by Alec Peche
“That’s a great idea,” Jo agreed. “We may be letting our American view get in the way of the truth or at least an understanding of these groups.”
Jill looked at the time, it was still morning in Germany, and she had no idea what a high tech CEO might be doing at this time of day. She supposed he’d be in meetings, but they would soon find out as she dialed his number.
Chapter 8
“Hello Jill, have you found Nick’s murderer?” was apparently Henrik’s new way of answering the phone. This told her he had faith they would quickly solve the case and that he was worried enough to drop his usual polite manner of easing into a conversation.
“Sorry, but we haven’t Henrik. We wanted to pick your brain to understand a secret operation that began after WWII that Nick may have been affiliated with.”
“I don’t doubt that he was involved in with some kind of secret as I still have been unable to identify his real identity beyond Nick Brouwer who as you said appeared to have been created three years ago. It’s so rare that I can’t find the identity of someone and our friend Nick has become a personal challenge for me. Tell me about your secret operation.”
“I attended Nick’s autopsy a few hours ago, and he appeared to have healed bullet and knife wounds. He also had a tiny tattoo under his hairline. We’ve identified that tattoo as belonging to Operation Gladio, a secret leave behind army that NATO countries created at the end of WWII. At that time, the fear was Russia would expand its left-leaning philosophies to Europe. Paranoia was rampant, especially after the Berlin Wall’s construction. There was fear that Italy would be the next target. Allegedly these armies had their origins in the CIA and MI6, and according to the Italian parliament, these ceased operations in the early 1990s. Nick would have been too young to have any involvement in such a secret army, but we have no other explanation for the tattoo. He was heard to be in conversation with someone shortly before a scuffle broke out and then he was pushed out of the castle tower. Witnesses didn't see the faces of the two men, but we’re sure it was Nick and another man. The language wasn't recognizable by the witness but thought to be German or Dutch. Have you heard of Operation Gladio or stay behind armies in Europe?”
There was a pause at the other end of the phone as Henrik was thinking about Jill’s words and then he said, “I’ve not heard of Operation Gladio, but as a German, I’ve lived through the Berlin Wall. As for stay-behind armies, I'm aware of them, but not the specific one you’re referencing. I have a friend who is a political science professor at Stuttgart University. Let me give him a call and pick his brain about stay-behind armies. He sees conspiracy everywhere, so I’m sure he’s up to date on these groups. I’ll give you a call or email you with what I learn.”
“I bet Henrik has some interesting opinions on the Berlin Wall,” Marie said. “He’s lived through history that we can only imagine. We’ll have to ask him about it sometime.”
“We had 9-11 in our country and the civil rights movement, but other than that, recent American history is boring compared to other parts of the world,” Jo said.
“How about if we spend another thirty minutes searching for more information on Operation Gladio then we could visit the Brains Brewery sample their beers and toast to Nick,” Angela suggested ever the beer aficionado.
Her friends agreed, and soon there was silence in the room as they were chasing facts about the operation. Marie was amazed that Facebook had recent comments from people about Operation Gladio; mostly the conversation seemed to be that the Operation had never gone away.
Nick’s tattoo only made sense if the Operation was active in say the recent ten years. Maybe the Prime Minister had lied to the Italian Parliament saying it was dismantled when it hadn’t been, or perhaps the CIA and MI6 lied to the Prime Minister while secretly continuing the operation. It would be interesting to hear the opinion of Henrik’s friend; Jill made a bet with herself that he would say that Gladio was still in operation.
Half an hour later, they’d had their fill of paranoid conspiracy theorists, and so their topic of conversation during the brewery tour was how they could get information on the CIA and MI6 secret operations. After all, they were secret, duh! They’d never tried to research what was alleged to be top-secret information. In the covert world, what was real and what was an illusion?
“How about contacting Special Agent Ortiz in San Francisco?” Jo suggested. “Perhaps a friend in the FBI might tell us about covert operations of the CIA. Let me do a quick search to understand the relationship between the two agencies. If they don’t get along, maybe the agent might be more willing to assist us.”
“That’s an intriguing thought; use one American agency against the other,” Jill agreed. “How about our friend David Gomez from our Colorado case last year? He was a pretty good hacker. I wonder if he could hack into the CIA’s computer and find out if they say that the operation is still valid.”
“That’s a great suggestion, but I wonder how dangerous that will be for him” Angela agreed. “However much the FBI and CIA might despise each other, I can’t imagine them spilling state secrets to us especially if it is top-secret and they wish for the European Union to remain in the dark.”
“Maybe we should put aside this trail and go back to the males on the camera feed. You said you thought you’d eliminated four of the five males that were identified last night as potential suspects. What about the fifth male?” Jill asked.
“We’ve been unable to identify him, and his progress through the castle is certainly suspect,” Jo noted.
“Why is it suspect?” Jill asked.
“I was going to go back and study the footage again, but he appears out of nowhere. One moment he isn’t there, and then in the next, he appears in the feed. I don’t know how tall those castle walls are, but I think he might have gone over the wall.” Marie replied.
“Why don’t we ask the detectives if they have reports of people climbing over the castle walls? I don’t mean in relation to this male, but as a general rule how hard is it to climb? Are there frequent police reports from the castle or others of people getting into the castle without paying admission?” Jill suggested.
“It’s certainly a starting point,” Marie agreed.
They were inside a room containing huge stainless steel tanks of beer that was distributed to smaller kegs for transport to bar owners and such, as well as a bottling operation where their retail beer was created. The brewery was the largest in Wales, and you found signs and posters everywhere talking about Brains beer. They were on a private tour they’d arranged before leaving America. Angela had worked all of her bar contacts in Wisconsin to find someone with a connection to this brewery, and they’d felt privileged to go on the tour.
After leaving the bottling area, the tour was over, and they were taken to a local Brains Pub and deposited in a beer garden room where they could taste the many varieties of Brains. Seated, each had a different type of beer, and they clinked their glasses and said in unison, “To Nick.” and “May he rest in peace.”
They then honored his memory with funny stories involving him. Jill’s favorite was the wild ride down a mountain road in Colorado while someone in a big dark SUV was trying to push them off the road. He’d instructed her in such excellent defensive driving she should have known he was a James Bond like spy. In the end, the SUV had succeeded in pushing them off the road, but they landed safely in a prairie with airbag powder all over their faces. Jo’s favorite was when he rescued them in the windmill in the Netherlands; he used a fake police siren ringtone to get rid of a guy trying to shoot them with poison darts. Marie and Angela liked the facial expression he'd given them when they chased after Nathan who was pursuing a man that held a knife to Jo’s throat. Nathan and Nick had a good time using their skills to subdue the man, and he looked affronted that they would even think he would be in danger. It was very cathartic to remember Nick in this manner and with a final clink of their glasses their private memorial service ended.
They returned to their hotel rooms to spend more time tracking this fifth male to decide if he should stay on the suspect list. They’d gotten an email back from the detectives noting that there were occasional reports of someone scaling the castle walls, perhaps twice a year and usually a result of a guy drinking rather too much alcohol and his friends egging him on to try. Since many of them tried this maneuver in the dark, they often ended up with a sprained ankle on the other side of the wall or the realization that they had no other way to scale the wall back and out of the castle grounds. Okay if the average stupid boy could scale the wall, then it was quite possible that their fifth male entered the castle in this manner and then they could conclude that the fifth male was their suspect. It was an infinitely small coincidence that a guy would choose to scale the wall in the middle of the day as a lark perhaps fifteen minutes before Nick was pushed to his death.
“I think we need to go to the castle and study the approximate position that this guy appears and see how high the wall is at that point. We also might want to get any exterior camera footage from the city or businesses across from the castle,” Angela suggested.
Since no one had any better idea, they exited their hotel for the walk to the castle. Along the way, they soaked up the beautiful city of Cardiff and the residents that inhabited it. Jill watched people interacting with each other, while Angela stopped to take a few photographs. Jill was always amazed at the composition of Angela’s pictures, but then she should have expected this from someone whose profession was photography. Angela was so skilled that Jill found herself rarely taking photographs anymore; she’d just get a copy of Angela’s.
They’d used a map of the castle to ascertain approximately where the man appeared, and so they were on Cardiff’s North Road. They stood studying the pedestrian traffic and wall height in this area. None of them were rock climbers, but Angela, the tallest of them, thought that if she had that kind of skill; it would be relatively easy to duck into the shadows of the trees and get over the wall using a combination of the brick ledges or the tree to help. While there was both car and people traffic in this area; a man that was quick could time his approach right and scale the wall with ease or for that matter a person could go over the wall in the middle of the night and wait for daylight hours to appear. Still, it would pay to check cameras around the city. Cardiff had nearly three-hundred closed caption cameras collecting footage around the city, so she’d ask whoever was watching the cameras if they had footage of this particular section of the wall. Hopefully, the trees in the area wouldn’t block the view.
After asking the detectives about the camera locations, they learned that there were many hours of camera footage and they would need some way to make it usable. The Welsh Police were going to make a run at consolidating the massive amount of footage. Jill knew they could get help from Jo’s friend Jack, a video expert, but in order to have his help, she needed a copy of the footage which the police had declined to release to her so far. Jill and Angela returned to their hotel.
“Let’s return to Operation Gladio,” Jill suggested. “Can we come up with a recent list of perhaps the last five years of anyone that has commented on this topic?”
“I’m not sure that will help. It’s a pretty crazy group of people that comment on this topic. They remind me of the case we had in Sacramento; the anti-government people,” Jo replied.
“So are there hundreds of people commenting or just a few?” Jill asked.
“Just a few, but I would classify them as bat-shit crazy as they often remark that Russia is going to take over the world,” Jo said. “I guess this is a case of you had to live through the Cold War to understand it. I know a few people who see conspiracies around every corner, but I’m not one of them.”
Chapter 9
For eighty years, the secret order had played a game of chess with the European continent. The order prided itself on upholding its three values: covert operations, death to communists, and prevent a World War III. Of course, in Latin, the motto sounded much stronger and romantic, but over time the order had moved away from their Latin origins. They still spoke in a coded language; well not a coded language, but rather one that few people outside the order spoke.
In 1944 at the start of the order, in the original meeting of France, England, and the United States, they settled on all the order’s communications being in Guernésiais, a rare language from the island of Guernsey which was briefly and resentfully occupied by the Germans in WWII. It was a combination of French, Norse, and English and few people in the world could identify the language upon hearing it. This obscurity made it rather perfect for the order as they could readily teach the language to new members. They had little fear, outside the small population of about fourteen-hundred native speakers on the island of Guernsey, of being understood or even detected as to the language’s origin. At times it sounded like French, while other times it sounded like English or Danish. The French could hear the odd word that they recognized, but it would still be hard for them to follow a complete conversation. The order had never had someone intercept their communications.
In the past decade, the order had sustained dwindling numbers and an ongoing conversation as to its role in the current world order. Communism was at play in few countries, and it was not increasing in popularity. It economically seemed to hobble a society from joining the first world. Countries like Russia and China had drifted from communist doctrine into socialism with capitalistic influences. An original list of twenty-five or so countries was now down to five, and those five provided little threat to the rest of the world. The order had not influenced the formation of a single government in the last twenty years.
New members were recruited out of the military, but the present order members were having a difficult time whipping up enthusiasm or even extolling the victories of the past. No new members had joined in the last decade. There was little mission, and the doctrine was out of date with today’s society.
Nick Brouwer had been recruited to the order immediately after his required service to the Belgian military. The Berlin Wall had fallen a few years earlier. It had been a heady time as the order had influenced its destruction. Then Nick had become their strongest proponent for the dissolution of the order as he had not seen any relevancy for the group in nearly 15 years. However, one did not voluntarily leave the order. You were killed in action or died by the hand of your fellow order members so that the secret went with you to the grave. This be killed or get killed was the reason the order had not completely shut down, and it was also the reason there were no new members. Why put your life on the line for a cause that wasn’t important anymore. With Nick’s passing there remained fifteen members of the order; at odds with themselves and the world they inhabited. The last class of recruits had joined following their father or uncle membership.
All fifteen members were meeting in an apartment across the English Channel in Le Havre, France in two hours. The murder of Nick Brouwer caused an irreparable chasm among the fifteen members. They needed to discuss the future of the order and the women in Wales that Nick was set to meet. How much had Nick revealed to the women about the order?
Chapter 10
Jill received a reply from Special Agent Leticia Ortiz that she had never heard of Operation Gladio and the FBI had no current information on the subject. The agent suggested that Jill contact the CIA as their agents would be the ones with knowledge of such an operation. It was another dead end.
After a conversation with her friends, she decided to contact David Gomez, an excellent computer hacker from Colorado to see if he could reach into the CIA records. Her FBI contact did not provide her with a contact at the CIA, and she figured she’d go nowhere without someone opening the door for her. So, she’d bypass their front door and sneak in the back.
Jill met David when he hired her to look into the death of his partner on the ski slopes of Colorado. David taught coding in a public school in hopes of steering his kids towards job
s in tech industries rather than a more criminal use of their skills. Jill knew it would take at least a day before David got back to her.
One of the problems the team was having was the historical context of this group. So much of it dated back long before the invention of the Internet, and so many pieces of communication were lost forever. Jill took another look at everything that Marie and Jo had found on the operation.
Jo stood up and said, “Let’s take a tour of the National Museum. Besides, I think we got all of the useful stuff on the order, so I’m not sure there’s anything more to do.”
Marie looked up and said, “I agree with you. I keep seeing the same rhetoric over and over again. Since we’re not getting anywhere, let’s at least be tourists while we're waiting for others to get back to us.”
Soon the four of them were on the way to the Museum with somewhat lighter hearts when they caught the rare Cardiff sunshine while leaving the hotel. It was a beautiful fall day. Dry and unseasonably warm. Trees and flowers still had the look of peak bloom from the summer, but here and there you could see fall setting into the leaves on some trees. It was such a pretty day they decided to change their destination to St. Fagan’s Museum as it had many outdoor areas. With some help from hotel reception, they soon rented bikes and were cycling towards St. Fagans. What a perfect afternoon!
They started on sidewalks next to a road with tract houses but eventually came upon the Ely River Trail from which they had great views of the river on their way to St. Fagan’s.
“This sort of reminds me of our trip to Zaanse Schans outside of Amsterdam. It was outside of a major city and more of an open-air museum,” Angela said.
“I’m amazed you remember the name of the windmill museum and I like our weather better in Wales. As I recall, it was raining and very windy,” Marie said.
