by By Jon Land
“My deal with Vorsky did not include you, fraulein.”
“You broke your deal, Herr Mundt, when you passed information onto him you knew to be false. I am here to negotiate a new deal. Why was accessing Paul Hessler’s confidential file so important to you?” The woman paused and raised her left eyebrow. There was no break in the hairs, as though it were painted on with an eyebrow pencil. “It strikes me as curious, Herr Mundt, that Paul Hessler was interned at the same labor camp where your father served as guard. Karl Mundt, member of the Waffen SS. Assigned to one of the three labor camps outside of Lodz, Poland in early 1944 at the age of twenty, the very same year you were born. According to reports and testimony, your father was shot by Paul Hessler just prior to Hessler’s escape in late 1944. His body was never found.”
“You know my family history quite well.”
“I’m not finished yet. Paul Hessler was found by an American GI detachment days later in the forest well north of Lodz, miles away. One of these GIs was the gunman who tried to assassinate Hessler four days ago: Staff Sergeant Walter Phipps.”
“This means nothing to me.”
“So you don’t know Staff Sergeant Walter Phipps?”
“Never met the man.”
“Have you ever spoken to him?”
“No.”
“Interesting. Because a week before he flew to Israel, Walter Phipps received a phone call from Germany. We traced the number to a school that had been closed and its phones disconnected for months. Apparently, whoever called Staff Sergeant Phipps knew how to manipulate such things.” The woman turned her face enough for Mundt to see the uneven texture of the right side. “What does the attempted murder of Paul Hessler have to do with what has brought you to Israel, Herr Mundt?”
“Am I to consider this an interrogation?”
“Just answer my question.”
“Because I am curious to know exactly in what capacity you are operating here.”
“I want to know the basis of your interest in Paul Hessler, Herr Mundt.”
“And if I don’t tell you, you’ll kill me, is that it?” Mundt asked, glancing at the two gunmen whose fingers had still not left the triggers of their pistols. “You’d be able to, I suppose, but it would be messy. Can you afford that risk? Can your organization afford it, considering you don’t officially exist anymore?”
The woman stiffened. “We never officially existed.”
“Your time has past.”
“Not according to your data, Herr Mundt.”
Mundt locked his eyes on the woman’s. “Tell your men to put their weapons down, or use them. One way or another, this conversation is over.”
“You’ll have to do better than that; and better than that phoney e-mail threat of yours made to Vorsky about delivering information to various media outlets.”
“But I’ve added a section since I last spoke with Vorsky, describing him as a Holocaust survivor and Israeli war hero who took the law into his own hands by murdering three innocent people, including the deputy chief of staff of the army.”
Mundt could see the rage building in the woman’s eyes but the color of her face remained placidly pale and unchanging.
“Innocent?”
“There’s no proof of the victims’ guilt that would stand up in any court, and you know it.” Mundt rose, inviting the gunmen to shoot him. “So kill me and you destroy your friend Abraham Vorsky.”
The woman started to back up for the door. “We’ll find out what you know, Herr Mundt. One way or another.”
“Be my guest,” Mundt told her.
* * * *
CHAPTER 48
G
et out ofhere!” TabarAzziz ranted.“I don’t want to talk to you anymore! I don’t like what you insinuate.”
“We’re not leaving,” Ben told him.
“Not until you answer a few more questions,” Danielle picked up.
“We believe sensitive information was stolen from at least one of the companies you service,” Ben explained. “At this point we have no reason to believe you were involved and every reason to believe that Shahir Falaya was. That could change if you remain uncooperative.”
“It’s hard enough for Arab-owned businesses to survive in Israel already,” Danielle added. “Don’t make it any harder for yourself.”
Tabar Azziz shrugged. “What is it you want to know?”
“You said the most advanced machines you service now have hard drives,” Ben said.
“Nonvolatile memory,” Azziz nodded.
“And if these hard drives were faulty?” questioned Danielle.
“We would replace the entire circuit board.”
“Would all the memory be lost?”
“Not necessarily,” Azziz replied. “It’s a simple process really to transfer the memory from one board to another. Usually just one chip or switch that’s faulty.”
“You’re a good teacher, yes, Mr. Azziz?” Ben asked him.
“I am very good teacher, Inspector.”
“So good that Shahir Falaya could replace these circuit boards on his own?”
“Of course. There is no great trick to it.”
“Even if the board wasn’t faulty at all?”
The air seemed to drain out of Azziz’s lungs. He slumped visibly and tapped the counter before him.
“How long would it take?” Ben continued.
“Minutes.”
“And the company would never know, would it?”
“Not if he did it right.”
“You taught him, didn’t you?”
Azziz nodded grimly. “The boy would do it right.”
“So now he has in his possession the board containing everything that was copied, faxed or printed since the machine was delivered.”
“Yes,” Azziz nodded.
“Could he learn what those contents were? Print them out or something?”
Azziz nodded reluctantly. “But I never left the boy alone. Always we work side by side.”
“You taught him how to identify damaged circuit boards, of course,” Danielle said, trying not to make it sound like an accusation.
“It’s not that hard. A few simple tests once the office machine is plugged into our system tester. One of these.” Azziz pulled a car battery-sized device with a high tech LED read-out board from a shelf overhead.
“And when working together, side-by-side, sometimes you let him work this system tester,” Danielle resumed. “Maybe trusted him so much you didn’t question his findings.”
“Shahir was good boy. Comes in early on Sundays. Stays late during the week.”
“Is it possible he switched the boards without you knowing?”
“It’s possible,” Azziz acknowledged, shrugging his portly shoulders. “But what could he gain by that? He’d still have to access the information. No way he could do that. Mish mumkin! Because, because he’d need a machine that takes the same circuit board, an identical machine.”
Ben felt everything click into place. “Like the models on display in the front of your store?”
* * * *
O
ver seventy companies ,” Ben sighed from the passenger seat of Danielle’s Jeep, surveying the list provided by Tabar Azziz of companies serviced by Abasca Machines. “Azziz is a busy man.”
Beside them traffic continued to snail past, slowed even more by hopeful drivers thinking the Jeep was about to give up its parking space.
Danielle flipped through her copy with considerably less interest. “Law firms, corporate headquarters, and that’s only the start of our problems.”
“What do you mean?”
“If blackmail’s what this is all about, we can’t be sure the target or targets were actually the businesses Abasca Machines served,” Danielle explained. “It could be a client at one of these law firms, or a customer of one of these companies. All those copies, all those faxes, all those pages transferred from an employee’s desktop computer to his file on the printer/copier.” She
flapped the pages composing the list in frustration. “Who can tell which one was behind the deaths of these children?”
“I see your point.”
“There’s more; equally unhelpful, I’m afraid. We have no way of gaining access to the circuit boards Shahir Falaya may have replaced, which leaves us with no way of narrowing down the list. Even if we could, blackmail victims are unlikely to talk—that’s why they paid in the first place. And, for the same reason, we can forget about them giving us the kind of access to their records that we’d need.”
“One of them is responsible for four murders, Pakad. We can’t forget that.”
“Even if we could narrow down this list...”
“There’s got to be a way.”
“How?”
“Re-create the steps the four students took once Shahir had the stolen circuit boards in his possession.”
“Considering the condition of Shahir Falaya’s computer when you found it,” Danielle reminded, “that won’t get us very—”
She stopped suddenly, the pages crinkling in her hand.
“What is it?” Ben asked her.
She held her copy of the list out to him, pointing at one of the final names. “Look.”
* * * *
CHAPTER 49
A
s soon as the woman and her henchmen had departed, Hans Mundt sat back and tried to think. He had no memory of his father, knew Karl Mundt only from pictures his mother deposited around the house and from the exhaustive research he had conducted, trying to reconstruct the man in his head.
Beyond that, Karl Mundt lived in his son’s mind through the stories Hans had solicited from those who knew him. Much of the time, these tales remained just collated notes on paper or the faded recollections of old men speaking in cracking voices. Lately, though, now that Hans Mundt had come so close to the truth, the tales took on a reality all their own.
* * * *
P
aul Hessler lay on his bed in the camp quarters, pale and shivering. He had lost so much weight he had taken to tying a rope around his waist to keep his pants up but now, his intestines racked by dysentery, he lacked the strength to even knot it.
He was alone in the rank barracks that had once been a stable, shared by the camp’s workers with rats. At night, when he couldn’t sleep, Paul would hear the rats scuttling and pittering about. They didn’t scare him. They used to, but they didn‘t anymore.
He tightened the thin blanket around his shoulders. It smelled of mold and mildew, and had been unpacked from boxes left out in the rain while the inmates worked. He had a mattress and a straw pillow. The sum total of his life’s possessions.
Paul Hessler knew if you didn’t work, you weren’t fed. The penalty for sneaking food to a sick or disabled inmate was death, and the Haupsturmfuehrer, Gunthar Weiss, loved to make examples. Paul knew that now that he was no longer of any use to them, the camp guards would be coming soon to put him out of his misery. Take him outside where the other inmates would be able to see the gun pressed against his head and his brains splatter across the ground. He wasn’t sure he cared. Perhaps he should look forward to that moment for the opportunity it would provide to join his parents, slaughtered in the Lodz ghetto before he’d been brought here. If it wasn’t a bullet that took his life, it would almost certainly be typhoid or the dysentery that plagued him now.
No! He had to survive for his parents. They had sacrificed everything to keep him alive for as long as they could, including ultimately their lives. Give up and he would render their deaths meaningless.
The upstairs door creaked open and the steps of heavy boots clattered down the stairs.
Paul Hessler didn’t turn, didn’t move. Couldn‘t help but welcome the end. The boots clacked closer to him and he began to pray silently.
A hand squeezed his shoulder, eased him around gently.
“I brought you some bread,” said Karl Mundt, the young guard who had already saved his life once before. “And some pills too.” He sat down next to Hessler on the cot and handed him six pills. “Take two now and the rest later. You’ll have to swallow them dry. I couldn’t sneak you anything to drink. I’ll try again later.”
Paul Hessler managed with great difficulty to choke down the first two pills and then accepted the hunk of bread Mundt had stuffed inside his jacket.
“Thank you,” Hessler said, grasping the young guard’s sleeve. “Thank you.”
Mundt pulled away, as if revolted by his touch. “Another thing. In the soup line I always notice you fighting to be near the front.”
“Of course.”
“From now on, wait until the end to be served. The potatoes and solids settle near the bottom of the cauldrons. Wait until the end and you’ll find more than just broth spooned into your bowl. Do you understand?”
Hessler nodded gratefully and tore off a hunk of bread. “I’m going to be a rich man someday,” he said between chews, his stomach quaking from his first solid food in a week. “And I’m going to pay you back for this. You won’t be sorry.”
“What makes you think I won’t be rich myself?” Mundt asked him.
Paul went back to his bread.
“I guess I could always come to you for a job,” the guard resumed.
“Only if I live.”
“Oh, you’ll live,” Karl Mundt assured him. “I’m going to make sure of it.”
* * * *
H
ans Mundthad intervieweda dozensurvivors from the camp where his father had served, all of whom related parts of the strange friendship that sprouted between Karl Mundt and Paul Hessler. How his father had nursed the boy back to health and kept him alive through the remainder of the boy’s stay in the camp. They spoke of overheard conversations in which the two young men compared their divergent lives. Karl Mundt, they said, claimed he had been forced into military service. Taken right out of a school he loved and later away from the woman he had just married.
Karl Mundt did not learn he was going to be a father until a letter reached him shortly after his arrival at the camp. A letter Hans himself found buried amidst other such material in Germany’s National Archives. Coming to know the father he had never met had long been an obsession for Hans Mundt. It had taken up a good part of his life and, more recently, came to dominate it. He was in search of no truth other than what little he could learn of the man whose absence had created a void in his life which became more painful for him as the years went on.
But the truth Hans Mundt uncovered was far different from that which he expected.
Just a few weeks before, his funds nearly exhausted, Hans had at last found the body he had been searching for buried in the woods beyond the camp’s site north of Lodz. He’d had suspicions before that, suspicions raised by inconsistencies and too much that didn’t fit. All underscored by a dread fear Hans had tried to bury where he couldn’t reach it.
The crumbling bones he’d lifted out of the ground, though, told a different story. Hans Mundt had to face a reality that was as horrible as it was impossible. That’s why he was here. That’s why he had to act.
And he would.
Soon.
* * * *
CHAPTER 50
B
en lookedat theitem onthe listDanielle was pointing to. “Hessler Industries,” he said, feeling his breath catch in his throat.
“Strange, don’t you think?”
“You think there’s a connection between murdered Holocaust survivors and murdered high school students?” he said and shook his head. “No, Danielle. Hessler Industries has an advanced digital printing station that Abasca Machines services. Don’t look for more than that.”
“I thought you once told me you didn’t believe in coincidence.”
“Sorry, that was Sherlock Holmes.”
“Another great detective.”
They both smiled. Ben wished it could last.
“What are you going to do with that list?” Danielle asked him.
“Try an
d figure out which of these companies was the one being blackmailed.”