The Fix

Chapter 37

“Wow!” exclaimed Brown.

She and Decker had just entered Berkshire’s luxurious condo.

Brown looked around in amazement. “You were right about her having money.”

Decker didn’t respond. He made a beeline down the hall and Brown quickly followed. He went into the master bathroom and then into the separate toilet closet. He snatched the toilet paper off the wall, slid off the roll, and opened the tube.

“Damn.”

There was nothing there.

“What did you expect to find?” asked Brown.

He pushed past her, left the bathroom, and moved down the hall. He entered the second bedroom and pushed open the door to the en suite bathroom. He stared down at the toilet paper roll.

He took it off the wall, slid open the tube, and there it was.

“A key,” said Brown.

“Like you said, spies don’t like to learn new techniques, like bomb makers.”

“So she used this device before?”

“At the cottage in the woods, yeah.”

“What’s it a key to?”

Decker looked at it more closely. “Could be lots of different things. A padlock, maybe.”

They left the bathroom and he perched on a chair in the guest bedroom. He closed his eyes and let the frames roll back and forth.

Brown watched him curiously. “Checking the old memory?”

He said nothing.

A minute later he opened his eyes and stood. He went out into the hall and over to the broad set of windows that looked out onto the street below.

“If you had something important that you didn’t want to keep here, but you wanted it close, what would you do?” he asked.

“Put it at a storage place.”

“There aren’t any around here,” said Decker, looking out the window. “This is too high-rent a district for it to make economic sense.”

“But, like you said, she’d want it reasonably accessible.”

“Yes, she would. Let’s go.”

Twenty minutes later they passed the Catholic school where Berkshire had worked. Decker pointed across the street.

Brown looked where he was pointing.

“A to Z Storage?”

“And hopefully everything in between.”

They drove into the parking lot and climbed out of the car. Inside, they showed the woman behind the counter their official creds. She looked up Berkshire’s name on the database. “She paid for one year in advance. Still has a few months to go.”

“Don’t count on her renewing,” said Decker. He held up the key. “Which unit?”

“I’m not sure I can allow that without a warrant.”

Brown said, “We have reason to believe that Ms. Berkshire has been storing explosives in that unit.”

“Oh my holy Lord,” exclaimed the woman.

“So before we call the bomb squad we need to check it out. Or we can wait for the warrant and just hope you and this business don’t get blown into the sky.”

“It’s Unit 2213,” blurted the woman. “Out that door and to the right. Do you think I should leave the premises? I don’t want to die for minimum wage.”

“I think now would be a great time for you to take a break, yeah,” said Brown.

The woman fled out the door, got into her car, and drove off with a screeching of tires.

Decker glanced at Brown. “I’m beginning to see you in a whole new light.”

She smiled but said nothing as they walked to Unit 2213. It was a single unit with a roll-up door. Decker used the key to unlock the thick padlock, then bent down, gripped the door’s handle, and pulled the door up.

Inside was a single shelf with a solitary box on it.

“Looks promising,” said Brown.

They walked over and examined the box. It was plain cardboard with no writing on the sides or top. Decker pulled out his pocketknife and slit the tape, unsealing the box.

He opened the flaps and looked inside. He started pulling objects out and placing them on the shelf next to the box.

What looked like a security badge.

A typewritten paper in Cyrillic.

An old floppy disk.

And a doll.

While Brown looked at the paper, Decker examined the doll.

Brown said, “This is dated May 1985. It looks to be some sort of official communication from Moscow. The KBG.”

“You can read Russian?”

“Along with Chinese and Arabic. And I can hold my own with Korean.”

“Impressive.”

“It’s part of my job, Decker.”

He had been probing the doll with his fingers until something gave and a compartment popped open. Decker looked inside, but it was empty. “You can see that there’s where the batteries would go.”

“Okay.”

He used the blade of his pocketknife to probe around inside the battery compartment. There was a tiny pop and the whole battery compartment slid out, revealing a space just behind it.

She said, “I’m betting that was not put there by the toy manufacturer.”

Decker nodded. “And it’s big enough for a roll of microfiche or a microdot or whatever else they used back then.”

“How do you know about microdots?”

“I watched enough old James Bond films.”

He looked at the floppy disk. “Old technology like this.” He picked up the security badge. The name that had once been on it had been clipped out. But Decker held it up to Brown.

The golden torch with the black background and red atomic ellipses hugging the globe.

“DIA seal,” Decker said. “She wasn’t a whistleblower.”

“She was a spy,” finished Brown.