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Proctor.
Bastard.
“Well done,” he said. “I gave you only about a 20 percent chance of making it in three minutes.”
She shook her head to clear her face and hair of dust. “And what would have happened if I hadn’t?”
He shrugged. “Problem over. But you did make it out. So now you and I are taking a trip.”
She had little choice. “Can I ask to where?”
“You can, but I won’t answer.”
“And what if I refuse?”
“As you know, I have Terry Morse. If I don’t arrive soon after that truck arrives, my associate will kill the old man.”
She had no reason to doubt the statement. This man seemed to enjoy killing. So she simply asked, “Do I get my hands free?”
“If you’re a good girl.”
Which she intended to be since she needed them unbound. Once that happened, she’d deal with James Proctor.
And the truck?
Thank goodness it could be tracked.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
Cotton returned to the Smithsonian, finding Rick Stamm in his office beneath the Castle. The entire encounter with Frank Breckinridge had been troubling. How much of that old man’s mind was really gone? Hard to say. The man clearly lived in the past, yet retained a solid hold on history, which might explain the ability to so easily code the message he’d passed on.
BENEATH ELEVEN MISTAKES.
He told Stamm everything.
The curator shook his head. “Amazing. I know exactly where we have to look.”
* * *
Grant roused himself.
He hadn’t passed out from the beating, but it had been close. The two men had taken a play from his book and expertly administered the punishment with just enough force to make the point, but not enough to damage anything. Luckily he was in good shape, and his tight abs had absorbed most of the blows. He lay in his father’s den on the floor, the old man talking on the front porch to his two thugs. He’d caught bits and pieces, but not enough to know what was going on. At least he now knew how his father had lived alone. There was nothing wrong with him. The whole thing had been a ploy, one used quite effectively he had to admit. And he’d done exactly what his father had wanted, without ever realizing he was being manipulated.
The screen door opened and closed.
His father stepped into the den and sat in a chair. “How’d that feel?”
“I get it, old man. I gave it to you. And you gave it back to me.”
His father laughed. “I do like your bravado. You never were afraid of much. You had so much potential, but you never showed a shred of the discipline needed to channel it. Then, all at once, you focused on gold. Greed really is a powerful motivator, isn’t it?”
He winced against the nausea building from the beating. “I wanted that treasure.”
“But it’s not yours.”
He rubbed his sore stomach. “So who gets it?”
“That remains to be seen. Right now, I require your help.”
* * *
Cotton settled into a chair and faced Stamm, who sat behind a cluttered desk.
“Beneath eleven mistakes. Breckinridge is talking about James Smithson, the man who left the initial gift of $500,000 that started the Smithsonian.”
“How do you know that?”
“I can show you upstairs. How much do you know about Smithson?”
“Little to nothing.”
“We try hard to make Smithson appear more than he was. Unfortunately, he wasn’t Indiana Jones. He was just an ordinary, nondescript 19th-century scientist. He studied things like coffee making, human tears, and snake venom, and managed to discover a mineral that was eventually named for him after his death. Smithsonite. But it’s a relatively useless ore. Nothing Smithson did was revolutionary or particularly enlightening. But he lived at the time when chemistry was emerging as its own science, drifting away from alchemy, becoming a respected discipline. In a small way he helped forge that distinction.”
“And he’s buried upstairs.”
Stamm nodded. “In the crypt, just inside the north entrance. He’s been there since 1905, just after his remains were brought over from Italy. He was originally buried in Genoa, but Alexander Graham Bell, one of our regents at the time, convinced everyone to bring the bones here. Bell traveled to Italy in 1903 and personally supervised their return.”
Stamm told him how Smithson’s coffin then went on public display inside the Regents’ Room upstairs for over a year, while a crypt adjacent to the north entrance was prepared. It was originally intended as a temporary resting place until funds could be found for a more elaborate memorial. But those moneys never materialized. In 1973 it was decided to renovate the crypt to make it more welcome to visitors.
“That’s when Breckinridge took it upon himself to open the grave,” Stamm said. “The secretary at the time was out of the country, in India, which was surely no accident on Breckinridge’s part. He chose the moment carefully. Afterward, there was a lot of debate about what he did.”
“He had no authority to open the grave?”
“That’s hard to say. He was Castle curator, and they were renovating the crypt. So he could do whatever was necessary to get that job done, but he did not have the regents’, or the secretary’s, specific okay to open the tomb. A lot of people were present, though, when it happened. The undersecretary, several assistant secretaries, curators, archivists. Then some staff member called the Washington Star-News and reported what was happening. They also turned us in to the DC authorities. It seems you need a permit to open a grave within the district, which Breckinridge did not have. To diffuse all that attention, a reporter was invited over and shown the bones. He eventually ran a sympathetic story that nobody cared about.”
“So what was inside?”
* * *
Grant listened as his father explained, “They’re going to reopen James Smithson’s tomb.”
He knew his father had done the same thing, years ago. “How can you be so sure?”
“Because the man who came here earlier is the same one investigating all of this for the Smithsonian. I pointed the way, provided he’s smart enough to figure it out. I’m betting he is. They won’t be able to resist taking a look. And they’ll do it tonight.”
“How did you know about him?”
“It’s my job to know everything. I’ve been watching all of this closely for a long time. I have many eyes and ears.”
“I don’t get it. Why would you point the way?”
“You were able to find the Witch’s and Trail Stones. I led you to both. But the Heart Stone is something different. I left it inside Smithson’s tomb in 1974, after I opened it for a supposed historical inspection. I took that chance because I knew that tomb was the perfect hiding place. Davis Layne wanted the five stones to get to the gold. He wouldn’t stop. I tried conventional methods, even a threat or two, but they all failed. So I hid away the one piece of the puzzle he could not do without.”
He could hardly believe what he was hearing.
“You should know that I now have the Witch’s Stone,” his father said.
“How? My men took photos of it in Arkansas, but were not able to get it.”
“And they failed. So I sent my men, who are far more competent. They now have the stone. Your men are dead.”
He was shocked.
“I was forced to eliminate them, thanks to you,” his father said.
Who cared? They were not his problem.
He had bigger ones.
“What did you manage to obtain on the Trail Stone?” his father asked.
“Only photos. I was interrupted.”
“I heard about what happened in Fossil Hall. You’re lucky not to have been arrested.”
