The Intelligencer Page 5

  One of those courtiers—Phelippes’s new employer—was Robert Devereux, the dashing and tremendously popular Earl of Essex. A man as beloved by London’s commoners as by the ladies of the court. Each time Marlowe had seen Essex enter the Rose, the playhouse had erupted with cheers. Queen Elizabeth was said to be equally as captivated by him. At twenty-seven, he was more than thirty years her junior, but she’d granted him the rooms adjoining her own in Greenwich Palace, and everyone knew whatthat meant. Essex had entered the espionage game quite recently, after learning that providing the queen with valuable intelligence was one of the best ways to maintain her favor, perhaps even better than warming her bed, a feat Marlowe was certain the amorous earl performed admirably. The young nobleman’s string of sexual exploits was the talk of the town. Apparently he was very generous—and adept—with his affections.

  Essex’s rival for the position of secretary of state was Sir Robert Cecil, son of the queen’s most trusted adviser. A small, dour-looking hunchback with years of experience in the intelligence world, Cecil was Essex’s polar opposite in every way. Whereas Essex was impetuous and loose-tongued, Cecil was shrewd, patient, and quiet. Essex was emotional, and often quite warmhearted, but Cecil, always utterly ruthless. Marlowe had been playing both sides of the fence since Walsingham’s death, taking assignments from each network. He knew it was dangerous, but other spies did it, and more important, having a front row seat to the courtiers’ bitter rivalry was irresistible.

  “Well, what have you for me this time…Tom?” Marlowe asked, knowing that Phelippes despised it when employees used his first name.

  Pressing his lips together, Phelippes visibly bit back a reprimand.

  Good. You still need me.

  “A delicate matter has arisen, and I thought you might be particularly suited to it. There’s been talk about a certain new publication of yours…”

  Marlowe assumed a look of mock innocence. “I’ve no idea what you mean.”

  “You damned well do. That book of vile smut,” Phelippes exclaimed with distaste. Marlowe had translated a collection of erotic elegies from the Roman poet, Ovid. As such erotica was banned in England, he’d had the poems printed at a secret press in the Netherlands.

  “Icould report you to the proper authorities…” Phelippes continued.

  “If you could trace it to me.”

  “…but since you obviously had the lewd thing smuggled into this country illegally, it occurs to me that you must have the unsavory sort of connections that could help us with a matter of the utmost consequence.”

  “And if I choose to help you?”

  “If you are successful, I will pay you more than I ever have. At least twice what you receive for your silly little dramas.”

  Marlowe raised his eyebrows. Phelippes was talking about more than twenty pounds. “What about my so-called unsavory connections? How can I be certain you aren’t using me to hunt them down?”

  “This matter is of far greater import than catching a ring of book smugglers.”

  “Even so…”

  “I am not interested in having your misbegotten friends arrested—they could be useful to me on this assignment and others to come. You will have to take my word on that. And once again, your reward will be considerable. Have we a deal?”

  “Yes.”For now.

  Leaning in closely, Phelippes said softly, “You’ve heard of the Muscovy Company?”

  “Very little,” Marlowe lied.

  “Named for its monopoly on trade with Russia, it was founded forty years ago by a group of wealthy merchants and royal courtiers determined to find a Northeast Passage to the Orient—a sea route that no one in Europe had yet found, that could be dominated and controlled by Englishmen. A route that would give us direct access to the riches of the East, free from the threats of the Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean Sea.”

  Phelippes toyed with his sparse beard for a moment. “Obviously the Muscovy merchants didn’t succeed in that quest, but they established a lucrative relationship with the czar, trading English goods for Russian furs, cable, and oil. And for a share of the profits, the czar allowed them to travel from Moscow to Persia by land many times—along the Volga to Astrakhan, over the Caspian, and on to Bukhara—to exchange English wool for precious gems, silks, and spices. Then, twenty years ago, Turkish conquests left that route impassible, and such exotic goods have not passed through Muscovy hands since.”

  Phelippes paused to glance around once more, then added softly, “But on two recent occasions, gems from the Far Easthave appeared in London at the Royal Exchange, not long after a Muscovy ship docked downriver in Deptford. Rubies, diamonds, pearls…only they do not appear in the company’s books, and shareholders, among them our queen, have not seen any profits.”

  “Trading under the queen’s flag while stealing from under her nose—how very bold. I assume the old Muscovy trading route from Moscow to Persia is now open? That land route you spoke of?”

  Phelippes shook his head. “No. Still blocked by the Turks.”

  Then how had Muscovy merchants gotten access to the gems? Wasn’t it more likely that English privateers had stolen them from Portuguese ships, then neglected to inform local customs officials? Or that England’s Levant Company—with its monopoly on trade along the eastern shores of the Mediterranean—was responsible?

  Marlowe noticed an unusual gleam in Phelippes’s eyes. The man always discussed matters of espionage with intensity, but his gaze at the moment was positively electric.What might he be…ah! “You suspect certain Muscovy merchants have finally discovered a Northeast Passage, that they’re keeping it secret and trading on the sly?”

  “It’s one among several possibilities, but one that bears looking into, as you might imagine.”

  Marlowe could imagine. Such a discovery would have enormous consequences for England, in terms of international prestige as well as financial gain. The Spanish and Portuguese had been far more successful at exploring and colonizing the New World, and England’s national pride was wounded. But Marlowe knew that the good of their country was not Phelippes’s primary concern.

  “Is Essex a shareholder?”

  “Yes.”

  “So he stands to profit handsomely should this smuggling be exposed.”

  “Naturally,” Phelippes answered calmly.

  “And should he take credit for exposing the smugglers and alert the queen to the existence of a secret sea route to the Orient…”

  Phelippes smiled like a cat with a mouse in its paws.

  I see.If Phelippes’s suspicions were true and the mission was successful, Essex’s power at court would soar; perhaps the position of secretary of state would finally be his. And Phelippes, of course, would be right there at his side.

  “Your informant at the Royal Exchange, did he see who was selling the goods?” Marlowe asked.

  “A representative of an unknown Dutch trading company. Legerdemain, I suspect. A cleverly fashioned shield to hide the true source, which I expect you to find.”

  Marlowe nodded.

  “Now, Kit,” Phelippes said gravely. “Discretion.”

  “Of course.”

  Phelippes rose to his feet. “I hope to hear from you shortly.”

  “And you shall,” Marlowe responded, slouching lower on the bench. Watching the little man slink through the trees, he finished, “…hear what I see fit to tell you.”

  5

  NEWYORKCITY—6:30P.M., THE PRESENT DAY

  The dove-gray townhouse in the East Seventies had a narrow stone façade and a charcoal gabled roof. It was a sedate, old-fashioned exterior. Most people would never guess that electronic jamming signals crisscrossed each of the windowpanes, preventing voice-stimulated vibrations from being picked up by directional microphones.

  Kate entered the lobby and walked toward the brass elevators in the far left corner. The shy, heavyset doorman looked up and nodded at her briefly, then continued reading his book. As always, his paperback was missing
its cover.

  “Hearts Aflame? The Knight’s Embrace?Which one you got this time?”

  He blushed. “You just can’t give a harmless old guy his space, can you?” He’d managed to hide his addiction to romance novels from everyone but Kate.

  “Lemme see some cash, Jerry, or the whole building’s gonna know about the shirtless Fabios on those missing covers.”

  Twin gilt-framed portraits of a Victorian couple who once lived in the building hung on the interior sidewalls of the first elevator car. Kate’s office was on the fifth floor, but she wasn’t headed there at the moment. Her boss had sent a page. There was a meeting.

  She pressed the button for the second floor and the elevator began to move. Then, while looking at the eyes of the painted Victorian woman, Kate pushed a button hidden in the ornate gold frame. From the lady’s right eye, a blue laser beamed forth to analyze the distinctive pattern of interlacing blood vessels on Kate’s retina while a closed-circuit camera behind the woman’s left eye cross-checked her face against a small set of stored images. The button Kate was pressing scanned and transmitted her fingerprint to the security system’s database. A moment later, the elevator stopped, but the sliding front door remained closed. Instead the mirrored back wall of the elevator swung back, revealing a narrow corridor.

  The rear wall of the Slade Group’s headquarters was a dummy, hiding twenty feet on each of five floors that were unaccounted for in city blueprints. Because the building was enclosed on three sides by its neighbors, the spatial inconsistency was impossible to detect from street level. Kate’s boss, Jeremy Slade, used the hidden enclave as a command center for the covert operations he quietly managed for the government.

  Passing a small kitchen on her way to the main conference room, she heard a telltale hissing sound and glanced inside to see Slade standing over the cappuccino machine frothing some milk. He’d just mastered that particular culinary art. He was so good, in fact, that Kate had circulated a confidential interoffice memorandum recommending his immediate demotion from head spook to chief office barista.

  Intent on his task, Slade’s deep-set eyes were cast in shadow. In his mid-forties, he was just shy of six feet tall with dark hair and brown eyes that looked black under his prominent brows. The genes of a grandmother from India and ten years of Middle Eastern sun had given him dark, burnished skin. He was in exceptional physical shape; only his generous crow’s-feet hinted at his age.

  Slade had spent a dozen years as a CIA case officer collecting intelligence and planning missions in dangerous and often war-torn locales around the globe, but only recently had he dared to enter a kitchen. Since then he’d become obsessed with gourmet cooking, which delighted his employees because whatever Slade chose to do, he did with perfection. A Princeton graduate with a degree in Classics, he had risen to the position of deputy director for operations—the highest position in the Agency’s clandestine service—before his departure. Stylishly dressed even when casual, he had a humorous nonchalance that would give way to cold efficiency when the moment required. For Kate, the sight of a classic gentleman spy wearing an apron to fuss in the kitchen was priceless.

  She’d met him three years earlier when her father had reluctantly introduced them. It was the second year of her doctorate program, just after the unexpected death of her fiancé. A fellow grad student, he’d been on a hiking expedition in the Himalayas, and while sitting at a campfire one night had been killed in a grenade attack by Pakistani militants. The two German tourists beside him had died as well. Devastated, Kate had sunk into a depression that lasted for months. Slowly, however, she recognized that only part of her life was over, the part involving the man she loved and the prospect of marriage and a family someday.

  She told her father, a U.S. senator who served on the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, that she was going to apply to the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. Not out of a desire for revenge—she simply wanted to spend her life trying to keep other people’s lives from turning into hers. Though her father was sympathetic, he made every effort to stop her. Having lost Kate’s mother years before, he couldn’t bear the thought of anything happening to his only child. But her mind was made up, and Senator Morgan eventually gave in, setting up a meeting with Slade in New York. If Kate was determined to leave the academic world for fieldwork in the intelligence community, he figured, better it be with a man he knew and trusted than a sprawling bureaucracy where mistakes were made and leaks inevitable.

  Slade had left the CIA because he’d tired of catering to the whims of politicians whose motives he often found questionable. His recent move into the private sector, however, was a ruse. Slade still reported to the director of central intelligence (the head of the U.S. intelligence community and director of the CIA), and the small and secret team of operatives he managed acted under their exclusive guidance. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement; the DCI had a way of bypassing the gaunt-let of approvals necessary to launch certain covert actions by the book, and Slade could focus on the business of saving lives, free of political pressures.

  When Kate entered Slade’s office that first time, she was starstruck. While growing up, she’d immersed herself in spy fiction, filled with the murky bogeymen in dark suits and Bond-like über-spies that pop culture continually recycles. But Slade was real. A flesh-and-blood cloak-and-dagger man. Someone she’d imagined many times but had never gotten the chance to meet.

  They connected immediately. After a two-hour interview and review of her background materials, Slade offered her a job as a private investigator, explaining that his new company was opening offices in several major cities around the world. There were already ten investigators in the New York office, he said, most of whom came from careers in journalism or law enforcement. She could begin by working alongside one of them on a case that was already under way. Slade added that he’d start training her for intelligence work as well, and in time, depending on her progress, she’d get her first government assignment. He said that Kate’s credentials were as strong, if not stronger, than any CIA trainee he’d come across, and he also had a good feeling about her, which to him was what mattered most.

  Kate accepted right then, grateful to Slade for giving her a reason to wake up in the morning and keeping her so busy she barely had a moment to be sad. The Slade Group’s back rooms might not officially exist, but they’d been home to Kate since she’d first walked in the door.

  Continuing along the narrow corridor, she entered the second-floor conference room. With the exception of computer equipment, the place looked more like J. P. Morgan’s library than a typical intelligence op-center. The walls were lined with hand-carved built-in bookshelves, and two wrought-iron spiral staircases hidden behind them led to the floors above. An antique Turkish rug covered the floor, and several chocolate-colored leather couches and armchairs were positioned near the walls.

  At a circular table in the center of the room, Max Lewis, Slade’s top computer guru, was hovering over a laptop. Against the muted colors of the room, he stood out sharply; his T-shirt was bright red, small gold hoops glittered from his ears, and his short dreads had recently been bleached a bold peroxide blond, a color Kate thought looked cool against his mahogany-colored skin.

  Max had joined the Slade Group around the same time as Kate. Then a senior at NYU, he’d decided to apply for his first-choice job in a slightly unorthodox manner. After hacking into the CIA’s most secure database, he copied a dozen files and sent them as attachments, along with his résumé, directly to the DCI’s internal email address. Impressed with his nerve as well as his skill, the director had mentioned him to Slade that same day.

  “So how’d it go with Bill Mazur?” he asked. “Did you figure out if he was after the old book?”

  “Yeah, he was. Thanks again for the quick background.”

  Max nodded.

  “Turns out someone hired Mazur by emailing the assignment to him, using the screen name Jade Dragon,” Kate said, reaching int
o her bag for the exact address. “Could you see if this leads to anyone? And can you blow these up a bit?” she added, handing him Medina’s crime scene photos.

  “Sure thing.” Max slipped them into his shirt pocket. “Now that Medina. Gemma calls him ‘dishy,’ ” he said, referring to the receptionist in their London office. “Says he’s hot and heavy with some runway string-bean.”

  Kate smiled. Max liked short plump women. She’d walked in on him surfing porn sites featuring plus-size actresses on more than one occasion.

  “Well?” he demanded. “You saw him—what did you think?”

  “I wasn’t thinking. I was praying I wouldn’t trip while he watched me cross the room.”

  Max laughed.

  “I was on my way to see a book dealer I know to help me authenticate the manuscript, but I got Slade’s page. What’s up?” Kate asked, sitting down next to him.

  “Director Cruz called. The assignment involves the art world.”

  Alexis Cruz, the DCI, referred matters to Slade if they were extremely urgent and of the utmost secrecy or when Slade simply had someone more suited to a particular assignment than she did, which in this instance was the case.

  “It’s nothing serious,” Max explained. “Just a low-level threat for you to handle in Europe.” Grabbing the back of Kate’s chair, he slid it closer to his own. “Time to meet your new friend.”

  A video clip began playing on his computer screen. Two middle-aged men were dining together. One was Middle Eastern, the other Caucasian.

  “I may have seen the guy on the left before,” Kate said, looking closely at the slim Persian man’s familiar features—short receding dark hair, a smoothly shaven fine-boned face, and large wide-set brown eyes.