Signs on a Page, page 15
She had never been in there and first perused his bookshelf, commenting on his interesting anthropology books. Roger didn’t answer her. He locked the door and reached his arms around her belly from behind, holding her close, squeezing his chest against her back.
Molly smiled as she slowly rotated within his grasp to face him and plunge into a deep kiss, their tongues colliding as the embrace grew stronger and stronger.
The kiss was long, long and almost exhausting—but it did not exhaust Roger too much to lift Molly’s red silk blouse over her head, exposing her ivory-white breasts nestled in a white bra. They continued to kiss, Molly moving to his neck as she began unbuttoning his fleece shirt, almost ripping it as she exposed his narrow chest.
Molly’s loose, mid-thigh skirt fell easily, exposing her long, thin, smoothly contoured legs. Roger sat on his knees, rubbing up on her thighs as he kissed one, then the other, then the first again, rising up to nestle his hands along her tight butt cheeks, pausing only to lower his own jeans.
Their shoes had been flung off by the time Roger’s hands managed—with slight delay and difficulty that made Molly squeal at his lack of dexterity—to unclasp her bra, letting it fall to the ground as he cradled her white breasts softly, lowering his head to kiss, lick, and suck at her nipples.
They simultaneously shed the rest, facing each other in a short, awe-inspiring, naked moment before collapsing into each other’s arms and another deep kiss, walking sideways toward Roger’s small dorm bed.
Molly was more satisfied than she had ever been before.
Fight over.
30
Molly shied away from the university dining hall for breakfast, remembering the old walk-of-shame jibe from her college days, and they went around the corner to a coffee shop. Roger then headed off to class, and Molly returned to Stamford.
Back in her kitchen, scrolling through her credit card statements and incoming bills, Molly was dismayed to realize that she’d have to start on some paid consulting jobs to make ends meet while she continued to pursue her unpaid scavenger hunt of connected clues. Reluctantly, she sent a nice email back to a firm that had inquired about her looking into records of an 1870s mining deal in the Rockies. Seemed dull but perhaps easy. In every job, as she had told Roger several times, there were tiresome, tedious tasks that needed to be done.
Molly prided herself on her ability to concentrate on one task—an attribute seldom emphasized among the many geniuses of the ages. For instance, Einstein was no doubt outstandingly brilliant, but he was also able to work at a problem for days and weeks and months and years. That persistence was surely part of his success.
But now she struggled to avoid withdrawing into the confines of her ongoing, much larger and much more important (she thought) secret research project.
The words printed on the Carpenter’s palm had been His wine cooler is guarded by our man who regretted his mortality. Interrupting her web search for the history of mining operations in the Western US, Molly Googled the phrase “wine cooler.” She received many Amazon links to buy wine coolers and kept searching.
Wine cooler could refer to a wine-based, summery beverage or perhaps to a contraption for storing and presenting wine bottles; she wasn’t sure which. Nothing specific came up for the drink itself, so she tried to limit her search to the metal or wooden contraptions that were used to hold wine bottles in a generally ornamental fashion.
She stopped at a listing from Christie’s auction house from 2012.21 They had auctioned off a Sheffield-plated silver wine cooler, one of four that George Washington had bought for the President’s House in 1789. The president gave one to Alexander Hamilton in 1797, and Christie’s had auctioned the item on behalf of Hamilton’s direct descendants. Washington had taken two with him to Mount Vernon upon his retirement.
“Guarded by our man who regretted his mortality,” she repeated aloud. Who regretted his mortality? Everyone. But at that time, in the revolutionary period, one quote came to mind: “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” Nathan Hale, a Yale graduate of 1773, had served as a soldier and gathered intelligence for the Continental Army. He was executed by the British in New York in 1776.
Did Hale, the person, physically guard the wine cooler during his life? All information indicated that Washington had bought the wine cooler in 1789, thirteen years after Hale’s death. But there were pictures and statues of Captain Hale. Could the wine cooler be adjacent to or underneath a statue of Hale? No, the wine cooler was sold by Christie’s in 2012. Or was it? There were originally four wine coolers. One was clearly given to Hamilton, and one was given to secretary of state Timothy Pickering.22 But Molly couldn’t find where the other two had gone. Was the one sold by Christie’s indeed the one presented to Hamilton, or was it replaced over the years? Maybe a wine cooler was underneath a Nathan Hale statue.
The problem was twofold: there were several Nathan Hale statues. One, at the RFK Department of Justice building in Washington, DC, was sculpted by Bela Lyon Pratt, cast in 1930 and dedicated in 1948. Others were at Fort Nathan Hale along the east shore of New Haven Harbor, at the Chicago Tribune Tower, at the CIA headquarters, and on the Yale campus. The CIA one, she read, was a copy of Yale’s, with the university’s permission.
One wine cooler couldn’t be at all these places. If only there was a way to know which one was used. Any other clues I’ve read? Could I somehow survey the ground nearby and underneath these statues? A metal detector could detect silver, but depending on how deep the cooler was buried, that might not work.
Molly sat back, stared up at her kitchen ceiling, and sighed. She spent a few idle minutes scanning documentation that the mine operation investigators had sent her, trudging through painstaking details of sites and acreage to get a rudimentary understanding of the locations they were looking at.
She definitely could not muster the enthusiasm she had for Nathan Hale statues and wine coolers at this point. Molly had to get a metal detector. Maybe Roger can help. He seemed to know all sorts of people at the university who might have ideas for her, perhaps in the Engineering Department.
She sent her boyfriend a text. Molly was always very reluctant to use that word until a man had really proven himself over several months, and in more ways than one, but Roger had finally earned that honor. He texted her back between classes—Or, more likely for him, she mused, during a class—and told her he was contacting an engineering friend he had. Taking advice from grad students. She laughed. Better than nothing.
A boyfriend certainly got back to her faster than the more senior research contacts she used. He asked her what she was looking for with a metal detector, but she said she’d tell him later. She knew she’d prevaricate until she found something on her own. Once again, Molly was a solo agent. Extra people on board were extra baggage to carry, even if it was a close friend or boyfriend.
Molly received a metal detector recommendation later in the day and went directly to the hardware store. She put the 250 bucks on her credit card, reminding herself as she signed her name that she needed to work on the mining project. Money was money.
Shying away from starting at such a secure location as CIA headquarters, Molly intended to begin her search at the Judiciary Department building in Washington. She went during a busy, tourist-infested day and walked back and forth around the statue, holding the metal detector at every possible angle yet finding nothing. She then drove up a busy I-95 to New Haven and tried the same at Fort Nathan Hale; again, nothing. The area around the Hale statue on Yale’s Old Campus was closed off for maintenance, so she flew to Chicago and tried the statue at the Chicago Tribune building. This was getting disheartening.
She called a friend at the Pentagon and asked about the Nathan Hale statue at Langley but was told to steer clear. Security around that site was so intense that her presence, and particularly a metal detector, would light off more loud alarms than she could deal with. So, the Yale statue was next on the list—and her last hope if she wanted to avoid the year’s worth of paperwork and intrusive background check the CIA would require.
Joining a campus tour to hide her intentions, Molly was pleased to see the maintenance workers still at work near Connecticut Hall, with huge trucks digging up and replacing underground piping about fifty feet from the statue. If she found something, perhaps this was an avenue for access.
Typical of all modern do-it-yourselfers, she had already watched several online videos of people digging underground tunnels, all of whom were exuberantly excited about the instruments they used and the progress they were making. She returned late in the day with her metal detector hidden in a large duffel bag and approached the statue, just feet away from the maintenance barricades.
The metal detector started beeping.
31
Now Molly couldn’t deny that she could really use Roger’s help. If he later failed as a boyfriend, at least he could be useful here and now!
When she gave him a call later that evening, he sounded excited to hear about what she was looking for, although he had perhaps imbibed a bit too much after dinner. She was out of town the next two days to meet with the mining company executives down in New York, but they made a plan to meet up after that, late at night on the Old Campus—and tunnel their way toward the site the metal detector indicated.
Not overtly dressed to conceal their identities but overall wearing darker shades, at around 2:30 a.m. the two approached Old Campus, holding hands, with Roger carrying the large duffel bag. They circled the statue with the metal detector and found the loudest, most reliable signal just to the left of the statue, almost directly lateral to Nathan Hale’s left arm. Only two feet from the base of the pedestal. Hopefully, their dig wouldn’t take them close enough to undermine the stability of the statue itself.
They took turns digging and keeping watch for police and students. A few times they had to suspend their work, throw a towel down over the hole, and walk around the block, holding hands to maintain the student-couple look while a police patrol came by.
“Cops are rotating through about every twenty minutes,” Roger whispered on their next walkabout. Fifteen minutes later, on their next position swap, Molly took up the shovel again, and Roger began his usual patrol.
Minutes went by, and Molly grew tired, occasionally straightening to check for Roger. She could no longer see him. Her breathing grew heavy as she lifted smaller and smaller loads of dirt, digging deeper but still not finding anything. She tried the metal detector now and then and was still getting a signal. She prayed the device was not just picking up a metal pipe.
Twenty minutes later, she hit wood and began digging faster around the surface to reveal the edges of a lid. Where the hell is Roger? She was getting frustrated and upset and worried but continued to dig, uncovering a smallish box, about two feet long on each side. The soil to the sides of the box was looser, and she was soon able to get her long, thin fingers around it.
She crouched down to reach further along the sides of the box, and it moved under her fingers. Molly struggled to pull it up.
Suddenly she heard a whizz in the air and a tiny explosion of rock as a projectile hit the statue’s pedestal, with a second one rapidly ricocheting against Nathan Hale’s foot.
She ducked and cried out involuntarily. Soft pops, from silenced guns, now came from all directions. She tried to wiggle the box free while keeping her head down. “Fuck!”
Molly finally got hold of the box, ripped it from the ground, and gripped it tightly to her chest, sprinting toward the nearby Rosenfield gate.
Five men in black moved in through Phelps gate, with a second group of three approaching from the opposite side by Harkness tower. The men fanned out over the grass, unsure where the woman had gone.
“She must have gone toward one of the gates. Close them all off, now!” a man growled into a tiny microphone.
Roger turned to look back at the speaker, nodding and pointing toward the Harkness gate. Now dressed fully in black and clutching a black HK MP5/10, Molly’s boyfriend was firing shots at anything that moved.
Molly made it to the street and started running north, glancing behind her, hoping to see the police or a taxi. She thanked her lucky stars that her attackers hadn’t found her until she was basically ready to flee. But where can I run? Whoever these men were, they were deadly.
A black van screeched to a halt on the street about twenty yards ahead of her, and men in black suits jumped out from the rear doors, well armed. They ran directly toward her. She heard the men behind emerging from the gate she had exited and spotted two figures leaving the other gate in her peripheral.
She pelted left, across the street, and a car careened off the road onto the sidewalk, narrowly missing her and hitting one of her assailants from the van.
Remembering the particulars of a small café nearby, Molly dashed over a cross street and dove downstairs to the underground door, ducking her head. She cautiously peered up through the wrought iron fencing and eyed the men in black moving toward her from the campus. With relief, she witnessed the second group start firing at the first set of men. Molly squeezed into a thin passageway alongside the café building, leaving the box in dark shadow just outside the enclosure.
“She can’t have gotten far,” one of the men muttered into his headset.
“She knows these streets too well,” Roger replied. “She’s a resourceful girl. I bet she had a getaway in mind when she started. And now these guys are on us!”
“And you know these streets well too, Soloview,” the man almost shouted back, using Roger’s call sign. “She never told you that plan?”
“Nope.” Roger rolled on the ground under a tree and continued firing at the newer set of masked warriors. “We must get her. She’s in too deep!”
“How the hell did we lose her?” another voice demanded over the joint radio frequency.
“Too dark in that corner of the campus,” Roger replied. “But there was no way I could’ve convinced her to do this during the day.”
Molly’s defenders had seen where she hid, and four created a perimeter on the street, firing madly. Two jumped down into the underground passageway in front of the café, one grabbing the wooden box and the second Molly’s arm, without a word pulling her out of her narrow hiding space as their black van spun around the corner and stopped on the sidewalk.
Men fired from the side windows. Molly’s rescuer threw her light frame over his big shoulder and lifted her up toward the open van door, into the waiting arms of another man. The rest kept firing as they mounted a second van parked just behind the first, and then both screeched down the street, bullets scattering off the armored sides.
Molly lifted her head painfully off the floor of the van as one of the men pulled her up. Now on her knees, she sobbed hysterically.
“It’s okay, Molly, it’s okay. We got you.” A man in a black suit turned to look at her from the front passenger seat. It was Nathan. He gestured for her to be quiet, and Molly clutched the box they had given back to her.
“Where’s my friend?”
“We don’t know. We don’t know who was with you. He’s the student you’ve been seeing?”
“Did they get him?”
“Maybe. We can’t worry about that now.” Nathan spoke calmly. “We’re taking you home.”
Molly cried, “How can I stay there? Who are these—”
“In time. In time, Molly. You’ll know. We’re watching you.”
She sat silently in a seat they opened for her. Other than Nathan, the others stayed masked the entire ride, holding their guns but not speaking. They drove off the Stamford exit, found her little side road, and dropped her at her driveway. One of the masked men nodded to her, and Nathan shook her hand before she stepped out with the box. He opened the passenger window for some final words. “Molly,” he said quietly, “we’re watching you.”
She said nothing, just turned and stumbled up the driveway to her door.
32
The colliding emotions in her head reminded her of her traumatic visit to the Ogilvies. She had had enough. Enough. She told herself she didn’t care what was in that box.
Who were those people? Who are the other people? The first group of attackers clearly wanted her dead. The second group—Nathan’s group—clearly wanted her alive. But if they were watching me, why did they not do more? Where is Roger? Poor Roger. She hoped he’d seen them and run. He was no athlete, but hopefully his stubby little legs took him out of danger. The mysterious attackers must have scared him away before they came after her. Molly called Roger’s phone and left two messages but got no reply.
Molly did not want to open the box. That box might contain the answers to all her questions, and she still didn’t want to look at it. It sat on her dining room counter. She would leave it there.
For a few minutes, at least.
The men who had assailed her were no doubt aware of where she lived, and despite what Nathan said about watching her, his group had yet to prevent the dangerous situations she kept finding herself in. She had no time to lose. After a dinner of kale salad and tomato soup and a healthy serving of Jim Beam, she stood from her kitchen table and approached the box.
The top was easy to open, just four mildly rusted, rotating screws, no lock; this box had been secured by its hiding spot, not by any feature of the box itself.
Molly held her breath as she pulled a hefty, hollow silver object out of the box and placed it on the nearby coffee table. A silver wine cooler. The inscription on the side of the cooler, she had read online, was a copy of the accompanying letter Washington had sent to his former military aide and Treasury secretary, Hamilton:
Mount Vernon, Aug 21, 1797
