The Intelligencer Read online

  The romantic interlude between connoisseur and cocktail was cut short. Harsh pulses of red light filled his glass. With a quick glance, he saw a whirling light outside the windows, heard the sound of car doors shutting, footsteps coming closer, hushed tones.

  Bewilderment wrinkled his brow. Security men on the scene already? Impossible. He’d disabled the simple system effectively, without a doubt. They must be approaching one of the adjacent homes. Maybe the neighbors were having a domestic dispute, or a child had accidentally tripped an alarm.

  Softly a door creaked. With a jolt, the baron realized it was the rear entrance of the house he was in. The place was being surrounded.This place. But he’d find a way out. Always had.

  Though calm, his mind raced over the possibilities. Perhaps the inevitable had finally occurred. Perhaps the police had caught up with him after all these years. Followed him from his home, then called in for backup. He had known it would happen at some point, had meticulously planned his escape and new identity long before.

  Thinking the roof his best option, he was moving across the room toward the stairwell when footfalls sounded within the house. From the floor above, from down the hall. Drawing closer. Damn, he thought; he would have to duck out one of these windows, climb to the roof from here. Peering down at the street, he saw two armed men keeping vigil…and one of them was looking up. He was trapped.

  For a moment, the baron stood stock-still, mesmerized by the sound of his unexpected fate, slowly closing in. With a shake of his head, he realized how greatly he’d underestimated the opposition.

  Taking a seat in a leather armchair by the windows, he placed his glass on the table before him. He then removed his left glove, revealing a large square-cut ruby ring. With his right thumb and forefinger, he flipped back the gemstone and gazed at the well of powder hidden beneath—highly potent crystals distilled from the saliva of Australia’s blue-ringed octopus. The small, sand-colored creature, which flashed to yellow with bright blue rings when disturbed, possessed venom five hundred times more toxic than cyanide. Having decided long ago that he would sooner die than face prison, he lifted his tongue, positioned the ring just beneath, and tilted back his head. The crystals melted and almost instantaneously penetrated the rich vascular network on the underside of his tongue. Seconds later—faster than if he’d injected it into his arm—the poison was entering his heart.

  Grimacing at the bitter taste in his mouth, he took another sip of cognac. How perfectly appropriate, he mused. Bittersweet. The flavor of his ironic demise—Europe’s most infamous gentleman thief caught during an ordinary household robbery. In spite of the tremors in his hand, he raised his glass.

  His final toast. Punctuated by gunshots.

  3

  NEWYORKCITY—4:08P.M., THE FOLLOWING DAY

  Wrapped in a towel, Kate Morgan was standing in her bedroom eyeing the contents of her closet with a furrowed brow. She had a problem—a business meeting to get to in twenty minutes where she was supposed to look presentable—but it was a warm spring afternoon and there was an eye-grabbing mark on her neck that she needed to hide. Can you get away with wearing a scarf tied around your neck on a day like this without looking like a teenager covering up a hickey? she wondered. Probably not.

  Ah-ha! This should do the trick.She pulled a black sleeveless turtleneck from one of her shelves, laid it on her bed, and began to towel-dry her hair.

  The hot barrel of the freshly emptied pistol that had been slammed into her neck the night before had left an ugly welt—part bruise, part burn. Kate knew she was lucky. The guy had been aiming to crush her trachea. She’d twisted at the right moment and he missed by a couple of inches, giving her a window to throw a well-placed punch to the face. A painful but effective finishing touch on that assignment. Her boss had insisted she take the following day off, but an urgent matter had come up—with a client who might be unsettled at the sight of seared purple flesh.

  Bra, underwear, and slim-fitting top in place, Kate zipped up the skirt of her pinstripe suit. Pulling a comb through her long tangle-prone hair, she searched for the right pair of earrings. Pearls. Nice and demure. Makeup? Maybe a dab of lipstick. She picked up a tube, turned to her mirror, and applied a layer of her favorite shade, Guerlain’s Brun Angora—reddish brown flecked with gold. The color worked well with her dark hair, green eyes, and olive skin tone.

  Now the jacket. She pushed the middle button through and took a step back to assess her image. After flicking her twisting curls back over her shoulders, she tilted her head to the left and looked at the right side of her neck. The turtleneck did its job well. Good, she thought; you’re officially presentable. She glanced at her clock.You’re also late. Time to move.

  Kate slipped into her shoes and reached for her shoulder bag. That’s when she noticed the back of her right hand.Shit. Forgot about that. Oh, well, not much I can do.

  As usual on a perfect spring day in New York, tourists with cameras and ice cream cones filled the Fifth Avenue sidewalks. Kate was slicing her way through the throngs in the direction of Central Park. The canopy of oak and sycamore leaves hanging over the park walls had just come into view—a green wave lapping at the granite shore of the metropolis.

  She paused with a cluster of other pedestrians before a red light at Fifty-ninth Street. The clattering of hooves from the horse-drawn carriage depot on her left mingled with the buzz of nearby conversations and the incessant blaring of taxi horns. Thinking wistfully of the T-shirt, spandex shorts, and sneakers she’d been running in the hour before, she shrugged out of her suit jacket.

  “Is that all?” a leering bicycle courier called out, cruising toward her.

  “For now, but later tonight…”

  Blowing a kiss at his bewildered expression, she moved forward with the flow of the crowd and dialed her boss.

  “Slade,” he said.

  “It’s Kate. I cleaned up and I’m on my way to the Pierre. Who am I meeting?”

  “Cidro Medina. Oxford dropout turned finance wizard. Thirty-something playboy with a Midas touch. He’s one of our regular clients in Europe—uses the London office mostly, for forensic accounting work. At any rate, the guy returned home from dinner last night to find a dead body in his study and the place crawling with cops. The would-be thief was after a sixteenth-century manuscript written in a strange language, something Medina’s workmen stumbled across during renovations a week or so ago. Medina wants to know exactly what was found and why someone wanted to steal it. That’s where you come in. Those are hardly questions for the cops. Not that they’re even interested, what with the perp already in their hands.”

  “Why didn’t he just show it to an expert at a local museum? Or auction house?”

  “He was planning to. But one of the guys in our London office mentioned your background to him. He decided that you make more sense. Another Renaissance scholar might be more experienced but won’t have the investigative background to coordinate the historical effort with the police work. You’re the perfect person to put all the pieces together. He had some other business in New York, so he flew over this morning.”

  “Got it. Well, I’m here. I’ll check in soon.”

  The Pierre Hotel’s intimate circular tearoom brimmed with quiet conversation. Kate admired its tasteful opulence—frescoes that combined classical scenes with images of New York society figures from the sixties, ornate golden sconces, two sweeping curved staircases, and an oversized vase with a bouquet that towered over her. Just nine tables were arranged around the room along the wall, with armchairs and loveseats upholstered in tapestry.

  She realized that the elegant setting was a perfect place to begin her bookish mystery, a welcome change of pace after her last assignment. Not that she shied away from danger, but sometimes she missed her old life: a quiet nook in a well-stocked library, the comfort of immersion in another place and time, the excitement of peeling back the layers obscuring a subject that fascinated her with every turn of a page. At least to Kat
e it had been exciting; her college roommate had threatened to sic the nerd patrol on her with shocking regularity and would blast Norwegian thrash music if she tried to stay in and work on a weekend night.

  Kate gave her name to the host, then followed his eyes to her client’s table.Oh, my. Not that Medina was conventionally handsome, by any means. His nose was too prominent—hawkish, in fact—and his jaw and cheekbones were sharp enough to hurt someone. Lips, a touch too full. But it was an arresting face. Framed in unkempt short blond hair, it was a face that made you stop, stare, and wonder what was going on behind it.

  Crossing the room, Kate glanced at the fresco painted on the wall behind him. A nude Venus stood on a scallop shell, with a half-man, half-serpent curled around her feet.Now there’s a chick who’d be cool with her first hot client—even if he could put a Versace model to shame.

  Turning back to him, Kate recognized a familiar expression, one she encountered just about every time she met a new male client. First, the eyebrows raise with pleased surprise that she’s attractive, and then the mouth purses slightly as they mull over her unexpectedly young age.

  Rising, he extended his hand. “Cidro Medina. A pleasure to meet you.” His accent was public school English, seasoned with a sprinkle of Spanish.

  “I’d like to shake your hand,” Kate said, “but…I had a little accident yesterday.”

  Medina looked at her questioningly.

  No way to avoid this.She showed him the back of her right hand. A big purple lump, the size of a large grape, covered her last two knuckles.

  “Looks to me like youraccident involved somebody’s face,” he observed with surprise. “I may look like a choirboy…”

  Yeah, right.

  “…but I do know what happens when you throw a bare-knuckle punch.”

  “Oh? Tell me more.”

  He laughed. “Impressive. Appeal to my ego and draw the attention away from yourself. Well, I won’t press. But I’m still curious. I didn’t realize you white-collar P.I.s were in the habit of scuffling like football fans.”

  “We’re not,” Kate said, which was true. The private investigation company she worked for—one of the world’s top firms—was actually founded as a cover for an off-the-record U.S. intelligence unit. Her boss, Jeremy Slade, a former deputy director for operations at the CIA, had chosen the closest private sector equivalent to be the unit’s front company, because he knew that the best lies are cloaked in as much truth as possible. Only a handful of his investigators were aware of the company’s dual nature—those who participated in the covert government operations in addition to conducting their regular work. Kate was one of them. And it was the government assignments that tended to be dangerous, that sometimes got physical. As she’d quickly learned, the idea that P.I.s are always getting into scrapes is a myth of popular culture.

  But Kate couldn’t explain all of that to Medina, so instead she said, “The fact is, we rarely scuffle. Almost never. But once in a while, if a client is really, really pushy…”

  Medina grinned. “The London office faxed me your bio last night, but they didn’t tell me you’d be such good company.”

  With a shrug, Kate slid into her chair.

  Sitting down himself, Medina continued, “I’m impressed—two Harvard degrees. You know, I couldn’t even manage one.”

  “I heard. It’s a shame. Your career does seem to be suffering.”

  Flattered, he grinned again. “You were in the middle of a doctorate program in English Renaissance studies when you left university, right?”

  Kate nodded.

  “What exactly were you studying?”

  “Curiosity…the pursuit of secrets and forbidden knowledge.”

  “Oh?”

  She continued. “I found it interesting that England’s first official state-funded espionage organization was formed around the same time that Englishmen were searching in new ways for the answers to cosmic mysteries—you know, God’s secrets—exploring the farthest reaches of the globe and turning the first telescopes on the heavens. And that all the while, curiosity wasn’t exactly the virtue it is today. I—”

  “What do you mean?” Medina interrupted.

  “Mmm, theologians in the Middle Ages tended to condemn excessive curiosity as a vice—if you probed heavenly mysteries, it was heresy. Black magic. That attitude lingered among hardcore churchmen in Elizabethan times, so certain lines of inquiry could get you in trouble with the government, like wondering if hell existed, or whether the earth was really the center of the universe. Anyway, I wanted to compare the two. Think about which type of knowledge was most dangerous to pursue—state secrets or God’s secrets.”

  “Brilliant. Why the move to the Slade Group?” he asked. “Seems an unusual choice for a budding scholar.”

  Kate looked away for a moment. Ithad been an unusual choice, but two years into her graduate program she’d been faced with an unusual personal circumstance. An event that had broken her heart and turned her life upside down. But it was nothing Medina needed to know about.

  “It’s pretty simple,” she answered. “I decided I wanted to have an impact in the real world—help people get answers to important questions, get them out of trouble, recover something they’d lost. Slade’s does do a fair amount of corporate work, as you know, but it’s not my area. I mostly handle personal matters for people—crimes the police never solved, that type of thing.”

  She smiled. “Now, I know I should make more idle chitchat, but what happened in your home last night—the dead body, the mysterious manuscript? I’m impatient to hear more.”

  “I’m having a new property restored. In the City, near Leadenhall Market,” Medina began, referring to London’s financial district.

  “New office space?”

  Nodding as he clicked open his briefcase, Medina leafed through some materials. “During structural reinforcement work, the men came across a hidden compartment beneath the building’s foundation.”

  He handed Kate a rectangular object encased in a thick velvet sack. “This was found sealed in an airtight metal box. Presumably that’s why it’s so remarkably well preserved.” He snapped the briefcase shut and moved it to the floor.

  Easing the manuscript from the sack, Kate stared at the plain, gilt-edged black cover, then turned to the ridged spine, checking for a title. Seeing none, she lowered the manuscript to the table and gently, as if caressing the cheek of a newborn, ran a fingertip across the cover. “The leather’s barely cracked,” she marveled. “Hard to believe this is from the sixteenth century.”

  She lifted the cover, turned past the blank first page, and for a moment was transfixed as odd arcane symbols resembling hieroglyphics glared back up at her.

  “I looked up a tutor I knew well at Oxford,” Medina said. “An historian called Andrew Rutherford. Showed it to him last week. Though he was able to roughly date some of the paper, he couldn’t make sense of that writing—consulted a specialist in ancient alphabets, but apparently those symbols are nothing of the kind.”

  “Could be nullities,” Kate said softly, lifting the page.

  “Pardon?”

  “Come closer.”

  He leaned toward her across the small table, and after a split second, the right corner of his mouth curled up a bit. Not quite a smile, just the hint of one.

  “Closer to the book,” she admonished. “What do you smell?”

  He assumed a crestfallen expression, then asked, “Do I want to smell anything? It’s hundreds of years old.”

  “Have a little faith in that airtight seal you mentioned. You’ll be fine.”

  “Okay. Leather and, uh, some type of old paper.”

  “Right. What else?” Kate asked, gently waving the page back and forth.

  “Ink, I suppose?”

  “And?”

  “And…something else,” he murmured, inhaling again. “Lemon.”

  Kate reached down and pulled a slender but powerful flashlight from her bag. Turning the man
uscript sideways, she trained the light onto the page they’d been examining. Translucent letters appeared between the lines of inked symbols.

  “Bloody hell,” Medina whispered. Reading the translucent letters aloud, he said,“The Anatomy of Secrets by Thomas…what does that say? Philip…Phel…”

  “Phelippes,” Kate said, stunned. “The two letters at the end—that backwarde, and the backwards with a closed loop at the bottom? This is an Elizabethan style of handwriting.”

  Eyes wide with amazement, she lowered the page. “Do you know who Phelippes was?”

  Medina shook his head.

  “You might have heard of Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth’s legendary spymaster? He’s considered the founder of England’s first official secret service, and Phelippes was his right-hand man, his covert op director—was called ‘the Decipherer’ for his expertise in code breaking. Today, Phelippes is mostly remembered for helping Walsingham with the entrapment of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots.”

  “His name looks French.”

  “Yeah. He was born Phillips. Changed it, probably to add some panache,” Kate said quickly.

  She then pointed to the hieroglyphic-like symbols. “These characters written in ink were known in the Renaissance as nullities. They’re decoys—meaningless symbols intended to throw you off. Codes and ciphers were a crucial part of covert communications at the time, but so was penning information in lemon juice, milk, onion…anything organic. Someone shuffling through Phelippes’s papers might look at a sheet like this and give up, perplexed. But if he held it to a candle…”