The Eldridge Conspiracy

by Stephen Ames Berry

  “Your English is flawless—I wish mine were.” Her German accent was almost indiscernible.

  “What little accent you have is quite charming,” he said. Tennu kept his collection of Marlene Dietrich records a closely guarded secret. He decided that Dr. Horreth, like Dietrich, could probably make schnell sound enticing.

  “Where did you go to college?” she asked.

  “University of California Berkeley for undergrad, then architecture school at Yale. So, how long have you been on our tight little isles, Leni?”

  “Tight little isles? Yes, they are that, aren’t they?” she smiled. “Seven months, working with Shunichi and Dr. Kimura.”

  “Have you had much chance to sightsee?”

  “Yes. Shunichi has been the perfect host.”

  “Very gracious of him,” said Tennu, hiding his disappointment. “So Germany is working on this too?”

  “Well, Germans certainly are,” she said guardedly. “Go ahead—ask me if it’ll work. Everyone does.”

  “Will it work?”

  “We think so—but how or what will happen, we can only speculate.”

  Comforting, thought Tennu, as the ship slowed. They were now well clear of the Inner Harbor and its traffic.

  The alert klaxon sounded as Shunichi returned. “One minute to field activation,” said a voice over the loudspeakers. “All personnel don goggles. Goggles on now.” Everyone pulled on the dark goggles given them as they’d boarded.

  “Thirty seconds to activation.”

  As the count neared its end, Tennu turned to watch the sun rising over Tokyo Bay, a fiery red ball back-dropping a long v-shaped flight of loudly honking geese. Closer in a brown pelican dived, scooping up breakfast, while beside him Leni Horreth slipped her hand into Shunichi’s.

  How good to be alive, thought Tennu, as the count reached zero and his world was forever swept away.

  New Orleans

  November 1998

  Chapter 13

  “We have part of the list,” Whitsun told Schmidla over the phone.

  “Part of it? How?” asked Schmidla.

  “We were acquiring it remotely as Beauchamp queried SLIF the other day. Our remote site suffered a power failure while copying the file—we thought we’d lost the information. We just found and restored the truncated file.”

  “How truncated?”

  “We have twelve names and partial related information.”

  “Twelve? Out of how many?”

  “We assume there were approximately fifty or so men crewing Eldridge that day.”

  “You don’t even know how many people were on that ship?” said Schmidla, amazed.

  “Would you prefer that we had no names to work with, Richard?” Whitsun said testily.

  “So, you’ve had these twelve names for some time, but you didn’t know it?” said Schmidla. If he was trying to keep the sarcasm from his voice, he failed.

  “Since Halloween. The man responsible for the oversight has been permanently replaced.” (Tony Master’s messy suicide was a shock and an inconvenience to his colleagues. It took a week to clean and repaint the conference room where he’d blown his brains out. Meetings had had to be rescheduled.)

  “Trick or Treat indeed,” said Schmidla. “Did you put those names through your computer system?”

  “Through SLIF, yes. It’s given us the addresses of scores of descendants. The problem with acquisition is manpower—the CIA is staying out of this and I’ve just got Phil Martin and his team.”

  “I need Potentials now, Terry.”

  “You’ll have them shortly. Martin’s going to start acquiring the Potentials nearest you in the next day or so—makes it easier to transport them. And of course we’re still after the complete list, the one Beauchamp has.

  “And now,” said Whitsun, hanging up the phone and turning to the younger man across from him, sitting stiffly on the trophy room sofa, “you incredible imbecile, what am I to do with you?”

  “I didn’t come here to be abused by you, Grandfather,” said Erik Saunders, rising, his face red.

  “Sit down and shut up,” snapped Whitsun. Erik sat. “I spoke with my ex-aide Frank Jameson over at the Bureau. He and his boss, the Chief of Naval Personnel, would take it kindly if you’d resign your commission today. Do it. Fax it over and you won’t have to rescue your uniforms from the Salvation Army. I’ve been bailing you out of your messes since the Academy, Erik, but this one was just too public. Plus my star is on the descent—the right people are no longer calling me back. Time you grew up, boy. Now, who’s this devil-woman you were living with?”

  When Erik told him, Whitsun’s expression changed to one of amazement. “Angie Milano! What a small world.”

  “What...”

  “I’m asking the questions.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “This civilian who beat the crap out of you...”

  “He didn’t...” Erik stopped at a withering gaze from his grandfather.

  “Was his name Munroe, by any chance?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Erik, no longer surprised at anything the old man knew.

  Whitsun thought for a moment. “Erik,” he said. “I think I may have a job for you. My company, GDR, is the primary contractor for several very sensitive, long-term projects involving applied physics. The largest of these is located at a facility in a very remote part of New Mexico. There are several openings for project managers there. I’m going to get you one of those jobs,” he continued, happy to see Erik’s sudden smile vanish at the word “remote.” “We’ve a lot of ex-officers there – you’ll fit right in,” said Whitsun. “Now, it’ll take about a month to get you vetted. Stay at my Annapolis house while you’re waiting, take the boat out before the weather gets truly awful, and relax. I’ll let you know how things are going.

  “I’ll be visiting our sister project up in Boston. I’d like you to join me for the day. You’re not cleared, but I can introduce you. Richard Schmidla’s a brilliant man, if a bit difficult. He’s doing great things for this country—great things. Someday you can tell your children that you met Richard Schmidla.”

  “Thank you, sir. About the job, Grandfather,” Erick continued uncertainly, “I don’t know much physics.”

  “No, Erik, you don’t know any physics,” corrected Whitsun. “And if you did, it wouldn’t help—this stuff is way out there. But you won’t need to know anything—you’ll be a project manager.”

  “What’s going to happen to Angie, Grandfather?” Erik asked later as he was leaving.

  “Do you ask out of concern or hatred, Erik?”

  “What do you think?” said Erik sullenly. “She ruined my Naval career and made me look like a fool.”

  You are a fool, thought Whitsun, patting him on the shoulder. But you’re my fool. “Some things it’s best you not know, Erik. Rest assured though that nothing good is going to happen to Commander Milano or to Mr. Munroe. My word on it.”

  Angie was gone and Jim was alone. Terribly, achingly alone. His sense of loss was all the greater for having been adrift for so long before their one glorious week together.

  Walking to the window of the rental condo, he looked out over Boston’s North End. It was Sunday morning, just a few early risers out jogging through the mist and light rain. He watched as a couple came out of Mike’s Pastry Shop over on Hanover Street, laughing, carrying coffee and pastry.

  Sighing, he went back to his own coffee and Angie’s laptop, reviewing the file on Smalls Island left by George. It didn’t take long. George had been right—it was woefully inadequate.

  The phone rang. “Mr. Jim, sir,” said a voice with a pronounced Boston accent. “Got your message. Heard you were dead.”

  “I was,” said Jim. “Tooky, can we get together today? I need a favor. A big one.”

  “I hope it’s nothing illegal,” laughed Tooky. “Where are you?”

  Hands cupping her eyes, Angie peered through the darkened shop window. Haitian masks stared back at her from
the dimly-lit interior. Masks, paintings, carvings, knives and mysterious objects filled the walls and those few of the old glass display cases she could see from the street. Indeed, she thought, stepping back from the window, the shop’s gloomy interior. M. Laval & Sons, New Orleans, read the gilt lettering on the window. The shop had a brooding, baleful aura about it that seemed to reach out past the window, touching some deep, long-neglected part of her brain.

  Brushing her sudden uneasiness aside Angie stepped to the door, rapping sharply on the thick glass. When no one answered, she rapped harder.

  “We’re closed!” called a voice from the back of the store. “Read the sign!”

  “It’s Angie!” she called.

  A thirty-ish, lightly-complected African-American emerged from dimly-lit recesses of the store, framed by a sudden burst of light from an opened office door. He was wearing a gray coverall with the words “Chalmette Cleaners” over the front pocket. Letting Angie in, he led her past the display cases toward the office.

  “Nice shop,” she said as they walked.

  “Creepy is the word,” he said, grinning. “And creepy’s what we strive for.”

  Angie decided she liked him. “Your shop?” she asked.

  “My Dad’s, mostly. I help out. Been going on buying trips with him to the islands since I was twelve.” Shutting the office door behind them, he turned and held out his hand. “Paul Laval,” he said as they shook.

  “Angie Milano.”

  “So, from what Jim told me, you need access to the Enlisted Personnel Management Center of NSA New Orleans to make sure that some records were really destroyed?

  “That’s pretty much it.”

  “Couldn’t you just ask them?” He had an easy smile, an intelligent, good-humored face and a taut athletic build visible beneath the coveralls. Either he didn’t shave very often or he was growing a beard.

  “Not really,” she smiled back. “If they’re not destroyed, I have to destroy them.”

  “Ah,” he said, learning against a filing cabinet, arms crossed. “So this could be like, a big time felony, not just a little B&E?”

  Angie looked at him appraisingly. “Pretty much. What can you do for me? Or rather, what are you willing to do?”

  “Since it’s Jimbo, just about anything,” said Paul. “We go way back. This is important, right?”

  “Very, terribly important. Fate of the universe stuff.”

  “Already I love it. Okay, Jim said you’re familiar with NSA East facility?” The Mississippi River divided New Orleans’ Naval Support Activity into the East and West banks. The main operations complex was on the east bank, near the French Quarter.

  “I had a three year tour here, in the late ‘80’s,” she said. “A dismal three year tour.”

  “It hasn’t changed,” he said, “on any level. Jim asked me to scope things out and I did. As nearly as I can tell, what you want are the records that are stored in the EPMAC contractor’s area, on the fifth floor. They scanned all those records into an optical disk-based system, over about an eighteen month period. Then, last week, they had a huge rush effort to dispose of the original records. Navy guys, civilian haulers. Thing is, though, like I told Jim on the phone, they were ordered to stop toward the end, so there’s still quite a bit of stuff left.” He shook his head. “It’s the government, but even for the government, it was crazy.”

  “Not really a cleaner, are you?” said Angie.

  “Usually, I’m a computer programmer,” said Paul. “Working on converting—this will surprise you—EPMAC’s COBOL-based system into an ORACLE environment. But tonight, I’m a cleaner.”

  “Am I a cleaner tonight, too?” she asked.

  Paul laughed.

  “I say something funny?”

  He nodded, recovering. “A nice white girl like you, cleaning? In this town? You’ve lived here—come on.”

  “I’m nice olive girl.”

  “Okay, okay. A nice olive girl.” He shook his head. “The Union may have won the Civil War, Angie, but in New Orleans, and especially where we’re going tonight, it’s still a plantation economy. Come on, how many white folks you ever see cleaning that big old Navy building while you were there? Good heavens, I’m the only black computer geek in the whole place—some days I feel like I’m expected to do a little Sammy Davis Junior tap dance routine for those folks.”

  “You’re right,” she said, dredging up memories of her New Orleans tour. “So how do I get in?”

  She got in by hiding in the back of the Chalmette Cleaners van—hiding under bags of new cleaning rags behind cartons of new trash bags. Not that anyone looked. After a cursory inspection at the gate, the van drove on up to the fifth floor of the garage attached to the main building. Then they just walked right in, down the deserted main corridor, turning right and again until they came to a door marked “SLIF Staff Only”. Paul turned the handle. “Gracious. It’s locked.” Taking a lock pick set from his pocket he set to work as Angie watched the corridor.

  “This is still the world’s butt-ugliest building,” she said, looking at the brown walls, the brown linoleum floor and the brown ceiling.

  “Oh, but very clean. And they repaint it every six months,” said Paul, intent on his task. “NSA New Orleans must be the world’s largest purchaser of brown latex semi-gloss,” he added, delicately maneuvering two slim lock picks. There was a faint click. “If possible, it’s even uglier in here,” he said, swinging open the door.

  The SLIF area was yet another squalid collection of grimy Federal office cubicles, a cluttered space unbroken by any windows, lit only by the usual flickering fluorescents. Two doors led off from the work area.

  “Where’s the SLIF system hardware?” asked Angie.

  “Downstairs, third floor. Not much to see really, just two little shiny black boxes about the size of a water cooler.”

  Angie turned to him, surprised. “A water cooler? But we were told that there were five supercomputers, vast arrays of file servers, optical disk readers...”

  “Here?” He laughed. “Supercomputers? Who’d be crazy enough to send a collection of advanced hardware here? Until last year they still had a functional keypunch machine!”

  Angie was now totally perplexed. “They sent those little black boxes here. Who takes care of them?”

  Paul shrugged. “They just seem to take care of themselves. I work on that floor—I’ve never seen anyone go near that gear.”

  “Let’s get on it with this,” said Angie, setting aside the puzzle of the SLIF hardware. “I’ll be in there,” she pointed to the door marked “Document Storage.”

  “I’ll watch the corridor,” said Paul. “Next security rounds begin at 2200 hours.” He checked his watch. “Two and a half hours enough for you?”

  “More than enough.” Paul held the door as she wheeled the cleaning cart into the document room.

  What had been spared the landfill lined the far wall of the big mostly empty room: several hundred bundles of 8.5 x 11 inch paper, bound with thick red rubber bands, divided into three groups, stacked four to five feet high. Each bundle had a five-digit number taped to the front of it—Angie assumed they were batch processing identifiers.

  She figured that as a percentage of all those old Navy personnel records what was left in the room was bubkas. Most of the records must have been burned before Whitsun intervened. “Time to finish the job,” she said.

  Opening a utility knife, Angie began cutting the rubber bands. It took her thirty minutes to heap the dry old paper into a mound in the middle of the room. As she worked, she was impressed by the fine condition of most of the paper—there was none of the yellow brittling so common to high-acid modern paper. Most of the fifty year-old records looked no more than a few years old. Taking the first of three five-gallon cans marked “Disinfectant” from her cart, unscrewed the lid and began sloshing it over the mound. As she worked, the pungent smell of gasoline filled the air.

  “Merde,” cursed Philip as their rental ca
r hit yet another pothole on Dauphin Avenue. The road was dark, the only light from their headlights or the occasional security lights outside the dilapidated warehouses set back from the roadway. It was late and there were no other cars, the government workers long fled home to the suburbs. Though not near any of New Orleans high-rise ghettos, Dauphin Avenue after dark wasn’t safe. After twilight, safety in New Orleans resided in the French Quarter, where cops looked out for the cash crops of tourists.

  “Just a few more blocks,” said Iceman. He was checking the map for cross streets as their rental car jounced along, tortured suspension squeaking.

  Whitsun had dispatched Philip to New Orleans as soon as he’d heard from the Navy that some of the records had survived. “Get down there and secure what’s left,” he ordered. “We may be able to use it.”

  “There,” said Philip as they turned a corner. A hulking rectangular slapdash of concrete, concertina and sodium vapor lamps, NSA New Orleans blazed before them, outpost of light amid an otherwise dark and blighted district. Marines in camouflaged fatigues guarded the perimeter, M16s slung over their shoulders. A Rottweiler watched disinterestedly as Philip pulled to a stop at the main gate.

  “Good evening, sir,” said the lance corporal, bending to look into the car at Philip and Iceman.

  Philip handed over a brown leather ID case. “Commander Cheyne, NCIS,” he said as the guard looked at the IDs. “And Lieutenant Walker,” he said, passing Iceman’s ID. “We should be on your list.” The Marine stepped into the guard shack, taking a clipboard off the wall.

  At such moments Philip Martin’s French accent vanished. (“So, Monsieur Martin,” Schmidla had once asked him in his flawless English, “do you take elocution lessons to preserve zee cute little accent?”)

  Waiting, Philip felt watched. The Rottie was scrutinizing him, large red tongue lolling from its big square mouth. “Nice doggie,” smiled Philip. Growling low, the dog lifted its right lip, displaying fang-like incisors.

  “Saw one of them dogs rip a big nigger’s balls off once,” said Iceman in his nasal Ozark twang. “That fucker was screamin’ like a little girl,” he chuckled.