“A cat with PTSD?”
We looked at each other, each sharing the other’s knowledge of the nightmares we shared.
“Was Frank involved with anything that might have led to his death?” I said.
Jo said nothing for a while. Then she said, “I don’t know for sure, Peter. Maybe.”
“What about your friends? I mean people who knew you both?” Jack stopped glaring at Jo and purred as I scratched his ear.
“All our friends were Frank’s friends,” Jo said. “And I don’t trust them.”
“Why not?”
“Because I think, maybe, Frank was involved in something—something big—and his friends might be part of it. You’re the only person I felt I could turn to.”
I tried hard to ignore the thoughts in my head, angry thoughts about running back to the lover she dumped for a richer, more powerful man. Taking a deep breath, I forced them back down into the black hole from which they came. I’d been down that road of misdirected resentment before. It was a wrong way street and one I didn’t want to travel again.
“Something like what?”
Jo finished her drink again and held out her glass. I lifted Jack off my lap and placed him on the couch next to Jo. “Take care of the lady, big guy,” I said. “That’s an order.”
When I returned a minute later, Jack was kneading Jo’s lap.
“I think he’s getting used to me,” she said.
“It’s the Scotch,” I said. “You smell like me now.”
“Why do you call him Jack?”
“After Kerouac,” I said. “I read him growing up.”
“I think he’s a Maine Coon,” Jo said, checking Jack’s paws and the white fur beneath his face.
“A what?”
“Maine Coon,” she said. “They were bred to mouse in cold New England winters. You can tell by the long fur, the fur on the bottoms of his paws, and this white ruff. And his size. Maine Coons grow for four years rather than two like other cats.”
“You know cats?”
“We had them when I was growing up,” Jo said. “My mother’s passion, not the general’s.”
I sat down again. “Back to the question, Jo. Something like what?”
“Frank had an office in our house,” she said. “An office no one ever entered except him. Not me, not our house cleaner. When he died, I had to hire a locksmith to open the door. There was a wall safe I had to have opened, too.”
“Anything inside?”
“Just papers. Bonds and legal stuff.” She paused and took a drink. “Then I found another safe hidden under the carpeting and had the locksmith open that. There I found something.”
“What?”
Jo shook her head. “I need you to come to my house and see it,” she said. “To make sure I found what I think I found. You’d know. I know you would.”
“I—don’t know what I can do for you, Jo.”
“Please, Peter, I need your help,” she pleaded. “I think somehow Frank … I think Frank was mixed up with Nazis. Not those skinhead neo-types you see on TV. Real Nazis. Like from the Third Reich.”
CHAPTER 2
JO LEFT ME DIRECTIONS to her home in Rancho Bernardo, a so-called “planned community” in the foothills of eastern San Diego. Planned, of course, meant a community where the residents could afford homes that cost in the high six or seven figures, and a complexion pale enough to please the bankers making the home loans.
I remembered what Jo said about Crane’s extremist views, how he treated her as his blonde, blue-eyed wounded war hero trophy wife. Emphasis on the blonde and blue-eyed. This would certainly be the type of community Frank would choose to homestead. The only people with dark skin in this neck of the woods would be there to clean someone’s house, caretake their lawn, or wash their car. I wondered how Jo, who loved the men in her MP unit whether they were white, black, or Hispanic, could end up here.
Never try to understand someone else’s marriage, I thought.
Finding the “planned community” wasn’t difficult; navigating through it was. The streets snaked around hills, verdant meadows, and wooded expanses. Some ended in cul-de-sacs, others at gated walls. I drove with a Thomas Bros. map book on my lap to find Jo’s house.
My journalism career began as a reporter for a daily newspaper in Palm Springs. I’ve seen my share of the lifestyles of the rich and famous, so I wasn’t much impressed with Jo’s home. Like most of the residences in Rancho Bernardo, it was a ranch house influenced by California’s Spanish/Mexican heritage—which, I thought, was ironic. Set back from a quiet, two-lane street, its rooms spread out over the better part of a quarter acre. Red Spanish tile covered the roof. The exterior was a pale adobe color. A driveway leading to a large two-, maybe three-car garage sliced through a manicured lawn bordered by equally manicured bushes. It was large, but it was no mansion. Still, it put my little OB bungalow to shame.
Jo must have seen me through the window because she opened the front door as I made the long trek up the driveway. In the sunlight, her beauty made the knife in my gut twist even more, and I questioned for the umpteenth time why I agreed to help her. And for the umpteenth time, the reasons flashed through my head. We were close once, brought together by wars that left us both physically and emotionally scarred. Together we had righted a terrible wrong. Plus, she had once saved my life. All that and the fact I probably still loved her made it inevitable I would help her.
“Back with the sunglasses, Peter?” she greeted me, smiling.
“Only in the sunlight,” I said. I removed the dark, gold-rimmed aviators I used to wear even at night to hide the scar that marred my left eye and face, a scar produced by a rifle butt wielded by a Salvadoran soldier who didn’t like me taking photographs while he and his buddies committed a war crime.
She stopped me at the door and studied my face.
“It’s looking better, even in the sunlight,” she said, then took me into the house.
“Nice place,” I said, looking about.
“But a cold place,” Jo said.
“Poor heating?”
“Poor marriage,” she answered. “This way to Frank’s office.”
I trailed behind Jo, admiring the way she now walked with only the slightest limp. Jo was leading a three-vehicle MP convoy during Operation Desert Storm when two American attack helicopters mistook them for Iraqis. The friendly fire incident left Jo injured and the GIs she loved dead.
“Your leg must be doing better,” I said.
“Lots of physical therapy,” she said.
We crossed a glistening hardwood floor and Jo unlocked the door to the study. Inside I saw a mahogany desk as large as my kitchen, with two stuffed leather guest chairs in front of it. A computer sat on the desk. Matching mahogany bookcases lined the walls. A television sat on the bottom shelf of the bookcase opposite the desk. Another shelf held the wall safe Jo mentioned. Books with expensive-looking hardcovers—the kind you find only on collectable volumes—filled the rest of the shelves. The only wall space not taken up by bookcases sported a large world map.
I whistled. “Frank must have done well in the security business.”
Crane owned World-Wide Security, providing security personnel and systems to corporations around the globe. After her medical discharge from the army, Jo went to work for World-Wide. That’s how she met Frank. Within six months she was out of my arms and into his. I could resent them both, but like I said, I don’t like to misplace blame anymore.
Anyway, looking around Crane’s study, I understood there could be no competition from me and my little bungalow.
“He did okay,” Jo said without interest. “Something I forgot to tell you last night. When I finally got inside, I had the feeling someone had been here before.”
“You mean after Frank died?”
Jo nodded. “I got the sense someone had searched the room. Not trashed it, but very quietly and thoroughly searched it. Look here.”
Jo gestured me over to one o
f the bookcases and pointed to a shelf.
“Like I said, Frank didn’t let anyone in here, not even the cleaning lady,” she said. “He cleaned it himself. But look at this thin layer of dust. There are drag marks showing the books have been removed and replaced.”
I studied the shelf. Thin scrape marks disturbed an otherwise even layer of dust. I looked at the shelf above that one and found the same scrapes. I stepped to another bookcase and saw more of the same. And something else.
“These three books have been replaced upside down,” I said.
Jo examined the books and nodded.
“Frank would never do that,” she said. “He was OCD about stuff like that.”
I pulled out each book and flipped through them. Nothing fell out and none of them were extraordinary.
“I wouldn’t have even started looking around for disturbances except the locksmith said he thought someone had tried to crack the wall safe,” Jo said. “He showed me what he said were telltale signs of someone using tools to break into it.”
I looked around the room, then stepped over to the large bay window that looked out to their backyard. If you could call acreage the size of a small city park a backyard.
“What about these windows?” I asked. “Were they locked?”
“Yes,” Jo said. “And I checked outside for footprints. Nothing but the gardener’s boot prints.”
I wandered around the room, looking at everything, seeing nothing, and still wondered why I was there. Finally, I said, “Is this what you wanted me to see, Jo?”
“No,” she said. “Remember I said there was a floor safe?”
Jo stepped over to one of the guest chairs and shoved it aside. She knelt on the carpet, her leg wound still stiff despite the therapy she mentioned, and felt around for something. I heard a click and a section of the carpet popped up. A hidden trapdoor. Jo grabbed it and pulled it open. Beneath it was a safe buried in the home’s concrete foundation and secured with a combination lock.
“I found this entirely by accident,” Jo said as she started spinning the combination wheel. “I dropped an earring and it fell under that chair. When I moved the chair to retrieve it, my bad leg gave way. I fell right on top of the trapdoor and it popped open. I had to call the locksmith back to open the safe.”
“Did he say there were signs of someone trying to crack that safe?”
“No, he said there were no signs of tampering.” Jo finished the combination, opened the safe door, pulled some papers from it, and set them aside. She reached back into the safe with both hands, pulled out a cloth sack, and laid it gently on the carpet. The top of the sack was held closed by a cord sewn into the fabric. Jo untied the cord and pulled back the sack to reveal a glistening gold bar.
I dropped to my knees and leaned over the ingot. It was the width and length of a red building brick but only half as thick. Cast width-wise into the top surface was an identification number—DR199030. Above this were the words DEUTSCHE REICHSBANK, then FEINGOLD 999.9. At the very top was the image of an eagle with its wings spread, a wreath grasped in its talons. Inside the wreath was a swastika.
Nazi gold.
CHAPTER 3
“IS IT REALLY GOLD?” Jo asked.
“I don’t know.” I hefted the bar in both hands. “It’s certainly heavy enough. But it could just be a gold-plated lead bar.”
I carried the ingot to the desk and set it down with a thud. Searching through the desk drawers, I found a pair of scissors. Using one of the blades, I scraped at the bar expecting the gold to flake off. It didn’t. I looked at Jo.
“It’s real gold, all right,” I said.
“But is it Nazi gold?”
I ran my fingers over the eagle and swastika, and shrugged. “Where would Frank get a bar of Nazi gold?” I said. “Where does anyone get a bar of Nazi gold? Was there anything else in the safe?”
“Just these.” Jo handed me the papers she’d pulled from the safe. I shuffled through what were photocopies of Kriegsmarine radio messages from World War II. Since I don’t speak German, the only way I knew they were from the German navy was the word Kriegsmarine printed at the top of each message and the year they were sent, 1942.
“Do you speak German, Jo?”
“No,” she said. “Oh, one thing more.” She bent down, reached into the floor safe again, then stood with her hand outstretched. “There was this, too.”
It was a silver ring. Its flat bezel was embossed with the twin-lightning bolts of the Nazi SS. The shanks on either side of the runes held the Nazi eagle. Rolling it over in my hand, I spotted an engraving on the inside of the ring. The letters were worn but, taking the ring over to the brighter light near the windows, I was able to make the word out. KRAN. Numbers followed the word—13-03-40—which I recognized as a European date format.
“There’s a name,” I said. “Kran. And it’s dated March 13, 1940. Obviously, it’s not Frank’s. Did Frank’s father serve in Europe in World War II?”
Jo shook her head “I don’t know. Frank never talked about his father. He said his father died when he was just a baby.”
I set the ring down and looked at the photocopies again. The messages were in plain German, not coded. But like I said, I didn’t sprechen Deutsch. Well, no more than just that.
The message with the earliest date, May 3, 1942, read:
“Heute Ziel 0300 erreicht. Fracht intakt. Bereit für den Kontakt von der deutschen Botschaft Mexico City. Müller.”
The second one, dated about two weeks later read:
“Begann Vorbereitungen für Zebra. Standort, der per Messenger weitergeleitet werden soll. Bereit für ein Wort von der deutschen Botschaft Mexiko-Stadt. Tijuana Konsulat Personal alarmiert. Müller.”
The final message, dated two weeks after the second, read:
“Nachricht erhalten. Wird den Notfallplan Zebra sofort initiieren. Müller.”
“The only thing I can make out of these is something about a zebra in Mexico City and Tijuana,” I said.
“That doesn’t make sense,” Jo said. “What would the German navy have to do with Mexico during the Second World War?”
“Actually, Mexico declared war on Germany,” I said. “I learned that when I worked out of the Mexico City bureau. The Mexicans are quite proud of their contributions to the Allied cause. They were neutral at first, but then Nazi U-boats sank a couple of their ships by mistake.” I looked at the message dates again. “And I think it was just around the time these messages were sent. 1942.”
“And zebras?” Jo asked.
“Maybe a code name,” I said, shaking my head. I mulled it over, then remembered an old history lesson from school. “You know, during the First World War, Germany tried to get Mexico to declare war on the U.S., hoping to keep us out of the war. The Brits intercepted a diplomatic letter to the Mexican government and passed it to our people. It was called the Zimmerman Letter. Z—Zimmerman. Z—zebra.” I shrugged. “A connection? Maybe they were trying to do the same thing early in the second war. Who knows?”
“We should get those translated,” Jo said.
“I agree,” I said. “And I know just the guy to do it. Jonathan Glasgow. He’s one of those conspiracy authors. Writes about secret societies and stuff like Hitler still being alive and living in Antarctica. I sat on a writers’ conference panel with him once and, I must admit, he knows his stuff when it comes to the Nazis. He doesn’t live far from here. I could give him a call and take these up for him to look at. The ring, too.”
“What about the gold bar?”
I shook my head. “Keep it locked up in the floor safe. I don’t want to be driving around with Nazi loot.” I thought of something and asked, “Do you have a camera?”
She did, and after she fetched it from another room I photographed each side and end of the gold bar, making sure to get clear close-ups of the numbers and Nazi eagle.
I wound the film up in its canister and removed it from the camera. “I’ll get these developed today and call
Jonathan,” I said. “Think I’ll also drop by the cop shop and talk to an old friend.”
“About Frank?” Jo asked.
“And you,” I said.
“Well, I hope you put in a good word for me.”
“Count on it,” I replied. “In the meantime, Jo, where are you staying?”
“I’m back here since—” She let the sentence drop.
“Is that safe? I mean, with—” I gestured at the evidence of a break-in.
“World-Wide beefed up the security after Frank died,” she said. “And, as you know…” She smiled mischievously. “I’m armed and dangerous.”
☼
I didn’t want to take the film to a commercial developer. The fewer people who saw the photos of the gold bar the better. Greed has a strange effect on people, turning a normal God-fearing Joe Average into a calculating criminal and even a murderer. I took the roll to a friend, Jay Bernbaum, a “shooter” or photographer for the local paper. While Jay developed the film in the paper’s darkroom, I made use of the office photocopier to make dups of the radio messages.
“Hey, Pete,” Jay said as he walked out of the darkroom. “The negs are ready. Is that a gold bar in the shots?”
“A prop,” I said. “A movie guy I know in Hollywood is making a heist picture and asked me if I knew where he could get some authentic-looking fake Nazi gold. That bar in the photo was made by a local guy who does World War Two re-enactments. Pretty realistic, isn’t it?”
As a journalist, you sometimes stretch the truth a bit to get people to talk to you. It sometimes concerned me that I had become so adept at lying, but not too often. But our entire society was made up of deceivers, and I rationalized it as just fighting liar with liar.
Jay shrugged. “I wouldn’t know Nazi gold from bupkis. You want prints?”
“Yeah, eight-by-tens of the best of each side and then blow-ups of the eagle and the numbers.”
“You got it,” Jay said as he disappeared back into his shooter’s cave.
The Fourth Rising (Peter Brandt Thrillers Book 3) Page 2
