Taylor strolled through a mall, a shopping bag filled with a few necessities—milk, fresh fruit, decent coffee and a blond wig. She’d only slept a couple of hours, but despite that she felt alert and in control.
She was supposed to have felt this way in the Witness Security program but that hadn’t happened. She’d thought long and hard about exactly why the program had failed her. The problem could be as simple as the publicity surrounding her shooting in D.C. making her too visible. Either that, or someone powerful enough to circumvent WITSEC had betrayed her.
She was betting on the second option. A mole who had eluded protection had disrupted the Morell/Lopez investigation. It was an uncomfortable notion to think that she had been personally targeted by the mole, but given that the information she’d had stored on the disks had pertained solely to the Lopez investigation, she had to consider it.
The way she saw it she had two options. She could disappear, renege on her agreement to testify against Lopez and start a new life with a false identity, or she could find out who wanted her dead—and why—and stop them.
With the contacts she had, and with Jack’s help, she could arrange a false identity. But if she took that route, Dana would have to come with her, which would mean a huge disruption in a life that had already been derailed by the Chavez cartel. It would also mean taking the coward’s way out. After all she and Dana had been through, after all the effort she’d put into catching Lopez, she was damned if she would roll over now.
She turned down the street that led to her motel, her gaze watchful. Despite her tiredness, her stride was loose and her chest felt close to normal. The hours she’d spent at the gym and jogging around the streets of Cold Peak had paid off.
When she reached her motel unit, she unpacked the groceries, had breakfast, pinned up her hair and tried on the wig. With her hair color changed from dark brown to honey-blond, she looked radically different. Satisfied, she changed clothes, collected the bag of disks and her purse, locked the unit and walked back to the mall, which had an Internet café.
She hired a computer for the morning, sat down and placed the stack of disks beside the hard drive.
There were twenty in all. Setting the disks in order of date, she inserted the first one and began to read. By the time she inserted the second disk, the noise of people checking mail and transacting business at the counter had faded and she was once more hotwired into the world that Lopez had locked her out of.
As she worked, she made brief notes about the interweaving threads of the Chavez cartel and the wild card of the Nazi cabal that, according to Slater, had backed Alex Lopez. She had every confidence that if she searched long enough, she would find what it was that had pushed Lopez’s buttons.
At eleven she stopped to stretch her legs and iron the cricks out of her neck and shoulder, then paid for the afternoon. The café was open until late, which suited her. If she had to stay until closing, she would.
She slipped in another disk and the cadences of the investigation began to flow, the strange coincidences and seemingly unrelated incidents forming a pattern that had implications beyond the investigation into the Chavez cartel.
She took a break from the screen to read the notes she’d made about the Nordika dive tragedy and Tito Mendoza, and suddenly the pattern made sense.
There was a book. It was the last piece of information she had found while she was working on the case. Just days after e-mailing the file to her work computer, she had been shot.
Maybe she was stretching things too far, but she didn’t think so. When she had read the Mendoza article months ago, she had connected it with Lopez, because Slater had said Lopez had made a trip to Bogotá to retrieve a book from a safe-deposit box. What she hadn’t focused on were the implications behind what the book Mendoza had had in his possession contained: names, dates, blood types and numbers tattooed onto German ex-nationals.
If the articles about Stefan le Clerc were correct, SS officers had hijacked the Nordika and used it to transport so-called genetically superior children and a cargo of looted art and gold bullion to South America. If any of the SS officers were still alive, they would be elderly. The children would now be past middle age.
There were no actual estimates of the value of the art and gold bullion, but the le Clerc article suggested that it was enormous. More than enough to bankroll a new life in the United States and to form the financial base of an exclusive club based on a shared past and genetic heritage.
And what better way to control the members of the cabal than through a book that had the potential not only to expose individual members but the entire cabal?
According to Slater, the cabal was ordered, secretive and primarily in the business of making money through shareholdings in large corporations and manipulating lucrative defense contracts. The reason the CIA were involved in the investigation was clear. The cabal’s activities weren’t confined to the United States: they had political and terrorist affiliations and operated on a global scale. If Slater’s information was correct, their influence extended all the way to the White House, and the list of crimes perpetrated by members of the cabal included conspiracy and high treason.
Tito Mendoza, a hit man, had gotten hold of the book right about the time the navy divers had disappeared. The close timing with the naval tragedy was what had drawn her attention to the news report about Mendoza in the first place. At a gut level, she had been certain that Mendoza and the book were linked to the Nordika dive tragedy.
She inserted the disk with the article about the missing divers. Partway down the second page, the name of the SEAL team leader caught her eye: Todd Fischer.
She stared at the name for long seconds, transfixed. She hadn’t paid the actual members of the dive team much attention before, because she had been focused on Lopez and the cabal.
Pulse racing, she scrolled down the page. Todd Fischer’s next of kin were listed. His wife, Eleanor May Fischer.
His son, Steven John Fischer.
She searched through her disks and inserted one that had a grainy photograph of Todd Fischer. The family resemblance was clear. Steve was taller, his skin and hair a little darker, but he looked enough like Todd that the relationship was in no doubt.
She went online and searched “Steve Fischer.” A number of hits came up, among them an article with a photograph of Lieutenant Commander Steve Fischer accepting a trophy on behalf of his naval shooting team. There were a number of official records cataloging medals and awards for tours of duty in the Middle East, and one brief article from an in-house naval magazine outlining Fischer’s secondment to the office of the Director of National Intelligence in a special projects role, reporting directly to RearAdmiral John M. Saunders.
The report was more than a year old, and in that time he hadn’t changed much, except his job.
She already knew he had followed her to both Wilmington and Cold Peak. He wasn’t Bureau. It was possible he was operating under the umbrella of the CIA. The office of the Director of National Intelligence oversaw the entire intelligence community and it had a wide reach. Special Projects threw it even wider.
The reason Fischer had focused on her was clear. He had known she was being hunted. He had had her watched in D.C. Given that he had known she was researching Lopez and the cabal, the spyware on her computer had likely been his. Every time she had e-mailed files to her work address, he had received a copy. He had kept close but not too close, staking her out while she acted as a sacrificial goat. That wasn’t the act of a man falling in love, or even in lust. It was the act of a cold-blooded professional. It didn’t explain why he had risked his cover by getting so personally close to her, but she was certain there had been a net gain involved.
He was good; he had fooled her. He had watched her and moved in close; he had even slept with her. He was on his own private mission, hunting his father’s killers.
The government was paying him, but she was willing to bet that he would do it for free.