The Furies

EDITH ZIMMERMAN Pensioner's Killer "May Have Been Female"

A coroner's inquest opened in Coo lidge today on the mysterious death of well-known local artist Edith Zimmerman. It emerged that one of the killers may have been a woman.

Coroner Patrick Trainer stated that much of the detail contained in his autopsy report was "unpleasant in the extreme." Eyewitnesses at the hearing described the abduction of the eighty-year-old woman in broad daylight from a supermarket parking lot. She was bundled into a red Ford Chrysler by a middle-aged man and woman. The vehicle was found two days later abandoned at a railway station in Atlanta. Dr. Edith Zimmerman's body was subsequently found in a derelict warehouse. It appeared that she had been subjected to "extreme physical abuse," the details of which the coroner wished to spare the inquiry.

One eyewitness, however, thought that both abductors may have been male. She described the "female" as having a masculine voice.

An FBI detective told the court that there was no obvious motive for the crime. Neighbors described her as a person who lived quietly and kept to herself. Dr. Zimmerman lived alone, having retired 20 years ago from an academic position at George Mason University. Born in Frankfurt, Germany, she had no close friends or known living relatives. She was a micro-biologist by profession, and was a keen artist before Parkinson's disease forced her to give up her hobby. The file on the abduction and murder is still open and any leads will be pursued vigorously.

The inquest continues.

Mr. Phoenix leans over her, putting his hands on her shoulders. His breath smells of garlic and cheese. "What's the date of this, honey?"

Neanderthal. Joanna scrolls the screen and points. "She was murdered about a year ago."

"Joanna," Caddon says patiently, "we're checking on active biochemists in the weapons programs. This old lady was eighty. How could she possibly tie in with the UFO?"

"I know it's thin." She feels a headache coming on. Part of it, she thinks, is coming from long hours peering at the screen, part of it is lack of fluid; and part of it is an oppressive sense of ridicule she feels bearing down on her. She continues stubbornly. "She was a biochemist, she was a German, and she would be the right age for being involved in a Nazi bioweapons program."

Mr. Phoenix grins. "You're new at the job, right? She's new at the job, Neal?" Joanna says nothing, feels her face flushing. Me Tarzan, you Jane, you knuckle-grazing ape.

Caddon is still being patient. He explains: "The Hitler lead is dead, Jo. The swastika was put there by the Phoenix militia. Either they meant it as a decoy along with the London letter or they were stupid enough to leave it as their signature. And there must be dozens of old German biochemists in the US."

"I know. But this one died such an interesting death." She passes over a printout.

"The rest is just routine," Joanna declares. "Informing relatives, except that she didn't have any, handing body over for burial, and so on."

"So somebody didn't like her," Caddon says. "They half drowned her, beat her, and gave her some high-voltage juice."

"They were after information."

"Which she didn't give."

"Didn't have to give. Nobody could have stood up to that."

"So what was this information?"

"Something about the poisonous UFO. Something they needed to know. Something from the Nazi past."

Me Tarzan is still grinning. "Be kind to her, Neal. She's new at the job."

Caddon's eyes are hard. "Dig a little deeper, Joanna. We can't afford a mistake."

THE SCIENTISTS

Tuesday morning, some weird hour, and the phone is ringing. Caddon's wife makes an animal noise and turns away, a gesture of annoyance refined over the years. Caddon sits up and picks up the receiver, more asleep than awake. "Caddon."

Female voice. Joanna, the new girl, her voice enthusiastic at half past two in the morning. "Neal, I think I've got something."

In the late afternoon, Sharp and Ambra disappear into the enormous kitchen, leaving Jocelyn tapping and muttering at one of the three terminals. They emerge forty minutes later after a great deal of chatter, Ambra carrying a tray with steaming Mexican rice, white fish fillets, and little plates of red and green sauce, Sharp with two uncorked bottles of red wine. Jocelyn is tapping the palms of her hands together and pacing up and down impatiently. "There's a pattern. There are factors common to the first five names on the list."

Ambra begins to spread cutlery, plates, and glasses around a low coffee table. "We're listening."

"They were all Germans, they were all old …" Jocelyn pours wine into glasses and takes a gulp.

"Keep going."

She rubs her eyes and joins Sharp and Ambra at the table, hauling her ankles up to sit cross-legged. "And they all died violent deaths within the last year."

Ambra and Sharp stare at Jocelyn. She says, "Edith Zimmerman we know about. But look at the other two with crosses — Klein and von Steiner. Take this Klein. He drowned in weird circumstances. His car was found at a bridge spanning the Mississippi, keys in the ignition, headlights on, and engine turning. He'd just left a dinner. They found his body three weeks later, five hundred kilometers downriver."

"So he topped himself, or fell off the bridge drunk." Ambra, the devil's advocate.

Jocelyn shakes her head. "The inquest said he committed suicide but Klein's family deny this. They said he was in a good mental state with no problems, and his dinner companions said he was sober. How can a body float downriver for five hundred kilometers and nobody notices?"

"But was he the same Klein as the one on Petrov's list?" Sharp asks.

"I'll come to that. Now look at von Steiner," Jocelyn says. "Half a glass. Also drowned. But wait for this. Upside down in a barrel, in some farm outbuilding in Utah. An open verdict on this one. I mean, an eighty-year-old man might lean into a barrel and tip over and not be able to get out, but why would he want to lean into a barrel of rainwater in the first place?"

"It's a selection effect. You've picked out the interesting deaths from dozens of old Germans with these names."

Jocelyn shakes her head again. "No, no, no, Ambra. They were all scientists. Klein and Zimmerman were microbiologists, von Steiner was a rocket man. Now, if you wanted to build a flying bioweapon, you'd want microbiologists and rocket people."

Ambra says, "What are you saying, Jocelyn?"

"Someone's going systematically through Petrov's list. They're looking for information from these old scientists. When they don't deliver, they get an accidental death and a little cross against their name."

"What information?" Sharp wonders.

Ambra breaks the edgy silence. "Where did they live?"

"Klein in some one-horse town in Maryland, Zimmerman lived in Fairfax Virginia, von Steiner in Utah." Jocelyn stands up and jiggles about excitedly. "You see what I'm getting at, don't you? They were all Germans in their eighties, they were all scientists, and they all died violent deaths in the last few months."

Ambra asks, "What about the other Germans on Petrov's list? What about Krafft and Bauer?"

"Nothing. I don't know who or where they are."

"We know something," Ambra says. "Their names aren't scored off. Not yet."

"The intelligence services don't do burglary, Lewis. That's an urban myth."

"Tell their reporting officer to give them brownie points at ACR time, Jocelyn. Mr. Nuts and Mr. Bolts gave a terrific performance."

"For the sake of discussion, let's pretend that all this nonsense is for real. What was the giveaway?"

"The Mas-Hamilton software. Only a government department could afford it. It might as well have had CROWN PROPERTY, TECHNICAL SERVICES DEPARTMENT, written all over it." Sharp grins.

Jocelyn sips at her G&T. "You've been watching too many Bond movies."

"But they were from B4, right?" Sharp springs it on her. He thinks he sees a hint of surprise cross her face, but the moment comes and goes so quickly he can't be sure. Not many people knew about B4, which was a group of "specialist locksmiths" belonging to the Technical services Department (TSD), part of the Communications and Information Systems Division (ISD), which came under the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), which was in essence the diplomatic service. B4 was located not in the underground dungeons of Legoland but in a secret building at Hanslope Park near Milton Keynes. It was all very confusing.

"It would take more than one government department to carry through something like that," Jocelyn says. "Not that I'm admitting a thing."

Sharp takes that as an admission. He waves at the barman and orders another tomato juice. He waits until the man is out of earshot. They are in Andy's Bar, a pub with plush armchairs and an Irish literati theme. There are Irish rustic paintings, and Pub of the Year certificates, and glass panels etched with the faces of George Bernard Shaw, Yeats, Joyce, and other Irish writers. He's had to get out of the safe house, even for an hour; the walls were closing in on him.

She adds tonic water to her gin and watches the bubbles. "The crazy letter says London gets zapped in three days, in case you've lost track. I'm seeing Gordon first thing tomorrow. What do I report? What have you people discovered?"

"A conspiracy."

"Of course you have. You've uncovered a secret lodge of the Knights Templar."

"Nothing so harmless."

CONSPIRACY

"Ambra, You're not going to believe this."

"Try me anyway, Neal."

Caddon's face is on a flat screen in the living room of the safe house. He has bags under his eyes and a light stubble, but there's something else that Sharp can't quite place — a grimness, maybe even anger. It's midmorning in London and has to be one or two in the morning in California. "I've been into the Modern Military Branch of the National Archives and Records service, I've been exploiting the Freedom of Information Act like hell, and I've been calling in a few favors. I've also been getting some blocking maneuvers."

"Blocking maneuvers? Who from?"

"I'm not sure, Ambra." Sharp and Jocelyn are on either side of Ambra, touching shoulders to stay in the field of view. Caddon launches into his story: "It goes back to the Allied invasion of Europe. A few thousand intelligence officers moved in behind the armies. Their job was to find Nazi scientists and bring them back to America under military custody. This operation was code-named Overcast."

"So far, so good."

"The original idea was scientific plunder, and they found plenty. Advanced submarines, prototype jets, rocket planes, even a supersonic wind tunnel. But the most valuable loot was human, the scientists themselves. The original idea was to pull them in, suck them dry, and then spit them out, back to Germany. The trouble was that they turned out to be just too good. They were too valuable to lose. The War Department decided it wanted them kept in the States. So Overcast was replaced by a new project called Paperclip, created and signed by President Truman in 1946 to allow this."

"The Cold War was getting under way," Sharp volunteers. "You needed the new weapons and the new people."

"But what you didn't need — at least Harry Truman didn't — was war criminals in America. He ordered the War Department to conduct background investigations of the war time activities of these scientists. And that's when the big problem began. The military wanted their skills and they didn't give a toss what these guys got into during the war."

The screen flickers slightly, then recovers. Ambra says, "Keep talking."

"The way it worked was this: The War Department's intelligence agency had to create a dossier on each scientist. The dossier went to the State Department and the Justice Department. These departments had the final say on whether a scientist was allowed to immigrate to the States."

"Which surely settled it. You're telling us the US military had a presidential directive. They couldn't go against their own president."

"They did."

"What?"

"They freaking did. The military and the CIA combined to subvert their own president. It was massive, a conspiracy to undermine the orders of the president. I'm faxing something now but it's just a sample."

Caddon's face disappears from the screen. A moment later a fax starts buzzing next to the terminal. Sharp pulls it out and they read it together as Caddon reappears.

"Suitably revised, I see. What happened, Neal?"

Caddon was flicking through some offscreen sheets. "Well, they brought in over seven hundred Nazi scientists to the States. No matter how depraved, no matter how closely they worked with the Nazi killing machine, engineers, scientists and doctors were rounded up. Military intelligence sanitized their records. The scientists became American citizens, God-fearing, gum-chewing, flag-waving fucking patriots. Examples. Von Braun of V2 fame and his team, all of them Nazis, some of them unquestionably war criminals, all of them with dossiers whitewashed by the War Department. One of them was recalled to West Germany for a secret trial, and do you know what happened? The army sabotaged the trial. They witheld records that could have sent the guy to the gallows."

The FBI man is exhausted and beginning to wander. He seems angry. Ambra brings him back. "What about Petrov's list?"

"Getting to it now. One of the hundreds brought in by Paperclip is a guy called Kurt Blome, now dead, hopefully with a stake through his heart. The Nuremberg prosecutors charged him with carrying out plague experiments on Polish prisoners."

"Plague? As in bubonic?" Ambra has a thoughtful frown, sips at a white wine.

"Yeah. He got off on a close call — surprise, surprise, his army dossier doesn't even mention his Nuremberg trial. So they put him to work with the US Army Chemical Corps under Project 63 — don't ask. He teams up with another charmer called von Haagen, a professor at the University of Strasbourg. He and Blome have a mighty close interest in biological weapons. Von Haagen spent the war infecting inmates with God knows what at the Natzweiler concentration camp before the military brings him over on Paperclip and puts him straight to work on germ weapons research at Camp King, just outside Washington."

Caddon has black bags under his eyes, and his whole face is sagging. Ambra says, "You said you were getting to it, Neal."

"It gets hot about now. In 1954 this Blome is interviewed by officers from Fort Detrick. He gives them a list of the bio-weapons researchers who'd worked with him during the war. Their names include Zimmerman, Klein, Bauer, and Krafft."

Sharp says, "Bingo."

Jocelyn looks over at him. "They were a war time team."

"But what were they up to?" Ambra turns to the screen again and the unblinking round eye on top of it. "Neal, what did they do?"

"I don't know, Ambra. The records have gone missing."

"Come again?"

"I don't know what's going on here, Ambra, and I don't like it. But one thing I have found out. In the 1950s the CIA built a wing of Weldon University Hospital. They paid for it secretly, channeling their money through a Dr. Carl Shaeffmann who ran the Shaeffmann Medical Research Foundation. I don't know what the CIA did there. But I do know they employed Edith Zimmerman."

"And the hospital records?" Sharp asks.

"Destroyed in 1973 on the orders of Richard Helms, the CIA director."

Ambra says, "But there have to be patients' records."

"Negative. Destroyed also. But something nasty." Caddon pauses. "We've been checking the surviving records from penitentiaries scattered around Dixieland dating from that period. A surprising number of prisoners — poor blacks mostly — took ill just before they were due for release, and were transferred to the foundation for treatment. And according to the prison records, a surprising number of them were released straight after hospitalization. The problem is, we can find no trace of what happened to them afterward. No parole records, no nothing. These were men without families, men nobody would miss."

"You mean …?"

"They went into the Shaeffer Medical Research Foundation. But there's no credible record of their having come out, or of what happened to them while they were inside. And your biochemist, this Edith Zimmerman, worked there."

Caddon is talking again, as if to himself. He's looking down at the papers rather than the screen. "Operations director of Dora-Mittelbau, Arthur Rudolph, where twenty thousand people were killed by exhaustion, starvation, or hangings, becomes a US citizen and designs the Saturn V rocket used to land Americans on the moon. Kurt Blome ends up with the US Army Chemical Corps working on chemical warfare. Walter Schreiber, who organized medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners, ends up at the Air Force School of Medicine in Texas. School of medicine, for Christ's sake."

"We've got the message."

"These bastards stained my country."

"Calm down, Neal. I expect everyone was at it."

"And that, I think, is what we're seeing here."

It's against regulations to talk shop in the staff bar, but nobody is about to remind the head of MI6. Sharp looks out over the Thames and thinks again that the spooks have one of the best views in London. C looks across the table at Jocelyn. "Comments?"

"It makes sense. These people would all be in their twenties during the war. They must have been brought over to the States as part of a team for some purpose, something they were working on at the war's end. And now they're being killed off."

"But we don't have any records. We don't know what they were up to. Isn't that right? We don't know what they were up to?"

"That's right, Gordon. whatever they were doing, it was so secret that not even the historians have dug it out. Caddon's team are combing the US National Archives right now, but the records have gone missing."

Gordon taps half a dozen buff folders piled in front of him. "We know nothing of what they did in the seventies, but after that they suddenly pop up in various parts of the States as teachers, college professors, whatever."

Sharp says, "They're geriatrics, long retired. And yet whatever it is suddenly rears its ugly head in the twenty-first century and starts to kill them."

Jocelyn says, "It has to be connected with the Arizona device."

The intelligence chief nods at Sharp. It could almost have been an acknowledgment of some sort. "I still think your theory that it really was a Third Reich weapon is a long shot. Why now? Why Arizona? But with three days to go and a credible death threat against London, it's something we must check out."

"Some names weren't scored off Petrov's list," Jocelyn points out.

Sharp stares in amazement: The intelligence chief is smiling, or at least exposing his teeth. "We have no idea about Bauer or Hosokawa. However, we've had a breakthrough on the matter of Krafft."

"He's alive?"

"We're not entirely inert in this expensive outfit, Sharp. We did follow up on your Nazi biochemist suggestion. It turns out that military intelligence had words with this Kurt Blome at the end of the war. It seems that Max Krafft didn't go over to the West. For reasons we don't understand he was taken by the Russians. And within the last hour we have found that this Krafft is still alive and well, living in an extremely remote part of Rus sia. But there's a problem."

C is still exposing his teeth. "The bad news is that the Russians wouldn't want him interviewed. He was involved in their own bioweapons program and might talk about things that they don't want us to know about. The good news is that we are experienced in putting people in and out of Rus sia without legitimate papers. The bad news is that time is seriously against us. The good news is that you have the specialized knowledge to interview him in the necessary depth. An experienced field agent will nursemaid you."

"I want to go home."

"You can't. There's nobody else."

"I don't speak Russian."

"Miss Volpe does."

"I'm a coward."

"I could have you shot."

"We're not at war."

"You think not? But I take your point, Sharp, I can't put you up against a wall. Just keep back from the edge of subway platforms." Gordon exposes more teeth to show that he is joking. They are all having fun.

THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW

Caddon grabs a few hours in his downtown pad and wakes up feeling haggard and guilty at the time spent asleep. The street outside is buzzing with early-morning traffic. He scurries across the road to Ingrid's Deli, scurries back with a bagel, and switches on a coffee machine. He's giving a progress report to State Department bigwigs at nine, needs to shave.

Report what?

He stares at the papers on the kitchen table with bloodshot eyes.

The slick chick has been identified, courtesy of the Chinese and Japanese secret services, of all things — globalization is surely with us, pal. She's part of Gakushi-gumi, a North Korean spy ring operating in Japan. She'd arrived in LA impersonating some opera singer whose arrest the next day led to a fine operatic performance. The airport videos tie the chick to the Macao money-laundering scam a while back wherein top-grade counterfeit dollars were filtered through Banco Delta Asia into the international money markets. She'd vanished then and she's vanished now — in and out quick, before they can blink. Caddon thinks she's maybe North Korea's answer to James Bond. And the barbecued sausages at the Globe mine shaft have been identified as Nazi-loving militiamen, one of them the Phoenix dentist. Probably Demos's Strawberry lunch mates.

He puts a sheet of paper on the kitchen table and scribbles:

Enemies working together. All now vanished somewhere in Berlin, except Novello, back at his desk in Parallax Satellite Systems. Caddon scribbles more:

He sighs, frowns, covers his mouth with his hand in an unconscious, nervous gesture. This would give Einstein a headache. Then he prints in big letters:

So far as they've been able to find out, there was only one Sophia in Petrov's life, or had been: Sophia Milankovitch, his young wife of the gulag, dead these past fifty years.

He wonders what in the name of sanity he's going to tell the State Department bigshots at nine o'clock. Wonders if he has time to shave. And he wonders about getting his wife on a plane to Mexico and telling his son to take a break from Manhattan, maybe go rafting or do a ranch holiday, someplace like Montana. Feels that it would be somehow treacherous, like insider dealing. Even so, there comes a point …

Light, dark, light, dark …

The same godless hour. But Sharp hasn't been sleeping, he's been lying fully clothed on top of his bed, waiting for an early-morning knock. Somewhere, he knows, other people are awake in some secret room, putting together false papers, while yet others are playing logistic games that will shortly transport him from this room to the edge of civilization, somewhere in Arctic Russia.

Who knew where the weapons were headed? Who directed the project that created them? If he's dead, did he leave documentation buried in some mine shaft or a Swiss safe-deposit box, or handed down through his family? Someone at the present time knew where these sixty-year-old weapons were hidden. Someone who wants to bring that past alive.

Neo-Nazis?

No, they're just stupid thugs. Someone with a vision, but unhinged.

Petrov?

Petrov fought the Nazis, for goodness' sake. But for his own reasons he has made an alliance with some lunatic who wants to …

Why unhinged?

No one threatening a city at peace is rational.

Why now? What has triggered this?

I can only guess. But Petrov has pulled together a group of international terrorists for some purpose of his own involving America and North Korea. Maybe some secret rapprochement that the old Stalin-hater doesn't want. They still have the gulag in North Korea. His young wife died in one.

How do you know …

Must go … find what happened at the war's end. Reach for that past. Someone is trying to bring it alive.

The screen goes blank. Sharp, his nerves tingling, sits in the dark and stares at it.