The Legacy Read online

  He moved forward once more, checking back over his shoulder every so often. Finally he reached the screening room and moved inside, flipping on the light as he entered. He walked directly to the rows of videocassette cases lining the shelves and pulled one out. As he gazed at it, he laughed to himself. This was the tape he had retrieved from the Chase safe-deposit box earlier in the day. The one he had hidden in the stacks of the New York Public Library was a decoy, an old presentation a Gilchrist investment banker had produced for a buy-side client. If anyone had followed him into the library and watched him hide that tape behind the atlases, then retrieved it thinking it was the tape of the Kennedy assassination, they would be sorely disappointed.

  Cole flipped on the television and the VCR, then pulled the tape from its case and inserted it into the slot. He wanted to make certain no one had pulled a switch. Almost instantly the limousine was turning left in front of the building, and a wave of relief coursed through his body. The idea of hiding the real tape here and taking another one away had occurred to him as the cleaning woman had pushed for immediate access to the screening room. When he had opened the door, he’d seen her glance down at what she thought was the Dealey Tape—as he was going to call the cassette when he began his auction tomorrow with the media. He was fairly certain that the woman would never have thought to check the tapes in the screening room, but you never knew.

  His shoulders sagged and he leaned back against the wall for a moment. The last few hours had seemed interminable without the Dealey Tape actually in his possession, and he suddenly realized how drained he was, physically and mentally. But he would probably improve when Fox offered ten million dollars for the Dealey Tape—and feel even better when ABC offered more.

  When the tape had ejected from the VCR, Cole replaced it in its black plastic case, turned off the television and the VCR, and headed toward the screening room door. In the event that someone had followed him to the library and taken the tape from behind the atlases and now realized he had been fooled, Cole was going to be careful. He was going to stay at the Marriott Marquis tonight and would get a room for Nicki as well. There was no reason to take a foolhardy chance by returning to the apartment. The blond man who had chased him down Fifth Avenue could easily find out where he lived—after all, two “mobsters” in sunglasses had—and it wasn’t as if one scrawny doorman was going to stop someone looking for this piece of history. By this time tomorrow a megadeal for the Dealey Tape would be struck. It would be too late for those who might want to keep it from the public, or to acquire it for themselves so that they could make the deal and get the money.

  Cole flipped off the screening room light, stepped into the hallway—and nearly ran into a short dark man with a scar slicing from the bridge of his nose down his left cheek all the way to his jaw.

  Before the man could react, Cole slammed his scarred cheek with a hard right fist. It was instinct, and it saved his life. As the man toppled backward, Cole stumbled over him and toward the same stairway door he had slipped through several hours before to avoid the cleaning woman. The man grabbed for Cole’s legs, but Cole was quickly past him and into the stairwell, taking the steps even faster than he had this afternoon, leaping from landing to landing, the cassette case tucked like a football in the crook of his right arm. He heard the door slam open above him and several sharp reports as the man with the scar aimed his gun down the stairwell and began firing.

  In seconds Cole had descended several stories. He hadn’t imagined a damn thing. They were after him, whoever “they” were. The cleaning woman, the blond man, now this man with a scar. All of them after the Dealey Tape. A bullet zipped past him, pinging the metal handrail, and Cole ducked as he jumped onto the second-floor landing. One more set of steps and he was back in the deserted lobby.

  The guard lay facedown behind the desk in a pool of blood. Cole caught only a fleeting glimpse of the prone body as he tore across the lobby. Christ, these people weren’t screwing around. What the hell had he stumbled into?

  Rage erupted as Cole thought of his father. Jim Egan must have known this would happen. He must have known there would be people willing to go to any lengths to obtain the Dealey Tape. Why else would he have arranged for it to be conveyed so covertly?

  As Cole burst through the outside door onto Fifth Avenue, the stairwell door slammed open behind him. The man with the scar fired from across the lobby and glass shattered. Cole ducked again and started left, but he noticed a woman coming at him down Fifth Avenue. It was the same woman who had been outside the screening room beside the trash container as the bond traders had sauntered down the hallway. But she wasn’t wearing the robin’s egg blue uniform of the cleaning staff anymore. Now she was wearing black from head to toe.

  Cole whirled and took off in the opposite direction. He sprinted south on Fifth Avenue all the way to Thirty-eighth Street, then crossed Fifth and headed east down the shadowy cross street to Madison Avenue before turning up Madison and finally running west on Thirty-ninth for a short distance. During the day the streets would have been jammed with people, but now they were deserted. He stumbled into a recessed doorway, smashed the dim bulb above the door with the cassette case and stood perfectly still in the darkness, his back against the inside wall, gasping for breath as quietly as he could.

  For ten minutes he stood in the dark doorway, slowly regaining his breath. He was certain he had put a fair amount of distance between himself and the woman. He had played wide receiver for the University of Minnesota football team. That was seven years ago, but he was still in excellent physical condition, still very fast. There was no way she could have kept up with him.

  Finally he peered out of the doorway into the gloom. He saw nothing unusual and stepped out of the doorway, crossed the street and began jogging back toward Madison Avenue. There he would catch a cab, pick up Nicki at Emilio’s, anonymously call 911 to alert the police to the Gilchrist security guard’s plight and get to the safety of a hotel that would take cash up front without requiring a credit card imprint. That was where he and Nicki would stay tonight, not the Marriott Marquis. The crazies chasing him might be able to track them down if he used a credit card, but not if he used cash. Hotels that would accept cash without the guest having to produce a credit card weren’t the nicest places in the world, but he’d take safety over style for this one night. He clutched the Dealey Tape tightly. It was more valuable than gold.

  The woman stood directly in front of Cole on the sidewalk, clutching a pistol. He stopped abruptly a few feet away from her, unable to believe what he was seeing. He hadn’t noticed her until he was practically on top of her. He glanced around frantically, but there was nothing he could do now.

  The man with the scar on his left cheek raced up behind the woman, breathing heavily. He patted her on the shoulder, pointed at the tape in Cole’s hand and mumbled something unintelligible into her ear. Then he moved to where Cole stood and grabbed the tape. Cole didn’t release his grip on the tape right away, but the man yanked harder and finally tore it loose.

  “You thought you’d made it, didn’t you?” The man remained in front of Cole for a moment, smiling smugly.

  Cole didn’t respond.

  “Sure you did,” the man answered himself. “But even if you had given us the slip, we would have gotten you when you went back to your apartment. It’s all set to explode,” he said, still smiling. Then he turned and walked to where the woman stood. “Shoot him,” the man ordered loudly.

  Instinctively Cole put his arms up and ducked, then dropped to the ground and rolled. He heard the crack of a gun, but felt no pain. Maybe you don’t feel a gunshot wound right away, he thought as he scrambled behind a parked car.

  Suddenly Cole saw the man with curly blond hair sprinting up the street, pistol in hand, aiming at the man with the scar, who had taken off toward Madison Avenue. And he saw the woman lying on the sidewalk, blood oozing from a neat hole in her forehead,
her gun at the end of her outstretched fingers. Then the street became quiet as the two men disappeared around the corner.

  Cole bolted from his hiding spot behind the car and ran west, away from the corner around which the two men had disappeared. Within seconds he had reached Fifth Avenue and flagged down a cab.

  Minutes later the cab screeched to a halt in front of Emilio’s. Cole jammed a ten-dollar bill into the slot in the Plexiglas between the front and back seats, then moved quickly into the restaurant.

  “Where’s the woman I left sitting right here forty-five minutes ago?” Cole shouted at the bartender, who was busy fixing a round of drinks.

  “Huh?” The bartender didn’t look up.

  “The woman I left sitting right here.” Cole repeated himself as he pointed down at the stool beside which he was standing. “You and I talked briefly before I left. I told you to make certain she didn’t leave.”

  The bartender finally glanced up as he finished mixing the last drink. “What did she look like?”

  “Tall, blond, beautiful, with a face you couldn’t possibly forg—”

  “Oh, right.” The bartender snapped his fingers and pointed at Cole. “Sure, I remember now.”

  “Well, where the hell is she?”

  “She just took off.” The bartender waved at Jimmy to let him know that his round of drinks was ready.

  “What?”

  “Yeah. She was trying to call some friend of hers but couldn’t reach her. She said the woman was supposed to be meeting her at her apartment.” The bartender gestured at the door. “So she left to meet the woman. She said to tell you she’d see you back at the—”

  “Give me that phone!” Cole interrupted.

  “What?”

  “Right there!” he yelled, pointing at the cordless phone standing next to the cash register on the counter behind the bar.

  “Sure.” The bartender picked up the phone and tossed it to Cole.

  Seconds later the information operator had given Cole the main number for his apartment building and he had punched it into the phone’s keypad. The line rang ten times before a recording finally answered. “Dammit!” He tossed the phone back at the bartender, then turned and raced out of Emilio’s.

  * * *

  —

  Emergency lights flashed red and orange across Cole’s face as he stood on the sidewalk gazing at the two ambulances and three pale blue-and-white police cruisers parked at odd angles in front of his apartment building. There were several hundred residents in the forty-story building—many of them elderly and likely candidates for emergency service—but he still had a terrible feeling about what was going on. Slowly he limped forward, putting one foot in front of the other as if in a daze. He was exhausted and his ankle was swollen, but he barely noticed the pain. His gaze was now fixed on the building’s front door.

  “Hey, buddy, you gotta stay here while we bring the victim out.” A large police officer stepped in Cole’s way.

  Cole glanced at him. “Victim?”

  “Yeah.” The policeman gestured toward the night sky with his flashlight. “There was some kind of explosion up in one of the penthouses and a young woman was hurt pretty bad. We need to keep the entrance clear so the paramedics can bring her out.”

  “A young woman?” Cole’s voice was barely audible.

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you know which apartment it was?”

  “Huh?”

  “In which apartment was the explosion?” Cole asked again, his voice shaking.

  “I don’t know,” the policeman said impatiently. “Look, you’re gonna have to step back.” The policeman spotted another resident moving toward the front door and moved away to intercept him.

  As the policeman moved away, Cole saw two uniformed paramedics rolling a white-sheeted stretcher out through the lobby and broke past the small crowd that had gathered.

  “Hey, buddy!” the policeman yelled. “Stop!”

  But Cole kept running. As he neared the stretcher, his heart sank. Bandages and gauze covered most of a young woman’s face, but he thought he recognized the ring on her limp hand. He stopped and grabbed his hair with both hands. “Jesus, is she all right?”

  The paramedics shook their heads somberly as they lifted the stretcher into the back of the ambulance.

  “Cole!”

  Cole pivoted toward the voice, and relief flooded through him at the sight of Nicki sprinting toward him. She too had broken through the thin line of policemen.

  As Nicki neared the ambulance, she pointed at the hand of the woman on the stretcher with its distinctive ring. “Maria!” she screamed, lunging for the back of the ambulance.

  But Cole caught her as the paramedics closed the door and the emergency vehicle moved away, siren screaming. He wrapped his arms tightly around her as she sobbed into his chest. “It’s okay, sweetheart,” he said comfortingly, the feeling of relief that the victim hadn’t been Nicki still pulsing through him.

  “No, it isn’t,” she cried.

  He nodded. It really wasn’t okay, but there was nothing either one of them could do about it. “Come on,” he urged gently, guiding her away from the apartment building.

  “Where are we going?” she asked through her tears.

  “I’m taking you home.”

  6

  For the better part of four decades William Seward had been a history professor at the University of Virginia. Now that he was seventy-two years old, Seward taught just one class and that was in the spring semester. It was an upper-level course covering the Civil War, or the War of Northern Aggression, as Seward preferred to call it. The class was his only commitment at this point, at least to Mr. Jefferson’s university.

  This late in November the leaves had fallen, and as Seward watched from his living room window, he could make out a silver government-issue sedan moving slowly through the bare-branched trees and over the crushed-stone lane leading down into the small valley which his cabin overlooked. The cabin lay secluded in a thick grove of oaks halfway up a small mountain. The site was only a few miles west of the university’s hometown of Charlottesville, but it was remote. The closest house was more than a half mile away. Here Seward could do research in solitude—and direct one of the most clandestine operations ever initiated by the United States government. Operation Snowfall.

  Seward moved from the window to the stereo and turned on gentle symphonic music. It helped soothe his nerves. He enjoyed little-known composers others didn’t appreciate, but he could listen to whatever he wanted because he lived alone. He wasn’t married and had few living relatives.

  Seward was tall and angular with thinning hair the color of cotton. His face was kindly, and traces of a slight smile were permanently etched into the corners of his pale lips. With age, his salt-and-pepper eyebrows had become bushy and his lower teeth crooked—the result of refusing to have his wisdom teeth removed because he couldn’t risk the potential truth-serum effects of anesthesia. Both of his knees were stiff from arthritis and he needed a cane to walk. He spoke in a soft voice tinged with a pleasant Virginia accent, and lately he seemed to forget a word now and then or address one of his students by the wrong name. In private, some faculty members speculated that he was on the precipice of senility, but they were gravely mistaken. Behind wire-framed glasses, Seward’s dark eyes burned brightly, and behind the dark eyes was the mind of a twenty-year-old. His senility was simply an act. People expected a man in his eighth decade to forget a name every once in a while, so he gave them what they expected. He couldn’t risk stepping out of character.

  The silver sedan pulled up outside the cabin door. Seward heard the driver cut the car’s engine as he relaxed into a large leather chair positioned on one side of the stone fireplace. Seconds later there were two sharp raps on the cabin’s thick wooden door.

  “Come in,” Seward called st
ernly as he rested his cane against the arm of the chair.

  Commander John Magee entered the cabin, nodded formally, closed the door and sat down in the chair opposite Seward’s.

  “Good afternoon, Commander,” Seward said.

  “Good afternoon,” Magee responded tersely.

  The thirty-nine-year-old Magee was five feet seven inches tall, had dark hair and dark eyes and maintained a wiry, steel-strong build with a constant and rigorous exercise program. Acne scars covered his ruddy face, and through this pocked visage ran a long scar extending from the bridge of his nose all the way down his left cheek to his jaw. He was an ex-Navy SEAL, having attained the rank of full commander at the youthful age of thirty-six, and was now on loan to William Seward from an elite special-forces unit of the CIA. In that unit Magee had been extensively trained in everything from high-tech explosives to germ warfare. He was coldly efficient at whatever task was at hand and possessed an intelligence quotient of 164, an IQ he was not shy about marketing.

  “How are you, sir?” Magee asked.

  Seward noticed subtle derision in the way Magee articulated the word sir. “Fine, Commander Magee,” Seward answered calmly, exhibiting none of the irritation gnawing at him. Seward knew that the young commander considered him long overdue for an appointment with a Florida continuing-care facility. Seward knew this through his extensive Pentagon grapevine, of which Magee was not aware. However, it wasn’t the lack of respect that so angered Seward today. It was something far more important.

  Through four decades Seward had made it a point not to initiate friendships with any of the six men who had previously held Magee’s position. Becoming friendly with those men wasn’t a good idea, because it made the “unfortunate accidents” at the end of their tours of duty with him all the more difficult. Still, in most cases Seward hadn’t been able to resist developing a sense of companionship with the men.