Echo of War (8 page)

Royal Oak

It had become something of a morbid tradition for Joe McBride, this watching of the clock as the forty-eighth hour passed and a case tipped down the slippery statistical slope. He'd started the practice ten years before in Minneapolis as a desperate mother and father waited for a ransom call that had never come.

Now he sat beside Jonathan Root at the kitchen table as the wall clicked over to 11:58. Root wasn't watching it, but was staring into space as he'd been doing for the better part of two days. His hands were wrapped around a long-cold cup of coffee.

Statistically, most ransom-driven kidnappers make contact within a few hours of the abduction. The wilier and/or cruder the perpetrator, the longer they wait, but after twenty-four hours the likelihood of contact begins to drop until the forty-eight-hour point, at which time the odds plummet. In the history of kidnapping, ransom demands made outside the “golden forty-eight” are rare.

Having learned the hard way to never lie to a client—even to save them some heartache—McBride had given Jonathan Root the statistics, but he'd also added a caveat: “Rules are made to be broken. Nothing is set in stone.”

Root had simply stared at McBride, then nodded blankly, said, “Sure, sure,” and turned away.

The former DCI and Washington powerhouse was withdrawing into himself, McBride could see, and he imagined the nature of Root's profession was working against him. As a spook, it had been his job to envision worst-case scenarios and come up with contingency plans. Problem was, there was no contingency plan for this, no manual or committee Root could consult if the worst came to pass and his wife was found dead—or never found at all. Root had seen the worst of humanity: images of atrocities in Rwanda; suicide bombings in Haifa; public executions of captured American soldiers in Afghanistan … It was all there in his memory, a sieve through which his hope was being filtered.

Unbidden, McBride felt his mind switching gears.
If the worst happens,
he's going to need help.
He won't ask for it.
He'll have to be pushed into it
—
coaxed back into life.
Left alone,
he'll sit here alone in the dark and let himself die.

After parting company with Oliver at Quantico, McBride had driven back to the Root estate to walk the grounds. As much for Root as for himself, he'd guided the former DCI through the event again, trying to pick out a thread of something useful. Together they walked through the house, Root giving him a running monologue of the sights, smells, and sounds of that night. Occasionally Root would stop beside a knickknack or a photo and relate its story to McBride. Without exception, Amelia Root was the main player in each tale. She was the nexus of Root's life, McBride realized.

Root picked up a picture of him and Amelia standing in a fishing boat, smiling. His arm was around her waist as she struggled to hold aloft a Coho salmon. “She was so proud of that thing,” Root murmured, tears in his eyes. “She wouldn't let anyone help her—she even netted it herself. You know, just the other day she was …” Root trailed off, blinked a few times as though coming back to reality, then walked on.

There had been one positive sign, though. Earlier in the day Root had accepted a lunch invitation from his next-door neighbors, Raymond Crohn and his wife—the people that had sounded the alarm after the kidnapping. Root had been reluctant, but then agreed at McBride's urging. When Root returned, McBride could see some of the tension had melted from his face.

The clock began bonging. As if on cue, McBride's cell phone trilled. He walked into the living room and answered. It was Oliver: “We've got something, a hit on the hiking boot.”

“Where are you?”

“Salisbury. We rousted the store owner; he's going to meet us.”

McBride copied down the address, said, “I'll meet you,” then hung up.

“What is it, Joe?” Root said from the doorway. “Did you find her?” he whispered.

McBride walked over and laid a hand on his shoulder. “No, but we've got a lead. We've got our foot in the door. Try to get some sleep. I'll call you the second I know something.”

The town of Salisbury, population 23,000, was nine miles from the Root estate. Twenty-five minutes after leaving, McBride pulled into a parking space in front of Norwich Camping Outfitters. Ten minutes after that Oliver pulled in beside him. A man in pajama bottoms, slippers, and a red sweatshirt emblazoned with “Salisbury State University” got out of the passenger seat and hurried to the store's front door.

McBride asked Oliver, “What's up?”

“The company that makes the Stonewalker asks its retailers to send in the names of customers. They use it for direct mail promotions, customer satisfaction surveys—that sort of thing.”

After obtaining a copy of the list, Oliver sorted it by state and time frame, taking only those purchases made within the last month in D.C., Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia. He then filtered the list through the FBI's database. Of the sixty-seven Stonewalkers sold in the last month, two were bought with credit cards that had been reported stolen; of these, one report turned out to be a case of misplacement, the other genuine theft.

As Oliver's team went to work on the lead, the report on the footprints found on the Dames Quarter road came in. The tires were identified as Bridgestone 225/75R14s, standard equipment for 1999 Ford Econoline vans. A regional check showed theft reports on fourteen Econolines, none more recent than two months ago. All the vans in question had either been recovered or had been identified as having been disassembled at chop shops.

“Rental?” McBride guessed.

“Right,” said Oliver. “However good these guys were with the kidnapping, they got sloppy with their logistics. We checked rental agencies that handle Econolines. Two days ago a Hertz office in Ellicott City outside Baltimore reported one of theirs overdue. The credit card used was reported stolen later that day.”

“Stolen how?”

“That's the interesting part. Both cards were lifted by pickpockets.”

“You're kidding me.”

“The Baltimore and Ellicott City police are looking for the van. We're working on getting the credit slip from Hertz.”

“So what now?”

“Now we hope our luck holds and we get a match on the signatures. Fingerprints would be better, but … Well, hell, if we get prints, I'll start going to church regularly.”

McBride understood. The chances were good that Amelia Root's kidnappers had arrest records. Generally, kidnapping is a learned behavior, not something your average law-abiding citizen dives into on a whim. If this lead turned up a suspect's name, they'd be back in the race. “Jesus, could we be that lucky?”

“A little good luck on our part, a little stupidity on their part … Who knows.”

A minute later the store owner poked his head out the door and waved at them. They went inside. The owner had turned on the lights; lying on the glass counter was a credit card receipt.

“I only touched the edges like you said,” the owner offered.

Oliver pulled a clear plastic evidence bag from his coat pocket, laid it flat on the counter, and nudged the receipt inside. He looked at McBride. “Follow me back.”

The agent from Elucott City arrived at Quantum twenty minutes behind McBride and Oliver, who sat together in a conference room, sipping coffee and staring at the walls as technicians from both Latent Prints and Questioned Documents processed the receipts. Shortly after two A.M. the conference room door opened and the techs walked in. The man from QD laid the two evidence bags on the table and slid them across to Oliver.

“You're golden,” the tech announced. “Both signatures were forged by the same person. I make him male, right handed, early to mid-twenties—I can give you more once I get it into the computer.”

“And the prints?”

“Eight point match on each,” the Latent man replied. “Same person handled both slips.”

Oliver slapped his palm on the table and whooped. “Hot damn! Did you—”

“Already fed it into IAFIS,” the Latent tech replied, referring to the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, pronounced “ay-fis.” The Latent Print Unit and IAFIS—which contains over 38 million individual fingerprints—form the FBI's Disaster Squad, which responds to both man-made and natural disasters to help local and federal authorities identify victims. “If he's in the database, we should have a hit by mid-morning.”

“Thanks, guys, you've made our day.”

They talked for a few more minutes and then everyone left except for Oliver and McBride.

Joe glanced over at his adopted partner. “So, what's your denomination?”

Oliver laughed. “You name it, I'm joining it.”

St Malo,
France

Founded in the seventh century by a vagabond Welsh monk named Maclow, the city of St. Malo has been sitting astride the Ranee Estuary on France's Emerald Coast for over fourteen hundred years, during which time it has been a nexus for war, rebellion, and independent spirit, a history which Malouins and the people of Brittany proudly guard to this day.

During the League Wars of the late 1500s the people of St. Malo rejected the local governor, a protestant, then stormed the castle, routed the local garrison, and declared their independence as a sovereign nation. In the seventeenth century St. Malo grew into one of the richest ports in Britanny, a haven for merchants, pirates, and corsairs plying the trade routes of India, China, and Africa. In the late 1600s Britain's William of Orange, hoping to break the city's economical hold on the Emerald Coast, let loose his fleet on the port, but St. Malo escaped nearly unscathed behind its ramparts and thick stone walls.

Finally, after weathering centuries of conflict, St. Malo felt its first defeat as in August 1944, when the German Wehrmacht, unwilling to abandon this critical part of the Adantic Wall to the Allied invasion force, razed it to the ground. The twelve thousand troops garrisoned in St. Malo destroyed the quays, locks, breakwaters, and harbor machinery, then set fire to the town center before retreating to Citadel at St. Servan.

After the war the independent spirit of Malouins reasserted itself as they chose to salvage what remained of the demolished city center. Bricks and cobblestones and timbers were picked from the wreckage and used to lay the foundations for a new St. Malo. Today the skyline is virtually indistinguishable from its medieval self, with narrow, canyonlike cobblestone streets, mansions of sloping granite slate roofs and peaked dormer windows, and castle-like ramparts and baritzans that sit perched atop the 1.5 miles of wall that encloses the
intra muros,
or “old walled city.”

Though he didn't yet know the reason behind her flight, Tanner felt certain it was to St. Malo that Susanna Vetsch had come after leaving Paris, and it was toward St. Malo that Tanner and Cahil headed in the early morning hours after leaving the Pigalle, a trip inspired, according to Cahil, by “a cartoon goat and a teenager's secret code.”

The cryptic graffiti Tanner had found scribbled on the inside of Susanna's kitchen cupboard was not only a clue to where she'd gone, but also he hoped, a sign that the Susanna he'd once known hadn't completely lost herself in France's underworld.

As do most toddlers, when Susanna was a child she'd mangled her share of unpronounceable words and phrases, but the one that found its way into the Vetsch family lexicon was her smushed-together version of the words “go” and “to.” “I want goat the zoo,” she would announce, or “I want goat the park.” The abbreviation stuck and eventually mutated into a simple drawing of a goat. From then on, it became their shorthand for any destination or trip.

As a teenager, the rebellious and inventive Susanna, certain her overprotective parents were spying on her, had developed a code she'd once revealed to Tanner on one of their “uncle/niece” outings. Boys' phone numbers, rendezvous times with her girlfriends, and party addresses were all veiled from prying eyes by subtracting from them her favorite number, four. Like “goat,” the practice became second nature for her, a fond attachment to her childhood.

If Tanner was correct—if he wasn't groping for something that wasn't there—the twelve digits on Susanna's cupboard—translated as 330299554783. Following his hunch, Tanner regrouped them: 33 0 2 99 55 47 83—the twelve-digit arrangement of a French phone number.

Once back at the St. Beuve, Tanner called Oaken and brought him up to speed. “Was Slavin any help?” Oaken asked.

“As little as possible.”

“I was afraid of that. He's coming up on retirement. The last thing he's going to do is put himself out on a limb. Sorry, Briggs.”

“Don't worry about it. We paid a visit to her apartment. We might have something.” Tanner recited the decyphered number and explained his theory. In addition to the code, they'd also gotten a lead from Trixie's questioning of Rene the Gatekeeper, who'd also seen Susanna's mysterious German. Rene was certain the man's name was Stephan. It wasn't much, Tanner realized, but perhaps enough to shake the tree.

“I'll see if I can get Susanna's cell-phone LUDs,” Oaken said, then hung up. He called back twenty minutes later. “You might be on to something. That phone number belongs to a tavern in St. Malo called the Sanglier Noir.”

“The Black Boar?” Tanner translated.

“Downright medieval, isn't it? Susanna's cell-phone dump shows five calls there in the last month. I've got an address.”

Tanner copied it down, then said, “One more question: Could you tell whether there'd been any other requests for her cell-phone dump?”

“I thought of that. There weren't, not in the last six months, anyway. You'd think that'd be one of the first things the DEA would have checked—if they were trying to find her, that is.”

Oaken's information told Tanner something. Whether Slavin knew it or not, the DEA was in fact not looking for Susanna, a fact which probably had little to do with apathy, and everything to do with hope. In the shadowy world of special operations, undercover work is the grayest; there are few rules and fewer still were unbreakable. Susanna's controllers were probably hoping her disappearance was simply her way of burrowing deeper into France's drug culture and that she'd soon resurface and make contact

Maybe yes, maybe no, Tanner thought. Either way, it was no way to run an operation. He'd worked both as an undercover operative and as a controller. Of the two, the controller is in a better position to play devil's advocate, to recognize pitfalls to which the operative may be blind. Chances were, Susanna's disappearance had been foreshadowed by her own behavior: vague reports, missed check-ins, impulsive behavior. Seeing the signs, her controller should have either pulled her in, or put a tighter leash on her.

“I'm hoping they haven't written her off,” Oaken said.

“Me, too,” Briggs replied. He thanked Oaken, hung up, and turned to Cahil. “St. Malo.”

Bear checked his watch. “It's after ten; let's hope we can find an all-night Avis,” he said and reached for the phone book.

As it happened, they found no rental agencies open, but a better arrangement presented itself with the
train a grande vitesse,
or TGV, France's high-speed train. They checked out of the St. Beuve, boarded the 11:10 train at the Montparnasse station, changed trains at Rennes, then continued north to St. Malo, arriving two hours and ten minutes after leaving Paris.

From habit, Tanner had kept peripheral tabs on their fellow passengers. Of those that boarded at Montparnasse, nine changed trains with them at Rennes for the final leg to St. Malo. Of these, two boarded their car: a blond-haired man in his middle thirties and a teenage girl with magenta hair, a black leather jacket, and square-tipped biker boots. Twenty minutes into the ride, the girl ambled over to the blond-haired man, exchanged a few words, then accepted a franc note from him and walked down to them.
“Aide une fille hors
?”
she said. Help a girl out?

Tanner handed her a few notes. She flashed a dingy smile, then returned to her seat.

As they disembarked at St. Malo, the teenager started walking in the opposite direction, and the man hailed a taxi that took him around the corner to Quai Des Corsaires. Tanner and Cahil rented a locker, stuffed their duffel bags inside, then started walking.

The Black Boar was inside the walled city on Place Vauban, so they walked across Avenue Louis Martin, which spanned the three-hundred-meter canal separating the
intra-
and
extra-muros.
Across the canal they could see the lighted ramparts and watchtowers perched atop the ancient wall, which was lit from below by amber spotlights, lending the battlements a Disneyland-like appearance. Tanner suspected the lighting had been installed in anticipation of the upcoming tourist season. By this time next week, St. Malo's population would swell to five times its normal size as visitors from Great Britain and urban France descended on the “City of the Corsairs.”

As they reached Grande Porte, the city's main gate, Tanner caught a glimpse of a taxi pulling away from Porte St. Louise down the quai. A lone figure disappeared through the gate.

“Blondie from the train?” Cahil asked.

“Couldn't tell.”

It was nearly one-thirty, but Tanner was hoping the Black Boar would still be open. The deserted cobblestone streets glistened under the glow of gaslights long ago converted to electricity. It took little for Tanner to imagine them hissing and sputtering with the flow of natural gas. Houses crowded the street, dormer windows looming over them. Hanging from every dark balcony were flower boxes and hanging pots, tiny blooms of color in the darkness.

“Talk about lost in time,” Cahil murmured. “I feel like we're heading to a meeting of the resistance, listening for jackboots on the cobblestones.”

Tanner nodded. “It's eerie.” Of course, it was precisely this atmosphere that drew hundreds of thousands of tourists every year. On its face, St Malo was frozen in the 1930s.

They followed the winding streets for another twenty minutes until they reached a cul-de-sac at the end of Place Vauban. There, tucked between a pair of alleys, was the Black Boar. Hanging from a rusty chain above the oaken door was a neon sign: “Sanglier Noir.” Light flickered through the tarnished windows. Tanner could hear raucous laughter coming from inside.

“Something tells me we're not going to be able to slip in unnoticed,” Cahil said.

“Maybe that's good.”

“Gonna shake the tree?”

“I was thinking about it It's hard to tell what kind of reaction we'll get though.”

“One way to find out”

Tanner grabbed the door latch and pushed. In keeping with its appearance, the door let out a rusty shriek. They stepped through and were hit by a wave a cigarette smoke. The tavern's interior went quiet. Two dozen faces turned to them and stared.

“Thank god there wasn't a piano to stop playing,” Bear murmured.

“Amen.” Tanner nodded at the patrons and raised a hand.
“Bonjour.
”

No one replied. After a few seconds' silence the patrons returned to their drinks and conversations. The Black Boar's furnishings were nearly as medieval as its name, with trestle tables, long benches, and a horseshoe bar whose front had seen more than its fair share of kicks and gouges—as had most of the patrons, all of whom Tanner assumed were locals, an assortment of sun- and wind-burned fisherman and oyster bed workers. There were no women to be seen.

Incongruously, the bartender was dressed smartly, in a royal blue, tab-collar shirt with a red tie.

“
Bonjour,
”
Tanner repeated.

“
Bonjour,
messieurs.
”

“Deux bi
è
res,
s'il vous pla
î
t.
”

The bartender brought them a pair of draft beers, then moved on to other customers. Tanner could feel eyes on his back, but he fought the urge to turn around.
Probably just curious,
he thought. His French was passable in Paris, but too urban for Brittany. The patrons were probably cursing them as early tourists invading their favorite night-spot.

Amid the babble Briggs thought he heard snippets of German. He focused on the voices and tried to filter out the rest until certain of what he was hearing. He turned around, hiked his foot on the kick rail, and began scanning the room, trying to pinpoint the voices.

Four men, huddled around their mugs at a table in the corner, seemed to be arguing.

Long shot,
Tanner thought. But, as Bear had said, there was only one way to find out. He turned to Cahil and explained. “In the corner by the window, four men.”

“I see ‘em. What're you thinking?”

“We don't dare mention Susanna's name; if she's still under, it could burn her.”

“Stephan it is, then.”

“Find a table within earshot of them. I'll be back.”

Tanner found the bathroom, killed three minutes, then walked back out. He strode to the center of the room and called,
“M'excuser
…
M'excuser
!”
He waited until the voices died away and all eyes were on him.
“Je cherche un ami,
un homme a nomm
é
Stephan.
”
I'm looking for a friend, a man named Stephan.

There were five seconds of silence and then, as though he hadn't spoken, the patrons returned to their drinking. In the corner, the German group put their heads together and began muttering between one another. Tanner glanced at Cahil, who gave an imperceptible nod:
Reaction.

After a few minutes, the Germans finished their beers, stood up, and headed out the door. Cahil rejoined Tanner at the bar. “You got their attention,” Bear said. “I only caught bits of their conversation, but the gist of it was they wanted to know who the hell you were and how you found this place.”

“Good enough for me,” Tanner said. “Let's go.”

They stepped out the door and onto the street. It was dark, deserted. A wind had come up; mist swirled in the air. Beyond the stone wall Tanner could hear the roar of waves. He tasted salt.

“Either they ran or they're still around,” Cahil murmured.

“I vote for the latter. We'll know soon enough.”

They started walking. They'd traveled less than a block when they heard footsteps clicking on the cobblestones behind them. Tanner glanced back. “Two,” he said. Ahead lay the mouth of an alley. As they neared it, the second pair of Germans stepped from the darkness to block their path. Briggs wasn't surprised by this, but still he felt his heart pound a little harder. He and Cahil stopped and took a few circling steps into the street, now shoulder-to-shoulder.