The Jefferson Allegiance (5 page)

“He is,” Evie said.

Ducharme was impressed she didn’t stare at the major, taking his word about the gun. “And he’s usually never late, is he?”

“Never.”

“And he left you a note.”

“Yes.”

“Come with me.”

Without protest or hesitation, Evie tossed a twenty on the table, put on her coat, closed the book, and followed him toward the kitchen. Ducharme led her past startled chefs and out the back door into an alley.

Snow was falling as Ducharme edged into the alley, Evie close behind. He drew his Mod-23 pistol and took a step forward. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw Evie looking at the gun with a frown, as if disapproving or perhaps jealous and wanting one herself. He also saw the red dot in the center of her chest, and he slammed her against the brick wall as a sub-sonic bullet missed by less than an inch, chipping brick from wall. Ducharme rolled, pulling her to the ground, his body on top of hers, firing rounds as fast as he could pull the trigger down the alley toward the unseen gunman, his suppressed gun emitting only the sound of the slide going back and forth. A deadly battle played out in near silence.

Ducharme tensed, feeling exposed on the ground, waiting for a bullet to slam home. But there were no further shots as flashing lights suddenly lit up the alley from the street entrance. Ducharme helped Evie to her feet as the doors on a dark sedan opened and four men piled out, weapons in hand.

“FBI! Drop the gun!” one of the men yelled.

Ducharme carefully put the gun on the ground, and then raised his hands.

A black man in a dark suit underneath a long overcoat held up a shiny badge in his free hand. On his head he wore, of all things, a fedora, which rated in usefulness only slighter better than the Green Beret Ducharme wore.

The man came walking down the alley, wary, weapon at the ready, as the other three ran by, after the shooter. He looked at Evie. “Are you Doctor Tolliver?”

“Yes.”

He shifted his gaze. “Colonel Ducharme?”

“Who’s asking?”

“Special Agent Burns.” He holstered his weapon. “I need both of you to come with me. If you please,” he added in a tone that indicated he didn’t care whether they pleased or not.

“I’ve got to get some place,” Ducharme said.

“Pennsylvania and
nineteenth?” Burns asked.

Ducharme tensed. “How did you know?”

“We read it off General LaGrange’s cell phone.”

Ducharme took a step back as if punched in the chest. “Is he all right?”

“He’s been murdered.” Burns didn’t pause, looking at Evie. “Mister McBride has also been murdered.”

Chapter Three

Lily removed her heavy, armored cloak, draping it over a chair. The khaki pants were serviceable and fashionable, and fit her compact five-foot-four frame. The black turtleneck accommodated her shapely upper body. Her short blonde hair framed a face more befitting a nun’s habit than an armor-cloaked killer.

She removed the wakizashi from its sheath and gently placed it on the desk, next to the half empty bottle of cognac and the three roses the Chair had carried. She found disinfectant, poured it onto a towel, and thoroughly cleaned the blade with it. She let it sit for a few minutes, then took a silk cloth and carefully wiped the blade dry. Turning it under the desk light, she checked the edge for damage. There was none, not that she expected any, given the quality of the blade and the weakness of flesh, muscle and bone against steel that had been folded so many times by hands skilled in the perfection of such weapons.

She pulled back her left sleeve to the elbow. The skin on the inside of the forearm was marred with six scars, each about two inches long. The scars were poorly healed, red raised ridges marching down her arm, an incongruity for someone who held an MD, and a harsh contradiction to the unblemished beauty of her flesh.

She grabbed the handle of the short sword with her right hand. Slowly and precisely, she drew the sword across the skin, just below the last cut. Skin parted easily to the razor-sharp blade, and blood flowed. The hand holding the sword was steady as a rock. Then she did it again, another slice. Done, she sheathed the still bloody sword and rolled down her black sleeve.

Lily was from a long line of military veterans, but was the first female in the line of service. While her friends received dolls and clothes for their birthdays, she’d received knives and guns. Her father had rigged an old sea bag in the backyard as a punching bag for her and her brother. Instead of the mall, her father had taken her to military surplus stores. For her 15
^th
birthday, her father had given her the Special Forces Medical Handbook and the Special Air Service Tracking Guide. She’d never realized she was different from other girls. Now she was so far out of the bell curve it wouldn’t occur to her to realize there was a different reality.

Her four years at the Air Force Academy had honed the harsh discipline of her childhood into a martial zeal bettered by none of her peers. Still, being a woman in a male-dominated institution, the brutal hazing of the first year, coupled with the sexual harassment inherent at the Academy, had appeared to present more obstacles than even that discipline could overcome.

Early one Sunday morning, when her roommate was away on a team trip, someone snuck into her room. Feeling hands groping her, she’d reacted, smashing his head against the metal frame of her bed, and then dashing for the rack where her rifle and bayonet were displayed. Cursing, the upperclassman had come after her.

She’d drawn the bayonet and held it in front of her. In the darkness, and dazed from the head slam, the upperclassman never saw it, running right onto it. His screams as the blade penetrated his bowels woke the entire floor.

The Academy, reeling under Congressional scrutiny from numerous sexual harassment complaints, listed the event as a training accident. The upperclassman graduated after a stint in the hospital, and Lily was told to forget about it and be happy no charges were brought against her for assault with a deadly weapon.

On the plus side, she was never harassed again.

On a deeper level, Lily replayed the moment of the bayonet in her hands penetrating flesh and blood flowing over the blade and her hands, again and again; relishing the thrill it had given her. She had never felt so alive.

She succeeded so well at the Academy that she was one of the select few tapped to go directly to medical school. She believed surgery was one way she could recapture that feeling. It was a futile attempt at control of her newly unearthed impulse.

After medical school, she’d been assigned as a flight surgeon for a transport squadron, but her sense of duty and the drive inside her caused her to volunteer to work on the ground, as far forward as she could go. She’d ended up near Fallujah during some of the worst of the fighting.

Patients in the forward operating center were brought in and treated without regard to what they were—American military, Iraqi civilians and even insurgents were all triaged together. Lily saw an opportunity. Every badly wounded insurgent that came under her scalpel died. In the confusion of war, it was weeks before anyone caught on.

When the commanding officer became aware of what was happening, it was too late. He couldn’t charge her without creating a publicity fiasco. A board was quietly convened, a psychological evaluation hurriedly churned out, and she was discharged.

Her family had served in every US war, with her participation in the Gulf being the most recent, although her living male forbearers didn’t hold a parade for her when she returned from overseas. She returned to the United States disgraced by the military she had given her life to, but also aware that the hunger inside her needed to be fed.

Leaning back in the chair, she looked at the large painting that dominated the wall. A portrait of Larz Anderson III, whose wife donated their house to the Society of Cincinnati. History was made in the Anderson House. A secret history. A portion of it was open to the public who trickled through, looking at the abundant collection of Revolutionary War documents. The open portion was like the sheath on her sword, hiding the edge underneath. This wing of the house was never on the tour, and entry was limited only to the chosen few of the inner core. Lily had been granted access just a month earlier in her first meeting with the Head of the Society, known only as Lucius.

She looked down at the glowing screen of her laptop. She tapped the keyboard, accessing the secure satellite up-link. She was hooked into the Society’s network, which saddled on top of the military’s Milstar Internet, and her transmission was encrypted by the latest technology from Silicon Valley—so advanced, that even the military had not yet begun to field it. The encryption allowed her access to be safe from the National Security Agency’s screening program that monitored all Internet traffic, even its own.

Like night follows day, the NSA had enacted a program called Carnivore as soon as there was an Internet to monitor. For years, fools had been sending emails unaware that a few choice words would tap them as a danger. A poor actor who typed--
I bombed; I died on stage--
was snared by Carnivore’s database which counted alert words per sentence.

She was using such a high-speed system for something very simple. Googling.

She typed in:
cognac three roses
.

She stared at the results, all-pointing in the same direction. She quickly read the top three entries, collating the information in her brain.

She paused in thought for a few moments, glanced at the door, and then typed in
head heart
.

The first three entries weren’t useful, but she paused as she read the fourth. She accessed the entry and scanned it. She knew it was connected, but she had no idea how. As she was puzzling over this, the heavy wooden door creaked open, and an old man in an archaic butler’s uniform nodded his head. She cleared the screen and shut the lid on the laptop.

Leaving the wakizashi behind, she followed the servant down the heavily carpeted and dimly lit hallway. On the wall were portraits of prominent Society members, the angled lamps highlighting them providing the only light. All of those portrayed—exclusively male—were recognizable. A who’s-who of American political history: George Washington, Henry Knox, Alexander Hamilton, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Zachary Taylor, James Buchanan, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, Herbert Hoover, J. Edgar Hoover, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, and the next-to-last two portraits which flanked a set of double doors were of Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush.

There was a puff of air, and sensors searched for traces of explosives or dangerous chemicals. There were also imaging machines trained on her, penetrating her garments, searching for hidden weapons. She knocked on the intricately carved wood and waited.

The voice that replied from beyond was low and deep. One that was used to power and respect as a right. “Enter.”

She went into a cavernous room and squinted in the darkness. The only light was reflected through the windows from the streetlamps outside. There was a large desk directly in front of her. On the other side of the desk was a single high-backed chair, but it was hidden in the shadows and all she could make out was that it was occupied. As she had been trained as a Plebe at the Air Force Academy, she marched up to it, halted three paces in front, and snapped to attention.

She bowed her head slightly instead of saluting. “Reporting as ordered, sir.”

“How did the meeting go?” Lucius asked.

“Sir, as of this evening the Chair of the American Philosophical Society and one of the Philosophers are dead. I have the names of the remaining two Philosophers.”

A long silence, then a click as Lucius turned on a lamp, shooting a cone of light onto the desk. Several white chess pieces were directly under the lamp. A king, a queen, and several pawns—the motif was Revolutionary America, as the ‘king’ was clearly George Washington and the queen, his wife Martha. Some of the pawns were only roughed out, not yet finished.

Lucius’s aged hand broke into the light, picking up one of the smaller blocks, an almost finished pawn in the shape of a Minuteman. His other hand held a file. He scraped the file against the piece, the sound loud in the room. “It is very difficult to acquire pure ivory these days,” Lucius said.

Lily, as she’d also been taught at the Academy, remained silent.

The file scraped along the side of the piece. “Some of the few remaining expert ivory sculptors use power tools, but I prefer the traditional. You cannot achieve the fine details with power tools. The emphasis has switched from quality to quantity in order to mass-produce trinkets for tourists. A waste of an elephant’s life.”

The file rasped across the ivory. Then the hands paused. “You were directed to get the Jefferson Cipher, not kill.”

There was movement behind her in the darkness. She tensed, but dared not turn her head.
Had she blundered?
With her thumb she began to twist the Air Force Academy ring that adorned her left ring finger. The rough face of small diamonds shaped in a dagger ran across her skin.