She looked pale and shaken, as if the terrorist attack were hitting her particularly hard.
“Sam Reilly?”
“Ma’am.” He was panting.
She smiled, looking exhausted but showing dimples. “Follow me. The Director of the Air and Space Museum says you need help finding a book.”
“Yes, ma’am. And fast.”
“It’s Miss,” she said. “Ms. Zyla Needham. Inside, please. We’re retrieving the document as we speak.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Sam was led to a small room with a table, chair, and a computer. “Coffee?”
“Just the document,” he said. “What is it?”
In a strained voice, Zyla said, “It’s the North Atlantic Treaty. The actual, original treaty. As you can imagine, we can’t exactly let you walk out of the library with it. It’s irreplaceable.”
“Then shouldn’t I be wearing white cotton gloves or something?”
“If you like.”
The two of them waited. Sam checked the phone.
No new messages. He’d made it to the library on time. With growing trepidation, his eyes focused on his watch, he saw it tick past the twenty-minute mark.
Without meaning to, he held his breath.
The last time he’d made an assumption about the terrorist…
He waited for an explosion but either there wasn’t one or the sound was unable to penetrate the thick walls of the Library of Congress.
A breathless library aide appeared with a slim blue leather-bound document in hand. “Here it is, Ms. Needham. Uh, and as far as anyone can tell, no sign of him anywhere.”
Zyla shook her head slightly. Not now.
“Thank you, Troy.” She accepted the document, laying it almost reverently on the table in front of Sam. “A piece of history.”
The leather had a small plastic sleeve attached with the call number coded on it. When he opened the front cover, a slip of onionskin paper identified the document as the original agreement of the North Atlantic Treaty. It was dated the fourth of April, 1947.
Sam wasn’t a historian. He cleared his throat.
“Yes? It’s the right one, surely, or at least the one that Director Nelson instructed us to bring to you.”
Sam checked the code against the sweaty piece of paper he’d shoved into his pocket.
The codes matched up, all right.
He licked his lips.
“Ms. Needham,” he said, “either this is a typo, or we have a problem.”
She glanced at it, then did a double-take.
“That says 1947. But the call number lists 1949 as the year of publication.”
He nodded. Zyla reached in front of him and turned the sheet of onionskin. Sam was no expert, but the linen paper of the pages of the treaty seemed authentic.
But the date 1947 appeared on several pages.
They reached the signature pages.
“Wait.”
Sam made Zyla flip back to the first of the signature pages, then started counting.
“What is it?”
“Thirteen signatures.”
“Thirteen…?”
“I only noticed the number was off because of one of them,” he shifted through the document, “this one.”
He pointed toward a large, looping pair of signatures under the words, “FOR THE UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS / POUR LA UNION DES RÉPUBLIQUES SOCIALIISTES SOVIÉTIQUES.”
“I’m no historian, but I know that the U.S.S.R. wasn’t part of NATO in the Forties,” Sam said.
The librarian hissed between her teeth. Her face was turning red with rage.
“It’s a fake. Another fake.”
Chapter Thirty
Shaken, Zyla turned toward the door, where her aide Troy awaited further instructions. His face was pale, too. He’d pulled his phone out and was jabbing the screen with a shaky hand.
“Another fake?” Sam asked.
“I discovered another document that was replaced, the text changed.”
“What was it?”
She shook her head. “It has nothing to do with this. We’re going to have to go over every document in the library to verify them and put still more security features in place. It’s like we can’t trust anything anymore.” She took a breath. “Let’s focus on the issue at hand. Troy, who knows anything about post-World War II politics? We need someone ASAP.”
“I know some of it,” Troy said.
“Talk,” Zyla ordered.
He puffed out his cheeks. “Mr. Reilly’s correct. The treaty was signed in 1949, not 1947. In 1955, the Soviets and their allies set up a rival treaty organization under the Warsaw Pact. The USSR certainly didn’t sign NATO.”
“And?”
“NATO was supposed to protect Europe from the Soviet bloc countries during a nuclear attack or a Soviet invasion. How that was supposed to work, nobody really knew, and the organization didn’t mean squat until the start of the Korean War in 1950. In fact, even after that, NATO was considered to be so weak a deterrent that the French withdrew in 1966 and started setting up their own nuclear deterrent program. After the Berlin Wall fell, former Soviet bloc countries started drifting out of the Warsaw Pact and into NATO, one after the other.”
He shook his head. “I only know that much because my Uncle Matt was a captain in the Army in the Nineties, and he had to go over to Bosnia in 1993 as part of a NATO-directed joint force. He met his wife there, and then of course NATO was invoked after 9-11 when we deployed joint troops to Afghanistan.”
“So why would we be directed to a fake copy?” Sam mused.
“And where’s the original?” Zyla asked in a strangled voice. “Where are all the originals?”
Compared to the potential death of a million people, it seemed as though the librarian had a few issues with her priorities. Then again, she might not know the stakes.
Sam flipped back to the first page of the treaty. “Only one way to find out.”
Chapter Thirty-One
“Madam Secretary,” Tom said, as he entered her office.
Her nostrils flared. “Tom! What are you doing here?”
“Sam sent for me. Don’t worry, he didn’t put anyone at risk. I was able to work my way in without being seen.”
“Tom Bower, do you know how many lives are at stake? We’ve just had undeniable evidence that the terrorist has the bomb, and that the bomb is still live.”
“What evidence?”
“You’ll be interested to know that the terrorist left Sam a plutonium rod in the trunk of a parked car near here.”
“What a wonderful gift,” Tom said, cheerfully.
“And before you ask, no, that’s not enough to render the bomb inoperable.”
“Shame.”
“Since you’re not with Sam, I’ll assume that you have something you need to tell me in private.”
“I do. Elise has been looking into William Goodson’s, a.k.a. Wilhelm Gutwein’s, past.”
“And?”
“We got it all wrong!” Tom said emphatically, knocking his knuckles on the desk.
The secretary took a deep breath. “Tom, so help me…”
He chuckled. “All right, I’ll stop torturing you. Gutwein wasn’t a Nazi.”
“What? But he was ordered to drop an experimental nuclear bomb on Washington, D.C.!”
“Membership within the National Socialist Party — which wasn’t actually socialist, by the way — wasn’t quite obligatory at the time. Highly encouraged, yes, but not required.”
The secretary waved her hand. “Go on.”
“Gutwein had a number of German Jewish friends before and during the war. Elise was actually able to track down a few records of survivors who had later spoken of their friend and even looked for him after the war to thank him. But by then Gutwein had disappeared, with William Goodson in his place. They assumed he was dead.”