III

“Are you sure there’s nothing in that book?” said Nemo when they had started to drop out of the mountains toward the piedmont on a twisting two-lane road.

“I flipped through it twice,” said Patton. “No bookmarks, no letters or receipts for safe deposit boxes, no circled words or underlined sentences. What makes you so sure it’s even important? And for that matter you never did tell me how you know about Jasper or what you know about Jasper.”

“I guess I don’t know as much as I thought,” said Nemo, “if there’s nothing in that book.”

“When I said back at the house that I wanted to talk to Jasper you said we should assume that’s not a possibility,” said Patton. “What did you mean by that?”

“Nothing. Don’t worry about it.”

“But I do worry about it. Is Jasper dead? Did you kill Jasper and then start taking shots at me and then pretend to rescue me?” Patton spoke evenly, but there was a tinge of anger and accusation in her voice.

“I didn’t shoot at you and I didn’t pretend to rescue you,” said Nemo.

“And Jasper? Is he dead?”

“Yes,” said Nemo flatly.

“Jesus,” said Patton, turning to look at the passing landscape. She had suspected it since this morning. Hell, she had expected it every day since she had gotten to know Jasper. Anytime you have a friend in his nineties you think about death every time you see him. But Patton felt the blow with an unexpected weight. Jasper had been her only real friend in Alta Vista. Her only real friend anywhere, she thought.

She turned back to face Nemo, because now she wanted to know, she needed to know how he knew about Jasper. “Did you kill him?” she said.

“You don’t want to go there, Patton,” said Nemo, but she could see the white in his knuckles as he gripped the steering wheel more tightly.

“Did you kill him?”

“I was hired to kill him,” said Nemo.

“Stop the car,” said Patton.

“I’m not going to stop the car.”

“I said stop the car.”

“I’m not going to stop the car. We don’t have time for me to stop the car.”

“Stop the damn car or I swear to God I’ll blow your fucking head off.” Patton leveled her gun at Nemo’s temple, but he didn’t flinch.

“You do that and the car will crash and we’ll both be dead.”

“OK,” Patton said, moving the gun. “Then I’ll take out your left kneecap. You want to find out what that feels like, or do you want to stop the car?”

“Just give me ten more minutes,” said Nemo, “then we’ll be someplace safe and I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. Now stop waving that damn gun at me.”

But Patton did not lower her gun as Nemo turned onto a narrower road and then, a couple of miles later, onto an unpaved track. A few minutes later he pulled the car to a stop behind the remnants of a house that looked like it had first collapsed and then burned and both a long time ago. The area was thick with weeds and briars that stood taller than the car, and forest surrounded the house on three sides. He switched off the engine and turned to look at Patton.

“We should be good here for a few hours,” he said.

“How would you know that?” said Patton.

“Because I’ve already staked the place out,” said Nemo. “Always have a place to retreat.”

“Smart strategy,” said Patton, still pointing the gun at him. “Now who the hell are you? And what the hell are you.”

“You don’t want to know what I am,” said Nemo.

“Maybe not, but I need to know.”

“There are a lot of words for what I am,” said Nemo. “Hit man, hired gun. The point is I make my living by killing people.”

“But why . . .”

“Just let me tell you about Jasper. Let me tell you and then if you want to shoot me, fine.”

Patton nodded. She could feel a tear trickling down her cheek. Tears really pissed her off. Emotional weakness, her father called them, and she did not want to show weakness in front of Nemo, but she wasn’t about to move the gun to brush the tear away.

“Somebody hired me to kill Jasper. Seemed like a simple enough job, but when I got there, your friend was expecting me. At first I thought he wasn’t completely in his right mind because he seemed to think I was the angel of death. But he knew exactly what he was doing. He told me he didn’t want the guilt of his death to rest on me. And then he very calmly unwrapped a candy bar and started to eat it. I didn’t understand what he was doing, and I was getting a little impatient, when his face turned red and his lips swelled up and he started to gasp for breath.”

“Jasper was allergic to Brazil nuts,” said Patton, the tears coming more regularly now.

“I figured it was something like that. Anyway, that’s when he looked at me and said, ‘Find Patton. She has the key.’ And then he stopped breathing. So my job was done. I wasn’t hired to find a key; I was hired to eliminate Jasper Fleming and he was eliminated.”

“No thanks to you,” said Patton, sniffing.

“Yeah. He was a real gentleman if you think about it. Anyway I’m leaving the house when what do I see parked about fifty yards up the hill but a black van. Subtle, right? Now I don’t know if somebody’s watching me, if these are cops, or if it’s just some kids looking for privacy. So I go back to my car and I decide to watch for a couple of minutes. Nothing happens, so I drive down toward the main road and when I get around the curve I park my car in that pull-off and walk along the edge of the woods to where I can see the van and the house. Sure enough, these two guys get out and walk right into Jasper’s house. I’m curious, which is stupid of me, but I watch. They’re in there for a good three hours, then they go back to the van, and one of them stays there and the other takes a rifle and heads up toward what turns out to be your place.”

“And you followed him,” said Patton.

“You’re welcome,” said Nemo.

“But why? Why didn’t you just leave?”

“Because somebody was using me, and that pisses me off. These guys are serious muscle but they need me to kill Jasper for them? No way. But they also don’t trust me to find whatever they’re looking for. Looks to me like somebody wants me to take the rap for a murder while they get whatever is in that house that’s so important.”

“Only they didn’t find anything, did they?”

“Apparently not. And then they came after you.”

“So for some reason they figured I had it.”

“You were Jasper’s only friend.”

“Been watching him, have you?” said Patton.

“Little bit,” said Nemo.

“So you’re like a big-time professional assassin?”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“Why would someone hire a person like you to kill a ninety-two-year-old man?” said Patton. “Why not just hire some local thug?” She had lowered the gun and finally dragged her sleeve across her damp face.

“I got hired for the same reason I always get hired. Because I have something lacking in Fritz and Franz. I have subtlety. I have discretion. Shooting up your house because they thought you had something important, murdering law enforcement—that’s not just wrong, it’s stupid. That’s not how you conduct yourself in this business if you want more than one job. These guys are not subtle and they’re probably not smart, but they are dangerous.”

“What do you mean you have subtlety?”

“It’s my second rule,” said Nemo. “Never leave a crime scene.”

“You have rules? You kill people for a living and you have rules?” There was a hint of accusation in her voice even as Patton thought about the rules under which she had killed people.

“Four,” said Nemo.

“How can you never leave a crime scene if you’re a professional murderer?”

“Because as far as law enforcement is concerned, everyone I’ve ever killed died of natural causes or in an accident. It takes a lot of hard work to commit a crime that nobody knows is a crime. That’s why they pay me the big bucks.”

“What are your other rules?” said Patton.

“Plan the escape before you plan the crime,” said Nemo. “Never know the client’s endgame, and always have a retreat—like this one. This is the first time I’ve ever intentionally broken a rule.”

“But you said Jasper killed himself, so you didn’t leave a crime scene.”

“True. But whoever hired me didn’t trust me to do the second part of the job—to find whatever he’s looking for. So he sent those thugs after me to get the treasure and probably leave my body in a ditch somewhere or turn me over to the sheriff. That makes me angry. It’s not a good idea to be angry in my business because anger makes you do stupid things. But I don’t care. I’m angry so I’m doing a stupid thing. I’m going to find out the client’s endgame.”

“Why?” said Patton.

“Because it’s a definite possibility that part of his endgame is to kill me, and maybe kill you, and I’d rather that didn’t happen.”

“Who is this client?”

“I wish I knew.”

“An anonymous customer?”

“They all are,” said Nemo. “The dark web is a mysterious place. Anyway, when I saw Fritz trying to ruin your day, I figured I had to find whatever he was looking for before he did and get the hell out of Alta Vista. Since Jasper said you had the key, and they didn’t find anything in his house, I guessed that meant another property someplace. But you said he never gave you a key. Just an old book.”

“Wait a minute,” said Patton, suddenly remembering something. “When I flipped through that book, The Key to Rebecca, the back pages were in perfect condition.”

“So?”

“So, I spilled water all over the back of that book and it’s a cheap book club edition. It should have soaked through the cover in no time.”

“What’s your point?”

Patton lowered her gun and placed it, with Nemo’s, on the floor, well out of his reach. She pulled the book out from under her seat. The rear panel of the dust jacket was badly water damaged, but, as she had recalled, the inside of the cover wasn’t affected at all. Patton carefully peeled back the dust jacket to discover, taped on its back side, a thin plastic bag containing a single sheet of yellowed paper with one of its corners chipped off. Printed at the top were what looked like two lightning bolts and the word “H-Sonderkommando.” Below that were two German words written in pencil and then a series of typed five letter words that weren’t words, as far as Patton could tell. Not even German ones.

“You think this might be what they’re looking for?” she said, holding up the dust jacket so Nemo could see the paper.

“Holy shit,” said Nemo. “Is that . . .”

“If I’m guessing right,” said Patton, “this is a message from the Nazi SS encoded with an Enigma machine.”

“The SS? Like storm troopers and . . .”

“And concentration camps and Heinrich Himmler.”

“Apparently it’s a message worth killing for, even all these years later,” said Nemo.

“Yeah,” said Patton. “So what are you waiting for? Let’s get the hell out of here before Fritz and Franz track us down.”

“They’re not going to track us down—at least not here. Can you break this code?”

“If you give me a computer and Internet access,” said Patton.

“Absolutely not,” said Nemo. “We need to stay off the grid.”

“What about a computer at a library or something?” said Patton.

“What would you use it for, exactly?”

“There’s a site that uses statistical techniques and the hill-climbing search algorithm to find the key for an Enigma message,” said Patton.

“Just one site?” said Nemo.

“Just one.”

“Then you can be absolutely sure that whoever hired me is watching that site. We use it to break the code and we hand them our only bargaining chip.”

“That’s inconvenient,” said Patton.

“Isn’t there another way? A way to break it without the Internet?”

“There is,” said Patton, “but you’d need an Enigma machine, something called a Bombe, and an old friend of mine who happens to be an expert in the field. Lucky for us they’re all in the same place.”

“Where’s that?” said Nemo.

“Bletchley Park, about fifty miles north of London. Not exactly convenient.”

“The first thing I do whenever I finish a job is leave the country,” said Nemo, “so it suits me. You have a passport?”

“Yeah,” said Patton. “But given that Bletchley is the obvious place to go to break an Enigma message, don’t you think they’ll know that’s where we’re headed?”

“Probably,” said Nemo, “which means stealth is more important than speed at this point. So, we stay here for a few hours, get some sleep, then head out.” Nemo took a sleeping bag out of the trunk and led Patton a short way into the woods to a small clearing. “You can take the bag,” he said. “I can sleep anywhere.”

Patton shoved the two guns into the foot of the sleeping bag and crawled in. She thought the idea of sleeping in the middle of the afternoon foolish, but ten minutes later she was out like a light. When she awoke, Nemo and the car had both disappeared.

They were not named Fritz and Franz. They were named Karl Gruning and Erich Koepler and they were smart enough to know they had fucked up. Or at least Karl was. Erich was the one who had gotten trigger happy twice in one morning and ended up killing someone who worked for local law enforcement. Not a smart move. Karl had followed his companion up the road after Erich failed to answer a radio message. He had heard noises coming from the toolshed and had pried the lock and hasp off the rotting wood of the door with a knife to discover Erich groggy from the effects of a tranquilizer dart. They wanted to search P.J. Harcourt’s house, but when they came out of the shed, they saw a sheriff’s car pull into the side yard. Afraid their escape might be blocked, and still a little loopy from the tranquilizer, Erich had taken a shot at one of the men who got out of the car. Karl grabbed the gun and considered shooting the other man, but no one had seen them, and he didn’t want to compound Erich’s mistake. Their employer would be angry enough about one dead cop. Luckily, the ensuing confusion on the part of the survivor gave them plenty of cover to get the hell out of there. They knew that pretty soon cops would be crawling all over the place, so they ran back down the road to where they had left the van and drove away, turning right on the main road, away from town. They would take back roads down the mountain to avoid any police who might be coming in from town. It might take an hour longer, but there was no point in rushing. Nemo and the woman could be anywhere by now.

Lack of sleep had probably contributed to their poor judgment that morning, but their employer wouldn’t care anything about that. They had been watching Nemo for the past week, and you never knew when he was going to sleep or wake up. When Nemo finally went in to kill Jasper, they were ready to search the house as soon as he left, but after three hours they hadn’t found anything, and they decided P.J. Harcourt must have the paper. She was the one person who had regular contact with Jasper. Even though Erich wasn’t brilliant, he was observant, and he had seen P.J.’s name on one of the two mailboxes at the end of Lone Pine Road—the box that didn’t say Fleming.

They figured they would take out this Harcourt character, find the paper, and be out of there as fast as possible. Erich would do the job; Karl would stay in the van, monitor the police radio, and watch the road for Nemo, in case he came back. But Nemo had stayed hidden as he followed Erich to P.J.’s house and the morning hadn’t gone quite the way Karl and Erich had expected.

Thirty minutes after hightailing it away from the body of a dead sheriff’s deputy and finally back on the main highway, Karl and Erich picked up a signal from Patton Jackson Harcourt’s cell phone, which their employer had helped them hack into.

“They’re headed west,” said Karl, “toward Tennessee.”

“Where in Tennessee?” said Erich.

“Who cares where,” said Karl. “Just get on Interstate 40 and drive west. And don’t get too close. We don’t want them to know we’re following.”

They were well past Knoxville when the signal came to a stop in the parking lot of a BBQ joint.

“You stay here,” said Karl, pulling the van around to the back of the building. “I’ll check to see what they’re up to.” Karl slipped in through the back door and got a view of the entire dining area before someone asked what he was doing in the kitchen. He didn’t see Nemo or the woman anywhere.

“Sorry,” said Karl in English. “My mistake.” Five minutes later he found Patton’s phone taped to the running board of a semitruck in the parking lot.

“Bitch thinks she’s smarter than us,” said Karl, slamming the door as he slid back into the passenger seat of the van. “If she sent the phone west then she’s going east, but she’s got a hell of a lead on us now.” They pulled back onto the highway, heading east, and Erich gunned it to eighty.

“Slow down,” said Karl. “The last thing we need is to get pulled over by the police.”

“Do you think the assassin is with her?” said Erich.

“Well he’s not locked in the toolshed,” said Karl, “so for the time being I think we have to assume so.”

When they had crossed back into North Carolina, Erich insisted on pulling into a rest area. Karl decided he could delay no longer and took out the burner phone to make an uncomfortable call. Even though they had broken protocol already that morning, not least by killing a member of law enforcement, this was one protocol Karl was not willing to suspend. In the event of failure, ring the home office.

Once Karl explained the situation, the voice on the other end of the line did not shout, but it nonetheless made Karl’s blood run cold. He, of all people, knew just how ruthless his boss could be and he wanted nothing more than to make this right before he got called in from the field.

“They can’t use computers or cell phones,” said the voice. “He’s smart enough to know we would track them. There’s only one place in the world to do what they need to do without going online. If I can think of anyone else to send I will but you and your idiot companion represent the whole of our field operatives at the moment, which is exactly why this operation needs to succeed. I’ll let you know the details as soon as we make a decision here.”

The voice explained where Karl and Erich needed to go next. They would need to dump their weapons, of course, and the voice told Karl that, if things played out as it suspected they would, he might need to improvise. The voice signed off in the usual manner and Karl dropped the phone into a cupholder.

“Where do we go?” said Erich.

“Closest international airport,” said Karl.

“Are they calling us home?”

“Sounds like we might be going to London,” said Karl.

“Looks like from here the closest major airport is Atlanta,” said Erich, looking at the map on his phone. “Plenty of flights from there.”

Jean Simpson had just turned off the lights in her office when the phone rang. She considered ignoring it—anyone important would call on her cell phone. But Jean had been raised with manners, and that meant answering a ringing phone no matter how likely it was a student complaining about a grade or wanting to have a conference outside office hours.

“Jean, it’s Peter Byerly. I’ve been looking a little closer at that book you left with me and I’ve found something . . . well, something a little disturbing to be honest.”

“Funny you should say that,” said Jean. “I’ve been digging into Ingrid Weiss and Columbia House and I’ve found several disturbing things. Would you like to meet for coffee at the Rathskeller?”

“I don’t drink coffee,” said Peter. “But I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

The Rathskeller was Ridgefield’s rebellion against Starbucks—a throwback to the time when coffee shops near college campuses were more about poetry and folk music than lattes and cappuccinos. Located in the basement of a building on the strip across from the main entrance to campus, it had dark corners, cheap coffee, spotty cell service, and no Wi-Fi. It was the best place in Ridgefield to have a chance of spotting the socially anxious Peter Byerly in public, and Jean knew that. The two of them sat in a booth in a back corner where Jean sipped a coffee and Peter ignored a mug of tepid tea.

“I don’t think this book belonged to your grandfather,” said Peter, indicating the volume that sat on the table between them, “and I don’t think anyone rescued it from a charity shop or bought it from a rare book dealer. I think somebody stole it from the National Library of the Czech Republic in Prague.”

“That’s a very specific suspicion,” said Jean.

“Tell me what you found out about Weiss.”

“Nothing concrete,” said Jean. “Just a pastiche of oddities that may or may not add up to something.”

“Oddities like what?”

“For starters, she lives on Döbereinerstrasse in a neighborhood of Munich called Obermenzing.”

“And other than a chance for you to show off your German pronunciation, what’s disturbing about that?”

“I went to a conference on art forgery once and the mantra was never take anything at face value. Always look below the surface. So, I looked below the surface of Ingrid Weiss’s address and she lives in a district that was popular with Nazis back in the day. And Döbereinerstrasse wasn’t always called that. During the war it was Hermann Göring Strasse. Göring lived in the neighborhood for a while, although I can’t find his exact address.”

“Surely there are plenty of neighborhoods in Germany once inhabited by Nazis,” said Peter. “And plenty of streets that once had—shall we say, politically incorrect names.”

“Of course, but that’s just the beginning. She runs an organization called Columbia House, but other than giving away old books, I can’t figure out what they do. The website says something vague about international business concerns but the only mentions I can find elsewhere are about their charitable work returning books stolen by the Nazis.”

“Seems reasonable that those activities would get the press.”

“True, and I did track down several dozen stories about books being returned. It looks like they’ve been doing it for a year or so.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“I read about forty or fifty of these articles, and almost half of them include this same sentence, with the exact same wording—‘Columbia House has returned over a thousand volumes of literature and academia usurped by Nazi Germany to their rightful owners.’ ”

“That’s a strange sentence,” said Peter.

“It’s a very strange sentence,” said Jean. “And it turns up again and again in these articles. I think every time Columbia House returns a book, they send a copy of a press release to the local papers. It’s like they’re more interested in getting publicity than in actually reuniting people with lost heirlooms. And if they have really returned a thousand books, how come I could only find a few dozen articles? I will say this, they seem to return books all over the world—Germany, the UK, a woman on the Upper East Side of New York City.”

“Let me guess. You called the New Yorker.”

“She said she received a book a couple of months ago that supposedly belonged to her great-uncle. She never thought to question the story, but she called me back an hour later to say she found some marginalia in the book that was definitely not in her great-uncle’s handwriting.”

“He might have loaned the book to someone or bought it secondhand.”

“Maybe,” said Jean, “but there seems to be a pattern here. And there’s one more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“The name of the company. Columbia House.”

“The same as that outfit that used to get you to buy records, right?”

“That’s what everyone in our generation thinks of, but there’s another antecedent. Columbia-Haus was one of the first Nazi concentration camps. It’s not well known because it was only open for three years from 1933 to 1936, before they tore it down to make way for an expansion of the Berlin airport.”

“So you think Ingrid Weiss is living on a Nazi street in a Nazi neighborhood and running a company with a Nazi name in order to send people books for free that they actually have no right to?”

“Sounds ridiculous, I know.”

“There’s a narrative that explains it all,” said Peter. “You just haven’t discovered it yet. But there’s something else that’s bothering me.”

“Besides the fact that my book was stolen from the national library in Prague?”

“Oh right, that,” said Peter, sliding the book across the table to Jean. “Look at page 157 and at the rear endpaper. In both cases you’ll see someone has tried to sand off a library stamp, but the ink has gone too deep into the paper to be so easily erased. If you look at the verso of those pages you can just make out the stamp of the Public and University Library of Czechoslovakia—what’s now the National Library of the Czech Republic.”

“Maybe it ended up there after the Nazis stole it from my grandfather.”

“The stamp has an acquisition date—1921,” said Peter.

“So it’s been there since it was published.”

“Until someone walked off with it.”

“I doubt that was my grandfather,” said Jean.

“Seems unlikely,” said Peter.

“What was the other thing bothering you?”

“It’s just this,” said Peter. “I know the Nazis stole a lot of books. But so far as I know, they didn’t stock them away in salt mines like they did with artwork.”

“I thought of that, too,” said Jean. “There’s only one thing the Nazis are famous for when it comes to books.”

Peter smiled and finally took a sip of his tea, then nodded to Jean as he said, “Burning them.”

“I don’t know why I even care about this,” said Jean Simpson, draining the rest of her coffee cup and pushing back her chair. “I should just mail the book back to the library in Prague and let them deal with Ingrid Weiss—if she really is a book thief.”

“Yes,” said Peter, “that’s exactly what you ought to do. It’s probably no more than petty theft and someone trying to inflate their charitable résumé. Just send the book back and let it lie.”

“Is that what you would do?”

“Absolutely not.”

“You’d be on the next plane to Prague.”

“It’s a lovely city.”

“Well, not everyone has Peter Byerly’s taste for bibliographic mysteries.”

“Not everyone,” said Peter with a smile, “but you do.”

“Exams are over in a couple of days,” said Jean.

“And you go to Europe every May.”

“Vienna this year,” said Jean. “Two weeks including a conference on the art of Prussia.”

“Sounds delightful. And I assume you already know how far Vienna is from Prague?”

“Four hours by train,” said Jean. “And the same distance to Munich.”

Patton couldn’t decide whether to be angry, frightened, or relieved. If Nemo had left for good, maybe she could put this whole crazy affair behind her. But if Fritz and Franz thought she had the Enigma sheet, her life might still be in danger. And how did she know this place was secure? How did she know Nemo wasn’t working with Fritz and Franz? How did she know they wouldn’t be back any minute to finish her off and bury her in the middle of nowhere where no one would ever find her?

She felt in the bottom of the sleeping bag and was relieved to discover the guns were still there. She shoved Nemo’s in her belt and held the Beretta in front of her, the safety flicked off, as she made her way toward the ruined house. A half-moon gave just enough pale light for her to find her way to the remains of the front steps where she sat waiting and trying to decide if she would be pleased or concerned if she saw headlights coming up the track from the road. An hour later, when she saw just that, two white lights bobbing up and down and growing gradually larger, she pointed the Beretta toward the lights and waited.

A minute later the gray Taurus pulled to a stop in front of her, and Nemo leaned out the window.

“Miss me?” he said.

“You might have told me you were going,” she said.

“Hadn’t really thought it through before you fell asleep. Hop in.”

“Where are we going?”

“Flight to London leaves from Atlanta at seven tomorrow morning,” said Nemo. “I’ve got coffee, fried chicken, and two first-class tickets bought with cash from a very happy travel agent in Wilkesboro.”

“I didn’t know there was still such a thing as travel agents.”

“In Wilkesboro there is,” said Nemo. “I also found a nice lake to dump everything we’re not taking on the plane.”

“Even Jasper’s Enigma machine?” said Patton wistfully.

“Sorry,” said Nemo. “No loose ends.” Patton hated to think of the result of all Jasper’s work rusting away on the bottom of some muddy lake, but she understood.

“I’ll bet a mysterious assassin like you who lives his whole life in the shadows has no idea where to get good fried chicken,” said Patton, putting the safety back on her pistol and climbing into the car. But she was wrong. It was the best fried chicken she’d ever had.