“Wow!” she whispered at the sight of it. Shaped like a grid, it was bolted to the stone wall of the room. It consisted of six vertical bars reaching from the top of the frame to the bottom, with two horizontal bars crossing it diagonally. The edges of the grid ended in ornate curls and Gothic arrow points, asymmetrical and crude. It appeared as if the artisan just welded the lot together to give it a sense of disorder, like the vines of a creeper.
“Reminds me of the head of Medusa,” Gretchen grinned, running her hands over the network of beautiful twists and points. Her hand suddenly jerked back and she winced in pain.
“Ouch! Jesus, what is on this thing?” she whined loudly. Her finger was bleeding. Nina was intrigued.
“Don’t touch the pointy things,” Nina advised, but on examination she noticed that the entire piece’s iron bars consisted of tiny protruding slivers that made up its texture. Like tiny thorns on a rose’s stem they faced upward so that any downward movement of one’s hand would result in injury.
“My God, what a savage work of art!” Gretchen remarked through her teeth as she sucked on her wounded finger. “It is kind of cool, though. Don’t you think?”
“Aye,” Nina smiled, “if you have a mean streak.”
“There’s a waxy substance on some of the curly bits, see?” Gretchen said, pointing it out to Nina without touching anything again. Nina stood on her toes to see.
“Oh!” she smiled, looking enlightened. “I think this was intended to be a giant chandelier, Gretch! Look, the waxy stuff is candle wax and some burnt wick residue caught in the white bits.”
“It must look amazing filled with candles,” Nina’s mildly inebriated friend agreed. “Then it will really look like a shrine.”
Nina gave her a stern look that made them giggle, and they continued on to the rest of the house. It was a beautiful old place with few rooms, yet each room was large and presented a pleasant view, in all directions. The kitchen boasted an antique black coal stove and a modern AGA cooker on the other wall. In the middle of the room stood a heavy oak table that had seen decades of cooking, peeling, and clearly even painting, but it was sturdy and large.
“Look how they damaged this table,” Gretchen said, shaking her head. “They did some art here too, I’m sure. Paint stains and some hardened clay embedded in the cracks. I think the previous guy was an artist, eh?”
“Looks like it,” Nina agreed, checking out the deep sink under the window. It was the only window in the house not dressed in some fabric and the darkness outside was so black that Nina could see their reflection in it. The exposed window made her feel vulnerable, similar to the feeling she got when the crowd congregated in front of her house. She kept feeling as if she was being watched, and now, with no visibility outside, someone could easily be standing right on the other side of the thin layer of glass and she would never know it. The thought made her feel naked, fair game; and she quickly turned and moved to the middle of the room at the table with Gretchen.
“Let’s get out of the kitchen. I want to see the last room at the end of the hallway. Tomorrow I’ll draw up a diagram of the house to see where I want what before the movers come,” Nina told her friend as she finished her wine. It helped to talk about normal things right now and she tried to get her mind off the impending discomfort she felt.
“Okay, but first more wine, yes?” Gretchen giggled.
“Aye, of course!” Nina smiled.
After a quick refill, the two of them stole down the broad corridor to the last room that sat on the right of the T-junction. To the left was the bathroom. Nina only used the uncharted room as an excuse to leave the kitchen, but now she realized that it was indeed a corner of the house that intrigued her.
“Look at this!” she gasped, pulling Gretchen by the arm to join her in the doorway.
“Easy! Spilling my drink here,” her friend complained. She stopped and looked where Nina pointed. “Wow!”
Nina had to smile for the quaint and interesting idea of the room. At first it looked like a regular bedroom, but to their left, in the corner a spiral staircase coiled upward through the ceiling. It was wrought from the same black metal of the grid in the other room, and equally intricate in careless design.
“Cool, huh?” Nina groaned in glee. “Let’s go check it out!” Again Gretchen was being dragged along, staggering over her loose-fitting shoes as she went. They started up the steps, where no trapdoor was fitted. The staircase just continued on up through the ceiling and into another room. Supposedly the attic, the room was the entire length of the east side of the building.
“This is magnificent, Nina!” Gretchen said, her face lit in awe as she looked around.
“It is almost like a whole new floor above the other,” Nina replied, properly fascinated by the omitted feature of her property. “I was not made aware of this extra space, you know. I wonder why she didn’t tell me about this!”
“You can do so much with it. Personally, I would make this my bedroom, all concealed and huge,” Gretchen told Nina. She was right, Nina thought. It was a good idea to make this her bedroom, away from the rest of the house, and with all this space it was hard to resist.
“The previous owner must have been a lot like you, old girl,” Gretchen said from halfway through the room where she sat on her haunches with her glass, fiddling with something in the wall.
“Why?”
“Come look at this. He was a bibliophile of note,” Gretchen said with a touch of suspense and mystery, like the narrator of a fairy tale. Nina rushed over to see what she was meddling with and to her astonishment she found a hidden bounty of old books, stacked within the wall. Nina reached out to the odd collection and noticed something peculiar.
“Gretch, why don’t they have titles?”
“Maybe they are ledgers or something. If they were printed books, they’d surely have titles on the spines, right?” Gretch weighed in, but she did not want to just pull one of the books out, in case they were stacked to support something. She grabbed Nina’s arm as Nina started to remove a book.
“No! You never know what they are doing here. What if you pull it out and the wall caves in?” Gretchen warned.
Nina scoffed and took one, opening it after dusting it off. The first page was indeed handwritten, but what it said unsettled Nina as much as it perplexed her.
“What is it?” Gretchen asked from her crouched position.
Nina examined the old ink scribbling on the first page, and with a quivering voice she read it out to Gretchen, “It says… Mein Kampf.”
Chapter 9
Sam was clean shaven, at least, when Patrick picked him up.
The office in Glasgow had planned the mission and debriefed Patrick that afternoon before he left for Edinburgh to collect his partner for this assignment. They were to travel to Rotterdam, locate Jaap Roodt and collect reconnaissance on his daily routine. Photographs, video footage, and a phone tap to his business office would be required so that the Secret Service could determine the extent of his involvement in an antigovernment conspiracy to infect the larger population of western Europe with a highly contagious biological agent that had a 100 percent mortality rate and a twenty-four-hour window of efficacy.
Patrick told Sam what he expected from him, but other than that all details were classified. Sam Cleave was the best at recording clandestine dealings and the assignment was of such high importance and urgency that they could not afford to use an amateur to get them their evidence. All he knew, though, was that Jaap Roodt was the mark. Patrick did not tell him why MI6 was after him, or that he had been associated with some shady names that Nina Gould was also tied to. They did not know how the lot tied in together, but with Sam in his company for the next few days, Patrick Smith could do some of his own intelligence gathering and assist the home office in the apprehension of anyone linked to Roodt’s insidious plan.