Frame 232 (24 page)

“THE CIA LIBRARY
opened its doors more than a half century ago,” Hammond said as their taxi sped through downtown Washington, “and yet most people don’t even know it exists. It’s actually three libraries in one because there are three separate collections
 
—circulating, reference, and historical. There are more than 1,500 magazines, 100,000 books, and millions of individual documents.”

“And anyone can just walk in off the street? That can’t be right.”

“Some items are available to the public, but most aren’t. Even people with high clearance need special permission to access certain things. And it’s not like a traditional library, where you can take something off the premises and return it later. You go, you see what you need to see, and you leave.”

“Security is pretty tight, then, I’m guessing.”

“Skintight.”

“So how do we get in there?”

“I’m still working on that,” he said, smiling. She smiled back for reasons of her own.

He had wept for a long time. When the tears dried up,
he had said, “Okay, we need to get some sleep, both of us. We’ve got a lot to do today.”

She’d nodded and left him there, swallowing all the questions she wanted to ask. The last image she caught before entering her own room was of him, still fully dressed, climbing into bed and pulling the sheets over his head.

She slept for only a few hours, but her exhaustion had been such that she awoke feeling fully refreshed. She went back to the partition door and could hear him moving about busily on the other side. When she knocked, she was surprised to hear an enthusiastic voice inviting her in. He had showered and put on new clothes and was in the last stages of packing. He had also contacted Noah to arrange a flight to Washington for them. “As soon as you’re ready,” he’d said, “we’ll apply our makeup and disappear into our new identities.”

He seemed more energized than ever, and she thought his earlier catharsis must be the reason for it. She knew such purges served to wash emotional contaminants from the system, allowing the individual to think more clearly and feel with heightened sensitivity. The effect was always temporary, but she was still happy to see him unburdened for a while.

Once they were in their disguises
 
—she continued to be amazed at how effective these were
 
—they left through the hotel’s rear door and got into a waiting taxi that Hammond had called ahead for. At the airport they went into the restrooms to remove their makeup so their faces would match their IDs.

Sitting on the plane, Sheila began to feel uneasy about how smoothly their little operation was going. She was convinced they would be arrested the moment they arrived in D.C. They got off the plane along with everyone else and
began down a crowded corridor. Then an unsmiling, thick-necked policeman stepped in front of them and held a hand up. Her heart seized like an old engine before she realized the officer was simply pointing out that the magazine she had bought in the Dallas airport had just fallen out of her bag. They went into the public restrooms again and reapplied their false faces. Then they were in another cab, heading toward the heart of the nation’s capital.

The driver slowed to a halt in front of McCormick & Schmick’s on F Street as instructed. Hammond got out and paid the driver, then slung his knapsack over his shoulder and began walking. One block over, he stopped at the corner and nodded to a building about a hundred feet farther on. “There it is.”

It was as plain and unassuming as any urban location could possibly be
 
—six narrow stories of white sandstone with the blinds drawn in every window and no clues on the facade as to the occupants or their purpose. To the left was a dry-cleaning and tailoring shop; to the right a driveway that appeared to have been recently repaved.

“Looks inviting,” Sheila said.

“Doesn’t it?”

“Any ideas yet on how we get in there?”

“Possibly.”

He started forward again, his eyes moving back and forth as he absorbed everything around him. Motivated by the desire to be helpful, Sheila began doing the same. She had no idea, however, what she was supposed to be looking for.

When they reached the paired glass doors at the front, Hammond turned abruptly and went inside.

“Jason!”

“Relax,” he whispered.

They entered a small foyer, then went through a second set of doors. Just beyond them was a circular reception desk commanded by a middle-aged woman wearing a uniform of indistinct patronage.

“Good morning; may I help you?” she asked. Sheila was surprised by her congeniality. She could’ve been a greeter at a department store.

“We have an appointment,” Hammond said. He checked his watch, then added, “At eleven o’clock.”

“An appointment? I don’t understand.”

Hammond took out a pocket-size notepad with spiral binding along the top. Flipping up the cover, he pretended to read the first page. Sheila saw over his shoulder that it was blank.

“With a Mr. Keller. Brett Keller.”

The receptionist, now clearly perplexed, shook her head. “There’s no one here by that name.”

“There’s no Brett Keller? Physical trainer?”

“Oh, you must be thinking of the gym. The Iron Pit.”

“That’s correct. This isn’t it?”

The guard laughed. “No, it’s a few more doors farther down.” She lifted herself an inch out of her chair and gestured with a ballpoint pen. “That way.”

“Oh, jeez. I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right.”

Hammond turned away with a wave. “Thanks very much. Have a nice day.”

“You too.”

As soon as they were back outside, he went left and then left again
 
—down the freshly paved driveway that lay between the library and what appeared to be a very busy Starbucks.

“What was that all about?”

“Did you see the registry book?”

“You mean the binder on her desk?”

“Yeah. Everyone has to sign in. That means they’ve got to show some form of ID.”

“So? You’ve got a few falsies, don’t you?”

“This is the CIA. How long do you think it’ll take before they figure it out?”

“About two seconds?”

“Yeah.”

“So what now?”

“I don’t know. Let’s see. . . .”

They crossed into the library’s rear parking lot. It was only half-filled with vehicles and surrounded on three sides by scraggly, stunted trees. A Dumpster stood at the far end with one rubber flap up and the other hanging down.

“Looking for the back door?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You don’t think they’ve already considered that?”

“I’m sure they have, but there’s always . . . Ah, there it is.”

The door stood atop a short run of concrete steps. It was battleship gray with a small caged light above it and
 
—most importantly
 
—no knob, bar, handle, or any other mechanism that allowed access from the outside. A few feet away, tucked in a corner of the aluminum handrails, was a long-necked cigarette receptacle.

“A fire door,” Hammond said. “I knew there’d be one. It’s the law, after all.”

“Terrific, so how do we
 
—?”

It opened as if on cue, and a young black man in a tie and short-sleeved shirt came hustling down the steps. He nodded as he breezed past them, then climbed into a Honda compact and sped away.

“Did you see his ID?”

“Yeah.”

“It was bouncing and flipping off his chest. There was a photo and text on one side, but the other side was blank.”

“So?”

Hammond smiled. “So let’s go get a pack of smokes.”

“Excuse me?”

They went to a convenience store Hammond had noticed when they first got out of the cab. When he announced that he wanted a pack of cigarettes, the girl behind the counter
 
—barely old enough to smoke herself
 
—asked which brand he wanted. This stifled him, and he stared at the myriad selection with his mouth half-open. Sheila snorted; evidently she found this amusing.

“You don’t know which brand you like?” the girl asked with more than a trifle of derision. She was resplendent in a red apron with large pockets along the bottom and a tiny name tag that read
Billi Jo
.

Without missing a beat, Hammond said conversationally, “I was just released on parole, and I don’t see the one I used to get when I was in the joint.” The girl’s face drained of all color, and Hammond could feel Sheila struggling to keep from laughing. He settled on a pack of Marlboros because that was the only brand he’d heard of. After he paid and got his change, Sheila grabbed a folder of matches from a plastic bowl by the register.

“Now what?” she asked when they were back on the street.

“You’ll see.”

He went into a Staples farther down and followed the aisle signs to the construction paper. He bought a ream that
was pale green
 
—the same base color as the library employee’s ID
 
—and a pair of scissors. He took out one sheet and cut two rectangles that were roughly the size of baseball cards. Then he scribbled a decent facsimile of the president’s signature on each.

“What’s that for?”

“Motivation.”

“Huh?”

They went to the store’s copy center. The lord of this particular fiefdom was a young man, roughly the same age as Billi Jo, who appeared to possess no greater interest in his duties.

“Excuse me; you do laminating here, don’t you?”

The kid seemed put out by the question, as if the very idea of having to perform this function was almost unbearable. “Yeah.”

Hammond produced the two cards from his shirt pocket and fanned them between his thumb and forefinger.

“My wife and I saw the president during a White House tour yesterday afternoon, and he signed these for us.”

The attendant’s manner changed immediately. “Whoa, cool!”

“Cool indeed. I would like to have them laminated to preserve them for posterity, please.”

“Sure!”

The attendant took the holy relics in hand with exquisite reverence. After they were sealed in the laminate, he removed the excess around the edges with a swing-arm paper trimmer, taking great pains to assure that each border was cut equidistantly. He set the finished products in a flat paper bag, then returned them to Hammond along with an in-store receipt and instructions to pay at one of the front registers. Before
doing so, Hammond also grabbed a pair of lanyards from aisle 6 and a manual hole-puncher from aisle 8.

As they walked briskly down the library driveway again, Sheila said, “You had that poor kid thinking he was touching the Shroud of Turin.”

“Good thing he didn’t know the president has been in the Pacific Northwest all week.”

She shook her head and took the fake ID out of her pocket. “So I’m assuming we’ll be wearing these with the blank side facing out? Is that the idea?”

“You will, but I’m putting mine here.” He slipped the lanyard over his head and tucked the laminated card into his shirt pocket so that only a narrow strip of green was visible along the top. “I just hope some gung ho type doesn’t insist on seeing the whole thing.”