The Jefferson Allegiance (30 page)

MODE: 6 INCHES, DIRT

Watch and learn.

“What is this?” Evie handed it back.

“It’s a cache report. A format that gives directions to where something is hidden. In this case, it must be the disks. You’ve got your Far Reference Point, then directions from it to the Immediate Reference Point and how the item is hidden. Didn’t they teach you that at the Farm?”

“It seems a little outdated,” Evie said.

“A wooden cipher wheel seems a little outdated,” Ducharme noted.

“A point for the man,” Kincannon said.

Evie laughed. “OK. So we have to find a mythical sword first?” She sat on the edge of the cargo bay of the helicopter. "Why couldn't LaGrange leave the disks at the grave?”

Kincannon spoke up. “Why couldn’t McBride leave all his in the briefcase?”

Evie nodded with a smile. “Point taken and earned.”

Ducharme tapped the report. “LaGrange is making it difficult to track and he’s making sure only someone who’d been a cadet could understand.”

“OK. Where’s Excalibur?” She eyed him. “Do you have to draw it out of a stone somewhere?”

Ducharme shook his head. “No. It
is
stone. An engraving above the entrance to the Cadet Chapel. So we go two hundred and seventy degrees, due west, one hundred and six meters, from the chapel door, to an oak tree. The disks are buried six inches down from the base.”

“So we have to go
back
to West Point?”

“I do,” Ducharme said. “The ‘watch and learn’ must be about the tape.”

Evie hefted the battered leather case. “I wish we could read his journal. I think it would give us a lot of the answers we need.”

“Well,” Kincannon said, rubbing the stubble of beard on his chin. “Seems to me these folks went out of their way with the tradecraft to keep their secrets,
but
at the same time they always left a way to find what you’re looking for. So there’s got to be a way to find that decrypter for the computer. He left the computer with
you
. He knew you’d figure it out.”

Evie closed her eyes in thought, and then opened them. “It has to be something simple and direct. Simpler than finding the disks. Because McBride probably thought it would be the first thing I’d do—try to figure out how to read his computer, maybe find out what exactly is going on. I don’t think he expected so much killing, so fast.”

“All right then,” Kincannon said. “Put yourself back to where and when he gave you the briefcase.”

“I was at work,” Evie said. “Monticello. And—“ she paused, her face lighting up. “It makes perfect sense.”

“A grave,” Ducharme said. “Jefferson’s.”

Evie nodded. “And like Poe’s, one where the marker isn’t right. Jefferson’s original marker was degraded by souvenir seekers chipping off pieces. It was donated to the University of Missouri on the
fourth of July in eighteen eighty-five.”

“The University of Missouri?” Kincannon wasn’t following.

“The first state university that came into being in the territory Jefferson bought with the Louisiana Purchase.”

“So it’s there?” Ducharme asked.

Evie shook her head. “No. McBride would have kept it close. They put a new marker over Jefferson’s tomb at Monticello. A larger replica of the original surrounded by an iron fence. I think this time, what we’re looking for stayed with the body, just like it stayed with Poe’s body, even though they moved the original marker.”

“The disks are the priority,” Ducharme said. “They lead to the Allegiance.”

“But we might need to know what McBride’s written in his journal to understand the Allegiance,” Evie argued. “He wouldn’t have given it to me for no reason.”

Ducharme summed the situation up. “We’ve got Adams’s grave possibly with disks, and Jefferson’s grave with possibly a decoder. And then, we might have one of our fellow—what do you call it—Philosophers—heading toward Hamilton’s grave.”

He seemed about to say something else, when Pollock came walking out, helmet under her arm.

“What now?” the pilot asked. “My motto is ‘you call, I haul.’ I shut off my transponder and if I do nap of the earth, I can stay off radar.”

Evie looked at Ducharme. “We have to split up.”

“Not a sound military tactic,” Ducharme said. “Didn’t work well for Custer.”

“You feel like Custer?” Evie asked.

“No,” Ducharme said. “But-“ he paused. He rubbed a hand across his face, pausing as his fingers touched the scar underneath his right eye. He glanced at Kincannon and the Sergeant Major nodded.

“A lot of ground to cover and we need to do it quick to stay ahead of these people,” Kincannon said.

“If we’re ahead of them,” Ducharme hedged.

“What you gonna do, Ranger?” Kincannon chided.

“All right,” Ducharme said. He turned to Pollock. “Jessie, you got a ride Evie and I can use? Just to get to West Point?”

She nodded. “That old pickup over there is my friend’s who works here. He’ll let you use it.”

Ducharme snapped out commands, his mind made up. “Evie and I take the pick-up, go to just outside Stony Lonesome gate. I’ll infiltrate West Point on foot, recover the cache.” He hit some buttons on his satphone. “Lojack says our Blazer is there—in the military police impound lot. I doubt the Feds—or whoever the hell these people are—left anyone there with it—they were all chasing us and they already went over the vehicle in DC. Evie, while I do that, you try to find something that will play that film.” He turned to the Sergeant Major. “Jeremiah, you go with Jessie. Fly to Monticello and see if anything’s buried at Jefferson’s grave. Then we’ll all link up at Adams’s grave.”

***********

The man had passed through without stopping, putting Lily even more on edge. Maybe she was wrong about the grave. Too many mistakes.

“A history buff, perchance, good lady?”

She spun about, almost unsheathing the sword. A man dressed in Colonial America regalia, from large buckle shoes to tricorner hat, was standing on the path, a cane under his arm. He had a big, bushy beard and small, old-fashioned glasses perched on his bulbous red nose. Ben Franklin come to life. If he started miming, she was going to cut him down where he stood. Perhaps with a few painful slices before a fatal one.

He stepped forward. “Ah. Alexander Hamilton. Quite the controversial figure. And the duel, good lady, the duel that caused his poor soul to end up here, it happened not far that way.”

He pointed vaguely to the southwest. If this guy ever had to navigate his way in enemy territory he’d be dead before nightfall.

He continued annoying her. “Many sources say Hamilton deliberately missed. That he thought he had a gentleman’s agreement with Burr that both would miss, honor would be assuaged, and they could go on with their lives. But Burr was no gentleman. Any who knew the cur would have been sure of that. After all, Burr lost the eighteen hundred Presidential Election to Jefferson by one vote, and, having to choose between what Hamilton viewed as two evils: Jefferson and Burr—Hamilton threw his support behind Jefferson and had one of his Federalist congressman swing the election to Jefferson.”

She tensed when the re-enactor stepped closer and reached under his frock. She was ready to strike as he withdrew an antique pistol. “The pistols used in the Burr-Hamilton duel—looking very much like this one—had been used previously, in a duel whence Hamilton’s own son, Philip, was slain.”

“Don’t you have a job?” She looked past him and saw another man enter the cemetery and knew right away that if she was wrong about the location, so was the latest generation of Philosophers. The newcomer had that attitude that only came from being one of the elite—Special Operations. They could dress in civilian clothes, grow beards, slouch, but they couldn’t lose that aura. He wore a long black leather coat—too much watching of “The Matrix”—and a baseball cap pulled down low over his eyes. He moved as if he owned the cemetery and feared nothing.

She tightened her grip on the sword.

“This
is
my job.” The re-enactor sounded insulted. “Well, I do have a role off-Broadway in a production of—“

“Shut up,” Lily hissed. She accepted that some people truly were idiots as the man continued.

“They say Hamilton was carried to his home in upper Manhattan where he lingered for a night after being rowed back from New Jersey, and then perished. But that is not true. He was taken to a friend’s home near the landing site. You can even walk down Jane Street in Greenwich Village and see a small plaque on the front of a brownstone proclaiming it to be the location of the house where Mister Hamilton expired.

“Burr, of course—“

“Leave!” Lily put all the command she had learned at the Academy and in the Air Force into her voice, and finally got through to the idiot. The re-enactor grumpily slouched away, in search of better listening and perhaps someone who would buy him a drink.

The newcomer looked down at a piece of paper in his hand, and then around. The re-enactor went up to him, they had a brief discussion, and then the re-enactor continued in search of other victims. The man’s eyes locked on Hamilton’s grave. He glanced at her, checking her out as men always did, but didn’t see a threat. A subjective dismissal she was too familiar with.

She pulled out her satphone and dialed the third number on the Post-it. It rang several times. On the fourth ring she saw the man pull out his own satphone.

“Hello?”

Lily pressed the off button and slid the phone back into her pocket. The man looked confused for a moment, then shrugged, putting the phone away. He walked over to Hamilton’s grave, staring at the monument, less than ten feet from her. The monument was a stone obelisk placed on top of a pedestal that had four urns at each corner. On the front was written:

The corporation of TRINITY CHURCH has erected this

In Testimony of the Respect

FOR

The PATRIOT of incorruptible INTEGRITY

The SOLDIER of approve VALOR

The STATESMAN of consummate WISDOM

Whose TALENTS and VIRTUES will be admired

Long after this MARBLE shall have mouldered into

DUST

He died July 12
^th
1804 Aged 47

The man laughed. “He sure thought a lot of himself.”

Lily raised an eyebrow. “That’s his eulogy, written by someone after he was dead.”

The man shook his head. “It’s bullshit. Take his incorruptible integrity for example. Hamilton had so many affairs people started naming their Tomcats after him. Martha Washington was one of the first to do it.”

The man was young, fit. Tanned skin despite the winter.

“I’m Lily. And you are?”

He looked at her squarely, a bit taken aback at her directness. She’d never understand the social ‘dance’ between the sexes, but she found it most useful at times in getting what she truly desired. “Vince.”

She had learned early on at the Academy that a man could be easily distracted by a woman. “You’re military aren’t you, Vince?”

He smiled once more, full of confidence. “Yes. Navy SEALS.”

“I thought so.” She nodded at the monument. “You don’t seem to like him.”

“Hamilton?” Vince shook his head. “Got to give him credit for what he achieved, but he sure had a twisted brain.”

“’Twisted?’”

“He was big into money and being born to the right people, yet he came out of squalor. Kind of weird.”

Lily found comfort in running her hand over the top of her sword grip underneath her heavy cloak. “How so?”

“He was born in the Caribbean on a small island, poor and illegitimate,” Vince said. “Mother died when he was young; he had nothing. Got to give him credit that he worked his way up. Made his own way in the world.”

“You know a lot about Hamilton?” Lily asked.

“I did some research on my way here,” Vince said vaguely. “You a fan?”

She got off the crypt and stood close to the Navy SEAL, her hand curling around the handle of the wakizashi, sliding it up a few inches in its sheath. “I think he was a brilliant man. A true patriot.”

He shrugged. “Should have been faster on the draw with Burr, though.”

“Hamilton was a gentleman and had pride,” Lily said. “He deliberately missed Burr, and then the coward shot him.”

Vince shrugged again. “Then he was stupid as well as arrogant.” He was dismissing her; she felt it. It was the way she’d been treated by men in the military. Somehow they could sense when she was near that she would not give them what they really wanted from her.

She stepped closer, inside the area that people considered their space. He seemed startled and really looked at her now. She could tell he liked what he saw. They always did until it was too late.