Curious Minds (27 page)

Emerson glanced at Riley, who nodded. “That would be Bertie,” she said.

“How many coins?” Emerson asked.

Vernon took a second to count. “Ten.”

“Thanks, Vern,” Emerson said. “Give Willie a hug for me.”

“So Günter was telling the truth about the coins,” Emerson said. “Let's hope his wife didn't find the mother lode and cash it in.”

I
rene Grunwald got up early every morning to work out. And by “work out” she meant have a pitcher of sangria while lying in a lounge chair in her backyard and watching the sun rise over the river.

She hardly thought about Günter at all nowadays. Oh, sometimes she woke in the middle of the night and was glad for the extra space in bed. But other than that, he had disappeared from her world like the memory of an annoying summer song. One minute it had been going through her head endlessly, the next minute she couldn't even recall it.

Of course, she knew he'd given her all she had, and she was grateful for that, after a fashion. The house here on the Potomac. The house up on Cape Cod. The stocks and bonds.

She spread a towel on the lounge chair on the patio and looked out at the river as the sky turned the deep blue that meant the sun was coming up. She'd miss this place when she moved. But that wouldn't be for a while. She would hold out for the best offer on the house. And then she'd be moving to Paris or London, where Washington, D.C., would be a distant, hazy memory.

The sky lightened and she realized her view had changed. The boat was missing. Günter's boat should be at the dock. The boat had been stolen. Damn. Günter had paid more attention to that boat than he had paid to her. Oh, well, it was insured, she thought. Now she didn't have to go through the annoyance of selling it. She could simply collect the insurance.

R
iley, Emerson, and Vernon cruised up the Potomac, past Reagan National Airport on the left, and got ready to branch off to the Anacostia River, heading to the District Yacht Club. Vernon was down belowdecks. Emerson was at the wheel, the wind blowing his shaggy hair around his face.

Riley tried to keep her red curls out of her eyes, but the breeze kept whipping them back around. “I still think we shouldn't have stolen this boat,” she said.

“We aren't stealing it. We're retrieving it for Günter.”

“Yes, but we retrieved it in the dark without telling Mrs. Günter.”

“It was simpler.”

Riley was sure that was true.

“I'm not much of a sailor but I'm surprised it can float, considering the weight it's carrying,” Riley said.

“It's riding low,” Emerson said. “I noticed it when we went to Günter's house that first time. The boat sat far too low in the water for a craft of this size. It bothered me, but I didn't make too much of it. Until Günter told the story of stealing the coins and hiding them.”

“You guessed they were in the boat even before he told us?”

“When he first talked about the coins he said they were underwater. It was a very good clue. He has buckets and buckets and buckets of gold in the ballast. Thirty thousand one-ounce coins. Almost a ton of gold. Hidden under the murky water.”

B
ertie Grunwald gazed out at the view of the Capitol. Most people looked at the blinding white dome and felt a rush of patriotism. Bertie saw it and thought only of obstruction and procrastination. Oh, the things he could have accomplished in the years he was running the Fed, if it weren't for this damned democracy.

He probably wouldn't live to see things put right. Of course he'd been thinking he was at death's door for years now. He just refused to walk across its threshold. Death would come soon enough, and when it did he would be blessed to know that his sons would carry on for him.

Hans was the strong one. Manny was the clever one. He'd figure out all the legal niceties to make the coup seem constitutionally sound. Werner, he was the hungry one. Werner was ruthless enough to make things happen.

Bertie thought of Günter for a second, involuntarily. Then he pushed the thought away. Günter had been a constant disappointment from his childhood on, and in the end he had relinquished his right to be a Grunwald. Günter was no longer his son. Especially since he was most likely dead. The final report wasn't back from the coroner's office, but Bertie felt confident of the results. There were several people in the van, but they were burned beyond recognition. Ashes and a couple molars. Rollo and his guards were also missing. Bertie assumed something went wrong and they went over the cliff with their prisoners. Not a large loss. Rollo was a screwup. Good riddance.

Bertie was sitting in his wheelchair on the eighteenth floor of the Blane-Grunwald building on Constitution Avenue. The floor above the seventeenth floor. The floor above everything and everybody, he thought. As it should be.

He turned his chair toward the television monitor on the wall. C-SPAN was covering the Red Mass, the Catholic ceremony blessing the Supreme Court and its newest member-to-be, Manfred Grunwald. Tomorrow was the first Monday in October, when the Supreme Court convened its new session. Then the new order would begin.

The dignitaries were arriving in their black limousines at the front steps of the Cathedral of Saint Matthew the Apostle on Rhode Island Avenue. The redbrick building wasn't as big as Saint John the Divine in New York or Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles, but it made up in style what it lacked in size. From its Romanesque Revival architecture to its Byzantine mosaics, it looked like an Eastern Orthodox church transplanted from Istanbul to Washington.

Rhode Island Avenue was entirely blocked off by Secret Service agents who stood in strategic locations, their black suits bulging with unidentified weaponry. News stations were outside the church, focused on the arriving celebrities, trying desperately to find an unpredictable story in the most preplanned ceremony of the calendar year.

One by one the movers and shakers of America made their way out of limos and up the steps into the church. The Supreme Court justices. The cabinet officials. Members of the diplomatic corps. Prominent lobbyists. Leaders of the Senate and the House. The vice president. And three Grunwalds.

The doors to the cathedral were closed and C-SPAN cut inside. For the first time, the ceremony itself was going to be broadcast to the entire world. Or as much of the world as watched C-SPAN.

Inside Saint Matthew's, the Byzantine motif was even more pronounced. Red marble arches framed the mahogany pews, separating the transepts from the central nave. Statues lined the aisle in front of the apse like monumental guardians. On the floor in front of the altar, set in a circle of black marble, were the words

HERE RESTED THE REMAINS OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY AT THE REQUEIM MASS, NOVEMBER 25, 1963, BEFORE THEIR REMOVAL TO ARLINGTON, WHERE THEY LIE IN AN EXPECTATION OF HEAVENLY RESURRECTION.

Bertie had been teaching at Harvard when the assassination occurred and was as shocked by it as everyone else. When he moved into the circles of power in the seventies, he occasionally made an effort to find out what had happened and who had been behind it. It was a source of constant disappointment to him that he had never found any concrete signs of a conspiracy.

The archbishop of Washington began his march down the aisle wearing the startling blood-red vestments that symbolized the tongues of fire that the Holy Spirit gave to the apostles during Pentecost. He followed a priest in blindingly white robes carrying a golden cross, and another very tall one swinging a censer filled with smoking incense. A flock of cardinals in scarlet frocks with tall white miters on their heads came trailing behind him. The whole effect reminded Bertie of the circuses of his youth. He half-expected a lion tamer to come in next, followed by acrobats and tumblers and a tiny car full of clowns.

The solemn procession passed under the red and gold dome, and sunlight streamed down. This was old-school majesty at its finest, Bertie thought. He was an atheist, but he approved of the sentiment and pageantry. Blind the people with ceremony, circuses, and red robes. Keep them happy and distracted. Power brokers like him could do whatever they wanted.

The choir sang and the organ played and the ceremony began. There was much standing and sitting and kneeling by the congregation, and a reading from the Acts of the Apostles by a junior priest. Bertie had begun to nod off before the actual homily began. He took a sip of green tea to try to wake up. God, he hated green tea.

Bertie stared at the flat-screen. He could see his sons sitting in the front of the church. Like the three wise monkeys. Except they could see, hear, and speak all manner of evil, Bertie thought with a laugh that shook his whole body and brought up some phlegm.

W
erner shifted uncomfortably in the hard wooden pew. He couldn't wait to hear the bishop say “Go in peace” so he could get out of there and go back to Blane-Grunwald. He glanced next to him where Hans sat ramrod straight, with no expression on his stony face, chest thrust forward to show off all his medals, as if he were in combat and shouldn't show fear.

Manny, on the other hand, looked like he was enjoying the hell out the show. Since he was joining the Supreme Court tomorrow, Manny considered himself the guest of honor, as if this whole ceremony was being put on solely for his amusement.

Archbishop Aberrai stepped up to the pulpit, and Werner sighed as Aberrai began to speak in his soothing Ethiopian accent. Keep your eyes open and look awake, Werner thought. The old man was watching C-SPAN and there'd be hell to pay if he caught one of his sons nodding off.

“I have thought long and hard about the words of the reading for today,” Aberrai said. “In this city, we all seem to speak in different languages, don't we? It's a bit like the Tower of Babel, isn't it?”

Blah, blah, blah, Werner thought. What the hell was the idiot talking about? He looked around. If this was his property he'd put in a cash bar. Maybe a Starbucks. God, he could really use a Starbucks.

“Why can't we speak so that each of us hears the other in his own native tongue?” Aberrai said. “Why can't we—”

The lights went out.

The church wasn't plunged into darkness, exactly. There were stained glass windows high up on the walls letting in colored light, and glowing beams streamed down from the opening in the dome. Werner supposed the best way to describe what happened was that the church was plunged into dimness.

R
iley looked down into the church from high up in the dome. She could see the nave of the cathedral and watched as the congregation reacted to the sudden loss of illumination with quiet disinterest.

“Well,” Archbishop Aberrai said. “I guess this is a sign from above.”

The congregation laughed and the archbishop continued. It was an easy crowd, Riley thought. They were going to love her little slide show. She touched an icon on her iPad, and images were projected from remote cameras scattered around the church. The images were ghostly but clear. Images of gold. A freaking maze of the stuff. The gold hoard in Area 51.

The tall priest holding the censer of incense stepped forward. “You're looking at images of the world's gold,” he shouted. “Gold that's been stolen from the Federal Reserve vault and recast and repositioned in Nevada.”

Werner leapt to his feet. “That man is an impostor. He's not a priest. That's Emerson Knight! He's a wanted man! And he's insane. Security!”

“Let him finish,” the archbishop said. “I rather like the slide show.”

“Thank you, Alex,” Emerson said to the archbishop. “The gold is at Nellis Air Force Base. It's being stored in tunnels and caverns under what is commonly called Area 51.”

Hans signaled his aide to stop Emerson and cut off the C-SPAN feed. Manny popped a Rolaid. Werner looked to see where the nearest exit was located.

“Werner Grunwald, Hans Grunwald, Manfred Grunwald. He who covers his sins will not prosper,” Emerson said, dodging a Secret Service agent and bolting for a side altar lined with a series of confessional booths.

Emerson yanked open the door to the first confessional. Gold coins spilled from the tiny room, rolling and clattering and shimmering and spinning on their edges before rattling to rest on the tile floor.