Finding North (20 page)

“
That guy looks like he
could be your twin,” Detective Williams said in Alex’s
ear.

Alex nodded. They watched
Max move out to the sidewalk. He peered at the hive of activity
caused by the Fey Team stirring the NYPD-FBI nest. Visibly alarmed,
he turned in place and came back down the alley. Raz, who had been
standing at the street end of the alley, followed Max toward Alex.
Max was ten feet from Alex when he nodded. Alex pulled an
electronic jamming device from her pocket and turned it
on.

With Max as his guard, Raz
ran to the side door. Alex knelt down to say hello to Master
Sergeant Bill Bailey.

“
What is this?” Detective
Williams asked.

Bill gave a warning
growl.

“
Detective Williams?” Alex
smiled. “This is my brother, Max, and our friend, Master Sergeant
Bill Bailey.”

“
You mean you know them?”
Detective Williams asked.

“
She’s my little sister,”
Max said.

“
He’s my big brother,”
Alex said. “And the Master Sergeant is our special
friend.”

Raz looked at Alex and Max
and made a show of rolling his eyes. Detective Williams
chuckled.

“
Ready?” Raz
asked.

Raz took out his key and
moved to the door.

“
Hey, how’d you
get . . .?” Detective Williams started.

“
Listen,” Alex said. “You
can come with us, but you have to go along. If you can’t do that,
you’re welcome to join most of your department on the street in
front.”

Alex whistled. Vince,
Leena, Trece, and Royce jogged down the alley toward them.
Detective Williams raised her hands as if to say she’d given up.
When Trece got to her, he took her thumbprint on his wireless
device. Trece’s hand moved like lightning, and he snatched a piece
of her hair and slid it into the device.

“
Hey!” Detective Williams
put her hand on her head. “Don’t you need a warrant for
that?”

“
I don’t,” Trece
said.

Raz raised his eyebrows in
question, and Trece nodded. Raz turned the key in the lock. To
their surprise, the door opened to a long stairway. Sergeant Pete
Beetle, Master Sergeant Bill Bailey’s handler, ran down the alley
to the door.

“
What the hell?” Detective
Williams asked. “I went through this door not three hours ago.
There was no stairwell then!”

She closed the door to
look at it again.

“
It had three or four wood
stairs up to the kitchen,” Detective Williams said.

“
Different key,” Alex
said.

Raz opened the door again.
Alex nodded to Pete, and he took Bill from Max. The soldier and his
dog went into the building. They waited almost five minutes before
Pete gave the all-clear over the team’s earbud communicators. On
Pete’s signal, Trece and Royce went down the long stairwell.
Margaret and MJ ran down the alley and joined them at the door. A
few minutes later, Trece and Royce gave the all-clear over their
earbud communicators. Vince and Leena moved down the stairwell.
Troy and Sergeant Dusty joined them in the alley.

“
You will stay with one of
my team,” Alex said to Detective Williams. “Do not go off on your
own. Raz and Max are with me. Sergeant Dusty?”

She nodded to Detective
Williams.

“
Yes, sir,” Sergeant Dusty
said.

“
Do not lose him,” Alex
said to Detective Williams. “We don’t have any idea what we’re
getting into here.”

White Boy and Colin
brought up the rear to guard the door, leaving Matthew and Joseph
to argue with the NYPD and the FBI. Alex nodded to Troy, and he
started down the stairwell. She followed Troy. Max followed Alex.
Raz waited a moment before coming after them.

“
How’s Helen?” Alex asked
as they headed down the stairwell.

“
Good,” Troy said. “But
she won’t do it.”

“
That’s okay,” Alex
said.

She glanced behind her to
Raz.

“
We assumed she wouldn’t,”
Raz said. “Your mother said she’d try again.”

Troy glanced back at Alex
and Raz.

“
Thanks,” Troy said, as
his feet hit the floor.

He put his hand up to slow
Alex and Raz down. Alex stood next to Troy on the floor. Raz
stopped on the stairwell. They were standing in a dimly lit,
cement-lined hallway or tunnel. Ahead, they could hear Trece,
Royce, Pete, and Bill signal each other as they worked.

“
I do love these
underground cement hallways to nowhere.” Raz put his hand on the
small of Alex’s back.

“
Brings back fond
memories, doesn’t it?” Alex smiled.

“
No,” Raz said.

Max looked at Raz and
laughed.

“
Shall we?” Troy
asked.

She nodded. Troy started
down the hallway. Alex followed close behind. Raz waited a moment
to signal MJ and Margaret before following them.

The hallway went the
length of the building before making a sharp turn right. Royce
waited for them at the door.

“
Sir,” Royce said. “It’s
oddly cluttered. We’d prefer it if you stayed here until we finish
our sweep.”

“
Oddly cluttered?” Alex
asked.

“
Bill indicates that the
clutter may hide items of interest,” Royce said. “It doesn’t look
like anyone has been here in a while. I believe Raz was correct
when he said that Dex was overwhelmed by all of this.”

“
All of this?” Alex
asked.

“
A hundred or more years
of papers, notebooks, journals . . .” Royce gestured
to his left. “There’s a room filled with art and old maps. We’re
going to have to check this stuff against the Art Loss
Registry.”

“
Why?” Alex
asked.

“
There’s a room full of
paintings, big and small, stacked on their sides,” Royce shrugged.
“It had to come from somewhere.”

“
Sounds like someone’s
been collecting for a long time,” Alex said.

“
About that,” Royce said.
“You should go straight and then into the room on your left in the
corner. There’s a timeline.”

Alex nodded. She motioned
to Troy, and he started forward. They entered a large open room
with smaller rooms along the edges. The rooms were built out of
solid cement, and the lighting was dim. They saw the round bright
lights of Pete and Bill’s headlamps as they worked the opposite end
of the large room. Behind them, they heard Royce guiding Margaret
and MJ to where they were needed most. They reached the end and
went into the room in the corner.

Compared to the larger
room, this room was stiflingly small and dark. Raz found a light
switch. An overhead fluorescent light blinked before washing the
room with bright white light. They blinked at the light.

“
Wow,” Raz said as he
sucked in a breath. Alex looked at him, and he pointed to the
walls.

Someone had written dates
in the concrete that made up the walls. The timeline started around
6000 BC, with plenty of space for the present and future. Max went
to the beginning.

“
Leaving Africa,” Max
shook his head. “It starts with leaving Africa, and there’s still
space to fill in pre-6000 BC. That’s pretty thorough.”

Alex shook her
head.

“
Begin at the beginning,”
Alex and Max quoted their father in unison.

Slashes in the concrete
marked events, calamities, and wars on every continent. As if to
say “pay attention to these,” some wars had lines underneath them.
World Wars I and II were marked and underlined. The concrete
markings stopped at the end of the 1950s. The documentation was
continued on two walls of blackboards.

“
This place was built in
the 1960s?” Troy asked.

“
I thought it was later,”
Raz said. “But who knows? This could have been here before they
built the house.”

Troy nodded.

A careful hand had
documented a timeline of every time the world was “reset,”
knowledge was lost, and humans retreated once again into the dim
light of primal survival. Just trying to take in the grim details,
Alex followed Max from event to event. Max pointed to a date, and
she nodded.

“
It’s hard to tell if this
is madness . . .” Max said.

“
Or brilliance,” Alex
finished his statement.

“
It’s both,” Troy
said.

“
Yes,” Raz
said.

“
Alex?” Troy
asked.

Alex turned to look at
him. He pointed to a mark on the blackboard signifying the murder
of the Fey Special Forces Team. She swallowed hard.

“
Go ahead,” Max said.
“I’ll stay here.”

Alex went to the end of
the timeline.

“
That’s next year,” Alex
said under her breath. Her fingers hovered over the chalk
mark.

“
Dex’s handwriting,” Raz
nodded. “9-11 is over here.”

Raz pointed to a mark in
the chalk.

“
Seems to be part of the
trigger for . . .” Troy put his hands on his hips
and looked around the room. After a moment, he added, “Something is
coming.”

“
Something catastrophic,”
Raz said.

“
According to Dex.” Max
glanced at the blackboard timeline before turning back to the wall
in front of him. “Dex also thought a lot of things
happened.”

At that moment, Alex
happened to look up. Above them, etched into the concrete, was the
compass rose with the eye in the middle center. She gawked at the
symbol.

“
Sir?” Vince asked from
the doorway. “You need to see this.”

Alex looked at the symbol
one last time before glancing at Raz. He had followed her lead and
was looking up. Feeling her look, he glanced at her. She gave him a
soft smile and followed Vince from the room. Max came out of the
room a moment later.

“
Did you
see . . .?” Max started and pointed up.

Alex nodded. They followed
Vince to a wall in the large main room. The entire wall was covered
with photographs stuck into thick corkboard tiles. Leena stood at
the end of the board.

“
Sir?” Leena asked. “I
believe it’s some kind of a timeline. Starting here.”

Alex went to where Leena
was standing. Her eyes flitted from photo to photo. There was a
photo of King Leopold, who murdered millions of people in his quest
for wealth in the Congo. There was a picture of a young, and naked,
Mao Zedong in bed, which looked like it had been taken by a friend
or lover.

“
Here,” Vince
said.

He pointed to a photo of
General George Custer’s crumpled body face down on the Montana
plain.

“
He looks so young,” Max
said.

“
Thirty-six,” Alex
said.

“
Weird how they look like
they were taken by someone who was there,” Raz said.

He’d followed them to the
wall. He glanced at Alex and went to a corkboard covered in photos
on their right.

“
I thought the same
thing,” Leena said. “They’re like creepy family photos.”

“
Yeah, it’s almost as if
the photographer was in bed with Mao or drinking with Himmler,”
Alex said, and pointed to the photos.

“
Or at the Battle of the
Little Big Horn,” Max said. “Who could have taken this
photo?”

“
Good question,” Raz
said.

“
You wanted us to see a
photo of Custer?” Shrugging, she looked at Vince.

“
Next to Custer,” Vince
said. He pointed. “We were instructed not to touch the
wall.”

Alex and Max moved in to
take a closer look. Next to the photo of Custer, partially covered
by a photo of Pol Pot urinating, was the
Stars and Stripes
article about Alex
and Max decoding the CIA’s Kryptos statue. Alex reached out to
touch the yellowed paper.

“
Sir,” Leena said. “We’ve
been asked not to touch.”

Alex nodded.

“
You also need
to . . .” Vince pointed to the far right corner of
the board.

“
That’s . . .” Alex started.

“
The photo of Josef
Yakovlev, with Buffy Joiner and the Boy Scout,” Vince
said.

“
The one Raz took from
Buffy’s house,” Alex said.

Alex shuddered.

“
Gives me chills,” Alex
said.

“
Alex?” Raz asked. He
waved for her to come to the partial wall perpendicular to the
Custer wall.

“
Seems to be some kind of
investigation,” Vince said.

“
It’s a
murder-investigation board,” Raz said.

“
Whose?” Alex
asked.

“
Dex’s,” Raz said. “He was
trying to figure out who was trying to kill him and why. Look. Each
event is separated along the timeline and by the number of people
involved.”