Page 70 of Booked for Theft

“And they were stupid enough to let librarians make off with the titles as long as they agreed to never sell or distribute them.” Bradley frowned. “Or they understood librarians wouldn’t be doing anything questionable with the books; all the librarians there are heavily vetted.”

“That didn’t stop the rest of the librarians from giving the books to your mother,” I pointed out.

“They didn’t want their heads on the chopping block.”

“How big were the boxes?”

“The rule was one per librarian, and someone had to be able to carry it out without help from a cart. My mother hired a rather strong man to carry all the boxes out, and she filled each box at the front desk, where he was authorized to go. My mother used larger moving boxes, which weighed approximately eighty pounds each when filled with books. She tipped the mover well, as he showed up for three weeks and hauled out one box of books per librarian. Dad had some of his security people handle the moving of the books. I think there are over three thousand employees there, and she said she worked with thirty-five of them every day for the three weeks. They all worked for three weeks straight to get as many of the books out as possible. I’m sure the other staffers pillaged from the banned book section as well. My mother definitely got the lion’s share of the plunder, though. She didn’t tell me how many books were destroyed. I was afraid to ask.”

“Her private study is not large enough for that many books,” I pointed out.

“The main library is absolutely loaded with the books. You know the second row of books that irritated you because you never remembered to check the digital list of what we have?”

I scowled. “Those are all literary felony titles?”

“Every last one of them. There are tens upon tens of thousands of books in there, all of them are a felony if they were to be digitized or sold.” Bradley grinned at me. “My mother is so proud of her collection.”

With good reason. “So, if we wanted to do a research project, we’d invade your mother’s library and start pulling down relevant titles. Does it include non-fiction?”

“She has everything she could get her hands on. And honestly, I suspect she received most of the books from the purge of the Library of Congress. We had random boxes showing up at home for months after the purge. I’m pretty sure she has the entire collection magically preserved, too.”

I shuddered at the thought of that bill. “We could have done our search at your parents’ place the whole time?”

“She doesn’t have any voter guides or anything like that. If the Library of Congress had them, those were destroyed so they’d never be found. Your idea to hunt in old bookstores was a good one. And since the government likely believes all copies of those records were destroyed, it’s not on the felony list, is it?”

“They’re not,” I confirmed. “They aren’t even on the state or local lists.”

“So there you have it. I mean, it didn’t occur to me to ask my mother. It should have.” He laid out the papers I’d located within Schindler’s Ark. “We now know more about who did the killings and what happened to the killers. But why would the government stage this? Why not just make them quietly disappear?”

“They want to keep the other politicians in check,” I guessed. “How better to keep them following their script than to convince them they’ll die if they don’t? What we need to do is figure out how these people left their set script.”

“Which means we need to go pay that warehouse a visit and get as much information as we can—and we need to do it in such a way where the government doesn’t believe we’re involved.”

I bowed my head and sighed. “Right. If we leak everything from Senator Maybelle’s campaign, and it does show the government’s treachery, it’s a lot harder to pin it on someone if the government can’t figure out who raided the warehouse. But how did this oversight happen?”

“You would have to ask the person in charge of the documents. My guess is simple: the person in charge is either dead or expecting to die, so information that shouldn’t be spread around is being spread around—and the person ‘forgot’ to move the documents out of the warehouse.” Bradley eyed the paper with the address. “I’ll lure Dad over and show him this. If anyone can help us pull this off without getting caught, it’s him.”

“That means we need to act quickly.”

My fiancé nodded his agreement. “Ideally, we’ll handle it this weekend, preferably in the middle of the night, quietly until we start lighting fires.”

“Start lighting fires?” I squealed. “We’re stealing stuff, not burning it down!”

He laughed at me. “We don’t want the government to realize we’ve stolen the stuff until it has been fully distributed to all news outlets. We need them to be completely blindsided. As such, I have an idea.”

In Bradley’s hands, ideas were dangerous and more than a little terrifying. I stared at him with wide eyes. “But we’ve only been talking about this for a few minutes.”

“I’ve had the idea for a while, but I haven’t had a chance to implement it, as getting to the original documentation is simply impossible right now. But my idea can be implemented for a warehouse hit. It will involve some magic, an idea of how many file boxes we’ll be carting off, and a general idea of what sort of papers are in it. We’ll take a truck loaded with preprinted documents to the warehouse. We will empty the file boxes in the warehouse, load everything into the truck, and fill the boxes with our documentation, which will be doused with an accelerant. It will be obvious that the arson was done deliberately, but it will appear as though somebody just wanted to watch the building burn, as the boxes will still be there, and there will be papers within them. We will be setting the boxes up with small stacks of paper to create air holes so the papers all burn—and we’ll be lighting the fires in such a way where all the boxes burn sufficiently to hide the fact papers were crinkled and otherwise put into the boxes in such a way they’ll properly burn.”

I admired his cunning. “But how are we going to prevent people like you from exposing us?”

“We’ll do the entire process fully disguised, and we’ll be imprinting the scene with the same sort of illusionary magic the killers have been using on the victims. We can’t see through that, so if we use the same sort of trickery, they won’t be able to see through it, either. And if we’re the ones scanning, we won’t be able to see what we did for the same reason. The illusions block our abilities. That’s part of what makes them so dangerous.” Bradley’s smile possessed a predatory edge. “If that warehouse has the documentation we need to prove the government’s misdeeds, then we grab the papers, burn the place down in such a fashion where the government believes it’s just a bunch of pyromaniacs getting a hit of fire, sort through everything, and send copies to all media outlets in the country and abroad. That will be my job. I’ll have to make use of illusions and general trickery to send the files through a public computer to a large list of media folks.”

“That sounds dangerous.”

“I’ll be careful—and I’ll have Ren and Dad help with the project to make sure that we don’t have issues. Or we’ll do something particularly tricky and find someone who wants to leave the country and have them go to the public computers to distribute the information before heading off. That would be the safest, and it would make the government feel we aren’t involved. That’s going to be important.”

I nodded, aware if we screwed anything up, we might both die as a result. I checked the map again, eyeballing the warehouse. “That might work. The warehouse isn’t really near anything. It’s possible to burn the whole building down without it spreading. It has a large parking lot, and it’s in an industrial area. There’s a closed gas station right next door, but I doubt it’s been used in at least ten years. If it burns, I doubt it’ll be a big deal.”