by Fiona Brand
Saunders invited Fischer to take a seat and opened the file. Minutes later he placed the photos that had accompanied the file in a neat pile beside the open folder. The photos were dated, numbered and indisputably had come from Todd Fischer’s underwater camera. The first four photos were family snaps, the next ten, working shots of the Nordika. The final three clearly depicted a murder in progress.
Saunders’s jaw tightened at the frozen violence of the last two photos. He had known Todd Fischer personally, and liked him. He had never found it easy to stomach the actions that had been necessary to keep Monteith’s Nazi-hunting junket under wraps. The fact that Monteith had gotten his men to the scene, recovered Todd Fischer’s camera and sealed away evidence that would not only have cleared Fischer and his men of all charges but sparked a murder inquiry, was an unpleasant shock.
The even more unpalatable fact that he now faced public exposure for his actions in the Nordika cover-up was a very personal and immediate threat. He reported to the Director of National Intelligence, who advised the president and oversaw the entire intelligence community. When it came to matters of national and international security, the slightest miscalculation on his part could cost him his job. “I presume you have the originals.”
Fischer’s gaze was remote. “And the negatives.”
Saunders steepled his fingers and studied Steve Fischer’s tough, clean-cut features, the immaculate uniform. Todd Fischer had been competent, likable and damned good at his job. His son was in another category entirely. In anyone’s terms, Steve Fischer was a high achiever. He had cruised through basic training, completed BUDS without a hitch and graduated from the College of Command and Staff with honors. With a string of awards and medals for active service with the SEAL teams in the Gulf and Afghanistan, he had fast-tracked his way through the ranks. A lieutenant commander already, according to the assessments of his superior officers, Fischer would make commander by the time he was thirty-five. If a new theater of operations opened up, the promotion would be effective immediately. “What do you want?”
Fischer slid a letter outlining his resignation from the navy across the polished walnut of Saunders’s desk. “A job.”
Two
Washington, D.C.
Eight months later
The barnlike chamber of the library was chilly, the central heating cranky and inconsistent, so that some areas were warm and others existed in a flow of icy air. FBI Agent Taylor Jones was unlucky enough to be sitting in a room with a windchill factor somewhere in the arctic range.
Huddling into the warmth of her lined woolen coat, she scrolled the microfilm until she reached the date she was searching for and began to skim newspapers that had been published more than fifty years ago. Outside, the night was black, the wind fitful, driving sporadic bursts of rain against tall, mullioned windows. Somewhere a radiator ticked as if someone had just turned up the heat. The sound was comforting and oddly in sync with the yellowish glow of the lights, and walls lined with books that had moldered quietly for decades.
She made a note on the pad at her side then continued to scroll. A clock on the wall registered the passage of time. One hour, then two. The ache in her shoulder and wrist that had developed from hours spent making the same small movement over and over became more insistent. Taylor dismissed it in favor of sinking into the familiar cadences of sifting through information, and the well-worn comfort of being in utter control of her world. If the pain became sharp enough to interfere with her concentration, she would take a break and do a few exercises to free up the muscles.
Somewhere behind her a chair scraped on the tiled floor. The measured step of the only other occupant of the room, a thin man wearing bifocals, registered. The double click of a briefcase unlocking was distinct in the muffled quiet of the room.
A terrible alertness gripped her.
Eyes glued to the screen, she concentrated on controlling her breathing. Stay calm. Stay focused. The tightness in her chest and stomach, the sour taste flooding her mouth, were a mirage, leftover symptoms from a nightmare that had ended months ago. A nightmare she had worked hard to forget.
She had read the psychiatric reports on the effects of the four days she had spent as a hostage; she’d had the therapy. She had even gone back for further sessions so she could understand and control the anxiety attacks which, according to her therapist, were her mind and body’s remembered response to the experience. The way out was simple: instruct the mind that there was nothing to fear and so invalidate the body’s responses.
Inhaling again, she forced her focus outward, away from the coiled tension, away from the memories. Her gaze skated over shelves of books, a wooden stepladder, and snagged on her own reflection, white faced and strained, in a window.
Not a dim, claustrophobic shed with bars at the window. Endless shadows, the snick of a briefcase, the sting of a needle. The smothering paralysis as the drug anesthetized her body, leaving her formless, floating, eyes wide, staring into a darkness that shifted, reformed—
Stop.
Don’t let the mind go back.
It was late. Instead of working she should have gone home and eaten dinner. She was tired; her therapist had warned her that tiredness and stress were, in themselves, triggers.
As dangerous as briefcases and needles.
She drew in another controlled breath and checked her watch, anchoring herself in the normality of that small gesture. The hostage crisis was over, finished. Earl Slater was behind bars, Diane Eady and Senator Radcliff, the man whose property she had been held on, were both dead. She had escaped; she was safe. But Alex Lopez, head of a Colombian drug cartel, and the man who had drugged her with a powerful hallucinogen called ketamine hydrochloride, had gotten away.
Rain swept against the windows, and the sense of cold increased.
Don’t go back.
But in order to catch Lopez, she had to.
He was dangerous, a psychotic killer, and she needed him caught. When he had injected the first dose of ketamine he had stated that he would kill her, regardless of whether Rina Morell—Lopez’s former wife and a federal witness—handed herself over in exchange for Taylor or not. The only question was when.
Normally, that kind of rhetoric wouldn’t have shaken Taylor. Lopez was powerful and influential; if he had wanted her dead, she would be dead. But caught in the grip of a hallucinatory drug, her normal reasoning process hadn’t worked. She would never forget the experience, and she was going to make sure it didn’t happen to anyone else.
Apart from her own determination to capture him, her appetite for the hunt was further whetted by the fact that Rina Morell was a personal friend. The damage Lopez had done the Morell family was a matter of record now, but that didn’t alter the horror of the ordeal Rina and her parents had endured.
She registered a second click as the briefcase was closed. Jaw tight, she swiveled around in the chair and studied the owner of the briefcase who was strolling toward the front desk, the box of microfilm he had been studying tucked under one arm. He was midforties, about one hundred and forty pounds, six feet tall, give or take an inch. Height was always the most difficult detail to estimate.
She wondered what he had been doing here this late on a Sunday night, but the flare of curiosity was brief. It was automatic for her to notice people. The clinical assessment was part of the job, but for as long as she could remember she had been aware of the people around her, how they looked and what made them tick. Her mother’s standard complaint had been that she hadn’t produced an eight-pound baby girl, she had given birth to a cop. It had been a mild form of rebellion for Taylor to become an agent instead.
Still on edge, she returned to the screen. A heading caught her attention, drawing her once more into the past. None of the key search words she had noted down were included, but the name was familiar.
She flipped through the files in her bag until she found the relevant one. It contained research she’d done while she was recovering from the ho
stage situation and the depressive effects of the ketamine. Locked out of the office for a month on mandatory sick leave, she’d had nothing better to do than attend therapy sessions and try to break open the Lopez/Morell case, which had unaccountably stalled.
She’d combed FBI files, the Internet and microfilms of old newspapers for anything to do with Lopez who, aside from drugs charges, was wanted for illegal entry into the United States, collusion in the theft and sale of decommissioned missile components, fraud, grievous bodily harm and murder.
Lopez’s real name was Alejandro Chavez, and he had been living in the States under a false identity from the age of twelve, courtesy of a brutal series of mass murders in Colombia that had made it impossible for him to live in his own country. Marco Chavez, Lopez’s father, had orchestrated the murders to force his son’s release from prison. Marco had succeeded in obtaining a pardon for Alex, but with the public outcry surrounding the massacres and a number of death threats, Alex had been forced into hiding.
She was also searching for anything to do with Marco Chavez, now deceased, and—just to pull this one into the region of the seriously weird—international banking and Nazis. The Nazis, according to the testimony of Slater—one of the few arrests they had made in the case—formed the backbone of a secretive cabal that had bankrolled Lopez and his cartel.
She opened the file, found the reference and returned her attention to the microfilm, a Reuters report dated 1954. Noted Jewish banker and self-professed Nazi hunter Stefan le Clerc had disappeared and fears were held for his safety. His last known location, New York, had been established from a letter he had posted to his wife, Jacqueline le Clerc, who was appealing for any information about her husband’s whereabouts. Apart from the years he had spent in international banking, le Clerc had founded an organization that worked to reunite families separated during the war and help survivors recover family money and assets. He was also noted for his campaign to track Nazi war criminals, and had been searching for a group of SS officers who had escaped Berlin in 1944 just weeks before Hitler had committed suicide in his bunker.
According to le Clerc, the officers had hijacked a cargo ship, Nordika, from Lubeck and escaped, taking with them an enormous quantity of looted goods and a group of children with IQs that ranked them as geniuses, part of a research project designed to establish a superior genetic seed pool for the Reich.
Taylor didn’t know how common the name le Clerc was, but the fact that Stefan had been Jewish and in banking made the likelihood that he was related to the le Clerc who had surfaced in the Lopez case stronger.
Xavier le Clerc was a Jewish banker turned international thief. He was infamous for collapsing a Swiss bank that had had a large base of Nazi investment, then having the audacity to make a clean getaway. Interpol had an old sheet on him, but despite that he was still at large. It was suspected, although not proved, that Esther Morell, the wife of one of Lopez’s business partners and a former international banker herself, had used her connection with le Clerc to pull off a multibillion-dollar theft, emptying Alex Lopez’s main operating account. The money had since been recovered by the feds but after more than twenty years, any trail that might have led to le Clerc was gone.
She leafed through the information she had collected on Xavier le Clerc, and found the connection she was looking for. Xavier was Stefan le Clerc’s son.
She made a note, then read through the Reuters report on the screen again, double-checking the name of the ship, a second reference that made the article even more interesting.
Two weeks ago, she had found an article that had been printed in 1984, about the wreck of a ship purported to be the Nordika, which had been discovered off the coast of Costa Rica. A naval team that had dived on the wreck had disappeared and had been presumed drowned. There was no mention of any cargo, but the fact that Costa Rica wasn’t far from the coast of Colombia and was well within Marco Chavez’s sphere of influence had been enough to pique her interest.
The tie-in was tenuous. She wasn’t certain any of it would add up to anything productive, but she couldn’t ignore the picture that was building. The disappearance of the Nordika from Lubeck had been a wartime mystery that had stumped a lot of people, including Stefan le Clerc. Marco Chavez was known to have harbored German nationals after the war. Crazily enough, the pieces of that old wartime puzzle seemed to be fitting into the Lopez case.
She hit the Print button. While the article fed out, she repacked her bag, then walked through to the front desk and paid to have the document scanned and saved to disk.
An hour later, Taylor settled down at the computer monitor in her apartment with a carton of hot noodles and a double-chocolate brownie from the all-night bakery at the end of the block.
Outside, the wind had increased to a steady howl. Hail rapped against the windows, a sharp counterpart to the clicking and humming of her computer as she slipped the disk into the drive and opened up the file that contained the articles she’d had scanned.
Long minutes passed while she ate noodles and read through the articles again. The hail changed to sleet, the cold palpable as it reached through thick, lined drapes into the comfort of her sitting room, sending the temperature plummeting as she made a written prècis of the information. It wasn’t as fast as typing, but she’d found over the years that sometimes her brain worked better when she had a pen in her hand.
Fingers stiff with cold, she left her desk to turn up the heat and strolled through to her bedroom to pull on a sweater. Taking a fleecy blanket from the end of her bed, she returned to the computer.
With the blanket wrapped around her middle, she sat back down and noticed that at some point she had eaten all of the noodles and the brownie. Somehow, the fact that she couldn’t remember tasting a brownie that was justifiably famous for at least a ten-block radius seemed symptomatic of her life. She had had her cake, she just couldn’t remember eating it.
Until those hours spent locked in the dark, Lopez turning her blood to ice every time he had injected what could have been a fatal dose into her veins, she hadn’t realized how empty her life had been, or how desperately she wanted to live, despite that emptiness. Coming that close to death had been like slamming into a brick wall. It had stopped her in her tracks, forced her to assess, to need more than a career that had somehow expanded to fill every waking hour.
The change, radical as it was, hadn’t happened overnight. For a self-confessed workaholic from a dysfunctional family, trying to picture herself fitting into a scenario that involved a husband, kids, maybe even a house and garden, was difficult. For most of her adult life she had sidestepped the issue, denying that she wanted the family values that most people clung to. It was disorienting to discover that she needed them.
Tossing the empty noodle carton and the paper bag that had contained the brownie into the trash can beside her desk, she accessed the Bureau Web site. She entered her code and password then dialed up a Bureau search engine, typed in a list of search words and stared at the list of hits.
Great. Boring and weird.
Huddling into the blanket, she began to read.
At one in the morning, on the point of giving up, she found an article about a Colombian drug dealer and hit man, Tito Mendoza, who had been murdered for a book. Mendoza had been shot at point-blank range but hadn’t died immediately. The Costa Rican policia had questioned him at the scene, but he had slipped into a coma and died before they had gotten more than a few basic details. The newsworthy part was that he had claimed that aside from names and addresses, the book had contained other details: blood types, numbers that had been tattooed onto the backs of a group of German ex-nationals—Nazis—and an execution list.
The report, though bizarre, meant nothing on its own. But coupled with the fact that Mendoza had been involved with Marco Chavez and that he had been murdered the same week the naval team who had dived on the Nordika had disappeared, suddenly, the implications began to pile up.
In her research, Tayl
or had found out a lot of information she never, ever wanted to know, including the fact that SS soldiers had routinely had their blood types tattooed onto their chests. A practical solution for the battlefield, it had proved to be a liability after the Allies had invaded, because the tattoos had made them easy to identify.
The tattoos Mendoza had mentioned didn’t sound like blood types—he had said numbers, not letters—but the connection was there.
Maybe it was a leap to imagine the book had anything to do with the SS soldiers who had hijacked the Nordika, and even more of a leap to connect it to the missing naval divers, Lopez or the Nazi cabal Slater had mentioned, but it was a possibility.
She saved a copy of the article and, out of habit, saved a copy to disk, which she labeled, dated and slipped into a storage box that contained copies of all of the archival information she had researched on Lopez. After the internal security leaks concerning the case, two of which had resulted in failed busts, and the more mundane fact that occasionally information had a habit of disappearing off the scope in the Bureau’s system, she liked to keep her own separate set of records.
Stifling a yawn, she hit the send button and e-mailed a copy to her work computer.
Just before she went to bed, she reread the article and made a brief note. The wintry chill seemed to intensify as she studied what she had written.
Mendoza had had a book. The book had been important enough that he had died because of it.
Three
A week later, Taylor leaned back in her office chair and skimmed a page of Alex Lopez’s file. She’d studied the information found on Lopez’s computer after the unsuccessful raid on his estate at Winton on the West Coast until her eyes ached. Legitimate company accounts, tax legislation and a bunch of legalese about property-development trusts.