, but Jan put a hand on her arm.

  "If your mission should require you to do anything that might be…embarrassing…you will give me advance warning, please?"

  "Yes," she said. "If we can. You are a good man, Jan. I have no desire to compromise you. But I cannot give you promises. Our sources indicate that there is another operation under way, so we may have to act very quickly. There may not be time for…courtesies."

  "Of course," Jan said. "Do what you must. Stop these bastards."

  "We will try," Renate said, climbing from the car.

  "If you need anything at all…" Jan said, letting the sentence trail away. "In my position, I have access to…certain assets."

  "Just do what you can to keep your police and the EU Collective Security forces out of our way," Renate said. "That will be enough. We can do the rest, and it will be better for you if we do it ourselves."

  * * *

  At the same moment, twelve blocks away, Ahmed Ahsami and his team were unpacking in a tired apartment that had most certainly seen better days. The outside of the building still bore clear scars from World War II, and the inside bore the scars of careless tenants since. Still, it was within his diminished operating budget.