“Couldn’t sleep.” Malone showed the guard the book. “I came to get another.”

The guard looked puzzled by the notion of finishing one book and wanting to read more.

Malone didn’t linger to talk about it. He went along the corridor on the left and opened the library door. In the darkness that faced him, the room had a smothering staleness that reminded him of the funeral parlor in which his grandfather’s body had lain. The only thing missing was the cloying scent of too many flowers.

Stop thinking that way, Malone warned himself.

He flicked a switch on his left, blinked from the glare of the overhead light, and closed the door behind him. The books were arranged not only by author but in categories: fiction, nonfiction, and reference, the latter on the right.

As Malone headed in that direction, he heard the door open behind him. Turning, he saw the guard. With a nod, Malone resumed his search. The encyclopedia was easily located. Britannica. He didn’t know anything about rare books, but he did know about Bellasar’s tastes, and he would have bet anything that this particular edition – 1911, the copyright page on the volume he selected showed – was the classic version preferred by collectors.

The guard kept watching. Malone nodded to him again, but this time with a slight impatience, as if saying, Fine, you’ve made your point. You’ve been a good watchdog. Now get on with your rounds and let me read in peace. The guard’s puzzled gaze wavered. After he stepped back into the corridor, his steps receding along the marble floor, Malone went over and shut the door, being sure that the latch made a noise to let the guard know he didn’t want to be disturbed again.

He carried the volume he had chosen – for subjects that began with R – to an easy chair, and as he turned the heavy book’s brittle pages, smelling its must, he tried to stifle his apprehension. Everything’s going to be okay, he assured himself. Just keep following the plan.

He found the article he wanted.

“Rossetti, Dante Gabriel: English painter and poet, a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, born in 1828, died in 1882.” Stop thinking about death! he told himself.

Rossetti’s original first names had been Gabriel Charles Dante, but his obsession with the Italian poet from the Middle Ages had prompted him to insist on being called Dante. The obsession had taken another form when he identified his beautiful wife, Elizabeth, with Dante’s Beatrice and dedicated himself to a passionate translation of Dante’s devotion to that woman, in effect describing the love he himself felt for Elizabeth. After Elizabeth’s death early in their marriage, Rossetti had buried the manuscripts of all his poems with her and had painted a symbolic portrait of his idealized love for her, calling it Beata Beatrix – Blessed Beatrice.

Again, the subject was death. Struggling to distract himself, Malone found significance in the parallel he shared with Rossetti – they were both painters, and their lives had been changed because of a woman each had fallen in love with while doing a portrait of her.

Love. For the first time, Malone realized that he had consciously used the word in connection with what he was feeling.

A half hour later, when the guard again looked in, Malone pretended to be asleep in the chair, his eyes closed, his head drooping, the encyclopedia open on his lap. This time, the guard shut the door when he went away. Immediately, Malone stood, turned off the lights, and went over to a casement window. Seeing no one outside, he opened the window, eased down to the murky ground, shut the window behind him, and sank behind a shrub. If the guard returned to the library, he would decide that Malone had wakened and gone back to his room.

Staying low, Malone assessed the spotlights in the darkness. After assuring himself that no one was in this area, he crossed a path, reached shrubs, and crept behind them in the direction of the Cloister, its bell tower silhouetted against the starry sky. Moving cautiously, working to blend with shadows, he took a half hour to cover a distance that would normally have been a five-minute stroll.

His palms sweated. Having been away from the military for a decade, he had to work to shut down his emotions. His heart pounded. His lungs couldn’t seem to get enough air. Leaving the cover of a fountain and reaching a clump of sculpted evergreen shrubs, he sank to the ground and stared at the arched windows of the Cloister. Although most were in darkness, it puzzled him that all of the basement windows were brightly lit. As he debated whether to risk crawling closer, he was startled by an outside door that opened, revealing a man’s shadow against an interior light. A guard with a rifle stepped out, closed the door, stared up at the starry sky, and lit a cigarette. Malone silently gave thanks that he had hesitated to crawl toward the basement windows.

No problem. I’ll just wait until he goes back inside or moves on. But with Bellasar and Potter away, the guard wasn’t in a hurry. Indeed, after finally finishing the cigarette, then stubbing it out with his boot, the guard continued to remain where he was. Only when the door opened and another man came out, this one wearing a knee-length white coat, did the guard assume a professional stance, as if he’d been standing at attention, watching the door.

The second man, tall, with dark hair, blocky features, and a husky build, wasn’t anyone Malone had seen before. With help from the hallway light spilling from the open door, Malone studied him, trying to memorize his broad lips, thick eyebrows, and square face. There was little time. The white-coated man pointed toward the crushed cigarette at the guard’s feet and said something curt, with the immediate result that the guard came to greater attention. A further disapproving remark caused the guard to follow the man back into the building. The door banged shut, blocking the interior light. But there was still ample illumination from the security lights in the area, and Malone took a long, careful time to watch for other guards before he reconsidered approaching the basement windows.

Why had the man been wearing a knee-length white coat? he wondered. It looked like the kind of coat a doctor would wear in a hospital. Or a technician in a laboratory. What was behind those basement windows? Ignoring a metal band that seemed to tighten around his chest, he stayed low and darted toward shrubs at the side of the Cloister. No sooner had he disappeared behind one than boot steps rounded a corner, passing close enough to Malone for him to hear a scrape of metal against metal, perhaps from a rifle against an equipment belt.

Other sounds attracted Malone’s attention – muffled voices, the rasp of what sounded like wood against stone. Wary, he peered through a window, staying to the side so he wouldn’t be seen. Not that it did him any good – the illumination through the glass was filtered by a blind. The voices seemed to come from farther along, however, and when he crawled to the next window, reaching the cover of another shrub, he discovered that instead of a blind, this window had an inside shutter, the slats of which had not been completely closed.

He was able to see part of a room – segments of a stone floor, tables, cabinets, laboratory instruments, computers, and various electronic devices. Two large appliances against the far wall looked like an industrial-grade freezer and refrigerator. The voices became more distinct as the guard and the white-coated man stepped into view. The man spoke what sounded like Russian, which the guard didn’t seem to understand and Malone certainly didn’t, but the gist was clear – the man wanted the guard to open a wooden crate.

Nails screeched as a crowbar pried them free. When the guard rammed so hard that a board shattered, Malone heard another voice cry out in protest. A third man stepped into view. He, too, wore a knee-length white coat. He gestured in alarm, speaking in agitated Russian, the frantic point of which was obvious: Be careful. Malone had seen those gestures before. In fact, he had seen this man before, the same balding, stoop-shouldered man he had watched get out of the helicopter the first morning he had been on the estate. The man had been dismayed by the rough way Bellasar’s men had handled the crates he had brought, just as he was dismayed now.