by By Jon Land
“The terrorist group? Sure.”
“Are you a member of al-Qaeda?”
“Am I what? Hey, do I need a lawyer? Can I at least call my parents?”
Fisher just sat there, not even his face moving. “Are you familiar with the Patriot Act?”
“Sorry. No.”
“Basically, it gives us the right to hold anyone suspected of terrorist activities without counsel and in secret.”
“Terrorist activities? Me?’ Jake raised his arms and held them before him. “Del, you really have the wrong guy. The closest I ever got to a terrorist was watching CNN.”
“You operate a Web site.”
“Whole bunch of them.”
“And you’re unaware that known terrorist operatives have been posting, receiving, and exchanging messages on this Web site?”
Fisher took a piece of paper from his folder and slid it across the table. Jake saw it was a copy of the e-mail inbox from one of his Web sites. A number of messages had been highlighted.
“I didn’t open most of those. They had virus written all over them.”
“We opened them, came up with fifty distinct user identities. But the messages are coded.” Fisher leaned a little forward. “You could help yourself by helping us.”
“How am I supposed to do that?”
“Tell us what the messages say.”
“Would if I could, but I can’t.”
“Have you ever been to Afghanistan?”
“I’m from California, for Christ’s sake!”
“Do you understand the severity of what you’re being accused of?”
“What am I being accused of?”
“Conspiring to commit terrorist acts.”
“Me?”
“I’m giving you a chance to cooperate.”
“Wait, this is about one of my Web sites, right? The hemp-fest one’s been up the longest,” Jake said, examining the e-mail list lifted from his computer, “but these came off my party site.”
“Party site?”
“I run reviews of raves and dance clubs. Just got it up and running maybe three weeks ago.”
“Three weeks,” Fisher repeated, his voice dropping an octave, the brash confidence slipping from his expression. “Could it have been twenty days?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
Fisher moved back through the doorway.
“Hey, where you going?”
“I need to check on a few things,” Fisher said.
“I could use some food when you come back,” Jake called after him, as the door closed tight.
* * * *
* * * *
Chapter 32
T
here were three cases. Each about three by five feet. Solid steel, almost like safes, and locked tight as a drum.
Danielle ran Charlie Corstairs’s words through her mind, trying to recall the ones that had followed.
The fourth was smaller, more like a lockbox. I carried that one to Henley myself. The others we put on the back of a truck.
Corstairs had not had the opportunity to elaborate on any of those words before he died, meaning Danielle would have to find that elaboration elsewhere along with information on the man Corstairs had called Jack Phills. Not only was the elusive second in command of the 121st Evacuation Unit not listed on the unit’s roster, but his name appeared nowhere on the entire Web site in any form.
By five o’clock the next morning, after a few hours of sleep at a cheap roadside motel, Danielle was on the road again, heading toward Washington and wanting to reach the Pentagon as near to its opening as possible. Along the way she stopped only long enough for coffee and to use the e-mail feature on her cell phone to send her request for information.
Everything had to be done, at least initiated, by e-mail these days in information areas of the Pentagon. No more requests presented in person for immediate action. The e-mails were handled in the order they were received, unless there was a priority coding or a personal contact.
In Danielle’s case, it was the latter. Tom Spears had once been attached to the U.S. embassy in Israel until one day he got too close to a bomb and lost both his legs in the blast. Danielle was the lead investigator on the case and, when the terrorist responsible was killed by an Israeli missile, she had brought a picture of the aftermath to Spears in the hospital. He lay there, looked at it, and then laid it down atop his chest. Danielle stayed with him for a time in silence. They never actually spoke until months later. Spears called from his new post at the Pentagon just to say thank you. That was all.
They had met once during Danielle’s brief tenure with a private security firm in the U.S., then again when she first took the job with the United Nations. She knew Spears got to work early and left late. So his receipt of her e-mail request was not in question, only his ability to fill it.
Upon arriving at the Pentagon, it took nearly an hour to process the paperwork required to grant Danielle access to the military intelligence section. Finally she centered the pass dangling from her neck and proceeded down an aisle dividing the two halves of a room lined with office cubicles. The two previous times she had met Spears had been on the outside, never inside this, his personal domain. He was waiting for her in his office doorway, hands on the armrests of his wheelchair, wearing his uniform with the pant legs clipped off just below his stumps.
“Long time, Danielle,” Spears greeted.
She grasped his hand warmly between both of hers. Danielle noticed Spears’s arms were thick and knobby with muscle from extensive workouts and wondered if he might have been compensating for the chopped-up trousers he wore to work every day.
“It wouldn’t have been quite as long if they hadn’t kept me waiting for an hour.”
“That’s because you’re U.N. The U.N.’s not very popular around here.”
“I haven’t been many places where it is.”
“Come on in,” he said, and wheeled himself inside the office after her, closing the door.
Danielle gazed about, studying the surroundings. Not much of note other than the lack of a desk chair and the sight of a familiar picture hanging on the wall behind Tom Spears’s desk: the picture Danielle had given him of the terrorist who had taken his legs being blown up.
She made sure her cell phone was turned off before she sat down. Alexis Arguayo had left a number of messages on her voice mail since last night. He sounded worried initially, but the latter messages must have come after he learned she had gone on from London of her own volition. The messages insisted that she return his call posthaste, which, of course, she hadn’t.
Spears wheeled himself behind his desk and laid his fingers over his keyboard. “Okay, where do you want to start?”
“How about these steel cases the 121st Evacuation Unit found in Buchenwald?”
Spears worked the keys quickly, fingers dancing across them until he had found what he was looking for. “Reported recovered on April 17, 1945. Turned over to military intelligence on April 20. Three heavy steel cases. Three and a half by five feet in size, each weighing approximately two hundred pounds, including contents.”
“Three days passed between recovery and pickup?”
“Could be. Could also be that the April 20th date refers to when they were logged in at military intelligence headquarters, not picked up in the field.”
“Is that standard operating procedure?”
“Depends. They were kind of making up the rules as they went along at this point.”
“What happened to the cases after they were logged in?”
“There is no after.”
Danielle narrowed her gaze across the desk. “Pardon me?”
A trace of a smile flickered across Spears’s lips. “I thought you’d like that. I can’t find anything else filed about these cases from the day they were logged in. Almost as if they just disappeared.”
* * * *
Chapter 33
H
ere, take a look,” Spears continued, after givi
ng Danielle a moment to digest his revelation.
She came out of her chair and Spears angled his computer screen so she could view it.
“You can see the routing numbers the cases were given upon check-in here, here, and here,” he resumed, pointing to them one at a time. “Theoretically I punch in those routing numbers and I can get a complete report on the history of the cases and their contents. Like chain of evidence in a court trial.”
“Theoretically.”
Spears punched in one of the numbers and the screen displayed no file on record. Entered the next two with the same results.
“Are you saying the army lost the cases?” Danielle asked, settling back in her chair.
“That happens sometimes.”
“And other times?”
“They get lost on purpose, especially with sensitive documents or materials the army, or some other higher power, figures are better not left to public consumption, or even knowledge. Anything more you can tell me?”
Danielle tried to recall if Charlie Corstairs had said something else she had neglected to pass on to Spears, but ultimately just shook her head.
“I ran some other general checks,” Spears told her, turning his wheelchair so that the picture of the terrorist’s car ablaze was centered directly over his head. “Comparisons to see how similar materials were handled. Found plenty of examples, but the trouble was they were different, weren’t really applicable.”
“Why?”
Spears slid his chair under his desk. “Because your cases were found in Buchenwald, buried in a trench beneath the remains of bodies. Typically most of the materials and documents recovered from the Nazis were hidden after the war was lost. But yours, clearly, were buried before the war began.”
“And were never seen again after the 121st dug them up.”
“I didn’t say that. Somebody saw them, but that somebody didn’t want anybody to know that they saw them or what it was they saw.”
Danielle nodded to herself. “You’re saying I need more clearance.”
Spears shook his head. “I’m not saying that. You could be the president of the United States and you still couldn’t access this info. That’s how deep somebody buried it. These cases of yours could be sitting in a storage warehouse in Bethesda right now or their contents could have been destroyed, for whatever reason, sixty years ago in Germany.”
“Wait a minute,” Danielle said, remembering something. “What about the fourth case?”
“Fourth?”
“According to Corstairs, four cases were dug out of the trench. Three large and one small, like a lockbox.”
Spears looked back at his computer. “Sorry, only three were logged in at pickup.”
Danielle frowned, frustrated over hitting a dead end. “Anything on Phills?” Danielle wondered, changing the subject to the 121st’s second in command.
Spears keyed in a new site on his screen. “Career army. Saw duty in Korea where he won a chest full of medals. A major by the time Vietnam rolled along. His last posting.”
“Things didn’t go well.”
“Vietnam derailed a lot of careers around here. The halls are full of stories . . . and a few of the remains, if you catch my drift.”
“We have them in Israel too, Major.”
“Not like John Henry Phills you don’t. He was a Special Forces commander, way before it was fashionable. Helped coordinate the Phoenix Project. Ever hear of it?”
“Vaguely.”
“You should,” Spears continued. “It’s right up your alley. The Phoenix Project’s prime directive was to knock off members of the Vietcong cadre. In areas where their assassins were active, we were actually winning the war.”
“They weren’t assassins, Tom.”
Spears gave her a long look. “I guess your knowledge of Phoenix was a little sharper than you suggested.”
“Like you said, it’s right up my alley.”
“Yeah, well, anyway, Phills went out with a team one night and was the only one to come back. Nobody ever got the whole story straight, but whatever happened was enough to get him sent home. He insisted he was okay, wanted to be returned to duty, but the brass was hearing none of it. Then the day he was shipping out, he showed up at the airport naked except for his boots, carrying his duffel bag.”
“Section Eight?”
Spears nodded. “Two years in a veteran’s hospital pysch ward. He dropped out after that. Went to live in the woods somewhere.”
“Explains why his contact info’s not listed on the 121st Evacuation Hospital’s Web site.”
“Fortunately, the Pentagon keeps better records. He’s got a cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains of West Virginia.” Spears handed Danielle a detailed map that she saw had been printed off a computer. “You drive your car in as far as you can and then walk the rest of the way.”
Danielle took the map, tried to estimate how long the walk would be.
“That doesn’t mean he’ll remember anything that can help you, though. Or even that he’ll talk to you if he does.”
“Leave that to me,” said Danielle.
* * * *
Chapter 34
S
ammy Barr lived in a castlelike, Mediterranean-style home built of white stone and stucco that rose dramatically out of a West Bank hilltop overlooking Nablus. Stone statues of roaring lions flanked the main doorway visible from the road beyond the chain-link fence that surrounded the property. The chain-link was rimmed with barbed wire, but other than that there seemed little attention paid to security. No Israeli military presence was evident, surprisingly, as if this sprawling estate built on land purchased from Palestinians was more like an outpost of the Hilltop Youth and less like the home of an Israeli multimillionaire.
The gate was locked shut, and Ben rattled it a few times to see if he could gain anyone’s attention. He imagined himself being watched on the most advanced surveillance system money could buy. Figured that the grounds within were either mined or wired with electrical fields to discourage invaders, maybe both.
Ben rattled the gate again. He looked inside the fence at landscaping that looked more like a picture postcard growing out of the desolation surrounding it than a real home. But Sammy Barr wasn’t making a home here, he was making a point.
Ben rattled the gate harder.
“Who the fuck are you?” The booming, nasal voice seemed to resonate from nowhere and everywhere at once, echoing slightly. “Leave my fucking fence alone.”
Ben finally pinned the voice to one of two circular parapets that bracketed the massive structure on either side. Leaning out of the topmost window was a man with just a memory of curly hair fading back over his scalp, below which hung a pale flabby face on an outsize head, and a torso that looked small by comparison. Sammy Barr wore a white, short-sleeved button-down shirt opened at the collar. He was holding something Ben couldn’t clearly make out against the parapet window’s sill.
“Mr. Barr?”
“Ain’t you a fucking smart one.”
“I need a few minutes of your time, Mr. Barr,” Ben said loudly, his voice punched back at him by the wind blowing in his face.
“You a lawyer, come to serve me with more papers? Fucking forget it. My land deals were a hundred percent aboveboard. People took my money of their own fucking volition. No one stuck a gun to their head, just stuck cash in their pockets.”
“Really? I understand some of the contracts were falsified.”
“Prove it, shyster.”
“Can’t. Some of the Palestinians you did business with have been killed as collaborators. The rest aren’t about to come forward out of fear of being labeled the same thing.”
“Ain’t that a shame, shyster.”
“I’m not a lawyer, Mr. Barr,” Ben shouted up to the man in the tower. “I’m from the United Nations.”
Barr leaned forward and Ben saw the object he was holding against the windowsill was an assault rifle. He raised it and fired a wild burst into the air
well over Ben’s head, making him flinch. “I gave at the office.” Another barrage sailed skyward. “Now get the fuck out of here.”
“I’d like to talk to you about the massacre in Bureij.”
“Sure, come on up. We’ll have a drink to celebrate.”
“I’m Palestinian, Mr. Barr.”