by Steve Berry
Hana stood at a counter twenty meters away sipping a bottled water.
For him, knowing the lay of the land, and the players in a room, came from living in an autocratic society where no one trusted anyone. Keeping everyone off guard was the most effective mechanism in retaining control. His family, occupying the apex of the political pyramid, had always enjoyed the luxury of only looking for trouble beneath them, never above. But that didn’t mean you ignored your family. His father had executed his own father’s brother, branding his great-uncle an enemy of the state. As a younger man, he’d never understood that. But as he’d grown older, the idea that family might pose the greatest threat had become a much clearer reality.
His half brother was living proof.
His own immediate family, though, remained benign. His children were all grown, all of them except Hana married. None to his knowledge had any interest in politics. His sons were businessmen, his daughters either mothers or teachers, living in North Korea. He hadn’t spoken to any of them since he’d left. It seemed that his fall from power had also included losing his children. Hana alone remained loyal, never judging, always there. She so reminded him of her mother. They’d not been married. Instead, she’d been one of many mistresses he once maintained. On that score he and his father and grandfather were much alike. He couldn’t help it. Women were a weakness. He’d met Hana’s mother twenty-five years ago when he was still in favor, drawn by her beauty. His wife had never minded his dalliances, content with the wealth and privilege that being married to the heir apparent had provided. But she, too, left him after the fall, remaining in North Korea when he fled to Macao. Which he hadn’t really minded. The marriage had turned depressing, draining from him much-needed talents and energy.
As he studied Howell and the woman Parks had said was named Jelena it was obvious they were connected. Their light touches and casual conversation seemed proof of a close relationship. They seemed utterly at ease with each other, content that everything had worked as planned. So what should he do next? He could proceed a number of ways.
But Jelena made the decision for him.
She stood, kissed Howell lightly on the lips, and walked away, leaving the satchel on the table. Perhaps she was visiting the restroom? Or headed somewhere else? Didn’t really matter. They were now separated and he caught Hana’s eyes with his own.
And he saw she knew exactly what to do.
MALONE STUDIED KIM YONG JIN, WHO WAS CLEARLY INTERESTED in Howell and the woman. He had to assume Kim knew both his and Howell’s identity—as who else on board that cruise ship would have set him up for Paul Larks’ death.
So what now?
The answer came as the woman with the satchel left Howell and bounded off toward the restrooms.
Kim immediately walked to Howell’s table and sat in the empty chair.
“MR. HOWELL, YOU AND I HAVE NEVER MET PERSONALLY. BUT WE do know each other. I am Peter From Europe.”
It took a moment, then Kim saw that Howell seemed to register the identity.
“We’ve emailed,” Howell said. “What are you doing here?”
“I’ve been looking for you.”
Howell looked much like his photo on the website. Mid-thirties, trim build, thinning black hair. The bio from the site had also noted a degree in political science. No work experience had been referenced and Kim doubted this man had accomplished much, besides stumbling onto what may be the cleverest weapon of mass destruction ever devised.
“How did you find me?” Howell asked, concern in his voice.
“Paul Larks facilitated that. I assume from him you know me as the Korean.”
He caught the surprise on Howell’s face as the American reached for the satchel and started to leave.
“That would not be wise.”
“Go screw yourself.”
Howell lifted the bag.
“I have Jelena.”
Howell froze.
“She is my prisoner.”
Howell’s gaze raked the room in the direction the woman had gone.
“Quite right. She just left. But my associates have her hidden away. Her life is now in your hands.”
He kept his voice low, directing both his words and gaze straight at his intended audience. The use of Jelena’s name sent a further message that he was also informed. But he hadn’t forgotten about Malone, across the room, who was certainly watching.
Howell sat.
“Much better,” he said.
He allowed Howell a moment of composure.
“I have to say, I’m disappointed in both you and Larks. I paid for you and him to come here, the idea being that I wanted to meet with you both. I thought we shared the same ideals. But then I learn that you considered me untrustworthy. A foreigner.”
“This doesn’t concern you. I’m not a traitor.”
“You’re just a man who thinks the rules do not apply to him.”
“They don’t apply to anyone.”
“Are you right, Mr. Howell? Is what you say true? That’s what I came to find out. We do share the same ideals. I want to believe what you say.”
He thought appealing to this man’s ego might work. People like Howell, who’d convinced themselves of the righteousness of their cause, were easily swayed by sympathetic ears. That same tactic worked every day across North Korea.
“Are you an American citizen?” Howell asked. “Do you really pay taxes? Are you subject to our laws?”
He shook his head. “None of the above. I lied about my predicament. But only because I truly want to understand what it is you know.”
“Why does this concern you?”
“It seems that anyone who is willing to aid your cause should be viewed as a friend. I doubt you have many allies. From what I know, you are a convicted criminal, a fugitive from American justice. Yet you judge my motives?”
The younger man leaned forward and whispered, “I’m not telling you a damn thing.”
Howell had seemed to calm himself. His nerve had returned, along with the boldness that had surely guided him in exile.
He made his position clear. “Then she will die.”
“I’ll get help from the crew. Turn you in.”
“And I will do the same to you. Except that you will then be available for arrest and extradition back to the United States, and Jelena will be at the bottom of the Adriatic, her body weighted, sunk to the depths.”
He could see that Howell was beginning to realize this was serious.
“What do you want?”
He pointed to the satchel. “To read what’s in there. After that, you and I will speak again.”
The ferry continued its smooth path east across calm water.
He did not have the time for Howell’s obvious agony of indecision. So he made the call for him, reaching for the case and saying, “Wait here.”
THIRTY
VIRGINIA
STEPHANIE FELT BETTER NOW THAT HER AGENTS WERE APPRISED OF the danger potential. She’d meant what she’d said to Joe Levy. Never had she taken unnecessary chances with her people’s lives. After ending the call to Cotton she’d called Luke, who’d just made contact with Treasury’s eyes and ears, a female agent named Isabella Schaefer.
“I should have Treasury recall her,” the president said.
They were still sitting alone in Ed Tipton’s den. Dawn was not far away. She was tired and needed sleep, but she knew how to run on adrenaline. The president was a notorious night owl.
“Let’s not,” she said. “That agent has a ten-day head start on us. We could use her knowledge.”
He did not argue or object. Instead he sat silent, as if weighing the emergence of a new idea. She’d made both of her calls using Tipton’s landline. Danny had assured her that their host had said it was okay. But she was beginning to get the idea. “The Chinese now know I’m in the game.”
“Which means they’ll be watching and listening to you.”
That meant, be careful with mobile phones.
There was nothing secure about them.
“It’s that damn FDR,” he said. “This is all his fault. He was the luckiest bastard in the world.”
“He was crippled.”
“Which didn’t stop him. His greatest successes came after the polio. Before that he was just another spoiled rich kid, an only child, a mama’s boy. All he ever did his whole life was exactly what he wanted. He didn’t know the meaning of the word no.”
She knew a little about Roosevelt. His father died when he was eighteen and his mother had indeed become an overriding influence. As a young man he was attractive, clever, and ambitious, using family money and connections to steadily climb the political ladder. But there was nothing wrong with that, anybody in the same position would have done the same. Still, he lost two elections prior to contracting polio in 1921. After that he went 6–0. Two terms as governor of New York. Four terms as president of the United States.
“I’ve read a lot about dear ol’ FDR,” Danny said. “I never realized, but he wasn’t all that bright and never amounted to much of anything at school. He talked more than he listened, and was not opposed to stretching the truth when it suited him. Teachers did not speak highly of him. He knew little to nothing about either money or economics. Why would he? His family on both sides were rich. Everything was always provided for him. His grandfather, on his mother’s side, sold opium to China. Can you imagine what the press would do with that today?”
She wondered about the rant, which seemed a bit out of character.
“His first two terms as president were a failure,” he said. “Unemployment in 1939, after six years of Roosevelt, was worse than in 1931, before he was ever elected. Stock values had also plummeted to new lows. And the national debt? That’s his greatest gift. It grew more in the 1930s than in the previous 150 years. All he did was print money, spend it, then print more. If it hadn’t been for World War Two he would have been a two-termer, gone and forgotten. War saved this country, not FDR.”
“But he offered people hope,” she said.
“Stephanie, he just plucked at their heartstrings and told them what they wanted to hear. He stood for flag, God, and motherhood. Today he would have been filleted by the press. His flip-flops on the major issues would have been the jokes of late-night TV. Instead he lived in a time when no one even reported he was crippled. The press was more than friendly—they were downright complacent. Look at 1940 when he campaigned on a pledge to stay out of the war. Then, in 1941, as soon as he was sworn in a third time, he implemented Lend-Lease to the Brits. Is that staying out? We supply them equipment, they take that equipment and fight. How long did he think the Germans were going to stand for that? If Japan had not attacked Pearl Harbor, the Germans surely would have made a move on us of their own. But no reporter ever took him to task. No one ever said a word. Roosevelt had a free pass.”
“What’s all this about?” she asked. “Why does it matter about FDR?”
“Because he was a condescending prick, patronizing and humiliating. And those aren’t my words. Those came from Dean Acheson, who worked for him and saw it for himself. Now here we are, decades later, faced with the results of that arrogance.”
She was still puzzled.
“The man preached moral leadership, yet he had too many mistresses to even count. We talk about Kennedy and Clinton and their indiscretions. They were amateurs compared with FDR. He lied to his wife on a daily basis. Any man who can do that will have no problem lying to the country. He chose to go after Andrew Mellon simply because he could. But he lost, big time. He underestimated Mellon. That old man was not stupid.”
“You held back with the ambassador,” she said. “You didn’t tell him what this was all about. But you know, don’t you?”
“That’s another two-faced SOB. China wants what FDR was supposed to find.”
“Care to tell me what that is?”
“We know that Mellon gave something to FDR when they met in 1936. It had to be that page with numbers. The code. That’s what FDR was supposed to figure out. Mellon probably had possession of certain documents that could have been harmful to the United States. They probably concerned Haym Salomon. There was some sort of internal Treasury investigation in 1937. That we know, too. Larks copied its report. He also copied other classified papers.”
“Cotton has the documents in sight,” she said. “You heard him.”
“Which gives me some comfort. I don’t want those falling into the wrong hands.”
The name Haym Salomon finally rang a bell. “There’s a big bronze statue in downtown Chicago, near the river. George Washington, Robert Morris, and Haym Salomon. I’ve seen it.”
He nodded. “It’s been there since ’41. Roosevelt called it this great triumvirate of patriots. It’s one of the few memorials erected to Salomon. He’s a forgotten figure, but appears to have been an important one. Hell, we might owe his heirs $300 billion.”
“But you and I know that could hardly be what this is about?”
“I agree. But in 1936 that debt was still in the many billions and would have been a big deal. The same was true in the 1920s, when Mellon first came across the information. Repayment then could have bankrupted the nation. Not to mention the pure embarrassment of the whole thing. So Mellon, being Mellon, used what he knew to his advantage and managed to stay in power until the Depression made his blackmail irrelevant. That’s when Hoover got rid of him.”
“There has to be more to this than just that.”
“There is.”
They’d been inside Tipton’s house a long time, and she sensed that their conversation should be finished in the car where they would be alone.
“Shouldn’t we be leaving?” she asked.
Danny stood. “I need to get back to the White House, before things get going for the day there.”
His voice had grown low and tired.
“Here’s the deal, Stephanie. Mellon fashioned some sort of hunt. Something that would be, to use his words, the end of FDR. He provided the code and a starting point, but FDR, being the arrogant prick he was, crumpled it up and threw it away. We now know that crumpled sheet still existed in April 1945, when FDR died, and that it was given to Morgenthau at Treasury.”
She heard what he hadn’t said. “But it wasn’t among the papers you read yesterday.”
He shook his head. “No, it wasn’t.”
Which begged several other questions. But she held those for now and asked, “Why would Mellon hide something away that was so potentially harmful, and then give FDR a way to find it? If he hated the president, just use it and be done with it.”
“It’s like what Finley wrote in his diary. Mellon was a patriot. He hated FDR, but not America. He hid away what he had, then gave his enemy a way to find it solely for torment. He actually wanted FDR to find it. Surely, if it’s as bad as Mellon said, Roosevelt would have destroyed it. No harm done, except that FDR would have skipped to Mellon’s beat. For men with egos like those two, that was more than enough satisfaction. Today we do the same thing. We torment our enemies in the media, or on the Internet, or the social networks. We let ’em twist in the wind, just enough to drive ’em nuts.”
And she had no doubt that Danny spoke from experience.
“But Mellon overestimated his importance,” she said, “and FDR didn’t take the bait.”
“Not soon enough, anyway, as Tipton told us earlier. It seems that on the day he died, nine years after the fact, FDR had finally decided to pay attention. The problem for us is that it’s still out there, waiting for our enemies to find.” He paused, seemingly in thought, then asked, “You really think what’s on that paper is a code?”
“It sure sounds like it, and makes sense.”
“Then we have to find that missing crumpled sheet.”
THIRTY-ONE
ADRIATIC SEA
MALONE WATCHED AS KIM LEFT WITH THE BLACK TUMI CASE. HE debated what to do. Go after it? Or stay here? Howell’s face was thick with concern. Clearly
, whatever had just happened was way over that man’s head. Since there was no place for Kim to go aboard the ferry, he decided to stick with Howell and see what could be learned. He rose, walked across the room, and sat at Howell’s table.
“Who the hell are you?” Howell eyed him with an innate suspicion. Then recognition came to the younger man’s face. “Ah, crap. You’re government. What? IRS? FBI?”
“Neither. But I am a guy who can help. What just happened?”
“Does the whole damn world know what I’m doing? How did you find me?”
They were attracting attention.
“Keep your voice down, okay? And don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. What did Kim want?”
“Who’s Kim?”
“The guy who was just here. Kim Yong Jin.”
“Who is that?”
“Not someone you want to mess with.”
“You here to take me in?”
“That was the original plan, but things have changed. Paul Larks is dead.” He saw that Howell had not known that. “Kim killed him.”
Howell appeared both frustrated and scared. “This is getting way out of hand. You may not believe this, but I have no idea who that Korean is. He and I emailed some, but he used an alias. What does he want with me?”
“Actually, I can believe all of that. But I need to know what’s in that satchel?”
“Look … what’s your name?”
“Cotton Malone.”
Howell threw him an odd look. “How’d you get a tag like that?”
“Long story, and we don’t have the time. Answer my question.”
“That guy Kim has Jelena, my girlfriend. He said he’d kill her if I didn’t hand over the satchel. She’s an innocent here. We met in Croatia. That’s where I’ve been hiding. She was just doing me a favor. Larks bought my ticket for that cruise, but I changed it into her name.”
He doubted Larks bought anything. More likely Kim had financed the whole venture as a way to gather the players in one place.
