by Tom Hron
“My parents.” She sighed and cupped her face in her hands. “I never told them about the silver dollars, the ones their grandparents had given them on their wedding day. I’m sure they know that I took them, but it’s been bothering me ever since you mentioned it.” Blinking innocently, she straightened herself and looked at him with her eyes as sad as she could make them.
Nodding, he made a grateful face, seemingly satisfied with her answer. “Well, I guess that explains it.” He turned back to his polygraph.
She walked out without looking back, wanting everyone to see she didn’t have the slightest doubt that she had passed. In truth, she thought her results would turn out to be inconclusive, which was exactly what she wanted. If she came out truthful, they wouldn’t need her anymore, and if she came out as deceitful, they would know that she was on to them. Inconclusive was good. Inconclusive would buy her time, the time she needed to find the missing files, and maybe Dewey’s murderer as well. She might be next if she didn’t.
Security escorted her back to her desk, where she noticed that Reechi looked a little sweaty and out of breath. She had guessed the last thing he’d wanted to see was her zooming out of the polygraph room. Why were they working him in the library, anyway?… Her impression was that he didn’t have nearly the qualifications that Dewey Chambers had had, and didn’t know that much about computers either, which she would try to use to her advantage. If she could only get her hands on Dewey’s computer, she might learn something, like where he had hid the old files. It was impossible to carry them out, so they must be nearby. Then Reechi interrupted her thoughts.
“Hey, how did the polygraph test go?” he asked.
She waggled her head, although more in truth than deceit. “I really don’t know. Those tests are intimidating and I was nervous.”
“Understandable.” He nodded his head patronizingly. “Listen, I thought Magruder was crazy for jumping all over you yesterday, and he handled the whole thing badly. I hope you noticed that I didn’t take any part and kept my mouth shut. Scirpo stuck up for you, too.”
“Thanks.” What’s this, she wondered … but it played in her hand. Now if she could just catch a break maybe she could learn something.
He continued. “Tell me what Chambers and you were doing here, and I’d like you to go through things carefully. It will help me understand how to complete his work.”
She would be glad to, she told him, and then led him up and down the endless shelves of World War II file boxes. This is everything that remains and the boxes beside her desk were the ones Dewey and she had audited so far. It was all a matter of starting over there and ending up over here, she explained, motioning at the warehouse-like shelving. A year’s work remained, if not more, of reviewing, classifying, cataloging, and sorting everything that would go over to the National Archives. After watching his face turn aghast, she looked at his hands. They were perfectly manicured and he must have been a case officer somewhere, unaccustomed to hard work.
“I have to read all those—” He looked so surprised that he almost choked.
“Well, not exactly, since there would never be enough time,” she said. Then she saw another opening, seeing as he wasn’t used to endless tasks. It wouldn’t be long and he’d be asking her for help, at least if she played it right.
The files were usually interrelated, she explained, so if you read one you pretty much knew the subject matter of the others of the same classification. You read, skimmed, read, and then skimmed some more, at least that’s what Dewey Chambers had done. She next suggested they look at the files that were already declassified and she’d show him what she meant. He followed her back to a stack of boxes alongside her desk.
She opened the last file box that she’d used on Friday and searched for an example to show him. “I’ll find something in a moment,” she said. “What I want is a sequence—” Then she almost jumped out of her skin. Files NR-771 and NR-828 were sitting right in front of her, with Reechi standing so close behind her that she could feel his breath on the back of her neck. Dewey had done the smartest thing possible under the circumstances, ostensibly in the face of danger, she quickly thought, which was to hide the files right under everyone’s noses and where they would be carted off to the National Archives before long.
Reechi’s voice heightened her dilemma. “Is there something wrong?” he asked.
“No.” She slowly exhaled. “It’s just every time you want to find something it’s never there. I need to find some folders that will make sense to you, but I’m not seeing them right now. Let me look in another box.” She glanced at his face and he seemed to be buying her excuse, but nonetheless she needed to be more careful. Opening an adjoining box, she thumbed through its contents and found what she needed. “Here, see these file numbers, take them and start with the first. In a little while you’ll see that you don’t have to read everything and most of the material is meaningless.” She handed him the files, a foot thick all together.
He turned his back and walked to Dewey’s desk. She quickly pulled 771 and 828 from the box she’d first opened and stepped over to her own desk, mixing both with the work that she had remaining. Surveillance would see her little antic but would think, in light of her exchange with Reechi, that she was only doing what she had been told to do. Sitting down, she started speed-reading.
NR-771 told about U-1113, the German Nazi submarine named the Black Dragon by the Allies in the Second World War, one of only ten U-boats built with a rubber coating, giving it the ability to elude radar and sonar detection. The hull had been laid down in Nordsswerke, Emdem, on July 6, 1943 and the Kriegsmarine had commissioned it on June 3, 1944, taking less than a year to build it. It had been a VIIC/41 type and its commander had been Oberleutnant Ernst-Joachim Schwarz. Its only defect had been the rubber stripped off with age, which had helped the U.S. Navy find and sink it near the end of the war. However, whatever its faults, read the report, it was still way ahead of its time.
NR-828 was almost too macabre to believe. Because the report was so long, she could only look at parts of it, but it detailed the Nazi’s success in developing tuberculoid leprosy as an ethnic weapon. Somehow, through the hideous experiments that had taken place at Auschwitz, Josef Mengele, the SS doctor called the Angel of Death, had created a genetically modified mycobacterium lepry that only infected Jewish people. The lepry bacillus had the predilection to change the DNA inside the host’s living cells, attacking only those with certain genes, leaving the rest of the population immune.
Ecstatic when he had heard of Mengele’s ethnic time bomb, Adolf Hitler had told Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Eichmann that even if some Jews at first survived the disease, inevitably they would die anyway, shunned from existence by the awful stigma of leprosy. The SS was so determined to complete their Englosung, the Final Solution, they had planned to crop spray whole countries with the bacterium.
Then she saw Reechi walking toward her. Closing 828, she slipped it among her other work, made an entry on her computer (but deleted a file instead), then clapped both of her hands on the sides of her face.
“What happened?” asked Reechi when he reached her side.
“I just lost something.” She looked up at him, praying the simple deception had worked.
“Can’t you do something about it?” He looked puzzled.
“Yes, as long as I don’t mess something else up.” She heaved a sigh, since he seemed to be computer illiterate. “I really shouldn’t be doing this today, because the polygraph test has messed me up. Can you find out how I did? They never tell you, do they?” She saw her questions had taken him by surprise.
“Well, no … no they don’t. Maybe tomorrow I can find out for you.” Then his eyes seemed to remember the reason for coming over. “Where are all the files that Chambers looked at the day before he was murdered?”
“All of them, I don’t know. I thought they were on his desk.” She felt her fear rise.
“You said yesterday that he’d only h
eld back three or four and that’s all there is right now. Where’s Friday’s work?”
She put on an innocent face. “In the first box I opened.” She pointed at the stack of boxes.
“What about the ones on your desk?” It was now his turn to point, but, alarmingly, his arm was much straighter.
She looked at the jumble of files on her desk, then back at him. “Well, yes, of course. Which ones would you like to see first? These aren’t in my computer yet, so I don’t want them mixed up with anything else.” All of a sudden she realized Magruder’s interview, the polygraph test, the little walk around the classified shelving had really been part of a much larger test. What did she know and how long had she known it? She held her breath, because there were hours of reading and he had to decide.
He swung his eyes one way, then another. “Okay, I’ll start with the box. You finish the ones on your desk and then bring them to me.” He walked away, picked up the box that she had pointed at, and walked back to Chambers’ desk.
By the end of the day, she thought, he would know that she had read the files. For whatever had happened on Dewey’s last day at work, clearly he had gone upstairs with what he’d found, maybe not all of it, but certainly something. Then it hit her, the top-secret file that had started the whole nightmare, the one that Dewey had set on his desk just before he’d asked her get 771 and 828, the file that she had never seen. They had that file and knew what was in it, and she didn’t.
However, there might be a way to find out, she thought. She hit her keyboard and cleared her screen. You couldn’t get into the CIA’s supercomputers from the outside for all their firewalls, but if you were already inside … What she was looking for would be in the Seven Dwarfs, the name given the supercomputers housed inside the Agency. In the whole world, they knew everything there was to know, and the Agency had spent billions on them. Entering a search engine, she asked for the U-1113. Access denied. Go around another way. She typed in the Black Dragon. Access denied. She typed in Ernst-Joachim Schwarz. Bingo! Up came his name, along with a report that he and his crew had been lost off the coast of West Africa, their U-boat sunk by a Grumman TBF Avenger piloted by Lieutenant Commander Carl E. Newman, USNR, of the Jeep-class carrier, USS Portus. The new Mark IV acoustic-detection torpedo had been used, making its first kill ever. At last, she was on to something.
Reechi was watching her again. However, she would keep going until he stood and then back out and get over to where she belonged. For the speed of her computer, he’d never get close enough to see what she was doing. Typing in Josef Mengele, she then was sorry she had because there was this never-ending story about his life. Bavaria, Auschwitz, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Italy, Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil—he had run for his life after World War II—but there was nothing there, leastwise nothing that she hadn’t known before. What did the Black Dragon, Mengele, and leprosy have to do with each other anyway, especially when you threw the CIA into the middle of everything? She shook her head because nothing made any sense. Then it struck her.
Englosung, the Final Solution, the Holocaust, the Jewish people—who had always stood up for them, defending them like divine sentinels? The Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence, most certainly the best spy agency in the world. However, she couldn’t believe that Dewey would have gone to them … but he might have gone to the World Jewish Congress as an alternative, especially if he had felt threatened or intimidated. Entering the name, she watched 501 Madison Avenue, New York City, come up on her computer. Her heart stopped, since that address was within two blocks of where he’d been killed. In addition, since she’d already thought of the Mossad, there now seemed little doubt the Frenchman and the lady cop were working for them, which in turn explained why they had said they were missing something, the same thing she was missing, the third file!
She had to get out, and for a moment the revelation overwhelmed her like an archangelic scream. Whoever had killed Dewey wouldn’t hesitate to kill her as well, not for a second. Not for a New York second. She had stumbled onto something, just as he had, and it would cost her life if she didn’t run.
Glancing at her watch, she saw that it was almost lunchtime. Reechi wouldn’t catch on if she said the right thing, at least not right away, and then she might have just enough time to drive home and get Tungsten and some pocket money. She would have to live on the fly, never calling her parents, her friends, and avoiding everything and everyone from her past. She knew how the FBI hunted the ten most wanted, so nothing could remain the same. If you played golf, you took up knitting, and if you liked art museums, you went fishing. She was even stupid for picking up her cat, although she owed him that much, along with him being the love of her life. She would even have to color him, which would really piss him off.
She stacked the files on her desk so that 771 and 828 lay near the bottom, then set the entire stack alongside her computer as if it were unfinished work. Picking up some additional files, she walked over to Reechi, who was still busy with the ones he had taken earlier.
“I fixed what I messed up and these are done,” she said as she handed over the folders that she’d carried along. “It’s lunchtime and I need a break.” Although it might ruin her plans, she needed to add something that would ease his suspicions. “Would you like to have lunch with me?” she asked.
Reechi looked at her as if she had hit him with something. Answering no, no thanks, he ducked his head and quickly went back to work. She knew that he was smart enough to eventually see through it, but that wasn’t the point. It would pin him down for a little while and keep him wondering if he should have gone with her. Next, he would wonder what the boys upstairs would have thought if he had, and if she were up to something. Then he’d see that he hadn’t been paying attention to his work and would have to start all over again. It would give her precious time.
She hurried toward the nearest employee cafeteria, found a perpendicular hallway leading to the parking lot where she’d left her car, and followed it outside. Peanut brown and nondescript, the arrowy Chevrolet was perfect for her getaway, or at least it would be once she replaced its dealer plate with a real license plate. She set off for her apartment, using as many service roads and running as many yellow lights as she could in the hope of shaking off any tails.
She finally reached her place and ran inside. A couple of minutes, that’s all she give herself. She tore into her bedroom, stuffed clothing into a bag, added toiletries, and then ran to the kitchen and grabbed the four hundred dollars she’d hidden in the freezer. Thirty seconds later, she was out the door on the fly with Tungsten under one arm and her bag in the other. She knew surveillance would be screaming over their radios that she was on the run.
She threw Tungsten and the clothes into the Chevy and raced away, watching her rearview mirrors as closely as she could. Moments afterward, she saw a blue Ford chasing her, which meant, knowing the FBI, there was another car paralleling her in case she succeeded in losing the first one. The Capitol Beltway was her only prayer.
Down an on-ramp she roared, speeding as much as she dared, then pulled into the southbound traffic. Now the second car would have to join the chase from behind, which would give her a few minutes to decide on her next move. Should she try to outrun them or take an exit and run some red lights? The Ford was getting closer and the two suit coats inside looked mad as hell.
Accelerating, she ran up on a line of cars a couple of miles down the freeway and started winding through them. All at once, she spotted the reason everyone was strictly following the speed limit. There was a police car in the middle lane. She braked hard. Checking her speedometer, she saw the cop was a little slow. Now the Ford was almost on her bumper. She passed the police car, then couldn’t believe her eyes. It was the lady cop ostensibly helping her get away. She had to take advantage of the lucky break no matter how it might compromise her later on.
She floored the accelerator, cut in front of the police car, and shot over into the right lane. The Ford hes
itated a second and then followed her, just as she thought it would. Seconds after, she saw the police strobes flash on. The race was on, but the race was fixed and the FBI was about lose, at least if she’d give the lady cop the slimmest chance. She searched for a down-ramp that she could go up and a moment later found exactly what she needed, an on-ramp with only two cars coming down it. Slamming on her brakes, she slowed until she was sure the car wouldn’t flip and then put it into a skid across the merging lane. Through the dust and smoke, she saw the cop car had gotten on the inside of the Ford and had cut it off from following her.
She turned and shot up the on-ramp going the wrong way when she was finally in control again, barely missing the two cars that had stopped near the bottom to get out of her way. Once on top of the ramp, she cranked a right and glanced backward to see what had happened behind her. The Ford was off in the grass and the lady cop was covering the men inside with her pistol.
Having never felt more excitement in her life, she screamed, then screamed again. Then she remembered Tungsten. The poor cat was almost up under the dash he was so scared to death.
A few minutes later, she made another turn and drove away from the Beltway. Now all she had to do was find a general aviation airport, one with lots of cars sitting around, cars with valid licenses and keys hidden under their fenders, left there by the people who used them when they flew in with their private planes, which usually wasn’t often. She knew how it worked because her father had once taken flying lessons and gotten his private pilot’s license, something she wanted to do someday. Maybe then she could soar, soar away…
All of a sudden, the reality of what she had done overwhelmed her. Espionage, auto theft, reckless driving—they would burn her at the stake like the Joan of Arc if they ever caught her. Maybe the lady cop hadn’t done her such a big favor after all. Then it hit her—where was the Frenchman with his fox-like face? She had forgotten to keep an eye on her rearview mirrors.
