It took longer than twenty minutes to call a taxi and reach the suburbs. I had the driver drop me off on a side street a couple of blocks from the address I'd been given. Making my way back towards where Joe was supposed to meet his employers, I found a gas station along the highway, surrounded by other businesses and an apartment building. Across the road were some trees, opening up at one point to reveal a sprawling, futuristic-looking building beside a dimly lit parking lot. A glance at the map function on my phone confirmed my first guess: the place was a storage warehouse for the Smithsonian.
Joe's friends weren't where they'd claimed; the gas station was empty of customers. Staying back from the bright streetlights, I looked warily around and caught a glimpse of motion in the shadow of the trees across the road. Pulling the hood of my raincoat low over my face, I crept closer. There were four figures standing around a small metal structure, probably some kind of utility installation. I wondered if they would be cautious enough to call off their plan when Joe didn't show up.
Apparently not. As I watched, one of them pulled a little door on the metal box open. A flashlight flickered in the darkness. I dialed nine-one-one on my cell phone and reported a burglary in progress. As the operator told me to stay on the line and keep away from the suspects, I saw them back away from the structure. There was a brighter flash of light, a loud boom, and the streetlights went out abruptly.
"They just cut the power!" I half-yelled, half-whispered. "Listen to me. There's a Smithsonian storage facility just off the highway, that's their target. This is probably going to be a well-planned heist and they could be dangerous." I hung up before she could give me any more warnings. They hadn't noticed me, but they'd have assumed that causing a power outage would draw attention. They were counting on being out of there with the English Memorial papers before the police could respond.
I hurried across the road, hoping the criminals wouldn't see me. In the sudden darkness I'd lost track of them, and by the time I got to the last place I'd seen them they were out of view. Then, over the sound of the rain, I heard rustling branches and soft voices coming from the woods nearby.
Approaching cautiously, I found a little path among the trees. The voices sounded like they were some distance ahead of me, so I followed. Soon there were lights visible past the woods; the warehouse was still partially lit, presumably by a backup generator. Is the power outage just a diversion? I could make out the lines of a chain-link fence between me and the building, and the shadows of the four burglars standing next to it. One of them was holding a set of garden shears. As I watched, they cut a small hole in the fence and climbed through into the complex. I waited until they were almost out of sight to emerge from the woods.
Peeking through the fence and hoping the shadows of the trees would conceal me, I saw the thieves gathering next to a corner of the building. They'd attached a rope to the wall, and one of them was climbing up holding what looked like a drill. Within moments, the climber had removed a small piece of metal and disappeared into the building. They'd found a way into some kind of vent. The other three hurried up the rope and vanished in turn.
When they had gone, I climbed through the hole in the fence and slowly walked towards the building, hoping to spot a security guard. None appeared; I thought of all the effort the study group had put into planning our rescue of the Dean when Chang took over the school. Judging by how quickly they'd broken into the building, Claude's crew would have carefully planned every step to minimize the chances of being seen. No one else was likely to pursue them in time to stop the heist. I made my way across a driveway and a bit of lawn turning into a swamp in the rain, and then I stood under the wall that had swallowed the thieves.
The grate that had covered the air vent was on the ground where they'd left it, but the crew had been careful enough to pull up the rope. The vent was about seven or eight feet above the ground, tantalizingly close but out of my reach. I jumped up, barely got my hand on the edge, and slipped. Next I tried to take a running start and crashed face-first into the wall. On the third try I was able to hold on to the edge of the vent long enough to grab hold of the rope with my other hand. I pulled myself up and scrambled inside, hoping my first attempts hadn't been heard.
The air vents in the Smithsonian warehouse were about the same size as the ones at Greendale. I'd used those to maneuver in secret during paintball; Chang had even taken up residence there at one point. There was enough room to crawl around, though not comfortably. The problem was that it was too dark to see much and I didn't know where to go. I followed the passage until I ran into a barrier. It felt like there was space on either side. As I lay there trying to choose a direction, I heard muffled voices and a metallic clang from the left.
I crawled towards the sound for what felt like a long way under the circumstances, until a little light began to show through another entrance—a small rectangular gap in the wall that had probably been covered by another grate until a couple minutes before. I slowly slid over to the opening like a cat creeping up on a string. The view was of some big metal cabinets, a tiled floor, and no burglars.
I jumped down from the vent much more easily than I'd climbed in. I found myself in a vast, starkly geometrical room half-illuminated by dim, reddish fluorescent lights, with rows of ceiling-high cabinets extending far into the distance. Curious, I opened a nearby drawer. The contents looked like a lot of oddly shaped rocks until I picked one up and found curved, serrated teeth attached to it. I was holding part of the skull of a dinosaur.
Returning the fossil to the drawer, I walked stealthily down the row of shelves, on the lookout for any sign of Joe's co-conspirators. To one side, the corridors ended in a distant wall of glass. Thinking I heard a whisper, I headed that way. Drawing near the glass, I saw a series of partitioned rooms on the other side, the walls lined with smaller cabinets. Peering around the corner of a shelf, I spotted an open door. Behind it, three men were rifling through the cabinets, taking out some old crumbling papers and wrapping them in plastic bags. I recognized one of them as Joe's friend from the beach.
There was a soft sound of footsteps and a menacing click. I spun around to see a woman about my age aiming a fierce look and a revolver at me. "Freeze right there and explain what you are doing here," she said coldly, with an accent that might have been German. Brigitte, I recalled from Joe's description. "You don't look like building security."
Ok, Annie, I told myself. You've had lots of paintball guns pointed at you before. You can handle this. That wasn't exactly the same thing, but somehow it stopped me from panicking. "Let's just say we have some mutual acquaintances," I told her, hoping they'd be more willing to hear me out if they thought I was a fellow criminal. "Claude will want to hear what I have to say."
Brigitte glared at me skeptically, but gestured toward the room where the other thieves were at work. I walked over with my hands up and she followed a few feet behind, keeping the gun pointed at my head. When we got near the door, the three other burglars looked up in alarm.
"Who is she?" The oldest man snarled in a French accent. I figured he was the leader of the gang.
"I caught her spying on us. She says she has information for you," Brigitte answered. She was standing closer to me than she should have, but her finger was still on the trigger. I stood still and watched carefully.
"Anybody wonder why your new pal Joe didn't show up for this little caper?" I asked them in what I hoped was a cheerful voice. That was answered with a lot of what were probably impolite words in several languages.
"So we offer that guy more money than he's seen in his whole career of petty break-ins and he sells us out?" a younger man in the corner of the room said angrily.
"I don't buy that from him," the tall man with a mustache I'd seen in Ocean City replied. "Our boss, on the other hand, I'd expect anything—"
"Quiet, Viktor!" Claude snapped.
"Joe's not here because he's too busy being accused of murdering a congressional staffer," I explained. All four of them exchanged looks of bewilderment. If they're faking, they should give up crime to form a theatre troupe. "He insists he was framed. If that's true, you're all high on the list of people who had the opportunity to set it up."
Claude stared for a moment as if deciding whether to take me seriously. "We didn't kill anyone," he said finally. "That's not how we do things."
"I suppose that's just a prop, then?" I gestured at Brigitte's revolver.
"A precaution," she answered. "You can't trust anyone you're doing business with in this job."
"Like this boss Viktor mentioned?" They all glared. "Will you let me get my phone without being shot? I want to show you something."
Claude nodded. I took the phone out of my pocket, opened a web page, and held up the screen for the thieves to see. Gathering closer, they all stared with mixed recognition and suspicion at the promotional photo advertising the lobbying services of P.T. Lytar.
Brigitte, in an awkward position to see the picture, leaned over for a better look. The gun drifted a couple inches to the side, now pointing past me into the rows of cabinets. Seeing an opportunity, I let go of the phone. It clattered on the floor while I jumped back, away from the crowd. Brigitte spun after me, but I grabbed her wrist and twisted it before she could aim the gun. She stomped on my foot twice; I winced but held on. Pivoting back towards her, I hit her in the face with my free hand. She stumbled backwards and lost her grip on her weapon. Diving to the ground, I came up with the gun before the other burglars could get close enough to interfere. I backed off behind a cabinet while they retreated into the glass room.
Huddled behind the wall of precious artifacts, I took a few deep breaths to calm myself, realizing with relief that the thieves weren't eager to continue the fight. When I felt ready to appear confident again, I put the revolver in my hip pocket and walked into the room. "Being held hostage kind of ruined the conversation. Now we can just have a nice friendly chat," I said sarcastically. I picked up the dropped phone. The screen was cracked. The FBI had better reimburse me for that. "What exactly does this guy want with English Memorial's journals?" I asked, gesturing to Lytar's photo.
The younger man, Joaquin, was the first to speak up. "We didn't know who he was. He just set up a meeting through a contact. We assumed he was after the treasure, same as us."
"The treasure?"
"You don't know the stories? When English Memorial started his expedition, he had grand plans for starting a new colony, with himself as governor. He thought he'd get rich from it eventually, but he took along a lot of supplies and a lot of his backers' money to help get started. Well, by the time they got to Greendale their supplies were running low. The locals knew what had happened everywhere else explorers showed up and they told Memorial to get out in a hurry, or else."
I nodded. The Smithsonian press releases had told that much of the story. But he wasn't finished.
"So they had to run, and carrying all that stuff they'd brought would just slow them down. The story goes, Memorial buried his money and valuables, away from his camp so even his companions wouldn't know where it was, and made a map so he could retrieve it when he returned to complete his plans. Well, he made it back to the Spanish missions in New Mexico, but after a disaster like that no one was going to fund a second expedition. So English Memorial's treasure stayed in Colorado, and no one knew how to find it…until his private papers turned up in a museum collection."
The story was intriguing, but I suspected there were more mundane motives involved. "You're not after the journals to sell them, you think they're the key to your treasure hunt. So Lytar met with you because…"
"He offered us inside information on the museum and financing to prepare for the job, in exchange for a share of the treasure," Claude explained. "We were supposed to bring him the journals before the Smithsonian's experts came to study them, so that no one else would find out where to look. I don't see what this has to do with your murder."
"Lobbyists tend to get their money from less picturesque sources," I told him. "I don't think Lytar wanted to look for buried treasure; he wanted to make sure no one found it. It might interest you to know that one of his most important clients is a developer trying to build a controversial resort near Greendale. Suppose that the construction crew already found English Memorial's stash, by accident. The information that they were building on an important historic site could have put a stop to the whole project. So they wanted to make sure no one heard about it…which meant they couldn't have Memorial's journals released to the public."
"So what? He wanted the journals stolen just to hide them?"
"And the political operative who was helping him ended up shot, with Joe taking the fall for it. Maybe Chris Weagle had second thoughts. Maybe he was just a loose end who knew too much. So tell me, what do you think would happen to you once you delivered the papers to him?"
"And how is it that you are supposed to have learned all of this, and we are supposed to trust you? Shouldn't we assume that you are the law, trying to fool us into surrendering?"
"Do you think I followed you in here alone because a bureaucrat authorized it? I have been investigating that murder, more thoroughly than anyone official has. I know Weagle was meeting with Lytar and researching English Memorial. I know he worked for a major supporter of the resort project. The fact that he put you up to this connects the dots pretty neatly."
"So all you really have is speculation, then?"
"Did I mention I've already seen some of that treasure you're so interested in? If you can come up with a better story to explain it, go ahead and take your chances with Lytar and whatever muscle someone with his connections can hire. Or you can put those journals back, get out of here before we all get in a lot of trouble, and look for work with a more trustworthy crime boss."
Claude thought that over for a moment. "Get pictures of all the maps," he ordered. Joaquin and Viktor started taking folders full of musty papers out of the bags and returning them to the drawers, snapping a few pictures on their phones as they went. When one small, hastily drawn map seemed to catch their attention, I went over to get my own picture, just in case it was important to the case. As the thieves got ready to leave, assuring me they weren't taking anything but information, Brigitte handed me a sheet of paper with an address on it.
"That's where we were supposed to deliver the papers," she explained. "I always knew that guy was playing games with us. Whoever you're working for, tell them he's the one they should be going after, not us." She turned and led the way back towards the air vents.