Fiona Brand - Killer Focus

According to le Clerc, the officers had hijacked a cargo ship, Nordika , from Lubeck and escaped, taking with them an enormous quantity of looted goods and a group of children with IQs that ranked them as geniuses, part of a research project designed to establish a superior genetic seed pool for the Reich.

Taylor didn’t know how common the name le Clerc was, but the fact that Stefan had been Jewish and in banking made the likelihood that he was related to the le Clerc who had surfaced in the Lopez case stronger.

Xavier le Clerc was a Jewish banker turned international thief. He was infamous for collapsing a Swiss bank that had had a large base of Nazi investment, then having the audacity to make a clean getaway. Interpol had an old sheet on him, but despite that he was still at large. It was suspected, although not proved, that Esther Morell, the wife of one of Lopez’s business partners and a former international banker herself, had used her connection with le Clerc to pull off a multibillion-dollar theft, emptying Alex Lopez’s main operating account. The money had since been recovered by the feds but after more than twenty years, any trail that might have led to le Clerc was gone.

She leafed through the information she had collected on Xavier le Clerc, and found the connection she was looking for. Xavier was Stefan le Clerc’s son.

She made a note, then read through the Reuters report on the screen again, double-checking the name of the ship, a second reference that made the article even more interesting.

Two weeks ago, she had found an article that had been printed in 1984, about the wreck of a ship purported to be the Nordika , which had been discovered off the coast of Costa Rica. A naval team that had dived on the wreck had disappeared and had been presumed drowned. There was no mention of any cargo, but the fact that Costa Rica wasn’t far from the coast of Colombia and was well within Marco Chavez’s sphere of influence had been enough to pique her interest.

The tie-in was tenuous. She wasn’t certain any of it would add up to anything productive, but she couldn’t ignore the picture that was building. The disappearance of the Nordika from Lubeck had been a wartime mystery that had stumped a lot of people, including Stefan le Clerc. Marco Chavez was known to have harbored German nationals after the war. Crazily enough, the pieces of that old wartime puzzle seemed to be fitting into the Lopez case.

She hit the Print button. While the article fed out, she repacked her bag, then walked through to the front desk and paid to have the document scanned and saved to disk.

An hour later, Taylor settled down at the computer monitor in her apartment with a carton of hot noodles and a double-chocolate brownie from the all-night bakery at the end of the block.

Outside, the wind had increased to a steady howl. Hail rapped against the windows, a sharp counterpart to the clicking and humming of her computer as she slipped the disk into the drive and opened up the file that contained the articles she’d had scanned.

Long minutes passed while she ate noodles and read through the articles again. The hail changed to sleet, the cold palpable as it reached through thick, lined drapes into the comfort of her sitting room, sending the temperature plummeting as she made a written prècis of the information. It wasn’t as fast as typing, but she’d found over the years that sometimes her brain worked better when she had a pen in her hand.

Fingers stiff with cold, she left her desk to turn up the heat and strolled through to her bedroom to pull on a sweater. Taking a fleecy blanket from the end of her bed, she returned to the computer.

With the blanket wrapped around her middle, she sat back down and noticed that at some point she had eaten all of the noodles and the brownie. Somehow, the fact that she couldn’t remember tasting a brownie that was justifiably famous for at least a ten-block radius seemed symptomatic of her life. She had had her cake, she just couldn’t remember eating it.

Until those hours spent locked in the dark, Lopez turning her blood to ice every time he had injected what could have been a fatal dose into her veins, she hadn’t realized how empty her life had been, or how desperately she wanted to live, despite that emptiness. Coming that close to death had been like slamming into a brick wall. It had stopped her in her tracks, forced her to assess, to need more than a career that had somehow expanded to fill every waking hour.

The change, radical as it was, hadn’t happened overnight. For a self-confessed workaholic from a dysfunctional family, trying to picture herself fitting into a scenario that involved a husband, kids, maybe even a house and garden, was difficult. For most of her adult life she had sidestepped the issue, denying that she wanted the family values that most people clung to. It was disorienting to discover that she needed them.

Tossing the empty noodle carton and the paper bag that had contained the brownie into the trash can beside her desk, she accessed the Bureau Web site. She entered her code and password then dialed up a Bureau search engine, typed in a list of search words and stared at the list of hits.

Great. Boring and weird.

Huddling into the blanket, she began to read.

At one in the morning, on the point of giving up, she found an article about a Colombian drug dealer and hit man, Tito Mendoza, who had been murdered for a book. Mendoza had been shot at point-blank range but hadn’t died immediately. The Costa Rican policia had questioned him at the scene, but he had slipped into a coma and died before they had gotten more than a few basic details. The newsworthy part was that he had claimed that aside from names and addresses, the book had contained other details: blood types, numbers that had been tattooed onto the backs of a group of German ex-nationals—Nazis—and an execution list.

The report, though bizarre, meant nothing on its own. But coupled with the fact that Mendoza had been involved with Marco Chavez and that he had been murdered the same week the naval team who had dived on the Nordika had disappeared, suddenly, the implications began to pile up.

In her research, Taylor had found out a lot of information she never, ever wanted to know, including the fact that SS soldiers had routinely had their blood types tattooed onto their chests. A practical solution for the battlefield, it had proved to be a liability after the Allies had invaded, because the tattoos had made them easy to identify.

The tattoos Mendoza had mentioned didn’t sound like blood types—he had said numbers , not letters—but the connection was there.

Maybe it was a leap to imagine the book had anything to do with the SS soldiers who had hijacked the Nordika , and even more of a leap to connect it to the missing naval divers, Lopez or the Nazi cabal Slater had mentioned, but it was a possibility.

She saved a copy of the article and, out of habit, saved a copy to disk, which she labeled, dated and slipped into a storage box that contained copies of all of the archival information she had researched on Lopez. After the internal security leaks concerning the case, two of which had resulted in failed busts, and the more mundane fact that occasionally information had a habit of disappearing off the scope in the Bureau’s system, she liked to keep her own separate set of records.

Stifling a yawn, she hit the send button and e-mailed a copy to her work computer.

Just before she went to bed, she reread the article and made a brief note. The wintry chill seemed to intensify as she studied what she had written.

Mendoza had had a book. The book had been important enough that he had died because of it.