Forty-Eight X

by Barry Pollack

  “Sounds like he cheated, sir.”

  “Well, maybe,” McGraw conceded. “We could dispute the legend. But what is undisputed is that Alexander the Great did go on to conquer most of Asia. There’s a lesson to be learned here, Captain.”

  “Sir?”

  “Do whatever needs to be done to accomplish the mission.”

  With the events that had unfolded in the last several months, McGraw couldn’t help seeing his own fate replayed in these Greek fables. Like Midas, for no rational reason he had been raised up from his lowly position as a prisoner to become a virtual king over his own army. Just as Alexander had tamed Bucephalus, he, too, was taming the untamable. And when his superiors remained bewildered how he would take his new army into battle, well, he untied the Gordian Knot. The generals were uncomfortable with arming chimpanzees with high-powered automatic weapons. Despite the animals’ dexterity, they were not yet capable of the fine touch required to aim and fire a weapon that could potentially spray death out at six hundred rounds per minute. McGraw remembered the stories of the Alexander battle scythe. Perhaps it was a recollection from his former life. He told the idea to Mack Shell and had no problem giving the general credit for the idea.

  In the fourth century BC, Alexander the Great molded a great army by creating a persona of invincibility. He made himself a legend, and then a god. McGraw knew that to command soldiers to fight and die, a leader, even a modern one, had to generate that same godlike aura—engendering awe, fear, and a prideful worship. As he trekked through the campgrounds and his troops stepped out, as Alexander did to Bucephalus, he gave one after another a gentle touch, but his voice was firm, decisive, and demanding of obedience.

  In a former life, Link McGraw knew he had been Ptolemy—not Alexander. But Ptolemy, the childhood friend of Alexander the Great, went on to become his greatest general. And, with Alexander’s death, Ptolemy himself became a king, the pharaoh of Egypt and the first of his own dynasty, which lasted three hundred years. McGraw, too, knew he had more noble things to accomplish in his life. But he would never speak of such imaginings. He was sure General Shell would laugh at his arrogance.

  “You see,” he would remind Link, “I told you no one imagines themselves reincarnated as a ‘nobody.’ And why imagine being a general, when you can be a king?”

  Facts are ventriloquist’s dummies. Sitting on a wise mans knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere they say nothing or talk nonsense.

  —Aldous Huxley: Time Must Have a Stop

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-NINE

  The black 1995 Mercedes 600 SL coupe had seen better days. It had been bought new, but like its owner, was older, world worn, and in need of a lot of refurbishing. It was parked across from Dr. Julius Wagner’s house on a cul-de-sac street in Palo Alto. For over a week it had been parked there every night and often during the day. Maggie Wagner knew it was there and ignored it. The neighbors were not so magnanimous. They had called the local police several times. After all, the stranger who sat all day and slept in the car night after night was suspicious and made them uncomfortable.

  “What are you doing here, sir?” the police asked. Stumpf efficiently and coldly passed over his driver’s license, his insurance certificate, and his photo ID as a licensed private detective.

  “Working,” he’d answer curtly.

  And the police would depart after taking time to explain to anxious neighbors that the interloper was not a thief or a pedophile but a private detective. Learning that Stumpf was “on the job” actually made many of these upright citizens even more nervous as they contemplated which of their indiscretions was the subject of his attentions.

  Maggie felt she had no more need of the man. Clearly she was meddling in a business where she could get hurt. She had been hurt. Someone had drugged her and clearly wanted to defame her. And while she believed Stumpf when he denied responsibility, she also believed he was incompetent and a little strange. While the video demonstrated that he hadn’t raped her, he couldn’t hide his lascivious glare and a subtle fondling as he put her to bed. So, she ignored his presence outside her front door. She would continue her pursuit of the truth about her father in a more mundane manner. She made telephone calls and sent lots of e-mails. None bore fruit.

  Stumpf, on the other hand, believed he still had a job, or wanted to believe that. And anyway, for the time being he had no other gigs. Finding out what BIOT was, was the key to this case. As at other times in his career, he expected the heavens to part and good fortune to suddenly shine upon him. Like the time he found a ten-thousand-dollar Rolex sitting on the bedside table of a hotel room quickly vacated by the wife of a client who had hired him to catch her in flagrante delicto. While he had missed “catching” her with the philanderer, he was able to provide his client with a “name” by tracking the registration number of the watch. And he kept the watch. So, Stumpf, a bit of a manic-depressive with an optimistic bent, expected to become suddenly enlightened or have good fortune stumble upon him again. Either that, or Maggie Wagner would solve the clue of BIOT and he would latch onto her to follow it. He did have a contract after all, and if he had any part in proving that her father did not commit suicide, well, it would be a big payday.

  Stumpf left his “stakeout” one evening, driving off for dinner to get his usual drive-thru burger and Coke. When he returned, he was a bit put off to find another car parked in his usual spot in front of the Wagner home. It was a car he had not seen before. After scarfing down his dinner, he decided to forgo his usual after-dinner smoke and take a closer look. The sedan, he quickly noted, was a rental. Was this a friend visiting? He didn’t like snooping so close to homes in broad daylight, but he was working for half-a-mil. He went back to his own car to retrieve two tools of his trade. He decided to leave one, the camera, behind.

  From a side window, he had a good view of the living room. No one was there. Damn, he thought, I hope they’re not upstairs in the bedroom doing tummy slaps. He had climbed trees and patio trellises before to get a view of a second story, but he hadn’t expected to do any second-story work on this job, and anyway he was wearing his good shoes, not sneakers. Nate Stumpf slipped through the side gate to see if he could spy anyone in the kitchen. And there they were. A swarthy-looking man with a military crew cut was standing over Maggie, who sat in a kitchen chair. He had his hand on her shoulder as if he were keeping her in place. Stumpf crunched down and crawled snake-like to put his ear to a small crack at the base of rear door. He could hear just snippets of conversation—the context was unclear, but one thing he knew for sure, this visitor had an accent and it sounded Middle Eastern. Shit, he thought, are Arab terrorists involved in this?

  Stumpf knew that whatever edge he lacked in size, he could always make up for in decisiveness. At least that’s the way he succeeded most of the time. Maggie bolted up from her chair when her kitchen door flew open as Stumpf kicked through it. He cracked the wood and tore the door off one of the hinges. It was a karate kick, he told himself. It had come in handy for him before—although he had never bothered to actually learn karate. He held a .38 Smith and Wesson revolver in hand and pointed it at Colonel Joshua Krantz.

  “Back off, motherfucker!” Stumpf bellowed at him. “And put ’em up. Hands on your head. Come on! Hands on your head!”

  Krantz complied.

  “You all right, babe?” Stumpf said with a wink to Maggie.

  “I thought you said you didn’t have a gun?” Maggie replied, still startled.

  “I never give away all my secrets.”

  “She was not in any danger from me,” Krantz interrupted.

  “Shut up.”

  “I’m okay,” Maggie confirmed.

  Krantz looked closer, eyeing Nate Stumpf up and down. And then he put his hands down.

  “Put ’em up, asshole.”

  Krantz began walking toward him.

  “No comprende ingles?” he said, mustering his meanest growl. “I’ll fuckin’ blow your h
ead off.”

  But Krantz kept coming. He simply ignored the gun, picked the diminutive detective up by the collar of his shirt, and set him gently on the couch. Then he turned to Maggie.

  “Please,” he said, and pointed for her to sit on the couch next to Stumpf. She complied, and Krantz pulled up a chair and sat opposite them, knee to knee.

  “Dr. Wagner,” he went on, “you have nothing to fear from me. I believe we are on the same side. Searching for the same answers.”

  “You know,” Stumpf said, still waving his gun, but now with far less bluster, “I could fuckin’ blow you away.”

  Krantz hesitated a moment and then simply leaned over, slapped the gun aside with one hand, and yanked it from Stumpf’s hand with his other. Krantz hefted the weapon for a moment and manipulated the trigger.

  “This is a very good replica,” he said. “You know, you could go to jail for having a toy gun like this. Your federal law requires that a yellow plug be visible on the barrel. You have taken it out.”

  Nate Stumpf smiled sheepishly. “I wasn’t going to shoot you. I was just protecting my client.”

  “Perfectly understandable.”

  “How did you know the gun wasn’t real? I got it from a friend who works props for the studios. The gun has gotta look real for close-ups. Nobody can tell the difference.”

  “The trigger action is different,” Krantz replied and demonstrated.

  “But how could you know that with me pointing it at you?”

  Krantz just smiled. “I am an expert on weapons. But I am more of an expert when it comes to judging people. Please do not take offense, but you do not look like the kind of man who could ‘blow my fuckin’ head off.’ Mister, mister?”

  “Stumpf. Nate Stumpf,” he replied, extending his hand to shake. “I’m a private detective. I work for Ms. Wagner.”

  “No, you don’t,” Maggie snapped back.

  “We have a contract,” Stumpf reminded.

  Krantz ignored their tiff and introduced himself. “My name is Joshua Krantz.”

  “It’s Colonel Krantz,” Maggie clarified. “He’s a spy. He works for Israeli intelligence.”

  “As I told you, I am not so much a spy. I am an archaeologist. And I am here because understanding why your father died will help me find my—my wife.” Sometimes, he thought, it was simpler describing Fala as a wife than describing their complex relationship.

  “Do you know why Professor Wagner was murdered?” Stumpf asked excitedly. He was counting his money already.

  “I know nothing of that.”

  And poof, Stumpf was broke again. “Then why are you here?”

  “The clues have led me here.”

  Krantz went on to explain the last month of his life, beginning with what seemed his long-ago former life—his suntanned tranquil explorations off the coast of Acre. Then he described the convoluted events that led him to Southern California—the discovery of the Alexander battle scythe, which led him to a survivor in the Hindu Kush who spoke of his attackers as Maimun; to his search in Iran for a nonexistent terror cell called the Right Hand of God; to a massacre in the Philippines and the disappearance of Fala there; and finally to his dismissal by Aman, his furtive flight from Israel, and new evidence that the soldiers who wielded the battle scythe were genetically similar to a chimpanzee stem cell line that a Nobel Laureate, Dr. Julius Wagner, had created.

  “I am no longer working for Aman, or for Israel,” Krantz stressed. “I am working now only to find a woman named Fala al-Shohada.”

  “My father was working on something called the Lemuria Project,” Maggie told him. “Do you know anything about that?”

  “No. What is this Lemuria Project?”

  “That’s what’s so damn unusual. No one knows. Or no one is saying.”

  “We think it refers to an ancient civilization,” Stumpf piped in. “Like Atlantis, Lemuria was a place that disappeared in a great flood thousands of years ago.”

  Stupid man, Krantz thought. “That is a myth. What else have you learned?”

  Krantz clearly focused his attention on Maggie; after all, she was the daughter of the next link in his “dig” for the truth. Stumpf, however, resented being ignored.

  “Do we really want to talk to this guy?” Stumpf interrupted. “We only know who he is from who he says he is.”

  Krantz leaned forward, putting his face inches from Stumpf and staring at him with a gaze that Stumpf understood quite clearly. It said, don’t fuck with me. It was sufficiently sudden and threatening to silence Stumpf. And just as quickly, Krantz relaxed.

  “Please, I am not here to hurt anyone. My wife, the woman I love, has disappeared, and the information I have has led me here. I would like to be a patient man, but I am impatient. You must understand.”

  “We talked to an associate of my father’s who was clearly very scared to talk about Lemuria,” Maggie went on. “So it must be important. He gave us one word and ran off, and I haven’t been able to find him since.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He didn’t say a thing,” Stumpf said, again wanting to be a team player.

  Krantz looked him over and decided to be more tolerant of the annoying detective.

  “I slapped him about a bit, and this is all he gave us before running off,” Stumpf said, trying to regain his gravitas. Then he pulled the scrap of paper from his pocket and handed it to the colonel.

  “We thought Biot was this biomedical convention, so I took my client there to make inquiries, but some people plainly didn’t want us looking into this and we got screwed there. They drugged us.”

  “I got drugged,” Maggie corrected.

  “That’s right,” Stumpf said, still apologetic. “She was drugged.”

  “B-I-O-T,” Krantz read the letters aloud. They were all caps. Working in military intelligence, he had seen reports about BIOT before and they never referred to anything about biotechnology.

  “Do you know what it means?” Maggie asked.

  “BIOT. I think it’s a place,” Krantz said, and then added, somewhat surprised himself, “a place like Lemuria.”

  “Hey, buddy,” Stumpf sneered, tired of being put down. “I know Lemuria is a myth, a legend, like Atlantis. I know it doesn’t exist. I’m not stupid.”

  But Krantz, an archaeologist and historian, had his own wealth of knowledge about ancient legends and myths.

  “Many people think it did exist,” Krantz continued. “Plato’s stories put Atlantis somewhere in the Aegean near Crete. Lemuria is supposed to have been in the Pacific, somewhere near Asia or Australia. And some believe it is in the Indian Ocean. Today, I am sure Lemuria is in the Indian Ocean.”

  “You’re sure?” Now Maggie was surprised.

  “The only BIOT I have ever heard of in all my years working with Israeli intelligence always referred to the American and British secret military base on Diego Garcia. It was called BIOT because it is a British Indian Ocean Territory. BIOT and Lemuria, I think they must refer to the same thing.”

  Ka-ching. Jackpot. Stumpf was counting his money again. Now this made sense.

  “So,” Stumpf verbalized his conclusion, “Dr. Wagner was murdered because he knew too much about some secret military project called Lemuria on a secret military base in the Indian Ocean?”

  “Possibly,” Krantz agreed.

  “So how do we find out for sure?” Maggie asked.

  There was a long lull—at first to allow them to emotionally absorb that the three of them were now collaborators, and a bit longer to conceive of how to proceed.

  “We need to shake the tree.” Krantz was first to respond. “We need to ask questions. By e-mail and on the blogs, we need to mention this information we know about Lemuria and BIOT and Dr. Wagner and his research. And then we must wait and see if important people become uncomfortable. And then we will know for sure. But if we do this, we should do it from a safe house.”

  “I have a safe house,” Stumpf jumped in.

&nbs
p; “You do?” Maggie asked, surprised.

  “Where?” Krantz asked.

  “Anywhere,” Stumpf replied, feeling puffed with power again. “It’s a twenty-four-foot Fleetwood Tioga and it sleeps six comfortably.”

  The best armor is to keep out of gunshot.

  —Sir Francis Bacon

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY

  In 1999 a newly assigned Russian diplomat walked into the Harry S. Truman Building a few blocks from the White House in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Washington, DC. The Truman Building, which housed the offices of the Department of State, was built as one of Roosevelt’s make work construction projects during the Depression. The old building was in a perpetual state of remodel. The diplomat was scheduled for a routine introduction with the secretary of state, a moment of polite face time. During a minute alone in the secretary’s office, he simply pried back a piece of molding on the floor and planted a powerful listening device. No one took notice of the warped baseboard. Cracked molding, half-finished newly painted walls, and dangling wires were a consequence of work performed by the lowest bidder. It was only during more routine renovations six months later that the bug was found. Everyone in government agreed that security—in the White House, the executive offices, the State Department, and especially in the Capitol building—places where both the public and foreign dignitaries frequently tread, was leaky. If the president really had something to say that he never wanted to hear played back, he said it on the south lawn with the noise of Marine One’s chopper blades in the background.