Free Salem's Cipher by Jess Lourey Page B

over the smooth metal of the locket. “I have the remaining manager with me. She has yet to supply the promised referrals.”
    There was a pause on the other end. A muffled exchange filtered down the line. Jason imagined he heard the closing of a heavy door, soft footsteps on lush carpeting, the echo of conversation off brocaded walls. Carl Barnaby returned to the line. “That might be all right. We have word that their daughters are on the way to Massachusetts to retrieve a document from the pulpit of one of the oldest churches in the United States.” He took a breath. “We have reason to believe it might be the master referral list.”
    Jason shook his head, chuckling. Hiding the names in the pulpit of an old church? He’d seen extreme measures in his fifteen years working for the Hermitage, but this came close to taking the cake. You hunt a group of women for a couple hundred years, though, and it made sense they’d find ingenious ways to communicate with one another.
    The Hermitage had always taken care of the obvious targets, like Benazir Bhutto, Indira Gandhi, and Anna Mae Aquash, but other than those very public Underground leaders, they’d had to rely on second-or third-hand information to discover who their enemies were. The five women he’d killed before coming to Minneapolis had most likely been high up in the Underground. Same of Grace Odegaard and Vida Wiley, though how high, he couldn’t know without the master docket.
    But it sounded like he was about to get his hands on the legendary document. Finally, after all these years of searching.
    Cut off the head, the snake dies.
    Hot goddamn.
    â€œYou want me to obtain the referral list, dismiss the daughters, and continue on to the Crucible?”
    Jason wouldn’t utter her name. His phone was disposable, Carl Barnaby’s line secured, but still. Her name would be flagged if anyone was listening, and someone was always listening. They were too close to achieving their mission to risk it on a loose tongue.
    â€œYes, and in that order.” Carl Barnaby’s voice relaxed into its signature jocularity. “I’ll send someone for your current interviewee. We’ll keep her in case a position opens up. You stay on task.”
    Jason nodded, even though Carl Barnaby couldn’t see it. He waited as he heard the familiar click of being transferred. When the man’s secretary came on, he exchanged directions to the abandoned Gopher Munitions Plant in Rosemount, 30 miles south of Minneapolis, for the address of the First Church in Salem, Massachusetts. He didn’t know if the woman would still be alive when the Hermitage Foundation’s clean-up crew arrived.
    He glanced at her. She was tied to a chair, her hair hanging in her face. Crusted blood had turned her top a muddy brown. Her smell was strong, even from ten feet away, the uniquely sour, musky potpourri of pain, feces, and terror.
    It was happy luck he’d discovered both of his Minnesota targets inside Odegaard’s apartment. He would have loved to bring them back here for questioning, but because of the neighbor and her dog, he’d only had time to transport the one.
    He’d cornered them on the fire escape and grabbed the woman nearest him. Whipping her around to face her friend, he held his fillet knife steady on her throat. Its metal reflected the moon back onto his cheek. The soft, distant purrs of cars driving through the night was the only sound. If either woman had screamed, the police would have arrived in minutes. Most women, he found, did not scream.
    â€œTell me who the rest of the Underground leaders are, or your friend dies.”
    The woman in his grasp closed her eyes, silent. The one he faced trembled but did not cry. “I’m the only one left,” she whispered.
    The soft ding of the elevator traveled through the foyer, across Grace Odegaard’s apartment, and out onto the fire escape. Jason had