The Tsunami File

by Michael E. Rose

  “Who do you work for, Mr. Delaney? Becker said.

  “International Geographic magazine. On this assignment. I’m a freelance journalist. I work for a number of clients.”

  “Not all of them media,” Becker said.

  “You’re confident about these facts? You’ve seen my personal file? Some papers?” Delaney said, knowing Becker would not have much patience for sarcasm. He was correct.

  “You insult my intelligence, Delaney,” Becker said. “I will find out more about you easily.”

  “Why would you agree to see me if you don’t think I’m who I say I am, Mr. Becker?”

  “I had something I wanted to tell you,” Becker said.

  “I’m listening,” Delaney said.

  “It is the same thing I told Smith when I saw him in his hotel. I will not have you or anyone else jeopardizing this operation. I will not have you spreading lies about me and my team and that file. You will stop this immediately.” “Or someone will get beaten up?” Delaney said. Becker was trembling slightly. Delaney had seen the telltale signs of adrenaline coursing through the body of an adversary many times before.

  “Have you had much to do with police in your work, Delaney? In whatever work you actually do?”

  “Quite a bit, yes.”

  “Then you will be familiar with the reactions of police who think they have been unfairly accused.”

  “No one likes to be unfairly accused, Mr. Becker. Not just police.”

  “Police do not like to have their reputations damaged, Delaney.”

  “No one does. Journalists don’t. And I thought you were a civilian anyway. Are you a policeman? Or maybe you’re a military man.”

  There was a pause.

  “So now a warning comes, is that next?” Delaney said eventually.

  “What is your feeling on that, Delaney? Do you think a warning is likely in such situations?” “Maybe not an explicit one,” Delaney said.

  “Ah,” Becker said. “Perhaps you have had some real experience of dealing with police after all.”

  On the way back, Bishop was as cheery as Delaney had seen him in days.

  “I took a few frames of the house and the car and the licence plate,” Bishop said. “I went around the back to try to get a shot of you guys inside with a long lens but no dice. The wall was too high and I couldn’t see you at all.”

  “That’s OK, Tim. He’s got a pretty unforgettable face.”

  “Bulldog boy. Seems like a nasty little guy.”

  “Yup.”

  “A bit shy around cameras.”

  “Yup.”

  “I’ll try to get a shot of him when he goes in to work at the IMC tomorrow maybe,” Bishop said happily.

  “Careful, buddy.”

  “Always.”

  “Wildlife photography.”

  “Love it. Savage beast shots.”

  There was a telephone message slip pushed under Delaney’s door when he got back to the hotel. And the message light was flashing on his phone. Jonathan Rawson had been trying to call, very late, it seemed, Ottawa time. Delaney had taken to switching off his cell phone when editors were getting anxious.

  The CSIS man answered his phone on the first ring.

  “It’s Francis, Jon. What’s up?” Delaney said.

  “Well, my friend, you seem to have a talent for digging up interesting stuff. That’s why we love you over here at Canada’s finest and only security intelligence service.” “What you got?”

  “A little bit of CSIS freelance money for you, I would think. From right now.”

  “I’ve got an assignment already here, Jon. Magazine piece, with nice pictures to go with it. You’ll read it in your dentist’s office sometime in the next month or so if I ever sit down to write it. I don’t need any extra CSIS dough.”

  “We think it’s a story for CSIS too now, probably. If not for some other spook outfit somewhere.”

  “What have you got?”

  Delaney heard Rawson shuffling papers in Ottawa.

  “Well, for that young dental guy from Netherlands, nothing much. Sounds like he’s who he says he is. A dentist with forensic tendencies. No big deal. A bit of trouble at university with pot smoking, maybe more than usual, but then everybody in Holland is stoned all the time anyway. Nobody cares over there. He’s a nice normal young Dutchman, it seems. Helping identify tsunami victims for his country.” “And Becker?”

  “Ah, well, Becker is slightly more interesting. An Army doctor, German.”

  “Army?”

  “Retired actually. He works still at the big military hospital in Frankfurt. Pathology. Cuts up soldiers who get killed. That sort of thing. High security clearance, or so my good friends in Germany tell us over here in Canada. Nothing strange on his file that they were willing to share with us anyway, but he smells high level to me. Strange guy to be sent out to do routine cadaver stuff at a disaster scene.”

  “There were a lot of German tourists drowned out here, Jon.”

  “And there’s lots of German pathologists who aren’t senior ex-Army to go out to Thailand to do their bit.”

  Already, Delaney was getting the impression that Rawson knew more about Becker than he was willing to share with a freelancer. Whether it was a freelance journalist or freelance CSIS operative. It was always like this, with Rawson & Company. Sometimes Delaney had patience for it, sometimes not. Tonight, he was patient.

  “And Heinrich?”

  “Ah, Heinrich,” Rawson said. “Now this Mr. Heinrich could be very interesting, if it’s actually him over there. This could be big, Frank. This is why we figure you’re in for a little CSIS expense money about now.” “What you got?”

  “Who wants to know? International Geographic?” “Spare me, Jon.”

  “Seriously, Francis. Who’s your client going to be now, on this one? Who are you going to be this time, reporter or spy?” “Do we always have to do this, Jon?” Rawson and CSIS valued Delaney highly, for his skills and his contacts and his performance in the field on past spook assignments for them. They often told him so. But he had also upset his CSIS clients a couple of times, by failing to follow instructions, or publishing more on a story than they had expected, or simply going off, as they would put it, half cocked.

  “Can you just give me what you’ve got on Heinrich? Then we’ll worry about my career?”

  Delaney said.

  Rawson hesitated, and then said: “It’s my career I worry about, Francis, whenever I work with you.”

  “Be brave, Jon.”

  “Well, look, anybody who reads the papers could have told you that Heinrich was a heavy duty Cold War spook working for the West Germans for many years. But actually inside the GDR. One of very, very few.” “Yes? And?”

  “You know this stuff already, you must, by now,” Rawson said.

  “What else have you got that I don’t know?”

  Delaney said.

  “It’s what you’ve got that’s the thing, Francis. If that is actually Klaus Heinrich’s body you’ve got over there, this could be very big.”

  “For who?”

  “Any number of people. Or just us, even, because we like to know about such things. Little Canada and the little intelligence service that could . . .”

  “You make sure the Germans and God knows who else knows that CSIS is out there doing serious work.”

  “Sure, of course. It never hurts. It’s a mutual back-scratching sort of world now, Francis, more than ever before. You know that. Post-9/11, blah, blah, blah.”

  “So basically, this is a little tidbit of information you can throw to the Germans, or the Americans, or whoever, for, what, future considerations?”

  “Maybe. Not sure yet. It’s just nice to have interesting information in the satchel. I like that feeling. So if that actually is Klaus Heinric
h you have over there, and if he didn’t die in 2001 like we all thought he did, well, you’ve got an interesting story on the go, my friend. We like that. That’s why we all love you so much.”

  “Why would anybody want to make it seem like Heinrich died in 2001 and then, what would it have been, shift him over here to live?”

  “Why indeed? That is the question. But I can think of a number of very interesting scenarios for something like that, Francis. Can’t you? Cloak and dagger stuff.”

  Delaney had already been pondering cloak and dagger scenarios for several days.

  “If it’s actually Heinrich over here,” Delaney said.

  “You seemed pretty sure in your email to me, Francis. You’re not going to get coy with your Uncle Jonathan now are you?”

  Delaney had been a journalist for more years than he cared to remember. He had been on assignment in more places than he cared to remember and he had been in danger more times than he cared to remember. People in war zones had pointed guns at him. People had beaten him up. Airplanes he had flown on had often seemed like they were going to crash and burn.

  He had always, however, thought that if he was going to die on assignment somewhere, a car would be the most likely cause of death. He had hurtled down very bad highways in Nigeria in overloaded, rickety, trembling Peugeot 504 station wagons, the deathtrap taxi of choice in West Africa. He had sat sweating in fear beside apparently suicidal local drivers on hairpin roads in Haiti. He had ridden notorious intercity buses in the mountains of Peru and Mexico, with drivers and passengers crossing themselves and kissing rosaries throughout the journey. He had even had people try to run him down with cars.

  Despite, therefore, his recurring fear that a car would be the end of him one day, Delaney did not at all expect someone to try to kill him with a car in the big parking lot behind the Metropole Hotel early on the morning after he spoke to Rawson by phone. He was walking to where he had parked his rented Toyota under some shade trees on the far side, on his way to a Phuket Town travel agency to buy a plane ticket to Germany. He was lost in thought, pondering scenarios, with no reason, yet, to think anyone was upset enough to try to crush him under the wheels of an automobile.

  The windows of the white van moving through the hotel parking lot that morning were tinted very dark, as with so many vehicles in Thailand. Delaney could not see the driver at all. But there was nothing immediately alarming about a large passenger van with tinted glass moving through the parking lot in the distance as he went to his car.

  What was definitely alarming was that the van suddenly accelerated with a mighty roar and a burst of blue-black diesel smoke. It careened left around a line of parked cars to Delaney’s right, and came swaying and skidding into his lane. He could not see the driver clearly through the dark glass but he could see, all too clearly, that the driver was trying to kill him.

  Delaney dove with all his strength between parked cars to his left. He landed painfully on his forearms, then stomach, then thighs on the hot pavement, ripping his clothes, scraping his skin. He smelled diesel and rubber and hot asphalt and fear, white hot fear.

  The van sideswiped the line of parked cars with a terrific crash of metal and plastic and glass. Lying in the shade between two cars, panting and bleeding, Delaney heard the van shift gears and roar mightily again, this time as it sped away. He heard the squeal of tires as the driver made another wild turn, and then he heard a rumble in the distance and the shout from a guard as the driver apparently raced off through the parking lot gate.

  All went suddenly silent. Delaney rested where he lay. He breathed deeply, calmed himself, listened and waited for a while in the rubber-scented, fuel-scented shade. For the moment, and for some time afterward, his thoughts were no longer on Berlin.

  PART 2

  Phuket, Berlin and Bonn — March 2005

  Chapter 9

  Jonah Smith was a fingerprint man. But he hardly knew himself in Thailand. He knew full well he had been transformed. However the transformation had now gone far beyond an unaccustomed suntan and a new mustache or his growing collection of floral shirts and the Chinesemade bicycle he rode to work.

  He sat, alone, fully dressed, on his bed at the Bay Hotel, pondering who he had become. The identification was proving difficult.

  Delaney was in Berlin. Conchi was at her own hotel, sleeping alone tonight. Zalm was likely drinking far too much in a bar somewhere in Phuket Town, doing penance for his sins over the Deutschland file. Mrs. Jonah Smith was in England where she belonged, surely untroubled by questions of who she was or how to do the right thing.

  Jonah Smith, for his part, was alone at the Bay Hotel, pondering who he had become.

  Frank Delaney, Smith thought as he sat propped up on his immaculate hotel bed, did not appear to have any trouble knowing who he was or what needed to be done. Delaney had simply decided he would go to Berlin to pursue the story wherever it might lead, had bought a plane ticket and gone.

  The new Jonah Smith, on the other hand, enjoyed no such certainty. Doing the right thing was no longer easy, the way no longer clear. He could no longer distinguish good guys from bad.

  In the past it had been easy. He would work alone at his small desk at Scotland Yard or at Interpol, matching fingerprints, following crime scene stories wherever they might lead. In the past, like any good fingerprint man, he simply made the match, informed his police superiors, and went on to the next case, the next match, the next story, wherever it might lead.

  This time it was different. The rules of the game had been breached; victims and villains were no longer easy to tell apart. His Phuket police colleagues and superiors were either angry, or not to be trusted, or both. He no longer had anyone he could trust on this, except perhaps a Canadian journalist he had known for just days, and a Spanish woman he had loved for just weeks.

  Smith was a man who had always sought—in his professional as well as his personal life—certainty, confirmation, clarity. He had found none of these things in Thailand, nor, he thought ruefully, could he find them any longer in London or Lyon, either professionally or personally.

  He got up from the bed and went to examine himself in the bathroom mirror. The new Jonah Smith looked tired tonight, a little bit worse for the wear. The scrapes from his beating had faded but not disappeared. A deep shadow remained under his left eye socket but the bruise was no longer quite so black. A thin linear scab had formed at the corner of his mouth where the stitches had been. His hair, though now sun-bleached, looked thinner than ever. It was the hair of a tired middle-aged man; at least that much of the identification was certain.

  Before leaving Lyon for Thailand, Smith had consulted the classic fingerprint literature for certainty, guidance, inspiration, as he always did before any important forensic assignment. He carried with him to Phuket, as always, a few of his favourite texts. Smith went over to the shelf where he kept his books and consulted them again for assistance.

  In Phuket, Thailand, in the Bay Hotel, in late March 2005, a passage by Sir Francis Galton once again provided him with wise counsel, despite the words having been written in 1892. Smith smiled as he imagined the father of fingerprint science writing quietly, with Victorian-era certainty, at his old desk at the Royal Society in London all those years ago:

  Whenever honest persons travel to distant countries, the need for a means of recognition is more keenly felt, Galton wrote. The risk of death through accident or crime is increased and the probability of subsequent identification diminished . . .

  Frank Delaney was clearly not a man who would spend his time reading classic texts by Sir Francis Galton. Smith understood that perfectly well. But Delaney did know a lot about the risk of death through accident or crime in distant countries. Before leaving for Berlin, he had told Smith, and Conchi, about his near-death experience in the parking lot of the Metropole Hotel.

  Smith thought Delaney was remarkably sanguine about som
eone having tried to kill him with a car. Conchi, on the other hand, thought Delaney was remarkably foolish, and she told him so, angrily, as the three of them sat around an outdoor table at the Whale Bar on the very humid Phuket afternoon before Delaney left. She was angry because Delaney had approached Horst Becker about the Deutschland file, she was angry that someone had subsequently tried to kill him, and she was angry that someone might now try to do the same thing to Smith.

  “You are stupid, Frank Delaney,” she said.

  “Stupid, stupid. Do you think now that this German will leave us all alone?”

  “We’re not absolutely sure it has anything to do with Becker,” Delaney had said. “Oh really?” Smith said.

  “Of course it is Becker,” Conchi said. Smith could see that Delaney almost certainly thought so too.

  “Well, our only choice now is to find out what’s really going on and sort these people out,” Delaney said. “That’s why I’m going to Berlin.”

  “Someone will try to kill you there, you watch,” Conchi said. “And someone will try to kill Jonah here too. And me too now, no? In Spain we know how Germans are when they get mad.”

  “You’ll be all right, Conchi,” Smith had said. He touched her arm. She looked over at him and touched his arm. He could see Delaney filing this little scene away in his journalist’s memory.

  “This is all stupid,” Conchi said. “Men, you’re all stupid. You get mad, you get so violent, you make me mad, all of you stupid men. Jonah gets a beating, his face gets scratched up. Stupid Frank almost gets killed by a car. For what?”

  “We want to know who that dead man really is,” Smith said. “You don’t really have any trouble understanding that, Conchi. I know you don’t.”

  “Yes, I do, yes I do have trouble understanding that.”

  “It’s not worth it if they kill you.”

  “Why do you work so hard in Bosnia to identify bodies in those mass graves, Conchi. Hmm?” Smith said.

  “That’s different, Jonah. There are families over there who need to know. No one tries to kill me for it.”