Simple Genius
Page 33
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HORATIO CALLED SOUTH FREEMAN later that morning for two reasons. First, to see if the man had a list of any of the German POWs held at Camp Peary during World War II.
The man laughed out loud. “Oh, yeah, I got that right here on my desk. Pentagon wouldn’t give it to me so I strolled on over to the CIA and the spooks printed me out a nice clean copy and then asked me what other secret shit I’d like to get my hands on.”
“I’ll take that as a hell no,” Horatio said. Then he asked Freeman whether he knew any people with newspapers in Tennessee around the area where Michelle grew up. On this query Horatio struck gold.
“Man named Toby Rucker runs a weekly in a little place an hour south of Nashville.” When he named the town, Horatio almost jumped out of his chair. It was the very place where Michelle had lived.
“What do you want to know for?” Freeman asked.
“I’ve got some questions about the disappearance of someone down there, say nearly thirty years ago.”
“Well Toby’s been there over forty years, so if it made the paper he’ll know about it.” Freeman gave Horatio the number and added, “I’ll call him right now and tell him you’ll be in contact.”
“I appreciate it, South, I really do.”
“You better. And don’t you forget our deal. Exclusive! Or I strangle you.”
“Right.” Horatio hung up, waited twenty minutes and called the number.
A man identifying himself as Toby Rucker answered on the second ring. South Freeman had just gotten off the phone with him, Rucker said. Horatio relayed his request and Rucker agreed to see what he could find out.
As Horatio clicked off his phone, there was a sound from overhead. He poked his head out the bedroom window. It was a chopper buzzing over Babbage Town. As it sped away Horatio thought about Michelle thousands of feet up in the air with a man Sean King clearly didn’t trust. So clearly in fact that he’d asked a special favor of Horatio that the man had granted.
“Come back in one piece, Michelle,” he muttered under his breath. “We still have a lot to talk about.”
The takeoff had been clean and smooth. The Cessna Grand Caravan was very roomy and luxurious, with a single aisle, seating fourteen counting pilot and co-pilot. It also had every navigation and communication bell and whistle, Champ had assured her.
“You take many people up?”
“I’m a solo kind of guy.” He hastily added, “It’s just that I like to think up here.”
She looked back at all the seats. “Seems like kind of a waste then, all this room.”
“Who knows, if things go really well, I could buy my own jet.”
“You don’t really strike me as all that materialistic.”
He shrugged. “I’m not really. I went into science because I liked figuring out things. But it gets complicated, and I’m not referring to the science.” He fell silent.
“Come on, Champ, talk to me.”
He stared out the window of the plane. “Quantum computers have enormous potential to do good in the world and bad.”
She said, “I’m sure the guy who invented the atom bomb had the same concerns.”
Champ shuddered. “Can we please change the subject?”
“Okay, show me what this little old plane can do.”
He put the plane into a steep climb, something it handled easily. Next he guided the Cessna through controlled dives, cutting tight banks and even doing a rollover. None of it bothered Michelle; she’d ridden in just about anything with two wings in some of the roughest conditions possible.
He pointed out the window. “The infamous Camp Peary. This is about the closest we can get without being shot down.”
“Can we at least go a little lower?”
He eased them down to two thousand feet and circled back around. Michelle kept her eyes on the topography, taking in every detail she could. “So you can’t get any closer?”
“Depends on how risk-averse you are.”
“Not very. I take it you are.”
“Funny, not since I met you.”
He moved the flight wheel to the left and reduced their airspeed. The plane flew along on a straight line basically following the contours of the York River.
“This is really as close as we can get without having a missile up our butt,” he said.
Michelle could see the boat dock that Ian Whitfield had presumably used to launch his RIB. Next to that appeared to be the bunkers that Sean had shown her from the satellite map. From the air they looked like a series of concrete boxes lined up side by side. To the north of that was the inlet from the York that seemed to bisect Camp Peary. And farther north of that she saw the massive runway. Her gaze next ran across the old neighborhoods South Freeman had described, then an old brick home, and a small pond. And south of Camp Peary was the Naval Supply Center and the Weapons Station.
“The feds have this area pretty well locked up,” she said.
“Yes they do.” He banked to the right, flew east over the York, staying at two thousand feet, and passed over some of the most picturesque country Michelle had ever seen.
“It is beautiful.”
“Yes, it is,” Champ said, staring at her. Then he looked abruptly away.
“Come on, Champ, it’s the girl who’s supposed to blush.”
He looked out the window. “I took Monk up once.”
“Really? Did he want to see anything in particular?”
“Not really. Although he did want to fly pretty low over the river.”
Michelle thought, So he could do a recon on Camp Peary. Just like I am.
“Um, would you like to take the controls?”
She took the wheel in front of her and eased it to the left. And then to the right. “Can we climb a bit?”
“You can go up to eight thousand. Just take it slow and easy.” She edged the nose of the plane up and leveled off at eight thousand feet.
She said, “How about a controlled dive? Like you did?”
He stared at her a bit nervously. “Oh? Sure, okay.”
She eased the wheel forward and the plane’s nose dipped. Then it dipped some more. Michelle could see the earth coming at them awfully fast. And still she kept the wheel pushed forward. Suddenly flashing through her mind were nightmares that had torn at her for nearly three decades. A child petrified, but what child? Her? Even in her mind’s eye she couldn’t be sure. And yet the terror she was feeling was very real.
They were diving nearly straight down and yet Michelle didn’t seem to notice the altimeter reading plummeting or hear the warning horn in the cockpit. She also didn’t see that Champ was frantically pulling his wheel back, screaming at her to let go; that she was going to crash the plane. And yet she couldn’t pull her hands from the wheel. It was as though it had been electrified. For a second time she heard herself say, “Goodbye, Sean.”
Finally, through the fog of her mind she heard, “Let go!”
Michelle glanced to the side and saw a white-faced Champ straining with all of his might to pull the wheel back, to free them from the death spiral. Michelle ripped her hands from the wheel. Champ managed to pull the plane level and then took them in for a bumpy landing, the tires kicking off the runway twice before settling firmly down.
They taxied to a stop. For several minutes all each could hear was the other’s strained breathing. Finally Champ looked at her. “Are you all right?”
She could feel acid racing up her throat. “For nearly killing us both, yes, I’m fine.”
“I’ve known other people to freeze up at the controls. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have let you take the wheel.”
“Champ, you did nothing wrong. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”
They were walking back from the plane to Champ’s Mercedes when a motorcycle pulled up to them. It was Horatio Barnes’s Harley. The rider pulled off his helmet, and Sean King said, “Beautiful day to fly, isn’t it?”
“What are you doing here?” she demanded.
“Thanks for the flying lesson, Champ. I’m afraid I’m not up to lunch right now.” She climbed on the bike behind Sean.
After they’d left the private air terminal and been on the road for a couple of minutes Michelle told Sean to pull off.
“What’s wrong?”
“Just do it,” she urged.
He pulled off and Michelle ran behind some trees and threw up.
She came back a minute later, white-faced and wiping her mouth. She slowly climbed back on the bike.
“Skies a little unfriendly to you?” he asked.
She said slowly, “No, just chalk it up to pilot error. So what are you doing on Horatio’s precious Harley?”
“Just went for a stroll.”
“And just happened to arrive at the air terminal as we landed?”
He turned and said angrily, “You call that a friggin’ landing? You guys were coming straight down. I thought you’d lost the damn engine. I almost killed myself getting to the runway even if it was just to spatula you off the tarmac! What the hell happened up there?”
“Some kind of engine trouble. Champ corrected it.” She felt terrible lying to him, but would have felt even worse telling him the truth. And what was the truth? That she had frozen, nearly killing herself and an innocent person?
“I thought you said it was pilot error?”
“Just forget it,” she said. “Any landing you walk away from is a great one.”
“Excuse me for caring.”
“So you’ve been riding this bike all over the countryside watching us fly around?”
“I told you I didn’t want you to go up there with the guy.”
“You don’t think I can handle myself?”
“Oh hell, don’t pull that crap with me. I was just—”
She smacked his helmet. “Sean?”
“What?”
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
They rode on.
Michelle clung tightly to Sean’s jacket. She didn’t want to let go, for any reason. She had never been more terrified in her life. And this time the reason for the fear was not some external enemy. It was herself.
CHAPTER
73
SEAN DROVE THEM TO THE B&B where Horatio had originally been staying. “Joan is faxing me some info,” he explained.
They got the documents and drove to a nearby restaurant. Michelle’s stomach had settled down enough that they ordered sandwiches and coffee. She told Sean about Monk going up in the plane.
As they ate, they went over the pages Joan had faxed. Sean said, “Monk Turing did visit Wiesbaden.”
“How’d they find that out so quickly?”
“Joan’s firm has an affiliate in Frankfurt. They were able to track him via his credit card receipts. He bought that beer stein he gave Champ there among other things.” He next looked at several sheets of paper. “This is the list of German POWs held at Camp Peary during World War II that I asked for.”
“Okay, how the hell did Joan get that so fast?”
“One of their top executives is a former rear admiral and once headed the NSA. He was able to cut through the red tape. And it’s not like this stuff is classified anymore. Just gathering mold in some office in the Pentagon.”
They went down the list of Germans. Each name had the man’s date of capture, rank and what had happened to him.
Sean said, “You can see that most of them were released at the end of the war or else died in captivity. But I don’t see a Henry Fox listed.”
“Wait a minute. Look at this guy.” Michelle’s finger pointed at a blank space. “There’s nothing here that says what happened to him.” She scanned the pages. “And he’s the only one.”
Sean looked at the man’s name. “Heinrich Fuchs.”
“Heinrich Fuchs,” Michelle repeated slowly. “Anglicized, that might be Henry Fox.”
Sean stared at her. “I think you’re right, and for a very good reason.”
“What’s that?”
“Because I’m betting everything I have, little though it is, that Heinrich Fuchs was a German naval radio operator and that he was also the only man to escape from the naval stockade that is now the CIA’s Camp Peary. That’s why there’s a blank in the space as to what happened to him. The Navy wasn’t going to admit anyone escaped.”
Michelle drew in a sharp breath. “Escaped and changed his name to Henry Fox?”
“And moved to New York, set up another life, grew old and ended up living in the same apartment building as Monk and Viggie Turing.” He jumped up. “Come on. We need to see Viggie.”
“Why?”
“Horatio says she was programmed. Well, the name Heinrich Fuchs may be the key she needs to tell us more. Maybe everything.”
They drove to Babbage Town and hustled to the schoolroom where Viggie and the other children were. Only Viggie wasn’t there.
“She said she was sick,” the teacher said.
“She told you in person?” Sean asked.
“No, she sent in a note. It was on my desk this morning when I got in.”
A few minutes later Sean and Michelle were rushing up the steps to Alicia’s cottage. They burst through the door and Michelle called out, “Viggie? Viggie!”
She hurtled up the stairs and threw open Viggie’s bedroom door. The room was empty and she clattered back downstairs. She and Sean searched the rest of the cottage.
“No sign of her,” he said, his voice panicky.
“Where the hell is her guard?” Michelle demanded.
The door to the cottage opened and Alicia walked in. She was holding a bundle of papers and looked very tired. She seemed surprised to see them there and then said in a scolding tone, “Okay, you two, I’ve run every possible configuration of these damn notes through our strongest computer programs and came up with gibberish every time. So either the code is beyond our capability to decipher it, or it’s not code at all, which is the conclusion I’m fast coming to. I did find out the name of the song. It’s ‘Shenandoah,’ from the nineteenth century. Anyway, what do you know, it has lyrics, not many, none of it spectacular, but it has words. So I had the brilliant idea that perhaps the lyrics were the key to the code. I hit them with everything we had, in every conceivable combination. And do you know what? It was still all gibberish.”
They just stood there staring at her.
“What is it?” she said suspiciously.
“Where’s Viggie?” Michelle asked quietly.
Alicia looked at her watch. “She’s in school. She’s been in school since eight o’clock.”
“She’s not there, Alicia,” Sean said. “The teacher said someone left a note on her desk this morning saying that Viggie was sick.”
She gave them both searching looks. “I’ve been up all night trying to make sense of this garbage. You were supposed to look after her.”
“She was fine early this morning,” Michelle explained. “She came to my room a bit before dawn. Then she went back to her room.”
“Then what?” Alicia said.
Sean and Michelle looked at each other. Sean said in an uncomfortable tone, “Then we left to run down some leads.”
“Leaving her alone!” Alicia exclaimed. “You left Viggie alone? Again!”
“We thought you were here,” Michelle explained.
Alicia threw the papers up in the air. “You thought I was here? How the hell could I be here when you gave me this mess to deal with?” She drew several deep breaths. “Her guard is supposed to escort her to school. I requested a new one directly after that other fool let Viggie wander away and almost drown.”