CHAPTER 16
Washington D.C.
JIANJUN SAT WITH his back resting against multiple plush pillows on a king-size bed in a luxurious room at the St. Regis Hotel north of Lafayette Square and two blocks from the White House. He couldn’t believe the time. He had slept sixteen hours straight. Although past noon, he ordered eggs Benedict from room service, ate breakfast in bed, and now settled in to work in bed. After roughing it in a ger in Mongolia, and then traveling non-stop half-way around the world to get here, he owed it to himself. Ah, the good life, he thought as he patted the comfortable, lump-free, luxurious Egyptian sheet-covered mattress.
His gaze turned to the thumb drive holding files from Lionel Rempart’s computer. Maybe “the good life” wasn’t exactly the right term for this. He poured some tea from room service into the cup on the nightstand, set the laptop on his thighs and plugged in the drive.
The night before, he thought he was in big trouble when he heard a key in the door of Rempart’s town house. It turned out to be a management service Rempart had hired to keep an eye on the place. He showed the guy his student body card and a copy of the e-mail from Rempart’s server giving him authority to find some documents Rempart needed in Idaho. The property manager bought it, to Jianjun’s surprise. Taking his thumb drive, and telling the manager that someone had failed to lock the deadbolt or to arm the alarm system, Jianjun quickly escaped.
After a buying a burrito and chalupas from Taco Bell, which he’d learned to love while living in Seattle, he’d returned to his hotel room and crashed.
Now, he began to go through Rempart’s files. He learned that Rempart’s interest in Idaho and The Book of Abraham the Jew began over a year ago. Rempart apparently had met someone he called “JV” and liked what he heard. Two weeks after that meeting, he began writing down notes of their conversations. He didn’t annotate the initial meeting, only referred to it in later entries.
Rempart’s interest peaked when JV told him about a group of explorers who had secretly followed the Lewis and Clark expedition westward. Two young foreign students, Chou An-ming from China and Niels Jorgansen from Denmark, discovered their story many years ago as they worked together on a term paper for an anthropology class taught by Professor Thurmon Teasdale.
Rempart was fascinated by the explorers and the Indian band they found living in what was hitherto believed to be an uninhabited area in Central Idaho. Finding new anthropological groups was Rempart’s bread-and-butter.
As JV continued to feed Rempart new information, however, a change came over Michael’s brother. The Book of Abraham the Jew, which he had initially ignored, became more and more fascinating to him. JV talked about a man named Calvin Phaylor as having been the source of much of her information about all this. It sounded as if Phaylor was deceased, however. The Book of Abraham the Jew had caused Rempart to ask Michael to track down Chou An-ming in China while he flew off to France and Israel to learn more.
Jianjun paused to think about all this. He clearly remembered meeting Dr. Chou’s daughter, who insisted Chou knew nothing about alchemy, nor would he have wanted to.
The way Rempart’s notes expressed few thoughts and no explanation of why he suddenly started running around the world frustrated Jianjun.
Finally, the kicker: the mysterious “JV” offered Rempart the sum of one million dollars if he would spend a year of his life searching in Central Idaho for The Book of Abraham the Jew. Here, Lionel did explain some of his thinking, wondering what harm it would do to take the money. If he found anything, he’d be praised by his peers; if he didn’t, he’d still be a million dollars ahead. To be sure he didn’t lose in any way, he arranged for a visiting professorship to Boise State University so he could use the school’s money and students to fund his little field trip, along with paying his salary.
Cheap bastard, Jianjun thought.
Rempart’s notes about all this ended in the middle of him getting ready to move to Idaho for the school year.
Jianjun ran some searches to find out more about the mysterious people behind Rempart’s activities. Calvin Phaylor, he learned, wasn’t deceased at all, merely retired. He founded Phaylor-Laine Pharmaceuticals forty years earlier. When the company grew into one of the major pharmaceutical businesses in the world, Phaylor had it go public, and the hand-selected board kept him on as Chief Executive Officer until thirteen years ago, when they gave him a vote of “no confidence.” Three years later, the position went to Jennifer Vandenburg.
Ah ha! The mysterious JV.
Jianjun did more investigating, and soon sent Michael a long text message filled with information about the discoveries on Lionel’s hard drive, from the secret expedition to Lionel’s payment for searching for The Book of Abraham the Jew. He also let Michael know that, so far, he didn’t have a chance to do a deep investigation on Charlotte Reed or Simon Quade.
Hacking into the federal government’s personnel files, he found nothing about Charlotte Reed except that she had worked for ICE for over twelve years, and was now a GS-13. He could not find anything whatsoever on Simon Quade as yet. Also, there were no news accounts of a group of men going missing in Idaho in the past twenty years. Whatever happened was kept under wraps or wasn’t newsworthy.
Jianjun had lots more Lionel Rempart files to go through, but simply skimming the file names made him doubt he would find anything of interest.
Ancient Echoes
Joanne Pence's books
- A Brand New Ending
- A Cast of Killers
- A Change of Heart
- A Christmas Bride
- A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
- A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked
- A Delicate Truth A Novel
- A Different Blue
- A Firing Offense
- A Killing in China Basin
- A Killing in the Hills
- A Matter of Trust
- A Murder at Rosamund's Gate
- A Nearly Perfect Copy
- A Novel Way to Die
- A Perfect Christmas
- A Perfect Square
- A Pound of Flesh
- A Red Sun Also Rises
- A Rural Affair
- A Spear of Summer Grass
- A Story of God and All of Us
- A Summer to Remember
- A Thousand Pardons
- A Time to Heal
- A Toast to the Good Times
- A Touch Mortal
- A Trick I Learned from Dead Men
- A Vision of Loveliness
- A Whisper of Peace
- A Winter Dream
- Abdication A Novel
- Abigail's New Hope
- Above World
- Accidents Happen A Novel
- Ad Nauseam
- Adrenaline
- Aerogrammes and Other Stories
- Aftershock
- Against the Edge (The Raines of Wind Can)
- All in Good Time (The Gilded Legacy)
- All the Things You Never Knew
- All You Could Ask For A Novel
- Almost Never A Novel
- Already Gone
- American Elsewhere
- American Tropic
- An Order of Coffee and Tears
- Angels at the Table_ A Shirley, Goodness
- Alien Cradle
- All That Is
- Angora Alibi A Seaside Knitters Mystery
- Arcadia's Gift
- Are You Mine
- Armageddon
- As Sweet as Honey
- As the Pig Turns
- Ascendants of Ancients Sovereign
- Ash Return of the Beast
- Away
- $200 and a Cadillac
- Back to Blood
- Back To U
- Bad Games
- Balancing Act
- Bare It All
- Beach Lane
- Because of You
- Before I Met You
- Before the Scarlet Dawn
- Before You Go
- Being Henry David
- Bella Summer Takes a Chance
- Beneath a Midnight Moon
- Beside Two Rivers
- Best Kept Secret
- Betrayal of the Dove
- Betrayed
- Between Friends
- Between the Land and the Sea
- Binding Agreement
- Bite Me, Your Grace
- Black Flagged Apex
- Black Flagged Redux
- Black Oil, Red Blood
- Blackberry Winter
- Blackjack
- Blackmail Earth
- Blackmailed by the Italian Billionaire
- Blackout
- Blind Man's Bluff
- Blindside
- Blood & Beauty The Borgias
- Blood Gorgons
- Blood of the Assassin
- Blood Prophecy
- Blood Twist (The Erris Coven Series)
- Blood, Ash, and Bone
- Bolted (Promise Harbor Wedding)
- Bonnie of Evidence