Chapter 3: The Library of Congress
Arthur Vance did not look like a man who harbored state secrets. When the agents entered his living room, he was sitting in his worn velvet armchair with a cup of lukewarm chamomile tea in one hand and a magnifying glass in the other. He didn't jump when the heavy oak door creaked open; he merely lowered the glass and looked over the top of his half-moon reading glasses with mild irritation.
"Agent Miller," Arthur said, recognizing the man at the front of the formation. "You're late. I expected you twenty minutes ago."
Miller didn't return the greeting. He signaled for the perimeter team to hold their positions before stepping onto the patterned rug. "We had a slight complication involving a sporting good on the approach, Arthur. Your boy has a decent jump shot, by the way."
"Leave the boys out of this," Arthur said, setting his tea down on the side table with a steady click. "They were just shooting hoops. They don't know anything about the Palmer papers."
"They were standing twenty feet from the primary drop point," Miller countered, pulling a thin leather folio from his inner coat pocket. "In our line of work, proximity equals complicity until proven otherwise. You know the rules as well as I do, Arthur. You wrote half the indexing manuals for the classified stacks."
Outside, through the double-paned living room window, Leo could see Marcus’s silhouette pacing the driveway while Toby tried to comfort him. The boys were trapped in a bubble of ignorance, watching their world tilt on its axis without understanding the machinery that was doing the pushing.
Arthur stood up slowly, smoothing the wrinkles from his beige cardigan. His joints popped audibly in the quiet room. "The Palmer papers aren't here, Miller. I told your director yesterday morning. They were transferred to the National Archives sub-depot in Suitland three weeks ago, right on schedule."
"The ledger says yes," Miller said, taking two steps closer to the desk where Arthur’s laptop sat plugged into a multi-port charger. "The physical inventory says no. And the Director doesn't like discrepancies in his retirement gift."
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Arthur sighed, a long, weary exhalation that seemed to deflate him an inch. "The Director is looking at a ghost. Palmer was an accountant, Miller. Not a spy. The irregularities in those ledgers were tax write-offs for the Department of Agriculture during the Truman administration. There's no conspiracy. There's just a lot of bad math."
"Bad math can bring down a cabinet member if it's audited by the wrong committee," Miller said softly. He reached out and tapped the corner of the laptop lid. "Turn it on, Arthur."
