signed out to FBI Deputy Assistant Director Lawrence Mcdowell — now missing.
Not good, she thought grimly. Not good at all.
Helen checked her watch. It was after eleven in the morning.
By now, there might very easily be an APB out for the three of them.
And the charges against them could range from kidnapping to murder.
Somehow, in the space of just a few days, she and Peter had managed to push the punishments they were facing from likely administrative reprimands to possible imprisonment, and now maybe even the death penalty.
She shook her head in dismay. It was best to focus on the immediate future. For the moment they were free and still in a position to try something — anything — to stop whatever Heinrich Wolf and his employer, Ibrahim, had planned.
The hours since their abortive attempt to capture Wolf had passed in a dizzying blur. After a quick cleanup in the rest room of a large, busy gas station, she, Peter, and Farrell had found an out-of-the way residential street and abandoned the Chrysler.
With luck, it might be days before the neighbors compared notes and discovered it didn’t belong to a visitor or anyone local.
Next, they’d phoned a cab and checked into this plain, clean, and relatively inexpensive motel. Close to the Beltway, the motor lodge mostly catered to truckers, traveling salesmen, and economy-minded vacationers touring the nation’s capital. It offered privacy, easy access to the local road and highway network, and effective anonymity to anyone paying cash.
After a short rest, Farrell had left a couple of hours ago on a hurried shopping expedition.
Someone knocked on the door — softly but urgently.
Helen waved Peter down and checked the peephole. It was Sam Farrell.
He bustled in, set a large plastic bag down on the nearest bed, and displayed a set of rental car keys. “Okay! We’re mobile again.”
Helen read the tag. “A white Oldsmobile Ciera?” She tried hard to match his determinedly cheerful mood. “Not a brandnew, 007-type BMW? Hardly our style, Sam …”
Farrell grinned. “I know, I know — dull, boring. But there’s a zillion of ‘em out on the road. We’ll blend right in with everyone else in the metro area.
“I also got this.” He pulled a bulging manila envelope out of the shopping bag, opened the flap, and dumped several thick stacks of twenty-dollar bills onto the bed. “There’s somewhere around five thousand dollars there. I cleaned out one of my savings accounts.”
“Jesus, Sam,” Peter said, looking down at the money. “Your wife will kill you when she finds out about this.”
“Not with an IOU from you in hand,” Farrell reminded him.
“Louisa trusts you, Pete. It’s her one big blind spot. Anyway, we need the money right now.”
That was certainly true, Helen knew. Neither she nor Peter dared use their own credit or ATM cards, and their earlier travels had pretty well depleted their own cash reserves. And, unless the police or the FBI nailed them in the next few hours, they were sure to need money and lots of it.
She tapped the still-bulging shopping bag. “So, what’s left, Sam?”
“This,” Farrell said. He handed her a massive hardcover German-English/English-German dictionary.
“Perfect.”
Helen led Peter and Farrell over to the small circular table where she’d sorted out the possessions she’d collected from the three dead men — Wolf, his driver, Brandt, and Mcdowell. She’d swept Mcdowell’s into a separate bag for later disposal. What struck her about the other two men was the complete lack of commonplace personal items.
Their wallets contained only some cash and one credit card apiece — both tied to a Caraco corporate account. There were no dry cleaning receipts, no shopping lists, no photos of their wives or kids.
Both Wolf and Brandt were “clean”—covert operations jargon meaning neither had carried anything that might contradict their cover identities.
Which left just two interesting items. Brandt had apparently been more than just a simple driver and bodyguard for his boss.
He’d been carrying a fat, leather-bound appointment book. And Helen had found Heinrich Wolf’s blood-soaked briefcase under his still-warm body.
Naturally, all the notations in both the appointment book and in the papers inside the briefcase were in German. Hence the hardcover monstrosity Sam Farrell had just handed her.
Farrell took one look at the small table and shook his head.
“Two’s company, three’s a crowd-especially when you’ve only got one dictionary. You two take the first whack at this stuff. I’ll take a gander at the TV and see if there’s anything on about a shoot-out near Middleburg.”
“Nothing on the local news yet?” Peter asked.
Farrell shrugged. “Not a peep. And that makes me kinda nervous.”’
Helen nodded silently. The Loudoun County sheriffs must have found Mcdowell’s abandoned car by now — which probably meant the Bureau’s higher-ups were stonewalling all inquiries from local law enforcement while they tried to sort out just what the hell was going on.
She laid the German-English dictionary in the middle of the table, sat down, and slid the appointment book across to Peter.
Then she flipped open Wolf’s briefcase. Aside from a few business cards, there were only two folded pieces of paper that struck her as significant.
The first was a list headed “Flugzeug Piloten Ankunftszeiten.”
Which meant “Pilots-Arrival Times,” according to her best guess and some rapid flipping through the dictionary. Today’s date, “18 Juni,” appeared at the very top in crisp, neat Germanic handwriting. It was followed by a series of four airline names, flight numbers, and times — with the phrase “nach Dulles” circled to one side.
Several minutes on the phone with various airlines while Peter snagged the dictionary for his own rough translations elicited the information that Wolf had pilots arriving at Dulles on flights originating from Charleston, Los Angeles, Oklahoma City, and Seattle.
Helen didn’t like even the vague picture she saw emerging.
Caraco’s operation involved aircraft in some fashion — and more than one plane, too. Had the pilots now arriving in the D.C. area been used to ferry Ibrahim’s smuggled cargo into those four cities?
Oh, hell. Her blood ran cold. They’d been assuming they were chasing after one stolen nuclear weapon. What if there were more?
There was a second note on the same sheet, “Drei zusaetzlichen Wache von Deutschland nach JFK Flughafen.” Three cities — Los Angeles, Charleston, and Washington, D.C. — were listed below with an arrow pointing to each. More flipping to and fro in the dictionary supplied the information that Wolf had ordered three additional guards deployed from Germany through JFK International in New York to unnamed locations in each of those three cities.
And the word “additional” implied that he already had forces stationed at those locations. Wonderful. Just wonderful.
The second sheet didn’t have a heading — just a set of what looked like five underlined place names with other words beneath them. She studied the first set:
Berkeley Adler Fuchs Katze Baeren Hase Eagle, Fox, Cat, Bear, and Hare. All were clearly code names of some kind, Helen decided. But code names for what? For people?
For places? Stages in Wolf’s operation? “Katze” had been crossed out and the German word for cow, “Kuh,” had been written in beside it — with a further notation, “Wetter,” or weather.
There were more animal code words beneath each of the other four underlined locations five more under two, three under a third, and two under the last. A total of twenty then. With one more code word crossed out and another substituted — this one with the German words “Eine Obung,” or “an exercise,” as an explanatory note.
Helen frowned. Without more than this, it was going to be impossible to decipher much about Ibrahim’s real intentions. She showed the second sheet to Peter and Farrell. “Can either of you guys make heads or tails out of
