The Bishop's Pawn (Cotton Malone #13)(2)

He’d been but thirty-nine years old.

I stare at the man standing in the shadows at the end of the ground-floor hall. He’s definitely aged, but his face seems to have only become stronger with the years. His hair is grayer, the frame thinner, but the same air of gentle intellectualism remains, as does the stooped gait and short shuffle to each step as he approaches.

“Tomorrow will be a big day here,” he says in the low voice I recall. “Fifty years since King died.” He pauses. “Nearly twenty years since you and I last talked. I still feel the pain every day.”

A cryptic comment, but I expect no less. “Out of curiosity, how did we get in here tonight? This is a national historic site.”

“I have connections.”

Of that I have no doubt. It was the same years ago when all of this started.

“Did you bring them?” he asks.

I reach into my back pocket and display what he’d asked for. “Right here.”

“You’ve kept them all these years, along with the secret. Quite an accomplishment.”

“My career was the protecting of secrets.”

“I kept up with you. You worked for the Justice Department what, ten years?”

“Twelve.”

“An agent with the Magellan Billet. Now you live in Denmark and own an old bookshop. Quite a change.”

There’s a gun tucked at his waist. I point. “Is that necessary?”

“We both knew, at some point, it would come to this.”

Probably so.

“You managed to move on,” he says. “Everything that happened only pushed you forward to greater things. That’s been impossible for me. I’m amazed I’ve lasted this long.”

It’s true. My life has been altered in ways I could have never then imagined. But what happened also taught me a valuable lesson.

“I came, tonight, for you,” I tell him.

“Lay everything on that side table, please.”

No point arguing, so I do as asked.

“The King family lived in this house a long time,” he says. “They raised three children under this roof, one of whom grew up and changed the world.”

“We both know it took more than just him to make that happen. You were a big part.”

“That’s kind of you to say. But it’s no conciliation.”

Only a handful ever knew what really happened, most of whom are now dead.

“Do you ever think about those few days?” he asks.

My time with the Magellan Billet exposed me to some amazing things. Templars, a ruthless Central Asian dictator, Charlemagne’s secrets, the lost library at Alexandria, modern-day pirates. But nothing compares to what I was involved with during my first mission.

Before there even was a Magellan Billet.

“All the time,” I say.

“Should the truth be told?”

A fair question. Fifty years have passed and the world has changed. But I point again and have to ask, “Is the gun for me, or you?”

He does not immediately answer.

I learned a long time ago that people’s actions are nearly always less tidy than their minds. So I decide to be cautious.

“I want to talk about it,” he finally mutters.

“And your choices of listeners are limited?”

He nods. “It’s eating me up. I need you to tell me everything that happened. We never had this conversation back then.”

I hear what he has not said. “Before what?”

“Before I decide which one of us this gun is for.”





JUNE

18 years ago





Chapter One


Two favors changed my life.

The first happened on a warm Tuesday morning. I was cruising on Southside Boulevard, in Jacksonville, Florida, listening to the radio. A quick stab at the seek button and through the car speakers came, “Why does New York have lots of garbage and Los Angeles lots of lawyers?”

“New York got first choice?”

Laughter clamored, followed by, “How do you get a lawyer out of a tree?”

No one seemed to know the answer.

“Cut the rope.”

“The other day terrorists hijacked an airliner full of lawyers.”

“That’s awful. What happened?”

“They threatened that unless their demands were met they would begin releasing one lawyer every hour.”

More laughter.

“What do lawyers and—”

I turned the radio off. The disc jockeys seemed to be having fun, lawyers apparently a safe object of ridicule. Hell, who was going to complain? It wasn’t like gay jokes, Polish jokes, or anything even remotely sexist. Everybody hated lawyers. Everybody told a lawyer joke. And if the lawyers didn’t like it, who gave a damn?

Actually, I did.

Since I was a lawyer.

A good one in my opinion.

My name, Harold Earl “Cotton” Malone, appeared as one of thousands at the time who held a license within the State of Georgia, where I’d taken the bar exam six years earlier. But I’d never worked at any law firm. Instead I was a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy, assigned to the Judge Advocate General’s corps, currently on duty at the naval station in Mayport, Florida. Today, though, I wasn’t acting as a lawyer. Instead, I was doing a favor for a friend, a distraught husband going through a divorce.