walkway if you can hear me clearly.”
Jack drifted left, comforted to know that he wasn’t going it alone.
It was an overcast Monday afternoon, the gray-white skies as cool and washed out as the surrounding sea of stone buildings and marble monuments. Jack stopped at the foot of the museum steps, his back to Madison Drive and the mall. He wasn’t looking to be a hero-especially a dead one. The National Mall was a busy place in the middle of the afternoon. Jack was fairly certain, however, that he was the only visitor wearing an FBI-issued Kevlar overcoat and FBI surveillance electronics.
“I’m here,” he said for Andie’s benefit.
“Don’t talk unless you have to,” she said, her voice in his earpiece. “If he sees your lips moving, he’ll know you’re wired.”
Jack stood and waited, glancing about nervously at strangers coming and going from the museum. The block-long, granite-faced building was a classic design, and the fact that Jack actually recognized it as Beaux-Arts style was yet another disturbing sign that he was indeed forty. His last visit to the Smithsonian had been as a teenager, one of several bonding trips that Harry Swyteck had arranged in hopes of dealing with the rough spots in their relationship the same way he had always dealt with them: by pretending they didn’t exist. The trip was nonetheless memorable, not because the Hope Diamond had turned out to be much smaller than Jack had expected, but because the burning question of the day was whether to commit suicide or homicide before his old man could drag him to every last one of the museum’s 126 million specimens.
Jack’s cell rang, and the display flashed “Out of Area,” no incoming number. Jack answered it, and the instructions came quickly:
“Go inside to the rotunda. Walk around the stuffed elephant and come back outside.”
The call ended before Jack could respond. It seemed like a pointless exercise, until Jack realized that the museums probably had metal detectors. It was a clever way for his caller to find out if he was armed. He wasn’t- but he did worry that his wire would be detected, screwing up everything.
Andie’s voice was suddenly in his ear, as if she could read his mind. “Don’t worry about the metal detectors. The museum only has enough staff to turn them on at random intervals. Your caller obviously doesn’t know that.”
Jack was only partially assuaged. It somehow seemed way too predictable that the terrorist with a bazooka would get through security, but the good citizen trying to thwart a possible presidential assassination would be stopped.
Jack climbed the granite stairs and entered through the revolving door. The rotunda was as impressive as he’d remembered it, though some things had changed. The simulated habitat around the eight-ton African bull elephant in the center appeared more natural. And in the post-9/11 world, there were of course metal detectors. As Andie had predicted, however, Jack breezed right past them without setting off alarms. The security guards didn’t pick up his FBI-issued surveillance equipment or Kevlar overcoat either. He paused to check out the elephant-he suddenly wondered if his caller was a Republican-and then he circled around and exited to the mall side of the museum.
Jack stopped at the top of the stairs, expecting the phone to ring at any moment. He heard only traffic noises from Madison Drive and the whistle of the wind through barren tree branches on the mall. A young mother pushed a stroller along the walkway. A man on the bench had his nose buried in the newspaper. At the base of the stairs, a docent was giving a brief history lesson to a group of tourists. Jack wondered if his caller had lost his nerve. It was starting to feel like a hoax, until he heard the voice from behind.
“This is for you.”
Before Jack could speak-before he could even turn around and see what the guy had in his hand-an entire team of undercover FBI agents sprang into action. The man reading the newspaper, the mother pushing the stroller, the docent and his tourists-every single one of them rushed forward, guns drawn.
“Drop your weapon!”
“I don’t have no weapon!”
“Drop it!”
The man shrieked and jumped on Jack, causing them both to tumble down the granite steps. Jack braced himself for a gunshot from the attacker or even a barrage of firepower from the FBI. Rather than pummeling Jack or trying to hurt him, however, the man was clutching him out of sheer terror. Andie’s voice was in Jack’s ear, but she was drowned out by his attacker’s panicky screams and a chorus of commands from undercover agents. One agent finally managed to pry Jack away from the wrestling match. It took three or four agents to bring the man under control.
“Don’t move!” they told him.
“I didn’t do nothing!” the man shouted back, and he started rattling off something in Spanish.
Another agent helped Jack to the bench, and it took him another moment to realize that it was Andie. She’d rushed over from the hidden command center on the mall.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Yeah, fine.”
“You did great.”
“If you say so.”
Jack watched the team of agents lift the man to his feet. He was wearing an old navy peacoat, tattered blue jeans, and tennis shoes that didn’t match. His hair was bundled up in a lumpy, matted mess beneath a knit cap. It was hard to tell when he’d last shaved and bathed, but it wasn’t in the last week or probably even in the last month. His hands were cuffed behind his back, and he was no longer fighting back, but he wouldn’t shut up.
“Muggles! Harry, I’m surrounded by muggles!”
He was talking to Harry Potter, Jack realized, not Harry Swyteck. The rant continued as the FBI took him away.
Jack looked at Andie, and she back at him. For a moment, it seemed like a standoff to see who would speak first. Finally, she broke the silence.
“Strange world out there, isn’t it?”
“Stranger than it appears, muggle.”
“What do you mean?”
Jack glanced toward the base of the stairs, where a pair of agents was struggling to stuff their suspect into the back of an FBI sedan.
“That accent,” said Jack. “He’s obviously Hispanic. The guy who spoke to me on the telephone had some kind of accent, but it was totally different.”
“You’re saying they’re different people?”
Jack took another look. One of the agents was cursing and wiping his hands on the grass. The guy had apparently soiled his pants to make the job of law enforcement that much more unpleasant.
“I’d bet my life on it,” said Jack.
A crime-scene photographer approached. A team of specialists had already cordoned off the entrance to the museum with police tape and was collecting evidence.
“Agent Henning,” the photographer said. “Thought you might want to see this.”
“What is it?” said Andie.
“We bagged and tagged the original evidence. This is a photo of what was inside the envelope he was carrying.”
Jack didn’t ask for permission to see it. He peered over Andie’s shoulder and checked out the image on the digital camera’s LCD display.
It was a photograph of a handwritten message.
Before Jack could say anything, Andie turned and ran down the steps. Jack followed. They caught up with the sedan just before it pulled away. She flung open the door.
“Who gave you this?”
The man’s eyes were like saucers. “That’s what I been trying to tell you! Some old man paid me fifty bucks, told me to walk up to the guy at the top of the steps and say, ‘This is for you.’”
“What did he look like?”
