The Intelligencer Read online

  Slade sighed.

  “Oh, come on. You know I do whatever you say. You’re talking to someone who’s literally followed you over a cliff.”

  “Good point.”

  Throwing a light punch to his shoulder, she added, “And I’ll do it again, whenever you ask.”

  “That won’t be necessary any time soon,” Slade said gently. “But I’ve got a heap of dirty laundry the size of Texas and a pair of shoes that could use a good pol—”

  “See you tomorrow, boss.”

  Forty minutes and a quick shower later, Kate was in Greenwich Village, sitting in the musty, dimly lit basement shop of a rare-book dealer she’d been friendly with for years. The old dealer, Hannah Rosenberg, had a messy gray bun and was twirling an errant tendril while examining the binding of Medina’s manuscript through a pair of crooked gold-framed glasses.

  “Oh, this was beautifully stitched…black morocco leather, very expensive at the time. This type of gold tooling was a new, fashionable technique in Tudor England…”

  Kate reminded herself to breathe. “What do you make of the paper?”

  Opening the volume, Hannah began to leaf through it, pausing now and then to study certain pages against the light of a low-watt lamp. “Hmm.” She reached for her fiber-optic light pen, put on a pair of tinted goggles, and continued her examination.

  Knowing the process could take a while, Kate stood to peruse the glass-fronted cabinets of antique books lining the shop walls.

  “Mind getting me a glass of wine?” Hannah asked. She lived in the floors above her shop.

  “Not at all.” Kate slid out the door, her heart pounding.

  “Good news, dear,” Hannah said, when Kate returned with two glasses of Merlot. “I’d say your theory fits.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, to start with, the binding, the paper, and the ink—they’re each right for the time period. This is definitely a collection of pages written on different kinds of sixteenth-century paper by what appear to be many different people. The paper itself is from all over Europe. Hardly any of these pages come from the same batch as the ones next to them, and that’s highly unusual for any bound manuscript, even a collection of personal letters. The title page is a thick spongy Florentine linen, with a watermark that was used in the 1590s. The next is a far cheaper English rag paper, and I’d say it’s much older, maybe by a few decades. The third is Venetian parchment. Also appears much older than the title page.”

  Taking a seat on the stool across from Hannah, Kate leaned in eagerly. “They get progressively newer, right?”

  Hannah nodded. “Very roughly speaking, it appears chronological. I’d need a few days to date each page more precisely.”

  “Hmm. I need to take this with me, but…”

  “I think it would make more sense to decipher the content first anyway. If you’ve got yourself a bunch of soup recipes…”

  Kate smiled. “True enough.”

  “In the meantime, we can pretty safely rule out a modern forgery. People forge for profit, and something like this, with so many different authors and different kinds of paper…oh, trying to forge this would be an incredibly expensive, time-consuming nightmare.”

  Hannah reached into one of the pockets of her rumpled black linen dress, took out a pack of nicotine gum, and popped a piece in her mouth. “If you could convince a buyer this really was a collection of Walsingham’s missing spy reports,” she continued, “it would still be worth it, I suppose. A handwritten, one-of-a-kind object of major historical interest? Mmm…would probably fetch a couple million. But if your client was after money, he’d have taken it to an auction house or someone like me. Not you.”

  Kate nodded. “He doesn’t need the money anyway. He’s just curious why someone’s after this. Speaking of which, let’s see if Phelippes really wrote that first page.”

  Kate slipped a folder from her backpack and withdrew several sheets of paper. In grad school, she’d received a travel grant to research Elizabethan espionage in Britain and had microfilmed dozens of documents from different archives and libraries, some of which were penned by Thomas Phelippes. Handing them to Hannah, she said, “Can you compare the handwriting?”

  “You’re sure Phelippes wouldn’t have used a scrivener?”

  “Definitely,” Kate said. “If these reports are what I think they are, this collection would have been his prized possession, something he would’ve guarded jealously, never shown to anyone.”

  Hannah placed the four sheets before her, arranging them around the manuscript, which she opened to the title page. Peering through her magnifying glass, she moved back and forth between the various samples. “It’s a perfect match. And you know Elizabethan secretary hand is nearly impossible to forge.”

  Looking up, Hannah continued, “I can’t say with a hundred percent certainty—no one in this business can—but I think Phelippes did write this. That he gathered this collection of coded, uh, somethings and had them bound somewhere in London. But to determine whether the rest of the pages are from Walsingham’s missing files? That’s up to you.”

  Closing the manuscript, Hannah handed it over.

  As Kate started to put it back in its pewter box, Hannah said quickly, “Wait a minute. Let me see that again.”

  Kate complied, and Hannah squinted at the manuscript’s back cover, a smile slowly forming on her face.

  “What is it?”

  “Looks like the binder’s work was interrupted,” Hannah said, laying the manuscript between them with the back cover facing up. She positioned a lamp directly over it. “See those faint impressions?” she asked, pointing to the bottom two corners. “Three in one corner, two in another?”

  “Oh, yeah, how did I miss those?” Kate murmured. Five small rosettes, resembling profiles of blooming roses, had been lightly stamped into the black leather, leaving shallow, barely discernable impressions.

  “In that period, a skilled binder, an artist like this, usually made far more ornate decorations. I’d guess he was beginning an elaborate design—three rosettes in every corner, probably a large design in the center, more thin stripes, all to be filled with gold leaf…but that never happened.”

  “Because Phelippes was in a rush to hide this!” Kate exclaimed. “As soon as it was discovered that Walsingham’s files were missing, Phelippes would’ve been high on the list of suspects. I bet he put this collection together and hid it immediately, knowing people would search his place. Or maybe…”

  Kate bit her lip, her mind racing over the possibilities. “Maybe he didn’t have it bound right away. Maybe he held on to the whole file collection, to threaten certain people or blackmail them, but got worried one day that someone was coming after the evidence he had against them,then ran off to the binder.”

  “Both sound plausible,” Hannah said, nodding.

  “You know, I wonder if…no, it couldn’t be.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, I was just getting carried away, wondering whether the reason Phelippes rushed to hide this back then could be connected to the reason someone wants it now. But that’s not possible…is it?”

  Three blocks from her subway stop in east midtown, Kate turned onto her street and walked quickly toward her apartment building, an ivy-covered brownstone a block in from the East River. She was impatient to decipher as much as she could ofThe Anatomy of Secrets that night. As she climbed the marble steps, her cell phone chirped. It was Max.

  “I’ve been looking into that Jade Dragon email address you gave me,” he told her. “I haven’t been able to trace it to anyone yet—a series of anonymous remailers were used—but I hacked into Bill Mazur’s system and took a look at Jade Dragon’s emails. He sent the first one this morning, offering Mazur two thousand dollars to block out the whole day for an unnamed assignment. Mazur replied that he was up for it. Then, while you and Medina were at the Pierre, Jade Dragon sent Mazur a second email naming the location and the task. Mazur was supposed to steal you
r bag and leave it in a locker at Penn Station.”

  “So, he must’ve had someone following Medina, looking for the best time to grab the manuscript, and when we met at the Pierre and were obviously discussing it, he and his associate must’ve assumed I’d leave with it,” Kate speculated. “Probably viewed me as an easy mark.”

  “Yeah, and they used Mazur as a cutout in case something went wrong. You have any idea who this Jade Dragon dude might be?”

  “The same guy who sent a thief to break into Medina’s home,” Kate said. “Beyond that, I’m not sure, but I’d guess it’s a wealthy Brit with something to hide…or lose.”

  “Like what? A title?”

  “Maybe. If it came with a valuable estate. Titles are losing their cachet pretty fast over there. But that reminds me, a little while ago I read about a Scottish landowner who was selling a mountain range on the Isle of Skye for more than fifteen million bucks. There was a local uproar for trying to sell what most Scots viewed as a national treasure, but the court ruled he owned it, based on some fifteenth-and seventeenth-century documents. If this manuscript contains some kind of evidence invalidating property ownership on that scale, someone would definitely go to the trouble of trying to steal it.”

  “I’ll say. Hey, what about something to do with the government or the church?”

  “Anything directly connected with Elizabeth would be irrelevant since the Tudor line died with her,” Kate replied. “But a religious matter—that’s an interesting idea.”

  Max’s tone took on a dark, conspiratorial edge. “Maybe there’s a report about a saint who was into little boys, and some Vatican thug is desperate to keep it under wraps.”

  “As if anyone would even raise an eyebrow at this point,” Kate said wryly. “But I’ll let you know.”

  “Cracked any of those reports yet?”

  “I’m just about to start,” she said, unlocking her front door.

  “Cool. See you in the morning. And watch your back, Kate. Whoever’s after that manuscript? I doubt he’s ready to give up.”

  After saying good night to Max, Kate pulled a small bottle of diet Dr Pepper from her fridge and headed into her living room. With the exception of two walls of built-in bookshelves, the room had the feel of a Moorish harem or an opium den. The walls and ceiling were red, the windows were draped with gauzy gold curtains, mismatched Turkish cushions surrounded her dark wooden coffee table, and the carpet was an old Kilim from her grandmother’s house. The end tables were African with carved cobra legs, and the lamps resting upon them had shades an old Florentine craftsman had fashioned from medieval maps, with unusual creatures—dragons with pretty human faces and blond hair—lurking at the edges. It was an eclectic blend of stuff Kate had picked up on her travels, but it worked. At least for her it did—a guest had once asked if her decorator was a crackhead.

  Settling onto one of her couches, Kate unzipped her black backpack. It looked ordinary enough but was actually a reinforced computer bag with a built-in alarm. Sliding out Phelippes’s box and opening it, she turned to the manuscript’s fifth page, the one with the ciphered characters she’d recognized earlier that day in the Pierre.

  By today’s hi-tech standards, most Elizabethan ciphers and codes would be considered remarkably simple. They typically involved the substitution of invented characters, numbers, or words for various letters and proper names. Robert Cecil’s father, for example, Elizabeth’s chief adviser, used the signs of the zodiac to represent the different European monarchs and other leading political figures. Another courtier favored the days of the week.

  The writing Kate was examining consisted solely of invented symbols. As she’d told Medina in the Pierre, she recognized three of them, characters that had been used to represent England, France, and Spain. But where had she seen them? Racking her brain for a minute, the answer suddenly came to her—the characters were from a cipher key she’d seen at the Public Record Office in London.

  Sifting through one of her file cabinets, she found the right folder and, looking at her microfilmed version, located meanings for two additional characters on the page—a sliver moon with a line drawn through it referred to King Philip II of Spain, and two letterc ’s drawn back to back with a line between them represented the pope.

  All five of the symbols she now understood were positioned alone, Kate realized. The others were grouped together. Looking at the characters within each group, she decided that they must stand for letters, that the groups had to be words, with each symbol signifying an English letter. Knowing her computer’s decryption software could help her translate the rest of the message, Kate scanned the page into her laptop.

  Deciphering the next dozen pages of the manuscript was not so easy. In fact, it was a slow and tedious process. But Kate didn’t mind. In a few hours, she was knee-deep in salacious accounts of Renaissance mayhem and murder. She was in heaven.

  Her father, on the other hand, was in hell.

  WASHINGTON, D.C.—1:24A.M.

  In upper Georgetown, moonlight illuminated a simple yet stately white home. On the fourth floor, Senator Donovan Morgan sat alone in his study in the dark. He was staring, riveted to the poorly made black-and-white video playing on his laptop for the seventh time. It had appeared in his inbox fifteen minutes earlier.

  The heavily bruised, emaciated young man on the screen sat on the floor of a filthy prison cell with his head slumped forward. The soles of his feet were crusted with blood, and oozing white stripes zigzagged across them. Track marks on his arms suggested he’d been injected with sodium pentothal or a similar substance, over and over again. A guard came into view, opened the cell door, and began to shout. The prisoner looked up. His open eye was glazed, the other sealed shut by dark swollen flesh. With a shaking hand, Morgan adjusted his mouse. He clicked theSTOP button and the scene froze.

  It’s definitely his face, Morgan thought, studying the features of the spy he had known quite well. But was the video real, he wondered, or had the facial image been lifted from an old photograph? They said he died during the operation. Were they wrong?

  The spy had been sent on a mission that Morgan, then the chairman of the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, was aware of. Somehow the mission had been compromised and their man had disappeared, his fate unknown until the report of his death came in. Could he still be alive?

  Morgan’s brief bloom of hope withered quickly. Even if their spy had survived his capture, surely he’d have been executed, shortly after suffering forms of torture far worse than death. Morgan felt responsible; the guilt was overwhelming. Clicking thePLAY button again, he watched the guard grab the young man’s bony arm, jerk him to a standing position, and drag him, stumbling, from his cell.

  The video over, Morgan leaned back in his chair and turned to gaze out the window. The moon was unusually bright, and it shimmered on the dewdrops clinging to the leaves of his elm tree. But Morgan did not notice. The disturbing images shuffling through his mind had temporarily stolen his sight. A recovering alcoholic, he had not tasted liquor in more than five years, but damn, how he wanted to now.

  Picking up the phone, he dialed Jeremy Slade. “We need to meet. It’s about Acheron.”

  8

  Your Machiavellian Merchant spoils the state,

  Your usury doth leave us all for dead,

  Your artifex & craftsman works our fate,

  And like the Jews you eat us up as bread.

  Since words nor threats nor any other thing

  Can make you to avoid this certain ill,

  We’ll cut your throats, in your temples praying,

  Not Paris massacre so much blood did spill.

  —signed “Tamburlaine,” author unknown

  LONDON—NIGHT, MAY1593

  For a moment, the spy lingered in a shadow, scanning the street for passersby. No one. Good. He drew closer.

  His destination soon came into view—a small church attended by the neighborhood’s Dutch immigrants, the thieving dogs
who stole jobs from good Englishmen. Leaning around the corner of the adjacent building, he squinted into the churchyard. It was empty. He moved in.

  From beneath his doublet, he withdrew a parchment scroll that felt as heavy as iron. If he were caught with it, his employer would look the other way and he’d find himself in shackles. Fingers trembling, he unfurled the fifty-three-line poem and nailed it to the church wall.

  Threatening London’s immigrants with murder, his clever rhymes would strike great fear in Dutch hearts. They would also, the spy knew, throw Kit Marlowe into a deep cauldron of trouble. For the hateful poem, signed “Tamburlaine,” made other references to Marlowe’s plays, and the authorities would no doubt conclude that the popular playmaker was a pernicious influence on society, a miscreant who inspired the masses to violence and murder.

  Immediately the spy’s eyes jumped to his favorite lines. Unable to resist reading them one last time, he whispered softly, “ ‘We’ll cut your throats, in your temples praying, / Not Paris massacre so much blood did spill.’ ” Perfect, he thought with pride. Marlowe’s most recent play,The Massacre at Paris —about the slaughter of French Protestants on St. Bartholomew’s Day in 1572—had debuted at the Rose that very winter, just before an outbreak of plague had forced the playhouses to shut their doors. No one could miss his reference to Marlowe’s title.Massacre had been the most heavily attended play of the year. And it was, the spy had to admit, a truly marvelous one—a series of murderous spectacles that set your blood afire.

  The spy did not know why his employer was so eager to bring about Marlowe’s doom, but this poem would very likely do it. Similar anti-immigrant writings had been appearing around town for more than a month—all anonymous—and the Privy Council had appointed a special five-man commission to track down the culprits. The last thing the government wanted was more rioting in London’s streets. Beyond that, the queen was said to be personally outraged, as she considered the immigrants—fellow Protestants who’d fled their war-torn homelands—to be her friends. And so, to root out those who’d offended her, wrists would be shackled, joints would be snapped, and bones would be crushed.