The Jefferson Key: A Novel

by Steve Berry

  “Pauline, do you realize what you’re saying? Have you thought this through?”

  “I think about little else. Danny’s held office nearly our entire marriage. It’s been a distraction for us both, neither one of us wanting to face reality. In twenty months his career is over. Then it will only be him and me. No distractions. I don’t think I can stand that.”

  “It’s the other thing. Isn’t it?”

  “You talk like it’s dirty.”

  “It’s clouding your judgment.”

  “No, it’s not. He actually clears my head. For the first time in many years I can see. Think. Feel.”

  “Does he know that we talk about this?”

  “I told him.”

  Hale clicked off the recorder. “Seems the First Lady of the United States has a boyfriend.”

  “How did you record that?” Surcouf asked.

  “About a year ago I cultivated a relationship, one I hoped might provide us with some valuable information.” Hale paused. “And I was right.”

  Knox had researched Shirley Kaiser and learned of her long-standing friendship with Pauline Daniels. Luckily, Kaiser was outgoing, attractive, and available. A supposed accidental introduction was arranged and a relationship blossomed. But neither he nor Hale had realized the deep chasm that existed in the Daniels’ marriage. That had been an unexpected bonus.

  “Why didn’t you tell us what you were doing?” Cogburn asked.

  “That’s easy, Charles,” Bolton said. “He wanted to be our savior so we’d be in his debt.”

  Which wasn’t too far off the mark, Knox thought.

  “You berate us,” Bolton said, “for acting alone. But you’ve done the same thing, and for a long time.”

  “With the difference being that my actions were calculated and private. Yours were stupid and public.”

  Bolton rushed across the room, heading straight for Hale, arm cocked back, fist balled. Hale’s right hand reached beneath his jacket and the same gun used to ease the prisoner’s misery appeared.

  Bolton stopped.

  The men glared at each other.

  Cogburn and Surcouf stood silent.

  Knox was delighted. They were fighting among themselves—again—the perfect distraction from him. But it only went to prove what he’d already concluded before dealing with NIA. These men would not survive the waves that were about to wash across their decks. Too much conflict, too many egos, too little cooperation.

  “One day, Quentin,” Bolton said.

  “What will you do? Assassinate me?”

  “I’d love to.”

  “You’ll find killing me far harder than any president.”

  WYATT ARRIVED AT MONTICELLO. HE’D DRIVEN THE 120 MILES from Washington in less than two hours and parked in a treed lot, adjacent to an attractive complex of low-slung buildings identified as the Thomas Jefferson Visitor Center and Smith Education Center. Its rooflines followed the contour of the adjacent hillside, the wooden walls blending naturally into the surrounding forest and encompassing a café, gift shop, theater, classrooms, and exhibit hall.

  Carbonell had been right. He could not allow Malone to succeed. He’d involved his adversary in New York to place him in danger, perhaps even eliminate him, not provide another opportunity for him to save the day.

  Carbonell had also been right about one other thing.

  He needed her. At least for the short haul.

  She’d provided some useful information on Monticello, including its geography, security system, and maps for roads leading in and out. He walked from his car up a stairway into a courtyard dotted with locust trees. He found the ticket center and bought a spot on the first tour of the day, leaving in less than twenty minutes, when the mansion opened at 9 AM.

  He wandered around and read the placards, learning that Jefferson had labored forty years on the estate—naming it Monticello, Italian for “little mountain”—creating what he eventually called his “essay in architecture.”

  It had been a working estate. Livestock, hogs, and sheep had all been bred there. A sawmill produced lumber. Two other mills provided corn and wheat. A barrel shop fashioned casks for flour. Firewood was harvested and sold from the surrounding forests. Jefferson had raised tobacco for sale to the Scots, then switched to rye, clover, potatoes, and peas. At one point he could ride ten miles in any direction and never leave his land.

  He envied that independence.

  But inside the exhibit hall he learned that Jefferson had died broke, owing thousands of dollars, and that his heirs sold everything, including his slaves, to satisfy his creditors. The house survived through a succession of owners until being repurchased in 1923 by a foundation, which had labored to restore its original glory.

  He drifted among the various exhibits and learned more. The house’s main floor consisted of eleven rooms, each part of the official tour. The careful use of space and natural light, one room easing into another, once divided by glass doors, was meant to convey a sense of a free and open life—nothing hidden, no secrets. The second and third floors were not accessible to visitors, but the cellars were open to the public.

  He studied a diagram.

  Satisfied, he stepped back outside into a beautiful late-summer morning and decided that quick and fast was the only way to get this job done.

  He made his way toward where a shuttle bus would ferry him and the first group nearly nine hundred feet up the mountainside. The fifty or so people consisted of many teenagers. A life-sized bronze of Thomas Jefferson waited with them near the curb. A tall man, he noticed, over six feet. He studied the likeness with a few of the youngsters.

  “This ought to be neat,” one of them said.

  He agreed.

  A little fun.

  Like the old days.

  MALONE AND CASSIOPEIA MOTORED INTO THE MONTICELLO visitor center. Edwin Davis stood at the base of a stairway, waiting for them. Cassiopeia ignored a parking attendant, who was directing her toward a vacant part of the lot, and wheeled to the curb, switching off the engine.

  “I arranged for you to see the wheel,” Davis said to them. “I’ve spoken with the foundation chair, and the estate manager is here to take us up to the house.”

  Malone had never before visited any former president’s home. He’d always meant to come here and Mt. Vernon, but had just never made the time. One of those father–son trips. He wondered what Gary, his sixteen-year-old, was doing today. He’d called Friday when they arrived in New York and talked with him for half an hour. Gary was growing up fast. He seemed a levelheaded kid, particularly pleased to hear that his father had finally made a move on Cassiopeia.

  She’s hot, the boy had said.

  That she was.

  “The manager is waiting by the shuttle buses with a car,” Davis said. “Only estate vehicles are allowed to drive up. We can slip in with the first tour and see the wheel. It’s displayed on the ground floor, then we can take it upstairs where there’s privacy.”

  “Cotton can go,” Cassiopeia said. “You and I need to talk.”

  Malone caught the look in her eye—that something was troubling her—and one other thing.

  Her suggestion was not open for debate.

  “Okay,” Davis said. “You and I will stay here.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  BATH, NORTH CAROLINA

  HALE WAITED FOR BOLTON TO COW TO HIM AND, FINALLY, THE weak soul, as expected, retreated to the other side of the room.

  Tensions eased but did not dissipate.

  “President Daniels will not want his private life exposed,” he said. “There has never been a hint of scandal regarding him or his wife. America believes them to be the perfect couple. Can you imagine what the twenty-four-hour news channels and the Internet would do with this? Daniels would forever be known as the cuckold president. He’ll never allow that to happen. Gentlemen, we can use this.”

  He saw that the other three did not necessarily agree.

  “When were you going to tell
us?” Cogburn asked again. “Edward is justified in being angry. We’re all angry, Quentin.”

  “There was no sense speaking of it until I was sure that it could be used. Now, I am sure.”

  Surcouf stepped to the bar and filled a glass with bourbon. Hale could use one himself, but decided a clear head would be better.

  “We can quietly apply pressure and stop these prosecutions,” he said. “As I told all three of you a month ago, there’s no need to kill a president. The talking heads on television and bloggers of the Internet will do it for you. This president has shown us no courtesy. We owe him nothing, unless he wants to accommodate us now.”

  “Who is the woman you’re holding in the prison?” Cogburn asked.

  He’d wondered when they’d finally ask. “The head of an intelligence unit within the Justice Department called Magellan Billet. Stephanie Nelle.”

  “Why do we have her?”

  He could not tell them the truth. “She was becoming a problem for us. Investigating.”

  “Isn’t she a little late?” Bolton asked. “We’ve been investigated to death.”

  “I saw her watching the execution from a cell window,” Cogburn said.

  Finally. One of them had paid attention. “My hope was that it would send her a message.”

  “Quentin,” Surcouf said, “do you have any idea what you’re doing? It seems like you’re headed in three different directions. Taking a hostage could bring even more heat on us.”

  “More so than trying to kill a president? And I truly hate to keep harping on that, but not a soul knows my prisoner is here, besides us. Right now, as far as they are concerned, she is simply missing.”

  Of course, he did not include Andrea Carbonell in that disclaimer. Which brought to mind the second traitor. If that person existed, he or she could well know of Stephanie Nelle’s presence. But if that was the case, why hadn’t anyone acted to save her?

  The answer to that inquiry reassured him.

  Surcouf pointed at the recorder. “You could be right, Quentin. Daniels may not want this made public.”

  “And the price for our silence is quite reasonable,” he said. “We simply want the American government to keep its word.”

  “There’s a chance Daniels won’t give a damn,” Bolton said. “He may tell you to stick it up your ass, like they did the first time you went begging.”

  He resented the comment, but there was something else that required mentioning. “Did you notice an omission during that taped conversation?”

  “I did,” Cogburn said. “No name. Who’s the man the First Lady is messing around with?”

  He smiled. “Now, that’s what makes this so intriguing.”

  WYATT STEPPED INSIDE MONTICELLO WITH THE FIRST TOUR group of the day. He’d learned that visitors came in bunches of thirty, escorted by a guide who explained each room and answered questions. He noticed the guides were mainly older, volunteers most likely, and groups stayed clustered, spaced about five minutes apart.

  He stood in what the guide called the entrance foyer, just inside the east portico. The spacious two-story room cast the appearance of a museum—which had been Jefferson’s intention, the guide explained—displaying maps, antlers, sculptures, paintings, and artifacts. The second floor was visible through a semi-octagonal balcony. Thin, closely spaced balusters topped by a mahogany rail protected the outer edge. Everyone’s attention was directed to Jefferson’s dual-faced clock, displaying time and day of the week, its cannonball-like weights traveling through holes in the floor to the cellar. He feigned interest in two Old Master paintings and the busts of Voltaire, Turgot, and Alexander Hamilton while absorbing the layout.

  They drifted into a sitting room adjacent to the hall.

  Jefferson’s daughter, Martha, and her family had used the cramped space as their private living quarters. He retreated to one corner so the rest of the group could enter the next room on the tour before him. He noticed that the guide would wait and close the door of the preceding room before addressing the group in the next. He assumed that was so the tour behind them could enjoy their visit uninterrupted.

  “This is Jefferson’s sanctum sanctorum. His most private place,” the guide told the group in the new space.

  Wyatt studied the library.

  Many of the walls remained lined with shelving. In Jefferson’s time, the guide explained, they would have been fronted by pine boxes, stacked one atop the other—folios at the bottom, followed by quartos, octavos, duodecimos, with petit-formats on top. Nearly 6700 volumes at its peak, all of them eventually sold to the United States to form the Library of Congress after the British burned the capitol in 1814, destroying the nation’s first collection of books. Tall windows that opened like doors led out to a louvered porch and greenhouse.

  But what drew Wyatt’s attention lay at the far end.

  A semi-octagon lined with windows.

  What the guide called the cabinet.

  He spied a writing desk, a revolving leather chair, an astronomical clock, and Jefferson’s famous polygraph that duplicated letters as they were drafted. An architect’s table fronted one of the windows. Among a profusion of scientific instruments on a side table lay the cipher wheel. Maybe eighteen inches long. Its carved wooden disks were about six inches in diameter, resting beneath a glass lid. The guide was droning on about how Jefferson spent much of his morning and late afternoons reading and answering correspondence in the cabinet, surrounded by his books and scientific instruments. Few were allowed here, save those close to the former president. Wyatt recalled what he’d read at the visitor center about glass doors, openness, and no secrets, realizing that it had all been an illusion. In reality, there were a great many private spaces in this house, especially here in the south wing.

  Which were about to come in handy.

  The tour continued into Jefferson’s bedroom, which rose double-height, at least eighteen feet to a skylight, joined with the cabinet by an alcove bed. The next room beyond that was the large parlor, located in the ground-floor center, with windows and doors facing the rear yard and west portico. The guide dutifully closed the bedroom door after the last visitor entered the parlor. Oil portraits dominated the cream-colored walls. Crimson draperies crowned its tall windows. English, French, and American furniture sat intermingled.

  He reached into his pocket and found a flash bomb. Discreetly, he freed the igniter and, while the guide explained about the works of art on the walls and Jefferson’s admiration of John Locke, Isaac Newton, and Francis Bacon, he bent down and rolled the explosive across the wood floor.

  One. Two. Three.

  He closed his eyes as a burst of light and smoke flooded the room.

  He already held a second surprise, so he yanked its igniter and dropped it on the floor, reaching for the knob that opened back into the bedroom just as another swoosh of thick air terrorized the parlor.

  MALONE RODE WITH THE ESTATE MANAGER ON THE TWO-LANE road that wound up the mountainside. Traffic moved only one way, rounding the house at the summit, then working its way back down, past Jefferson’s grave, to the visitor center.

  “We were lucky to get the wheel back,” the manager said. “Nearly everything Jefferson owned was sold after his death to pay his creditors. Robert Patterson, the son of the man who was Jefferson’s longtime friend, bought the wheel then from the estate. His father had helped Jefferson make it, so there was a sentimental attachment. The elder Patterson and Jefferson shared a love of codes.”

  Malone made the connection with what Daniels had told him. The son Robert Patterson had worked for the government and provided Andrew Jackson with his father’s cipher. Apparently, he’d also suggested incorporating the wheel into the decoding process. Since there was only one in the world, which Patterson himself owned, Old Hickory probably rested easy knowing that the Commonwealth would never decipher a thing.

  “Jefferson stopped using the wheel in 1802,” the manager said. “It was resurrected in 1890 by a French govern
ment official and used for a while. Then again, during World War I, the Americans brought it back, and it was utilized for coding until the start of the Second World War.”

  They rounded a bend and approached a small paved lot, devoid of cars. One of the shuttle buses was just easing away after depositing more visitors. The house’s main entrance stood about a hundred feet away.

  “Nice to be with the man in charge,” he said. “Gets you real close.”

  “It’s not every day the White House chief of staff and the head of the Secret Service conference call with you.”

  The manager switched off the engine.

  Malone stepped out into the bright morning, the late-summer air dry and warm. He stared up at the mansion and its distinctive dome, the first ever, he knew, constructed above an American house.

  A flash momentarily illuminated some of the house windows.

  Screams came from inside.

  Another flash.

  Someone bolted out the front door.

  “There’s a bomb inside. Run.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  CASSIOPEIA AND EDWIN DAVIS STOOD ALONE, AT THE FAR END of a parking lot, beyond which more visitors were arriving by the carload.

  “I want to know about you and the First Lady,” she said to him.

  Defeat clouded Davis’ face. “Now you see why it had to be you working on this?”

  She’d already understood that fact.

  “When the Secret Service told us who they had in custody, I convinced the president to involve you both. It wasn’t a hard sell. He has great trust in both you and Cotton. He hasn’t forgotten what you did for him last time. I knew Pauline would instantly become a suspect, since only a handful of us knew of the trip that far in advance, so any investigation of her had to be controlled.”

  “You knew she was the leak from the start?”

  “The idea of her saying something to someone made sense.”

  “When did your relationship with the First Lady start?”

  A wave of uneasiness passed between them. She knew this was tough. But he’d involved her and she had to do her job.