The King's Deception

He ignored the boy and kept thinking.

“Can I use that phone to call my dad?” Gary asked.

He was about to say no, but a rumbling from outside caught his attention. Car engines. Switching off. Then doors opening and closing. He whirled toward the lone window in the outer wall and spotted two vehicles.

Two men exited the lead car.

The same faces from the Tower.

Denise emerged from the other.

All carried pistols.

He darted to the desk and yanked open the drawer. No weapon. Then he remembered. He’d taken it last night and left it in his hotel room. Why would he have needed it today? This morning he’d thought this a day of cleanup, nothing more. Then off to enjoy his money and kindle a relationship with his son, rubbing it all in the face of Pam Malone.

But none of that mattered anymore.

Except the money part.

To enjoy that, though, he had to escape the warehouse in one piece.

Then it hit him.

“Come on,” he said to Gary.

They ran from the office and across the interior, toward the tables and artifacts. He assumed that before Denise and her entourage plunged ahead, they’d scope out the landscape.

Which should buy him a few moments.

He spotted the plastic container resting on the concrete and lifted it onto a table. He snapped off the lid to expose eight clumps of pale gray clay, the remainder of the percussion explosives, the same substance used to violate Henry VII’s grave inside Windsor.

Nasty stuff.

Tricky, too.

Eight detonators lay inside. He pressed one each into four of the clumps and activated them. He snatched up a small remote, his thumb resting atop its single button. He stuffed the remaining four packets and detonators into a knapsack from one of the tables. Before popping the lid back on, he tossed the cell phone inside. No need for it any longer.

He pointed behind them. “That door across there is bolted from the inside with a digital lock. Go open it. 35. 7. 46.”

Gary nodded and ran off.

He retrieved Cecil’s journal from beneath its glass dome and slipped it into the knapsack.

The main door to the warehouse burst open.

Denise led the way in with the two men, guns drawn. Antrim shouldered the knapsack and ran toward where Gary stood, at the other door, nearly a hundred feet away.

“Stop,” he heard Denise yell.

He kept moving.

A bang.

One round zinged off the concrete near his right foot.

He froze.

Denise and the two men stood across the warehouse, each with their pistols aimed. He was careful, palming the detonator in his right hand, hidden by his cuffed fingers, thumb still on the button.

Get the door open, he mouthed to Gary, before turning around.

“Hands up,” one of the men said. “Keep them where we can see them.”

He slowly raised his arms, but kept his right hand facing away, four fingers open, thumb holding the controller in place.

“Your computer analyst told us he sent you what Farrow Curry deciphered,” Denise called out.

“He did. But I didn’t get a chance to read it before you showed up.”

She approached the tables and admired the stolen books and papers.

“A five-hundred-year-old secret,” she said. “And these are the keys to its unraveling.”

He hated the smug look on her face. She thought herself so clever. So in charge. Her rebukes of him, both in Brussels and at the Tower, still stung. He hated everything about cocky women, especially that arrogance bred from good looks, wealth, confidence, and power. Denise possessed at least three of those, and knew it.

She approached the empty glass lid. “Where is Robert Cecil’s journal?”

“It’s gone.”

She’d yet to pay any attention to the plastic container.

“Not good, Blake.”

“Do you know what it says?” he asked her.

“Oh, yes. Your man talked freely. He was almost too easy to persuade. We have the copies of the hard drives and the entire translation.”

The two other men stood behind her, now closer to the tables, their guns still aimed. He kept his arms raised, hands still. Percussion explosives were state of the art. Lots of heat, a manageable concussion, and minimum noise. Their effect came from high temperatures directed at a targeted focal point, which could do far more damage to certain surfaces.

Like stone.

Where intense heat weakened its structure.

Here was a no-brainer.

Lots of paper, plastic, glass, and flesh.

“We need that journal, Blake.”

He was a good fifty feet away.

Which should be enough.

“Rot in hell, Denise.”

His thumb pressed the button.

He dove back, toward Gary, pounding the concrete and covering his head.

* * *

Gary had easily spotted Antrim holding the controller with his right hand, concealed from the three people across the warehouse. He’d wondered what the clumps of clay could do.

Now he saw.