by Fiona Brand
Outside the wind had picked up. Rain rattled against the windowpanes, the monotony of the sound, soothing her even more. The words began to merge, blur. Her eyes drooped, shutting out the bright, intrusive gleam of the bedside lamp.
The book slipped from her fingers as she dropped into sleep.
France, 1943
Cold seeped through the stone walls of the Château Vassigny as Sara Weiss stepped into the cavernous reaches of the library.
She bypassed Oberst Reichmann’s desk and retrieved the set of keys hidden behind a leather-bound tome on the bookshelf.
Moving quickly, she unlocked the door to what had once been an anteroom but which, since the Germans had moved in, had been converted into a makeshift strong room. Stepping inside, she closed the door. She selected a second key and opened the small, squat safe positioned against one wall.
Ignoring the neat piles of francs and the boxes of jewelry that Reichmann and his Waffen SS had “confiscated” during their occupation of Vassigny, she removed a correspondence file, the SS codebook and a second book, this one bound in brown leather, which she hadn’t ever seen before.
The codebook itself was nondescript. Bound with board, it was about the size of a school exercise book or a journal. Some codebooks were enormous volumes, but this one fell into the medium range: comprehensive but pared down for portability and ease of use by soldiers in the field. The SS, like the other branches of the German military, also used encryption machines. But as highly efficient and notoriously hard to break as the codes transmitted by their Enigma machines were, the “clear”—that is, the uncoded message—was often encoded before it was encrypted for added security, making the messages even more difficult to decipher.
Ears straining against Reichmann’s return, she opened the codebook and turned pages. A bright red thread floated onto the carpet. Reichmann’s additional security. The thread was always positioned between pages fifteen and sixteen.
She found the reference she wanted and committed it to memory.
One entry, no more.
She had been steadily stealing the code, one word at a time, for the past few months, ever since Reichmann, the head of the local Waffen SS had employed her as his personal secretary. Sometimes she didn’t have access to the safe for weeks. At other times, she managed to get several words or phrases in a day. To date, she had stolen more than seventy percent of the code.
Placing the codebook on top of the correspondence file, she pushed the spectacles she wore for close work higher on the bridge of her nose and opened the second unidentified book. For long seconds what she was reading didn’t make sense. Then her stomach clenched in automatic recoil and bile rose in the back of her throat. The book was a ledger, a list of the Jews Reichmann and his SS had sent to the death camps.
Her mind slid back three years, to darkness and horror and grief. Her parents, Dietrich and Janine Weiss, had been living in Paris under assumed names, running an underground paper for the French Resistance. It was safe, they had assured her. At the first hint of trouble they would leave and join her in England. Just days later they had been arrested. Shortly after, they had been transported to Ravensbruck and executed.
She flipped through pages, frowning. The documentation was highly unusual. It provided proof of genocide, something the Germans were determined to conceal. The book shouldn’t exist, and it shouldn’t be here.
Vassigny was a small, quiet village, a producer of vegetables, milk, cheeses and wine, and a provider of accommodation for the SS. Reichmann billeted his men and ran his operation from the Château, but the prison at Clairvaux held larger concentrations of German forces, better security and an administration center. Any sensitive documentation should have been kept there.
Stomach tight, she flipped pages. Account numbers and figures leaped at her, and the reason for the book’s existence became clear. It wasn’t an official record. Reichmann was a former Swiss banker, and this was his own personal ledger. A secret accounting of murder and the transfers of the money he had stolen from the people he had condemned.
She stared at the neat lists of dates, names and bank accounts spanning more than two years, the dizzying amounts of money Reichmann had stolen.
Her task in Vassigny was to coordinate airdrops of supplies from Special Operations Executive in England for the local French Resistance, the Maquis, and run the escape pipeline. The fact that the job with Reichmann had fallen into her lap, giving her access to the codebook, had been a bonus. The code breakers at Bletchley Park in England needed the information she supplied, but Reichmann’s ledger represented another priority.
Her jaw tightened at the sheer numbers Reichmann had sent to the camps. The ledger was proof of genocide, and of Reichmann’s unconscionable greed.
Reichmann wasn’t just stealing from the Jews, he was stealing from the Reich. With access to the accounts of Jews sent to the death camps, before those accounts were declared to the Reich, he could transfer money into nominated accounts. The theft would be concealed behind a serpentine raft of paperwork, and was, no doubt, supported by the connivance of a bank. Reichmann might not be entirely suited for his SS command, but when it came to moving money, he was at the top of his game.
Her parents’ names wouldn’t be recorded here, because at that time Reichmann had been based in Lyon. But whether or not they were listed, it didn’t matter. Her parents had given their lives to stop this kind of evil. She needed the book for them—and for every individual and family listed in it.
A name registered. Simon de Vernay.
Shock reverberated through her. She checked the ledger entry. The amount of money transferred made her mouth go dry. She didn’t know any one person could have such an amount.
The de Vernays were very well-known, an old Jewish family that had settled in Angers, their principal business, the diamond trade. No diamonds, as such, were listed, but that made sense. The de Vernay’s were traders, not jewelers. Their stocks of diamonds would have been concentrated in Antwerp, the main diamond-trading center and, since war had broken out, no doubt in other, safer centers offshore.
Setting the book down, she opened Reichmann’s private correspondence file, which contained personal and classified materials that never crossed her desk. A telegram, received that morning, was sitting on top.
“Code leak traced to Vassigny Stop Find traitor Stop”
Her heart kicked hard, once. With fingers that shook slightly, she replaced the telegraph in the file and returned it to its correct place on the shelf, placing the ledger and the codebook on top. She locked the safe, then closed and locked the door to the strong room and returned the key to its hiding place.
The echo of footsteps in the front hall signaled that Reichmann had returned from his meeting. She slipped out of his office, walked through to her own room and sat down behind her desk. She checked her wristwatch. Almost fifteen minutes had passed while she had been in the strong room. The risk she had taken was huge. Normally, three minutes was her maximum turnaround time, but the information she had gathered had been crucial, not only for her own survival, but for the Maquis.
Code leak traced to Vassigny Stop Find Traitor Stop.
There were two possibilities, perhaps a third. Her radio transmissions to SOE HQ in England could have been intercepted. The success of their sabotage program could have aroused suspicion. Or they had a traitor.
The leak, if there was one, couldn’t be local. Her cover was simple. She was married to Armand de Thierry, the former occupant of the Château and the marriage, on paper at least, was real. Armand, a wealthy landowner, was seen as a valued Nazi collaborator, owing to the fact that he owned a great deal of productive land and was able to supply the German soldiers with wine, fresh meat, vegetables and cheeses. He was also the head of the local Maquis, a small, but effective group of French Resistance fighters.
Armand was in his fifties, but the fact that he was wealthy meant his second marriage, after the death of his first wife, to a much
younger woman was not considered strange.
For Sara, the cover was natural and impeccable. The fact that her mother was a Parisienne, and her father German, that she had spent her childhood in Berlin, her formative years in Paris and most of her adult life in Oxford, England, suited her uniquely for this mission.
During her time in Vassigny, she had been cared for and protected. Armand and the Resistance had gone to great lengths to integrate her into the village and their lives. The fact that she had devised the present cipher system that the Allied ground forces used to communicate with each other was the one glaring weakness in her suitability as an agent, although that risk was offset by the fact that her link with the cipher had been kept secret.
Armand and the SOE had protected her, but her time in Vassigny was over. There were a limited number of codebooks, and only a handful of people with access to the Château. It was only a matter of time before Reichmann, or more likely, Stein, the local Gestapo officer, unmasked her. When she transmitted the code information at her next scheduled radio contact, she would make arrangements to leave.
Reichmann bypassed her office and walked directly into his. Breathing a sigh of relief, Sara walked through to his office and bade him good-night.
Returning to her desk, she stripped off her spectacles, carefully stored them in her glasses case and slipped the case into her purse. Shrugging into her thick lined coat, she wound a woolen scarf around her neck, tucking it in against the cold. Collecting her purse, she straightened and caught a glimpse of her face in the ornate gilded mirror opposite her desk. Her skin was as pale as the empty marble fireplace, but that wasn’t what held her attention.
The scarf was bright red. The significance of the color drained the blood from her face.
She had forgotten about the thread in the codebook.
* * *
Sharp pain shooting up her shins jerked Sara awake. She stared blankly at the dimly lit room and the rectangular shape of a coffee table, for long seconds unable to grasp where she was.
A shudder swept through her when she identified the cozy familiarity of her sitting room. Dim light flowed from the hallway—her bedroom—which meant that when she’d fallen asleep, she must have left her bedside lamp on.
Gripping the nearby arm of the couch for support, she sat down, her hands shaking as she rubbed away the pain in her shins.
The sharp clarity of the dream, the jolt of raw terror, had already faded, sliding into automatic, practiced blankness.
Pushing to her feet, she flicked on the lights and poured herself a glass of ice water from the fridge. Sitting on a stool at the kitchen counter, she slowly sipped the water and waited for her pulse to even out.
There was an easy explanation for the dream. Something had happened when she had picked up the codebook. She had experienced a flash of déjà vu, which had, in turn, triggered the dream.
The purity of the logic didn’t help her with the fact that she had the dreams in the first place or that she had started sleepwalking again.
Or the certainty that her past was inextricably entwined with the now.
Eight
Grand Cayman Island, the Caribbean
Edward Dennison, ex-FBI agent, ex-drug cartel member, and now a dead man walking, wiped down the counter of the bar he owned. The Shack was a seedy joint on the waterfront renowned for cheap beer, mean chili and a distinct lack of any discernible comfort.
In terms of excitement, tending a bar scored low on Dennison’s barometer but, after escaping Alex Lopez’s last attempt on his life by a matter of seconds, Dennison was all over boring and routine.
He loved the seedy dim bar and the predictable clientele. In the months he had owned it, his customers generally fell into two categories: tanned tourists wearing gaudy clothing and smelling of sunblock, and the regulars. The tourists, annoyed by the stink of drying fishing nets and sour beer, didn’t stay long. The regulars—fishermen and plantation workers, mostly—hung out at the bar and propped up the pool table, providing a quality that had been sadly lacking in Dennison’s life for more years than he cared to count—continuity.
Rain or shine, the same faces appeared, the same beer was ordered and the same music on the jukebox was played. Conversations were predictable and laconic. Dennison hung on every word and loved with passion the static world he had landed in.
Just months ago, in custody in D.C., with the CIA squeezing him for information about Alex Lopez and the wealthy cabal that backed him, the future had been clear: a prison sentence, followed by a cartel hit. No matter where the CIA locked him up, or how secret they tried to keep his location, Lopez would have found him.
In a bizarre run of luck, Dennison had managed to escape custody and the hit. Weeks later, after scanning the Internet for news of his escape and the ensuing investigation, he had found, instead, his death notice.
He had sat staring at the briefly worded statement, a piece of prose that utterly eliminated all the highs and lows of his life and distilled his existence down to two dates and a deceased wife, and wondered who had killed him off, and why.
The answer had been simple. Marc Bayard, the intelligence executive running the Lopez and cabal investigations.
Bayard was sending him a message. The door was open, and he wanted him to come in out of the cold.
The terms were tempting. Dennison was officially dead, which meant the heat was off. The FBI wasn’t actively hunting him. Neither were the CIA, the NSA, Interpol and whatever other agency had been hunting his ass for the past twenty-four years. It was even possible that Lopez had bought into the death scenario.
There would be incentives to sweeten the pot—no doubt amnesty for his crimes and the opportunity to live on American soil under a new identity on the Witness Security Program—so long as he testified.
Another search had turned up the apparently unconnected fact that Agent Harris, one of the CIA agents who had been minding him, had been shot and killed in the line of duty on the same day Dennison had “died.” The only conclusion he could draw, incredibly, was that the CIA agent he had left handcuffed and unconscious on the floor of the motel had been executed by Lopez’s people in his stead. And Bayard, the methodical bastard, had used the situation to extend him an amnesty.
The implications had been huge. Harris had looked a little like Dennison, close enough to create uncertainty. If Lopez’s hit man had been working from a photograph, or he had simply been in a hurry, it was entirely possible that he thought he had killed the right mark. If no one in Lopez’s organization had found Harris’s death notice and tied it to the time of the hit, it was logical to assume that Lopez really did think he was dead.
So…dead and free, for the moment. He didn’t fool himself that it would last. Bayard could revoke his “death” whenever it suited his purposes. In one smooth stroke he had offered Dennison a deal, a grace period and a threat.
Life was good…but the clock was ticking.
He tossed the cloth under the bar, grabbed a broom and began sweeping sand through the cracks in the scarred hardwood floor. A cockroach the size of a small bird scuttled from beneath a table and made a run for the nearest piece of warped skirting board.
Dennison didn’t bother to make a swipe at the insect. Live and let live, that was his motto, and it was a fact that cockroaches were a part of island life. No matter how many you killed, they kept on coming.
A bit like Lopez and his limitless supply of hired guns.
When the bar was swept and the trash emptied, he walked out back where Louis Jamais, his only permanent employee, was preparing bar snacks— a big pot of seafood gumbo, slabs of island baked bread and a rich, spicy chili that was Louis’s own recipe. Picking up the latest copy of an American tabloid he subscribed to for the express purpose of keeping up with the Lopez/cabal investigations, Dennison walked outside to enjoy a few minutes respite before they opened for the lunchtime crowd. Sitting on the back step, he flipped through pages.
His gaze skimmed th
e lead stories without much interest, then snagged on a small special interest piece. His attention sharpened as he read. The focus of the story was an epitaph of Ben Fischer, the brother of Todd Fischer, and a rehash of the Nordika tragedy, with one exception. Ben Fischer had made a trip to Costa Rica to search for his brother. He hadn’t found Todd Fischer, but when he had returned to Shreveport, Louisiana, he hadn’t gone home empty-handed. He had taken Todd Fischer’s personal possessions with him.
Instincts honed by years of working for Alex Lopez and too many close scrapes with death sprang to life. He stepped back into the kitchen, ignoring Louis’s query as he ratted around in the box where they kept old newspapers, which were useful for wrapping up food waste. He found several editions of the same tabloid, but, frustratingly, no more front pages.
“This what you’re looking for?”
Louis tossed him a paper he’d been about to use to wrap up fish bones and vegetable peelings. Dennison unfolded it. The front-page coverage of the graves at Juarez jumped out at him and his pulse rate rocketed. He checked the date at the top of the page. It was several weeks before the edition he had been reading. “Thanks.”
Ignoring Louis’s curiosity, he walked back outside, reread the article and studied the blurred photograph of mourners. He didn’t recognize any of them and he hadn’t expected to. The CIA had vetted all coverage in order to guarantee the security of its own personnel.
The photo, or the fact that the grave had been found, didn’t interest him so much as the story behind the killings—one he had researched on and off during his years in Colombia.
Heinrich Reichmann and his fellow SS Officers, along with Reichmann’s daughter, Helene, had escaped Germany in January 1944 after hijacking a ship called the Nordika—along with a number of genius children who were the supposed genetic seed pool of the Third Reich. The ship had sailed from Lubek, a port on the Baltic Sea, reportedly loaded with gold bullion and art treasures.