“Seen enough?” he asked.

“Yes. This is fascinating stuff, Bruce. It’s another world I know nothing about.”

“I seldom show off these books. The rare book trade is a quiet business. I’m sure no one knows that I have four copies of Catcher, and I’d like to keep it that way. There is no registry, no one is looking, and many transactions take place in the dark.”

“Your secrets are safe. I can’t think of a soul I would want to tell.”

“Don’t get me wrong, Mercer. This is all legitimate. I report the profits and pay the taxes, and if I dropped dead my estate would include these assets.”

“All of them?” she asked with a smile.

He returned the smile and said, “Well, most of them.”

“Of course.”

“Now, how about a business lunch?”

“I’m starving.”

14.

The team dined on carryout pizza and washed it down with soft drinks. At the moment, food was not important. Rick, Graham, and Elaine sat at the condo’s dining table and reviewed dozens of still photos taken from Mercer’s video. She had produced eighteen minutes of footage from Noelle’s store and twenty-two from Bruce’s; forty minutes of precious evidence they were thrilled to now possess. They had studied it, but more important it was being analyzed by their lab in Bethesda. Facts were being established: the size of his vault, the dimensions of his safe, the presence of surveillance cameras and security sensors; dead bolts on doors; push-button entry panels. The safe weighed eight hundred pounds, was made of eleven-gauge steel, and had been manufactured fifteen years earlier by a factory in Ohio, sold online, and installed by a contractor out of Jacksonville. When locked, it was secured by five dead bolts made of lead and sealed by hydraulics. It could withstand heat of 1,550 degrees for two hours. Opening it would not be a problem, but the obvious challenge was getting to it without ringing bells.

They had spent the afternoon around the table, often in long, intense conversations, often on the speakerphone with their colleagues in Bethesda. Elaine was in charge but welcomed collaboration. There were a lot of opinions offered by smart people, and she listened. The FBI consumed most of their time. Was it time to call in the Feds? To introduce them to their favorite suspect? To tell them everything they had learned so far about Bruce Cable? Elaine didn’t think so, not yet anyway. And her reason was sound: there was not enough evidence to convince a federal magistrate that Cable had the manuscripts buried in his basement. At the moment, they had a tip from a source in Boston, a forty-minute video of the premises, and some still shots lifted from the video. In the opinions of their two attorneys in Washington, it was simply not enough to get a search warrant.

And, as always, when the Feds entered the picture, they took charge and changed the rules. As of now, they knew nothing of Bruce Cable and had no idea Elaine’s little mole had wormed her way inside. Elaine wanted to keep it this way for as long as possible.