The Dead Drop (19 page)

“Plus all those dates.”

“A girl has to have a life, Joe. Oh, and Gilda, honey, I’m sorry I won’t be able to make you dinner tonight, either. I’m going to be at the office late to finish this story.”

“That’s okay.” Gilda couldn’t help feeling that this was an absurd statement; with the exception of the scorched sandwiches, Caitlin hadn’t made a single meal since Gilda had moved in.

“She means she won’t be there to help you open the jar of marshmallow cream.” Joe winked at Gilda and Gilda laughed.

“As you can tell, Joe’s known me since college.”

“That’s right; I know your ways.”

Caitlin glanced at her cell phone. “I’m going to be late for my meeting if I don’t get going.”

“Okay—thanks, Caitlin.” Gilda admired Caitlin’s ability to sweep in, get a quick favor done and then run off to an important-sounding Judiciary Committee meeting.

Gilda found a quiet spot at a desk with a reading lamp, and a few minutes later, a tall stack of President Lincoln’s writings popped up from the underground tunnel. Joe placed them in front of Gilda. “Enjoy,” he said.

Gilda stared at the towering stack of leather-bound books. Lincoln had written
a lot
—speeches, letters, even poems. As she flipped through the volumes, she realized that she had no idea what to look for or where to begin.

Gilda took out the photographs of the dead-drop message and arranged them on her desk.
Maybe the words in the message will give me some clue about where to look first,
she thought.

Gilda leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. She recalled her last dream about Abraham Lincoln.
Look at my letters,
the ghost had said.

But which letters? There were so many volumes.

Flipping through her reporter’s notebook in search of more clues, Gilda noticed a phrase:

Gilda looked back at the first line of the message:

Following her instincts, Gilda looked up the word
speed
in the index of a volume of Lincoln’s letters. She felt a little tickle growing in her left ear as she flipped through the pages and a surge of excitement when she found an entry entitled “Letter to Joshua Speed.” Was it just chance that the corner of that particular page was folded, as if someone had marked it for her?

Gilda quickly flipped to the letter. Dated August 24, 1855, it was a letter from Abraham Lincoln to a friend from the South. The letter seemed to be about Lincoln’s rejection of slavery, but what really caught Gilda’s attention was a passage containing several significant words that also appeared in the dead-drop message:

She placed the coded message next to the passage from Lincoln’s letter, examining both closely.

It’s so obvious now,
she thought.
Why didn’t I see it before?

Now she understood that the sentence from Lincoln’s letter was just a disguise—a “cover” to distract her from the
real
message.

Gilda rewrote the dead-drop message, this time removing every word that also appeared in Lincoln’s letter.

I did it,
Gilda thought.
I cracked the code. It really is a dead-drop message!

Clearly, the message announced a signal and the transfer of a secret package of some kind.

But who is Anna?
Gilda wondered.
And is “The Poet” a code name, or is it something else entirely?

24

A Dangerous Encounter

Gilda heard the rumbling of thunder as she left the Library of Congress and made her way back through the park. She passed people who walked home from work with brisk, hurried steps and a homeless man who mumbled about “exposing the government” as he shuffled slowly along the sidewalk. The trees trembled as a warm breeze rose and dark clouds gathered overhead.

Inside Union Station, a parade of people streamed from the trains, dragging suitcases and talking on cell phones as they converged on shops selling ice cream and coffee.

Gilda followed a crowd of people down the escalator to the underground train. She waited on the platform, sensing the fuming impatience of weary people staring silently at each other across the tracks. Deciding she might as well contemplate the next steps in her investigation while she waited for the train, Gilda pulled one of her photographs of the dead-drop message from her purse to examine it for more clues.

A moment later, the skin on the back of her neck felt warm: she could literally
feel
someone staring at her—looking over her shoulder.

Gilda turned to see a man staring at the photograph in her hand with great interest. He had a round, sunburned face with a high forehead above which sparse, spiky hair sprouted. A close-cropped, reddish mustache and beard framed his face. He wasn’t much taller than Gilda: in fact, there was something almost elfin or gnomish about the man, but the piercing intensity in his gaze unnerved her.
He knows something about me,
Gilda thought.
How long has he been watching me?

For a moment their eyes locked, but before he could speak, Gilda instinctively stuffed the photograph back into her handbag. She abruptly opened her cell phone and pretended to check messages as she walked down the train platform, attempting to create some distance between herself and the man. She glanced up and felt another surge of anxiety when she found him still staring in her direction, slowly making his way toward her. The lights lining the train tracks flashed, announcing the arrival of a train.
Hurry up, hurry up!
The train simply couldn’t arrive fast enough. Gilda had no idea who she was running from—only a gut feeling that this stranger seemed to have a very special interest in her.

The train rushed into the station and Gilda joined a group of people clustering together at the doorway. She scooted inside the train and watched with relief as the doors closed behind her before the man was able to follow her into her car of the train.

Gilda opened her notebook:

25

An Unpleasant Discovery

Following her decoding of the dead-drop message, Gilda wanted to go down to Oak Hill Cemetery to look for more clues and conduct surveillance, but the steady rain pounding on the windows of her apartment made the idea of navigating the crumbling walkways in the cemetery very unappealing. Besides, the idea of venturing into a cemetery alone after her scare in the Metro station suddenly felt too risky.

Gilda pulled some blueberries out of the refrigerator, mixed them with a dollop of yogurt, and sat down in front of the television. Unable to find anything worth watching, she stood up and paced around the apartment, thinking about the tangled maze of clues that seemed to grow ever more complicated and dangerous.
What if that man knows where I live?
she wondered.
What if he’s been conducting surveillance and already knows all about my investigation?

She examined the walls of the living room, wondering if there was any possibility her apartment was bugged
. We are always being watched,
Boris Volkov had complained
.

“Okay, Gilda—just stop it,” Gilda told herself. “You’re getting too paranoid.”

Feeling the need to get her mind off her investigation for at least a few minutes, Gilda decided to do something she usually avoided: she called her mother. “Hi, Mom.”

“Gilda! How are you?”

“Pretty good. I guess.”

“Anything wrong?”

“No.” Gilda wasn’t about to tell her mother that a suspicious-looking man had been staring at her with great interest in the Metro station.

“What have you been up to?”

“Nothing, really. You know—just working hard. Same old, same old.” It was a banal expression she often heard her mother use with coworkers.

“I’m sure
something
interesting must be going on in the nation’s capital.”

“Not really.”
Maybe this is how spies live with their families,
Gilda thought.
There are so many details they have to keep secret, they end up saying nothing at all.

“What about you?” Gilda asked. “Any luck with your dating profile?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, today was my day off from work, and I met a nice gentleman for coffee.”

“What kind of ‘nice gentleman’? Did he meet the qualifications I outlined in your posting?”

“I don’t think anyone could meet those qualifications.”

“That would be the ideal, though.”

“Maybe for one of us.”

“Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Please do not yell into the phone, Gilda.”

“Sorry. I just need to know what kinds of ‘gentlemen callers’ to expect when I get back home.” Gilda walked into her bedroom and pulled open the blinds. “I need to prepare my interview questions for when they come to the house to pick you up.”

“I don’t think this man will be coming to the house.”

“One of the crazies, huh?”

“He was a little older than I expected.”

Maybe you were a little older than he expected, too,
Gilda thought.

“He’s a widower, so we had that aspect in common. It was just odd; he kept talking about his deceased wife.”

“That’s very loyal of him.”

“But it’s not the kind of thing you do on a date. It was a little off-putting, to be honest. I almost began to feel that she was sitting at the table right there with us.”

“Maybe she was.” Gilda pictured her mother and an elderly man sitting at a small table at Starbucks. Next to them were two ghosts—the ghost of her father and the ghost of the man’s wife. “Maybe she was there.”

“Oh—but there was one funny surprise.”