The Nostradamus File (2 page)

A twelve foot chain link fence
all around the property served to keep animals and the curious away. The real security was automated and invisible. The main building looked like a private home. It was vaguely colonial in style, with a columned front porch, white siding and a sloping green shingle roof. False wooden shutters painted green accented the windows.

A wide, paved driveway ran from the entry gate and guard station to the house. Across from the house was a low concrete building with overhead doors.
It was empty, a space waiting for a purpose. The drive ended in a cement helipad marked with a wide, yellow circle. Washington and the White House were minutes away by helicopter.

During the Cold War the property had
been a Nike missile site, with three 5000 square foot underground magazines of hardened concrete and steel. Two of the magazines had been covered over and landscaped, the only clue to their existence a series of low ventilation pipes rising from the garden and lawn. The house sat over the third.

The previous owner had converted the magazine directly below the house into an emergency second home. It came with a kitchen, bath, bedrooms, swimming pool and independent power supply. The living area
served as an operations center. A second magazine housed the Project's Cray computers and communication gear. The third contained a workout room, an armory, and a pistol range. Access to the lower levels was from inside the house, down a spiral staircase. A tool shed in the flower garden outside concealed an emergency exit from below.

Selena and Nick had come straight from the airport. Selena was behind the wheel of her burgundy-colored Mercedes. Nick eyed the house as they drove in.
After the old headquarters had been destroyed, Harker had found a more secure location.

"I'm still not used to this," he said. "When Harker said we needed to go underground, I didn't think she meant it literally."

"You have to admit it's great camouflage. Lamont really likes the pool. So do I." Lamont Cameron was part of the team, recruited after he'd left the Navy Seals.

She parked in front of the house. They went up the steps onto the porch. A camera over the entrance tracked them. There was a
biometric reader and facial recognition scanner by the door. Selena placed her thumb against the reader and leaned in to the scanner. The door opened with an oiled whisper of retracting bolts.

Director Elizabeth Harker's new office was in the back, on the ground floor. Elizabeth was at her desk, facing out through a wall of French windows onto a wide flower garden. The windows looked like regular windows, but even a fifty caliber round would have trouble getting through them. Elizabeth had decided the risk was worth it. In the old building, she'd been without a window for years.

Harker was a small woman. She was dressed in her usual outfit of black suit and crisp white blouse. She had milk white skin and emerald earrings that picked up the color of her eyes. Her hair was deep black with streaks of gray and white. There was a dimpled scar above her left eye, where an assassin's bullet had failed to kill her.

Nick thought she was the most competent woman he'd ever known. Her looks and small size deceived
people who didn't know her into thinking she could be manipulated. It didn't take long for them to find out they were mistaken. Elizabeth Harker was nobody's pawn.

A large, flat screen monitor took up
most of one wall in the office. A leather couch and three chairs were arranged near the desk. On Harker's desktop were the Nostradamus file, a pen and pad, and a picture of her father in a silver frame. The picture had replaced a photograph of the Twin Towers on 911, lost with everything else on the day the old headquarters was destroyed.

Elizabeth drew strength from the picture of her father. He'd had a practical way of getting to the heart of any problem with a quote or a quiet conversation. The Judge had died years before, but she still thought of his advice at times when she needed to make a critical decision.

She looked up as Nick and Selena came in. "The French are unhappy," she said. Harker never wasted words

They sat down on the couch.

"Hello to you too," Nick said. "What's their problem?"

"You mean aside from the fact that you put two of their nationals in a hospital and disappeared?"

"I thought it was best if we got out of the country."

"Fortunately for you, the two who attacked you were on Interpol's wanted list. What got the French upset was finding out Bertrand sent a package to your hotel the afternoon he was killed. They want to know what it was."

Elizabeth picked up her new pen. Her silver pen had been lost with everything else in the old office. She'd replaced it with a Mont Blanc, black with the trademark snowcap on the end. She began tapping it on the hard wooden surface of the desk.

"It seems that Selena's friend had some questionable contacts."

"What kind of contacts?" Selena asked.

"There's an underground black market trade in Europe for rare books. Interpol was keeping an eye on Bertrand."

"I don't believe Jean-Paul was dealing in the black market," Selena said. "He was an honest man. His books had provenance. All his contacts were legitimate."

"Not all of them.
The police looked through his phone records. He got a call from someone connected to the Union Corse the morning of the day he was killed."

"What's the Union Corse?" Nick asked.

"The French Mafia. They're based in Corsica and Marseille. Big in the narcotics trade, art theft, prostitution, money laundering. The men who went after you were gangsters, members of the mob. It can't be a coincidence."

"You think the Union Corse killed Jean-Paul?" 

"Yes. I told the French I'd talk to you. I didn't tell them we had this." She tapped the Nostradamus file with her finger. "Have you figured out what Bertrand meant by what he wrote on the floor?"

Selena brushed a hair from her forehead with the back of her hand. "No. It makes no sense to me."

Harker pushed the file folder across the desk. "I want you to translate this. We might learn something."

"I can translate it, but I can't guarantee I'll understand it. Not with Nostradamus."

"Work with Stephanie. Use the computers to speed things up."

Stephanie Willits was Harker's deputy and the Project's resident computer guru. One of the old Nike magazines contained a bank of Crays with enough computing power to rival Langley.

Harker set her pen down and looked at Selena. "You handled that attack in Paris. Are you fit to go back in the field?"

Selena had been badly wounded the year before. A bullet had clipped her spine and almost killed her. For a while, it looked like she'd be in a wheelchair for life. She hadn't been in the field since then.

Selena took a breath. She'd known this day would come.

"I still have to be careful, but yes, I can go back."

"You're sure?"

"Yes."

Harker nodded. "Good. For now, just work on the translation."

"I'd like to take the file home with me. I can get most of it figured out before I need to work with Stephanie."

"All right. Nick, you stick close to Selena, in case someone decides to make another try at the manuscript. Consider yourself a high priced bodyguard."

He smirked at Selena and stroked an imaginary moustache. "I will guard your body," he said in a deep voice.

"Jerk," she said.

CHAPTER THREE

Marcel Sarti sat on the terrace of his hillside villa on the outskirts of Marseille, savoring a pastis and watching a yacht under full sail glide across the sparkling blue waters of the Gulf of Lion. The boss of
L' Union Corse
was in a good mood. It was a beautiful day, one of those days in the south of France when everything seems possible and new. The licorice taste of the drink formed pleasant heat on his tongue.

He watched preparations for his daughter's sixteenth birthday taking place on the green lawn below. A large tent
was up, the tables set, the caterers on the scene. The bar was ready. Marcel expected 200 guests. An invitation was more than an honor, it was an unspoken command. It was not wise to offend Marcel Sarti by refusing. Six of the mayors of the city's arondissments and several council members would be in attendance. The Chief of Police was expected. And of course the CEO of the Grand Port of Marseille would be there. Smooth operations at France's busiest port were essential to the flow of drugs that formed a cornerstone of Marcel Sarti's empire.

If there was one bothersome thought to spoil Sarti's day, it was his failure to secure the manuscript in Paris. Marcel didn't know who had hired him to get the book. The contract had come through an intermediary, an American he'd dealt with in the past.

The targets had turned out to be more than tourists, which complicated things. One of his contacts in the police had learned the woman was a former consultant with the American NSA and worked for one of the American intelligence services. So did the man she'd been with.

The last thing
Sarti needed was to piss off NSA or the CIA. Retrieving the book was more trouble than it was worth. He'd cancelled the contract and wired the money back to the Swiss account, less a reasonable compensation for the loss of his men. He wanted nothing more to do with it. The American had been insulting when Sarti informed him of his decision, something only a fool would do with Marcel.

He
finished his pastis and stood. After the party he would decide what needed to be done about the American. 

CHAPTER FOUR

Indian Island was a little over five hundred rugged acres of rock and trees, fifteen minutes by motor launch from the Maine coast. A deep cove on the leeward side formed a small, natural harbor. A long, wooden pier stretched out from the rocky shore into the water. Anchored in the cove was a white motor yacht shaped like a hunter's arrow.

T
he main house was a three story structure of Maine timber, built in 1851 with profits from the slave trade. A wide gallery ran around the second story. The roof was capped by a widow's walk. A manicured lawn sloped from the house to the dock, green and perfect. The lawn was bordered by beds of brilliant flowers and half a dozen trees that had been saplings when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.

The island provided a
secure setting for special events of America's ruling class. One was about to begin, the annual meeting of the Cask and Swords Society. The majority of the members would be present. They would bring their wives, their fiancées and their mistresses. There would be good food, conversations, good liquor. Important decisions would be made.

It was a perfect June morning. The caterers had almost finished setting up on the lawn
. A large tent sparkled white in the morning sun. Barbecues were already smoking. Inside the house, three men sat at a table in the library. Through the library windows they could see the yacht riding at ease in the cove.

The three men were meeting to discuss progress in their plan to trigger war in the Middle East.

Phillip Harrison III owned the island. He was a wiry man in his mid-sixties. He wore a soft, casual shirt open at the collar, pressed tan slacks and comfortable Clark loafers. His face was an old New England face, a face that lacked humor, the kind of face seen in 18th Century portraits of colonial clergymen and wealthy merchants, narrow and unsmiling. Harrison had gray hair and hazel eyes and hands with long, narrow fingers. His family had controlled a large portion of America's wealth since the early days of the Republic. He owned and managed the largest private investment bank in the country. No one opened an account with his bank for less than five million dollars. Harrison considered that a small account.

Harrison
often thought he would have been more at home in the 18th or 19th Century, when leaders of men were expected to apologize to no one except God for their actions. Harrison believed in God. He believed God had set him on earth to become rich and use his wealth to spread the true faith of an austere and judgmental Christianity. He believed God had given him a mission to wrest control of the Holy Land and the Middle East from Islam. It was the overriding motive in his life. It was why the three men were meeting, although they all had different reasons for wanting the same result.

The second man was Stephen Boyd. Boyd was a round-faced, round-bellied man
. His features showed a hint of dissolution. His lips were distended, almost purple in color, a sign of digestive problems that sometimes embarrassed him in company. Boyd's family had been a dominant force in oil since the start of the industry in Pennsylvania. He'd been recruited into CIA right out of the University. He was currently inactive except as a deep source of information. There was no public record that his relationship with Langley had ever existed. It was better that way.

Allen Croft
, the third man, owned the yacht at the end of the pier. Croft ran an international consortium of arms manufacturers. If there was a weapon in the world, one of the companies in his consortium had probably made it. He had the look of a predator, with black eyes that glittered under thick eyebrows. Women of a certain type found him attractive. For Croft, war in any part of the world was good for business. He was always looking to create new opportunities and a big, regional war was the best business opportunity of all. The one they were planning would provide handsome profits.