The Charlemagne Pursuit (Cotton Malone 4)

It opened.

"Edwin-" she started, but he'd already entered.

She waited on the porch. "This is a felony."

He turned. "Then stay out there in the cold. I'm not asking you to break the law."

She knew clear thinking was needed, so she walked inside. "I have to be out of my mind to be in the middle of this."

He smiled. "Malone told me he said the same thing to you last year in France."

She had no idea. "Really? What else did Cotton say?"

He did not reply, just headed off to investigate. The decor made her think of Pottery Barn. Ladder-back chairs, sectional sofa, jute rugs across bleached hardwood floors. Everything was neat and orderly. Framed pictures dominated the walls and tables. Rowland was obviously a sportsman. Specimens dotted the walls, mixed with more portraits of what appeared to be children and grandchildren. A sectional sofa faced a wooden deck. Across the lake, the far shore was visible. The house seemed to sit in the elbow of a cove.

Davis remained intent on looking around, opening drawers and cabinets.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

He drifted into the kitchen. "Just trying to get a sense of things."

She heard him open the refrigerator.

"You learn a lot about someone by studying their refrigerator," he said.

"Really? What did you learn in mine?"

He'd ventured into hers earlier, before they'd left, to get something to drink.

"That you don't cook. It reminded me of college. Not much there."

She grinned. "And what have you learned here?"

He pointed. "Herbert Rowland is a diabetic."

She noticed vials with Rowland's name on them marked INSULIN. "That -'t all that hard."

"And he likes chilled whiskey. Maker's Mark. Good stuff."

Three bottles stood on the top shelf.

"You a drinker?" she asked.

He closed the refrigerator door. "I like a shot of sixty-year-old Macallan every once in a while."

"We need to leave," she said.

"This is for Rowland's own good. Somebody is going to kill him, in a way he least expects. We need to check the other rooms."

She still wasn't convinced and walked back into the den. Three doors led off from the great room. Beneath one, she noticed something. Light shifting, shadows, as if someone had just walked past on the other side.

Alarm bells rang in her brain.

She reached beneath her coat and withdrew a Magellan Billet-issue Beretta.

Davis caught sight of the gun. "You came armed?"

She held up her index finger, signaling for quiet, and pointed to the door.

Company, she mouthed.

CHARLIE SMITH HAD BEEN TRYING TO LISTEN. THE TWO INTRUDERS had boldly entered the house, forcing him into the bedroom, where he'd shut the door and stood close. When the man had said he planned on checking the remaining rooms, Smith knew he was in trouble. He'd brought no gun. He only toted one when absolutely necessary, and since he'd flown from Virginia to Florida, bringing one along had been impossible. Besides, guns were a poor way to inconspicuously kill somebody. Lots of attention, evidence, and questions.

No one should be here. The file made clear that Herbert Rowland volunteered at the local library every Wednesday until five PM. He wasn't due back for hours. His wife, of course, was gone. He'd caught snippets of the conversation, which seemed more personal than professional, the woman clearly on edge. But then he'd heard. You came armed?

He needed to leave, but there was nowhere to go. Four windows lined the bedroom's exterior walls, but they could provide no ready escape.

A bathroom and two closets opened off the bedroom.

He needed to do something fast.

STEPHANIE OPENED THE BEDROOM DOOR. THE MASTER SUITE BED was made, everything tidy, like the rest of the house. A bathroom door hung open, and daylight from the four windows cast a bright glow across the room's Berber carpet. Outside, trees jostled by the breeze shifted and black shapes danced across the floor.

"No ghosts?" Davis said.

She pointed down. "False alarm."

Then something caught her eye.

One closet was equipped with pocket doors and appeared to be Mrs. Rowland's, women's clothes hung in a haphazard fashion. A second closet was smaller with a hinged paneled door. She could not see inside, as it sat at a right angle to her, in a short hall that led to the bath. The door hung open, its inner side visible from where she stood. A plastic hanger on the inside knob rocked, ever so slightly, from side to side.

Not much, but enough.

"What is it?" Davis asked.

"You're right," she said. "Nothing here. Just nerves from committing a burglary."

She could see that Davis had not noticed-or if he had, he was keeping the realization close.

"Can we get out of here now?" she asked.

"Sure. I think we've seen enough."

WILKERSON WAS TERRIFIED.

He'd been forced at gunpoint to make the call to Dorothea, the man from the sidewalk telling him exactly what to say. The barrel of a 9mm automatic had been nestled close to his left temple, and he'd been warned that any variation in the script would result in the trigger being pulled.

But he'd done exactly as instructed.

He'd then been driven across Munich in the rear of a Mercedes coupe, his hands cuffed behind his back, his kidnapper at the wheel. They'd lingered awhile, his captor leaving him alone in the car while he spoke on a cell phone outside.

Several hours had passed.

Dorothea should be at the train station soon, but they were nowhere near its location. In fact, they were driving away from the city center, heading south, out of the city, toward Garmisch and the Alps, sixty miles away.

"How about one thing?" he asked the driver.

The man said nothing.

"Since you're not going to tell me who you work for, how about your name? That a secret, too?"

He'd been taught that to engage your captors was the first step in learning about them. The Mercedes veered right, onto a ramp for the autobahn and sped ahead, merging onto the superhighway.

"My name is Ulrich Henn," the man finally said.

THIRTY-SIX

AACHEN, 5:00 PM

MALONE FOUND HIMSELF ENJOYING HIS MEAL. HE AND CHRISTL had walked back to the triangular-shaped Marktplatz and found a restaurant that faced the town's rathaus. On the way they'd stopped in the chapel's gift shop and bought half a dozen guidebooks. Their route had led them through a maze of snug, cobbled lanes lined with bourgeois town houses that created a medieval atmosphere, though most were probably only fifty or so years old given that Aachen had been heavily bombed in the 1940s. The afternoon's cold had not deterred shopping. People crowded the trendy shops preparing for Christmas.

Hatchet Face was still following and had entered another cafe diagonally across from where he and Christl were seated. Malone had asked for and received a table not at, but near, the window, where he could keep an eye outside.

He wondered about their shadow. Only one meant he was dealing with either amateurs or people too cheap to hire enough help. Perhaps Hatchet Face thought himself so good that no one would ever notice? He'd many times met operatives with similar egos.

He'd already skimmed through three of the guidebooks. Just as Christl had said, Charlemagne

had considered the chapel his "new Jerusalem." Centuries later Barbarossa confirmed that declaration when he donated the copper-gilded chandelier. Earlier Malone had noticed a Latin inscription on the chandelier's bands, and a translation appeared in one of the books. The first line read, "Here thou appearest in the picture, O Jerusalem, celestial Zion, Tabernacle of peace for us and hope of blessed rest."

The ninth-century historian Notker was quoted as saying that Charlemagne had the chapel built "in accordance with a conception of his own," its length, breadth, and height symbolically related. Work had started sometime around 790 to 800 CE, and the building was consecrated on January 6, 805, by Pope Leo III, in the presence of the emperor.

He reached for another of the books. "I assume you've studied the history of Charlemagne's time in detail?"

She nursed a glass of wine. "It's my field. The Carolingian period is one of transition for Western civilization. Before him, Europe was a seething madhouse of conflicting races, incomparable ignorance, and massive political chaos. Charlemagne created the first centralized government north of the Alps."

"Yet everything he achieved failed after his death. His empire crumbled. His son and grandchildren destroyed it all."

"But what he believed took root. He thought the first object of government should be the welfare of its people. Peasants were, to him, human beings worth thinking about. He governed not for his glory, but for the common good. He said many times that his mission was not to spread his empire, but to keep one."

"Yet he conquered new territory."

"Minimally. Territory here and there for specific purposes. He was a revolutionary in nearly every way. Rulers of his day gathered men of brawn, archers, warriors, but he summoned scholars and teachers."

"Still, it all vanished and Europe lingered another four hundred years before real change occurred."

She nodded. "That seems the fate of most great rulers. Charlemagne's heirs were not as wise. He was married many times and fathered lots of children. No one knows how many. His firstborn, Pippin, a hunchback, never had the chance to reign."