"Man, where were you three days ago?" Ethan laughed.
"You want to can the celebration?" Nora scowled from her corner. "Show some respect, man. We just lost one of our own."
Ethan blushed. "I-I'm sorry." He was at a loss. "I, um ... I'm not much use to you all here. Maybe I should see if my MI-5 contacts could help turn up something on Morgan...."
He glanced nervously around the room and then exited the loft. Alex knew she should stop him from leaving, but she found herself watching and saying nothing as he went.
"So," Fletcher looked up from his computer, "are we really going to just `sit tight' like good little sidekicks?"
"What else can we do?" Lisa replied.
"We have no leads to investigate, do we?" Daniel offered.
A thought popped into Alex's head. Something she'd forgotten about.
"The Museum," she blurted out. Everyone faced her. "The British Museum. Morgan mentioned it the other day. There's supposedly some secret room there named `the Secretum'."
"Works for me," Lisa said, standing. "Anything's better than just sitting here."
Payton surprised everyone by storming through the outer door. He brushed past the Upholders in the kitchen and entered the main area of the loft.
"You must come with me, all of you," he announced, his features grim. "Where's Grant?"
Alex stood from her seat, and Julie moved to help or brace her, but Alex motioned that she was fine.
"You found something at the Library?" Alex asked.
"What's he on about?" Mrs. Edeson asked, appearing from the kitchen.
"I found something that could lead us to Morgan and the Secretum," Payton stated. "It concerns us all," he added, glancing at Mrs. Edeson.
"I think we should look into this Museum thing first ..." Fletcher said.
"I haven't time for this. We're going now," Payton replied.
"Shut up, both of you!" Alex shouted, fire returning to her for the first time in days. "Doc, you and Lisa go check out the Museum. The rest of us will go with Payton."
Daniel looked up, but at Alex, not Lisa. "I ... I don't think that's a good-"
Alex cut him off with a wave of her hand. "I don't want to hear it. Whatever the deal is between you two, I know I speak for everyone when I say I've had enough of it. The Museum is the least dangerous assignment we've got. It should give you two loads of time to work out your personal issues."
Daniel looked deflated and downcast, but Lisa appeared rather smug.
She turned to Mrs. Edeson and Cornelius. "Will you come with us?"
"What is this about, dear?" Mrs. Edeson asked.
"You want to know where that ring on your finger came from?" Payton stepped in. "Or who put it there? Then come with us."
"Here we go," Stephan said, taking a seat behind one of the computers in the Internet cafe.
They were lucky to find an open terminal. Patrons jammed the place, and everyone turned to look as Grant entered and took a seat opposite Stephan at one of the tiny tables. His appearance was ghastly, but he still had the world's most recognized-and now most wantedface. He kept a close eye on everyone around, should any of them try anything. But they all seemed too dazed and awed by his presence to act.
They shouldn't stay long ... One of these people was bound to dial 911, or whatever number Londoners dialed for emergencies....
Stephan's fingers tapped the keyboard as he logged into a remote account. In only seconds, he'd pulled up the "Guardian Fans" website and began scanning through the most recent postings.
Grant knelt beside him. "Where are the `Guardian Sightings' you mentioned?"
"One sec . . ." Stephan replied, clicking with his mouse. He pulled up a secondary page that looked like a standard Internet message board with brief paragraphs written by users detailing how and where they had seen Guardian. Stephan scrolled through the list, and two things caught Grant's attention.
First, more than half of the reports were unfactual nonsense. Nothing more than sad attempts at grabbing fifteen seconds of fame.
Second, the majority of the valid reports were signed by someone named Levi.
"Who's this Levi person?" Grant asked.
Stephan shook his head. "Dunno, man, but he comes up with more reliable sightings of you than anyone. Don't know how he does it."
"So you don't know him?"
"I know his name; he's on here all the time. Never talked to him. But he's the one who wrote the report I saw the other day that led me to you. Everybody wants to know who he is. Some friends of mine even think he could be a member of your team," Stephan added.
"He's not," Grant replied confidently. "Can you tell if Levi is online right now?"
"Yeah, he's on."
"I want to talk to him."
Lisa and Daniel entered the British Museum, an enormous building in classic Greco-Roman style, in silence. Daniel hadn't said a single word since they departed from the loft. Lisa had tried to start a conversation a few times, but she quickly gave up.
She gazed about at the enormous expanse before them. The sheer vastness was mind-boggling.
"Where do we start looking?" she asked.
Daniel merely shrugged.
Lisa rolled her eyes and turned to her right. "It's probably off in some remote corner ..."
Behind her, Daniel turned and set off to the left.
Lisa's shoulders slumped as she noticed his action and turned to follow him. "Or ... we could look over that way...."
"Tell me you were undercover, Ethan," Chief Inspector Walden said, rounding on him. "Tell me it was all part of one of your wild schemes to infiltrate Guardian's ranks and discover his secrets."
Ethan met Walden's eyes evenly. His hands were cuffed behind him. He was seated in a folding chair in the large police workroom, amid desks, filing cabinets, and over a dozen of Scotland Yard's finest. Several MI-5 agents were also present.
Things had not exactly gone according to plan. Apparently, Director Stevens had issued an international warrant for his arrest. Ethan had unknowingly walked right into her clutches.
"No comment," Ethan replied.
Walden knelt on one knee before Ethan and grabbed him by the shoulders. "You listen to me, lad! This man you're protecting is a wanted terrorist capable of, literally, almost anything. Your people are coming all the way over here to retrieve you, and I don't think they're going to be as friendly with you as I am. It'd be best to make your confession to me now and get it over with."
Ethan looked into his friend's eyes. He was grateful for the older man's concern, but he'd gotten himself into this mess and would have to figure his own way out. He couldn't reach Grant or any of his people for help, and he sure wasn't about to drag another good law enforcement officer like Walden down with him.
"I have nothing to say," Ethan mumbled and looked away.
His self-pity was for show only; in reality, his eyes were searching the room, his mind formulating various means of escape. He'd gotten out of tighter spots than this....
Walden walked away sadly, and several of his officers followed him. Two were left to guard Ethan, remaining by him on either side.
Ethan waited until Walden was clear of the room, allowed at least three minutes to pass, and then he acted.
"I need to go to the rest room," he said.
The two guards looked at each other. "You'll have to hold it," one of them said.
He stood, and one of them made a move to force him back down into his seat, but Ethan kicked backward against the chair, which hit the other officer, knocking him off guard. Ethan head-butted the man before him in the stomach and took off running for the nearest exit, his hands still cuffed behind his back.
He made it to within ten feet of the nearest door, which would lead to an outer hallway, a front desk, a foyer, and then the exit. This wouldn't be easy, but then, that was the way he liked it.
"Hold it!" someone yelled from behind. He heard more than one set of footsteps.
He didn't stop.
He made it to the hallway and ducked inside a water fountain alcove. When the running officers approached, he tripped them. He stepped over them and kept running.
He was halfway through the hallway when someone slammed into him from his side. Tackled and wrestled to the ground, Ethan looked up into the eyes of his friend Walden.
"What are you doing, lad?" Walden shouted. "Did you really think you could escape? You're just making things worse-"
His words stopped when the electricity went out all over the building. Emergency flood lights came on, augmenting the natural sunlight shining through the windows. Ethan looked up; Walden still had him pinned to the ground, but his attention was elsewhere.
Ethan heard a zip sound, and Walden's eyes grew wide. He passed out, his heavy weight holding Ethan to the ground.
More silent shots were fired, but Ethan's trained ears knew he wasn't hearing the sound of bullets firing-even ones from a silencer. This was some sort of tranq dart or Taser fire, and it seemed that everyone in the building was getting one. It happened so quickly and efficiently, Ethan couldn't believe it when he couldn't hear anyone speaking or any shoes hitting the tile floor. Everyone was out cold in mere seconds.
Walden's unconscious form was peeled off of him, and someone helped Ethan to his feet.
"Ethan Cooke?" said a voice to his right behind a black ski mask. The man was clad all in black, head-to-toe, and there was another man on his left dressed exactly the same.
"Yeah," he replied, no idea what was going on. "What is this?"
"You are needed," the man in the mask said. It was a voice he had never heard before.
The two men grabbed him by his restrained arms and dragged him toward the exit.
"Wait!" Ethan cried. "Who are you people?!"
"We're the good guys, friend," said one of the men. "And you've just been drafted into war."
Ethan shook himself free. "There is no way I'm going back to the FBI."
One of the men chuckled, amused. "We don't answer to any government. We work for ... a higher power."
"What higher power?" Ethan demanded.
"The higher power."
"You going to tell us what we're about to find?" Alex asked Payton as the group walked together through the main doors of the London Library.
"No," Payton replied.
"I kind of despise you," Alex said with a sigh.
They marched without incident to the librarian's office and down the spiral staircase. Mrs. Edeson proved Grant's theory about her control over willpower correct by ensuring that none of the patrons inside the Library looked in their direction. Nora erased the memories of the one or two that caught a glimpse of them anyway.
"I don't understand," Mrs. Edeson said as the group stepped through the blown-in doorway and into the charred remains of the Secretum's file room. "What's a filthy, poorly lit room such as this doing underneath the finest library in all the world?"
"We're not here for the room," Payton bit out.
He led the way to a distant corner, where he knelt and pointed at a small pockmark on the wall. It was less than an inch in diameter, but as Alex leaned in close to see it, she recognized it.
It was the six-pointed symbol of the Secretum.
She stood straight again. "So it's their symbol? So what?"
"What symbol?" asked Cornelius, twirling his mustache in what might've been a nervous gesture.
Fletcher summed it up. "The Secretum of Six. That ancient underground conspiracy Grant told you about that's screwed with our lives. They call him `the Bringer.' They have some kind of big plans for Grant that have been written in stone for seven thousand years. Literally."
"Why are we down here, Payton?" Alex asked, wanting to get back to the point.
Payton touched the tiny six-pointed star with his forefinger, and it depressed inward, revealing the seams of a round button that was set into the wall. He stepped back as three square feet of corner space swiveled open, pivoting on the corner itself.
It revealed a dank cubbyhole inside, no larger than the corner that had swiveled open. At its bottom was a hole that had been dug out of the ground. The top rungs of a cast-iron ladder stuck out over the top edge of the hole.
"Where does it lead?" Alex asked.
Daniel and Lisa's search of the British Museum turned up nothing. By early afternoon, they had covered most of the building's surprisingly modern interior.
But they were both far too distracted to take in the rarities the Museum held, simply proceeding in silence from one area to the next.
Lisa watched Daniel almost as often as she searched the exhibits. More than anything else, this proved how different a person he was. The old Daniel would have been alive with excitement. He would've wanted plenty of time to marvel at the ancient relics, the comprehensive collections, the perfectly preserved artifacts from dozens of ancient civilizations. The British Museum held one of the finest collections of cultural antiquities in the world.
Now, his gaze seemed to skim over the surface of everything he saw, like water running off of an oily surface. Nothing registered, nothing mattered.
Under different circumstances, their visit together to such a prominent British tourist attraction could have qualified as a date. She'd once longed for such a possibility, but she still couldn't reconcile her feelings for this man with what she'd seen him do. Daniel had used a handgun to drill a hole in the center of Detective Matthew Drexel's forehead.
She couldn't help thinking that if he would simply talk to her, they could sort things out somehow. But he refused, retreating further and further inward.
They concluded their tour of the facility in the central Great Court. A magnificent glass and steel roof covered what once had been an outdoor space, and in the center of this courtyard was a building completely separated from the rest of the Museum, yet enclosed by it on all sides.
It was a round building labeled "Reading Room." As soon as Daniel saw it, he rolled his eyes.
"I'm an idiot," he said.
"What?" Lisa asked.
"This place-the Reading Room-contains a library of reference materials on all of the Museum's collections and many volumes about the cultures represented inside the Museum. We should've started here. I'm so stupid...."
Her eyes were drawn upward to the dome that reached high above them as they entered the round room. Detailed with beautiful gold, white, and blue decor, the ceiling was a work of art in and of itself. Shelves lined the curved walls all the way around, and every shelf was filled to the brim with books.
The room's center was filled with straight desks, shelves, and other resources extending from the middle of the chamber out to the edges. The desks were topped with individual fluorescent lamps that illuminated the room in a soft, reverential way. The combined effect gave an unspoken command to visitors: Please be quiet.
Visitors were here and there about the room, researching or merely appreciating what could be considered another of the Museum's collections.
"This won't take long," Daniel said, wandering off.
Whatever, she thought. Lisa allowed herself to wander as well and soon came upon a computer screen containing a digitized version of the Reading Room's card catalog.
On a whim, she sat and typed in the word secretum.
An entry came up, but it wasn't about any sort of secret repository. It was the name of a book, a very old book. Something about it captured her attention immediately, and she got a tingle across her skina remnant of the same sensation she felt when she and Daniel used to make a breakthrough back at their lab.
She printed out the reference and read over it again before rising from her seat to locate Daniel. She spotted him facing the bookcases against the wall about forty feet away, flipping through the pages of one volume after another. She fought the urge to run with excitement as she approached him.
"Did you know there's a book called Secretum by somebody named Petrarch?" she said, still reading over the page in her hands.
"Mm
," he nodded absently, not looking up. "It's a classical Latin philosophy piece written by a disciple of Augustine. Dates back to the fourteenth century, if I'm not mistaken."
Lisa cursed him in her mind. Why did he always have to know everything she didn't? Frowning, she said, "Yeah, but do you know what it's about?"
"I don't recall the specifics," he replied, still not turning away from his book.
"According to this, it's a self-examination of man's free will."
A moment passed, and Lisa almost thought Daniel hadn't heard her. Then he slowly turned his head and looked into her eyes-truly looked into her eyes for the first time in months.
Her heart fluttered as she felt an old emotion surface-the thrill of shared discovery.
"Let me see that," he said softly. She handed him the printed page. "Man's free will ..." he repeated, whispering the phrase. She studied him, knowing the look in his eyes so well. It was intense concentration, and she could practically see the wheels turning inside his head, processing.
She felt it as well, her mind going over and over the words on the paper. He looked at her again, his expression severe. There was something to this.
They both knew it. "We're on to something," she whispered.
"I think so, yes," Daniel replied, his mind still spinning.
Lisa looked past his shoulder. There was something else bothering her, a vague sense that only now was forming into a genuine thought as she said it aloud. "Don't look, but there are two men on the other side of the room who've been watching us since we walked in here."
He faced the book in his hand, pretending to read. "Are you sure?"
"Positive," she replied, her adrenaline surging. "They're trying to hide it but not doing a very good job."
"Feds or locals?" Daniel whispered.
"Can't tell." She stared at her piece of paper, trying hard not to look at the men again.
"I want you to work your way around the outer edge of the room until you're near the exit. Don't look at them again," he instructed her.
Fearless (Dominion Trilogy #2) Page 26
