The Patriot Threat

by Steve Berry

  He nodded and produced his cell phone. “Right on this. Quite exciting, actually. The embassy is two hours away in Zagreb, but I was already on the way here to Zadar for the day on other business. The secretary told me to first contact Mr. Malone and take him to the library, then come straight here.”

  His tone was curt and precise, straight to the point, which she liked.

  But his directness clearly irritated Daniels.

  Which she also liked.

  “The charges are all being dropped,” the envoy said. “We’ll make restitution to the cabdriver for his vehicle, along with a little extra to compensate for his trouble. Luckily, no one was hurt, which will make this much easier to handle.”

  “And my phone?” Daniels asked.

  “Oh, I’m glad you reminded me.”

  He fished two units from his jacket pocket and handed them through the bars. “For both of you.”

  “I need to make a call,” Daniels said.

  “They don’t work in here,” the envoy noted. “It’s a police station, you know.”

  “Then get us out.”

  She agreed. The quicker she rid herself of Luke Daniels the better. Now that she knew where Malone was located, she’d get there herself and talk to him directly. Hopefully, he had the documents, or at least knew where they were located.

  “The officers will be right along to open the cell.”

  “Thank you,” she said, offering a smile. “Mr. Daniels and I are not meant to be kept so close together. I’m anxious to be on my way.”

  “But that’s not possible,” the envoy said.

  She saw the comment grabbed Daniels’ attention, too. “What do you mean? Let her be on her way, by all means.”

  “I was told to bring Ms. Schaefer along. She was not to go off on her own. Those were my orders.”

  She wanted to know, “From who?”

  “The secretary of state said those came directly from the president of the United States.”

  FORTY-TWO

  WASHINGTON, DC

  10:30 A.M.

  Stephanie examined the cache inside a closed room with the secretary of Treasury, who’d brought out everything Paul Larks had supposedly copied.

  “Joe, you have to explain. Why was this stuff classified? It’s a bunch of nothing.”

  He shrugged. “That’s a good question. But the decision to classify was made by other people a long time ago. I assume they had their reasons.”

  “Is this everything Larks took?”

  He nodded. “It’s all there. That’s it.”

  She knew he was lying. Cotton had briefed her on what he’d learned at his end, including the presence of a 1913 solicitor general memo and an original crumpled sheet with numbers that Paul Larks had stolen.

  Neither was here.

  “Joe, I’m going to assume that you’re trying to help. That whatever is going on is so bad you want to protect the president, protect the country.” She paused. “But you have to stop lying to me.”

  He seemed to sense something from her tone. “What do you know?”

  “My man on the scene has learned a lot.”

  “Far more than my eyes and ears.”

  She waited.

  “It’s bad,” he muttered. “Real bad. There could be a problem with the 16th Amendment. What Howell wrote in that book? It’s amazingly close to the truth.”

  “Tell me about the original sheet Larks stole. With the numbers on it.”

  “It’s the problem.”

  “I need more.”

  He stood. “Follow me.”

  They left the room and walked down a long hall to a set of double doors marked PRIVATE. People milled back and forth, as the Tuesday work morning had begun in earnest. After speaking with Cotton she’d left the hotel and come straight here. Any briefing of the president would wait until she knew more. Cotton had been right, a lot of things had gone wrong on his end. And things were rapidly deteriorating on her side, too.

  But there might be a way to turn it all around.

  Past the double doors were fewer people. She’d never been in this part of the building before. But she could only remember coming to Treasury once. Before this encounter, the department had not figured prominently into Billet business. The Secret Service handled most of its covert needs. The secretary led her to another closed door that he unlocked with a metal key he carried. Inside was a small workroom with a table and chairs. Files were stacked in neat rows, some of the paper lying scattered. A shredder sat next to the table.

  “This is where I’ve been working on all this,” he said. “Ever since Larks let the cat out of the bag. This is every piece of paper from our archives that even remotely mentions anything associated with what we’re dealing with. I had my agent Isabella Schaefer, the one who is now in Italy, assemble it.”

  She approached the table and waited for him to explain.

  He closed and locked the door. “The problem is, we don’t have a copy of that original Larks stole. Once he left for Europe, we seized Larks’ home computer and searched his email accounts. There was nothing in either. We’ve only been listening in on Larks’ calls for the past three weeks. We know there were a lot of communications to Howell prior to that. We only know that crumpled sheet is important thanks to a memo Henry Morgenthau wrote to FDR. That we do have. It was located in a set of classified files Larks did not examine. And thank goodness he didn’t. If he’d taken that, we might not know anything.”

  “Has your agent reported in?” she asked.

  He shook his head.

  She told him about what had happened with the police in Croatia and how she’d had the White House intervene. Edwin Davis had handled things with the Croatian government, and the secretary of state sent a representative to Zadar to secure the release of both agents.

  “Ms. Schaefer has been indisposed,” she told him. “I had the White House order her to go with my man. I hope you don’t mind, but it seemed better to keep them all together.”

  He nodded. “Of course, I understand. This is your game now.”

  “Not entirely. I still don’t know what you know.”

  “Are you sure you want to?”

  She had no choice. “Tell me.”

  He reached down to the table, lifted one of the papers, and handed it to her. She saw that it was a memorandum from Secretary of Treasury Henry Morgenthau to Franklin Roosevelt, dated December 5, 1944. Across the top, in large type were the words FOR THE PRESIDENT’S EYES ONLY.

  I have the answer to the questions you posed last week. I had agents interview several current and former employees of Treasury, people who were there in the 1920s. We learned that in 1925 former secretary Mellon was interested in a possible financial claim that the heirs of Haym Salomon may have against the United States. Congress, at the time, was considering some form of repayment and made a formal inquiry to Treasury as to any documentation that may exist in our archives. There were, in fact, documents. These were removed and given directly to Secretary Mellon. Those documents were never returned and remain unaccounted for. If you would like a personal briefing, I can provide one on the Salomon claim. Because of its sensitive nature, I would prefer not to commit those thoughts to writing.

  I remain troubled by what you told me concerning Secretary Mellon’s actions on December 31, 1936. This quest he left for you to decipher is not only insulting, it borders on treason. This country is now at war and we cannot afford to have anything jeopardize the efficient operation of government. It’s vital we maintain a strong and decisive posture. Mellon’s comments that whatever he left could be “the end of you” is disturbing. The dollar bill you showed me and the anagram of letters is particularly troubling. Is that a coincidence? If so, it’s one only Mellon seems to have been cognizant of. But the reference to “tyrannical aristocrat” is not hard to decipher. I am a student of history and those words were once uttered by George Mason, from Virginia, one of several delegates who refused to sign the Constitution in Philadelphia.
Which would also explain the significance of the word Mason formed by the six-pointed star. The crumpled page of numbers you showed me is definitely a code. I would suggest having our cryptographers examine it.

  It is possible that the missing Salomon documents could be what Secretary Mellon left for you to find. I am told that those could be not only financially damaging, but overtly embarrassing. As you related, Mellon noted that the page with numbers deals with “two” national secrets. What the other might be, I do not know. My suggestion would be to follow the trail and see where it leads.

  She silently filled in the blanks with what she already knew. Obviously, FDR had discussed the Mellon situation with someone other than his Secret Service agent Mark Tipton. But that was no surprise. She knew Roosevelt had made a habit of delegating the same task to multiple people, telling each not to speak of it with anyone else. It served as a way for him to obtain varying viewpoints. Ed Tipton had told her and Danny that FDR had focused on George Mason. Indeed, the wooden crate was full of books on Mason. Now she knew how that focus had been obtained.

  “Henry Morgenthau hated Mellon,” Levy said. “He wholeheartedly supported Roosevelt’s tax vendetta against Mellon. Of course, that backfired in both of their faces.”

  “Which is a lesson for not doing it.”

  “I get it, Stephanie. I’m playing games, too. But this isn’t 1944. The world is a different place. This country is different. Roosevelt had a war to worry about, but he was dead six months after that memo from Morgenthau. And all of this was forgotten.”

  She could see that there was more. “What is it, Joe?”

  He handed her a tattered sheet of brownish paper. An original memorandum from the solicitor general to the secretary of state, dated February 24, 1913.

  “Larks found this and copied it. I withheld it from what the president viewed yesterday and from what I showed you earlier. The stuff about Salomon is one thing, but this is altogether different. This is the second secret Mellon was referring to.”

  She read it, then said, “This talks about concerns with the 16th amendment. It specifically mentions Kentucky.”

  “Which Larks visited. He discovered that the state may have never ratified the amendment, yet Knox certified that it did.”

  She motioned with the copy. “And the other memo? The one sent eleven days earlier that seems to have even more concerns?”

  He shook his head. “It’s not here. And that’s the truth.”

  She gestured again with the page. “Is there any evidence that Morgenthau saw this memo from the solicitor general?”

  “If he did, he never mentioned it in any surviving documents. But in those days, finding anything in our archives would have taken weeks of hand searching. It was easy for things to get lost.”

  “Maybe he didn’t want to know.”

  “That’s possible. But there’s no evidence anywhere that he even looked. He was definitely focused on the Salomon angle, and realized that there may be something else, but there’s nothing to suggest he ever went looking. Again, they were all preoccupied with the war, then FDR died. I also did some other checking. The solicitor general who wrote that memo you’re holding, from 1913, left office and died three months after sending it.”

  “So tell me what’s so awful that you’re willing to risk your job and career?”

  “Larks read that 1913 memo and got some kind of wild hair up his butt. He went to Kentucky and found problems, which didn’t help. I told him to forget about it and leave it alone, but he wouldn’t stop. Finally, I sent Isabella Schaefer, the agent now in Croatia, not only to Kentucky, but three other states, and she found similar problems. Questionable procedures, lax rule following, missing originals. More than enough to call into question whether those states properly ratified the 16th Amendment. By then Larks had gone nuts, demanding a formal investigation. There’s no way we could do that. So I eased him out and sealed his lips behind a classified stamp and threat of jail.”

  “And without any proof, he’d just be another wild conspiratorialist.”

  “That was my thinking. But the old man got a step ahead of us and made copies. Then we found out he stole that original, keeping the best evidence for himself. A single page with random numbers—”

  “Crumpled up.”

  He looked surprised. “That’s right. How did you know?”

  “Kim Yong Jin has it now.”

  Shock filled Levy’s face. “Stephanie, I don’t think that amendment was properly ratified. It could be void, and may have been even from the start. I think Mellon knew that, and used it to his political advantage.”

  And she knew the rest. “But this was never meant to get out. It was something between Mellon and FDR.”

  The lawyer inside her calculated the fallout. Danny had been right in the car on the drive back from Virginia. If the person certifying the 16th Amendment had been placed on notice that the ratification process may have been flawed, yet he certified the amendment passed anyway, that was fraud. Which meant that every single cent collected through a wrongfully adopted 16th Amendment was subject to suit and restitution. Those millions of lawsuits would destroy the American economy. Not only that, current revenue collections would cease until a substitute revenue source could be legally enacted. Maybe a direct tax, subject to apportionment? Or some sort of national sales tax or flat tax? Or a new amendment to allow a legal income tax without apportionment? All options. But those would take time to enact, all while the U.S. government would be without over 90 percent of its revenues.

  “Kim wants to use this offensively against us,” Levy said. “And he can. He’ll be able to destroy us, without ever firing a shot. He’ll actually turn our own legal system against us. He could do what North Korea has been threatening for decades. We laugh at them. What are they? Just a tiny, insignificant country on the other side of the world. But look at the damage he could do.”

  Which also explained why the Chinese were so interested. Over a trillion dollars in defaulted debt would seriously injure them as well. She had to admit, the scheme was clever. Smart, too. And they would have never seen it coming but for a few fortuitous flukes that had pointed them in the right direction.

  “You see why I tried to contain this,” he said. “If the president was to know any of this, then he’d be part of the conspiracy. As it is now, he’s got deniability.”

  “I get it, Joe.” She pointed at the shredder. “You planning on a purge?”

  He nodded. “Every piece of this is becoming confetti. That’s what should have happened to it long ago.”

  She did not necessarily disagree. “Not yet. Okay? Let’s finish this, first. In the meantime we’re going to keep this between you and me.”

  “What about Kim? If he’s got that original crumpled sheet, he might be able to find whatever it is Mellon left for Roosevelt.”

  “He might, but Kim has a problem. He’s four thousand miles away, in Croatia, and what he wants isn’t there. The trick will be to contain him long enough so we can locate it here first.”

  “But he has the only clue to know where to look.”

  She smiled. “Maybe not.”

  Then there was that other problem.

  And with Justice and Treasury now being allies—

  “Joe, I’m going to need your help to end this.”

  FORTY-THREE

  CROATIA

  Malone waited inside the Zadar city library, a grayish-blue, single-story building that—back in the 1920s, he was told—had served as an officers’ club for the Italian military. During a recent remodeling its three wings had been connected with all-glass corridors that, at their center, accommodated a pavilion-like cafeteria forming a transparent inner courtyard. The library sat on the mainland, facing the old town peninsula. Beyond the glass, the fog was gone but rain continued to fall, though not with the intensity of earlier. In the distance, the ferry still sat docked at the north end of the peninsula.

  He’d managed to ease the lifeboat back to
shore, ditching it on a stretch of beach near one of the hotels north of the town center. Fog and the squall had limited his choices, the important thing being to get back to dry land and on Kim’s trail. He’d spoken to Stephanie and reported everything that happened, including that Luke and Isabella Schaefer might need some help. He had no doubt she’d take care of things. His problem was Howell and Kim. During a return call from Stephanie he’d reported where he and Howell had landed. They’d stayed put until a car arrived, driven by an odd-looking fellow in a bow tie, who produced State Department credentials and drove them straight to the library, explaining why along the way.

  Tucked in one of the wings inside was a section that contained books, biographies, novels—anything and everything American for the uninitiated. Also, there were three desktop computers, connected to the Internet, that the envoy said were at their disposal. That had been nearly an hour ago. Howell was sitting off to himself, still shaken up over Jelena. He, too, was bothered by what happened and sat quietly watching as a dozen or so birds arrived in the bay. They wheeled low, then hurled themselves into the water with closed wings and out-thrust heads forming a spear-beaked missile in search of food. To the west, where the sky met the sea, the pale watery gray shaded to a sepia haze.

  He heard movement and turned. The envoy had returned with Luke Daniels and Isabella Schaefer.

  “I can’t leave you two alone for more than five minutes without you getting arrested?” he asked.

  “It was all his fault,” Isabella said, pointing to Luke.

  Which he believed. He explained all that had happened on the ferry, then said, “We couldn’t find Jelena. Kim tossed her out, just to slow me down.”

  “She didn’t have to die,” Howell said. “She wasn’t part of this.”

  “Until you involved her,” Isabella said. “You sent her on that cruise.”

  Howell’s eyes widened. “To get some documents from a crazy old man. I had no idea North Koreans were involved in this.”

  “That’s what happens when people stick their noses where they don’t belong.”