“My pleasure,” Ken said. “It’s the least I can do for Joe.”
“Don’t believe it,” Rickards said coolly. “He owes me a favor.”
“That’s true. Now come on, let’s get inside.”
The place appeared even larger from the inside. It was packed floor to ceiling with giant bins, large metal shelving units, what Angela guessed to be hundreds of giant bags of mail and thousands of brown boxes.
Farther in were absolutely enormous machines stretching as far as she could see, with thousands of parcels moving along belts and rails almost too fast to follow. And among them, countless uniforms of men and women moving in and out, attending to the machines or piles of mail which were being pushed around in mobile bins.
The two followed Stives as he walked along an endless row of towering metal shelves before ducking down a small aisle to a flight of stairs. There, heading up to a second floor, they found dozens of offices and administrative cubicles stretching toward the front of the building.
Down one aisle and after a sharp turn, they reached a small, nondescript door displaying Ken’s name on a thin brown placard.
Stives glanced over his shoulder while unlocking the door. “Welcome to the Jungle.”
Jungle was apt, if perhaps a bit overstated. His office was messy, but still retained a faint hint of organization. Stacks of papers, interspersed with letters, and packages, littered every available surface, including two desks, two tables and a tall double-wide filing cabinet.
“Looks cleaner than last time.”
“Really?”
“No. Not at all.”
The younger man frowned at Angela. “I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who takes his calls anymore.”
With that, he emptied two chairs of their papers and walked around the larger desk to sit down. “All right, so what do you guys have?”
Rickards turned to Angela, who fished the photocopy from her purse, allowing Stives to study it.
“Do you have the original envelope?”
“No.”
He nodded and opened a window on his computer screen, then typed the addressee’s name. Gerald Reed. When a screen filled with information, he began reading.
“Hmm.”
“What?”
“Just reading some notes. Looks like we had to track down your grandfather to deliver this. Says here, this came in a larger envelope postmarked from Puerto Maldonado.” He glanced back. “Isn’t there a baseball player named Maldonado?”
“On the Astros.”
Stives nodded and continued reading. “The sender’s name was Lopez. Andre Lopez. Departamento de Servicios Generales.”
“What does that mean?”
“Department of General Services,” answered Angela.
Stives turned back to her piece of paper. “I’m not sure what we can glean from a copy. With the original letter, we could take UV and chemical samples. But not with this.” He pulled a magnifying lens closer and flipped on its light, using it to study the paper. “Doesn’t look like a very good copy, either. Did Joe take it?” he asked with a grin.
“No. My grandfather did.”
Stives nodded, then pulled the paper in closer and back out multiple times. “Well, the postmark is barely visible. And only partly at that. Not enough to make out a date.”
“No dice?”
“I didn’t say that,” he replied, staring at the corner of the image. “If we can’t scan it, we still have our powers of deduction.” He grabbed the computer mouse, then logged into the postal database. “What we can see pretty well is the stamp.”
“Do you recognize it?”
“No. But we should be able to find it. There are dozens of historical collections cataloging stamps from all over the world. Even from countries that no longer exist. The Stanley Gibbons Catalogue, for example. But those were of the earliest stamps, back in the 1800s. Today most have been put into computer databases.” Stives continued typing, then switched to his mouse when he found the correct listing. He began scrolling. “Peru…Peru…”
His mouse suddenly slowed. “Okay, here we are.” He studied the stamp on the photocopy again and returned to his screen. “This looks like your stamp. A dedication to the very first postage stamp of Peru. Circulation 1957.”
Angela and Rickards looked at each other.
“Are you sure?”
“That’s what it says.” He turned his screen so they could see. “The original is in color, but you can see it’s the same one.”
“And it was issued in 1957?”
“No. It was in circulation in 1957. It could have been issued up to a few years before that. And probably used for at least a decade after, as the currency slowly lost value. I seem to remember reading that Peru suffered from hyperinflation sometime in the eighties.” He switched windows and ran a search in his browser. “Yep. Look at that. 1985.”
“What’s hyperinflation?”
“It’s when a country’s debt finally catches up with its currency, first causing inflation, followed by very high inflation, then finally hyperinflation. Usually takes a few years to play out, but when hyperinflation finally hits, it goes quickly. Just like what’s happening now in Venezuela.”
“And then what?”
“They replace the currency,” Stives replied. “In Peru, the sol was replaced with the inti. And they started over. It happens a lot more often than people think.”
Angela picked up her photocopy and studied the tiny image of the stamp. “This was in their original currency.”
“Yep.”
Rickards folded his arms, peering at the screen. “So chances are this letter was sent around that time?”
“Correct. Most currencies lose a certain amount of value every year. More now than in the old days. Which is why there are clearer usage trends when it comes to stamps. Used more when they’re first issued and less and less over time as postage rates increase. If I had to guess, I would say your letter was most likely sent sometime between 1955 and 1960. For anything more exact, we would need the original envelope itself.”
“Right.”
“So,” Stives said, swiveling around in his chair. “You guys gonna tell me what was in the envelope?”
Rickards glanced at Angela. “We’re working on that part.”
21
The female customs agent studied the German passport carefully before looking up to study the man’s features again. Middle-aged, average height and build. Somewhat attractive despite a strong, oversized Roman nose. The man bore a pleasant expression, peering through the bulletproof glass with a pair of gray eyes surrounded by a dozen wrinkles. Waiting. Patiently.
“What’s the purpose of your stay, Mr. Fischer?”
“Business.”
“And what sort of business are you in?”
“Finance. My company has several American branches here.”
The woman glanced at the briefcase clutched in the man’s left hand, then slowly reached for her stamp. “How long are you staying?”
“Just until Friday,” he replied with only a hint of an accent. Never losing his smile. “Too cold, I’m afraid, for anything longer.”
“And where are you staying?”
“The Embassy Suites near the convention center.”
She nodded through the glass and let her right hand hover briefly over the passport before finally dropping and stamping the small page. Her eyes remained friendly but attentive while she slid the passport back to him through the opening. “Enjoy your stay.”
“Thank you.”
He took the passport and slipped it back into his suit’s vest pocket. He did not linger, nor did he move too quickly. Nervousness was an easy tip-off, and one any decent immigration agent would be watching for.
Instead, he continued forward, casually relaxed, with briefcase in hand, passing through the double doors in front of him along with several other passengers.
Outside, the full breadth of Denver International Airport instantly envelope
d him with the building’s massive, stunning design. High overhead, a ceiling of giant, sculpted white canopies stretched into the air, both artfully mimicking the state’s snowcapped Rocky Mountains and providing homage to Native American Teepees from centuries past, flooding the entire terminal with bright morning sunshine.
But unlike most other passengers, Fischer barely looked around, instead walking directly toward the baggage claim where his carousel had just begun moving.
The immigration system would soon link him to the corporation and his hotel. But that was as far as it would go. There was nothing even remotely suspicious under his passport to flag anything with their computers. No recent, unusual destinations, no intelligence or social connections to persons of interest, and nothing else in the public domain or other media sites. Nothing to prevent their automated system from quickly moving on to the tens of thousands of other passengers traveling through Denver International that day.
There would be absolutely nothing to link Fischer to anything at all--until, of course, he had already left. And even then, it was highly unlikely.
This was not Fischer’s first rodeo, as the Americans liked to say. He had made many such trips throughout his career, under different names, circumstances and slightly different appearances. That was something which was becoming increasingly more difficult to do with tracking techniques like the FBI’s facial recognition systems in place. America, China and even the Russians were doing it. Analyzing and recording millions of faces in thousands of locations every year. Quietly, and with cameras that went largely unseen to the human eye.
Soon they would be everywhere, giving Fischer yet another reason to be relieved this whole mission was finally near its end. At least according to the man who had employed him for all these years.
It was astonishing, really, especially since Fischer didn’t think the old man would survive much longer. Death couldn’t be more than a few years away. At most.
But evidently, he had finally located what he’d been looking for. Or so he’d said.
To Fischer, it made no difference whatsoever. He was merely doing his job. On the clock, to borrow another American term. He didn’t care whether the old man was right or not. All he cared about was when the funds would appear in his account and how soon he could walk away from all of this, spending the rest of his days sipping wine in the peaceful sprawling vineyards of Tuscany beneath a melting orange sunset.
No, he was not an assassin. Which, frankly, was little more than a cultural caricature now, anyway. Mindless sheep, all watching the same movies and television shows displaying stories about how mindless sheep thought these things worked.
But it wasn’t anything of the sort. Fischer had no gun. No long blades or killing instruments. Nothing that could be identified or tracked in the blink of an eye. No high-tech electronics to cripple a building’s security system or synchronize some elaborate detonation sequence. He had nothing.
Because he didn’t need anything.
Fischer was no assassin. Not specifically. His job was much more general than that, yet specialized at the same time. If anything, he was more of an extractor, of whatever needed to be extracted, and by whatever means necessary, be it information, possessions or the risk of someone talking. Fischer would merely learn and secure what he needed to, regardless of how he did it.
He carried nothing because the extent that he needed to go along with the resulting outcome was almost entirely dependent on the target and their environment when he found them. It was all about improvisation. Something, even Fischer had to admit, he had become exceedingly efficient at.
Because he always found them.
22
Upon retrieving his bag, Fischer left the area and stopped before a wall of glass windows near the airport’s exit, where he summoned an Uber car from a prepaid phone, purchased in cash with an untraceable credit card.
Ironic, really. As wholly digital as the world had become and how easy it was to trace everything and everyone, the onerousness of that same system had in many ways achieved exactly the opposite of its intended result.
Thanks to organizations like the FBI, NSA and CIA, as well as private corporations such as Google and Apple, everything was being captured. Not just personal information, but everything. Every scrap of human information and activity. Every place, every parcel, every byte, at every location. All tracked and logged and permanently saved in gargantuan datacenters with almost unlimited storage. All supposedly in a greater effort to make the world not just more efficient, but safer.
But with every strength came a proportionally opposite weakness. A vulnerability that could be exploited and used. The modern systems were no different. Because ultimately, in all of that colossal amount of data, resided the same simple dependencies that linked their purposes together in the first place.
Humans. Or more specifically, human labor.
All the information in the world still required someone to make sense of it. To analyze. To study and derive real and accurate meaning. Even those who worked tirelessly to eliminate that human variable with things like artificial intelligence remained dismissive that even the smartest computer programs ultimately still needed human brains and hands to program, test and maintain them.
The wondrousness of unlimited information had now become too much information. Yes, passports and cell phones could be tracked and eventually pinpointed. Credit cards, driver’s licenses, electronic devices, even automobiles.
Unless those targeted items continually changed. Unless they were routinely being rotated, creating endless problems for the trackers who had to then find out what the next related credit card number was, what the next street-bought phone number was, or the newly fabricated name, all swirling endlessly in a never-ending expansion of more data.
Every time a variable changed a human brain would eventually be required to verify whether the links were valid. To analyze yet another routine in a computer search algorithm.
As the cloud of digital tracking grew infinitely larger, Fischer knew it was just as quickly making things vastly more complicated, allowing someone like him who understood it to become lost in an increasingly hopeless game of Where’s Waldo.
His car arrived less than two minutes later. A white Ford, driven by a pleasant man in his sixties with a Korean accent whose conversation was promptly stifled by Fischer’s visible lack of interest.
Instead, in the back seat, he studied the phone to ensure he had completely memorized the information so the device could be discarded when necessary.
One way or another, everything was tracked. If not with a barcode, then by some other means. Which was another irony of modernization. If governments and corporations could track everything, so could the people Fischer worked for. With the right access, and the right system…anyone could be found.
23
Through a wide window, Angela watched Rickards traverse the sodden, muddy parking lot and step over an icy puddle less than ten feet from the door. Once inside the diner, he scanned the large room until he found her waiting in a vinyl-padded booth with a cup of coffee in front of her.
Winding between tables to reach her, he removed his coat, revealing a larger than average frame, relatively well-built, but reflecting a certain physical demeanor.
Something that felt almost…surly. Or perhaps morose. Or something else. She couldn’t decide.
Rickards looked down and noticed the second coffee cup.
“Thank you.”
“I thought we could both use one.”
He sat heavily and took an appreciative drink.
“How’d you sleep?” she asked.
“Okay. You?”
Angela raised her own mug. “Didn’t get much myself. I can’t seem to turn my brain off.”
“Think of anything new?”
She stared at him for a moment. “Think. No. Find? Yes.”
“What does that mean?”
“Are you sure you want to know?”
Rickard
s scowled, still gripping his coffee cup.
“I take it you don’t like suspense.” With that, she turned and unzipped her purse, pulling out two envelopes and dropping them on the table.
“What’s this?”
“Two more letters. Postcards actually. From my great-uncle, shortly after he joined the Monuments Men and went to Europe.”
“To your grandfather?”
“No. These were addressed to my great-grandmother. His and my grandfather’s mother. I found them in my grandmother’s old boxes. They must have been passed down.”
Rickards looked curious. “And?”
“Nothing special. Just the standard Hi Mom, I’m okay. Everything is fine in Europe letters.”
He reached out, opened the top envelope’s flap and slid the card out to read.
“I didn’t see anything useful in them. Except…”
Rickards’ gaze captured hers. “Except?”
A grin crept back across her face. “Except for the handwriting. The handwriting matches what turned up in the mail for my grandfather a few weeks ago.”
She added the photographed copy to the pile in front of Rickards so he could compare.
“I’m no expert, but I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that’s a match.”
“Dollars to doughnuts?”
“My grandfather used to say it.” When Rickards’ expression didn’t change, she folded her arms. “It’s a thing!”
“So, does this mean you’re officially a believer?”
“I think so. Yes,” she corrected. “It does.”
“So, what now?’
“I’m not sure.”
The two sat staring at each other silently, until Rickards’ phone rang from his front pocket. He answered, his attention still on the letters in front of him.
“Hello, Ken.”
After a moment, his gaze became still.
“Yes. She’s here with me now. We’re having dollars and doughnuts.”
The Last Monument Page 7