“Past the Capitol. Corner of First and Independence.”
Sam took a deep breath.
“Wait!”
Ms. Toben shoved a slip of paper with the code into his hand.
And he was off.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Sam shoved his way through the bystanders on the sidewalk. There were more of them than had been here half an hour ago. The tour buses and cars parked on the road had been turned off and everyone was standing around.
A man in a white shirt grabbed Sam’s arm as he ran by. Sam jerked out of his grasp.
“Stop him! He’s one of the terrorists!”
Sam cursed the man’s stupidity and kept running. A pair of big men in front of him on the sidewalk crossed their arms and strode toward him. Sam dodged between a pair of tour buses, hopped on top of a red car, banged his way rapidly across the roof, then leaped onto a black SUV.
At the end of the parked cars, he jumped down and onto the grass of the Mall.
Sam’s heart raced with anxiety. He heard a squirrel chittering angrily as rows of trees flashed by.
“Stop him!” The shout was further back now.
A group of people in front of Sam gaped at him, mouths open.
“What’s wrong?”
“The terrorist’s back there!” he yelled, pointing toward the men on his trail.
A couple of screams came from behind him as he kept running.
He crossed a street. The American Indian Museum was on his right, a rippling building that looked like it was being viewed from under a stream.
He was far enough away from his pursuers now, that their shouting had faded into the general noise of the busy public areas.
Looking both ways, and behind him, he crossed another street. Suddenly the Mall opened up onto the reflecting pool in front of the Capitol building. All it was reflecting at the moment was blue sky.
The street alongside the pool was more heavily packed with loose pedestrians, some of them sitting on their hoods. The sidewalks were jammed with strollers, bikes, little kids crying.
The Botanic Garden to his right looked relatively clear.
The wrought-iron fence wasn’t hard to climb. He was over in about five seconds, ducking through a pair of trees, over a rock, and pounding down the trail.
Gravel crunched under his feet.
He jumped a hedge, danced over a brick half-wall, splashed through a shallow fountain, ignored a group of old ladies with red hats and jumped over another hedge.
Then he bolted past a big marble building surrounded by a formal English garden, and out the other side.
The Capitol building was off to his left, now.
His skin crawled. He felt himself being watched.
The terrorist? Or just over-eager security forces working their shift at one of the most important buildings in the country?
Had to be both.
Even the trapped tourists weren’t brave enough to get too close. Sam tore down the grass, hell bent for leather.
His feet thudded on the street as he crossed. The Capitol was now behind him.
In front of him was the big white marble building of the Library of Congress. Holy smokes! There were more stairs here than Rocky Balboa would want to see on a daily basis. Tarnished bronze statues. Long columns reminiscent of ancient Greece.
He headed for the main doors.
A piercing whistle echoed from the building.
“Sam Reilly!”
A figure stood at a side door near the street, waving what appeared to be a white flag.
Correction, waving a white cardigan.
Sam changed direction, dodged a wild-eyed man driving a golf cart filled with plants, and arrived at the side of a slender woman putting her sweater back on. Half-rimmed glasses hung around her neck on a chain, but she couldn’t have been older than thirty. Her hair was pulled back with a pencil in the bun.
She looked pale and shaken, as if the terrorist attack were hitting her particularly hard.
“Sam Reilly?”
“Ma’am.” He was panting.
She smiled, looking exhausted but showing dimples. “Follow me. The Director of the Air and Space Museum says you need help finding a book.”
“Yes, ma’am. And fast.”
“It’s Miss,” she said. “Ms. Zyla Needham. Inside, please. We’re retrieving the document as we speak.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Sam was led to a small room with a table, chair, and a computer. “Coffee?”
“Just the document,” he said. “What is it?”
In a strained voice, Zyla said, “It’s the North Atlantic Treaty. The actual, original treaty. As you can imagine, we can’t exactly let you walk out of the library with it. It’s irreplaceable.”
“Then shouldn’t I be wearing white cotton gloves or something?”
“If you like.”
The two of them waited. Sam checked the phone.
No new messages. He’d made it to the library on time. With growing trepidation, his eyes focused on his watch, he saw it tick past the twenty-minute mark.
Without meaning to, he held his breath.
The last time he’d made an assumption about the terrorist...
He waited for an explosion but either there wasn’t one or the sound was unable to penetrate the thick walls of the Library of Congress.
A breathless library aide appeared with a slim blue leather-bound document in hand. “Here it is, Ms. Needham. Uh, and as far as anyone can tell, no sign of him anywhere.”
Zyla shook her head slightly. Not now.
“Thank you, Troy.” She accepted the document, laying it almost reverently on the table in front of Sam. “A piece of history.”
The leather had a small plastic sleeve attached with the call number coded on it. When he opened the front cover, a slip of onionskin paper identified the document as the original agreement of the North Atlantic Treaty. It was dated the fourth of April, 1947.
Sam wasn’t a historian. He cleared his throat.
“Yes? It’s the right one, surely, or at least the one that Director Nelson instructed us to bring to you.”
Sam checked the code against the sweaty piece of paper he’d shoved into his pocket.
The codes matched up, all right.
He licked his lips.
“Ms. Needham,” he said, “either this is a typo, or we have a problem.”
She glanced at it, then did a double-take.
“That says 1947. But the call number lists 1949 as the year of publication.”
He nodded. Zyla reached in front of him and turned the sheet of onionskin. Sam was no expert, but the linen paper of the pages of the treaty seemed authentic.
But the date 1947 appeared on several pages.
They reached the signature pages.
“Wait.”
Sam made Zyla flip back to the first of the signature pages, then started counting.
“What is it?”
“Thirteen signatures.”
“Thirteen...?”
“I only noticed the number was off because of one of them,” he shifted through the document, “this one.”
He pointed toward a large, looping pair of signatures under the words, “FOR THE UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS / POUR LA UNION DES RÉPUBLIQUES SOCIALIISTES SOVIÉTIQUES.”
“I’m no historian, but I know that the U.S.S.R. wasn’t part of NATO in the Forties,” Sam said.
The librarian hissed between her teeth. Her face was turning red with rage.
“It’s a fake. Another fake.”
Chapter Thirty
Shaken, Zyla turned toward the door, where her aide Troy awaited further instructions. His face was pale, too. He’d pulled his phone out and was jabbing the screen with a shaky hand.
“Another fake?” Sam asked.
“I discovered another document that was replaced, the text changed.”
“What was it?”
She shook her head. “It has nothing to d
o with this. We’re going to have to go over every document in the library to verify them and put still more security features in place. It’s like we can’t trust anything anymore.” She took a breath. “Let’s focus on the issue at hand. Troy, who knows anything about post-World War II politics? We need someone ASAP.”
“I know some of it,” Troy said.
“Talk,” Zyla ordered.
He puffed out his cheeks. “Mr. Reilly’s correct. The treaty was signed in 1949, not 1947. In 1955, the Soviets and their allies set up a rival treaty organization under the Warsaw Pact. The USSR certainly didn’t sign NATO.”
“And?”
“NATO was supposed to protect Europe from the Soviet bloc countries during a nuclear attack or a Soviet invasion. How that was supposed to work, nobody really knew, and the organization didn’t mean squat until the start of the Korean War in 1950. In fact, even after that, NATO was considered to be so weak a deterrent that the French withdrew in 1966 and started setting up their own nuclear deterrent program. After the Berlin Wall fell, former Soviet bloc countries started drifting out of the Warsaw Pact and into NATO, one after the other.”
He shook his head. “I only know that much because my Uncle Matt was a captain in the Army in the Nineties, and he had to go over to Bosnia in 1993 as part of a NATO-directed joint force. He met his wife there, and then of course NATO was invoked after 9-11 when we deployed joint troops to Afghanistan.”
“So why would we be directed to a fake copy?” Sam mused.
“And where’s the original?” Zyla asked in a strangled voice. “Where are all the originals?”
Compared to the potential death of a million people, it seemed as though the librarian had a few issues with her priorities. Then again, she might not know the stakes.
Sam flipped back to the first page of the treaty. “Only one way to find out.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Pentagon, Virginia
“Madam Secretary,” Tom said, as he entered her office.
Her nostrils flared. “Tom! What are you doing here?”
“Sam sent for me. Don’t worry, he didn’t put anyone at risk. I was able to work my way in without being seen.”
“Tom Bower, do you know how many lives are at stake? We’ve just had undeniable evidence that the terrorist has the bomb, and that the bomb is still live.”
“What evidence?”
“You’ll be interested to know that the terrorist left Sam a plutonium rod in the trunk of a parked car near here.”
“What a wonderful gift,” Tom said, cheerfully.
“And before you ask, no, that’s not enough to render the bomb inoperable.”
“Shame.”
“Since you’re not with Sam, I’ll assume that you have something you need to tell me in private.”
“I do. Elise has been looking into William Goodson’s, a.k.a. Wilhelm Gutwein’s, past.”
“And?”
“We got it all wrong!” Tom said emphatically, knocking his knuckles on the desk.
The secretary took a deep breath. “Tom, so help me...”
He chuckled. “All right, I’ll stop torturing you. Gutwein wasn’t a Nazi.”
“What? But he was ordered to drop an experimental nuclear bomb on Washington, D.C.!”
“Membership within the National Socialist Party – which wasn’t actually socialist, by the way – wasn’t quite obligatory at the time. Highly encouraged, yes, but not required.”
The secretary waved her hand. “Go on.”
“Gutwein had a number of German Jewish friends before and during the war. Elise was actually able to track down a few records of survivors who had later spoken of their friend and even looked for him after the war to thank him. But by then Gutwein had disappeared, with William Goodson in his place. They assumed he was dead.”
“So why did he try to drop the bomb on D.C. in the first place?”
“He didn’t,” Tom said. “I’ve had a look at the historical and current maps of the area where the bomb was found.”
“And?”
“And it’s to the northeast of D.C.”
“So?”
“So, he must have flown around D.C. to get there.”
Her mouth dropped open for a second, then closed tight.
“I think he intentionally found an unpopulated place where he could safely put the plane down.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Because Wilhelm Gutwein was trying to defect.”
She raised an incredulous eyebrow. “To intentionally abdicate the power of God over his fellow men. Why?”
“Maybe he wanted out,” Tom said. “He couldn’t stand the Nazis anymore, he wasn’t married and didn’t have a family. They’d been killed—”
“—In a previous Allied bombing run!” the secretary exclaimed, finishing his sentence. “It doesn’t make sense! The man crash-lands a plane carrying a nuclear bomb, then hatches an elaborate plan to be carried out nearly eighty years later in order to take his revenge on the city that he avoided destroying in the first place? No. He was blown off course and landed where he had to.”
Her face had turned red and angry. He’d be lucky if she listened to a single word he said.
The Secretary of Defense had known Tom since childhood, but he’d known her for that long, too.
She’d listen. He’d make her.
He took a deep breath. “Madam Secretary, what if we were wrong?”
“Wrong? About what, now?” she asked sarcastically.
“Wrong about what’s happening.”
“How?”
Her voice was still angry, but at least she was listening.
“We assumed that he wasn’t actually happy to be here. That he only had the appearance of a grateful immigrant, doing what he loved – flying. He married. Had a son. Saved his money for a rainy day.”
The secretary snorted. “And secretly transferred his enormous Swiss bank accounts to his new identity.”
“Yes. But even those he didn’t touch. He saved it all up for a rainy day. And we assumed that it was all so he could have the bomb dragged to somewhere in D.C. so he could torture us for a few hours, make us dance to his will, then destroy us.”
“Yes, exactly. He wasn’t saving for a rainy day, but for a thunderstorm filled with radioactive waste.”
He ignored her interruptions. Her face was starting to soften with curiosity.
“The fact was, he was happy. It wasn’t a facade.”
“How can you say that? He’s still trying to blow up Washington, D.C., and everyone in it.”
“I don’t think he is,” Tom said. “And I don’t think Sam thinks that, either.”
“So the terrorist is playing this game in order to lead Sam to discover something? What? What could possibly justify –” She waved one hand toward the windows. “All of this?”
“I’ve no idea,” Tom admitted. “I think Wilhelm Gutwein was persuaded to defect to the U.S. with the bomb, but someone betrayed him. Ever since then, he’s been trying to put history right again.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Sam and Zyla spotted it at the same time. They looked up at each other.
“What?” Troy said. He was sitting on the opposite side of the table, trying to read the treaty upside down. “What is it?”
It wasn’t a long document, in its original form, just fifteen articles.
One of which, Sam suspected, hadn’t been in the original treaty.
It was currently numbered as Article 7, right after the article defining what constituted an armed attack on a member country.
Article 7 stated, “All Parties hereby agree that all future developments of nuclear capability shall be shared with all other Parties, so that no Party may exclusively hold such power as to destroy the other Parties.”
“There’s no way,” Sam said.
“I agree. This must be another alteration.”
“But why?”
“It seems to suggest that the U.S. and U.S
.S.R. did share or should have shared their nuclear secrets with each other,” Sam said. “Besides, the Soviets didn’t explode their first atomic bomb RDS 1 – First Lightning – until August 29, 1949.”
“I don’t understand,” Zyla said.
Troy spun the treaty around and read quickly. “Wow. Just...wow.”
The change in angle seemed to show some kind of shadow on the page. Sam took the treaty back and examined the sheet in front of him. It seemed too regular to be an ink smudge.
He held the page up to the light.
“What are you...?”
“Troy,” Sam said. “I want you to look up a phone number for me.”
“Sure.”
Sam read off a series of ten digits.
“I don’t even have to look that up,” Troy said. “I have that one memorized.”
“What is it?”
“Old Tony’s Pizza. It’s on Pennsylvania and Third, a couple of blocks from here. I eat there all the time.”
“How long has it been there?” Sam asked.
“Since 1979,” Troy said without hesitating. “It’s on the sign over the front door.”
Sam gave Zyla another look, then handed her the treaty. Her lips went flat as she held it up to the light.
For a treaty signed in 1949 – or in 1947, for that matter – the phone-number-bearing watermark on the paper it was originally printed on was a lot more recent.
Sam took several photos of the document on the smartphone he’d been given. He then texted the images to Elise, with the question: Please compare this with the original and see if you can make sense of what the terrorist is trying to show me.
“What do you think any of this means?” Zyla asked.
“I’ve no idea, but I’m going to Old Tony’s.”
“For a pizza?” Zyla asked.
Sam shook his head. “No, for more answers.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Old Tony’s had a sign over the front door stating that the place was established in 1979. It was one of those places that would have ordinarily had a line out the door. Today, it was almost empty.
Sam checked his phone, looking for a message stating that he had twenty minutes to find the next clue. If so, he wasn’t going to make the deadline.
The Heisenberg Legacy (Sam Reilly Book 11) Page 12
