by Fiona Brand
She ripped the envelope open and skimmed the letter it contained. It had been signed by Colonel McCleod, her commanding officer. Her stomach tightened. In retrospect, she shouldn’t have been surprised by Cavanaugh’s arrival. The second she had seen the telegraph in Reichmann’s safe she had known it was time to leave. If she stayed and got caught, and Reichmann or Stein found out who she really was, she risked jeopardizing much more than Armand’s network. She met Cavanaugh’s gaze. “You already know about the leak.”
“We intercepted a message two days ago.”
Her jaw tightened. Two days. That meant he had left immediately. “I can’t go. Not yet. If I disappear, the entire network will be in jeopardy.”
Armand was suddenly there, a solid rock between her and the American. His dark gaze bored into hers. “What leak? What have you found out?”
“I haven’t had time to tell you. I saw a telegram in Reichmann’s safe. They’ve narrowed the code leak to Vassigny.”
Cavanaugh’s gaze sharpened. “Then we leave. Now.”
Sara kept her own gaze level, her voice flat. “We can’t. Reichmann has asked me to work tomorrow. If I don’t turn up at the Château in the morning he’ll know something’s wrong. He’ll tear the village apart. I need time to construct a cover story—a sick relative in another town, perhaps—something that will make sense. Besides, the next scheduled border crossing is in forty-eight hours. Leaving tomorrow night will give us a twelve-hour start. We’ll be in Switzerland by the time Reichmann finds out I’m gone.”
It would also give her time to break into Reichmann’s safe and get the ledger.
An hour later, Sara stopped at the concealed entrance to a warren of underground tunnels.
Armand lit an oil lamp. Light flared, golden and warm, making her aware of how cold she had become despite the long walk. She glanced at Cavanaugh, seeing him clearly for the first time that night. He was as dark as Armand, but younger and much taller. In terms of looks, he could easily pass for French, or even Italian. Shrouded in the dark wool coat, he could have been one of Armand’s men, except for the eyes. They, she decided, were what made him different: cold, remote and used to command.
The ease with which he held the Sten put him firmly in context. He’d had military training and active service before he’d moved into intelligence work. “You won’t need a gun.” Yet.
Sara woke with a start, bright lamplight hurting her eyes.
Vassigny. Stein.
Cavanaugh.
She stared, disoriented, at the color and noise blaring from the television screen, still tangled in that dark cold world and the unpalatable fact that Bayard seemed to be as inextricably part of that last life as he was of this one.
Fumbling through the rumpled covers, she found the remote and killed the TV. She’d spent years avoiding Bayard, but in the past few months she had bumped into him several times. At the memorial service for Uncle Todd a few months ago, then Steve and Taylor’s wedding. He had also turned up at her father’s funeral.
The dreams and memories had stopped when she was twelve, and had resumed briefly when she had come into contact with Bayard when she was eighteen. Since then she had been utterly normal—until now.
Pushing the covers aside, she shrugged into a robe and walked out to the kitchen, made herself a cup of hot milk, then walked through to the bathroom and found the small bottle of sleeping pills her doctor had prescribed shortly before her father had died.
She hadn’t used them then. She’d had weeks to prepare for her father’s death, and shuttling to and from the hospital, her father’s house, her apartment and work had left her perpetually exhausted. Whenever she had the opportunity, she had literally fallen into bed.
She shook a pill into her palm. It was after three in the morning, the wrong time to take a sleeping pill, but she was desperate.
She swallowed the pill, chasing it down with the warm milk and walked through to her bedroom. As a precaution, she set her alarm just in case she overslept.
Vassigny.
She frowned. She was certain it was a place name. On impulse, she walked out to the sitting room, found her atlas and ran her finger down the index.
The name leaped out at her. Not Louisiana, or anywhere in the States.
France.
She noted the grid reference and turned to the map of France and all the fine hairs at her nape lifted. Vassigny was a small village at the base of the Langres Plateau, not far from the Swiss border.
A crumbling Château, dark pines, vast silences…
She snapped the atlas closed.
The sleeping pill was working. Her head felt heavy, and—probably because she was already exhausted—she felt clumsy and uncoordinated. But that didn’t change the clear, sharp knowledge in her mind.
It was happening again.
The dreams, the horror.
And this time, it was intruding into her real life.
Ten
Sara checked with the Shreveport PD before leaving for lunch at twelve. Rousseau, the detective who had taken her statement the previous evening, wasn’t in yet. He worked second shift and didn’t start until two. Her call was transferred through to the field office and picked up by a crisp-voiced officer who identified herself as Detective Canon.
A few minutes later, Canon found the file. Rousseau had done some checking, and the man she had described didn’t have any kind of profile in either Shreveport or Bossier. It was possible he was new in town, or just passing through. His description had been circulated and they would keep looking, but unless he attacked someone else and they managed to get a license plate or Sara could add to the information she had given them, the likelihood that they could locate him was slim.
Bright sunshine made her wince as she stepped out of the dry, cool, air-conditioned environment of the library just after one. Moist heat enveloped her, making her break out in an instant sweat, and a surge of dizziness hit, an unpleasant side effect of the sleeping pill she had been battling all morning. She gripped the railing until the dizziness passed. A few seconds later, she continued on down the stairs and headed in the direction of the nearest café.
Ten minutes later, a deli sandwich tucked in her purse and a take-out coffee in one hand, she strolled back in the direction of the library. Smothering a yawn, she paused for a pedestrian crossing. When the walk sign flashed, she started across the road.
The throaty roar of a car sounded. Car horns blared and someone screamed. Pedestrians scattered. For a split second time seemed to slow, freeze, as her sluggish mind processed the fact that the car was torpedoing straight toward her. Coffee splattered across the road as she flung herself to one side. Hot exhaust filled her nostrils as she hit the asphalt and rolled, pain exploding in her hip, her shoulder, her head.
The roar of the car receded. Shakily, she pushed to her feet. An elderly man picked up her purse, which she must have dropped, and helped her to the sidewalk.
She leaned into him, limping and ridiculously weak. She was bruised and sore, she had wrenched her ankle and her palms were bleeding, but she was alive.
He helped her to an empty table at a nearby café. A waitress hurried over with water and a supply of paper napkins. “Do you need an ambulance?”
Sara blotted her palms, which were leaking blood and watery fluid. She realized her white blouse was spattered, and so were her beige pants. The lurid stains made her injuries look a lot more serious than they were.
“I’m fine.” She peeled the napkins off the heels of her palms. The bleeding had almost stopped, making them look raw and sore. “If I could use your bathroom to clean up, that’s all the help I’ll need.”
“No problem.” The waitress indicated the restroom doors just visible at the far end of the café.
As Sara pushed to her feet, the elderly man handed her her purse. “Are you sure you’re okay? Shock is a funny thing. It can sneak up on you.”
She put more weight on her sore ankle. When it held, she straightened and let out a breat
h. She didn’t feel good; aside from the dizziness and the fact that she was shaking with reaction, her head was throbbing. She didn’t think she had a concussion, but the bang on top of the sleepless nights and the sleeping pill hadn’t helped. “A couple of painkillers and a good night’s sleep and I’ll be fine.”
He stared in the direction the car had sped off. “Damned maniac. People like that shouldn’t be allowed on the road.” He handed her a piece of notepaper. “I wrote down the license plate. If you don’t want to call it in, I will, but there’s more chance the cops will haul that guy off the road if you put in the complaint.”
Sara took the number. “Don’t worry, I’ll do it. I’m on my way to the precinct as soon as I clean up.”
Ten minutes later, after she had soaked most of the stains out of her blouse and slacks and rinsed and dried her hands, she used her cell phone to call in sick at work, explaining that she’d had a small accident. Feeling closer to normal, but still undeniably shaky, she limped out of the restaurant and caught a cab.
The precinct was only three blocks over. She could have limped there, but given that she was almost certain the driver of the car that had nearly hit her had been the same guy who had attacked her last night, she didn’t want to risk it.
The detective who took her statement was concerned about the near accident, but ultimately dismissive about her theory that the driver of the vehicle had been deliberately trying to run her down.
Shreveport was a university town and there were a lot of kids with hot cars. Add the casinos on the waterfront and the drug trade, both of which generated a significant “underworld” factor, and they had their share of the weird and the wacky.
In the few minutes she had been seated in the interview room with Detective Thorpe, he had made it plain that he thought it was more likely the driver had been either a kid pulling a prank, or an addict, high on whatever drug he had pumped into his veins, than a killer.
He studied the file on her attack the previous night. “How could you tell it was the same guy who attacked you in the library parking lot?”
“I recognized his face.”
He glanced at the statement she had just filled out. “You say here that the driver was wearing dark glasses.”
“That’s right.” And last night the assault had taken place in the dark, but she had been clear enough about what he looked like then.
He tapped his pen on the desk. “Aside from the fact that he had dark hair and tanned skin and was wearing the glasses, was there anything else about him that you recognized?”
Sun had been slanting across the windscreen, glittering off the chrome grill….
She shook her head, unable to pinpoint exactly what it was that had made her so sure it had been the same guy.
“Nothing. I’m sorry.”
He made a note on his report and checked his watch.
She checked her own wristwatch. She had been here for approximately an hour. Her lunch hour was long gone. At a guess she had caught Detective Thorpe just as he was going off for lunch.
Thorpe sat back in his chair. “We have the license plate, so that’s a start. With any luck, we should be able to ID the driver, providing the vehicle wasn’t stolen.”
A second detective stopped by his desk. “We’ve checked the plate. It’s a rental, hired out of Dallas-Fort Worth Airport by one J. F. Delgado. Plus, I just pulled this off NCIS. Looks like your boy’s got a record.”
Sara stared at the black and white. The photo was of a much younger version of the man who had attacked her. “That’s him.”
Thorpe frowned. “Damn, that’s strange.”
The other detective grinned. “I was wondering when you were going to pick up on that little detail.”
Thorpe flipped the sheet around on the desktop so she could read the note at the bottom of the page and her blood ran cold. According to the file, Joe Delgado had died more than ten years ago.
At two thirty-five in the morning, she woke to find herself in the front hall of her apartment, her fingers curled around the door handle.
She had taken the chain off the door. Just a few more seconds and she would have been in the corridor. She could have made it outside and maybe even walked onto the road, if the soreness of her palms hadn’t jerked her awake.
Shaken, she put the chain back on and flicked on lights. According to the clock on the sitting room wall she had slept for just over five hours. She had needed a good night’s sleep. Instead, she had walked again.
She limped to the window and twitched the drapes aside. The city shimmered quietly, sprawled out and familiar. In the distance, she could just glimpse the hot pulse of a casino sign. The moon was up—
Shining with the same cold light that had flowed over the dark hills and forests around Vassigny.
Recoiling from the flash of memory, she turned on her heel and walked through to the bathroom, flicked on the light and rinsed her face, gritting her teeth against the sting of grazes on her palms. She dried off with a towel and stared at her reflection. It was the same face that had stared back at her all of her adult life. She had been born in Shreveport and brought up here. She had attended LSU in Shreveport. Apart from a postgraduate course at Oxford, she hadn’t traveled. In a family of footloose soldiers, she was plain, ordinary, stay-at-home Sara.
She had studied both German and French, but she had never been to either country. There was no way she should know about a place called Vassigny, let alone remember that she had actually been there.
Walking back into her bedroom, she shrugged into her robe. She would make herself a hot drink and read until she was relaxed enough to sleep again. Courtesy of her late shift the previous night, she didn’t have to be at work until one, so she could sleep in if she wanted.
Minutes later, chamomile tea steaming gently on a side table, she examined the piles of magazines and books on the coffee table. The knapsack caught her eye, reminding her that she still hadn’t heard back from Bayard, which was unusual. If she didn’t hear from him tomorrow, she would call again.
Unfastening the knapsack, she took out the codebook. Other than the cursory look at the first few pages when she had been in her father’s attic, she hadn’t touched it.
She flipped to pages fifteen and sixteen, automatically expelling a breath when there was no red thread lodged between the pages.
A wisp of memory intruded—a code reference.
Feeling certain that, like the red thread, the code wouldn’t be there, she turned pages. On page thirty-five, she stared at a table code and the combination: 8, 1, bridge.
It was the code in her dream.
Eleven
Half an hour later, Sara had printed out a number of files from the Internet about German codebooks.
The subject was huge and most of the online material was collated and presented by private citizens, which meant a great deal of the information was slanted toward a particular topic, or shallowly researched and repetitive.
From her own study of cryptology, she had a basic knowledge and understanding of codes and ciphers, although most of her research had been based on secret writing before World War II. Regardless of when the code or cipher was invented, the techniques for deciphering were based on mathematical systems. In a cipher, every letter of the original message was replaced. Once the key to unraveling a cipher was found, the entire system was broken, and any message written using the cipher could be easily read.
With a code however, this was not the case. Codes were not based on replacing every letter— in effect, creating a new alphabet—but on a code dictionary, or codebook. One word or phrase might be decoded, but the rest of the code dictionary would remain secure. The major weakness of a code over a cipher was that the codebook could be stolen, thus exposing the entire code.
On impulse, she picked up the codebook and the newspapers with the ACE advertisements and sat down at her desk. Pulling a piece of paper toward her, she began checking the line of code against the entries in th
e codebook.
Minutes later she stared at the result, which was utter gibberish.
Unwilling to give up she began working to “decipher” the text using the St. Cyr Slide—a system using two alphabets, one sliding beneath the other. A key letter is chosen—for example, the letter P—and positioned beneath the A. From that reference, the clear message was coded into the corresponding letter on the slide.
Applying the method she had used was like reaching into a haystack and expecting to pull out the needle first time. The impulse to try the St. Cyr system had simply popped into her mind. It shouldn’t have worked—but the result was grammatically perfect.
Five Down One To Go
She studied the phrase. Her mind instantly made the connection to the well-publicized fact that five members of the cabal had been murdered, most of them by Alex Lopez and, in theory, just one was left. It was more than likely that the message was a game or a joke and had nothing whatsoever to do with the cabal. But that wasn’t what worried her. She shouldn’t have been able to break the cipher so easily.
She shut down her laptop and closed the codebook, bracing herself against the automatic recoil that just touching it caused. It was just a book, an unpleasant chunk of history.
Too late to wish she had never found it.
The library was cordoned off when she arrived for work at one. The back entrance was blocked by a police officer.
She produced her ID, but he politely refused to let her in. There had been a homicide. Everyone inside the building was being detained and questioned and no one was being admitted until they were finished. He didn’t know how long the process would take, but he guessed another hour at least.
For a split second the world spun and she felt the blood drain from her face. Although the idea that Delgado had come back to finish the job he’d started was definitely wild. “Who was killed?”
