By the time I got in to the office the following morning it was far later than I had planned. When I arrived home the previous evening, I’d never been so desperate to crawl into bed, but I couldn’t do that until I’d had supper with Maria and the children, who naturally wanted to know why I was so late home, and were enthralled by the story I had to tell. I was still also pretty wired, and it was after midnight when I finally crashed. The office, it seemed, was even more enthralled.
There was a real buzz of excitement in the air. Rumours had spread – via security, in all likelihood, as they were the source of most of the gossip running around the building – about the events of the night before. Everyone was talking about Harry, Ellen and myself as if we were a reincarnation of the Three Musketeers, who had valiantly crossed swords with the Treasury villains, and delivered Justice from a terrible fate against all the odds. I’d also received some sarcastic but good-natured emails from colleagues, some asking me whether I would now be applying to join the Criminal Division, or the CIA, or better still, opening my own private detective agency; one informing me that my new nickname in the office was to be Sam Spade.
The laughter the emails brought me was a real tonic. In fact, the whole morning felt good after the trauma of the previous day, and I’m embarrassed to admit that I played my transient fame as a musketeer for all it was worth. I was pleased to see that Ellen was also basking in the sunshine. As we were leaving the office the previous evening, I’d insisted on putting her in a cab to go home, over her half-hearted protests – her bicycle was her preferred mode of transport and she rode almost every day, come rain or shine. But I wouldn’t have been happy with her on the roads; she was exhausted. She didn’t fight me too hard, and now she looked as if a good night’s rest had done her a power of good. She was back on top and acting like her usual self again.
The first item on my agenda was to talk to Kiah, but just as I was about to place the call, my phone rang.
‘Dave,’ Maisie said after wishing me a good morning, ‘Judge Morrow asked me to bring you up to date on something that happened here at the courthouse late last night.’
I suddenly felt a shiver going up my spine.
‘Late last night?’ I asked.
‘Yes. It all worked out OK, but it was somewhat disturbing. Our night security guard reported that two men in suits, who identified themselves as federal agents, tried to gain access to the building. They produced badges and suchlike, and were acting like they were entitled to be admitted.’
‘What did they say exactly?’ I asked.
‘They told the guard they were here to collect some papers that had been delivered to the court by mistake earlier in the day. Fortunately, the guard kept his head and did the right thing. He called our night emergency number for back-up and told the so-called agents what he was doing, at which point they left.’
‘And they didn’t try to force their way in?’
‘No, I guess they knew better than that. Dave, Judge Morrow said to ask you whether this might have something to do with the papers you brought us yesterday. No one at the court knows about that except us, but the Chief Judge has been asking whether anyone can explain the incident. Is there any reason why we can’t tell him?’
‘No,’ I replied, ‘no reason at all. Apparently, it’s not exactly a secret any more. And yes, I would say that this incident is definitely related to the documents I brought yesterday. We had something similar happen at our offices.’
‘I’ll tell him,’ Maisie said. She sounded relieved. ‘The judge would like to get a federal marshal assigned to look after things in his chambers at night until this case ends and the documents are gone, and he thinks that will be a lot easier with the Chief’s support.’
‘If it helps,’ I replied, ‘tell him I think that would be a very good idea.’
I hung up feeling disturbed, and my first thought was to tell Harry, until I realised that he would still be in his meeting with the Attorney General. Instead, I called Kiah as planned. When she answered the phone, Arlene was abrupt with me, but that wasn’t exactly unusual, so I thought nothing of it, and had no inkling that anything was wrong until she put me on to Kiah.
‘What do you want, Dave?’ she asked when I greeted her. ‘Do you want me to describe the mess to you?’ She sounded incredibly angry.
‘Kiah, what’s up?’ I asked. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Or perhaps you want to come and see for yourself?’
She hung up. I left immediately, drove as fast as I dared, and was at her office just over half an hour later. The awfulness of the scene hit me immediately. Arlene and Samantha van Eyck were sitting together at Arlene’s desk looking gutted. Kiah was standing just outside her office, leaning on the doorframe. The door was open. I saw a man walking slowly around inside, picking his way carefully through piles of debris. The place had been ransacked. Files, papers, books, pens, scissors, staplers, and every other piece of office equipment you could think of, were lying in heaps on the floor. They were heavily stained with large quantities of what looked like black ink. Every piece of furniture had been overturned and destroyed. The computers and printer had been smashed to pieces, perhaps with a large hammer, certainly a very heavy blunt object. The walls had been stained with huge blotches of the same ink, or whatever it was, that had been poured on top of the piles of debris. Someone had deliberately trashed the office, or someone had been looking for something. As I continued to stare, I began to put two and two together, and it was getting depressingly close to four. My heart sank. Kiah turned towards me. Her face was ashen. She was shaking.
‘Kiah, I’m so sorry…’ I began. I didn’t know what else to say.
‘Y’all damn well should be,’ Arlene answered. ‘Y’all should be ashamed. It was y’all’s people did this.’
‘They’re not my people,’ I replied quietly.
Kiah turned towards me, walked the short distance and touched my hand.
‘No, they’re not,’ she said. ‘I know that. ‘But do you know whose people they are?’
I looked down to the floor and breathed out heavily.
‘Are you sure it couldn’t have been kids, just messing around, causing as much damage as they could?’
I was snatching at straws, of course. She took a step towards the office door.
‘Powalski,’ she called out. ‘Got a minute?’
A tall man dressed in a navy blue suit and light blue tie made his way carefully to the door. I put him at late thirties to mid-forties, difficult to say, good-looking in a rugged kind of way, but with a reserved air about him, as if he felt no need to speak without being asked – or perhaps his mind was still on whatever he had been doing in the office.
‘I don’t think you guys have met,’ Kiah said. ‘Our investigator, Powalski. And this is Dave Petrosian, who’s handling the case at Justice.’
We shook hands briefly.
‘Powalsaki, please tell Dave why this isn’t a bunch of kids messing around,’ Kiah said.
‘This building is alarmed at night,’ Powalski began. ‘There’s no guard, but the alarm goes right into the nearest police precinct and into a private security company. One or the other would be here in ten minutes or less, and all you have to do to set the alarm off is open any door or window. Whoever did this had a device that neutralised the alarm before it could even react. I don’t know how much you know about electronic code-breakers, Mr Petrosian, but the speed and precision of the device they had was top of the range. Typically, when you find this kind of equipment, it indicates government involvement. I know this because of some work I did for the government during an earlier time in my career. It’s conceivable that we could be dealing with a very well-funded organised crime syndicate, a drug cartel or the like, but Kiah’s never been involved with cases like that, whereas she’s very involved with a case against the government.’
He took three small items from the side pocket of his jacket.
‘These put it beyond doubt. I found them while I was examining the phones. You’ll notice that the phones and the fax machine are the only items left untouched. This is why.’
He held out his hand to let me see.
‘Listening devices?’ I asked.
‘Japanese, also state of the art, planted during the visit. This is something else I used to do when I worked for the government. But the devices were an afterthought. If all they wanted was to bug the office, they could have come and gone without leaving a trace. They were looking for something. The vandalism was meant to cover that up, throw us off the trail. Whether they found anything of interest, we don’t know. Kiah doesn’t know of anything they couldn’t have found out through the court filings or the press, but then again, we don’t know what they were looking for.’
‘I do,’ I said.
Logically, it didn’t make sense. There was no way I would have given custody of the originals to Kiah, but these were the same people who thought that the Department of the Treasury was entitled to withhold its papers from other departments of the government, and saw themselves as the Treasury’s enforcers. Logic might not have come into it. They’d tried to infiltrate our building and the Claims Court, but they’d been denied by security. Here was a building they could just walk into. In their book, it must have seemed worth a try.
‘You know what they were looking for?’ Kiah asked.
I smiled. ‘I know this has been a terrible day so far,’ I said, ‘but I think I might be able to brighten it up for you a little.’
‘I’m ready for that,’ Kiah whispered. She was close to tears.
I had brought her copies of the documents with me. I opened my briefcase while Arlene cleared a space on her desk, and laid the documents out for them, side by side.
‘We found these yesterday in the Treasury building,’ I said. ‘I think this is what they were hoping to find – well, the originals anyway.’
I stepped back and watched as the four of them crowded around and read, silently at first, and then with gasps. Samantha took a step backwards, a hand over her mouth. She started to cry. Kiah was breathing rapidly.
‘Are these for real?’ she asked eventually.
‘We’re sure they are,’ I replied. ‘You can see the originals any time you want. I’ve deposited them with the court – frankly, because we were afraid of something like this happening at our offices.’
‘That would suggest that you have suspects in mind,’ Powalski said.
I nodded. ‘There’s a fake-cop outfit inside Treasury, calls itself the Internal Investigations Unit. They’ve been making our lives a misery ever since we began our search. Ellen and I didn’t trust them. They didn’t want to us to take the documents away, and in the end I had to smuggle them out of the building. We’re convinced that they were after the originals to do them some harm, and sure enough, they showed up at our offices last night demanding that we hand the documents back. When that didn’t work they tried to force their way into the courthouse, but fortunately the security guard saw them off.’
‘Thank you, Mr Petrosian,’ Samantha said. ‘Thank you for bringing these to us.’
I smiled. ‘You’re welcome.’
Kiah reached into her purse and took out some pieces of paper torn from a yellow pad.
‘In return,’ she said, ‘I’d like to show you this. We found it in Pennsylvania. You can see the original, of course.’
I began to read. It was a statement by someone called Isabel Hardwick, written in 1813, which rambled a bit and took some time to get to the point. But the point, once she got to it, was remarkable, especially given the documents we had found the previous day. According to Isabel Hardwick, Jacob van Eyck had entrusted her with twenty-two documents to take to his Brother, not named, in Philadelphia in 1810. The clear inference was that these documents were loan certificates, and that his Brother was to play some role in making sure that Jacob was repaid, presumably by delivering them to the Treasury in Washington. The value of the loans was not stated, but the significance of her statement was unmistakable. Isabel said she delivered twenty-two such documents to the Brother, while the anonymous writer said that he only delivered sixteen to the Treasury. But even with that discrepancy, there was a massive circumstantial case for believing that the anonymous letter-writer and the Brother were one and the same person. Kiah now held a huge piece of the puzzle in her hands.
But she also had a disaster on her hands. She could easily spend the rest of her discovery time reconstructing her office and nothing more. I looked up. I knew instantly that she had reached the same conclusion I had. I decided what I was going to say next in an instant.
‘Kiah, do you have any idea who this guy, the Brother, might have been?’
‘Not yet. We’re working on the theory that he was a Freemason, possibly someone who lived not too far away from the van Eyck family. Jacob was a Mason, so the use of the word “Brother” seems significant. We’re searching for the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania membership records of the time .’
I took a deep breath.
‘I’ll call the FBI’s Philadelphia field office this afternoon,’ I volunteered. ‘It might take you guys days to get that information. They’ll get it in a day and fax it to me, and I’ll send it over to you. What then? You’ll pick out likely candidates and try to find out who their descendants are?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Send me the names when you have them,’ I offered. ‘I’ll have the FBI run their addresses and phone numbers for you.’
Kiah took my hand.
‘Dave, I don’t know what to say. This is really above and beyond the call of duty. Why?’
I looked back into the office, and stretched out my hand in the direction of the devastation.
‘This,’ I said. ‘I didn’t become a lawyer for this.’