reached thirty-three, he took another match and, inserting it into his mouth, bit off the blue-colored tip-and swallowed it. He put the beheaded match into the box; the matches inside now covered his tiny sketch.
Taking up the pencil again, he wrote 34 on the box cover, beneath the tiny rocket. There were six matches left on the cot. He shook a filterless cigarette from the pack and pulled it out with his lips, then lit one of the remaining matches on the side of the box, brought it to the cigarette. He inhaled deeply. Then he picked up the remaining five matches and brought the burning match against them. The matches flared, bringing his face into sharp relief, reflecting in his brown, grim eyes. He watched them burn, then blew them all out. He reached over and took a metal ashtray from the desk. Putting all six spent matches into the ashtray, he stubbed out the cigarette and placed it on top of the matches, then returned the ashtray to the desktop.
He tucked the matchbox inside the nearly empty cigarette pack. He stood and crossed the narrow aisle to the cot opposite his: (ORLOV) read its wardrobe. He opened the thin metal door and, parting the front of a dress tunic identical to his draped on a hanger, slipped the package into the tunic's inside pocket. Then he carefully straightened the tunic and closed the locker's door.
Returning to his own cot he sat down. He looked at his hands, which were trembling, and closed them into fists. The trembling stopped. He removed a small black-and-brown automatic pistol from the gun belt's holster. Embossed on the grip was a tiny five-pointed star. The pistol looked surprisingly light for something made of metal, something so lethal. He removed his beret and placed it carefully on the pillow of his cot. Then he raised the pistol to his temple and pulled the trigger.
The sound, in such a confined space, was deafening.
CHAPTER 1
The low, rolling, thickly wooded hills of western Massachusetts passed by the windows of Benjamin's car. The leaves were just beginning their transition to browns and golds and reds, and as Benjamin rounded another curve in the winding country road, his passage sent up a colorful, swirling wake that settled with a soft rustling behind him. The sky was a clear blue, the air crisp with a hint of the winter chill to come… All in all, a beautiful day for a leisurely drive through the country.
But Benjamin wasn't feeling leisurely. And while the sights and sounds were those of a Thanksgiving television special, Benjamin's gut told him a Halloween thriller would be more appropriate.
Until late afternoon the day before, Benjamin Wainwright had been a happy-if-obscure postdoctoral fellow at the Library of Congress, pursuing his research on Colonial Native Americans with the pure focus of a scholar who had found his little bit of heaven in the bowels of the most extensive library on earth, a modern-day Alexandria. He would have been perfectly content to be left alone for the next two years rooting among historical detritus that hadn't been important even when it was new, and now was important only because it was so very old.
And then he'd received the phone call from Jeremy Fletcher.
Benjamin hadn't heard from Jeremy for nearly ten years; not since they'd been undergraduates together at Harvard. They'd been occasional friends back then, but too different to become more than that: Benjamin the bookworm, Jeremy the computer whiz kid; Benjamin raised in a solidly middle-class family of scholars, Jeremy from the titled British upper crust. Even their physiques were a contrast: Benjamin was above-average height, with short, curly black hair, his body fit and solid, whereas Jeremy was short and thin, as though his body fed on itself to supply his brilliant, methodical intellect.
Benjamin had always felt slightly intimidated by Jeremy's brilliance. But then, so did most people. Jeremy simply saw the world differently than other people did. For Jeremy, life wasn't random and haphazard; it was a complex network of interrelating causes and effects.
'Take your favorite subject, history,' Jeremy had said late one night as they sat on the steps of Widener Library, the neatly trimmed grass of the Harvard quad a checkerboard of dark trees and pools of light. 'It's created by people, not some disembodied 'forces.' And people are, as the saying goes, creatures of habit.'
'That's an old theory, Jeremy,' Benjamin had objected. 'Or are you becoming a conspiracy nut?'
'Oh, I'm not talking some drivel about who killed JFK,' Jeremy replied. 'I'm talking about the fact that people do things for the same sorts of reasons, century after century. There are decidedly patterns there, patterns made up of millions of individual acts, like dots in one of Seurat's pointillist paintings. The dots may not know the whole picture, but it's bloody well there, just the same. One merely has to find the proper perspective from which to see it.'
'And you're going to find that perspective buried in one of your computer programs?' Benjamin teased.
'Perhaps,' he'd said enigmatically. 'Just perhaps.'
Benjamin hadn't seen history that way. To him, the past knew things the present had forgotten, and one didn't kill that wisdom by autopsying it. The true wonder of the past lay in the ineffable complexity of human minds. And the key to those minds was to be found in books.
He remembered standing in front of his father's floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, inhaling the smell of leather and age, and feeling as though he were praying at an altar. Thus, when the opportunity for a postdoc at the Library of Congress had presented itself, it seemed to him those prayers had been answered.
After college, Benjamin followed in his father's footsteps, taking a degree in Colonial history at Georgetown University; meanwhile, he'd heard that Jeremy had finished MIT and then taken a postdoc at the RAND Corporation, doing some sort of supersecret work for the government with computer modeling. And they hadn't communicated in all those years since.
So when an intern at the Library had interrupted Benjamin-he'd been preparing a lecture he planned on calling 'Savage Art: Civilization Confronts Chaos in the New World'-telling him there was a Jeremy Fletcher on his office phone, at first he couldn't believe it.
Why would Jeremy call him, after all this time?
After the usual shallow pleasantries of a friendship gone stale with the years, Benjamin had finally asked Jeremy if what he'd heard was true: Was he doing some sort of supersecret work for one of the 'spook factories'?
'Not exactly,' Jeremy had replied cautiously. 'Actually, I'm out here at the American Heritage Foundation.'
' The Foundation?' Benjamin had whistled appreciatively. 'Even better. They're richer than the spooks.'
'Well that actually brings me to why I'm bothering you.' There'd been an uncomfortable pause, then, 'Benjamin, I'd like to share some of that wealth with you. I wonder… do you think you might be enticed into coming out here for a few days?'
Benjamin had been stunned. Nothing he knew of either Jeremy's work or that of the American Heritage Foundation would seem to relate in any way to his own expertise. 'Not that I don't appreciate it,' he finally managed, 'but what on earth could I do for you?'
'Well, it's difficult to explain, but you see, some of my own research… well, it's gotten tangled up in that Indian Wars muddle you love so much.'
'Native Americans,' Benjamin said reflexively, but really thinking about the curious, almost artificial breeziness of Jeremy's tone. 'We colonials don't call them Indians anymore.'
'Yes, quite right. Anyway, I could use that musty encyclopedia you call a brain to help me sort it all out. It would only be for a few days, a week at most. But it would have to be now, Benjamin. Tomorrow, actually. Think you could make the slog out here to the wilds of western Massachusetts?'
For a moment Benjamin had no idea what to say, but after a bit more hedging, Benjamin had allowed himself to be… seduced seemed like the right word. But not by Jeremy's promise of exorbitant reward; rather, it had been the mystery of the thing, the sheer eccentricity of Jeremy's offer.
Of course Benjamin had heard of the American Heritage Foundation; it was one of the most prestigious and most secretive 'think tanks' in the entire country. Young obscure scholars went into the Foundation-as it was known with a certain instinctual awe-and came out to appointments in the corridors of power that would otherwise have required decades of thankless service to obtain. And while the occupants of those corridors were elected officials and therefore merely passing through, the overseers of the Foundation were answerable to no one-or at
