The train took off again and gained speed rapidly. Stone was now making his way through the crowd toward Trent. He palmed his knife, keeping the blade tucked against his forearm under his sleeve. He visualized plunging the knife up to the hilt into Trent’s chest. Yet that wasn’t his plan. He would kill the guard, but Stone had no intention of cheating Trent out of spending the rest of his life in prison.
Stone was closing in on his target when his plans were foiled. The train rocketed into Metro Center, came to a stop, and the doors burst open. Metro Center was the busiest station in the entire subway system. Trent and his guard jumped through the open door. In the next car down Seagraves did likewise. Stone and the others pushed their way out and into a crush of passengers rushing to and from trains arriving and departing on two different levels and from several different directions.
Stone kept his gaze on Trent and the hooded figure next to him. From the corner of his eye he saw two men in white jumpsuits heading toward Trent. What he didn’t see was Roger Seagraves slide a small metal object out of his pocket, pull a pin with his teeth and let it fly, even as he turned his back and made sure his ears were plugged.
Stone saw the oblong cylinder sail past him through the air and knew instantly what it was. He whirled around and screamed to Reuben and the others, “Get down and cover your ears!” A couple seconds later the “flash–bang” went off, and dozens of people around it collapsed to the floor holding their ears, covering their eyes and screaming in pain.
Trent and his bodyguard had been unaffected by the explosion. They’d put ear protectors on and had averted their gaze from the “flash” part of the flash–bang.
Stone, woozy despite having put his face to the floor and jammed his coat sleeves into his ears, looked up and saw shoes and feet flying in front of him. As he tried to get up, a large man fleeing the panic barreled into him, knocking him down. Stone felt the tracker fly out of his hands, and he watched with a sickening feeling as it slid across the floor, over the edge and onto the tracks under the train as it pulled out of the station. When the end car cleared the station, he lunged to the edge and looked down. The box had been crushed.
He turned back around and saw that Reuben had attacked the hooded man. Stone sprang to his friend’s aid, not that the big man needed it. Reuben put the smaller man in a half nelson, lifted him off the floor and slammed him headfirst into a metal pole. Then Reuben flung the man away, and he slid across the slick floor as people scrambled to get out of the way. As Reuben stormed toward him, Stone hit him from behind, knocking his friend down.
“What the hell —” Reuben grunted as the shot fired by the man sailed by overhead. Stone had seen the gun and knocked Reuben out of the way just in time.
The hooded man rose on one knee and prepared for a point–blank shot but was dropped by the impact of three rounds in his chest fired by two federal agents who came running up followed by uniformed police.
Stone helped Reuben up and looked around for the others.
Annabelle waved from a far corner, Milton and Caleb beside her.
“Where’s Trent?” Stone called out.
Annabelle shook her head and held her hands up in a helpless gesture.
Stone stared hopelessly around the crowded platform. They’d lost him.
Suddenly, Caleb screamed, “There, going up the escalator. That’s the man who kidnapped me. Foxworth!”
“And Trent!” Milton added.
They all looked upward. At the sound of his alias Seagraves glanced over his shoulder, and his hood fell away, giving them all a good look at him and Albert Trent, who was beside him.
“Damn,” Seagraves muttered. He maneuvered Trent through the crowd, and they raced out of the train station.
Up on the street Seagraves pushed Albert Trent into a cab and gave an address to the driver. He whispered to Trent, “I’ll meet you there later. I’ve got a private plane ready to take us out of the country. Here’re your travel papers and new ID pack. We’ll get your appearance altered.” He shoved a thick wad of documents and a passport into Trent’s hands.
Seagraves started to slam the cab door shut and then abruptly stopped. “Albert, give me your watch.”
“What?”
Seagraves didn’t ask again. He ripped the watch off Trent’s wrist and closed the cab door. It drove off, a panicked Trent looking back at him through the window. Seagraves planned to kill Trent later, and he had to have something belonging to him. He was very angry about having to leave his collection behind, because he couldn’t risk returning to his house. And Seagraves was also upset because he hadn’t been able to get any items from the two agents he’d killed in the Metro.
Well, I can always start a new collection.
He ran across the street to an alleyway, climbed into a van he’d parked there and changed his clothes. Then he waited for his pursuers to appear. And this time he wouldn’t miss.
Chapter 66
Stone and the others rode the escalator out of the Metro along with hundreds of other panicked people. While sirens filled the air and a small army of police converged on the area to investigate the rampage, they walked down the street aimlessly.
“Thank goodness Caleb’s okay,” Milton said.
“Absolutely,” Reuben bellowed. He grabbed Caleb around the shoulders. “What the hell would we do without you to tease?”
“Caleb, how did you come to be abducted?” Stone asked curiously.
Caleb quickly explained about the man calling himself William Foxworth. “He said he had books for me to look at, and then the next thing I know, I’m unconscious.”
“Foxworth, that was the name he used?” Stone asked.
“Yes, it was on his library card, so he would’ve had to show some ID to get it.”
“Undoubtedly not his real name. At least we got a look at him.”
“What do we do now?” Annabelle asked.
“What I still don’t understand is how the chemical wash was put in the books,” Milton said. “Albert Trent works on the intelligence committee staff. He gets the secrets somehow and then passes them on to whom? And how do they end up in books at the reading room where Jewell English and presumably Norman Janklow see and write them down using their special glasses?”
While they were all mulling those questions, Stone used his cell phone to check in with Alex Ford. They were still looking for Trent, but Ford advised Stone and the others to pull back from the chase. “No sense in putting yourselves in more danger,” he said. “You’ve done enough.”
After Stone had told them that, Caleb said, “So where do we go? Home?”
Stone shook his head. “The Library of Congress is near here. I want to go there.”
Caleb wanted to know why.
“Because that’s where this all started, and a library is always a good place to get answers.”
Caleb was able to get them into the library but not the reading room because it was closed on Saturday. Wandering the halls, Stone said to the others, “What confuses me most of all is the timing of events.” He paused, marshaling his thoughts. “Jewell English came to the reading room two days ago, and the highlights were in the Beadle book. Later that night, when we had the book, the highlights vanished. That is a very tight time frame.”
Caleb said, “It is amazing, really, because most books in the vault sit unread for years, even decades. The highlighting would have to go on the letters, and Jewell would have to be contacted to come in with the name of the book to ask for. Then, like you said, that very same day the highlights disappear.”
Stone stopped walking and leaned against a marble banister. “Yet how could they be so sure the timing would work? You wouldn’t want the wash to remain on the pages very long in case the police got their hands on them. Indeed, if we’d acted a little sooner, we might have gotten the book to the FBI before the chemical evaporated. So logically, the highlighting had to have taken place close to the time English came in.”