Broken Honor

by Potter, Patricia;

  Irish chuckled. “You’re right, Miss Eachan. And Amy.” He looked at Eachan. “Truce?”

  Eachan grimaced. “What do you want to know?”

  “What has been your part in all this?”

  A silence. Long and painful.

  “Dusty?” The prompt came from Sally.

  He sat up. “I did try to get you transferred. I thought you were stirring up things best undisturbed.”

  “What else?” Irish asked coldly.

  Another silence.

  “We’re not going to give you anything unless you give us something,” Irish said coldly. “In fact, we might just be visiting some newspaper offices soon.”

  A muscle throbbed in Eachan’s throat. “I’ve had nothing to do with the violence. I have asked certain agencies to find you. They weren’t,” he added wryly, “very successful.”

  “Why?”

  “I wanted you out of the country,” Eachan said. “I thought that when you left, all the queries would end.”

  “Someone was seriously hurt to get me that position,” Irish accused.

  Eachan looked genuinely surprised. “I honestly don’t know anything about that.”

  “And Miss Mallory?”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with that.”

  “Who does? Who would have a reason?”

  “God’s truth, I don’t know,” Eachan said.

  “It’s certainly someone with a lot of power and a long reach,” Irish said. “You have both.”

  “I also have a career that’s important to me.”

  “Is that why you’re here?”

  “No. To be honest, I would rather have you picked up by the FBI and shipped back to your command.”

  “To be court-martialed?”

  “Hell, no. That’s the last thing I wanted. All would have been forgiven. I do have some influence there. It will still be forgiven.”

  “If I return now? Is that it? You’re still trying to silence me?”

  “Three days ago, yes. But now Sally’s in danger.”

  “To hell with Amy Mallory, is that it?”

  Amy saw Irish’s features darken, his jaw clench. He was ready to tear the man opposite him to pieces. So much for the truce.

  Irish continued, “Her house was burned, she was attacked twice, and was nearly blown up. And you sat there and did nothing.” Irish’s voice was as frozen as an Alaskan ice floe.

  “He’s here now,” Amy said. “We don’t have much time.”

  “Understand, Eachan, that we’ll be leaving here immediately after you.”

  The message was clear enough. There was precious little trust between them.

  “I came,” Eachan said, “because I think Sally has also become a target.”

  “But not you? I wonder why?”

  They were bristling like two junkyard dogs. Amy moved her chair closer to Irish’s and reached out to put her hand on his leg. She turned to Sally. “What happened?”

  “I thought someone had gone through my apartment, so Dusty took me to the coast. While I was there, I went to a bar for dinner, and someone tried to drug my drink.” She gave them a weak smile. “It might have just been someone who thought he could … score.”

  “But you don’t think so?” This time it was Amy.

  “I might just have been spooked,” she said. “Dusty told me to be careful, but there was something about the man’s eyes. They had a … soullessness.”

  “She was spooked enough that she didn’t go back to her room and drove all night through pouring rain,” Eachan broke in.

  But it was the word soullessness that hit Amy like a sledgehammer. It expressed exactly her impression of the man who’d broken into her room at Jekyll Island. Her face turned to Irish’s, and he raised an eyebrow.

  Eachan looked at his cousin.

  She looked back and nodded.

  Eachan took a piece of paper from his pocket and unfolded it. “Sally drew a sketch of him.”

  “You didn’t tell me that,” Irish said.

  “I didn’t know you,” she said.

  “You don’t know me now,” he reminded her.

  She smiled for the first time, and it was breathtaking. “Yes, I do,” she replied.

  Dustin Eachan frowned, but handed the paper to Amy.

  Amy looked at the drawing. It was good, very good, and she readily recognized the face. It resembled the police sketch based on Irish’s description of the intruder who tried to assault her in the hospital.

  Irish took it then. He nodded. “That’s the man who tried to kill Amy at the hospital.” He looked toward Eachan. “Do you know who he is?”

  Eachan shook his head. “I sent a copy to an acquaintance in the FBI to see whether they could find anything on him. There hasn’t been time for them to ran it through the computers. Particularly quietly.”

  “You didn’t report it to the police?” Irish’s question was sharp, accusing.

  “Did you report that explosion in South Carolina?” Eachan retorted.

  It was Sally who broke the tension that was building again. “I had no proof. Not that anyone was in my apartment, or that the man in the bar had planned anything ominous. The bartender made it clear he didn’t want any part of an investigation. I … owed him that.”

  Irish looked at her for a long moment. It was a searching look, and for a moment Amy felt the tug of jealousy. Sally Eachan was everything she wasn’t: Slender, blond, perfect features, naturally elegant.

  Even worse, Amy liked her.

  But then Irish turned to her and winked, taking her hand in his. As before, it was as if he knew what she was thinking. And that, at the moment, was very humiliating.

  She rose and got the coffeepot, filling up the cups again. Dustin Eachan had barely touched his. “We have some beer and a bottle of wine,” she offered.

  Eachan shook his head. “I have to drive back tonight.” He seemed to relax a little. “It wouldn’t help anything if I were arrested for DUI.”

  Irish nodded. “Now we know this has to be connected to the commission report. At least one of the men showed up twice, once attacking Amy, the other obviously attempting to get to Sally.” He picked up the picture again. “Let’s call him John Doe for lack of anything better. John could also have been the man who shot Amy at the college.” He turned to Amy. “Could it have been the burglar at the college?”

  “I don’t know,” Amy said. “He wore a ski mask. But he could have been, from your description as to height. Anything else … it just happened so fast.…”

  Irish stood. “It’s obvious that one of our band of assassins has left us for Sally. Probably because I saw his face. At least, they don’t seem to have unlimited reserves.”

  His gaze returned to Dustin Eachan. “Do you have any idea who might be involved? Or why?”

  “I hoped you did.”

  Irish raised an eyebrow. “Or is this a scouting expedition to learn how much I know?”

  “Damn little, or you wouldn’t have been desperate to meet with me.”

  Irish’s lips clenched again. “If you’d had the courtesy.…”

  “I don’t owe you anything, Flaherty.”

  “If you care about your cousin, you’ll help us end this.”

  Amy watched as Eachan’s gaze went to Sally and lingered there for a moment. He cared about her. A lot. It was, she knew, the only reason he was here.

  “All right,” Eachan said. “I found out about the commission two years ago. I kept track of what they were doing. It seemed as if they were going to whitewash the whole matter until there was such an outcry about Switzerland’s role in the looting. Then everyone stood up and took an interest. We had to clean our own house. They hired some effective investigators. Two died, the third left. I was able to look in the files. Documents that should have been there were gone.”

  “What documents?”

  “A list of items that were supposed to have been restored to their owners. Paintings, other valuables that could be positivel
y identified. The file did contain an inventory of what was liberated from the train. There was also a list of items taken to New York and sold at auction. The disparity between the two was enormous, including two trunks of gold dust. The difference was explained as items claimed by the rightful owners, but that list is missing. No one explained the lost gold.”

  “What else was missing?”

  “The list of people who had direct access to the warehouse.”

  “But there should be duty rosters at the very least. Who supervised the warehousing, who went in and out?”

  “There should be, but there aren’t. And after losing several investigators and running into stone walls, the commission issued a report full of conclusions. It was done quietly, and not many newspapers even picked it up. I checked to see whether there was any evidence connecting my grandfather to any theft. That’s when I discovered some of the original documents were missing. The commission apparently wasn’t overly worried about it. After all, it was half a century later, and records have a way of getting lost. I thought the whole matter would just fade away. Until I heard that you had asked for records under the Freedom of Information Act.”

  Irish was listening intently. His expression never changed. She understood why he was very good at his job. But he looked at her, and she knew what he was thinking. That’s why he hadn’t been able to get reports, why he’d been put off by security excuses. The information Irish wanted was missing, and no one wanted to admit it.

  Irish turned back to Dustin Eachan. “The investigators. What happened to them?”

  “One was killed by a car in Germany. The other had a sailing accident.”

  “Convenient, wasn’t it?”

  “I thought so,” Eachan said, “but the local police didn’t seem to have questions.”

  “And you didn’t want to bring any attention to it.”

  “No,” Eachan replied, “I didn’t. It happened fifty years ago, for God’s sake. No one who has a claim is alive today. It should have been dead and buried a long time ago.”

  “There’s snakes in that burial pit,” Irish said. “They’re very alive. Someone was willing to go to any lengths to keep them that way.”

  “You mean these past few months.”

  “I mean for fifty years. I think someone killed all three of our grandfathers.”

  Eachan’s eyes narrowed. “My grandfather died in a plane crash.”

  “A small private plane.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I’m an investigator. But Amy put it together. My grandfather had a heart attack, but he’d never had heart problems. Amy’s grandfather supposedly was a suicide. They died within a month of each other. Your grandfather died six years later, right after your own parents.”

  Dustin and Sally were staring at him as if he were mad. “You’re saying someone’s been killing people all these years?” Eachan said. “That someone would be damned old.”

  “And damned powerful,” Irish said. “I think one of the three generals must have found out something and talked to the other two. And there’s been more premature deaths of people who served in my grandfather’s command.”

  Sally gave a little cry. Eachan continued to stare at Irish as if he’d just escaped from a mental institution. “But my grandfather survived the other two; that means.…”

  “It could mean anything,” Irish said. “It could be that he was rendered harmless in some way.”

  Eachan slumped in his chair. It was obvious that he was trying to comprehend everything.

  Amy knew exactly what he was feeling. Even now, after she’d had a chance to understand the enormity of what had suddenly eclipsed her life, she was still bewildered by it. How could so many deaths go unnoticed?

  Of course, she knew. They were in different parts of the country. They were mostly seen as accidents. There was no way anyone could have picked up on it.

  It certainly said something about the power and influence of the person behind it.

  It had to be someone who had access to the treasures during the period they were warehoused in Europe.

  And apparently that someone believed she had information about it.

  She was suddenly aware that everyone was looking at her.

  It was Eachan who broke the silence. “Did your grandfather have any records?”

  She looked at Irish.

  “Some. We’ve placed them in a storage locker,” he lied.

  “And.…”

  “And we have some names of people who served with Amy’s grandfather,” Irish said. “We’ve been checking them out. Where they are today.”

  Eachan’s brows furrowed in concentration. “Wouldn’t they be in their eighties or more?”

  “Most of them are dead, and have been for a long time. More accidents,” Irish said wryly. “There was either a curse on that train or we have one hell of a serial killer tottering around.”

  “Or a successor,” Eachan said.

  Irish nodded.

  Amy decided to enter the conversation. “We thought if we could get together, maybe our recollections might give us a clue. My grandfather never talked much about the war, though I once asked him why he didn’t write a book. It was just before he … died.”

  “What did he say?” Sally asked.

  “That no one wanted to read an old man’s recollections. He said something else, though, something that never really rang a bell until last night. He said he’d tried to be honest all his life, and he didn’t want to start lying now. He said it rather sadly. I thought he just meant that autobiographers had a tendency to shade events on their side. Now I wonder whether he meant something else.”

  “Eachan?” Irish asked the question.

  “My grandfather talked about the military all the time. I think it was the best time of his life,” Eachan said. “But he made his fortune years after he left.”

  “He became a consultant?” Amy had done her own research. “To defense contractors?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that,” Eachan said defensively.

  “Of course not,” she said soothingly. “It’s just that he’s the only one of the three to go into the private sector.”

  Sally started to say something, then looked at Eachan and hesitated. Amy’s first impression of someone who was pretty and not much else had faded during the conversation. Sally had said little, but what she had said had been quiet and insightful. Her description of her attacker, and her subsequent actions, along with the drawing had changed Amy’s mind completely. “Sally?” she asked.

  Sally looked at her cousin. They exchanged looks, but Amy didn’t know them well enough to decipher it. A warning from Dustin Eachan. Defiance from Sally.

  “I’m going to tell them, Dusty,” Sally said.

  Eachan shrugged. “It doesn’t really mean anything.”

  “It could,” Sally said. “And too many people have died.” Still, she bit her lip for a moment before continuing. “My grandfather gave my father a painting. It’s one that’s on the original list. Part of that list is missing, but the painting was on what remained of it.”

  “Is there anything else?” Irish asked after a moment’s silence.

  “Not that I know of,” Sally said.

  “Eachan?”

  Dustin shook his head. “The only thing I recognized was Sally’s painting.”

  “That makes sense,” Amy said. “The newspaper story said some of the items were used temporarily in headquarters offices. Silver, linen, china. Even paintings. The houses that were confiscated for their use were mostly empty. It seemed easier to use some of these items, especially since things like china and silver probably couldn’t be traced and returned to the rightful owners.” She turned to Sally. “Is it valuable?”

  “It’s not a masterpiece,” Dustin said. “But it’s a well-known Spanish artist. It’s probably worth fifty thousand today.”

  “Did the commission know about it?”

  “Not where it is today, no,” Dustin
said. “It was one of the few things Sally’s father left her. There is no known owner today. I … checked.”

  Amy saw Irish raise an eyebrow. “I assume you think that makes it right?”

  Sally rushed to her cousin’s defense. “He didn’t know until recently. All we knew was that it belonged to my grandfather, and he’d given it to my father, who gave it to me. It didn’t look like anything special. But it was important to me because … my father left it to me. Dustin knew that.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Amy said. “What does matter is who feels that this is so important he has to kill for it. I suppose there’s a statute of limitation for theft.”

  “But not for murder,” Irish said pointedly.

  “Now it’s your turn,” Eachan said, turning his gaze to Irish. “What part did your grandfather play in the theft and its cover-up? He was the ranking officer.” His voice was deliberately sarcastic. “Didn’t he ever say anything?”

  “He avoided the subject,” Irish said. “I don’t know if he left any papers. I was out of the country when he died, and I was gone most of the succeeding years. I do know that when I started looking a month ago, I found a lot of papers, but none involving the last six months of the war.”

  “Which leaves us with no more information than he had,” Eachan said.

  “Not exactly,” Amy countered.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The list I’ve compiled from my grandfather’s memoirs.” She looked at Irish. “I think they should see it.”

  Irish shrugged.

  Amy took it out of a folder and handed it to Eachan. His gaze moved down the names with almost frightening speed. She knew he was reading—and cataloging—everything. She suspected that his elegant good looks cloaked a brilliant mind.

  She also saw that his eyes suddenly curtained at one point. She knew he recognized a name. So did Irish. She could tell by the way his body tensed.

  “What name?” Irish asked.

  Again Eachan hesitated.

  “Tell them,” Sally said.

  Dustin Eachan’s face had paled in those few seconds. “I didn’t see that name anywhere else,” he said. “It’s not on any of the documents I’ve seen.”

  “Which name?” Irish asked again.