The Julian secret

CHAPTER EIGHT

Downtown Atlanta The next day

Lang was sorting out the correspondence on his desk while trying to. prioritize the mound of pink callback slips when Sara buzzed him from her desk in the reception area.

"Gurt, line one."

Lang swiveled his chair to take in the floor-to-ceiling view of Atlanta's downtown skyline. "Yes, ma'am?"

"I contacted Franz Blucher." For an instant, Lang was puzzled, then remembered.

"Great. Can he help us?"

There was a pause for a second, Gurt organizing what she was about to say. "He wouldn't talk to me. I told him I was calling for a friend of Donald Huff and the line died. I called back, and he told me to contact him again never." Lang stood, absently watching the ant4ill of pedestrian traffic below. "What did you say to him that-"

"Just as I told you."

"So we only know he doesn't want to help."

"No," Gurt said, "we know who he is. I Googled him." Lang chuckled. "Really? Or perhaps you had 'enhanced' Google."

"Enhanced" Google. Although implemented after Lang had become a victim of the Peace Dividend and retired from the intelligence community, he was aware of at least part of the Agency's awesome fact-gathering potential. Occasionally, a slip or intentional leak of personal information concerning a current actor on the world's stage would bring such howls of privacy invasion, the same "anonymous source" would attribute the revelation to "Web sites and search engines available to the public." Only if the public had a billion or so for a computer system, the capability of which was so immense it could never be accurately measured. Sort of like the distance to the end of the universe expressed in miles. The data that caused the ruckus usually came from global monitoring of communications. The Agency had the capability to eavesdrop on every electronic, noncable transmission in the world. Telephone, computer, everything. Enhanced Google. Its limitations were only in the manpower necessary to translate, read, and index the information. Lang had little doubt that Gurt still knew how to ascertain the passwords needed to tap into the largest single bank of personal information on earth.

And probably the galaxy. "Was not needed," she said. "He is a professor at university, has published many papers, books." An academician who didn't want to talk was an oxymoron. ''About what-what is his subject?"

"All about the war, the Second War."

Made sense; that was what Don had been writing about. "What else did you learn?"

"He is retired. His father was a newspaperman, died in Berlin in 1945."

"All that was on Google?"

"Well, perhaps most of it."

Something was playing around the edge of Lang's mind like a moth around a light bulb.

"He is known to Jacob," Gurt said. "Interviewed him for a book on Auschwitz where Jacob's parents died."

That was it, of course. Holocaust survivors, Jacob Annulewitz.

Jacob had migrated to Israel, chosen Mossad as a profession, then moved to England and obtained British citizenship. In his retirement he had inexplicably chosen to remain in the rain and fog of the UK rather than the balmy sun of the Eastern Mediterranean. In fact, he had begun a second career, the cover for his first, a barrister in London. While he was with the Agency, Lang's path had crossed Jacob's, leaving a trail of friendship as well as professional respect. Jacob, like Gurt, had also been invaluable in Lang's struggle with Pegasus.

"You called Jacob?" Lang asked, slightly jealous Gurt had preempted contacting his old friend.

"I spoke to his wife, Rachel…"

"Who no doubt insisted whenever we're in London to come by for dinner."

There was a question in Gurt's response. ''Yes. How did you know?"

Rachel's cooking was notorious throughout the intelligence community. Common wisdom held that only the Geneva Conventions prevented the output of her kitchen from being used to intimidate the most tight-lipped enemy into diarrhea of the tongue. The last meal Lang had shared with her and Jacob had left him cramped with flatulence that threatened to be terminal.

"Good guess. Is Jacob calling back?"

"Rachel confirmed Jacob and Blucher knew each other. Not so good, but enough, perhaps. Jacob will call and see if Blucher will see us."