He stared at the screen, waiting for the pleasing whir and grind that signaled his money was being gathered. A new screen appeared informing him that the operation was not possible and that due to an account discrepancy, the bank was confiscating his card at that time. For any further questions, he could call…
Bolden stalked out of the cheerless office. The chill air was like a slap in the face. He jogged to the end of the block. At the corner, he opened his wallet and recounted the bills inside. He had eleven dollars to his name.
27
“Who were they?” asked Jennifer Dance, as the old sedan bumped and rattled up Atlantic Avenue toward the Brooklyn Bridge.
“Old boyfriends,” said Bobby Stillman.
“Are they the reason you had me keep the curtains drawn?”
“Boy, she’s full of questions, this one,” said the driver. “Hey, lady, put a lid on it.”
“It’s all right, Walter,” said Bobby Stillman. She twisted in her seat, bringing her intense gaze to bear. “I’ll tell you who they are,” she said. “They’re the enemy. They’re Big Brother. Remember the Masons’ ‘All-Seeing Eye’?”
Jenny nodded hesitantly.
“That’s who they are. They watch. They spy. Scientia est potentia. ‘Knowledge is power.’ They report. They silence. They brainwash. But that’s not enough for them. They have a vision. A higher calling. And for that calling, they’re willing to kill.”
The woman was crazy. Big Brother and the Masons. Scientia est dementia was more like it, or whatever Latin gobbledygook she was quoting. Any second now she was going to start babbling about the aliens among us, and the miniature transmitters hidden in her molars. Jenny had a physical need to move away from her, but there was no place to go. “How do you know them?” she asked.
“We go back a long way. I keep coming after them, and they keep trying to stop me.”
“Who’s they?”
Bobby Stillman threw an arm over the seat, shooting her an uncertain glance as if she was deciding whether she was worth all the effort. “The club,” she said. Her voice was calmer, sober even, gaining traction now that she was back on planet Earth. “It’s funny, isn’t it? But that’s what they call themselves. A club of patriots. Who are they? The big boys in Washington and New York with their hands on the levers of power. How do you think they found Thomas? They’re inside.”
“Inside what?”
“Everything. Government. Business. Law. Education. Medicine.”
Jenny shook her head, uncomfortable with these vague accusations. She wanted names, faces, plans. She wanted something she could read about in The New York Times. “Who’s in the club?”
Bobby Stillman ran a hand over her hair. “I don’t know all of them, and believe me, darling, I wouldn’t tell you if I did. Then you’d be number two on their hit parade with your boyfriend, right after yours truly. All you need to know is that they are a group of men, maybe even women-”
“A club…”
Stillman nodded. “A club of very powerful, very connected individuals who want to keep their hands on the tiller steering this country of ours. They meet together. They talk. They plan. Yes, it’s a club in the real sense of the word.”
“That does what?”
“Primarily, they interfere. They’re not content to let the government work the way it’s supposed to. They don’t trust us, and by us, I mean the people-you, me, and that guy over there selling Sabrett hot dogs-to make the decisions.”
“Do they fix elections?”
“Of course not.” Bobby Stillman flared. “Aren’t you listening? I said they’re inside. They work with those in power. They convince them of the purity of their aims. They scare them into acting. Into usurping the people’s voice… all in the name of democracy.”
Jenny sat back, her mind racing. She looked at her nails and began tearing at her thumb, a habit she’d gotten over at the age of fourteen. It was too much for her. Too big. Too ill-defined. Altogether too spooky. “Where’s Thomas?” she asked again.
“We’re going to meet him now.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Don’t you two have lunch planned? Twelve o’clock? At your regular place?”
Jenny bolted forward in her seat. “How did you know?”
“We listen, too,” said Bobby Stillman. “But we’re not mind readers.”
Walter, the driver, turned his head and looked at Jenny. “Where to, kid?”
28
At ten-thirty, the main branch of the New York Public Library, known officially as the Humanities and Social Sciences Library, was mildly busy. A stream of regulars filed up and down the stairs with a workaday stiffness. Tourists meandered through the halls, identified by their hip packs and their agog expressions. Only the library personnel walked slower.
Built on the site of the old Croton Reservoir in 1911, the Beaux Arts structure spanned two city blocks between Fortieth and Forty-second Streets on Fifth Avenue, and at the time of its construction, was the largest marble building ever erected. The main gallery was a heaven of white marble, its ceiling soaring a hundred feet above the floor. Imposing staircases framed by towering colonnades rose on either side of the great hall. Somewhere inside the place was a Gutenberg Bible, the first five folios of Shakespeare’s plays, and a handwritten copy of Washington’s Farewell Address, the most famous speech never given.
Hurrying across the third-floor rotunda, Bolden traversed the length of the main reading room and passed through an archway to the secondary reading room, where the library’s computers were kept. He signed his name on the waiting list, and after fifteen minutes, was shown to a terminal with full Internet access. He slid his chair close to the desk, rummaging in his pocket for the drawing he had made in his apartment earlier that morning. The paper was wrinkled and damp, and he spent a moment flattening it with his palm. I’m fighting a dragon with a paper sword, he thought.
Accessing the search engine, he selected “Image Search,” then typed in “musket.” A selection of postage-stamp-size photos, or thumbnails, filled the screen. Half showed a slim long-barreled rifle that reminded Bolden of the gun Daniel Boone had used. There were also pictures of men dressed in Colonial military garb: Redcoats, Hessians, Bluecoats (better known as the Continental Army); a thumbnail of a poodle staring at the camera. (Was the dog named Musket?) And a shot of three friends raising obscenely decorated beer steins. Sex was never more than a click away on the Internet.
The second page included a thumbnail of a miniature iron musket balanced on the tip of a man’s index finger. Impressive, Bolden conceded, but irrelevant. Another photo of the drunken revelers. The caption called them the Dre Muskets, which he took as Dutch for “Three Musketeers.”
Then he saw it. The third picture along the top row. The oddly shaped rifle butt differentiated the musket from the others he had seen. The butt was asymmetrical, shorter by six inches across the top than on the bottom. The caption identified it as a “Kentucky Flintlock Rifle, ca. 1780.” He checked it against his drawing. It was the one. He clicked on the picture and was directed to a fuller description of the gun.
“The Kentucky flintlock rifle was a favorable alternative to the more popular British Brown Bess musket. Not only was the Kentucky flintlock considerably lighter at eight pounds, versus the Brown Bess’s fourteen pounds, but the rifle’s spiraled-groove barrel permitted accurate fire from up to 250 yards, far outdistancing the Brown Bess’s (notoriously inaccurate) range of only eighty yards.”
The word “minutemen” caught Bolden’s eyes. He thought it sounded like the name of a secret group that might select a tattoo of a Revolutionary War-era weapon as their symbol. He typed in “minutemen” and spent a few minutes clicking on the more relevant citations. He read brief histories of the Minutemen, Paul Revere, and William Dawes. He hadn’t known that the Minutemen were a handpicked elite from the militia-only a quarter of the militia served as Minutemen-or that they had been in existence since 1645 to fight off all manner of foreign invasion and to protect the frontier against Indians. To his mind, Minutemen were the valiant bunch who fought off the British at Lexington and Concord in 1775.