The 14th Colony (Cotton Malone 11)

He eased open the rear door and unzipped the bag. Inside lay a sledgehammer, hasp lock, and bolt cutters. The agents back at the McDonald’s had mentioned that all three had been bought at Target, along with a few other items, including a shovel, which was nowhere in sight.

He closed the door softly and pointed ahead.

They moved deeper into the darkness.

* * *

Zorin tossed aside another of the split logs slippery with lichens. “Did you cut this wood?”

“Every piece. I may be getting old, but I’m still in good shape. As are you, Aleksandr.”

They’d removed a section of the stacked wood near the center of the long row, exposing hard dirt beneath. Kelly found the shovel and began a careful excavation, seemingly knowing exactly where to dig. His strikes with the blade were almost surgical, as he worked the tip only a few centimeters into the ground, forming a circle about a meter in diameter.

“Close the door,” Kelly said to him.

He stepped over and eased the two panels shut.

The only light came from their two flashlights pointed toward the circle. With the shovel, Kelly carefully loosened the packed dirt within the outline. Then he laid the shovel aside.

“This has to be done carefully.”

He watched as Kelly knelt and began to remove the dirt, which, thanks to the cold, came away in clumps. Dark metal became visible. More dirt was freed to reveal a hatch.

“No lock?” he asked.

Kelly glanced up at him. “I didn’t see the need. If this is not opened properly, six kilotons of nuclear explosives will ignite.”

His spine stiffened at the danger.

Kelly surveyed the hatch. “It seems okay. Nothing has disturbed it. Could you hand me the shovel?”

He did, and Kelly stayed on his knees, using it to loosen a path half a meter away from the portal. Kelly tossed the shovel aside and reached for one of the flashlights, clearing away more dirt until he found a small plastic box. He brushed it clear, blowing away the last remnants of dirt from its domelike shape. Kelly then reached to one side of the box and twisted, freeing the lid, which opened on a hinge. Inside were three sets of wires, each separately connected with a colored twist connector.

Red. Yellow. Black.

“You have to disconnect the right one,” Kelley said, “or it explodes. Disconnect all three and it also explodes.”

Clever, he had to admit.

Kelly untwisted the red nut. “I change the color each time, just to be safe. Red was this year’s.”

Kelly separated the exposed copper wires, angling them far apart. He then reached back and opened the hatch, the metal hinges offering only minor resistance. Below was a ladder built into one side that stretched down three meters.

“Go ahead,” Kelly said. “There’s a light switch at the bottom.”

CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

Luke drove as fast as conditions allowed, heading west on I-66 past DC into Virginia with Sue and her father in tow. Lawrence Begyn had told him about another hiding place within the Charon mansion, one Begyn assumed Brad Charon might have used to secrete the Tallmadge journal.

“I saw the place one time,” Begyn had told him. “Back when Brad and I were still okay with each other.”

“So you have no way of knowing if the journal is there?”

“Brad was a creature of habit. Once he started something, he kept to it. It’s reasonable to assume he’d keep that journal safe, hidden, and nearby.”

So it was worth a look.

“There’s something I don’t get,” he said to Begyn. “If Charon was a big mouth and breached your archives with two strangers, why was he allowed to keep the journal?”

“Brad was a strange man in many ways. Keeping that journal was maybe his way of showing us that he really could keep a secret. That he could be trusted. We decided not to press the issue. And we never heard about it again, which is why we thought this to be long over.”

His watch read nearly 11:00 P.M. He should call Stephanie. She’d tried him earlier and left a message, but there was nothing to report so he decided to play this out a little while longer. The night had not turned completely nasty yet, the wind, cold, and snow unaccompanied so far by ice, which was a good thing. The interstate remained a wet blacktop, snowflakes dissolving atop its surface. He sensed he might be on to something. But he was flying blind with no backup. Just himself. Which he liked. But he did have Sue, who sat in the rear seat, her father’s hunting rifle cradled in her folded arms. Begyn had, at first, not wanted her to come, but relented when she pointed out that she’d already killed three men and that the decision wasn’t his to make. He was glad to have her along.

He found the exit and turned left again on the same two-laned road where he and Petrova had squared off. A few miles later he passed beneath the wrought-iron entrance and sped through the woods to Charon’s house.

They stepped out into the night.

Begyn had brought two flashlights and led the way inside. “I haven’t been here in a long time. What a wreck this place has become. It was once a grand house.”

“It’s what happens when people can’t get along,” Luke noted.

“Can I see the archive you found first?” Begyn asked.

He didn’t want to take the time, but decided a quick peek couldn’t hurt. The flashlight beam he held pointed the way and they entered the study, stepping though the gash in the wall. Petrova’s ax still lay on the floor where she’d tossed it. Sue stayed outside in the hall, keeping watch with the rifle.

He and Begyn surveyed the secret room.

“Amazing stuff,” Begyn said. “We need to get it out of this cold.”

“My boss said she’d get it for you. You can take that to the bank.”

Begyn studied the book beneath the glass cover. “This is a rare volume, worth about $25,000. I know several society members who would pay that and more.”

Which mattered not to him. “Finished?”

His tone conveyed that they needed to move on, so they fled the study. The older man took the lead up the stairs to the second floor, where a long corridor ended at a set of paneled doors. Luke dragged in deep breaths of the freezing air and steadied his nerves, following the two Begyns into a master bedroom.

“I read that the other end of the house is the one that burned,” Begyn said.

The master suite was intact with all the furniture still there, the bed even made with a spread, but everything reeked of mold and mildew, dank as a ditch.

“In there,” Begyn said, motioning to a half-open door.

“You two go,” Sue said. “I’ll keep watch.”

He wondered about her taut nerves. “Somethin’ wrong?”

“I don’t like this place.”

Neither did he particularly, but nothing so far had generated any pause. “Any details you’d like to share?”

“It just feels wrong.”

He decided to respect her instincts so he indicated that they should hurry up. He and Begyn entered a closet larger than his apartment’s bedroom. Nothing hung on the bare rods, the windowless room devoid of everything except the empty racks, wooden cabinets, and shelves.

“It was there,” Begyn said, pointing at the last cabinet, a mahogany rectangle that accommodated a four-foot-wide rod for clothes and shelving above. It sat at the end of a row on the long wall, the cabinets from the short wall nestling tight to it at a right angle.

“We had a party here one night,” Begyn said. “Brad being Brad, was showing off. He brought a few of us up here and grabbed this rod, which then was hung with dress shirts.” Begyn handed him the flashlight and gripped the bare metal. “He twisted it this way.”

They heard a click and the cabinet shifted right, revealing that the corner with the other cabinet was mere illusion. Begyn slid the whole thing farther right, exposing a dark chasm behind.

“I bet Charon liked Harry Potter,” Luke said.

Begyn chuckled. “I’m sure

he did. He loved mysteries. He was a bit of an actor, too. He always played Bob Cratchit in the society’s production of A Christmas Carol. Quite good at it.”

He shone the light into the darkness, which dissolved to reveal a small space, about three feet square. The only thing inside was a black, four-drawer filing cabinet. A lock could be seen in the upper-right corner. He hoped it would not be an impediment and was pleased when the top drawer slid open.

“What’s the point of locking it,” Begyn said, “when it’s hidden away.”