The Diamond Dust on Dragonfly Wings: A Jeffry Claxton Mystery Novel

by Michael Yudov

  She looked at the tiny blue pill in her hand for a moment, then reached for the glass of water and took the pill. She held out the glass to me afterwards, just like a child would, focusing on the care giver. I took it gently from her hand and set it on the coffee table, and she fell softly against my shoulder again, the way she had in the car. I was thinking to myself that the Valium had better do the trick, because I didn’t have anything else up my sleeve, and I was sure that Godsen and her crew wouldn’t respond properly to this kind of behaviour. They had no personal commitment to her whereas I did. I was the one who brought her in, the one who was responsible for her being on this trip in the first place. I automatically put my arm around her shoulders when she leaned against me, and we sat like that, quietly, without speaking, as the attack of anguish that had gripped her slowly ebbed away. Her body still gave a little shake now and then, but the deep silent sobs had departed for the moment.

  We sat like that for a good fifteen minutes not saying a word. There wasn’t really anything to say. She knew that I knew why she was acting this way, and belaboring the point would only be rubbing salt in the wound.

  Godsen was going to be calling on the telephone any second to find out what I was up to. No sooner had I thought that than the telephone rang. Two short funny rings, European style. I disengaged myself from the entanglement with Therese and crossed the room to the phone. I picked up on the fourth ring.

  “Yeah, I’m here.”

  “Jeffry. The Colonel…” It was Westwood. I finished the sentence for her before she did.

  “…wants to know where the hell I am, the meeting’s already started, I know. Tell her I’ll be over in five minutes, Okay?”

  She gave a small chuckle, just enough for me to catch it, probably not enough for Godsen to hear.

  “See you then.” She put down the receiver.

  Therese was starting to nod off from the effects of the pill already, which meant that she normally didn’t take that sort of medication and had no tolerance. That was in our favour, because it meant that the pills I had brought would do the job.

  I helped her get ready for bed, and then I tucked her in. If I’d had a girl-child when I was seventeen, this fatherly act with a beautiful twenty-three-year-old woman would probably seem natural, but I hadn’t, and it didn’t. Coping was the name of the game for Therese right now though, and so I helped her cope. If she was looking to me to play the father, I’d do my best, although the next time I gave her a Valium, I’d make her get ready for bed first, so she could do it herself. She had a flannel ‘shortie’ nightgown she wanted to wear, which I had to dig out of her luggage for her. It rattled my nerves a bit, allowing the closeness that she was projecting onto me, but under the circumstances, what choice did I have? I closed my eyes during the appropriate moments. Once she had it on, she looked more like a child than ever, which made it easier for me to be a bit more comfortable with my new ‘caregiver’ role.

  Before I left I told her that I was going across the hall for a few minutes, and not to leave the suite. I left Godsen’s room number beside the telephone, mounted the Quorum motion detector on the door to the suite, armed it, took four paces to the left, and knocked on the door to seven oh six.

  Godsen answered the door herself, and was I surprised. She had changed into a pair of blue-jeans and a University of Oklahoma sweatshirt, with her hair in a pony-tail, totally changing her look. The change was for the better. I had pegged her as someone who didn’t have a casual side, but obviously, I was wrong. Her expression in no way matched her attire though, she was decidedly un-casual in that respect. Holding open the door for me, she threw a little chastisement my way.

  “Decided to join us, Jeffry? How nice.”

  There was no way to come out on top with the sound of that, so I let it slide by. Dropping into a casual tone hoping that it would be catching, I asked her how she liked the room. At the same time, I walked over and took a seat next to Westwood, who was on the couch at the far end of the room. Theirs was a mirror image of mine with the windows looking out across the valley to the mountains in the distance. The mountains are never far when you’re in Swiss territory.

  “Yes, the room’s fine. Just Ducky. First things first, though. What’s Therese doing?”

  “She’s sleeping. She’s fine, no worries, Okay?”

  “I’m not sure I like leaving her alone, even if she’s just across the hall. Maybe we should be doing this in your suite.”

  I unclipped the Quorum pager from my belt and help it up for all to see.

  “The door’s monitored, we don’t have to guess.” I put the pager down on the coffee table.

  ‘Evie’ looked up from her work, seemingly noticing me for the first time. She had taken the same route as Godsen, jeans and a tee-shirt. She was wearing a jogger’s sweatband around her forehead, which served to keep her hair out of her eyes while she worked on the equipment in her hands.

  “Monitored how? With this?” At that she reached for my pager. Curious Georgette.

  Turning it over in her hand, she asked for an operational rundown. I gave her a quick one. She was attentive and seemed to be mulling over something. “This is customized, right? I mean, this pager started out life as a regular pager. What’s the transmitter again?”

  I paused for a second before answering, and Godsen intervened.

  “Save it for later Evie, let’s get on with it.” She gave Westwood a funny look, and sat down in the chair across from us. There was a brown leather-bound notepad on the coffee table. She picked it up and flipped it open at the first page pulling a pen out of the pouch inlaid into the inside spine.

  Westwood put down the pager and went back to the gear in the flight case on the floor in front of her.

  Godsen seemed to speak for her. “As you can see, Evie’s setting up the comms gear. She gets rather taken with all things technical, so you have to be careful not to let technology sidetrack you when Evie’s around.” Again that funny look.

  Westwood didn’t even blink. She seemed to be totally engrossed in the device she had in her hands. I wasn’t sure what it was because she had the cover off and all I could tell was that whatever it was, it was fully digital. She had the innards laid across her lap, and the small circuit boards were all still connected to each other by ribbon cables of various sizes. All of the circuitry was modern ‘surface mount’ design, and the population count was very low, indicating VLSI, ‘Very Large Scale Integration’, architecture. Probably expensive, whatever it was. Godsen was speaking, so I gave her back my attention.

  “The plan is still set as we discussed earlier. In the morning, I’ll be going in to the main branch of the Inwestek Bank to meet with the General Director, a gentleman by the name of…” She consulted her notes. “…Urs Schnorrer. I don’t expect to work any magic there, but I do expect to get a certain level of co-operation. We have the tie-in from the bank robberies to use as leverage, and authentication from Interpol, of course.” At that point she paused, and I took that as my cue.

  “Okay. I see where you’re going. Two questions arise, though. First, does the rash of bank robberies have any weight here in Switzerland? There’s been no attempt to relieve any Swiss banks of their hard-earned cash, at least not yet. Second, how high up the chain of command is our Interpol connection, and how solid is the connection? If it’s really good, we might have enough leverage through Interpol itself to get into Ted’s bank under cover. What do you think, can we pull that off?”

  She stared through me at something too far away for me to decipher. That went on for about thirty seconds, then she snapped out of it with a decisive answer.

  “Yes, I’d say we can. I’ll call our connection in the morning and go over the proposal. I think we’ll put Evie in there. Maybe an executive assistant, hmm? That suit you Evie?”

  Westwood spoke up.

  “My German’s alright, but Swiss German is a whole different ballgame. I don’t know if it’ll do the job. Maybe I can get some testing d
one in the morning. Otherwise I’m fine with it.”

  Godsen picked up from there.

  “That leaves the actual stakeout. I believe that falls to you, Jeffry. Having Therese here won’t help if we don’t use her. How about if you case the bank in the morning and see how it’ll work. Fair?”

  “Well frankly, it seems to me that you’re jumping the gun with wanting to put Westwood in under cover.” Godsen frowned a little at that. I didn’t think she was used to people challenging her plans. I knew for sure she wasn’t used to making plans when it came to the field. I hurriedly continued. “If there’s no proper place for Therese and I to stake out the bank from, what’ll we do? Stand on the sidewalk at the front door? In that case, it would be wiser to put Therese and I on the inside. She’s the one who’ll be able to identify him, even in a disguise. At least that’s the result that we’re hoping for. And then there’s the part about convincing him that we’re on his side. Without Therese, he’ll just run for it, even if it means he thinks he’s going to take a bullet in the back for his trouble. The people he’s hiding from have already killed his brother. His only brother at that. He’s not going to stop to chat unless he’s sure that we’re not them, it’s that simple.” I stopped for a breath, and Godsen jumped back in.

  “The identification will be based on a flag from the teller when the account we’re interested in is accessed. Therese isn’t required for that. If there’s no suitable location for you two to do the stakeout, then it will have to be done from the car. When the account flag goes up, you’ll be told. If she spots him going in, then you’ll tell us. At that point she’ll have to meet him as he’s coming out of the bank, and convince him that it’s on the level. Then we take him in. Fairly straightforward, and that’s how it’ll be.”

  I leaned my elbows on my knees and hunched over a bit, sighing. This was going to be difficult, I could tell. Not because of anything other than Godsen. She was apparently determined that it be her way or the highway. When the stakes were so high, it should really be a consensus that ruled, or any one member with more experience. I tried again.

  “What about him spotting the car, and us in it? He’s not just walking up to the bank and announcing himself. He’s got to be casing the place before he shows, under the circumstances. As a matter of fact, he could visit any other branch in the country if he wants, with the same result. For him. I mean, all he’s going to be doing is withdrawing money. That’s easily done anywhere. I think we should put a fix on the account so that he’d have to come to his own branch in order to make a withdrawal. Some sort of clerical error, maybe. God knows it wouldn’t be the first time a bank gave someone a hard time about taking their money out. If we do that, for sure he’ll be casing the place before walking in. Is any of this making any sense to you?”

  “Don’t be impertinent. Of course it is. I agree about putting the fix on his account, but Westwood is going to be the inside person, and that’s that.” She ended on a huff, so I looked to Westwood for support. She gave me back a ‘don’t look at me, I’m just doing my job’ kind of look, and like the lady said, that was that.

  Westwood took over the brief, and for the next hour she showed us what the comms gear was going to be. How it worked, what the range was, what codes we would use, what they meant, stuff like that. By the time we were finished, I was tired all over again.

  The state of the art that was showing up on the coffee table was way above the level of anything I could afford to acquire for use in my business. It was at least a few whole generations above the gear I had used with the guys in recon, when we’d gone into Yemen, for example.

  Everything ran at ultra-high frequencies and ultra-low power, had coverage comparable to that of a decent sized hockey arena. And it was supposed to be clean and intelligible at all times due to the addition of error correcting circuitry.

  Did I mention the issue of physical dimensions? It was as if there were none. The gear had to have been made in a plant with a maximum zero point five micron die setup, and more likely zero point three five. That meant that one of just a few plants in the world could have produced them. All U.S. companies, and all on U.S. soil. There were a couple of places in the world where silicon wafers were being produced at even more macro levels than a ½ micron trace width, like Japan, but they didn’t have the means to do anything with the wafers. It takes up to about three billion American dollars to put one of those plants online. The catch is that within a period of two to three years’ maximum, the plant has to be torn down, being totally non-functional by then. And the reason that the plants last as long as that to begin with is because of the extraordinary efforts initially taken in design and construction to fight instability. Geo-Stability is taken for granted by most of the people working and living on this little rock we call our home.

  The truth is that when you’re dealing with any solid-state devices integrated into a package with a trace size in the under one-micron range, the super-duper, non-shake designs help a bit, extending the life of the plant by as much as a factor of two. That was the best we could do. The effects of the movement of the mantle of the earth floating on a molten core, day-to-day, soon renders the computer controlled die equipment useless. A fact of life. At that point there’s no choice but to tear it all down and start over somewhere else. Digital Equipment Corporation, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel Incorporated were the ones that sprang to mind. There were a few new American companies that had jumped into the game over the last number of years, striving to pick up market share in the personal computer microprocessor market. The government that I knew would stick to the big guys, the ones they had deep connections with. For example, the space shuttles were full of triple-redundancy computers powered by Hewlett-Packard’s Precision Architecture RISC microprocessors.

  This gear was using ASIC’s, or, application specific integrated circuits. That, combined with the limited functional requirements of the chips, had allowed for extreme miniaturization. Once you had the ear-piece and pin-head microphone in place, it was pretty hard to tell that you were wired. There was no wire setup, both the earpiece and the mic carried their own transceiver circuitry that would carry as far as the main unit, carried somewhere on your person. It was activated by pushing a small recessed button on the main transceiver, and you were on-line. The button would require a pen or pencil point to depress, it was that small. That part of the gear was the most impressive. It was about the size of a cigarette lighter, and clipped onto any one of your pockets. Or you could tuck it under your wristband while you were having a game of tennis, for example.

  The codes were simple, particularly as we wouldn’t be worrying about being monitored. It turned out that all comms were encrypted. It was a feature that was built in at the hardware level. We wrapped up the comms seminar, and Godsen asked Westwood to go over the weapons next.

  Westwood sighed as she handed out our comms gear and closed up the cases turning to the next two aluminum cases waiting in line for their turn. She started this part of our meeting with a caveat.

  “Littlefox is our weapons specialist, so you’ll have to bear with me here.”

  She opened the first one, which looked just like the others we’d been going through and contained another set of comms gear. Westwood carefully lifted out the first layer of form-fitting foam to reveal another layer of gear, this time with no relation to communications whatever.

  “This is what Littlefox set up for you. I can explain some of the basics, and why she wanted you to change to these, but I think it’s mostly self-evident.” She sat back and waved at the open case as if to say ‘Go ahead, look for yourself’. So I did. What I saw was very attractive. Twin automatic pistols, laid into a form-fitted mold in the hard foam. They were facing each other, so I could see both sides of the guns. They were H&K. Heckler & Koch, arguably the best handgun design teams in the business. There were more accessories than I could immediately identify, embedded in the foam surrounding the pair of pistols.

  I gave both of
them an eye contact, then declined the offer.

  “Thanks, but I have my own.” That hung in the air for less than a second before Westwood came back at me. She stayed leaned back into the couch, but turned her head my way and started making the points that she’d been instructed to make.

  “You use a Colt .45 calibre pistol, two, in fact. Both are the genuine article. Government issue model 1911-A1. Metal frame, eight-round magazine, and they’re temperamental about ‘Condition One’ carry mode, which makes it safer to leave the chamber clear, giving you the eight-round capacity of the magazine and no more. They’re also heavy. It’s a good gun with a solid tradition of field reliability, but it’s not in the same league with these.” She ended with a challenging look in her eye.

  “Okay, I’ll play.” I sighed. “H&K. Obviously well designed, and any H&K weapon also has a reputation for reliability in the field.” I took another good look at the open case. There were accessories for every occasion, some of which I would have had to guess at if pressed.

  While I was looking at this collection of the modern gunsmith’s artistry, Godsen spoke up.

  “Feel free to handle them.” I glanced up and she wasn’t even looking my way, she was making notes about something or other. What could it hurt?

  I leaned over and picked up one of the pistols. The feel was surprising and more different than any pistol I’d worked with before. I hefted the weight of the gun in my hand. Definitely lighter than a Colt. The magazine shaft was empty, but even so, it was lighter. The feel was already settling in on my hand. Interesting.

  Westwood reached across from her seat next to me on the sofa and picked a magazine out of the form fitted foam of the case, handing it to me.

  “Try it with this.”

  I took the magazine from her hand, instantly feeling the weight of the hardened steel. The clip was loaded with what looked like Tactical HST .45 calibre rounds. It was also loaded in a stagger. One a bit to the left, the next one a bit to the right, and so on. That method allows for more bullets per clip. I put the pistol down on the couch next to me for a moment, and started thumbing out the rounds. The clip was empty when I hit twelve. With one in the chamber that made thirteen. A fair increase in the overall load count that could be carried using my setup. A more than fair increase, in fact, along with an improved system for allowing ‘Condition One’ carry mode. Cocked and locked, one in the chamber, and the safety slide was thumb accessible, with a better feel than the one on my Colts’.