“Wow,” I said. “You know, one of my psychometric finds last year were blueprints of the Starship Enterprise from the Next Generation series… part of an old box set that a fanboy had lost. I sold them back to their original owner for a nice profit. These schematics are ten times more technologically advanced-looking than that. We’re talking at least Death Star design scheme advanced.”

I noticed something on the first page, and flipped down through the stack of designs that showed several different levels and cross sections of the building. Each of them had the same thing I had noticed on the first page.

“This doesn’t make any sense.” I flipped back to the first page and pointed toward the center of the main floor. It was a solid empty block labeled ADVENI LATERIS. “Whatever that is…”

“I think it means ‘to arrive later,’ ” Jane offered. I turned to look at her. “What? What can I say? We had a good school system back in Kansas. My English teacher used flash cards to teach us Latin roots words.”

“I’m not complaining,” I said. “Just surprised. What’s it doing here? I’m not up on blueprints-”

“Clearly,” Jane interrupted. “White prints. These are whiteprints.”

“Well, the ink is blue,” I said in a huff, hating to be corrected. “Anyway, I’m no architect, but I imagine the city is rather strict about showing what is actually being built here. I’m pretty sure you can’t just say you’re going to put something there later and not declare what it is, especially when it takes up almost a city block. Yet this one’s got a huge area that’s totally undocumented for the construction.”

Jane looked concerned, but also exhausted. “Please tell me we’re not going to tackle this right now…”

“I’ll check on these while you go off to your Arcana meeting,” I said, pulling out my camera phone. I started snapping shots of the whiteprints. “I think I’ll see if the Gauntlet has anything historical on this location in the archives.”

“And after that?” Jane asked. “Then what?”

“Once we get some more information on the Gibson-Case Center,” I said, “we shop.”

Jane gave me a smile.

“I know you’re trying to appeal to the stereotypical girl in me,” Jane said, “but I’m too modern to fall for that.”

“Sorry,” I said, forcing an innocent, wide-eyed expression onto my face.

“Oh, don’t be,” Jane said, heading for the door. “I can be bought into servitude. I just wanted you to know that I knew what you were up to.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell her the shopping would be more of a recon mission than anything.

9

As we left the offices on Centre Street, I e-mailed my secret spy photos to Godfrey Candella down at the Gauntlet, the D.E.A.’s sprawling archive, as Jane and I walked our way up to the Lovecraft Café on Eleventh Street.

I grabbed a quick kiss from her and an iced coffee from the bar before heading back into the offices. First I dropped off my ruined clothing with Allorah Daniels’s assistant and then headed down to the subterranean labyrinth that made up the Departmental archives known as the Gauntlet. I was surprised to see the modernized caves-turned-offices already abuzz with activity this early. When I finally spied Godfrey hiding in his cluttered office, I saw he was talking in an animated fashion to a cute Asian woman with long black hair. I almost fell over when king bookworm Godfrey leaned over and kissed her. She mussed his near-bowl-cut straight black hair before she smiled and walked out of his office into the stacks. I waited several seconds before walking in on him and stepping over to his desk, which was covered with piles of books, maps, and an assortment of folders.

“Hello, Godfrey.”

Godfrey Candella was busy fixing his mussed-up hair in the reflection of an empty terrarium on the corner of his desk. He barely noticed me when I had walked in, but he jumped at the sound of my voice.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Hello, Simon,” he said. He had a grin on his face that would have made the Cheshire Cat jealous. “How long have you been down here?”

“Long enough,” I said, smiling. Godfrey turned bright red and he redoubled his effort to suppress his smile, failing miserably to do so. “It’s okay,” I continued. “I approve, and besides… she’s hot.”

This seemed to bring him to his senses a little. His smile went away and he pulled off his black horn-rimmed glasses. “I hate when Chloe musses my hair. It gets my glasses all cloudy.” He fussed with them, wiping them down, and then looked at me. “I’m sorry. I’m certain you didn’t come down here to check out the social lives of the archivists. I trust you’re here for something?”

“Um, yeah,” I said, still trying to get over the idea of Godfrey with a social life. Usually he had a serious case of bookwormius maximus. “I e-mailed you some pictures from my phone…?”

“Oh!” he said, his eyes brightening. “Of course.” He moved behind his desk and sat down at one of the biggest flat-screen monitors I had ever seen. He started clacking away at the keyboard. “Let’s see what we can see.”

The first shot came up on the screen.

“Sorry about the crappy quality,” I said. “We were breaking and entering… Well, technically, keying in and entering.”

“Not a problem,” he said, adjusting the brightness of the images on the screen. The dark edges of my photos lightened, showing a greater amount of detail within the blueprints. “Ahh… schematics.”

I tapped at the screen. “If you zoom in there…”

Godfrey’s hand shot out and grabbed mine, pulling it away from the monitor.

“Please don’t touch it,” he said. “I brought it in from home.”

I looked at him, perplexed. “This isn’t Department issued?”

Godfrey let out a bitter laugh. “Are you kidding me? With the budget cuts around here from downtown? No. This is mine. It fell off of a truck that almost hit me and it survived so… I helped myself.”

I knew all too well the strange knack Godfrey experienced that made him a divining rod for luck. I also knew the guilt I still felt for having used him for it in the past, so

I remained silent on it.

“Sorry,” I said.

Godfrey shook it off and turned back to the monitor. “So what are we looking at?”

“It’s the blueprints for the Gibson-Case Center,” I said. “It’s that new place that’s been going up on Columbus Circle. Jane and I chased a guy right up to the doors and got turned away like we were trying to gain entry into a foreign consulate.”

“These look like whiteprints to me,” Godfrey said, and I cringed. Was he channeling her?

“Whatever they are,” I said, “there’s a problem.” I pointed toward the empty block of space at the center of the whiteprint, this time making sure not to touch the monitor. “It appears that there’s a dead zone that can’t be accounted for.”

Godfrey flipped to the next picture and then the next.

“They’re all the same,” I said.

Godfrey cocked his head and continued flipping over and over through them all.

“Well, not exactly the same,” he corrected. “I mean, yes, they are all technical drawings of the same building area, but look… There are both blue- and whiteprints of the location.” Godfrey flipped through a few to show me the difference.

“So?”

“Blueprints came about in the forties,” he said, “but whiteprints replaced them in more recent years. We shouldn’t be seeing a mix of blue and white ones together for one project given the spread of time.”

I was still confused. “Meaning what exactly?” “Meaning someone’s been working on whatever’s going on there for a long time, longer than any development cycle for most high-rises in this city. That hidden area seems to have been earmarked private for years.” He stood up, grabbing a flashlight off of his desk. “Come with me.”

Seeing the flashlight in his hand worried me. Every part of the cavernlike Gauntlet I had ever been in had been strung with at least the bare minimum of electric bulbs. I wanted to ask where we were going that we needed the flashlight, but Godfrey was already hustling through the shelves and shelves of record books.