Chaos Theory

by Graham Masterton

The receptionist hung up without answering. Noah tried calling DOVE again, but all the lines were busy.

  ‘No luck?’ asked Silja, as he tossed the phone on to the table.

  ‘I don’t know. I could try emailing her, couldn’t I?’

  Silja sat down close beside him and took hold of his hand. ‘Maybe Leon’s professor was right, and these medallions don’t mean anything at all.’

  ‘No, I think they do. In fact, I think he was lying to me. Or not exactly telling me the whole story.’

  ‘Why should he lie?’

  ‘How should I know? But when I think about it, he was so damned nonchalant about the whole thing. “So, Mr Flynn, you found a medallion in the ocean, and purely by chance some suicide bomber in Dubai was wearing the exact same medallion, and for some reason some mysterious guys jump on you and steal it, and kill your girlfriend, and then your best friend happens to make some enquiries about it, and he and his wife get hacked to death, all in the space of a few hours? Oh, dear, I’m so sorry to hear it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a plane to catch.”’

  ‘I guess if you put it that way.’

  Noah shook two cigarettes out of the pack and lit both of them. ‘How’s Leon?’ he asked, with his eyes narrowed against the smoke.

  Behind him, an unsteady voice said, ‘Hey – I’m OK.’

  Leon came out on to the balcony. He looked pale, and his eyes were puffy, but he sat down at the table and said, ‘I’ve been listening to what you’ve been saying.’

  ‘Leon – I’m only speculating. I don’t know what the hell’s going on, any more than you do.’

  ‘But those medallions – they were the only things that your Jenna and my dad and Trina had in common, weren’t they?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘So that’s what you know, but you don’t know that it’s important that you know.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘You know that these medallions have something in common. That’s all. They don’t want you even to start to make a connection. Which means there must be a connection.’

  Noah took another long drag on his cigarette. ‘Leon – your dad didn’t send you to college for nothing, did he?’

  At that moment, the phone warbled. Noah picked it up, and said, ‘Flynn.’

  A very tired and elegant voice said, ‘This is Adeola Davis, Mr Flynn. I’m returning your call.’

  Thirteen

  They met Adeola and Rick at dusk the following day, at Burbank airport. On Rick’s insistence he and Adeola had flown from La Guardia in New York to Dallas, changing airlines and flying to Phoenix and then changing again before flying to Los Angeles.

  Adeola came out of the arrivals gate wearing huge dark sunglasses and an ankle-length kaftan in pale green silk, so that she looked to Noah like a praying mantis. Rick was holding her elbow, and Noah could immediately tell by his taut, muscular swagger that he was both fit and alert. Behind his purple-lensed Ray-Bans, his eyes constantly flicked from side to side, looking over Adeola’s shoulder.

  ‘Appreciate your flying out here, Ms Davis,’ said Noah, taking Adeola’s Louis Vuitton bag.

  ‘I was coming out here anyhow, in three days’ time, for the International Peace Convention. And as I told you on the phone, Mr Flynn, I will do whatever it takes to find out who these people are. I want justice for my friends, as much as you want justice for yours.’

  ‘Justice? Maybe. I was thinking more along the lines of revenge.’

  ‘Well – you managed to account for three of them, didn’t you? Have the police managed to identify them yet?’

  ‘If they have, they haven’t told me, and there’s been nothing more about it in the news.’

  ‘I believe something is happening that is very dangerous,’ said Adeola. ‘I think that without realizing it we have stirred up a hornets’ nest.’

  ‘Where are you going to stay?’ asked Noah. ‘You’re welcome to put up at my place, but I’m not sure how safe it is – especially if they’re still after me, too.’

  Rick said, ‘I’ve booked a cottage for Adeola and me at the Bel Air, under assumed names, of course. A couple of my old Secret Service buddies live in West Hollywood, and they’ve agreed to help out with security until the peace convention starts. I’m not taking any more risks than I have to. Not after what happened in Ireland.’

  ‘From what you told me, that was just horrific. But it didn’t even get a single mention on the news over here.’

  ‘The Garda managed to keep a lid on it,’ said Rick. ‘Well, not the shooting itself. They put that down to a disgruntled ex-employee going postal. But they left out the fact that Adeola was involved. She wasn’t visiting Ireland officially, and the Irish government didn’t want the media to know that she’d been talking to certain people linked to certain unsavoury activities in Paraguay.’

  Noah led the way to the curb and opened up the tailgate of his Super Duty. ‘I’m real glad you didn’t get hurt. There’s some people out there who really have your card marked, and that’s for sure.’

  They climbed into the SUV and Noah headed west on Burbank Boulevard. Traffic was heavy, and they had to keep stopping and starting. This made Rick nervous, and he kept twisting around in his seat, checking the vehicles all around them.

  ‘So, Mr Flynn – these men in grey suits took the medallion that you found in the Mediterranean?’ Adeola asked him.

  ‘Hey, you should call me Noah.’

  ‘All right – Noah.’ Adeola opened her green silk purse and held up the medallion that the young sniper had been wearing in Ireland. ‘Was it anything like this?’

  Noah glanced at the medallion and then took it from her. ‘Exactly. Exactly the same.’ He turned it over. ‘Except for the inscription on the back. Mine had the letters P R C H A L on it.’

  Rick said, ‘My pal Bill Pringle at the Secret Service thinks that K A Z I M I is a name, so I’d guess that P R C H A L is, too. Bill’s trying to find out if the suicide bomber in Dubai was wearing his medallion when he blew himself up. We know that his name was Abdul al-Hamiz, so if his medallion has H A M I Z on the back of it, I think it’s pretty clear that we’re dealing with a distinctive and identifiable terror organization.’

  ‘Amazing that nobody’s ever heard of them before,’ said Noah. ‘They must have been around at least since 1943.’

  ‘Well, you’re right,’ said Rick, ‘that’s a long time for a terrorist group to be active without giving themselves away. Even Black September have only been around since 1970, and Lashkar-e-Tayyiba wasn’t founded till 1989.’

  ‘The question is, what’s their agenda?’ asked Adeola. ‘Why are they so determined to kill me, and why don’t they want anybody to know that these medallions are connected?’

  They had dinner at Noah’s house, out on the terrace. Silja cooked them Finnish pasties, filled with smoked trout, and served with sour cream and chives.

  ‘You have a find there,’ said Adeola, as Silja went back into the kitchen to fetch the dill-and-cucumber salad.

  ‘Silja? No. She and me, we work together now and then, that’s all. She’s a totally amazing stunt artiste. One of the best in the world. She should be in England, working on the next James Bond flick, but they’ve put it back for a couple of months.’

  He looked between the flickering candles at Leon, who was solemnly cutting up his pasty. ‘It’s OK,’ he reassured him. ‘It may be Finnish, but it’s kosher.’

  He had tried to persuade Leon to go to his uncle Saul, or one of his aunts in Pasadena, but Leon had asked if he could stay. ‘If you’re going to go looking for the people who killed my dad and Trina, I want to help you.’

  Leon wanted revenge, just as much as Adeola, and just as much as Noah. All three of them were hurt. All three of them were grieving, and it had created a deep, unspoken bond between them. Just because Leon was young, that didn’t make his pain any easier to cope with. Besides, there was a good chance that he could be very helpful. He might have been less enthusiastic about Je
wish history than his father, but he’d been studying ancient Babylon for two semesters, and he knew all about cuneiform writing and the empire-building of King Nebuchadnezzar, and so he might be able to discover more about Emu Ki Ilani, and what it really meant.

  Adeola said, ‘We need to find out as much about these medallions as we can. For instance, the medallion you found in the ocean: let’s suppose that it belonged to somebody called Prchal. Who was Prchal? And why was his medallion in his binocular case, at the bottom of the sea? How did it get there?’

  ‘Mr Prchal probably dropped it off his boat,’ said Noah. ‘That’s how I lost my last pair of binoculars. In fact, that’s how I lost my second-to-last pair of binoculars, and the pair of binoculars before that.’

  ‘But Prchal is a Czech name, isn’t it?’ said Rick. ‘And you say that Prchal had pieces of Czech newspaper in his binocular case, to roll cigarettes. So that would pretty much confirm that he was Czech.’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘But what was a Czech doing in a boat off the coast of Gibraltar in 1943? It was wartime, right, so he wouldn’t have been fishing, or sightseeing.’

  ‘You’re thinking that he was in a plane that came down.’

  ‘It seems more likely. You said yourself that there was airplane debris on the bottom. And it was in line with the end of the airstrip.’

  ‘Let me use your pc, Mr Flynn,’ Leon said. ‘I can check it out.’

  ‘OK – but take the rest of your supper with you. And call me “Noah” from now on, OK?’

  ‘Yes, sir – Mr Flynn – Noah.’

  When Leon had taken his plate inside, Noah said, ‘Poor kid. Thank God he didn’t see what those bastards did to his dad and his stepmom.’

  ‘We don’t know for sure that it was the same people.’

  ‘They cut his stepmom’s throat, same as they did to my Jenna. I’m pretty sure it was them.’

  ‘But how did they find out that your friend Mo had been asking questions about the medallions?’

  ‘How did they find out that I had the medallion, and I was taking it to show Jenna? I don’t know, maybe we need to talk to the cops about this. Maybe I should have told them in the first place.’

  Adeola said, ‘No, Noah. Your instinct was right. Let’s find out more about these people first. For all we know, they are involved with the police. If there’s one thing that I have learned in international diplomacy, it is to believe nobody and trust nobody.’

  At that moment, Noah’s parrot squawked, ‘Bastards. All of them. Bastards.’

  ‘Pretty salty vocabulary, your parrot,’ Adeola remarked. ‘She must have belonged to a sea captain.’

  ‘Uh-hunh. Doorman, from the Beverly Wilshire.’

  A little after 10 p.m. they were sitting in the living room with a bottle of Pinot Grigio when Rick’s friend Bill Pringle called him.

  ‘Rick? How are you, good buddy? Listen, I think I’ve found something that’s going to interest you.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘I’ve been talking to an old friend of mine who used to be the curator at the Secret Service Archive on H Street Northwest.

  I’m hoping to meet him in the morning so I should have some more information for you tomorrow.’

  ‘So what’s he come up with?’

  ‘Sorry, good buddy, maybe I’m being paranoid after all these years, but it only takes a key word, doesn’t it, and somebody starts to listen in. Let’s just say that – if it’s for real – it could be the story of the century. This century and the last century and maybe a few centuries before that.’

  ‘I’ll wait to hear from you, then.’

  ‘OK. But if I don’t call you by this time tomorrow, you can reach me on 102 9190, extension 1.’

  Rick jotted it down on the palm of his hand. ‘What’s that? A cellphone?’

  ‘Auburn, New York.’

  Rick frowned at his phone in bewilderment, but Bill Pringle had hung up.

  ‘Auburn, New York? What the hell did he mean by “Auburn, New York”?’

  ‘Auburn, New York?’ Noah repeated. He frowned, and thought for a while, and then he said, ‘I know – that’s where they invented the talking pictures – Auburn, New York. Some guy called Cross.’

  ‘Well, they have a very famous jail, too,’ said Rick. ‘Back in the 1800s, the inmates weren’t allowed to speak, ever. The Auburn System, they called it. It was supposed to stop them from plotting riots and breakouts. They all had to walk with one hand on the shoulder of the guy next to them, in this sliding kind of a sideways shuffle, with their faces turned towards the guards, in case they moved their lips. The Auburn Lockstep. They even named a dance after it.’

  He paused, and looked down at the number on his hand. ‘None of which explains why Bill Pringle’s going there. But he says he’s found out something important. The story of the century, that’s what he called it.’

  Only a few minutes later, Leon came in, carrying a sheaf of printouts. He looked flushed and excited.

  ‘Found something?’ asked Rick.

  ‘You bet. I Googled for air crashes off Gibraltar in 1943, and I came up with this one, pretty much straight away.’

  He sat down and laid a black-and-white photograph on the table. It showed the silvery outline of a World War Two bomber, clearly visible on the bottom of the ocean under a few feet of water.

  ‘This was July 4, 1943, right? It says here that the plane is a Liberator bomber, and it was supposed to be flying some Polish guy called General Sikorski from Gibraltar to Britain – him and his daughter and his chief of staff and some British brigadier and some British politician.’

  ‘Sikorski,’ said Adeola. ‘My God!’

  ‘You know who he was?’ asked Noah.

  ‘Wladislaw Sikorski? For sure. A great negotiator. A very respected politician in his time. Anybody who wants to go into foreign diplomacy has to learn about Wladislaw Sikorski. During the Second World War, he was premier of the exiled Polish government in London, and also commander-in-chief of all the Polish forces abroad.’

  ‘Sure – I saw something about him on the history channel,’ said Rick. ‘Didn’t some people think that the Russians killed him?’

  ‘Some historians believe that the Russians were responsible, yes. In the early years of the war Sikorski signed a treaty with the Russians to end the Nazi-Soviet partition of Poland, and for a while he managed to restore diplomatic relations between Russia and the exiled Polish government. But of course, after the war was over, the Russians were never going to allow Poland to be taken over by such a popular man.’

  ‘So what did they do?’ asked Noah. ‘Shoot the plane down?’

  ‘No,’ said Leon, holding up his printouts. ‘It was Prchal!’

  ‘You’ve found Prchal?’

  ‘It’s all here. Prchal was the name of the pilot. Edward Prchal.’

  ‘You mean he was like a suicide pilot – crashed the plane on purpose?’

  ‘No way. He was the only person on the plane who survived. He had a cut on his face and a broken bone in his right arm, but that was all. Everybody else had fatal head injuries – all ten of them.’

  ‘Prchal,’ said Noah, shaking his head. ‘Prchal and his goddamned cigarette papers!’

  ‘The British held this really thorough Court of Inquiry,’ said Leon. ‘The governor of Gibraltar said that he went out on to the runway around about ten o’clock in the evening to say goodbye to General Sikorski and his daughter. He knew this guy Prchal and he talked to him for about five minutes while the second pilot was warming up the engines. He said Prchal was like always, absolutely calm and normal.

  ‘Anyhow, they switched off all the searchlights, so that the pilot wouldn’t be dazzled when he took off. The plane took off, and because it was so dark, all they could see were its navigation lights. But the governor said that he suddenly noticed that the navigation lights were slowly starting to sink towards the sea.

  ‘He and one of his aides both agreed that they could tell t
hat it was Prchal who was flying, because after take-off he always put the airplane’s nose down to gather extra speed before he climbed up to his cruising height. He said they waited for the lights to start to rise, but they never did. The aircraft flew out about three-quarters of a mile and then crashed straight into the sea.’

  Leon turned the page. ‘At the Court of Inquiry, Prchal testified that after putting his nose down to pick up speed, he found that the joystick was jammed and he was unable to pull the airplane up again. But after it was salvaged, five different technical experts examined the airplane in detail, and none of them could work out how the controls could have become stuck. However, when he tried to pull back the stick it somehow became stuck and would not move. The governor said that nobody could have sabotaged the airplane, because it had been guarded by a Commando and an RAF guard during Sikorski’s entire visit to the Rock.

  ‘But here’s the clincher,’ said Leon. ‘The governor said that Prchal never wore his Mae West, ever. He always hung it over the back of his seat. In his evidence, Prchal insisted that he had done the same thing this time, but when he was picked out of the sea he was wearing his Mae West and every tap and fastening was properly fastened.’

  Rick sat back in his armchair. ‘Sounds like an assassination to me. Especially since he was carrying that medallion with him.’

  ‘But there is no connection between Sikorski and me, none at all.’

  Noah said, ‘Maybe we’re talking about assassins who kill people for no other reason except they’re trying to make peace. Sikorski, you, and who knows how many others they’ve bumped off – but nobody knows it was them.’

  ‘I can’t believe that. Who would benefit? It’s not even as if they claim responsibility to further their cause. They’re just like random killers.’

  Rick dry-washed his face with his hands. ‘Well, I don’t know about you guys, but I’m pooped. Thanks for the meal, Silja. Thanks for the hospitality, Noah. And thanks for your detective work, scout.’

  ‘Keep your eyes peeled,’ said Noah. ‘And don’t get into any strange Liberator bombers.’