The Bleiberg Project (Consortium Thriller) (10 page)

E
ytan takes the pile of
complimentary newspapers off the coffee table. He rapidly flips through the pages until he finds the article he’s looking for.

“Here we are. International section of today’s
London Times
. ‘
The situation in Mexico is causing serious concern in the scientific community. The number of deaths linked to a new and particularly virulent strain of influenza has increased dramatically in recent weeks. The virus causes severe diarrhea, leading to dehydration. According to authorities, an estimated 2,000 people have died, and the number is rising. The incubation period seems much shorter than other influenza strains. A delegation from the World Health Organization is due to arrive in Mexico City, and credible sources are talking of widespread quarantine measures.’
I’ll spare you the reporter’s half-assed analysis of the geopolitical consequences,” Morg concludes, lobbing the paper at my feet.

“So there is a health scare,” Jackie sighs with a frown.

“It’s better that way. At least, now we know what the vaccines are for.” From the way they look at me, I figure I’ve said something stupid. “What?” I splutter.

“Labs order chemicals that will enable them to produce tons of vaccine just a few months before a particularly virulent epidemic starts, and you find that reassuring?”

Maybe they have a point.

“Hold on, before you crank up your conspiracy theories, remember there are pharmaceutical watchdogs and epidemiologists all over the world. There are even tighter controls than on many other sectors. Those guys just had great intuition. I’m not convinced.”

Before Morg can reply, Jackie intervenes. “Before debating the ins and outs, maybe you should tell us who you are, why you’re protecting Jay and on whose orders.”

Short and to the point. Love it.

“My name is Eytan Morg. I work for Metsada, a unit within Mossad. To be even more precise, I’m a Kidon agent.”

“Kidon?” That earns me more appalled looks. Apparently I should know.

“Kidon is a subunit created in the early seventies to conduct covert operations. The general public learned of it when Spielberg made
Munich
.”

Now she’s talking to me like I’m stupid. “Sorry, Jackie. Never saw it.”

She goes on, “Kidon is the abduction and execution unit of the Israeli secret service. The name means bayonet in Hebrew. At the CIA, we study their techniques. Generally, they work in teams of four. Three men and a seductive woman if the target is a man. So, Agent Morg—Kidon Morg, I should say—where are your colleagues?”

“I have the peculiarity and privilege of working alone,” he replies serenely.

Jackie’s on a roll. “How do you know Bernard Dean?”

“I met him as part of a cooperation program between our two countries. That information is irrelevant to the current situation.”

“Why make your entrance right now?”

This time, Eytan Morg seems to hesitate a moment. “For the very good reason that we need to work together with our cards on the table if we want to survive.”

“What guarantee do we have you won’t eliminate us once the mission is over?”

Good question!

“Mossad has nothing to gain by your deaths. You don’t have many options. You can team up with me and benefit from my skills. Or you can go it on your own and then…”

He doesn’t need to finish his sentence. He’s made his point. An awkward silence ensues as we face off stonily. I wouldn’t say no to a smoke—it must be the stress. The dilemma of a secret agent: Kill or be killed. Simple and cruel. I see now why Dad left home. How can you lead a normal life without compromising your family? A thought comes to mind. “Eytan? Could you answer Jackie’s question? Why is Kidon protecting me? Why did you rescue Jackie in that alley?”

“My superiors appear to think that you have information that could lead us to a major enemy. Hence my intervention.” He glances at the tiny blonde. “As for Agent Walls, you were safely in the bank, so when I saw those guys tailing her, it seemed like a good idea to do something.”

Buffy nods her appreciation. Great. I have my own Mossad nanny. Party time.

“Would you mind telling us the whole story?” asks Jackie, as pragmatic as ever.

She brings out a hot sweat in me.

“You’re right. I should explain, but it’ll take some time. Can we take a look at the contents of the box first? I wouldn’t be surprised if they corroborated a hypothesis that will make my explanations even clearer.”

The box. I’d forgotten all about it. I grab it and remove the brown paper wrapping.

Eytan suddenly leans closer. We have in front of us a tiny, very scary-looking black box.

L
ike a man possessed, the
Israeli agent launched into a full-on history lesson. “In April 1945, Hitler stripped Himmler of all his duties after he was revealed to be negotiating with the Allies through the vice president of the Swedish Red Cross. The SS chief promised not to speed up executions in the concentration camps and to allow humanitarian organizations to send in food. In return, he hoped to avoid prosecution and obtain a position in Germany’s post-war government. But the Allies rebuffed him, and who could blame them?

“After Hitler’s suicide, Himmler tried in vain to join Admiral Dönitz’s provisional government. Dönitz hated Himmler and sent him packing. In desperation, Himmler fled toward Austria wearing an eye patch and disguised as a sergeant major in the Secret Military Police. He was arrested at a British checkpoint on May 22, 1945. Ironically, Himmler’s false papers aroused the Tommies’ suspicion because they were unusually pristine and complete.

“As the Allied powers were spying on each other, a Canadian agent, John Stewart, had infiltrated the British unit. He discreetly made himself known to Himmler. When the
reichsführer
-
SS
realized he had been unmasked, he once more tried to negotiate. His talent for manipulation nearly saved his life. Secretly, he gave Stewart a key decorated with a swastika, which opened a safe that contained top-secret SS files. It was Himmler’s last bargaining chip. Scared of being seen with Himmler, however, Stewart disappeared with the key in his pocket.

“Himmler was brought in to see a doctor for a routine check-up. Despite his disguise, he was recognized by one of the guards. Cornered and in an attempt to obtain an interview with British secret service, Himmler gave the guards a small black box no bigger than a cigar box, engraved with the death’s head symbol of the SS. Everybody ignored him. The check-up began. Seconds later, the prisoner screamed ‘I am Heinrich Himmler’ and bit into a cyanide capsule. He died betrayed, stripped of power and rejected on all sides. Poetic justice, perhaps, but the punishment hardly seemed to fit the crimes.

“Shortly afterward, the key flew to Canada with its new owner. The box was deposited in the MI6 archives with tons of documents seized from occupied Germany.” This box. This key. Three pairs of eyes converged on the unnerving little box. Two initials in Gothic script flanked the embossed skull. H.H. Heinrich Himmler.

“What can be in there? It’s tiny,” Jackie said, mesmerized.

“As they say, there’s only one way to find out,” Jeremy replied eagerly. He inserted the tiny key into the lock. A spring clicked. The lid popped open.

“Shit!” Jeremy took out a black-and-white photo that had yellowed with age. “That’s all there is,” he murmured. The blurred photo showed a slim, ageless man in a white coat gripping the shoulders of a child who looked like he was somewhere between six and eight, head shaved, wearing a striped concentration camp uniform. The smug smile of the scientist contrasted with the child’s eyes, which contained all the despair in the world. It was impossible to say if the child was a boy or a girl.

Jeremy handed the photo to Jackie. Lips pursed, she ran her fingers over it.

Eventually, it was Eytan’s turn. Jaw clenched, he stared at it in silence. “Viktor Bleiberg,” he sighed.

“Sorry?”

Eytan cleared his throat. “The man in the white coat is Professor Viktor Bleiberg, one of the worst criminals of World War II.”

“Never heard of him.” Jeremy glanced quizzically at Jackie for any reaction. She slowly shook her head.

“He died in an explosion in 1942,” continued Eytan. “The Nazis did all they could to erase any trace of his existence.” He flipped the picture over. “A sentence in German and a series of figures.”

“We’ll need a translator,” Jeremy declared, slapping his thighs.

“False prophets make only self-fulfilling prophecies. That’s what it says.”

“You speak German?” Jeremy asked in amazement.

“I speak French, English, Hebrew, Polish, Russian, German and a little Spanish. I’m sure you feel smarter now that you know that.”

Put in his place, Jeremy rolled his eyes and clammed up.

“The code was added later,” Eytan went on. “It’s not the same ink, and the handwriting is more contemporary. And from the three names, I deduce it’s a message from Daniel Corbin. Jackie, do these codes remind you of anything?”

The two agents pored over the scribbled message.

JEREMY
DANIEL J.
ANN

18791411287279141111101125162725261125
12111627162221261112262122162526261210251
22726
DLIH

“Yes, it looks
like a numeric key code. They’re not necessarily complicated, but they can be a pain in the ass when you don’t have the key. Which we don’t.”

“I could send it to my people for decoding, but I’ve been ordered to cease transmissions, and we have no time to lose.”

“I’ll talk to Bernard about it when I next speak to him,” concluded Jackie.

Jeremy grabbed a pen and piece of paper, copied out the coded message and slipped the paper into his pants pocket. He unfolded the road map that had been in the safe-deposit box with the spreadsheets. A red arrow with a scribbled street name and number made any hypothesizing redundant.

“My father wrote down an address in Zaventem, Belgium. I guess we’ll find answers to our questions there.”

Eytan jumped up and headed for the door. “Pack your bags. Let’s hit the road. We’re headed for whatchamacallit on the map.”

Jeremy glanced quizzically at Jackie. They should already have been on the flight home. Bernard was not going to be impressed. “Apologizing will be quicker than asking for permission we won’t get. And I think our best option is to follow Eytan,” answered the young woman.

Jeremy slapped his thighs and got up in turn. “OK, let’s go. A trans-Europe trip with Kidon Airlines!”

Zurich, 9 p.m.

O
ur bags are ready. Jackie
and I wait while Eytan empties a flight case of two silencers, three or four magazines and a cell phone, all of which wind up in various pockets of his combat pants. He also takes out a small black box the size of a cigarette case. With any luck, he smokes. If we outnumber Jackie in the car, I can smoke my ass off. He closes his case, presses the handle and twists it a quarter turn. Smoke filters out of the cracks.

“This tape will self-destruct in ten seconds, Mr. Phelps,” I laugh. Alone. “Say, if you destroy everything on each mission, that’s gotta add up for the Israeli taxpayer!” Long faces. Two days of all those I love or loved dying off around me. Humor is all I have left.

“Let’s go. I’ll tell you all I know in the car.” Eytan grabs his army bag and opens the door. He closes it immediately. “Change of plan.”

He drops his bag on the floor. Jackie does likewise. “What’s going on?” she asks anxiously.

“Three guys about to enter your room. We need to take extreme measures.”

“Releasing some tension won’t do me any harm,” says Jackie.

“OK. Three heads, three bullets. You want to prove I got you wrong?”

“Give me a gun. If I use mine, I’ll have to fill out reams of paperwork when I get home.”

She’s not kidding. I have a question. “Don’t you want to take one of them alive? They must know something.”

“Smart. But I’ll bet my jacket—and God knows I love my jacket—that they know nothing useful. Anyway, we have no time to interrogate them.”

He lobs Jackie a gun. “Kill ’em.”

“Hold on! What if they’re cops?” Just asking.

“Cops don’t use silencers.”

Jackie nods to us and steps into the hallway. I don’t like this. No, I’m definitely scared for her. “I hope you’re not sending her to get slaughtered.”

“I doubt it,” he grins.

The door opens again. The gun is lobbed back from whence it came. Barely thirty seconds have passed. When Jackie has that expression on her face, you don’t want to mess with her. “Let’s get outta here,” she says.

Eytan pockets the gun and nods. We exit.

In the hallway, I nudge our bedroom door open. One guy’s strangely contorted on the bed. Another’s sitting on the couch staring blankly at me. The last one’s sprawled on his back on the floor, arms outstretched. Three guys, three bullets between the eyes. Impressive. The chambermaids will need a shrink.

Eytan comes over. He pulls a flat circular object out of his jacket pocket. He presses and twists the strange puck, then tosses it into the room. His big paw grabs my collar and shoves me forward. “C’mon, we have work to do.” A muffled explosion echoes in the hotel room. I keep walking.

We quickly check out, pick up the rental and blow. Eytan programs the GPS with the address in Belgium, pulls into the Zurich traffic and heads for the freeway. As soon as we’re out of the city, Jackie tries again, “I think you have some explaining to do. Don’t you?”

As promised, Eytan begins his tale. “A little over six months ago, we received a request for assistance from senior people at MI6. A British agent had been taking World War II case files out of the archives at the Ministry of Defense. Certain officials make a little extra on the side by selling old reports to collectors or even writers. Given the space required to store dusty old files with no strategic importance anymore, a lot of department chiefs turn a blind eye to it or even skim off a commission. But in this instance, the Brits considered the documents sufficiently sensitive to ask for our help. I’ll skip the details, but after a very persuasive chat with the incriminated agent, I found myself on the trail of a buyer in the United States.”

“Persuasive? A chat like that with you is not something I’d relish,” mutters Jackie.

“Me either,” I add laconically.

“I’ll leave you to your fantasies. Shortly afterward, I rocked up at a high-end beach house near Miami to meet a guy named Robert Delmar, a middle-aged American whose French parents had moved to Florida in the early seventies. Our checks on their son, a property developer with a small empire of beachfront buildings, came up blank. His father, however, provoked a frothing message from our intel department. Christian Delmar was a leading Vichy official in occupied France. Like many real or supposed collaborators, he held important positions in French post-war administrations, retiring in 1968 and emigrating to the States two years later. For the next decade, he was a consultant for a South American country specializing in the transfer of advanced technology. According to Bob, his father was an unscrupulous, cynical, manipulative bastard. The kid was born with a silver spoon in his mouth but struck out on his own to break free of his father’s overbearing influence.”

“He told you all that under duress?” Buffy asks with a disarming smile.

“Would you feel better if I told you our interview was cordial and friendly?” Eytan replies, teasing.

“Besides playing the shrink, did you find out anything?” For once, I’m the pragmatist.

“More than I ever expected. Hear me out. In 1985, Christian Delmar had a stroke that left him paralyzed from the waist down. Bob looked after him. His mother had died two years earlier. The old man held on another twenty years and died in 2009 at the ripe old age of one hundred and three, much to the relief of his son. Bob seemed trustworthy. I told him that his father was suspected of trafficking in classified information. His reaction was beyond my wildest dreams. He took me into his dad’s office, which had been kept intact. It was Ali Baba’s cave! The old man collected Third Reich memorabilia. The room was packed with flags, photos and reports, including the plans for some of the concentration camps.”

“Nice.” I feel a shiver running down my spine.

“You said it. But I know enough regular collectors to be sure that it wasn’t just stuff gleaned here and there to feed some kind of sick fascination. Most often, it doesn’t go much further than plates and silverware engraved with SS symbols. Sometimes things take a morbid turn. For example, a couple years ago, I came across a sicko who collected notepads and lampshades made of human skin. But in this case it looked more like a systematic analysis of the Nazis’ industrial methods, techniques and innovations. Bob was good enough to let me explore. I spent a whole night in there going through Christian Delmar’s personal notebooks. Two things in particular caught my attention. The first was an account in one of the notebooks of a visit to Landsberg Prison in 1924. Bonus question. Who was incarcerated there at that time?”

“I’d be inclined to say…Adolf Hitler?” Jackie gave a little top-of-the-class grin. “Exactly. Delmar and another guy—the notes referred to him as A.E.—met with the future führer to deliver a message from a mysterious consortium offering to help Hitler in his quest for power. You can imagine what a discovery like that means to Mossad.”

“You’re saying a secret organization helped the Nazis set the planet ablaze. You seriously believe that?” I’m dumbstruck.

“The question isn’t whether I believe it or not. Even the most absurd lead must be investigated until it is proven true or false. On an assignment like this, acting on supposition is the surest way of screwing up.”

“I see. And the second thing?”

“Delmar kept records of his transactions with various suppliers of his relics. The last entry mentioned my British acquaintance and, more important, the nature of the acquisition—a box that had belonged to Heinrich Himmler. There were scribbled notes all over the page. The old man’s writing was impossible to decipher. It turned out the purchase had been made for a third party. Glancing through his records, I saw a similar entry. This time, it was for a key bought from a Canadian named Stewart, the guy who ran into Himmler just after his arrest. Again, the purchase was for the same third party.”

“And the third party’s name? Just trying to stay awake.”

“Corbin.” I’m not sleepy now.

“Dad?” My whole body feels like ten thousand volts are shooting through it.

“He features in Delmar’s records under the name Jeremy Dean. Our intelligence department soon uncovered his true identity. If your father was Lieutenant General Daniel J. Corbin, ex-U.S. Air Force, who joined the CIA in 1986, abandoning wife and child in the process, then, yes, it was Dad.”

“But my father wasn’t some fanatical Nazi. At least, he wasn’t when I knew him.” I feel as sick as when I’m standing in front of my DB9 in the parking garage. I want to puke.

“Who said anything about fanatics? Your father didn’t leave his family so he could get his kicks from a pent-up passion for fascism. Let me tell you the rest of the story, and you’ll see. Bob allowed me to take anything I wanted, so I transmitted the information to my department head in Tel Aviv. The special relationship between the CIA and Mossad meant the answers came through fast, provoking more questions. Daniel joined the Agency on some kind of undercover assignment that necessitated a protection program.”

“In plain English, please.”

“Your father was a CIA undercover agent. He considered his mission sufficiently important to leave you and your mother. Undercover agents receive special treatment with regard to posting and reporting. If they think it necessary, they can disappear for one, five or even ten years and resurface only when it is possible or urgent to act. You find them in drug cartels, terrorist organizations and so on. It’s not an easy sacrifice to make. Often, they can’t reintegrate into society. Of course, it’s impossible to know what organization Daniel was infiltrating or hoping to infiltrate. However, our contacts informed us of a problem with your dad’s handler.”

“His handler?”

Jackie chimes in, quoting from Espionage 101. “That’s what we call the operative to whom the undercover agent transmits information. What was the problem?”

“Let’s just say, heaps of cash coming in, heaps of data on Corbin going out. Get the picture?” Eytan grins smugly. The guy likes sounding off. I want to know more, but Jackie beats me to the draw.

“The handler sold his agent?”

“Not only that. I asked the Yanks to be allowed to clean up the problem in return for a detailed report on what I found out and a promise to be discreet. The guy’s name was William Pettygrow. I winged it by making contact with him in a hunters’ bar near Langley. After a few beers, I told him I’d be interested in anything on your father. He didn’t even act surprised and told me a woman had already bought some information from him the week before. Two months before he retired, he thought putting together a little nest egg by selling intel on an insignificant agent wouldn’t get him into any trouble. Eventually, he told me of a message from Bernard Dean to your father, confirming that a safe-deposit box in Switzerland had been leased. Corbin never received the message.”

“And Pettygrow?”

“For a reason I can’t fathom, his attitude toward me became distinctly frosty. The previous buyer must have warned him off. Now he’s compost for conifers somewhere in Virginia. I can’t tell you where—it depends on the prevailing winds. That’s all I know.”