Clear Skies

  “How do you know this?” asked Deacon.

  “One of our colleagues liaising between the DIA and American Aeronautics Corporation brought these plans to our attention five years ago. BFI pitched the concept to AAC for joint development. To say AAC, the DIA, and the Department of Defense were interested would be an understatement. They brought us in to study the specs and design at great length and produced functional three-dimensional models. They were scaled down, of course, but they worked. They were brilliant. Over the next three years, AAC invested a ton of US government-subsidized research and development funds in a top-secret project to manufacture several full-scale prototypes. They flew well in short-term tests over the Arizona desert but crashed every time approximately three hours into longer piloted flight tests. Luckily, the test pilots ejected, and there was no loss of life.”

  “So what’s the problem?” Deacon asked.

  “There’s a fatal design flaw that’s proven impossible to find. In fact, we suspect it’s an endemic error that can never be resolved even if we discover what it is. The development program was overpromising, undelivering, and plagued by cost overruns from attempts to fix the problem. Because of the skyrocketing costs and persistent flaw, the Pentagon pulled the plug on the whole ill-fated adventure, and none of the surviving prototypes surfaced again. They were scrapped as part of a total cover-up.”

  He inhaled hard and his gaze at Deacon and Slade was intense. “I don’t know what they paid for these specs, but they’ll be pissed off big time when they manufacture and test a full-scale prototype.”

  Deacon straightened his back and said, “Holy crap. It’s worse than I thought.”

  “You know what makes this even more surreal,” Helde said. “We learned the designs came from a BFI engineer and his savant brother who creates software for military computer games. Can you believe it? AAC spent a small fortune to manufacture a fighter conceived by a computer game designer.”

  “The Chinese government and military industry won’t know that,” Deacon said. “They’ll invest a truckload of money in manufacturing facilities, whip up a prototype, and in less time it takes to flush shit down the toilet, they’ll find the flaw. That’ll infuriate them, and before anyone here has a heads-up, we’ll be in diplomatic freefall.” Deacon loosened his tie. His words floated to the four corners of the room before anyone spoke.

  “There’ll be an all-out trade war,” Slade added. “And that will be the least of our worries. They’ll be hell-bent on military dominance. The global balance of power, now in the hands of the US and our Western allies with a commitment to human rights, democracy, and peace, will break down.”

  “We have just one option here.” Deacon broke the tense silence that followed Slade’s words. “We have to retrieve the money from Harris and Ashton, engage in straight talk about the scam with their Chinese marks, and repay the money in full. It won’t help bilateral relations, and we’ll lose face in the process. But at least, we can maintain the current level of détente and avoid conflict through the inevitable payback hacking and undercover counteractivities if they discover the scam themselves. They might even provoke hostilities with one of our Northeast Asian allies, knowing full well we’ll take the bait and jump in right away. And before that, they’ll call in the massive foreign US debt they’re holding and bring this nation to its knees.”

  Deacon stood up. “Dan—”

  He was interrupted by Mason striding back into the room.

  “They have a blonde Jane Doe in Road Town’s morgue in the BVI. She has severe facial trauma but appears to be in her late twenties to early thirties.” Mason paused for effect. “Apart from her injuries, she is, by all accounts, a stunning beauty.”

  “Slade, I want you to go to the BVI right away,” Deacon said. “And Mason, I want you in Seattle to flush out the nexus point connecting Ashton and Chloe Harris.

  Also, find out who the hell he persuaded to undergo plastic surgery to look like her and why.”

  CHAPTER 40

  (Tuesday Afternoon—Seattle)

  Kevin Mason stared at an upscale block of apartments under construction on land where he’d expected to find the Harris residence and adjacent houses. So much for any intelligence he might have gleaned from the next-door neighbors.

  Hope is the first frontier for the optimist and the last resort for the pragmatic researcher, Mason mused. He decided to disregard his natural inclinations and wear the veil of hope for this assignment, making his first foray of the day into the house directly opposite the construction site.

  “I moved in here three months ago,” the homeowner said, “and never even saw the houses across the street, let alone the people who lived there. You could try Mrs. Whitfield next door.” She inclined her head to the right. “She’s lived in this street a lot longer than I have.”

  He progressed an inch or two with Mrs. Whitfield. She’d resided there for three years and rarely spoken to anyone in the Harris house, but knew some of the local legends.

  “Mr. Harris left his wife a few months after their daughter was born thirty-three years ago, and he never returned. A new partner moved in, and three years later, Mrs. Harris gave birth to another girl.”

  Mrs. Whitfield leaned in closer. “What happened to that family was tragic. Apparently, the partner died a few years later from cancer, and Mrs. Harris raised her two daughters alone. After all that, Mrs. Harris and her younger daughter perished in a hit-and-run accident a year after I moved here. No one was ever caught and charged with their deaths,” she said, confirming information sent by the Seattle FBI office to Mason the previous day.

  “How old was the younger daughter when she died?” he asked.

  “I don’t know for sure. Late twenties, I guess.”

  “Did the older daughter come back for the funeral?” Mason asked, jotting down notes.

  “I never saw her. I’ve told you all I know. You could try Mrs. Benton over there in number twenty-three next to the construction site.” She pointed at the house. “She’s seventy-eight and has lived here fifty years. I got my information from her.”

  Mason believed in due diligence and never relied on good fortune, but five minutes into his conversation with Mrs. Benton, he thought there might be some truth in the expression third time lucky.

  “They lived just two doors down the street from here. I used to babysit and clean their house once a week for a bit of extra income. I did a few houses in this neighborhood in the old days. Times were tough for me and my husband, God rest his soul. The Harris house was right there.” She pointed to the center of the construction site.

  She held the doorframe for support, then shuffled to a chair on the porch. “All that ended, of course, when Mr. Harris left his family. The little girl was just three months old when he took off to Washington, DC with another woman and never came back. Not once.” She paused to brush away a fly buzzing around her head. “I was surprised because they went to a lot of trouble to get pregnant and have their baby girl—Chloe was her name.”

  Mrs. Benton paused, straining to recall what she knew. “He worked for the Secret Service. I think for the military, too. After he left, Mrs. Harris couldn’t pay for cleaning anymore, but I helped out when she needed a babysitter.”

  “What did you mean when you said they went to a lot of trouble to get pregnant?” Mason asked, a tingle slithering down his spine from the prescient thrill of impending discovery.

  “It was hush-hush back in those days. Anne, Mrs. Harris, broke down and told me everything after the husband ran off because she needed a friend to lean on. I was the only one because most neighbors were itinerant renters and we hardly knew them. I suppose it’s all right if I tell you now. In confidence, you understand.”

  “Of course. Anything you say will remain confidential.”

  “Well, Mr. Harris had a fertility problem from a childhood accident. He could perform in bed—you know, sex was not a problem. In fact, it turned out he was quite the philanderer, but couldn’t
produce enough sperms, and his wife couldn’t conceive.” Mrs. Benton pulled herself to the edge of the porch chair as she recalled the family’s story, her words coming faster as her memory kicked in.

  “They were lucky. Test-tube fertilization had just taken off here, and they visited Seattle’s leading IVF clinic at that time—I can’t remember the name. It took many visits and many failures, but eventually, the clinic produced a fertilized egg, and she gave birth to Chloe.”

  “Why did Mr. Harris leave? He should have been happy.”

  “They only produced one fertilized egg, so the clinic split it and wanted to implant both to have a better chance of success. Mrs. Harris refused because she was fragile and afraid of multiple births, but he wanted more than one child. She and her husband fought like starving monkeys over a banana, according to her. He ended up leaving Seattle with another woman after Chloe’s birth. I never liked him. Good riddance, I thought.”

  “It must have been difficult for the mother,” Mason said.

  “I felt sorry for her. In the end, Chloe grew up to be a handful—a wild, reckless girl. She never held down a proper job. Always borrowing money from her mother to get herself out of scrapes.”

  She stopped talking, reining in her memories before going on. “There was a second girl born a few years later with another father and they called her Carol. She’s the one who died in a car accident. It must be two years ago now. Her mother too.”

  “Yes, I heard about that,” Mason said, stretching out his hand. “Can I help you back into the house? You’ve been most helpful.”

  # # #

  A visit to the Vital Statistics Office in Seattle confirmed Chloe Harris’s birth, thirty-three years ago. It also confirmed the delivery from the same mother of a half-sister registered as Carol Harris thirty years ago, but from a different father, the mother’s de facto partner at the time.

  Mason found a Starbucks and scoured the internet for the next hour to identify IVF clinics operating in Seattle in the early 1980s. He narrowed the list to one, the oldest—City Fertility Clinic—and called for an appointment. Thirty minutes later, he stepped into the office of the chief administrator, a middle-aged man called Johnson.

  “I need information,” Mason said. “And before you tell me about patient privilege, let me advise you that my inquiries involve national security. You can be compelled by law to provide access to the clinic’s records, so it would be easier and prudent to help me now.”

  “Given the time frame—1980s, I think you told me on the phone—and the fact that the mother is deceased, I am willing to dispense with formalities. Luckily, all the files from that period have been retained over the years, and we prepared a copy of the Harris records before you arrived.” Johnson moved to the front of his desk and laid out the Harris file for Mason to read.

  “You can see here in 1982, a single viable zygote or fertilized egg was produced in vitro from an ovum taken from the ovary of the mother, Anne Harris, and a sperm extracted from the left testis of the father, James Harris. With permission from the father, the technicians split the fertilized egg to yield two viable, genetically identical zygotes for culture to the early embryo stage.” He paused to clear his throat. “Splitting is an accepted procedure to allow insertion of two embryos into the mother’s Fallopian tubes to enhance the probability of at least one embryo implanting in the wall of the uterus.”

  Johnson shifted his finger to another section of the record.

  “You can see over here that at the insistence of Ann Harris, only one of these two early embryos was inserted and the second was not used. Instead, the staff cryopreserved it to give the couple another chance if the first implantation failed or to allow them to have a second child in the future.”

  “It says here that the frozen embryo was transported to a Washington, DC clinic for implantation into Mrs. Harris,” Mason said.

  “Yes, according to this note, James Harris contacted our clinic when the first child would have been two years old. He’d shifted because of a job transfer, so our clinic released the embryo.”

  Johnson shifted his weight from one foot to the other in an uneasy stance.

  “Unfortunately, twelve months after we transferred the frozen embryo, a routine birth follow-up report came from the Washington, DC clinic, and the staff here discovered that Anne Harris never left Seattle. Katherine Harris, the father’s second wife, received the embryo. She gave birth to a healthy girl who would have been three years younger than the first IVF daughter.”

  Johnson looked increasingly uncomfortable. “Obviously, the father remarried, but the egg donor, Anne Harris, was never asked to give permission for the release. Because of the embarrassing misunderstanding, my predecessors made what I think was an unethical decision and never told her, and the file was sealed.”

  “So the end result,” Mason said, “was two daughters, clones if you like, with identical DNA from Anne and James Harris, but born of different mothers at different times—three years apart, in fact. One lived in Seattle and the other in Washington, DC, each unaware of the other’s existence. The only people who knew were the father and his second wife.”

  “It would appear so.”

  # # #

  Mason called Deacon and passed on his findings. “I’ve asked one of my team to check dates of entries and departures to and from Japan during the past year of both Chloe Harris of Seattle and her younger doppelganger, who probably was the real Mrs. Carol Palmer born in Washington, DC and more recently based in Tokyo and London. I want to see if there’s a pattern that links them,” he said. “They’ll also hunt down the whereabouts of James Harris and his second wife and report to you when they have concrete information.”

  A few hours later, Mason called Deacon again.

  “I looked into the Harris father’s IRS records here in Seattle. His tax returns show that he worked for the DIA in Seattle before transferring to DIA headquarters in Washington, DC thirty-three years ago, three months after the birth of his first daughter.” He paused to give Deacon time to digest the information before continuing. “On a hunch, I checked Ashton’s IRS records as well. And guess what. He also worked for the DIA in Seattle and was promoted to the same department of the Washington office one month after Harris’s transfer.”

  “So Ashton knew James Harris and no doubt knew his family circumstances in Seattle and Washington. It would be typical of the man to keep himself informed over the years in case he could use the information to his own advantage,” Deacon said. “And then the Clear Skies operation came along, and there was a perfect fit.”

  “He must have engineered the alliance between Richard Palmer and Washington, DC-based Carol Harris and strung out her clone, Chloe Harris in Seattle, for her eventual role in the plan. It wouldn’t have been difficult, because Chloe needed money,” Mason said. “I can imagine Chloe tormented with resentment and jealousy when she learned from Ashton about a younger look-alike clone with a lifestyle she could only dream about and a father who was the parent she never knew.”

  “Your team located James Harris and his wife,” Deacon said. “They’re six feet under in Prospect Hill Cemetery. Both were killed in a hit-and-run accident one year ago. Highly suspicious circumstances, apparently. They also checked Japan’s immigration records, as you instructed, and tracked the movements of Carol Palmer and Chloe Harris.” Deacon paused, and Mason heard him shuffling papers in the background.

  “Ashton mounted an elaborate plan, and was the master puppeteer, basing the real Carol Palmer in Tokyo for the past year and sending her to the UK and Monaco every couple of months to work the China grift,” Deacon said. “And during her absences from Tokyo, he installed Chloe Harris in the Tokyo apartment for a few days to keep the project moving with their Japanese clients. Chloe and Carol were never in Tokyo at the same time.”

  “Chloe probably supervised the kill and switched passports in Carol Palmer’s purse,” Mason said. “Imagine Carol Palmer’s surprise when she opened the door and
saw a mirror image of herself standing there with Sakata.”

  “Ashton must have arranged for Isabella Kato to work as a part-time maid during Carol Palmer’s absences to monitor Chloe because he wouldn’t have trusted her any more than a thief with an open loaded safe. Kato and the real Carol Palmer never crossed paths until Palmer turned up dead.”

  “So with the real Mrs. Palmer dead in Tokyo and conveniently misidentified by Isa Kato as Chloe Harris of Seattle, Chloe could substitute for her clone in Monaco and fool everyone, including Carol Palmer’s husband and lover, for the short time needed to complete the operation. She was Sakata’s cutout,” Mason said. “Despite the complexities of managing Ashton’s scheme, the basic plan was rather simple—no one needed plastic surgery. And it gave Ashton facilitated access to Palmer’s money.”

  “All he needed to do was get rid of Richard Palmer and Chloe Harris and settle into his secret hideaway while the investigation of Carol Palmer’s death proceeded at a predictably slow pace in Tokyo, and nobody would have been the wiser.”

  “But he didn’t count on Slade’s and the FBI’s involvement, which gave the investigation a turbo boost,” Mason said.

  “Yes. And I think we can also assume the unsolved hit-and-run deaths in Seattle and Washington, DC were not accidents,” Deacon added. “With the Harris parents and Chloe’s half-sister Carol already out of the way, and with the Palmer couple and Hewitt eliminated, there’d be no one left to interfere with Ashton’s plans.”

  CHAPTER 41

  (Tuesday Afternoon— Road Town, BVI)

  It was Slade’s first trip to the British Virgin Islands. Deacon’s instructions had been clear. Go immediately to Road Town on Tortola, BVI’s main island, to check the blonde woman’s body first-hand for an accurate identification and interview the local director of Palmer’s BVI-registered company. Do whatever’s needed to find out where Ashton, posing as Richard Palmer, had stashed the money cheated from the Chinese and where he went in a private jet after leaving BVI’s local Beef Island airport.