SAMPLECHAPTERS

Sample Chapters from

The Grail Conspiracies

Prologue

Southern England. June 6, 1944. Afternoon

“But we’re deceiving him, lying to him about his mission,” Webster said.
“If he can’t trust his own people, who can he trust?”

   “Hell, he’s just a soldier,” Barrington replied. “It’s not his goddam job
to know the score.” The three of them sat at a table, Barrington in the
center—it was his operation—Webster on one side, the Major on the
other.

   Barrington looked, some people said, like a shorter version of Gary
Cooper. But his eyes were strangely hooded. “Lizard-eyes,” they’d
called him in school, until he showed that it was dangerous to laugh at
him.

   His state’s Senator pulled some strings in the first months of the war,
and he got in at the start-up of the OSS, Office of Strategic Services,
referred to by some as Our Spooks and Spies.

   Barrington didn’t really fit the OSS mold—he wasn’t a New England
WASP with an Ivy League degree and a background on Wall Street. But
he was smart and ruthless, and spoke French.

   His parents had been born in France. When they came to the United
States in 1911, an immigration officer wrote their name, Bourton, as
Barrington, and it stuck. His mother thought Hadley sounded more
American than Henri, his father’s name.

   “I still don’t think—” Webster began, then cut himself off. He was 36,
round and balding, an associate professor of psychology at Yale on
loan to the OSS.

   “If you don’t like what we’re doing, blame goddam Hitler, not me,”
Barrington growled. “But right now, do your job. Tapscott is going to be
here in a minute. When he leaves this room, it’s essential that he
believes this mission is exactly what we say it is.”

   He leaned forward and peered down the table at Webster. “You are
with us on that, aren’t you, Professor?”

   Webster nodded. In Barrington’s mouth, “professor” was an insult.
There was no point in antagonizing him. Barrington had connections;
Webster was having a good war where he was, and had no desire to
get shipped out to some godforsaken atoll in the Pacific. Cross
Barrington, and that could happen.

   Besides, what was one more life in a war like this?

   Barrington looked at the Major. He’d lost an arm on a B-17 raid over
Hannover, and seemed to feel it was a miracle that he was still alive. He
would coordinate the air-drop, and was sitting in on the briefing as a
technical advisor. He nodded; he was used to following orders.

   Barrington pushed the button on the table. They heard the buzzer
sound, two rooms away.

   Wind rattled the windows, and the rain started up again. It was early
afternoon, and the troops had hit the beaches in Normandy at dawn. D-
Day was finally under way.

□

Paul Tapscott entered the room. He was a shade under six feet, lean,
with curly dark hair and a boyishly handsome, open face dominated by
dark, intelligent eyes beneath thick brows. He looked younger than his
25 years, unusual in a time when so many faces had been prematurely
aged by war and stress. He had spent nearly two years in a Catholic
seminary, preparing to be a Jesuit priest, before leaving to join the war
effort.

   It was OSS custom to wear the uniform of a U.S. Army officer with no
rank or other insignia. Tapscott had added the set of pilot’s wings he’d
earned before being grounded.

   “At ease, take a seat,” Barrington said, pointing to the wooden chair
in front of the table. His voice was husky from the daily three packs of
Camels. He nodded to Webster.

   Professor Webster cleared his throat, and began as Barrington had
scripted. “I open with a question: Are you familiar with the so-called
‘Spear of Longinus,’ the alleged ‘Holy Lance?’”

   Tapscott wondered if he’d heard correctly. Was this some kind of a
trick question, another weird psychological assessment?

   But the invasion had begun; this had to be for real. Unless Barrington
and the others were insane. “In the New Testament accounts, it’s the
lance the Roman centurion Longinus used to pierce the side of Jesus
before they took the body down from the cross.”

   Webster steepled his fingers and said, “There was supposedly a—
shall we say mystical?—aspect to this lance, one that made it of interest
to certain military leaders. Perhaps you are aware of that?”

□

The three men behind the table waited until they heard Tapscott leave
the building.

   Barrington chuckled. “The dumb shit fell for it, hook, line and sinker.
Some goddam spy he’d make!”

   Webster shook his head. “Such a fine young man. Innocent, naive—
so rare these days. He won’t last long over there.”

   “Starting this morning, professor, fine young men are dying all over
Europe by the thousands. But if this operation succeeds, then we can
save a hell of a lot of those lives. We sacrifice one and win the war. It’s
a trade that makes sense.”

   “But tell me,” the Major said, running a finger along his moustache.
“The mystical power of the Spear, and all that. Do you actually think
there’s anything to it?”

   Barrington snickered and lit another Camel. “You asked Tapscott the
same question. Hell, it’s about as goddam real as Mickey Mouse.”

Day One

______________________________________________________

1

Washington, DC. 7:15 AM.

   The fax sounded like somebody’s bizarre practical joke, but it was in
Cal Katz’ distinctive scrawl, thick and stubby and intense like the man
himself, and Cal was definitely not one for jokes.

   Cal was a strange little guy, one day hush-mouthed and
conspiratorial, the next day ready to tell you more than you ever wanted
to know about what was really going on behind the scenes in
Washington.

   A conspiracy nut, but an intelligent one who did his homework . . .
obsessively.

   A paranoid, forever vaguely hinting at threats he’d supposedly
received. But paranoid with good reason: people were in prison
because of things he’d turned up; others had seen their careers blown.
“Sometimes even paranoids have real enemies,” he’d said more than
once, quoting Henry Kissinger—no stranger to the ways of Washington.

   Have uncovered very important info regarding our recent
conversation. To Cal, everything was always life-and-death important. I
tried to recall that conversation, a week, maybe ten days ago. Mostly he’
d talked at me about his latest project, something about Twisted
Messiah, the rock group.

   In Cal’s eyes, Twisted Messiah wasn’t just a rock group. It was, as he’
d put it, “media superstardom consciously morphing into a world-wide
political force.”

   Typical Cal Katzian exaggeration, I’d figured.

   But, just before we were interrupted, he’d asked me out of the blue if I’
d had a relative in the OSS during World War II.

   I’d told him about my Uncle Paul Tapscott—OSS, missing in action
since D-Day.

   “Interesting,” he’d said with even more than usual gusto. “We need to
talk,” he’d said, but his cell-phone rang before we got the chance.

□

Cal’s fax had arrived while I was out jogging. I poured some orange juice
and moved on to the phone message blinking on my answering
machine. A number in Vermont I didn’t recognize, but my father’s voice:
“Greg, it’s me. Don’t—do not—call me back. I’ll call again in a little while.
It’s urgent.”

   Don’t call me, I’ll call you—the same phrase that Cal Katz had used.
Mere coincidence, I thought.

   However, as I was about to learn from the events of the next few
days, there is no such thing as a “mere coincidence,” certainly not on
anything important, and what seem to be random events are usually
anything but random.

□

I’d been up since 4 A.M., crashing out an overdue report, then off for a
quick jog through one of those monsoons that hit Washington in the
autumn. It felt good to pull off the wet running suit and hit the shower.
There were still some loose ends to tie up before sending it to the client.

   As I showered, my mind was on Cal’s message. You are the butterfly!
You’re about to set off a storm that spreads around the world!

   “Butterfly”—I understood that much of it—came from Chaos Theory,
suggesting that small, unanticipated events, like the tiny puff of wind set
off by the wings of a butterfly, can trigger a chain of events that bring
about major, unpredictable change.

   But me as the butterfly? Not likely. I was just another faceless soldier
in that army of Beltway Bandits living off government contracts. I had no
politically embarrassing documents to leak, no secrets the media or
anyone else would find the least titillating.

   At least, so I thought then. But, as things turned out, Cal was right. A
storm was brewing, and I, the 180 pound butterfly, was indeed about to
set it off.

   By the time the storm climaxed, things would be changed forever, not
just in my life, but changed as well in how we view reality, and what is
possible within that reality.

   But I didn’t know that then. On this first morning, I had no more idea
of what was about to happen than a soccer ball does before both sides
start kicking the hell out of it.

   Like it or not, you’re about to set off a hell of a storm!
   Watch your back. You’re involved, like it or not!

2

The phone rang as I finished dressing: Dad’s mysterious new number in
Vermont. He clicked off before I could pick up.

   I took the portable phone and another glass of juice out to the
balcony, dreading the conversation. Kiss a toad first thing in the
morning, and nothing worse can happen to you all day.

   Looking back now, knowing how things would turn out, of course I’m
sorry I felt that way, but lately every conversation with him had been a
downer.

   It’s urgent, probably meant he wanted me to drop everything and fly
up for the weekend. He’d been pressuring me since summer to come to
Burlington for a visit, and I’d been putting him off, partly because things
had been too hectic here. But also because he’d been in a funk for over
a year now, and it was draining to be around him. He was unhappy
nowadays, since Mom had passed.

□

My father had been a lifer with IBM, and couldn’t seem to accept that
there were other ways of living. In his view, it was long overdue for me to
quit consulting and get a “real job”—by which he meant one where I
filled a box on an organization chart, putting in the years toward a
pension. As he saw things, I was unemployed, not self-employed. The
world had changed, but he hadn’t.

   I wasn’t in the mood for his needling. One of his favorites: “What’s a
consultant? Somebody who used to have a steady job.”

   It stung because there was some truth to what he said. I was drifting—
in my career, in the rest of my life. But drifting was comfortable, for the
moment. I’d just turned 32, and had (as I was sure then) plenty of time
ahead. I didn’t need to be reminded—time and again—how much he’d
accomplished by the time he was my age.

   There was a second reason he was on my case: he also wanted
grand-kids, and I wasn’t ready for that yet.

   A couple of deep breaths of the fresh, misty air cleared my head. My
apartment, on the twelfth floor, overlooks a park and a little brook that
meanders through a natural growth of trees and underbrush. It’s like
living in a tree-house—a nice fantasy for those days when life in
Washington gets to me. As apartments go, it’s great, but I’ve been there
too long—going on two years now, since the split with Laurel.

   The rain had let up now. Mist hung in the trees, almost blocking the
view of the park and Massachusetts Avenue, one of those broad, tree-
lined boulevards L’Enfant laid out a century and a half ago when he
redesigned the city, back before the days of commuters and grid-lock,
back before Washington had evolved from a swampy village into the
self-proclaimed center of the universe.

   The phone chirped again. “Morning, Greg. Hope I didn’t wake you up.”

   Great way to start a conversation. “Actually, I’ve been up and working
since four this morning. I got—”

   “Tell me, has anybody come around asking you about Paul?”

   “Paul who?”

   A pause. “Your Uncle Paul, who else?”

   “But Uncle Paul—he’s been dead 60 years. Why on earth would
anyone—”

   Then it clicked: Cal Katz asking if I’d had a relative in the OSS.

   Before I could say more, Dad went on: “Two men showed up at the
house last night, asking some very peculiar questions like, ‘When was
the last time we saw Paul?’ and ‘When did we last have contact?’ Crazy
stuff, and I told them so. They were from the CIA.”

   That stopped me. “CIA? You’re joking!”

   “You know I wouldn’t joke about Paul. Don’t ever forget it was the CIA
that kept insisting all these years that Paul was dead. Now they show
up, ask questions, won’t tell me diddly-squat, just that supposedly it
related to a national security issue, something about a terrorist group.
That’s why I want you to catch that plane tonight. Let’s come up with
some answers on our own.”

   “Catch what plane? Where?”

   “Because that’s where Willoughby wants to meet. He set it all up,
even paid for the tickets. They’re being delivered directly to you.”

   “I’m not following you, Dad. Who’s Willoughby? Why does he want to
meet? Where?”

   Has he been drinking this early? I wondered.

   “I don’t know who he is, don’t have a clue. He signed the letter P.
Willoughby, but the name means nothing to me. Anyway, I scanned that
letter, along with some other photos and papers and things you might
need. I just sent you all of this as an attachment to an e-mail, along with
the other papers you’ll need. All you have to do is print it out. Look it all
over, then let’s talk.”

   “What about meeting this Willoughby?”

   “The deal is, you catch a plane to Paris tonight, connecting to La
Rochelle.”

   “But I can’t go anywhere today. It’s out of the question. Not today.”

   “Your passport—it is up to date, isn’t it?”

   “Sure, but I’m overdue on a report, and I can’t leave town until I turn it
in.” It pained me to say that, as a trip to France sounded a lot better
than pounding a keyboard. “Why don’t you go, Dad? A trip would do
you good.”

   “I can’t do that, Greg. The fact is I’m not—not feeling so well these
days. I really need you to do this for me.”

   “You’re sick?”

   I heard him sigh deeply, the way he used to in those grim months
before Mom died. “There’s something we haven’t talked about. I was
hoping all summer you’d come up to visit so I could tell you face-to-face.
Remember that stiff neck I had last spring? Well, turns out it wasn’t just
from too much golf, like I thought. Turned out to be a cancer, pretty bad
one at that, progressing damned fast.”

   I felt my legs wobble, and I dropped into a deck-chair. Not Dad. He’d
always been so healthy.

   I couldn’t get the words out at first, then finally managed, “Why didn’t
you tell me?”

   “That was why I was hoping you’d come up over the summer. I
wanted to . . . didn’t want to have to break the news this way, over the
phone. The doctors say I’ve got maybe a month, two at the most,
though I’m going to be knocked out with the drugs for half that time. I
really need you to follow up this lead on Paul—so I can know the truth
before I go.”

3

I was printing out the materials Dad e-mailed—photos of Paul, along
with the various letters sent by the government over the years, each
one giving a different account of what happened to Paul. The house
phone rang: the receptionist at the front desk, telling me an envelope
had just been delivered for me, marked Urgent.

   “Who delivered it? Fed-Ex? A bike messenger?” I was groping for
clues to who Willoughby might be.

   “Neither. It was a man in a business suit. He pulled up in a car, just
long enough to drop it off. He said he was a travel agent, and you
needed the tickets right away.”

   I went down. Tickets—business class, that was nice—Air France from
Dulles tonight to Paris, connecting on to La Rochelle. No indication who
had arranged them, just a Visa charge slip with the usual last four digits
of the credit-card number. They weren’t from my cards, nor from Dad’s.

   No business card from the travel agency was enclosed, nothing I
could trace.

   Also in the envelope was a wad of cash—about $1000 in dollars and
Euros. Willoughby thought of everything. Whoever he was.

□

That gave me incentive to buckle down on that report, and I had it pretty
well finished by noon. Just the final details and a bit of polishing were all
that remained.

   The phone rang, a local call from a number I didn’t recognize. I let the
answering machine pick it up. “Dammit, pick up. It’s me. We need to get
together.” The throaty voice of Cal Katz, raspy from too many of the
stinky cigars he lived on.

   “I’m here.”

   “You got my message? We need to follow up, ASAP. Why don’t you
come over now, see the stuff I’ve turned up.”

   “Can’t now, got to finish a project. Anyway, I’m not clear what it is you
want me to see. You were working on—”

   “No names, no details,” he cut in. “I’m calling on a new cell-phone,
prepaid, anonymous, but they could be tapping your line. Yeah, I’m
working on what I asked you about last time we talked. Remember?”

   ‟You asked if I’d had a relative in—”

   He cut me off before I could say OSS. ‟Yeah, yeah, that’s it, just don’
t say the word. Gotta watch what you say. Be discreet. Like it or not,
now you’re part of it, so you gotta be smart, watch your back. This is
serious, these people play for keeps.”

   Like it or not—again that phrase. What had I been drawn into?

   “How about later? I’ve got to finish a report, then I’ve got to catch a
flight to La Rochelle at—”

   “You didn’t hear what I just said. Be smart, don’t give out clues over
the phone. But if that’s where you’re going, then we’ve really gotta talk.
Pronto.”

   If I took a cab, and had the cab wait outside Cal’s, I could make the
flight easily enough. ‟I’ll be there in about an hour or so, okay?”

   “We can really scratch each other’s backs on this,” he said. The last
words I’d ever hear him say.

□

Given the work I do—consulting, motto being “Have laptop, will travel”—I
fly off someplace or another just about every week, so I’ve got packing
down to a science.

   I did the last bits on the report and hit Send, knowing that, no matter
how much polish I put into it, the client would bounce it back, nit-picked
to pieces.

   But that’s the nature of the job. A consulting joke Dad hadn’t picked
up yet: How is a consultant like a eunuch? Answer: both have great
ideas, but never get to follow through.

   Another call from Dad, this time asking me to set up a video-
conference with him, his computer to mine.

   “But you’ve been saying your camera is out of commission.”

   “That was then, this is now. Time for me to be honest with you. Time
for you to see me, see how I’m looking these days.”

□

When I’d last seen Dad, in May, I’d been encouraged by what the family
genes forecast for me. Despite what he’d been through losing Mom, he’
d still been tanned and fit—at 76, six feet and 200, an inch shorter than
I, and proud that he was only 20 pounds heavier. His hair had thinned
over the years, but he still had the Tapscott features, the large eyes,
the prominent brows. His only complaint had been a stiff neck that he
couldn’t shake.

   That was then. Now, over the course of a summer, my rugged,
vibrant father had turned into a shrunken, hairless old man hunched in
a wheelchair. The chemo and radiation had cost him his hair, but hadn’t
stopped the tumor.

   With his hair gone now, and his face swollen by medications, he
looked like an oversized baby with a big, round head. Without the
Tapscott eyebrows to shield them, his eyes seemed bigger and more
expressive, and I picked up a sense of vulnerability that had never been
there before.

   “Why didn’t you tell us?” I asked, struggling to keep my voice steady.
“Did you tell Joanie?” Joanie, my older sister, lives in Colorado with a
passel of kids.

   “I was hoping you’d come so we could talk face to face. It wasn’t the
kind of news I wanted to give over the phone.”

   How many times over the summer had he asked me to come up for a
weekend? I couldn’t remember now what had been so important that I’d
begged off each time.

   “As I told you on the phone, a couple of guys in lumpy suits showed
up at the door yesterday. CIA, they said. I pointed out how damned odd
it was for them to suddenly come asking me about Paul, since it was
their agency that had been insisting all along that Paul died back in ‘44.
They shrugged it off, said they were just doing their jobs.”

   The mystery of my Uncle Paul began with the telegram that arrived
from the War Department at the end of June, 1944:

   A couple of weeks later, a letter arrived from Paul’s commanding
officer, assuring the family that Paul had “died a hero on the Normandy
front on 7 June 1944.”

   June 7, of course, was the day after D-Day. Things were hectic, and
the letter gave no details. As Paul had been in the OSS, there was no
real signature, just a bureaucratic code: B/F-12.

   That settled it for the family: it was true, Paul was dead, a reality
confirmed by his Commanding Officer. Maybe his body would be found
and returned home for burial after the war.

   But then another letter arrived a few months later, after France had
been liberated, setting off a mystery that had puzzled our family for 60
years.

   The letter had supposedly been sent by a young Frenchwoman
named Cecile Du Fresne, with a return address 23 Rue des Cygnes,
apartment #4, La Rochelle, France. She wrote that she’d had the
“honor” of meeting Paul during the “short period of 7 to 10 June, 1944,
while he was in La Rochelle,” and was writing to enquire about him.

   Nothing unusual about a soldier making friends with a local girl.
Nothing unusual, except that Paul had been on a secret mission into
occupied France: would he really have given her his name and home
address?

   Even more puzzling, La Rochelle was 250 miles south of the
Normandy invasion site. If Cecile was telling the truth, then Paul had
been a long way from where his Commanding Officer had told us he
died.

   Further, Cecile Du Fresne claimed that she had been with Paul until
June 10. If that was true—a big if—then Paul had been alive for at least
three days after his official date of death.

   Aunt Ursula wrote back to Cecile three times, and got no reply.

   Dad had made the trip to La Rochelle once travel became possible
again. He had even knocked on the door of #23, but no one had heard
of Cecile Du Fresne.

□

Over the years, the family had made attempt after attempt to get to the
truth about Paul.

   Finally, they sent photostatic copies of Cecile’s letters to one of the
Vermont Senators, who passed them on to the War Department and the
OSS for an explanation. By that point, the War Department was evolving
into the Department of Defense, and the OSS into the CIA. Not much
came back.

   The Senator pressed the issue. Eventually a letter from Washington
arrived, changing the government’s story:

   Similarity in names . . . inadvertently confused . . . difficult operating
conditions during wartime. That made sense. After all, the term SNAFU—
Situation Normal, All Fouled Up— had come out of that War, and Dad
himself had encountered enough SNAFU’s to accept that a mistake like
this could have occurred

   Along with that letter came a black-and-white photo of that bridge,
along with a photo of a plaque to the memory of “Un Soldat Americain
Inconnu.” An unknown American soldier.

   Requests to have Paul’s body brought home opened the next phase.
Now the people in Washington claimed that it was not known where Paul
had been buried.

   But, as Dad put it in the letter he wrote back, “If the U.S. government
doesn’t know what happened to his body, and the French don’t know
the name of that unknown American soldier, then why should we have
any more confidence in the story that Paul died at the bridge in La
Rochelle than the previous account that had him dying in Normandy?
Why won’t you just tell us the truth? WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO
PAUL TAPSCOTT?”

□

“Those CIA boys like to ask all the questions, but don’t like to give much
in return,” Dad said after pausing to take some pills.

   “But they did tell me this much, when I asked why the hell this fire got
lit after all these years. Supposedly they’ve been picking up Paul’s
name frequently in the ‘chatter,’ as they called it, of a certain terrorist
organization. You know what chatter is? Intercepted messages and
phone calls and e-mails.”

   I was back swimming in that sea of unreality. Were Dad’s medications
causing him to hallucinate? Why would the name of someone dead for
over 60 years be of interest to today’s terrorists?

   He chuckled, and I saw a flash of the person he used to be, before
the sickness and drugs that had bloated him. “I can still read your face,
just as well as ever. No, your old man hasn’t hallucinated all this. That’s
exactly what they said, that some terrorist group has been talking about
Paul Tapscott, actually using his name.”

   “What group?”

   “They wouldn’t say.” He laughed again. “They wouldn’t tell me much
of anything at all, so I don’t feel I need to tell them every damned thing.
Like Willoughby’s letter. That arrived by messenger, not more than a
half-hour after they left. I could have called them, they’d given me a
number, but I decided the hell with them. For whatever reason, they
haven’t been straight with us over the years, so now I’m returning the
favor.”

   That letter had been in the packet of materials he’d e-mailed me
earlier:

   “As I said, I’ll be damned if I know who Willoughby is, never heard of
him. But did you notice the wording? ‘Your brother, who was alleged to
have been killed.’ Not ‘killed,’ but ‘alleged to have been killed.’ That’s
why we’ve got to follow this up.”

   “If Willoughby lives in London, why not meet there? Why have us
both go all the way to La Rochelle?”

   But Dad didn’t hear me. “Willoughby also says, ‘It’s time the truth
came out.’ We can’t pass up the chance that it might just amount to
something.”

   “But can we trust Willoughby? There have been so many false leads
over the years—what makes you any more sure this is the real thing?”

   When I saw the sadness cross Dad’s face I wished I hadn’t asked.
“Fact is, I’m not sure of this one. But I know this is the last chance . . .
last chance in my lifetime, that’s for certain. I’ve spent most of my life
wondering what really happened to Paul. If Willoughby can tell us that,
then I can go in peace.”

   Then I can go in peace. I choked up then and turned away so he
wouldn’t see the tears that filled my eyes.

5

I had the cab wait while I went in to see Cal Katz. The ride out to Dulles
would cost a bundle, and now this waiting time would add even more.
But Willoughby had sent me expense money, and I’ve been around
Washington long enough to have no qualms about spending OPM—
Other People’s Money.

   Cal lived in Adams-Morgan, a funky part of town with the mix of ethnic
restaurants, grungy bars, upscale boutiques, rug merchants, liquor
stores, bookstores, and a mix of housing ranging from the ultra-chic to a
step above flop-houses.

   The driver found a spot in a liquor-store parking lot. I left my bags in
the trunk and hurried around the corner to Cal’s place. He lived two
floors above an Afghan restaurant. “Fortress Katz” somebody had
called it after a visit there, and the name stuck—four separate locks,
plus an electronic alarm. A lot like what he’d grown up with on
Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where security was the name of survival.

   Adams-Morgan was safe enough, for an urban neighborhood. But
Cal wasn’t just the usual city-dweller, and it wasn’t just his electronic
equipment—computers, faxes, digital cameras—that made him a target.
It was what he did that really put him at risk—his job was about
upsetting the rich and comfortable.

   I was running late—not a great concern, as Cal always ran late
himself. I half-expected to encounter him racing back to make the
meeting, and was reminded of a profile the Post had done on him a
year or so back: “Cal Katz scuttles around Washington on his stubby
legs, gathering tidbits of news here, obscure reports there, to bind into
his exposes.”

    But Cal didn’t care what they said about him; only his work mattered
to him.

   I rang the bell and waited for the buzz that would let me in. I rang
again. Still nothing. Was the bell broken? I knocked, and the outer door
swung open.

   The smart thing would have been to phone him, make sure he was
up there. Of all times, I’d left my cell-phone back in my apartment
because it wasn’t set up to work overseas.

   The second smartest thing would have been to call the police, let
them come in with me. But I was running late; I had a plane to catch.

   I climbed the stairs, as silently as I could manage.

   Cal had installed a second door on the upper level. That also swung
open. I climbed the next flight, dread—or was it fear?—building.

   His apartment door was closed. A good sign. I knocked. No sounds.

   I pushed the door. It didn’t open. I tried the knob, and it turned. I let
the door swing open. Cal had never been much of a housekeeper, but
at least he kept his piles of papers and books neatly piled. This was
shambles, papers scattered all over the floor, the drawers of filing
cabinets yanked out and dumped.

   I don’t know how long I stood there, fear building, a chill moving up
my spine—maybe a second, maybe half a minute. Time stood still.

   I turned and ran back down the stairs, not screaming, just a long
primeval grunt coming from me. I heard steps behind me, a man, two
men, running after me, yelling “Stop! Stop! Police!” But these guys
weren’t police, that I knew.

   I leaped the last four steps to the ground floor, yanked the door open
and slammed it in the face of the lead guy, feeling a satisfying thunk as
it smashed his face.

   My cab-driver was dozing. “Go! Go!” I yelled. “We’re running late.”

□

I don’t know whether I lost them, hurt them with the door, or they just lost
interest in me. I didn’t see the two guys on the street, and I kept a watch
behind and got no sense of a car following.

   Then I thought: Cal! Was Cal in there with them?

   “I have to make a phone call. It’s urgent,” I said. The driver passed
back his cell-phone. “Dollar a minute, two dollar in advance.”

   “I need a pay phone.” I didn’t want the police tracing the call, now or
later. The right thing to do would be to go back, just in case something
happened to Cal. But I had a plane to catch.

   “No pay phones nowhere no more.”

   We were crossing the bridge to Rosslyn, about to pick up I-66 to
Dulles. “Pull off, find a gas station. It’s urgent.”

   It took three stops before I found one with a phone that worked. The
D.C. police dispatcher didn’t seem very interested, even less so when I
refused to give my name. Finally she said she’d have a patrolman look
in, “when he had some free time.

Day Two

6

Paris. 6:20 AM

The 747 broke through the clouds in the final minute before touchdown,
and we floated over flat green meadows and scattered villages. I craned
to get a glimpse of Paris, but saw only patches of fog and farm fields
muddy from the morning rain.

   A grim day. A day that matched my mood.

   I’d brought my laptop, planning to spend the flight taking a second
look at that report, but I couldn’t work, not after seeing Dad. He had only
a very finite number of days left, and I didn’t want to be wasting any of
them chasing after Willoughby’s letter. I told him I thought I should be
staying with him for these days.

   He’d looked at me for a moment, his eyes sad. “I’d like that, to spend
these days together, but this is an opportunity we can’t pass up.”

□

La Rochelle. 9:20 AM.

My spirits perked up a bit as I came to the end of the final leg, and saw
the blue Atlantic sparkling in the bright morning sun as the plane
banked to land at La Rochelle.

   From the air, the core of the old town, spread around the small
harbor, was as picturesque as a movie set, with arcaded streets, red-tile
roofs, and a pair of medieval stone towers that flanked the entrance to
a small inner harbor.

   I stepped out of the terminal, and the warm air, tinged with sea-salt
and the aromas of flowers, triggered images of arriving at a sea-side
vacation.

   This was no holiday, but at least the sun and sea air lifted my spirits.
Maybe something worthwhile would come from this, and I’d be able to fly
home tomorrow, mission accomplished.

   A cab dropped me at the hotel in La Rochelle, just inside the old city
walls, and within sight of the medieval port. According to a plaque by the
entrance, the building had been constructed to serve as a Royal Mint
back in the 1600's, and looked it: a grey block of granite, with walls as
thick as a fortress.

   But the lobby was light and airy, filled with bright morning sunshine. A
fountain bubbled in a small private garden in the sun-drenched open
courtyard.

   Janine, the desk clerk, pulled up my reservation. “You guaranteed it
with your Visa card. Will you be leaving it on that card?”

   “My Visa?” Willoughby’s letter had said the room would be with his
compliments.

   “You are Gregory Paul Tapscott?”

   I usually sign as Gregory P., but this seemed close enough. I nodded,
and she rotated the monitor so I could read the card numbers. The Visa
was in my name, but the account number was definitely not mine.

   P. Willoughby was not waiting for me in the lobby, nor had he (or was
it Ms. P. Willoughby?) left a message. Nor was he registered at the hotel.

   A bad omen? What about delivering the “truth” he’d promised? Or
was this going to be another in that 60-year string of false leads? A
practical joke, with the travel bills charged to a phony credit card in my
name?

   I pulled out my business class air tickets and looked to see what card
had paid for them. A Visa, with the same last four digits.

   My new fake credit card. April Fool in October.