by Lowe, Tom
In the middle of the table, two long metal cylinders lay side-by-side. The late afternoon sun splintered through the window giving the cylinders an antique bronze look. Still visible were the labels on the right side of both containers: U-235.
“This,” began Volkow, his voice a mix of arrogance and authority, “is going to do three things. It will settle a long-standing score between the motherland and the Americans from 1945 to 1950, the Venona Project, they called it. Second, these cylinders give us supreme reign because we decide who acquires the power inside them. And, third, we will be compensated well.”
Sorokin said, “We have the computer equipment assembled in the next room. Everything is secure, non-traceable. You can begin the auction whenever you wish.”
“Perhaps the first bid should come from those who almost acquired it before we did, that asshole Mohammed Sharif and his comrades. Will they use the power to strike the Americans, especially since it is already in this country, or will they export it to Syria or Iran?”
“Does it make a difference?”
Volkow smiled and stroked the barnacled-surface of one cylinder like a man caressing a sacred object. He looked up at Sorokin and Keltzin. “These are two of more … correct, Jason Canfield? More buried on a beach?”
“Maybe,” Jason said, the ropes dulling the blood circulation to his hands. “The old woman told Sean that the Germans buried something.”
“Where is this old woman?”
“I don’t know.”
Volkow sneered. “If we locate the other cylinders, we will begin the bidding at fifty-million dollars. Put images of these on the site.”
“Should we not find the remaining U-235 first?” asked Keltzin.
“This will arouse the appetite of our buyers.”
“Perhaps the other cylinders do not exist.” Sorokin said. “What if the Americans found them in 1945? Or they may not have been found and never will be.”
“The target area has been narrowed. Also, based on what Canfield told us, this O’Brien either knows or might be able to find the rest of the U-235. We’ll offer him a motivation, if you know what I mean, and a deadline. Set up the video camera.”
***
LAUREN MILES POINTED toward the image on the monitor and said, “Freeze that.” The Chapman’s Fish House manager clicked the mouse in his hand and the image on the screen stopped playing. O’Brien, Cronus, Collins, Bridges, Thompson and Hunter stood by the monitor and watched. Lauren continued, “There they are, coming out of the dark van under the mimosa tree.” It was a wide shot. The images on a computer monitor showed the entire parking lot. Two men walked quickly over to Jason’s truck, less than fifty feet from the van.
“The kid doesn’t even see them coming,” Thompson said.
“Play it,” Lauren said to the manager. The video continued, the men moving casually toward Jason as he placed the boxes in his truck bed and opened the driver’s side door.
Dave grimaced. “This is hard to watch.” The images showed no struggle. Jason was surprised, his head whipping right and left to look at both men. In ten seconds, he was inside the blue van, one man climbing in the back seat with him.
Eric Hunter looked away. “They’ve had him long enough to get what they want.”
“Yeah, they got the location of the storage unit out of him,” Dave said.
O’Brien’s cell rang. He looked at the number. “It’s Jason!”
“Put it on speaker.” Hunter said.
O’Brien hit the speaker button. “Jason … .”
“Sean! They’re holding me!”
“Where are you?”
“At an undisclosed location,” Yuri Volkow said.
“Who is this?” O’Brien demanded.
“I’m the man who can slit Jason’s throat. Are you near a computer, O’Brien?”
“Yes.”
“Very good. Go to Anonev.com. I will spell it for you. A...n…o…n…e…v.”
O’Brien typed in the address and an image of Jason sitting in a chair appeared. A man, only visible from the chest down, held a knife to Jason’s throat.
“Jas—” began Nick as O’Brien raised his hand for silence.
The others crowded around the screen. O’Brien held up one hand to make sure no one spoke. He said to Volkow, “Don’t hurt him. He’s a kid—not even twenty.”
“My father was only twenty-five when your people killed him.”
“I’m sorry to hear that … what were the circumstances?”
“Similar to what we have in the world today. The cold war never ended. It will never thaw as long as your country continues its world meddling.”
“Who is this?” O’Brien asked.
“How much do you want to see Jason live?” Volkow pulled Jason’s head back with one hand, placed a knife against his neck. “His carotid artery is less than one inch from the blade.” Then he began cutting.
“Oh dear God …,” Lauren whispered.
“Wait!” shouted O’Brien.
Jason screamed, his body visibly trembling. Volkow held the knife, and blood trickled down Jason’s neck, looking into the camera, tears spilling from his eyes.
“What do you want?” O’Brien asked.
“I want the rest of the cargo. It is rightfully ours. There are other canisters. We know this. You have forty-eight hours from now to deliver them to a destination I choose. If you do not, the next time you see Jason, you will watch him die. You cannot find him, but we can find you. All GPS and tracking devices on his mobile have been deactivated. But you can leave a text message to communicate. The clock starts right now.”
The screen faded to black.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Lauren Miles said, “Ron, I don’t care what that asshole says about deactivating Jason’s phone. Let’s see if we can triangulate a location from a cell tower. Maybe we’ll get something. I’ll call Mike Gates. We’ll see if the cyber team can get a trace from this computer to that website. Maybe there’s something there that will give us a location, lead us to Jason. They’ve got to be within a few miles of us. But where?”
Agent Bridges said, “The unsub’s voice. Did anybody notice the slightest hint of an accent? German? Russian, maybe? Didn’t sound Middle Eastern.”
“Not much of an accent,” said Paul Thompson. “Could be some German.”
O’Brien watched Eric Hunter as his eyes darted from Lauren to Thompson. Hunter said, “His hands, large, light skin. Very non-Middle Eastern in appearance.”
“I noticed that,” Lauren said. “Like the unsub had Scandinavian or German stock.
“He wasn’t Greek,” chimed in Nick. “And what the hell’s an unsub?”
“Unknown subject,” Dave said. “A frequently used FBI term.”
O’Brien shook his head. “It’s what the guy holding Jason said that might be our biggest clue. He said, ‘my father was only twenty-five when your people killed him,’ and he added, ‘It is rightfully ours … the rest of the cargo.’ If his father was twenty-five when he died, where did he die? How’d he die, and when did it happen? What was, or is, ‘rightfully ours?’ By ours, does he mean a country, a group of people, or is he talking about himself, like a claim on a property inheritance?”
“All good questions,” Dave Collins said.
“Yes,” added Lauren, “and right now we don’t have any of the answers.”
“Maybe some are outside,” O’Brien said. “Let’s take a look.”
“Wait a minute,” protested Thompson. “We have plenty of expertise here. We don’t need or want your assistance. Take your friends and go back to the marina.”
O’Brien ignored Thompson and started for the parking lot. He walked to the spot under the tree where the kidnapper’s van had been parked. He knelt down a few feet from the trunk of the tree and looked at the soil, his fingers touching a small dark spot about the size of a half dollar. He smelled the stained grains of sand.
The others approached, Paul Thompson visibly angry. “Go home,
O’Brien.”
Thompson looked at Lauren. She said, “Sean, we can take it from here.”
Thompson said, “There’s no shoe or tire print. That’s enough, leave.”
“The stain is transmission fluid,” O’Brien said. “Their van probably has a leak. Maybe the lab can match the chemical analysis of this fluid with the van, if we find it—”
“We will find it,” Thompson said. “But we—”
“We’ll get forensics back out here,” Lauren said, dialing her cell. “Ron, stay here until they arrive. We’ll head back to the federal building.”
As the others started for Dave’s SUV, Eric Hunter walked to his truck. O’Brien pulled Dave aside and asked, “Who’s Hunter?”
“What do you mean?”
“Dave, I saw him recognize you. What nailed it for me was when you looked the other way. Who is he?”
Dave watched Hunter get in his truck and leave. “I can’t get into who he is. Suffice to say he’s deep undercover. Let’s just leave it at that, Sean, all right?”
“No. Hell, no, it’s not all right. A kid we both know has less than forty-eight hours to live. His girlfriend is dead. A storage manager is dead. Two men in a boat at sea chasing us are blown to hell out of the water. And, today, two guys were tailing Nick and me before I found the U-235 missing. I don’t think they were the hostiles who kidnapped Jason. I need to know who Hunter is and what’s going on.”
“Eric Hunter is one of the Agency’s best field agents. I don’t know what he’s involved in or how deep the layers are.”
“Then who’s this Paul Thompson?”
“He’s with the Agency, liaises between Homeland and the FBI.”
“And he has no clue who Hunter is, come on, or is all that a charade?”
“I doubt he knows what I’ve told you, if that.”
“But you can’t ask because there are only so many lies that a human brain is capable of processing before plausible denial doesn’t work. And the CIA is the best at this kind of—”
“Look, Sean—”
“I think Hunter tipped the media, maybe called the reporter Susan Schulman that day we found the U-boat and the cargo. Jason had called Hunter, a man Maggie, Jason’s mom, says she doesn’t know. I saw the number on Jason’s cell. Hunter knew we were bringing the boat back after the find. Maybe he contacted the Coast Guard. Maybe he had the boat blown up when we went back there and got the HEU.
“Remember, I’d radioed you guys that day you found it. You were on the bottom exploring the sub and Jason answered the radio. Coast Guard could have heard that.”
“How’d Hunter get here so fast?”
“He’s been here. Working undercover in Florida. This is a hotspot for hostiles. We saw that with 911. I do know he’d been part of the investigation that brought charges against Awwab Bakir.”
“Hunter says he knew Jason’s father. His dad died in the Cole bombing.”
“Maybe they worked together. We have no way of verifying that.”
O’Brien said nothing.
Dave asked, “Did you get a look at the hostiles following you and Nick?”
“Dark features, from what I could tell. They weren’t bald or blonde.”
“Looks like we have two factions. If the guys in the van stole the HEU after they kidnapped Jason, then who were the men tailing you? Maybe Abdul-Hakim’s men?”
“I don’t know. Ask Hunter. Right now we’ve got to find the men who kidnapped Jason and stole the HEU. It could be loaded onto a container ship in Port Canaveral in a couple of hours and shipped to just about anywhere. Possibility of it being shipped out creates a greater urgency.”
“Whoever gets it, they’ll have to know how to turn it into an atomic bomb. That’s not an easy thing to do unless you’re a nuclear physicist.”
“I have to go. Keep an eye on Nick. He’ll be safer with you.”
“Where you going?”
“You remember how we were talking, trying to make sense out of this—you, me Jason and Nick? Then I told you about Abby Lawson and her grandmother, Glenda?”
“What about them?”
“If the men who kidnapped Jason managed to get that out of him, Abby and her grandmother could be in danger. If Glenda’s story is true, we could have a repeat today.”
Dave looked at the others waiting by his SUV. “What do you mean, repeat?”
“I think what Billy Lawson saw before he died in 1945 caused two things: it brought down the German sub after Lawson called his wife … and it exposed something or someone.”
“As a nation, we were trying to end the war.”
“Maybe Billy Lawson’s report that night had something to do with that.”
“What are you going to do?”
“What if Lawson wasn’t killed in a mugging? What if he was killed in a cover-up and the cover-up has a direct connection to Jason being held hostage today?”
“How could that be?”
“The hostile on camera—it’s what he said about his father and the rightful ownership of the U-235 canisters. Why would he say that? Maybe his father was around the time Billy Lawson was shot. What if there’s a connection?”
“Sean, what connection? Any witnesses in the Lawson case are probably dead. Evidence is long gone.”
“Not if Billy Lawson was buried with it.”
“What?”
“Bullets. An old newspaper story indicated Lawson died from a single gunshot wound to the chest. Glenda Lawson, on the phone with her husband at the time of the shooting, said she heard three shots.”
“Maybe she was mistaken. Regardless, what can you do at this stage?”
“Exhume Lawson’s body from the grave.”
“Do what? If you find evidence of more than one shot, what have you proved?”
“That the newspaper story, taken from the police and FBI reports, was a lie. If they didn’t remove all the bullets in an autopsy, assuming they even did one in 1945, I might be able to identify the type of murder weapon.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Glenda Lawson’s home was cast in dark olive green shadows when O’Brien pulled into her driveway, which was long ago built of aged bricks. The home was turn-of-the-century old Florida: coquina stone, one story, and a tile roof the tint of rust. A large banyan tree stood in the small front yard flanked by philodendrons along one side of the home.
When O’Brien parked his Jeep and walked across the small, faded limestone blocks, the sweet scent of night-blooming jasmine and magnolia blossoms escorted him to the door. He knocked once; and in the dying light, Abby Lawson opened the door and greeted him.
“Sean, I’ve been watching the news,” she said, holding her hands in front of her, fingers locked. “They say two people died ... the manager of a self-storage building and the girlfriend of Jason who works on your boat. They also said Jason was kidnapped … is he …?”
“He’s alive. What your grandmother might tell me could keep him that way.”
“Please, come in.”
“I won’t be long.” O’Brien looked at the road beyond the home before entering.
Abby closed the door. “Things are happening at a frightening pace since you found that U-boat.”
“Good evening Mr. O’Brien,” said Glenda Lawson entering the living room. “It’s nice to see you.”
“Mrs. Lawson—”
“Please, dear, call me Glenda. We heard about the deaths of that poor young woman, the kidnapping of her boyfriend and the death of the storage place manager.” She was quiet a moment and said, “This is all happening because of what my Billy saw that night, isn’t it, Mr. O’Brien?”
“I think it might be connected.”
Glenda coughed once, inhaled, a wheezing sound bubbling from her lungs, and said, “Is there anything we can do for you? Please stay for supper.”
“I need to ask you some questions about the night Billy saw the U-boat.”
“Okay, but I must ask you a question first, when was the last time you
ate?”
“Yesterday.”
“You look like it. Abby makes the best lasagna you’ll ever have. We just took it out of the oven half hour ago. Please join us.”
“I don’t have a lot of time—”
“Young man, if you have time to talk, you have time to eat, too. I insist.” She turned and went into the kitchen. “Come join us, don’t keep an old woman waiting.”
***
AS ABBY SERVED LASAGNA, warm garlic bread, and salad, O’Brien, who was sitting across the oak table from Glenda, asked, “When your husband told you where the men had buried the cargo, what did he say? You’d mentioned the old Fort Matanzas, remember?”
“I’ve never forgotten it,” Glenda said, looking out through the glass French doors onto her small garden. Holding her gaze on the fireflies floating in the philodendron, she added, “He told me they buried it maybe two hundred feet south of the old Spanish fort. When the light from the St. Augustine lighthouse comes across the fort’s watchtower at the six o’clock position, it shines through the window. Billy said they buried something in the sand along the line of light.”
“Do you know where Billy was standing when he saw the light on the fort?”
“No.”
O’Brien was silent. “Billy told you that when the light from the St. Augustine lighthouse rotates across the fort’s watchtower at the six o’clock position and shines through the window, that’s where something is buried in sand. The watchtower would have at least two openings, observation points, for the light to shine through it. If someone were to position themselves in the general area and walk it until they see the beam from the lighthouse through the observation opening on the south side, maybe—”
“But that area has dramatically changed since 1945. There are million dollar homes through there now.”
“Two things have not changed. The fort has been there for two-hundred-sixty-six years. It hasn’t moved. Neither has the lighthouse, which has been there at least a century. I used to surf fish there. There are no homes on the island, it’s a national park. I’d have to retrace, or try to retrace Billy’s steps that night.”
