“I get that a lot. You have the files?”
“Could you give me the numbers? Then your supervisor could write my supervisor a memo on Monday, and we’ll backdate the authorization.”
This is more like it. “Thanks, I’ll do that.” She read off the two file numbers.
“Just a moment.”
This time she was on hold for nearly five minutes, and when the line clicked again, Ann McAdams’s voice had been replaced by a deep male voice, older. “This is Colonel Meares. To whom am I speaking?”
A colonel? In human resources on a Saturday? Now that is odd. “Colonel, this is Meg Tolman with RIO. I was asking about two files—”
“You’re not authorized to view those files.”
“We’re reviewing an investigation, and the two men whose files I’m requesting may be connected to it.”
“Connected in what way?”
Tolman hesitated a moment. “As suspects in a burglary and assault. One of the men was killed in the incident.”
“Impossible. You’re mistaken.”
“Why don’t you just release the files, then, and I can eliminate your men as suspects?”
“They’re already eliminated, Ms. Tolman.”
“What do you mean?”
“The men whose file numbers you referenced are not suspects in your case, whatever it is, because those two men were Army Rangers who were both killed in action in Iraq in 2006.”
CHAPTER
10
Journey walked along the SCCO common with Sandra, Andrew in between them. Journey held Andrew’s hand, and as always drew stares when Andrew vocalized. Journey was never sure if the stares were because of the vocalizations, or of people’s puzzlement in seeing a child as large as Andrew holding tightly on to his father’s hand.
Few students were on the common on a Saturday. A handful sat under trees with books and laptops. One couple simply lay on the grass next to each other. An impromptu jam session—acoustic guitar, harmonica, and violin—was in progress near Howell Hall.
It was the first time Journey had been back on campus since the night he was attacked, and the college felt strange, smaller. He avoided the space between Cullen and Howell. He’d already taken two blood pressure pills, and was feeling shaky.
“So,” Sandra said, “two things.”
“Two things,” Journey said. “Find out what G.W. means. And find the rest of the document. That means the note at the bottom of the first page. ‘The Poet’s Penn makes the waters fall and causes the strong to bend.’ Penn spelled with a double en.”
“Misspelling or wordplay?”
“I think wordplay. The rest of the page is very precise. The writer was educated. If he knew how to spell conspiratorial, he should know how to spell pen.”
“Good point.”
Andrew whistled.
“I hear you, Andrew,” Journey said.
“How do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Talk to him, when he—” Sandra stopped, looking stricken. “I didn’t mean—”
“It’s okay,” Journey said. “The truth is, we don’t know all of what he can and can’t understand.”
“You’re such a verbal person. It must be … tough.” She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Nick. Everything I say sounds so trite. I don’t mean it to.”
“It’s all right. If it makes you feel better, most people don’t know what to say.”
“You’re so good with him,” Sandra said, then stopped herself. “There I go, trite again. Talking about Civil War conspiracies was easier.”
Journey shrugged. “At times it can be—” He squeezed his son’s hand. “—overwhelming. I don’t always know the right things to do. I see other parents of kids with special needs, and they’re advocates and activists and they know exactly what to do in every situation. Most days, it’s all I can do to get him fed and keep his clothes clean. I don’t do nearly enough.”
Sandra looked thoughtful. “You know what someone told me once? The people who think they aren’t doing enough are usually the ones who are doing all they can. It wasn’t about having a child with autism, but I think it applies.”
“Maybe,” Journey said. “I don’t know. Most of the time, I’m too tired to even think straight, though.”
They walked a few steps in awkward silence. “So … the Poet’s Penn,” Sandra finally said.
“The Poet’s Penn,” Journey said. “It makes the waters fall and causes the strong to bend. What waters? And how do the strong bend? Are the words part of an actual poem? The same person who wrote the rest of the page wrote the riddle. The writing is the same, but it’s not as neat. It looks rushed, less precise.”
“Like an afterthought,” Sandra said.
“He didn’t trust his partners, or they didn’t trust him, so he decided to make it more difficult for someone to get the whole thing. In the top part, it says the clause will not go into effect unless the heads of the three branches of government are removed by ‘conspiratorial means,’ and that the document must be authenticated, including signatures.”
“Whose signatures? Grant and Lee?”
“That’s the implication. It refers to the time and place of Lee’s surrender, and implies that this clause is a condition of the end of hostilities.”
Sandra nodded. “Could they be talking about the Lincoln conspiracy? That was supposed to go much further than it did.”
“It was,” Journey said, “but no one ever seriously thought the Speaker of the House or the chief justice were in danger. On this page, G.W., or whoever it was, seemed to be planning for the likelihood that the highest-ranking officials in each branch of the government would be removed somehow, and their clause would be activated if that kind of crisis came about. They even referred to the Lieber Code article about martial law, which shows they’d done their homework. If Grant and Lee signed off on this…” He shook his head and let the thought hang between them.
They reached the edge of the common. Beyond it were two student dormitories, parking lots, then a beautifully landscaped area and the shores of Lake Texoma. Journey stopped at the edge of the parking area, still holding his son’s hand. “G.W. was involved in this in 1865, and they exist today, and they want this document. Consider this: If they buried this document and the pin, they buried all those weapons.”
“They were preparing for something.”
“Armed conflict,” Journey said.
“But why? They’d just come out of the bloodiest conflict in history. Lee and Grant sat there at Appomattox and agreed to end the hostilities. Why would they be preparing for another conflict?”
Journey shook his head, gazing toward the lake. Andrew wiggled his fingers inside his father’s hand. “Okay, Andrew, we’ll keep walking.”
They rounded the edge of the parking lot. The day was hot, and Journey was starting to sweat.
Sandra glanced at him. He was looking at the ground, shuffling beside Andrew. “My brother teaches English at Stephens College in Missouri,” she said. “He does a section on American poetry every fall. Maybe he’s heard of the Poet’s Penn.”
Journey didn’t look up. “You can’t tell him why you’re asking.”
“I’m beginning to see that.”
Journey nodded, still looking at the ground. He squeezed Andrew’s hand, then slowly looked up at Sandra. Her eyes were wide and very, very green. They’d talked in faculty meetings and casual lunches and at various college functions, but he didn’t think he’d really ever looked at her before. Her face seemed older than thirty. Not in an unflattering way, but her face and those eyes seemed to hold great depth and more self-awareness than most thirty-year-olds Journey knew. Sandra’s red hair was pulled back from her face, and she wore a pair of dangling silver earrings in the shape of miniature dream catchers.
“Jewelry,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“The G.W. pins. They’re gold, custom-made jewelry. Jewelers are artists. Artists sign their wor
k. Somehow, some way, they sign their work.”
Realization came over Sandra’s face. “If you can find the origin of the pins themselves—”
“Then maybe we can find who or what G.W. is.” Journey turned, pulling Andrew with him. The boy screamed, a keening wail. “Come on, son. You’re okay.”
“I think I’ll go call my brother,” Sandra said.
“And I think I should start learning about jewelry,” Journey said, then turned toward home.
CHAPTER
11
Jefferson Vandermeer felt every one of his seventy-three years, and the fact that Labor Day had passed meant winter wasn’t far, and his arthritic bones would spend five months begging for mercy. Of course, most of that time would be spent farther south, where the winters didn’t bite so hard, where six inches of snow would shut down the city. The thought made Vandermeer smile. In Sheboygan, Wisconsin, on the precipice of Lake Michigan, six inches of snow was scarcely enough to shovel.
He locked the front door of his house and stepped onto the porch of the stately Victorian. It was still modest for a man of his power, but it was where he had started fifty years ago, he and Beatrice, and he’d kept the home all these years. Beatrice had been dead six years now, and everything about the house reminded him of her—its modesty, its lack of pretense, its bookshelves, her handmade quilts everywhere. There were times, even now, that he swore he could smell her cherry pie baking early in the mornings.
Vandermeer stretched on the porch, his knees complaining, and walked slowly down the steps. For the moment, he was alone, and he needed the quiet time before heading south again. He needed to clear his mind, to think without people clamoring on all sides of him. He could have had security guards here, even in Sheboygan—there were those who worried about his safety, and he simply laughed at them—but he had to have his solitude. These walks were sacred. His schedule was erratic when he was in Wisconsin, so sometimes the walks came early in the morning, sometimes the middle of the day, occasionally at sunset. But he made time to walk every day that he was here. Before the cancer took her, he had shared the walks with Bea. Now they were his alone.
Vandermeer’s house was a block from North Point Park, with its overlook of the lake. Better get going, he thought. He didn’t walk nearly so fast as he once had. He stretched once more, then started down the tree-lined sidewalk toward the park.
* * *
Chicago One Silver was a woman in her thirties with long blond hair that she had tied back in a ponytail. She wore runner’s gear and a Brewers baseball cap with her ponytail pulled through the cap’s rear opening. A small gym bag was slung over her shoulder. An earpiece curled into her ear from beneath her T-shirt.
She gave the appearance of total relaxation, a single young woman out for a run alongside the lake. But her entire being was on alert. She was keenly aware that she was one of the few female Glory Warriors in the field, and she had been given a mission that most of her male counterparts wanted. She had been chosen to set the plan in motion. Silver would not fail.
The cell phone in the pocket of her warm-up pants vibrated once, then stopped. After a few seconds, it vibrated twice more. Silver bent over to attend to her shoe, even though it wasn’t untied. She glanced to her right. She could see the old man in his khakis and Windbreaker moving slowly along the sidewalk. If he held true to form, he would go to the overlook and spend a few minutes contemplating the lake before turning and beginning the slow walk back to his house.
Silver watched as Vandermeer moved toward her. She could begin to see some of the details of his famous craggy face and pure white hair. He was fifty feet away.
* * *
Vandermeer had to catch a plane south tomorrow morning. This was his last day of peace until Thanksgiving. By then, the leaves would have fallen from all these trees. No doubt the first snows would have come. North Point Park would be a very different place in November, not nearly so hospitable as this pleasant September afternoon.
He saw the young woman ahead of him. She was his daughter’s age, maybe a bit younger. It seemed that not many people came to city parks anymore—probably all inside on their computers, he mused—and he was happy to see a young, pleasant-looking woman outdoors enjoying the sunshine.
* * *
Silver had moved a few steps down the sidewalk, where she stopped to read a historical marker about the Phoenix Tragedy of 1847. The steamship Phoenix, carrying more than two hundred passengers, including many Dutch immigrants who intended to settle in the Sheboygan area, had caught fire five miles offshore. Less than fifty on board survived. So the story went, some of Jefferson Vandermeer’s ancestors had been among the survivors.
Just beyond the marker was a set of playground equipment, monkey bars painted bright purple. A grassy area sloped down toward the great lake. A few steps farther on was a rocky outcropping into Lake Michigan. Vandermeer was twenty feet from Silver. She placed her gym bag on the sidewalk at the foot of the historical marker and reached inside it.
Silver pulled out the H&K MK 23, suppressor attached, and held it in her right hand, away from the sidewalk.
A bead of perspiration appeared on her upper lip.
Focus, she told herself. Remember your training. Remember why we’re here.
Silver bent down to scratch her leg with her free hand. She angled her body to keep her gun hand hidden.
* * *
The young woman was certainly pretty, Vandermeer thought. He didn’t particularly care for baseball caps on women, but he supposed that was the modern age at work. Vandermeer smiled his famous lopsided grin as he approached her. He wondered if she would recognize him. “It’s a fine day to be out,” he called.
“Sure is,” the young woman said, and Vandermeer thought he heard a slight catch in her voice.
“I haven’t seen you out here before,” he said.
“I’m new in town, just moved up here from Arizona,” the young woman said. “I like to look out over the lake. No lakes like this around Tucson.”
“That’s a fact,” Vandermeer said, smiling as he came abreast of her. She certainly was pretty.
She turned to face him. She wasn’t smiling, and her expression didn’t match the words of a woman who’d just been talking about the lake. Her hand came up, and the last thought that United States Speaker of the House Jefferson Vandermeer had was that the last laugh was on him—maybe he should have had security in Wisconsin after all.
CHAPTER
12
Distracted, his mind cartwheeling through everything that had happened, Journey finally realized it had been at least a couple of hours since he’d changed Andrew. He and Andrew walked the six tree-lined blocks from the campus to the house, and Andrew’s pants were soaked by the time they walked up the driveway past Journey’s old minivan, the one he and Amelia had bought when they thought they would have more children. “I’m sorry, son,” Journey said to Andrew, then got him into the house, changed him, and put a dry pair of jeans on him.
He’d been terrified three years ago, when Amelia decided to file for divorce. Not so much of the end of the marriage itself—she’d been emotionally divorcing herself from Andrew and him for several years by then—but of becoming a single parent. It wasn’t that Amelia didn’t love Andrew. Journey knew she did—he still remembered her rolling around on the floor with him as a baby, and the way she’d always been able to get him to go to sleep when Journey couldn’t. But as Andrew’s condition grew more profound, she’d gradually begun to put up walls. It was her way of dealing with something she couldn’t understand. For as long as Journey had known her, she prided herself on being a problem solver, and she couldn’t solve Andrew. So Journey had been doing most of the parenting for a while before she moved out, but the idea of not having someone else to physically fall back on, someone to give him a break when things blew up, was the most frightening thing he’d ever faced.
He’d told Sandra the truth—he knew he didn’t do enough with Andrew. He tried to kee
p up with the new therapies, to know all the educational processes and procedures, to network with the right people and organizations, but most of the time, he was a blind man in the dark. He didn’t talk much about his life as a parent, and he wasn’t sure why he’d said what he did to Sandra. He loved Andrew without question or reservation, and he tried to do the right things for him. When Andrew gave one of his genuine heart-stopping smiles, or held his father’s elbow—one of Andrew’s signs of affection—when they walked into a store, or seemed to truly understand something Journey was telling him, the stress and the frustration and the doubt fell away. But he also couldn’t help the sadness that gripped him when he drove by a field of kids playing baseball, or heard one of his colleagues talk about their child who was in the school play or singing in the choir.
Journey’s heart was racing, and he knew his blood pressure must be coming out the top of his head by now. He tried to calm himself, using the same trick he used with Andrew, the soft music on a CD. He put on an early Windham Hill sampler and listened to Alex DeGrassi’s “Western” and George Winston’s “Thanksgiving,” but with no effect. He was all nervous agitation, his finger tapping its triplets repeatedly against the wall, his desk, his pants leg.
He felt the two G.W. pins in his pocket, read the strange document again and again. He felt a silent to urge to hurry, to move. Journey’s mind clicked and whirred. History is about passion. These people were passionate about something. They were committed. Fanatics, even. And they were preparing for … what?
Armed conflict, he’d told Sandra a few minutes ago.
The missing piece was how G.W. got from 1865 to now, how a secret society protecting a secret treaty at the close of the bloodiest conflict in American history landed in the here and now, men with gold G.W. pins searching for this document and willing to use whatever means necessary to obtain it.
Knowledge was power, and what he’d told Sandra was true—he had to be ready for them. He had to know more than they did to keep himself and Andrew safe.
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