“Uh, huh.”
Finally, the door yielded, and he pushed it open with a flourish.
Queen led the way, her glasses revealing details about the darkened interior of the pavilion that were hidden from unaided eyes. She saw that several of the display cases were empty, while others contained what looked like nothing more than a collection of dusty old knick-knacks without any sense of continuity. In an age of high-tech interactive displays and immersive environment, the Royal Museum was itself a relic from another age.
“I can see why they thought it was time to renovate.”
“Well, it’s good that one of us can see something,” Rook said.
“Don’t get all pissy just because I take better care of my things.”
“Oh, is that how you remember it? Because I—”
“Are you guys always like this on a mission?” Aleman cut in.
Queen smiled but didn’t reply. Banter was standard operating procedure for Rook, but as a rule she didn’t engage in it with him during a mission. Right now though, the good humor was a welcome distraction from the uncertainty surrounding the rest of the team’s fate, a situation which left her feeling helpless.
They made their way to the reading room, where to their disappointment, they found rows of empty shelves. A computer terminal sat idle on a desk near the entrance, and at Aleman’s direction, she booted it up. A password prompt appeared on the screen.
“Hang on,” Aleman said. “The good news is, I’m already in the museum’s WiFi network… Okay, try this.” He rattled off a string of letters, numbers and characters, which she entered on the keyboard, and when the desktop appeared a moment later, Aleman began remotely searching the directory. Queen watched as file folders and spreadsheets began opening on the screen.
“Okay,” he said, after several minutes of silence. “The Stanley archive is still in the building, but has been moved to conservation storage, just down the hall.” He gave her directions to the nearby room, along with the number of the container with the relevant documents.
The storage room was crowded with plastic totes, each labeled with an inventory sticker. The room had no windows to the outside, and with Aleman’s permission, Queen told Rook to turn on the lights.
Still squinting from the change in illumination, Mulamba began scanning the stickers. He seemed to have a sense for the way the collection had been organized, and he found the correct case without consulting the catalogue number Queen had provided.
“Here,” he said, his voice bubbling over with enthusiasm. “This is the one.”
He loosed the clasp and opened the lid to reveal a nest of packing paper, and several bound books, each vacuum sealed in heavy cellophane and marked with another sticker. He held up one of them. “This is the diary in which Stanley recorded his meeting with Livingstone.”
“I thought he tore out those pages,” Rook said.
Mulamba nodded. “That is what has been reported. Still, it is a place to start.” He pinched the plastic between his fingers and tried, without success, to tear apart the protective overwrap.
Rook rummaged in the desk and found a pair of scissors. “Try these, Joe.”
“And be careful,” Queen added. “Let’s not add anything else to the list of crimes we’re committing.”
Mulamba seemed not hear her as he sliced open the packet and took out the journal. He thumbed through it quickly, scanning the dates at the top of each page until he found the entries from November of 1871. His expression fell just a little.
“It is true. The pages have indeed been removed.” He looked uncertainly at the container but made no move to take anything else from it.
Queen spoke to Aleman in a low voice. “Any suggestions?”
“Wait one. Okay, there is a collection called ‘miscellany.’ Loose papers, looks like scientific notes, personal letters and so forth. Should be in the same container.”
She relayed the message to Mulamba who commenced rooting in the packing material like a kid tearing into a Christmas present. His enthusiasm outpaced Rook’s valiant effort at keeping the discarded items in some semblance of order, but after a minute or so, the African president held up another sealed package containing a dark brown manila folder. Mulamba cut it open and shook out several yellowed envelopes. He thumbed through them quickly, glancing at the delicately scripted name on each, before shuffling it to the bottom of the stack.
Rook chuckled and muttered, “Bills, bills, junk mail, bills.”
Mulamba let out an excited cry and held up an envelope. “This is addressed to John Rowlands, esquire.”
“And that’s good?”
“John Rowlands and Henry Morton Stanley are one and the same. Stanley was born as Rowlands… forgive me, that’s not quite correct. There is uncertainty as to his parentage. His mother abandoned him as an infant and Rowlands, the man he believed to be his father, died shortly after he was born. In any event, he took the name Stanley when he was eighteen.”
“So what is that?” Rook asked. “Letters to my former self?”
“It is unopened,” Mulamba said, breathlessly. He broke the wax seal and teased out the folded paper inside.
Queen saw his eyes moving back and forth as he read the contents, growing wider as he digested the information contained therein. Right up to that moment, she had been expecting the search to end in disappointment, a wild-goose chase, which she had agreed to only to placate the African leader. Now, she knew better.
“Aleman, it looks like we got what we came for. Tell Crescent II to come get us, ASAP.”
A loud noise, like the sound of a very heavy book slamming down on a tabletop, startled the night watchman seated in the security office, in the main building. He laid his Sudoku puzzle on the desk and peered at the monitor, which showed the feeds from the security cameras distributed throughout the museum. Every few seconds, the display would change as the system cycled through the cameras, but nothing he saw accounted for the unusual noise in what was otherwise, at least as far as the guard was concerned, the deadest place on Earth.
He glanced at his wristwatch, then shrugged and stood up. He was just reaching for the antiquated security watch-clock when he glimpsed a figure standing on the other side of the security desk. He stared in disbelief for a moment, as if not quite believing his eyes.
He started to say something, but his voice was drowned out by the bark of a pistol. He was permanently silenced by the bullet that tore into his chest.
The man who now called himself Ace Diamonds looked down at the dead watchman to make sure that he wouldn’t be getting back up. Then he took aim with the handgun just in case he did. If Ace had been using overpressure rounds, like his counterparts in the Congo, there would have been no need to verify, but it was hard enough getting guns in the more security conscious European countries. The experimental depleted-uranium rounds were simply out of the question. Too bad though, he thought. He kind of liked the way those super-bullets made a weasel go pop.
He rounded the security desk to get a look at the monitor and watched the feed for a few seconds. Finally, he unclipped the walkie-talkie from his belt and keyed the transmit button. “This is Ace D. Looks like we got here first. Diamonds, set up an outside perimeter so we’ll know if anyone’s coming. Spades, start a full sweep of the museum, just in case.”
There was a flurry of responses, though not as many as there would have been just a few hours earlier. The unknown duo that had hit the farm outside Dartford had practically driven a lawn mower through their ranks. When the dust had finally settled, the force of ESI mercenaries had been reduced nearly by half. Just eleven men remained, four from the Spades team, and seven from the Diamonds. Ace, who had previously been the fourth man on the Diamonds team, suddenly found himself the most senior operator still standing.