Blind Instinct

by Fiona Brand

  Her room matched the elevator, with seventies decor, peeling paint and a musty smell. Grimy windows overlooked rooftops and a back alley filled with Dumpsters.

  Leaving the suitcase and knapsack in her bedroom, she carried the grocery sack of food through to the small kitchenette then used her cell phone to dial her apartment and access her answering machine.

  She had four messages. Bayard’s voice was deep and faintly raspy, a northern curtness overlaying the southern drawl. He was home; call him. He had left his cell phone number.

  The second call was from Nicola. She was concerned and was just ringing to check that Sara was okay.

  The third and fourth calls were from Bayard, the last one curt and edged with frustration.

  She called Bayard’s cell. He picked up immediately.

  Swallowing to clear the sudden tightness in her throat, she filled him in on the items she had found and the events of the last three days. Bayard’s questions were clipped and concise.

  She gave him the name of the hotel and her room number.

  There was a rustling sound, a faint click as if he had unlatched a briefcase, then Bayard’s voice filled her ear. “I’ve got a funeral to attend in the morning, but I can be in Shreveport by tomorrow afternoon—three o’clock at the latest. In the meantime I’m sending an agent over. He won’t be obtrusive. He’s just there to make sure you’re okay, but if he thinks you’re in trouble, he will act to protect you. I’ll ring back in a few minutes with his name.”

  With fingers that shook slightly, she placed her cell phone on the counter in the kitchenette. Calling Bayard had been an admission that she needed help, hammering home the fact that she was a fish out of water with this stuff.

  While she waited for him to call back, she unpacked the few grocery items she’d brought to save either having to go out and buy food, or wait on ordering from dicey room service. Making a cheese sandwich, she ate it at the counter, washing down each bite with a sip of water. The food steadied her and helped her think, but the mundane chore of eating did nothing to dissipate her tension.

  Within fifteen minutes Bayard rang back. “His name’s Alan Hicks, he’s an FBI agent and he’ll be there in about twenty minutes. Call me as soon as he makes contact.”

  Hicks, a lean, fit man in his early forties, with salt-and-pepper hair and glacial blue eyes, took just over the twenty. When she rang Bayard he almost bit her head off.

  Her fingers tightened on the receiver. “Calm down, he’s here. Do you want to talk to him?”

  There was a pregnant pause. She had the definite impression that Bayard was furious, which, she decided, was so not her problem.

  “Not necessary. I’ll see you at your hotel tomorrow afternoon.”

  He disconnected before she could say anything further, and she swallowed her own spurt of reaction and anger.

  “Was that Marc Bayard you were talking to?”

  “Yes.”

  Hicks’s brows shot up. “If it’s okay with you, I’ll take the couch.”

  When the kitchen was cleaned and the dishes she had used were put away, she carried the knapsack through to the bedroom. After dropping a pillow and a spare blanket on the couch, she showered and changed into jeans and a tank top, unwilling to wear anything too flimsy to bed in case she sleepwalked again.

  She said good-night to Hicks, who had the television playing softly and seemed to be immersed in some technical magazine, and closed the door. It wasn’t late, it had only just gotten dark, but she was out on her feet. Aside from a symphony of aches from the near hit-and-run, she badly needed to sleep.

  Although not just yet.

  Unfastening the knapsack, she extracted Todd’s gun and the magazine, loaded the empty clip and, using the blanket to muffle the sound, slid it home.

  She listened intently to see if Hicks would respond to the metallic click, half expecting the door to burst open. When it didn’t, she let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding and examined the weapon.

  The gun would need cleaning. It was possible that after all these years, it would either fail to fire or misfire, but right now the risk didn’t concern her. For now, despite the fact that Hicks was here, she was just happy to have a gun that could work in her hands.

  She searched the bottom of the knapsack just in case any shells were rolling around loose. Her fingers brushed against something cool and flat. A metal tag with a key attached was caught partway beneath the stiffened piece of canvas lining the bottom of the knapsack.

  She studied the key. The tag, printed with a name and address, made it clear enough what the key opened: a safe-deposit box in a Shreveport bank. The bank was the same one that both she and her father had used, but there was only one person the safe-deposit box could belong to: Todd Fischer.

  The sense that she was trespassing on very private ground, that Steve should have been the one to find the items her father had hidden behind the wall in the attic and not her, was overpoweringly strong.

  The mystery of Todd Fischer’s disappearance and death had deeply affected the entire Fischer family. Steve had adored his father. He had focused his life on finding his father and bringing Todd Fischer’s killers to justice. He had defied the odds and succeeded in unraveling the mystery and finding Todd’s body. Several of the cabal members who had been implicated in the naval killings had been found dead—but none of them, to date, had ever officially been brought to justice.

  But, right or wrong, she didn’t want to involve Steve. In just a few weeks he would be a father. After the trauma he and Taylor had been through, the last thing they needed was to be sucked back into the investigation. Besides, Bayard would be here tomorrow.

  Slipping the handgun under her pillow, she crawled into bed.

  At two in the morning she woke up. She couldn’t remember dreaming this time, but something had happened. She felt different, sharper. Clearer.

  The dreams pried open the door to memories, but this time something else had happened. A door had opened in her mind and it hadn’t slammed shut.

  Maybe it had been her decision to research the codes, which had meant that for the first time since she was a child she was actively trying to remember instead of forget. Maybe it had simply been the contact with Bayard. Whatever, this time she hadn’t remembered actual events. She had remembered what she had been.

  Knowledge flowed through her like a cold electrical current. In that moment her senses were almost painfully heightened. She was acutely aware of the scents and sounds of the night, the cool draft of air from the conditioning unit against her skin.

  She had been Sara Weiss, a scholar. Some things, it seemed, never changed. Like iron filings to a magnet, she had clung to the academic life.

  But she had also been something more. Intellectually, she had known what her real profession had been. Now she knew it in a flat, matter-of-fact way that was faintly chilling. She had been a spy.

  Flicking on her bedside lamp, she shoved back the covers and crossed the room to stare into the mirror fixed to the wall above the dresser.

  Outwardly, she looked the same. She was still Sara Fischer, a thirty-four-year-old librarian from Shreveport. Inwardly she was essentially the same person, but with a difference. The new knowledge had burned away the paralyzing uncertainty. Last night, despite her gut instinct, she had let Rousseau and Thorpe fob her off. Now she knew better.

  At eight-thirty in the morning, Sara called work and requested time off. Her boss was sympathetic. They were short staffed, but they didn’t expect to be busy. Already the front steps were overflowing with flowers. With the funeral in just two days time, they were keeping opening hours short and they would be closed the day of the funeral.

  The funeral.

  Sara’s fingers tightened on the receiver. The thought of having to sit through another funeral service, of having to watch another casket lowered into the ground, made her feel hollow inside. “Thanks. I’ll call next week, when I feel better.”

  As soon as
she hung up, she informed Hicks that she needed to go to the bank. He didn’t like it, and insisted on calling in backup. Sara calmly told him to do whatever he had to, so long as he was ready to go at nine when the bank opened. And before Bayard got into town.

  She had told Bayard about every item in the knapsack except for the key, which she had found after the phone call. She had thought about simply handing him the key along with everything else, but one fact stopped her. Todd Fischer’s safe-deposit box belonged to the Fischer family before it belonged to anyone else. For all she knew it contained items of a private and very personal nature, meant for either his wife or child. If that was the case, she didn’t want Bayard and who knows how many federal agents looking through what should have gone directly to Steve. On the other hand, it could contain evidence or information pertinent to Bayard’s case. Either way, she wanted to check it out before Bayard got in. A final, practical consideration had sealed her decision. With the nature of deposit boxes, Bayard wouldn’t be able to access it without either her or Steve there, anyway.

  At ten past nine, with Hicks still grumbling and a second agent, Crombie—a younger, more muscular version of Hicks—flanking her, she walked into the bank. She was shown into an interview room. A short time later she was joined by Lydia Clement, her personal banker. Lydia had helped her through the process of closing her father’s accounts and also of dealing with the loose ends involved with Steve’s financial affairs when he had entered the Witness Security Program.

  She studied the key, then checked a computer file. When Lydia quietly stated, “The safe-deposit box belongs to Todd Fischer,” Sara got goose bumps. It wasn’t exactly a hand from the grave, but close.

  “Can I access the box on Steve’s behalf?”

  Lydia closed the file and pressed a key to activate the screen saver. “You have a power of attorney for Steve and the bank holds a letter from him appointing you as his agent while he’s on WITSEC. Under the circumstances, that’s acceptable.”

  Fifteen minutes later, she studied the contents of the box—a large manila envelope, which contained a sheaf of photocopied sheets, and a smaller envelope of black-and-white snapshots. From the dated clothing of the snaps, they appeared to have been taken decades ago—perhaps in the 1940s or 1950s.

  She studied a group of young people sitting on a riverbank and a name popped into her head.

  Helene.

  A small tingling started at her nape as she studied the blond child. The quality of the print wasn’t good. She could barely make out facial features, but something about her had sparked recognition. This time the recall had been easier, smoother—simply there—like an ordinary memory.

  She returned her attention to the sheets, which were written in German. The originals were faded and old before the photocopies had been made. The date made her pulse quicken. November 22, 1943, just weeks before the Nordika had sailed.

  The contents of what appeared to be a manifest were varied. In some cases the original print had been so faded that the words had disappeared when the reproductions had been made, but she instantly recognized what she was looking at. The manifest of a warehouse in Berlin which, just before the fall of the Third Reich, had held a fortune in art, artifacts and gold bullion.

  Now the attacks on her, and Delgado searching her apartment, made even more sense.

  She studied the list of goods. On the last page a name was scrawled in blue pen, probably by Todd. The name—George Hartley—meant nothing to her.

  Minutes later, the papers and the photographs stored in a manila envelope, she left the vault.

  Helene.

  The name teased at the corners of her mind.

  Another name swam up out of the murk. Reichmann. Helene Reichmann.

  Shock momentarily held her rigid. For a bleak moment she considered the very real possibility that her mind was playing games with her, that her subconscious had thrown up a name she knew was part of the investigation into the cabal.

  No. Quiet certainty filled her. The name was familiar because it had been a part of her dreams long before she had known anything about either Alex Lopez or the cabal. Until that moment she hadn’t remembered that it had been a part of her dream. Like most of the finer details, it had slipped beyond her reach when she awoke. Now the connection was shocking and unavoidable. She had read the newspaper reports, and listened to Steve’s clipped explanations. Heinrich Reichmann had hijacked the Nordika, murdered members of the crew and perpetrated numerous other atrocities. He’d had a daughter called Helene, who was the current head of the cabal, and who was wanted on charges of murder and conspiracy.

  Hicks and Crombie joined her as she stepped out into the main reception area of the bank. Minutes later, she was ensconced in the passenger seat of Hicks’s car, which he had insisted on bringing. Crombie was driving a second vehicle, watching their tail.

  The air-conditioning hummed to life as Hicks pulled out into traffic, sending a flow of cool air over her. Her hands tightened around the envelope, and for a moment she needed the anchor. Most of the time the memories were faded, distant, and confined to dreams as if they did belong to someone else, but now wasn’t one of those times.

  She checked the rearview mirror as Hicks drove. Crombie had slotted into traffic about four cars behind.

  Heat shimmered off asphalt, sunlight glittered off passing cars.

  Not an icy wind, Alps towering in a clear blue sky, Reichmann’s eyes, pale and empty…

  Her jaw tightened. The past was over. Finished. Reichmann was dead.

  But his daughter wasn’t.

  Thirteen

  Edward Dennison pocketed the newspaper clipping of Ben Fischer’s funeral that he’d had printed off the online records maintained by the library where Sara Fischer worked. The photo of Sara was distant and blurred, but that, and the fact that she was Steve Fischer’s cousin, made her easy enough to identify.

  He had only seen Fischer twice, both times in circumstances he preferred to forget, but the family resemblance—dark hair, dark eyes, distinctive cheekbones—was clear.

  The fact that she had a couple of feds with her made her even easier to identify and underlined that his instincts were right. Something was happening.

  Climbing behind the wheel of the Lexus he had rented shortly after he had exited his flight into Shreveport, he turned in the opposite direction, heading toward the Fischer farmhouse and away from the feds.

  She had been carrying an envelope tucked under one arm.

  She hadn’t had the envelope when she had walked into the bank. It was possible it contained investment material but, with two agents watching her every move, he didn’t think so.

  He had searched her apartment, and found nothing of interest. Judging from the mess, someone had beat him to the punch.

  If he didn’t miss his guess, she had found something important—information or items that either Sara’s father or Todd Fischer had secured in a safe-deposit box.

  If the box had belonged to Todd Fischer and hadn’t been accessed since his death in 1984, then Dennison was willing to bet that it had contained material that had been part of his undercover work.

  From the information that had been leaked to the press over the years, Dennison was certain Fischer hadn’t taken the Costa Rican job that had cost him his life seriously, but if he had taken the precautionary measure of securing information before he had gone south, that meant he had found something.

  It was possible he had gotten hold of sensitive information pertaining to Admiral Monteith, Fischer’s commanding officer.

  Monteith had been in hip deep with George Hartley on some deal. The pair had instigated the dive on the Nordika, and he didn’t think it had been for reasons of national security, as stated. Monteith had been as corrupt and greedy as they come. In his opinion, they had done it solely to panic Helene, which they had, only not to their advantage. By the time the crisis Monteith and Hartley had instigated was over, Helene had used the excuse of Hartley’s sec
urity leak to restructure the cabal. Think major bloodbath.

  When the killing spree had stopped, all links to the upper echelon had been severed. Helene had ruthlessly dropped almost all organized crime activities and, from what he had gathered from newspaper articles, had liquidated assets and poured what was left of the cabal’s resources into the vast, amorphous sea of global commercial business interests. Within the space of a few days the cabal had morphed into a group of extremely wealthy and powerful shareholders hiding behind a complicated maze of shell companies. Monteith had resigned and Hartley was dead.

  Helene’s continuing contact with Lopez and the Chavez cartel and some high-risk dabbling in terrorism had been the only aberration. The risk had been huge and in the end it had bitten her on the ass. It was a glaring lack of foresight that had always puzzled him.

  Back to the envelope. It didn’t in any way fulfill his idea of the “personal effects” Sara’s father was supposed to have brought back from Costa Rica, and it had been relatively flat—no diamonds.

  He could be too late, and the lead on the cache of gold and diamonds the Nordika was supposed to have carried was in the envelope she had been carrying. But he was the eternal optimist. He was certain there was more to find than an envelope.

  He was clutching at straws, but he was used to that. And he had a gut feeling.

  Now that didn’t come along very often. He would keep digging.

  * * *

  Sara checked her watch as she finished packing her suitcase, carried it out to the sitting room and set it beside the envelope and the knapsack. Aside from the visit to the bank, the morning and the early afternoon had dragged by, the boredom relieved by making sandwiches and coffee and watching TV. Bayard, who had been delayed, was due any minute. She never thought she’d be so glad to see him.