Chapter 12

Keith was jolted awake by the pounding on his door. He was momentarily disoriented. Hotel room. Mainz. Maddie. Black River. It was the Black River that he had been dreaming about. He had been swimming in it—drowning in a sea of black ink—but the promised code still eluded him. Maddie was already out of bed pulling on a hotel bathrobe. She handed one to Keith as she called out, “Just a minute!” She checked through the eye-hole and saw Agent Fry. She glanced at Keith, who was cinching up his robe, and then she opened the door and let the agent into the room as he was raising his hand to knock again. Fry stepped into the room, leaving a second person in the hall. Keith didn’t quite see who it was.

“Agent Fry,” Maddie said. “We expected to talk to you in the morning.”

“It is either here, now, or at German Police Headquarters in the morning,” Fry said flatly.

“I think I’d prefer the here and now,” Keith responded. “I’m sorry we don’t have anything to offer you, but we could try room service to bring us coffee.”

“Coffee is on its way,” Fry said. “Sorry to have awakened you. If you need a moment to collect your wits, I understand.”

“I think I’m fully awake already. Keith, are you okay?”

“No. Yes, I’m fine,” Keith got out. “Actually glad to be awake from my dream. I’m sure I’ll be able to sleep well enough when this is over.”

“Let’s get right to this, then,” Fry said sitting in the chair by the desk. Maddie and Keith sat on the small sofa in the room. “A terrorist is following you or tracking your movements in some way. Your proximity to two different libraries that were attacked in such a short period of time is too significant to be a coincidence, especially since there could be no other rational reason for the terrorist to target the NHGA. Logically, the next attack would have been at the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, or the New York Public. Every move a terrorist makes is consistent with his own internal logic. The only thing that links these two targets is your presence.”

“I wondered why they would choose that library,” Maddie said. “But we didn’t decide to visit the NHGA until the day before we arrived. How could someone follow us?”

“That’s the question that makes my German counterparts want to arrest you on the spot,” Fry answered. “I was inclined at first to agree, but there is a possibility that you were set up. If so, you’ll be good bait. My ability to sell that idea to the German authorities is what is keeping you out of jail right now. Being bait is a dangerous occupation, of course, so if you decline there is an officer waiting outside to escort you to protective custody.”

“That’s a great choice,” Keith said. “But unless they actually want to kill us, I don’t see the danger of being bait, as you say. It seems that they have avoided killing people so far. So they are more likely to wait until we are away than to attack while we are there.”

“I agree,” Fry said. “But I want to firmly eliminate you as suspects, which at the moment I can’t. You are planning to visit the Gutenberg Museum and Library in the morning?” Keith and Maddie nodded. “Okay, here is how it will play out. I will stay here for the rest of the night. I’m sorry to cramp you. You are welcome to go back to sleep. I would like your cell phones here on the desk so that I know that there are no changes in plans or accidental alerting of the terrorist.”

“How cozy,” Maddie said. Both cell phones were charging on the desk, so the demand was already satisfied.

“If you don’t mind,” Keith said, “before we go back to sleep I’d like to know what was in the message after the last bombing. On the phone, you said you had a message that led you to believe we were being followed, but you didn’t tell us what it was.” Fry opened his jacket pocket and withdrew a folded sheet of paper. Both messages had been printed on the sheet. Keith scanned the first message then read the second closely.

The seekers go to the cradle, but there is no safety there. The family extends back beyond the printed page. The Wisdom of Pharaoh is this: Flee the halls of learning and return to the land that bore you. The clay feet of this empire will not support it. It will collapse into a river of darkness. Flee the tomb of words, for only the chosen grants access to knowledge.

“It’s another hopeless mishmash,” Keith sighed. “What gives you the idea that it has anything to do with us?”

“I looked up your job title,” Fry said. “I wasn’t familiar with the term Incunabulist. The dictionary say incunabula means ‘the cradle,’ and is applied to the first fifty years of printing. Then I see that the ‘seekers go to the cradle,’ but the ‘family extends beyond the printed page.’ You were searching and continue to search in the cradle of printing. That is enough for me to speculate that it has something to do with you.”

“That’s silly,” Maddie said. “It’s no more than a coincidence.”

“The Kane could be a coincidence,” Fry said. “The NHGA is 800 miles away from the Kane and on the day it was bombed you happened to be there, too. That’s not coincidence, whether the note existed or not. Now look. I’ve pulled every file on you two from your birth certificates up through your professional credentials. I know how many times you’ve traveled outside the country, not just this year, but in your lives. Miss Zayne, I know you are divorced from a wealthy man who owns a computer company. I know your grandfather is here in Mainz with you, Mr. Drucker. I know that you are not the type of people who would destroy libraries. But I don’t know why someone with an axe to grind against libraries would follow you specifically around damaging the libraries you visit. I need your help on this or I need to take you out of circulation, so to speak.”

Keith sat silently with Maddie’s hand on his shoulder. He was still exhausted, but he felt he was thinking clearly. The second terrorist note included two more references to material in the manuscripts that they had uncovered. Keith was convinced that whoever had written the notes had at one time or another had access to those two manuscripts. Homeland Security could probably find out who owned and had access to those documents. But Keith could not jeopardize the sanctity of the Guild. Perhaps he could reveal enough to the Agent to help without revealing the secrets of the Guild. He would have to try.

“Agent Fry,” Keith said. “I think you are right. In fact, I’m beginning to suspect we were targeted before the first explosion.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere. Will you explain, Dr. Drucker?”

“Please, call me Keith. We’re going to be having some long conversations before this is over.”

“Very well, Keith.” The agent sat back expectantly, but did not offer a first name to Keith and Maddie.

“As you know, my work involves examining books and manuscripts to verify their age and authenticity,” Keith began. “On the day of the Kane bombing, I was working in the Rare Books collection on a manuscript that purportedly came from a Carthusian Monastery here in Germany. It’s a splendid piece—a catalog of works that had been collected and copied in the monastery over the 11th to 19th centuries.” Keith paused to be sure he did not reveal too much, but making sure that he gave the agent enough to work with. “Tucked into the book was a fragment of a letter—one page—that dates back to the mid-1400s. I can give you a photograph of it. The two terrorist notes you have received have four direct references to information in those two documents: the key, the river of darkness—or in the manuscript referred to as the Black River—the Wisdom of Pharaoh, and the Tree of Knowledge. I thought they were completely unrelated at first, but now that there are four different references, I have to believe that whoever wrote the terror notes has at one time or another had access to the two documents that I was reviewing at the Kane on that day.”