by Fiona Brand
Reichmann had been an aristocrat, a banker and an SS Officer, but his primary talent had been theft.
One of the rumors—perhaps more than a rumor—was that the crates of treasure had been hidden in a series of caves on the coast of Juarez.
Dennison had spent weeks searching Juarez, cruising the coast in a launch, walking the seashore and slogging through jungle, but he hadn’t found anything that remotely resembled a system of caves large enough to hide a substantial cache.
The previous year, however, the story had been given unexpected credence by the discovery of a mass grave containing both the bodies of the original crew of the Nordika and a naval dive team that had investigated the wreck in the eighties. For a brief time, the legend of the treasure had been resurrected, and Juarez had crawled with treasure hunters.
Dennison hadn’t bothered. The gold bullion had undoubtedly been stored in Juarez, but he was willing to bet that it had been for a very short time. Reichmann had used it to buy protection from Marco Chavez, and when he had moved into the States, he had likely taken what was left of the gold with him.
While Dennison had lived at the Chavez compound, he’d had years to go through Marco’s papers. He hadn’t found much, just a few leads. One of them had been about the late George Hartley, one of the original SS officers who had sailed on the Nordika. Hartley had betrayed Marco and the cabal, providing the Navy with enough information to instigate the original investigation that had ended in the dive tragedy. If Hartley had known where the Nordika was scuttled, then to Dennison it had followed that he could have known the location of the treasure.
Checking into Hartley’s past had largely been a dead end, but he had pulled up one significant fact after holding a gun at Hartley’s lawyer’s head and forcing him to hand over a journal.
The journal had been in German. It had taken Dennison weeks to decipher it, and the process hadn’t been without its frustrations. Hartley had been laying the groundwork for his memoirs. Unfortunately, aside from the relatively short interval Hartley had worn the SS uniform and then turned to organized crime, his life had been uneventful. But Dennison had turned up one interesting snippet of information.
It was known that Reichmann had stolen money, gold, art and artifacts. According to Hartley, he had also stolen diamonds.
Specifically, a large cache of polished and cut stones from the diamond-trading de Vernay family.
Dennison found the newspaper that had carried the story about Ben Fischer and reread it. It was a long shot, but Todd, Ben Fischer’s brother, had been researching the Nazi cabal just before he was killed. It was a matter of public record that one of the people he had interviewed had been George Hartley. If Ben Fischer had retrieved his brother’s personal possessions from Costa Rica, it was possible that he had information that Dennison could use.
He studied the details of the epitaph, then walked into the tiny cramped office that opened off the kitchen, booted up his laptop and dialed up a search engine. Seconds later he studied the telephone pages for Shreveport. Rummaging in a drawer, he found a pen and some notepaper and wrote down the details. He had his street address.
Shutting down the laptop, he packed it into his briefcase. He folded the piece of notepaper and the newspapers he wanted on top of the computer, fastened the case, then walked back out to the kitchen and placed the keys to the bar on the kitchen counter. “I have to go away for a few days. You’re in charge.”
Louis’s expression was outraged. “I can’t look after this place on my—”
“Employ someone,” Dennison snapped, his mind already locked on the task ahead. “I’ve got unfinished business to attend to.”
Nine
Sara locked up the library and stepped into the parking lot. She had spent her lunch hour researching the codebook she had found. The amount of material on World War II codes was staggering, and most of it had to do with the race to break the Enigma codes. The mechanized enciphering machines had been supremely efficient and the codes difficult to break. The addition of double coding—that was, encoding the clear before it was enciphered—had made the task doubly difficult.
She caught a blur of movement out of one eye. A split second later she was jerked back against a hard, male body and a gun was jammed against her throat. The sour smell of sweat and the unmistakable scent of marijuana filled her nostrils.
“If you want my bag, take it.”
A hand clamped over her mouth. He began to drag her away from her car and the light, toward the deep pooling shadows of a service lane. His continued silence sent adrenaline pounding through her veins. She was abruptly certain this was no ordinary attack. If he had wanted her bag, he would have snatched it and left, although if he was high, his ability to reason might be nonexistent.
The other alternative was that he was a rapist, which would fit his need for darkness. Her car was parked in the brightest part of the lot, and was easily visible from the road and the park.
She sagged, letting him take all her weight, and at the same time pulled her feet up so that she dropped to the ground.
He grunted with surprise as she sprawled on the asphalt and rolled free. Hard fingers wound in her hair as she surged to her feet. Ignoring the stinging pain, she chopped at his wrist, the movement instinctive. The gun discharged and spun away. A blur of movement off to the left registered, the slam of a car door. One of a group of lanky teenagers dressed in team uniforms tackled the assailant.
The two men grappled on the ground. Seconds later, her attacker scrambled to his feet, scooped up the gun and ran.
The kid sprang to his feet. “Jay, he’s got a gun!”
Jay, who was pounding down the street, stopped at the corner. In the distance, Sara heard the roar of a powerful engine. The fact that her attacker had a car surprised her. She had assumed he was some kind of vagrant.
A young woman helped her to her feet. “Are you okay?”
She pushed strands of hair out of her face and stared at the wink of taillights as the vehicle rounded a corner and accelerated away. Her pulse was still pounding, and she was shaking. Her hand hurt where she’d chopped at his wrist, although she didn’t think she had broken a bone. “I’m fine. Thanks for stopping and helping me.”
She worked out and, a couple of years ago, she had done a self-defense course. She had seen the physical activity as a necessary balance in a life that at times was too quiet and too studious, but now she was glad she had taken the course.
She had seen his face and she had an idea of his height and build. He had clearly been Latino, and his face had been pockmarked with scars. Maybe it wasn’t the most distinctive description but, with any luck, in a town like Shreveport, it would be enough.
A young man in sweats handed her her purse. “Do you need help getting to the police station? We can take you if you’d like.”
She looked at the young fresh faces around her. They were all maybe seventeen or eighteen—technically young enough to be her children. Great. Not only was she shaking like a leaf, now she felt like an old lady.
When she finally got home, it was just short of midnight. Parking her car in the lot behind her apartment building, she turned off the engine and the lights and studied the lit area outside the apartment entrance. Tension that just hours ago hadn’t existed gripped her, although the idea that the man who had attacked her would know where she lived or stake out her apartment in order to finish what he had started was patently ridiculous.
Grabbing her bag, she exited the car, and pressed the remote-control key, locking the vehicle as she covered the few yards to the door. She inserted her key card and punched in her PIN number. When the lock disengaged, she stepped inside, closed the door and stared out into the parking lot—for a moment back at the library, the smells of sweat and marijuana turning her stomach.
She strode down the hall and fitted the card into her door. When she had searched for an apartment, she had specified a ground floor property. She had wanted the additional luxury of
being able to step outside onto grass, of having her own small piece of garden. Now she would gladly trade it for one of the cheaper upper-story apartments.
She had laid a formal complaint with the Shreveport PD and given her statement. An APB was out on the guy she had described, although the officer she had dealt with hadn’t been optimistic about their chances of finding him. The cities of Shreveport, and its close neighbor, Bossier, just across the Red River, had their share of crime, including a busy homicide list. The fact that her attacker was armed was cause for concern, but the scenario of an armed man attacking a lone woman in a parking lot wasn’t unusual. She should count herself lucky that she had gotten away unscathed, and that nothing had been stolen.
Stifling a yawn, she checked her answering machine, her stomach tensing slightly as she remembered the call to Bayard the previous evening. The light wasn’t blinking, which meant there were no messages.
After showering and changing into a pair of cotton drawstring pants and a tank top, she made herself a hot drink and a snack, brushed her teeth, then propped herself in bed and turned on the small television set she kept in her bedroom.
She flicked through game shows and documentaries and settled on a sports channel. The NFL game was as simple and straightforward as apple pie—utterly divorced from the attack in the parking lot—but even so, every time she relaxed and began to drift off, a flashback to the attack would snap her back to alertness.
At one in the morning, her head finally drooped on the pillow. Awareness of the flickering picture, the monotonous drone of the sports commentator, faded as darkness rushed to meet her.
The frozen chill of a Vassigny winter seeped into Sara’s bones as she stared at the bright red scarf wound around her neck.
Maybe the thread she had left on the floor by Reichmann’s safe wouldn’t matter. He already knew someone was stealing information.
Although, she reminded herself, not from his safe.
The leak could have originated from Stein, who also held a codebook in his possession.
Reichmann was arrogant and cruel, an aristocratic Teuton with a touch of vanity that made him easy to handle. Alexander Stein, on the other hand, showed no tendencies toward any form of self-indulgence. He was cold, methodical and very efficient. He seldom showed any emotion at all.
A small shudder went down her spine. His previous posting had been in Lyon at the Ecole de Sante Militaire—the location of one of the Gestapo torture chambers.
Lately, Stein had also been resident in the Château, but his rooms were more accessible than Reichmann’s. He also had an office at the prison at Clairvaux, where he carried out much of his interrogation work, a third potential source for a leak.
But the telegram had specifically named Vassigny, not Clairvaux. At one point Sara had considered obtaining information from Stein’s book and discarded the idea immediately. Unlike Reichmann, he didn’t take risks with the book. It was kept under lock and he carried the only key with him at all times on a chain around his neck.
Her heart clenched. Fear was a sour taste in her mouth.
Survival. Preservation. The concepts had been drummed into her during the two-month training course at Inverie Bay in Scotland. The SOE instructors had been ex-military and ex-agents. Everything they had taught they had learned through personal experience, some in the First World War, and on the beaches at Dunkirk.
She needed to get back into Reichmann’s office.
Stripping off the coat and scarf, she dropped them across the back of her chair, opened her correspondence file, took out a letter she had taken down in shorthand that afternoon and began typing.
Ten minutes passed, then twenty. It was past five. Outside the sky had darkened; she could smell the savory scents of food being prepared in the Château’s kitchens.
Finally, Reichmann left his office. She listened intently, nerves stretched taut as she registered the distinctive sound of his boots on the wooden stairs. He was going to his rooms.
Picking up the letter she had typed, she placed it on a clipboard and carried it through to Reichmann’s office. Halfway across the room, she stopped. She had forgotten her spectacles. Heart pounding, she walked back to her desk, found her bag, extracted the spectacles from their case and slipped them on the bridge of her nose. They were a detail, but an important one. She needed the layer of protection her guise as a shortsighted secretary provided. She usually kept her head down, her voice soft, the image of a mouse uppermost in her mind. If Reichmann or Stein ever looked past her dowdy clothes and hair and the delicate glasses, she wouldn’t last five minutes.
She knocked on Reichmann’s office door. When, as expected, there was no answer, she strode into the room, collected the key and unlocked the strong room. Leaving the door open so she could hear if Reichmann was on his way back, she unlocked the safe, picked up the thread and inserted it between the correct pages of the codebook.
With jerky movements, she locked the safe and exited the room. Footsteps rang on the stone flags as she locked the strong room door and replaced the key in its hiding place.
Walking swiftly, she stepped out of his office and closed the door behind her just as Reichmann stepped into her office.
She smiled smoothly. “Herr Oberst, I didn’t realize you had gone out. I have the letter you required for the morning.” She handed him the clipboard and watched as he removed a gold pen from his pocket. “If you don’t require anything else, I’ll go home.”
Reichmann’s expression was oddly distracted as he signed the letter and handed it back to her. “By all means. You have already worked past your normal hours.”
“Then I’ll leave. Armand has guests tonight.”
“Another soiree, madame?”
“Unfortunately, no.” The only “soirees” they had were the small parties thrown by Armand for the leaders of the occupational force—a political necessity to maintain his privileged position. With nothing but sprouting potatoes, shriveled apples and spoiled wine to serve, because the Germans had all but emptied their storerooms, there was no chance for anything but grim survival. “Business, I’m afraid. Armand is trying to convince some of the farmers to modernize their farming methods.”
His gaze was clear and cold, his contempt for what he considered the peasantry, clear. “Commendable.”
Placing the clipboard on her desk, she reached for her coat and scarf.
“Just one more thing, Madame de Thierry. We have had a little…emergency. I’ll need you to come in tomorrow.”
Heart pounding, she slid her arms into the coat and wound the scarf around her neck. “The usual time?”
“That’s correct.”
“I’ll be here.”
She could feel his gaze boring into her back as she picked up her purse and left. She kept her pace sedate as she walked through the vaulted hall and down the front steps, quelling the panicked urge to run.
Four hours later, warm air plumed from Sara’s lungs, forming a fine mist in the icy air as she waited with Armand.
Shadows flickered at the edge of the forest. Jacques de Vallois and his men, with their “package,” an American SOE agent by the name of Marc Cavanaugh.
As soon as Cavanaugh flowed out of the forest, a Sten gun held in one hand, as at ease with the cold, alien landscape as any of de Vallois’s men, her stomach did a familiar little flip. Cavanaugh had been an instructor at Inverie in Scotland, training recruits in close quarters combat and survival skills. During those two months, he had barely spoken a word to her that wasn’t part of the course, and she had been utterly focused on passing each unit and getting to France, but as stubbornly as she had repressed it, the awareness had grown.
Cavanaugh’s mother was originally from Lyon, which explained his fluency with the language. For the past year he had been working on and off clandestinely in France, helping to train Resistance groups, and coordinate their activities. They had been instructed to shelter and assist him.
De Vallois lingered to collect f
ood supplies and ammunition, and to exchange information about the movements of the SS and the Milice—French Collaborators—a group in which he had a spy. With the mounting activity in Lyon and swelling numbers of troops indicating an imminent assault, he and his band of Maquis were moving camp and traveling deeper into the forest. The fighting philosophy of the Maquis was to inflict damage with minimal losses to their fighting force. They had no wish to become involved in a pitched battle with an SS panzer division.
When de Vallois and his men melted back into the forest, Sara turned and issued orders in rapid French.
“You have a vehicle nearby?”
She swung around to find Cavanaugh looming over her, his shoulders broad in a dark jacket, his eyes calm and remote. “Yes, but only for the forest roads. After that we walk. This close to the SS garrison, it’s risky to use a vehicle at all after dark. Anyone caught on the roads after seven risks being shot.”
When they reached the cover of the trees, she found her knapsack, rummaged in it and handed him a dark woolen coat. “Wear that. The wool makes you disappear, and when you brush against trees and shrubs it doesn’t make any sound.”
Armand grinned. “You’ll have to excuse Sara. She likes to give orders.”
Cavanaugh shrugged into the coat. “In this case, she’s going to have to take some.”
Armand’s expression cooled. “Who are you?”
Sara placed a hand on his arm. “It’s all right, Armand. I know him. Don’t forget, he’s not an airman, he’s an agent.”
Cavanaugh’s gaze fastened on her. “I know your work on encryption systems. I’ve been instructed to get you out.” He unzipped a pocket in his jacket and handed her an envelope. “I have your orders.”
