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He ran.
A large space loomed before him, thirty feet wide, over twice that long, an interior wall stretching on one side, an exterior one on the other. Surely it had once been filled with dinosaur skeletons and other fossils. Now it was empty, except for debris and three people in hard hats.
With another man beyond them.
Racing away.
* * *
Grant decided to use the three new people as cover, slowing his pace and passing by them, Thomas’ ID hanging from around his neck. No one would notice the photo, just having the badge was all that mattered. He placed the men squarely between himself and the pursuer. If he could make it to the exit door, he could lose himself within the labyrinth of offices that he knew filled the other side. There would also be no cameras there, as the Smithsonian rarely monitored the staff-only sections of the buildings.
He readied the swipe card.
“Get down,” he heard a voice command. “Out of the way.”
* * *
Cotton ordered the three workers to hit the floor, waving his arm and signaling for them to move. His target was beyond them, heading for a door lit as an exit. The three looked at him strangely, then apparently noticed the gun and dropped to the concrete.
He leveled the weapon.
* * *
Grant kept his cool, never slowing his approach to the door. He slipped the cell phone into his pocket and slid the card’s magnetic strip through the slot in the reader. The lock immediately released and he yanked open the metal door. He bolted out and helped the hydraulic closer by yanking on the lever, closing it shut behind him.
Just as a gun fired.
* * *
Cotton sent a round straight at the door, where the man had stood one moment, gone the next.
He’d been an instant too late.
The bullet pinged off the metal door.
The three workers were sprawled on the floor, hands covering their heads, clearly in a panic.
“Get up,” he said. He spotted an electronic reader at the door. “I’m with the Justice Department. Do any of you have a key card to open that door?”
One of the men said yes and found it.
He rushed over and grabbed the card.
* * *
Grant loved the adrenaline flowing through him. He knew everything that he’d done the past few hours was foolish, but God help him, he loved it. There was something intensely satisfying about defying the odds. He’d even managed by a split second to avoid getting shot, which should have generated fear. But in him it created only resolve.
And a need for more.
His mind recalled the details of this part of the museum. It had been a couple of decades since he was last inside, which probably meant that things had changed. But the stairway he recalled was just ahead. He could go up or down. He decided to descend, two steps at a time, slowing near the bottom and opening another metal door that led to more staff space on the ground floor. The museum sat between the Mall and Constitution Avenue, which came with a height difference. So the first-floor entrance opened to the Mall, while the ground-floor entrance led out to the street. Beyond the staff-only portions, where quiet and simplicity reigned, were the busy public areas, the street side particularly so since it contained gift shops, a café, restrooms, and a large auditorium.
And there’d be cameras.
He left the stairwell and entered a hallway where more offices opened on either side. He walked slow and confident, his badge dangling from his neck. No one challenged him.
He found the exit door and slowly opened it.
With his head down, he stepped out into a busy foyer throbbing with activity and alive with sound.
And he made a beeline for the street exit.
* * *
Cotton realized immediately that he’d lost the man. Before him, past the metal door, was nothing but labs and offices. There were also stairs that led up and down. His target could have gone anywhere. But he wondered. Did the man know his way around? Was he familiar with the building? It seemed possible.
The door from Fossil Hall opened and Rick Stamm appeared.
“This way.”
He followed the curator down the stairs.
“An exit door opened a couple of minutes after the guy entered using Martin’s key card. He didn’t need the card to get out, so there’s no way to know if it was him. But it had to be.”
They quickly descended, then left the museum’s back spaces through another metal door. Before them stretched a crowded, noisy public area.
“Did you get a look at him?” Stamm asked.
He nodded. “Enough that I won’t forget him. He had brown, curly hair and a port wine stain on the left side of his neck.”
“That’s the guy who killed Martin Thomas.”
They searched the crowds.
But saw nothing.
The man was gone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Diane arrived at Alex’s apartment. She’d taken the first flight of the day from Knoxville to Reagan National, a short one-hour hop. On landing she’d texted Grant and told him that they should meet at the apartment. She hadn’t visited since last summer and the June Smithsonian Libraries Advisory Board meeting. The board tended to vary its meeting locations across the country, returning to DC usually for only one of the three annual gatherings. She liked that habit, as she hated Washington, a city of opportunists filled with people either wanting power or wanting to be close to power, Alex no exception. On the one hand he’d possessed the clout of a U.S. senator. On the other he did little with that power except cling to those who possessed even more, like Danny Daniels. So different from the 19th century, when lone senators faced down both the House and the president, afraid of neither. What a time that must have been. Bitter political battles constantly raging over tariffs, whether new territories would be free or slave, the annexation of Texas, the war with Mexico. At one point a member of the House, Preston Brooks from South Carolina, beat Senator Charles Sumner nearly to death with a walking stick right on the Senate floor.
Talk about passion.
That was a time when opinions mattered.
And people were not afraid to express them.
Political warfare today had turned entirely guerrilla, the assaults all coming from the shadows, making it hard to ever identify the culprit.
Especially in the Senate.
“Alexander Stephens’ plan is not workable,” Alex had said to her that last day. “The Founders never intended for Congress to work that way. If they had, they would have written Article I differently.”
Not necessarily.
What a huge idea from such a small man.
Stephens had stood barely five and a half feet tall, weighing less than a hundred pounds. He stayed sickly all of his life, many times bedridden, though he lived to be seventy-two. He served nearly twenty-five years as a congressman, off and on both before and after the Civil War, making a name for himself as a skilled orator. During the war he acted as vice president of the Confederacy. He died in 1883, while serving as governor of Georgia. Long before leaving this world, though, he devised a way to make the U.S. Senate irrelevant, just as it had been prior to 1800. Let the blowhards command the Senate floor and talk to their hearts’ content. Filibuster away. Who cared? None of it would matter. The House of Representatives was the true American political body, elected every two years, responsible only to the people. To Stephens it was no accident that the first words of the first article of the Constitution dealt with the House of Representatives. And the first government official mentioned anywhere in the Constitution was the Speaker of the House. To him, those were messages from the Founders he believed the country had come to ignore.
But thanks to her, Lucius Vance was about to provide a reminder.
Inside the apartment she noticed its usual order. Alex had never liked things out of place. She was the same, so that was one fault she could not hold against him. She’d never felt comfortable here.
This had been all his place. And something she’d noticed long ago now made much more sense. Nothing personal was displayed anywhere. No photos, accolades, or any mementos from a lifetime of marriage and service. His Senate office was part museum, part hall of fame. Here nothing reminded him, or anyone else, of his life.
She’d run a bluff that day, long suspecting another woman. What was the cliché? The wife can always tell. That’s provided the wife actually gave a damn enough to pay attention. For her, that had happened only recently. They hadn’t been intimate in years, which partly explained her own infidelity. But sex had never been all that important to Alex. What really hurt was his declaration that he’d not broken his marriage vows.
Because she believed him.
Which meant he’d really cared for the other woman.
Right here.
In this place.
