She was becoming dizzy. She would pass out if she didn’t get some fresh air. She knocked on the divider to get the driver’s attention. He didn’t respond. She glanced at the driver’s ID card and thought that the photograph didn’t match the driver’s face. Her heartbeat accelerated, and she broke into a cold sweat.

Must…get…out.

She pounded with her fists on the plastic window. The driver glanced in the rearview mirror. She could see his eyes. Uncaring. The reflection in the mirror began to blur.

Her arms seemed made of lead. She was unable to lift her fists. She stretched out on the backseat, closed her eyes, and passed out.

The cabdriver looked in the mirror again. Satisfied that Carina was unconscious, he flicked a switch on the dashboard to shut off the gas flow to the backseat. He turned off Fifth Avenue and drove toward the Hudson River.

Minutes later, he drove the taxi up to a guardhouse at the entrance to a fenced-off area. The guard waved him through to a helipad at the edge of the river. Two tough-faced men stood near a helicopter whose rotors spun at a lazy speed.

The taxi parked next to the helicopter. The men opened the doors to the backseat, extracted Carina’s limp body, and loaded her on the helicopter.

One man got into the pilot’s seat and the other sat next to Carina holding a canister, ready to administer another whiff of knockout gas if she started to regain consciousness.

The rotors began to spin into a blur. The helicopter lurched, then lifted off the pavement. Within moments, it was only a speck in the sky.

NUMA 7 - The Navigator

Chapter 38

“I AM HAPPY NO PLACE ELSE,” Gamay said, quoting from the guidebook. “Jefferson was unequivocal about his love for Monticello.”

“Do you blame him?” Paul pointed through the windshield toward the familiar columned portico and rotunda on a distant hill high above the green rolling Virginia countryside.

It had been at least a year since the Trouts had last visited Jefferson’s fabled retreat on one of the back-road motor treks they enjoyed in their Humvee. Paul usually drove. Gamay navigated and provided local color, drawing on a pile of guidebooks to recite little known facts. Ad nauseam.

“Aha!” Angela said.

Trout winced. Angela, who was sitting in the backseat, was proving to be Gamay’s equal in travel trivia. Since leaving Georgetown that morning, the two women had been taking turns reciting facts and factoids about Jefferson and Monticello.

“Too late,” Paul said in an attempt to cut the young woman off at the pass. “We’re here.”

“This is important,” Angela said. She had her nose buried in a thick paperback entitled The Life and Times of Thomas Jefferson. “This deals with the Jefferson material that was stolen on the riverboat trip to Monticello.”

Trout’s ears perked up. “Read on.”