“Okay, she’s not answering. I just knocked on the door, and it swung open. What would you suggest I do?”

“I’d leave right now,” Milton answered automatically.

“I was hoping you’d say that.” Caleb started to back down the steps, afraid to turn around lest something leap out at him from the house. Then he stopped. What if she was lying on the bathroom floor with a broken hip or had suffered a heart attack? The thing was, despite the evidence, part of Caleb could not believe that the same sweet lady who was such an enthusiastic lover of books could be wrapped up in the spy business. Or if she was, maybe she was simply an innocent dupe.

“Caleb? Have you left yet?”

“No,” he snapped. “I’m thinking.”

“Thinking about what?”

“About whether I should go in and check on her.”

“Do you want me to come with you?”

He hesitated. Milton did have a Taser gun. If Jewell were a spy and came at them with a meat cleaver, they could take the old crone down, hard.

“No, Milton, just stay put. I’m sure it’s nothing.” Caleb pushed open the door and went in. The living room was empty, as was the small kitchen. There was a frying pan on the stove with bits of onion and what looked like ground beef; this matched the aroma in the air. There was one plate, a cup and a fork in the sink, all dirty. On the way back through the living room he picked up a heavy brass candleholder as a weapon and moved slowly down the hallway. He reached the bathroom first and looked in. The toilet seat was down, the shower curtain open, and no bloody body was lying in the tub. He didn’t check the medicine cabinet primarily because he didn’t want to see how absolutely terrified he looked in the mirror.

The first bedroom was empty, the small closet full of towels and bedsheets.

There was only one room left. He hoisted the candleholder above his head and nudged the door open with his foot. It was dark inside, and it took a moment for his eyes to adjust. His breath left him in a rush. There was a lump under the bedcover.

He whispered, “There’s someone in the bed. The covers are over her face.”

“Is she dead?” Milton asked.

“I don’t know, but why would she be asleep with the covers over her face?”

“Should I call the police?”

“Just hang on a sec.”

There was a small closet in the room, its door partially open. Caleb stood to one side, his candleholder at the ready. He again used his foot to push the door open and then jumped back. A short rack of clothes hung there without a murderer in sight.

He turned back to the bed, his heart beating so fast, he wondered if he should have Milton call an ambulance for him. He looked down at his shaky hands. “Okay, okay, a dead body can’t hurt you.” Still, he didn’t want to see her, not like that. He suddenly realized something. If they had killed her, he was partly responsible, for taking her glasses and exposing the old woman. This somber thought depressed but also calmed him somewhat.

“I’m sorry, Jewell, even if you were a spy,” he mumbled solemnly.

He gripped the top of the bedcover and jerked it down.

A dead man stared up at him. It was Norman Janklow, the Hemingway lover and Jewell English’s nemesis in the Rare Books reading room.

Chapter 57

Albert Trent lived in an old house with a broad front porch set far back from a rural road in western Fairfax County.

“Must be a hike for him to get into D.C. every day from here,” Stone noted as he eyeballed the place with a pair of binoculars from behind a copse of towering river birch. Annabelle, dressed in black jeans, dark tennis shoes and a black hooded jacket, crouched next to him. Stone carried a small knapsack.

“Does it look occupied?” she asked.

He shook his head. “No lights that I can see from here, but the garage is closed, so we can’t tell if there’s a car in there.”

“A guy in the intelligence field probably has an alarm system.”

Stone nodded. “I would be stunned if he didn’t. We’ll disable that first, before we go inside.”

“You know how to do that?”

“As I once told Reuben when he asked me that, the library is open to everyone.”

There wasn’t another house within their line of sight, but they still approached the rear of the house to avoid being seen. This required crawling on their bellies, then their knees, and finally crab–walking down a gentle slope twenty yards from the house. They halted here and Stone took another reconnoiter. The home had a walk–out basement with a pressure–treated deck on one end. The back was as dark as the front. With no streetlights and just a dash of ambient light, Stone’s night binoculars were working optimally. Through the green haze of the coated optics he could see everything he needed to.

“I’m not spotting any movement, but make the call anyway,” he told Annabelle.

Milton had gotten Trent’s home phone number off the Internet, a far more dangerous threat to America’s privacy than the poor National Security Agency ever thought of being. Annabelle used her cell phone to call. After four rings the voice mail kicked in, and they listened to a man’s voice instructing them to leave a message.

“Our spy seems to be out in the cold tonight,” she said. “Are you armed?”

“I don’t own a gun. You?”

She shook her head. “I’m not into that. I go for brains over bullets.”

“Good, guns aren’t great things to be into.”

“You sound like you speak from experience.”

“Now is not the time to swap life stories.”

“I know, I’m just foreshadowing for when will be a good time.”

“I didn’t think you’d be sticking around after this.”

“I didn’t think I’d be sticking around for this. So you never know.”

“Okay, the phone box is hanging on a foundation wall underneath the deck. Let’s move, keep it nice and slow.”

As they crawled forward, a horse whinnied somewhere in the distance. There were small family farms scattered around here, though they were being rapidly ground under by northern Virginia’s colossal residential housing machine that randomly spit out condos, town houses, modest single–family homes and mansions with numbing speed. They’d passed several such farms on the way to Trent’s place, all of which had stalls, hay bales, paddocks and large critters nibbling grass. Fat piles of horse manure left on the streets had served as an exclamation point for the equines’ presence. Stone had almost stepped in some getting out of Annabelle’s rental car.

They reached the phone box, and Stone spent five minutes evaluating the security system hardwired into it, and took another five minutes to disable it. After he’d rerouted the last wire, he said, “Let’s try the window right here. The doors probably have dead bolts. I brought a tool to force them, but let’s take the point of least resistance first.”

That point was not the window, which was nailed shut.

They moved down the rear of the house and finally found one window that was secured with window pins. Stone cut a circle of glass out, reached in, pulled out the pins and popped the lock. A minute later they were roaming down the hallway toward what looked to be the kitchen, with Stone in the lead holding a flashlight.

“Nice place, but he appears to be a minimalist,” Annabelle noted. Trent’s taste in interior decoration did tend toward the spartan: a chair here, a table there. The kitchen was barren.

Stone said, “He’s a bachelor. He probably eats out a lot.”

“Where do you want to start?”

“Let’s see if he has an office of some kind here. Most D.C. bureaucrats tend to bring their work home.”

They found the office, but it was nearly as bare as the rest of the house, no papers or files. There were some photos on the credenza behind the desk. Stone pointed to one. A big, bearish man with a bluff, honest face, white hair and thick gray eyebrows was standing next to a smaller, flabby man with a bad comb–over but who possessed a pair of cagey brown eyes and a furtive expression.