by Alex Archer
Satisfied that they had done all they could to ensure a successful conclusion to their salvage operation, Annja gave the order for the floatation bags to be deployed.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then, slowly at first but with increasingly greater frequency and agitation, the surface of the lake began to bubble and churn as the mass of the aircraft began pushing up from below.
The tail of the plane broke the surface first, followed quickly by the glass of the canopy up front. Soon the entire aircraft was sitting on the surface of the lake, visible in the midday sun for the first time in seventy years. Cheers broke out all around the lake as those on site—both workers and security—felt the thrill of victory at the recovery mission’s success even if they didn’t know what it was all for.
Annja wasn’t ready to cheer quite yet; they still needed to lift the plane out of the lake and onto dry land, but she did indulge in a smile that her on-the-fly idea had actually worked. She hadn’t let it show, but she’d been nervous as heck that the whole thing would just fall apart when the floatation devices began their push for the surface.
Hopefully the second step will go as smoothly as the first.
Even as she thought it, the helicopters were moving in and positioning themselves over the wreck. Cables were lowered to the four divers in the water, who secured them to the chains holding the floatation devices to the aircraft. This way there wouldn’t be any direct pressure on the plane’s fuselage, which she hoped would increase their chances of getting the plane out of the lake intact.
When the divers were finished securing the cables, they swam away from the wreckage so that they wouldn’t be hit by any falling debris should things go awry. When the lead diver gave her the signal, Annja brought the handheld to her mouth, depressed the talk button and said, “You are go for lift.”
She crossed the fingers of her other hand even as the words were leaving her mouth.
After that, there was nothing to do but watch and hope.
The helicopters began a steady lift, moving in tight formation and in unison with each other to keep the force being applied to the aircraft’s frame as even as possible. The wreckage creaked and groaned, as if protesting being taken from its watery grave, but nevertheless it began to rise slowly into the air, water streaming off it at every angle.
Foot by foot the aircraft rose above the water and took to the air once more, perhaps for the final time.
The helicopters carried the Junkers away from the lake and set it down in the snow on the far side of the camp, where another team of Garin’s men were waiting to release the tow cables and free the choppers of their burden.
Annja’s radio crackled to life. “Big bird to base. Mission accomplished.”
She had done the impossible! Now she felt like cheering.
Chapter 15
After posting guards around the aircraft, the team returned to the command center. It was one o’clock in the afternoon in Germany, which made it three in the morning back in the States, at least, on the east coast, but Annja didn’t care. She pulled out her cell phone and punched in the number the kidnapper had given her.
The phone rang several times before it was picked up.
“Hello?” Annja said.
A series of clicks echoed down the line before the kidnapper’s voice sounded in her ear.
“Have you found the aircraft?” he asked.
“I have. You can pick up the gold anytime you want.”
His voice sounded a little different this time, as if there was an accent hiding under his excellent English. She wondered if it had been there the last time they’d spoken or if it was just an artifact of the quality of the connection between them.
“Gold?” the voice asked. “You believe it is the gold that I’m after?”
Annja’s blood ran cold. Something was wrong, and she was suddenly afraid that she knew what it was.
Still, there was no sense in admitting defeat at this point. She’d play the game as long as she could, hoping the kidnapper might give something away during the course of their conversation that would help to locate Doug.
Annja plunged ahead. “I do, yes. The original crates have rotted away, so I’d suggest that you bring new ones with you when you come to pick it up. Now let me speak to Doug.”
“You can speak to Doug when you have completed the task I set out for you.”
Here it comes, she thought.
“You asked me to find the plane. I’ve done that. Our deal is over.”
The others were watching her and knew that something had gone wrong. Paul got up and started toward her, but she waved him off, not wanting the distraction at the time when she needed to concentrate most.
“If you found the plane, then you obviously found the letter as well.”
“What letter?” Annja asked.
There was a pause and then in the background Annja heard a man begin to scream.
And he kept screaming.
“Hello?” Annja shouted into the phone. “Are you there? Stop it!”
The scream cut off abruptly and the kidnapper’s voice came back over the line. “Your friend does not tolerate pain very well.”
“Stop,” Annja said, her heart sinking in her chest. “Just stop. Please. Yes, I found the letter.”
With an air of satisfaction, the kidnapper asked, “Did you read it?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Then there is no need to explain myself. The real target is Insel Wolf.”
Wolf Island? He can’t be serious.
“We don’t even know if that’s real,” she protested.
“Oh, it’s real all right. And you’re going to find it for me, just like you found that aircraft. Or else I’ll start mailing pieces of your friend here to that lovely little apartment you have in Brooklyn.”
Annja had to bite back the anger that threatened to overwhelm her at the kidnapper’s words. One thing was for certain; when she caught up to him, she was going to ensure that he couldn’t do anything like this to anyone else ever again.
“And when I find your mystery island, what then?”
“Then I will release Mr. Morrell on the street corner of your choice in downtown Manhattan, alive and…well, reasonably unharmed. You have another week, no more. Find that island!”
“Wait!” Annja cried.
Too late. The line had been cut.
She hit redial and waited for the phone to be picked up on the other end, but it just rang and rang. After a few moments of listening to it, she hung up in disgust.
She looked up at the others, who had been watching her closely during the call. Obviously, they knew something wasn’t right.
“He doesn’t want the gold,” she said. “He wants the island.”
Reinhold shook his head in disbelief. “This guy must think you’re some kind of genius. What are you going to do?”
Genius or not, she didn’t think she had much choice.
“Find it, of course.”
“But we don’t even know where to begin,” Paul said dejectedly.
He was wrong on that score.
“Yes, we do,” she told him. “We just don’t know what it means yet.”
“The symbols on the letter,” Garin said quietly.
“Exactly. I’m guessing the symbols are some kind of coded message, revealing the location of the island. Hitler did say that everything Martin needed in order to follow his instructions was in the letter.”
“You can’t be sure of that,” Reinhold said.
“But I am. Have to be, for Doug’s sake. Hitler himself stated that Martin, the letter’s recipient, didn’t know the location of the new headquarters, yet he asked him to complete the preparations for his arrival two weeks later and that everything he needed to carry out his orders was contained right there in his letter.
“If the coded message doesn’t give the location of Wolf Island, then at the very least, it will tell us how to find it.”
Annja was confi
dent she knew what the code was hiding. What she wasn’t so confident about was her ability to crack it, especially in the time frame given.
Still, she had no choice but to try.
Figuring four heads were better than one, Annja copied the symbols at the bottom of the letter onto individual pieces of paper and then handed one each to Paul, Garin and Reinhold, keeping one page for herself. She packed the original documents back into their waterproof container and slid the container inside the satchel. They’d been stored like that for decades without any damage, so she figured another few hours wouldn’t hurt. When she had the chance, she’d turn it over to the proper authorities, but for now she’d just keep it protected and close. Satisfied, she took her copy of the symbols and her laptop and settled down in a corner to see if she could break the code.
Her work in archaeology had introduced her to a fair number of different types of codes, and she was expecting to make short work of this one.
Things began to go wrong right from the start, however.
Looking at the symbols, she immediately discovered that none of them were familiar to her. Some looked like Hebrew characters. Some like Teutonic runes. Others like Japanese kanji. It was almost as if the code maker had taken symbols from a variety of cultures and slapped them together to create a new kind of alphabet.
She spent an hour trying to separate the ones that were familiar from those that were not, only to find that even the familiar characters had subtle differences to them that made her unable to classify them with definitively.
When that didn’t work, she decided to approach the cipher as if it were a simple substitution code. By assigning a letter to each symbol based on its frequency of appearance, she could begin to identify certain repetitive symbols and the English letters associated with them. For instance, E was the most common letter of the German alphabet, so she looked for the symbol used most frequently and assigned the letter E to it. N was the second most common, so she found the second most common symbol and assigned the letter N to that. With enough correct letters, the code breaker could then make some educated guesses about the other symbols. If a three-letter word started with the symbol that corresponded to T and ended with the symbol that corresponded to E, it was a fair guess that the middle symbol was most likely H. And so on.
Unfortunately, after making several such substitutions it became obvious that the message wasn’t long enough to get a good handle on it following that process. There simply weren’t enough letters or variations therein for it to work.
She decided to try the Caesar cipher after that. Used by a Roman emperor, the Caesar cipher was actually multiple substitution codes in one. To use it, Annja assembled two wheels, one inside the other. She wrote the German alphabet on the outside of each wheel. By turning the inner wheel and aligning a letter on that one with a letter on the outside wheel, a substitution code was formed. This method provided twenty-six different possibilities and Annja took the time to work through them all, assigning the most frequent as the letter E and then using the code to assign values to the other symbols based on frequency.
When she had exhausted her own knowledge, she used the satellite uplink in the command center to connect to the internet and spent several hours researching everything she could on Nazi codes from World War II. She learned more than she ever wanted to about Enigma, Reservehandverfahren, Geheimfernschreiber and other German codes, but none were any use in cracking the one in front of her.
Long after the sun had set, Annja finally put her pen down in disgust. She’d been at it for hours and was no further than when she’d started. She knew the others had given up hours ago, but she’d stubbornly continued, believing that at some point she’d find the key. Now she sat, surrounded by her notes and sketches, her various attempts to solve the puzzle, and realized with a growing sense of despair that she might never solve this one.
The door on the other side of the room opened and Garin stepped inside. “Any luck?”
Annja shook her head. “At this point I’m convinced it is some kind of high-level German code that was only used by a handful of select individuals. If the Allies knew anything about it, during the war or after, it was never made public knowledge.”
She pounded the table once in frustration. “I don’t even know where to go from here, Garin.”
He looked at the floor as if contemplating something, and then glanced up at her. “I may know someone who can help us with it.”
Annja had known him long enough to recognize the tone of voice he was using. “And?” she asked, knowing that there was more, that there was something Garin wasn’t telling her.
“I hesitate to get him involved because he is a…well…let’s just say that he’s a less-than-savory character.”
Now that was rich. Garin judging someone else’s morality. This from the man who had no qualms about industrial espionage or the theft of priceless artifacts and who thought more about what he was having for dinner each night than he did about taking someone’s life.
If Garin thinks the guy is unsavory, he must have crawled out of a dark cesspool somewhere.
She didn’t care.
She needed to solve the cipher in order to rescue Doug, and so far all of her efforts had been for naught. Even worse, she was out of ideas.
If she was going to solve it, she was going to need some help and right about now it didn’t matter at all where it came from.
She said as much to Garin.
“All right,” he told her. “I’ll make the arrangements. He won’t come to us so we’re going to have to go to him. Thankfully, he’s close.”
“How close?”
Garin smiled. “This time tomorrow we’ll be out of the cold and dining in Paris.”
Chapter 16
After leaving Griggs in charge of removing the gold and shipping it to Garin’s headquarters in Munich for safekeeping, Annja, Paul and Garin boarded the DragonTech Security executive helicopter for the flight to Paris.
Annja was glad to be going. She knew it wouldn’t be long before word of what they were doing in the Alps reached the press. There had already been a few flyovers by the curious, who no doubt had seen the resurrected bomber sitting in the snow, and she didn’t want to be associated with the project in any way in case that scared the kidnapper into doing something rash. She knew Griggs would discourage anyone who was overly curious, but she was still glad that at least for now it was Garin’s company, DragonTech, that was the public face of the operation.
They landed in Paris as the sun was setting. To Annja’s surprise, Garin didn’t have a car waiting. Instead, she and Paul followed him as he walked out the front doors of the terminal and got in line for a cab. In all the time she’d known him, Annja couldn’t remember a time he’d taken a cab by choice.
“Slumming, are we?” she asked, a mischievous smile on her face.
Garin glanced at her and said, “Trust me. You’ll appreciate it in a bit. We want as much anonymity as possible for where we’re going.”
On that ominous note, they piled into a taxi and headed out. Under Garin’s direction, the cabbie took them to the Les Halles area in the 2nd Arrondissement and let them out on a corner down the street from the mall entrance. Garin said that they would walk from there. Annja had spent a considerable bit of time in Paris over the past few years—her friend and sometime mentor Roux lived nearby—but the neighborhoods she frequented were a bit more upscale than this.
Once the site of Paris’s central food market, the place was now home to a giant underground mall that was in the midst of a badly needed makeover, the area had unfortunately become a haven for pickpockets, drug dealers and those with a penchant for petty crime.
The three of them got their fair share of glances as they got out of the taxi, but the predators had to have sensed that they were far from prey and left them alone. Garin led them east several blocks, until they reached Rue St. Denis, where they turned left.
One of Paris’s red light districts,
this area was even seedier than the one they’d just left.
* * *
GARIN LED THEM to a door at the end of an alley. There were no markings on it, nothing to indicate that it was any different from any of the other doors that they passed along the way.
He raised a hand to knock and then hesitated. Turning to Paul and Annja, he said, “The man we are here to see knows me as an American collector of unusual artifacts. No matter what you see or hear in there, keep your thoughts and opinions to yourself. Doing anything less can put us in considerable danger. Understood?”
They nodded in agreement.
Turning back to the door, Garin pounded on it with his fist. After a moment a small panel slid open, allowing whoever was on the inside to look them over. Garin said something in German in a low voice to whoever was on the other side, which apparently satisfied him, for the lock clicked and the door swung open.
Annja followed Garin inside, with Paul at her heels.
Three muscular men in dark suits were waiting for them. Annja noticed that each had the telltale bulge under his suit coat that said he was armed, most likely a handgun in a shoulder holster.
All three were blond and blue-eyed.
It’s a coincidence, Annja told herself. It doesn’t mean anything.
But given the nature of what they needed help with, Annja didn’t quite believe it was a fluke.
The guard gestured for Garin to step forward, but didn’t search him. Apparently Garin was known to these people.
Interesting, Annja thought.
The guard waved Paul forward, saying, “Arms out.”
Paul did as he was told, standing there with his arms out to the sides while the guard patted him down quickly.
Annja noted that it was done rather sloppily; she wouldn’t have relied on these men to protect anything important.
The guard was leering when she stepped forward, but she met his gaze with a hard stare of her own, letting him know nonverbally that she wasn’t to be trifled with any more than her companions. He had to have gotten the message, for the smug expression dropped off his face and his hands didn’t wander any more than necessary during the pat-down.
