Losing Maddock and Bonebrake was a major annoyance, but he knew that three men couldn’t have reliably controlled two such skilled soldiers. Without the old woman’s resources, O’Meara only had five men at his disposal, so he hadn’t seen any better options. With one pursuing the Octavius Marshall angle, that had left two to cover the getaway and two to accompany him down into the tunnel. He wouldn’t agonize over it.
Two of those men were out in Wissahickon in the small room right now, carefully examining the books. O’Meara couldn’t muster much optimism given the condition of the material, but he knew from long experience to follow every lead until it was exhausted.
“Sir, we found something.”
Smyers and Dantry stood in the doorway to his suite with muddy clothes. Rain had come in towards the end of the day and it flowed into the once dry tunnel and room. O’Meara knew that if he wanted to preserve the material — after all, who knew what surprises a thorough examination would uncover — his window for doing so before salvage became impossible was measured in days, not weeks or months.
“What did you find?”
Smyers, the one with the dark hair and hook nose, which gave him the appearance of a cartoon villain, walked over to O’Meara and handed him what appeared to be a book sized pamphlet. O’Meara opened it up and saw a map of Paris.
He looked up. “What is this supposed to be?”
“Turn to the last page.”
O’Meara did and felt his blood pressure rising as he saw the signature on the hidden document.
A map of Paris. Maddock was playing me and I fell for it.
He quickly scanned it and exhilaration replaced his frustration. This was the final clue they had been looking for, the one that finally made sense of the clue about the creator of the five hundred.
“Call the others. Get some shovels and lights and some gear that can handle the cold rain. Better bring a bunch of weapons as well. Meet me here in three hours.”
O’Meara smiled as they left the room.
He now knew exactly where to find Ben Franklin’s copy of the agreement.
Dane and Bones reached the apartment about an hour after dark. Long showers at the hotel had taken the edge off the cold from their mid-winter swim, but Dane knew it would probably be another day before the chill completely left. In some ways he didn’t mind, as the unfamiliar sensation kept him on his toes.
They took a cab to Marshall’s apartment, figuring one of the ways O’Meara could have been onto them was by bugging the Mustang. They’d have to recover it eventually, he knew. Dane admitted to himself that O’Meara probably knew where they were staying, but he and Bones had done everything they could to leave the motel without being seen. He was about ninety percent sure they had succeeded.
Marshall opened the door dressed in a black tuxedo and a bow tie. The outfit transformed him from a bald, skinny and mild-mannered man into an image of a power broker that Dane wouldn’t have thought possible.
“Hi guys. I’m glad you’re here.”
They sat down and Dane preempted any questions about their activities with one of his own. “What did you find out about the plane?”
“You don’t beat around the bush, do you?”
“I never saw much point in it.”
“Yes, well, it’s registered to a Delaware company called the Vindication Corporation. The officers are all lawyers, not directly associated with the corporation, but it turns out that a single individual is the majority shareholder, a woman named Edmonia Jennings Wright.”
Bones snorted. “That name sounds like someone who made her money the old fashioned way— inheriting it.”
“Interesting observation. She’s not a public figure but you find the occasional article in the newspaper about her. You’ll never guess who she’s descended from.”
Dane raised his hand. “Edmund Randolph, right?”
Marshall’s eyebrows rose almost in slow motion. “How did you know?”
“Well it fits, because Randolph has been floating around this whole puzzle. But there are two other reasons. One is that Randolph had a daughter named Edmonia. But the more curious one is that he was involved in a bribery scandal involving the French government and forced to resign as George Washington’s Secretary of State.”
Bones interjected. “You mean Samuel Washington’s Secretary of State.”
Marshall’s mouth twisted in confusion and Dane shot Bones a wicked look. “As I was saying, he resigned but was later cleared. He wrote a book about it called Vindication.”
Bones shook his head. “Now you’re just showing off, Maddock. How the hell do you know these things?”
“I’d like to say I knew them all along, but I noticed them when we were at the library this morning doing research. Anyway, my question is, who is she besides a Randolph descendant? And what does the Vindication Corporation do?”
Marshall looked from Bones to Dane and then back. “I can answer the second one. It’s a political think tank. Very critical of both of the major parties. They are sometimes considered Libertarian, but that’s just because they hate both parties equally. Their research generally focuses on exposing corruption by specific individuals as opposed to commenting on general freedom and rights. I looked at a couple of their papers and they were big on talking about how the corruption is a pattern and things have got to change.”
“Hey Maddock, that sounds a lot like the people who keep trying to kill us.”
Dane processed this latest revelation. “It does. And you’re saying you don’t know much more about Wright?”
Marshall sighed. “I didn’t spend a lot of time, but no. She attends the occasional rally, and like I said, she’s not a public figure. I did find one picture of her.”
He handed a folded newspaper clipping to Dane. “Aside from that, the only other thing seems to be that she was quite the martial artist when she was younger.”
Dane looked at the picture. It was taken outdoors on a cold day, as evidenced by the hood framing her face. The woman was seventy-five if she was a day, but the strong jaw and cheekbones gave her a presence that he could sense even through a newsprint-quality snapshot.
“A martial artist, huh? She could be the woman who asked about the medallion. But I guess it’s a dead end at this point.”
Marshall cleared his throat. “So what did you guys find?”
Dane gave a quick summary of the events of the afternoon. He didn’t bother holding anything back besides the location of their motel. When he finished, Marshall collapsed into a chair.
“The lost Library of Congress. Hard to believe you found it buried in a ruin in a city park. Have you let anyone official know?”
“Bones and I talked it over and we couldn’t come up with a way of doing it directly that doesn’t open us up to uncomfortable questions about how we found it. Not to mention that O’Meara may have already destroyed it. We’ll put an anonymous letter in the mail to the current Library of Congress tomorrow.”
“Makes sense, I guess. And no idea what the Ben Franklin document is, the one that could rend the union?”
“Nothing more than a guess it has to do with the Constitution.”
Bones smirked. “Speak for yourself, little man. I know what it is”
They both turned to him, faces expectant.
“It’s about how the Freemasons were secretly meeting with aliens who directed them what to put in the Constitution.”
Dane rolled his eyes. “Really? That’s the best you could come up with?”
“On short notice, yeah.”
Marshall said, “Are you guys always this way? You sound like an old married couple.”