Book of Souls

At that moment, Malcolm Frazier awoke with a start and a scowl, uncharacteristically disoriented. The credits were rolling on the in-flight movie, and the elderly woman in the middle seat was tapping his granite shoulder to get past him to the lavs. The coach seats on the American flight were not configured for his large, muscular body and his right leg was pressure-numb. He rose and shook out the pins and needles and cursed his superiors for not springing for business class.

There was nothing about this assignment he liked. Sending the head of security at Area 51 on a mission to buy a book at auction seemed ludicrous. Even this book. Why couldn’t they have sent a lab toad? He would have gladly dispatched one of his watchers to babysit. But no. The Pentagon wanted him. Unfortunately, he knew why.

The Caracas Event.

It was T minus thirty days and counting.

One of those seminal Area 51 predictions was bearing down on them, but this one was different. They weren’t in their usual reactive, defensive mode. They were going to capitalize on the data, go on the offense. The Pentagon was geared up. The Joint Chiefs were in perpetual session. The Vice President was personally chairing a task force. The full heft of the US government was pushing hard on this. It was the worst possible time for the one missing book to surface. Secrecy was always the top priority at Groom Lake, but no one wanted to be talking about a possible security breech with a month to go until Operation Helping Hand.

Helping Hand!

What Pentagon spin doctor came up with that?

If the missing book wound up in some egghead’s hands, who knew what kinds of questions might be asked, what kinds of facts might surface?

So Frazier understood why he got the assignment. Still, he didn’t have to like it.

The pilot announced they were approaching the coast of Ireland and would land at Heathrow in two hours. At his feet was an empty leather case, specially sized and padded for the job. He was already counting the hours until he was back in Nevada, the priceless 1527 book sitting heavy and snug inside his government-issued shoulder bag.

THE AUCTION ROOM at Pierce & Whyte was off the main hall on the ground floor of the Georgian mansion. Bidders signed in at a reception desk and entered a fine old room with fawn-colored hardwood floors, a high, plastered ceiling, and one entire wall lined with bookcases that required a ladder to reach the top shelves. The auction room faced the High Street, and with the drapes pulled back, yellow shafts of sunlight intersected with neat rows of brown wooden chairs making a chessboard pattern. There was space for seventy to eighty patrons, and on this fine bright Friday morning, the room was filling up briskly.

Malcolm Frazier had arrived early, anxious to get on with it. After registering with a pert girl who cheerfully ignored his surliness, he entered the empty room and sat down in the first row, directly in front of the auctioneer’s podium, where he absently twirled his paddle between a meaty thumb and forefinger. As more people arrived, it became increasingly apparent that Frazier was not the typical antiquarian book buyer. His fellow bidders didn’t look like they could bench-press four hundred pounds or swim underwater a hundred yards or kill a man with one weaponless hand. But Frazier was decidedly more nervous than his nearsighted, flabby brethren, since he had never attended an auction and was only vaguely aware of the protocol.

He checked the catalogue and found Lot 113 deep in the brochure. If this was the order of the day, he was afraid he’d have a long, agonizing sit. His posture was erect and stiff, his feet planted heavily beside his shoulder bag, a big block of a man with a face with more angles than curves. In the second row, the chair behind him stayed empty because he blotted out the view to the podium.

He had learned about the auction from a Pentagon e-mail flashed to his encrypted BlackBerry. He had been pushing a shopping cart at a suburban Las Vegas supermarket at the time, dutifully following his wife through the dairy section. The chime that went off on the device was the high-priority one, an insistent whoop that made his mouth go dry in a Pavlovian way. Nothing good ever followed this particular alert tone.

A long-forgotten Defense Intelligence filter that scanned all electronic media for the keywords “1527” and “book” had been triggered, and a low-level analyst at the DIA forwarded the finding up the line, curious but clueless why anyone in military intelligence would give a hoot over a Web-site listing of an old book coming to auction.