Castle Killing

by Alec Peche

  "Wow, Nick spoke many languages Dutch, French, German, English and now this Guernésiais."

  "Yes, he was good with languages. I have software on my laptop now to translate each email."

  "Do you think we should focus on the emails in that language?" Jill asked.

  "Yes. There was no reason for Nick Brouwer to speak that language," Nicole said simply.

  Jill thought about her statement for a moment and agreed. Nick wasn't from that region and to the best of her knowledge had no business there, and it was a very rare language. With that conclusion, she began forwarding a series of about twenty emails in total to Nicole. The two stared at each email as the translation software revealed it.

  A few emails were reminders of meeting times sent by an unknown sender; unknown as far as the sender's name meant nothing. It was titled, ‘Server". As it was a proper name, the software didn't translate it, but Jill and Nicole understood the word.

  One email was from Girard LeRoux, the man that had pushed Nick out the window, including that last meeting time at the Cardiff Castle. Nick hadn't had time to delete it. She noted that contrary to what he told them about arriving by train, he instead arrived by plane. She supposed that made sense when you looked at the transit time on the train from the Netherlands to Wales; he would have been unable to reach them on just a morning train ride. Perhaps she misunderstood his travel details. Or perhaps he couldn't keep the facts straight between his real and secret lives.

  Jill tuned back into Nicole's translation process to see if anything more came to light.

  Looking through the multiple translations, she asked, "Is that all of the emails I sent you?"

  Nicole nodded a 'yes'.

  "Let me see if there are any messages in his trash in that language," Jill said. However when she looked his trash was empty. "He must have had his phone set to empty the trash frequently as it's empty. Darn."

  Nicole looked deflated by the finding. They hadn't found any useful information in regards to the Nazi loot yet.

  "Let's move on to the pictures. I may be able to use some software to identify the location of a picture. Let's give it a try," Jill said, but then she felt the train braking and heard the announcement that they were arriving at their destination.

  She looked at Nicole and said, "This is the last night my friends and I are together, and we're going to enjoy ourselves and perhaps celebrate Nick's life. They leave early in the morning, and Nathan will be a while waking up so you and I can meet as early as seven in the morning in the hotel bar."

  Nicole looked disappointed but knew she wouldn't move Jill to share anything. With a sigh, she prepared to exit the train with all the other passengers knowing she'd have another crack at the phone's information the next day.

  Angela led the group that night with help from Nathan visiting a variety of pubs to try a variety of beers. They'd all had plenty of whiskeys thus far on the trip and were at their core beer and wine drinkers. They ordered up dinner at one pub known for its food and had dessert in another pub before dragging themselves off to bed just after midnight.

  Jill got up early the next morning to see her three friends off to the airport. They knew they were getting together in a month or so for Nick's funeral in Germany, but the end of vacations was always sad.

  She was seated in the hotel bar eating breakfast and sipping coffee when Nicole and Michael walked in.

  Chapter 27

  Jill looked up as she said, "Hey there."

  Michael offered to take care of breakfast for all of them, but Jill indicated that she'd already dined, but wouldn't mind an additional cup of coffee.

  As Michael took care of that, Nicole asked, "Did you have a nice evening with your friends?"

  Jill marveled at the sense of formality and manners that would allow the woman to delay her own gratification by asking if Jill had found something rather than the usual niceties of ordering breakfast and inquiring about her friends. Jill thought if the situation were reversed she'd likely not be so gracious. It was a lesson for the future that sometimes it was more important to waste seconds of time to share your humanity with the world.

  "We had a fabulous time in the pubs last night, and I saw them off in their airport shuttle about an hour ago," Jill said looking at her watch. "How about you and Michael, did you have a chance to explore this town?"

  "We ate at a nice German restaurant that featured excellent sauerkraut and beer. We spent some time studying the significance of the Guernésiais language, trying to understand why your friend would have communicated with it."

  "It is a puzzle. I wonder if Nick’s ever visited the Island of Guernsey? Certainly, if he never did, that would suggest the rare language was the language of his organization - the stay-behind army. What did you come up with?"

  Nicole looked momentarily puzzled, so Jill added, "Did you and Michael learn anything new in your focus on the language?"

  Jill knew she needed to focus speaking in full sentences rather than her own, at times, colloquial English.

  Nicole smiled with an understanding of Jill's question and replied, "After researching the language in depth, we came to the same conclusion as you did - it must be the organization that speaks the language. The language has been around for one thousand years, but the German occupation of the island during World War II nearly eliminated the language. The Islanders had advance warning of the coming army, and many evacuated to other parts of the UK, and the language started to die out as after the war many didn't return to the island. Guernsey is trying to revitalize it by requiring it be taught in school, but most fluent speakers are over the age of fifty which Nick was not. So I think additional research into the language won't get us to know if Nick Brouwer was successful at locating the Nazi Gold train or some other stolen artifacts."

  "How about if I work on the emails and you and Michael work on the pictures on his cell phone? It's all we have left to pursue. I asked a computer expert about using facial recognition software to identify the location of the pictures. He suggested that instead, I use a program that Google created that can look at a picture and identify the continent and country. I'll forward you the link for that, then start sending you the pictures from the camera."

  Jill looked to Nicole and Michael, who had returned to the table, to get their feedback on her suggestion. After looking at each other and shrugging, Michael said, "I don't have any better ideas at this time."

  The three of them got to work chasing words and pictures. An hour later Nathan appeared in the bar. He had a meeting with a potential new client at a relatively new distillery. They were picking him up in thirty minutes, and Jill had opted to stay in Edinburgh when he first arranged the meeting. Now instead of shopping or playing tourist, she would work with her new German acquaintances to see if they could identify the possible source of the hypothetical treasure.

  Jill took a break from their research and sat with Nathan while he ate breakfast and worked on erasing the last vestiges of sleep. He wanted the account from the distillery. He already had many customers from the wine industry and then two from the craft beer industry, but today's meeting would be the new industry of spirits and whisky in particular. It might open new avenues of creativity for him. By the time he finished breakfast, his ride had arrived.

  He leaned down to kiss Jill murmuring, "Stay safe inside the pub. I'll see you this evening with a dinner recommendation in hand from the distillery. Love you."

  Jill raised her brows at his request that she stay inside the pub all day, but merely murmured back at him, "Love you too, and good luck with this potential client."

  They parted, and Jill returned to her seat and laptop continuing the translations. After another hour of work, Jill checked in with Nicole and Michael.

  "Have you guys found anything yet?"

  "This software is great. We recognized a few of the pictures on Nick's phone and the software got it right also. At the moment, we entered into Poland according to the software. We looked up the lo
cations that Nick's company says it manages the security for on his website and he had none in Poland. So I guess that's a positive sign; there's not an immediately logical reason for him to have been in Poland."

  Their laptop made a sound and then Michael added, "And now we have entered Lithuania."

  "Is that significant?" Jill asked.

  "Significant?" Nicole asked.

  "What role did Lithuania have with stolen Nazi loot?" Jill asked.

  "Ah," Michael replied. "About ninety percent of the Jewish people in Lithuania were believed to have been murdered in the Holocaust. Those murdered souls would have left art, money, gold, jewelry behind for the Nazis to confiscate."

  Ninety percent seemed like an incredibly high number and so she asked, "Did that ninety percent mean nine people died or a far bigger number? Nine is, nine too many, but it also represents the potential size of seized assets."

  "It was perhaps 190,000 of 200,000 Jewish Lithuanians at the time on perhaps a total population of a little more than two million people," Michael said reading from a website on his computer.

  "Wow, that's a horrible number, and it puts this part of Europe into perspective. I have to think there was a fair amount of loot from those murdered people," Jill replied, trying to imagine how horrible a time that was in the early 1940s. Then her logical mind took over, and she thought about the number of people it took to kill nearly 200,000 in three years. All she could do was shudder at the atrocity of it all. She wondered how they found enough men to kill their fellow citizens, but then she could think of wars over the centuries that had been equally brutal.

  She tuned back into the conversation as Michael said, "And these pictures are from Latvia."

  Jill returned her focus to Nick's emails. She'd read all that was available and while some of the English translations were awkward, she'd found nothing more than poor grammar catching her attention. How else could she look at the emails? How about the mention of Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, or a city therein? Another search turned up no mention of a Country or City. Her eyes went through the emails a third time, and she focused on the word "tallinn". She assumed it was a miss spelling the first few times, but when she re-read the sentence, it appeared to be a place. Was it a city, a park, a restaurant? A Google search led to a town in Estonia.

  "Have you guys come across any pictures from Estonia?"

  "Not, yet as we're still in Latvia," Nicole replied. "Why?"

  "There's mention of a city named Tallinn in Nick's email and I looked up the word, and it's a city in Estonia."

  Michael smiled at her, "Yes, I've been there. It's one of the oldest cities in Europe, and there are many art galleries there."

  Jill wondered if she'd ever learn enough about the world at large, but then after a quick search, she found that her home State Of California had forty times the population of Estonia and ten times the square feet of Estonia. Since she hadn't visited Estonia she hadn't had the chance to learn its geography or cities. When she'd been in school, Estonia was a part of Russia adding to her memory blanks of certain parts of the world. Oh well, back to the problem at hand - what did Tallinn have to do with this case if anything? And how about the mention of Scotland? If she were to have any impact on finding this treasure, it needed to be in Scotland, and more precisely near Edinburgh.

  "Was Nazi gold rumored to be in any of the countries we've just spoken about?" Jill asked the two art experts.

  "No, but these former Soviet States were controlled by the Nazis, so it's reasonable that they might contain Nazi stolen artifacts," Michael replied. "Conversely, all of the biggest art finds have been in Germany. So it's not clear that Hitler had the time or resources to move loot some twelve hundred kilometers northeast, but anything is possible."

  Jill looked at the time and realized she'd been researching Nick's communications for several hours. It was time to stretch and get a walk in before returning to her laptop.

  She stood up and did a few stretches and said, "I've been sitting too long. I'm going to find lunch somewhere in Edinburgh and stretch my legs with a walk."

  Nicole and Michael were deep into identifying pictures and briefly looked up and nodded.

  Jill took her laptop upstairs and locked it and Nick's phone in her room safe. She then grabbed her purse, jacket, and sunglasses as it appeared to be sunny outside.

  Chapter 28

  Jill walked about three blocks before she began looking for a place to have lunch. The first block seemed promising then the next two, not so much. She seemed to be in an older area with more houses than businesses and small alleys separating apartment blocks with few people out and about. They were probably all at work. She could see down the road another two blocks the beginning of a restaurant row, so she stayed on course as the exercise felt great. Looking in the distance, she could see the words pub and café, and she was sure one of them would have a menu item that appealed to her. She looked down each alley as she passed, and found children playing in one on bicycles with mothers nearby keeping them safe. Another alley was empty except for a parked scooter; she was crossing the third alley when she sensed someone behind her seconds before she felt her body jolt from a Taser gun. She tried to call out for help, but she couldn't coordinate her vocal cords to let out a scream.

  The muscle shaking continued as she descended to the ground and then she lost track of time and place for a few moments while her body contended with muscle contractions.

  As she became more aware of her surroundings, she looked around and found herself seated on the floor of what appeared to be a building under renovation. Where was she? She couldn't remember seeing a building like this before. Where was Nathan? Was she in Northern California, her home?

  And then as if she put readers on to be able to see text, her vision and brain focused, and she had a clear picture.

  She'd come into contact with a Taser of some sort, and it hadn't been enough to kill her, so whoever had done it hadn't wanted her dead. Nathan wasn't around to help as he was up north in Scotland visiting a distillery today. She felt for her purse which contained her cell phone but didn't sense it on her shoulder or at her side. Then she took another look around the room and spotted a man in his mid to late forties, dark hair with some grey, he had a round face and receding hairline and was holding a Taser in his hand.

  "Voglio sapere che cosa sai di Nicholas," the man said.

  Jill was trying to understand what language she was hearing - Spanish? Italian? Latin?, but who spoke Latin? She did hear the word Nicholas, so she assumed he was asking her a question about Nick.

  "I don't understand you," Jill said. Then she added, "No hablo español Je ne parle pas français. " Those three sentences were the extent of her ability to tell the man she could not understand him.

  He fired another sentence at her, and she just tried to look confused which wasn't much of an act on her part.

  Since they were at a stalemate, she thought she'd see if she could walk out the door of this building, and so stood up, taking a moment for the dizziness to go away. When she headed for the door, he stood up, got in front of her and held up the Taser. Okay, Jill thought, he's not going to kill me, but he's not going to let me leave. They seemed to be at a stalemate as they hadn't found a common language.

  He threw another sentence at her and again she didn't understand and repeated in English, "I don't understand what you said. I don't speak your language."

  Again she made as if to leave and he gestured with the stun gun that it was a bad idea. She knew that such guns had ranges of up to twenty feet, so no matter how fast she ran, the room was too small for her to escape a stream of electricity.

  She looked around again for her purse, and saw it near his feet, and so she said aloud, "Hey Siri, how do say in Italian I don't understand?"

  Jill paused, and then Siri said, "I don't understand what you said."

  Jill tried again, "How do you say in the Italian language I don't understand?"

  Siri replied with, "He
re take a look."

  That wasn't going to do her a lick of good. The man had the look of a Spaniard or an Italian, but the only word she could think of was hello and thanks, so she tried them. "Ciao, grazie."

  The man looked confused then understood what Jill was trying to do. So he said, "Si, Italian."

  Okay, Jill thought at least she knew what language he was speaking, but she'd just used all of her capacity to speak in Italian. She tried, "Parle Anglais."

  He nodded his understanding but was at a loss as to how to bridge their gap. Jill pointed to her purse and said "iPhone" and "telephono." She was beginning to feel like an idiot with her fake French or Italian and of course, that was better than feeling scared that this man was going to hurt her. Next, she would raise the volume of her voice in hopes that she would be understood.

  He seemed to understand what she planned to do with her phone so they could understand each other. Jill noticed he had an old-fashioned flip phone on his belt, so they would need to use her phone's translate function. Her captor was wisely suspicious that she would just use the phone to call for help. Fortunately, despite the age of his phone, he didn't seem entirely clueless. He pulled her phone out of her purse, opened the Google app for translation. Unbeknownst to Jill, he had watched his brothers in Operation Gladio use it to speak with each other. He'd never needed it as everyone that ordered his plumbing services spoke Italian on Sardinia.

  Soon they were communicating.

  "What's your name?" Jill asked.

  "That's not important. Tell me about Nicholas."

  Jill thought "'tell you what about Nicholas?'

  So she wrote back on the translation screen, "His favorite color was blue."