Blind Instinct (11 page)

She studied a group of young people sitting on a riverbank and a name popped into her head.

Helene
.

A small tingling started at her nape as she studied the blond child. The quality of the print wasn't good. She could barely make out facial features, but something about her had sparked recognition. This time the recall had been easier, smoother—simply
there
—like an ordinary memory.

She returned her attention to the sheets, which were written in German. The originals were faded and old before the photocopies had been made. The date made her pulse quicken. November 22, 1943, just weeks before the
Nordika
had sailed.

The contents of what appeared to be a manifest were varied. In some cases the original print had been so faded that the words had disappeared when the reproductions had been made, but she instantly recognized what she was looking at. The manifest of a warehouse in Berlin which, just before the fall of the Third Reich, had held a fortune in art, artifacts and gold bullion.

Now the attacks on her, and Delgado searching her apartment, made even more sense.

She studied the list of goods. On the last page a name was scrawled in blue pen, probably by Todd. The name—George Hartley—meant nothing to her.

Minutes later, the papers and the photographs stored in a manila envelope, she left the vault.

Helene
.

The name teased at the corners of her mind.

Another name swam up out of the murk.
Reichmann
. Helene Reichmann.

Shock momentarily held her rigid. For a bleak moment she considered the very real possibility that her mind was playing games with her, that her subconscious had thrown up a name she knew was part of the investigation into the cabal.

No
. Quiet certainty filled her. The name was familiar because it had been a part of her dreams long before she had known anything about either Alex Lopez or the cabal. Until that moment she hadn't remembered that it
had
been a part of her dream. Like most of the finer details, it had slipped beyond her reach when she awoke. Now the connection was shocking and unavoidable. She had read the newspaper reports, and listened
to Steve's clipped explanations. Heinrich Reichmann had hijacked the
Nordika
, murdered members of the crew and perpetrated numerous other atrocities. He'd had a daughter called Helene, who was the current head of the cabal, and who was wanted on charges of murder and conspiracy.

Hicks and Crombie joined her as she stepped out into the main reception area of the bank. Minutes later, she was ensconced in the passenger seat of Hicks's car, which he had insisted on bringing. Crombie was driving a second vehicle, watching their tail.

The air-conditioning hummed to life as Hicks pulled out into traffic, sending a flow of cool air over her. Her hands tightened around the envelope, and for a moment she needed the anchor. Most of the time the memories were faded, distant, and confined to dreams as if they did belong to someone else, but now wasn't one of those times.

She checked the rearview mirror as Hicks drove. Crombie had slotted into traffic about four cars behind.

Heat shimmered off asphalt, sunlight glittered off passing cars.

Not an icy wind, Alps towering in a clear blue
sky, Reichmann's eyes, pale and empty
…

Her jaw tightened. The past was over. Finished. Reichmann was dead.

But his daughter wasn't.

E
dward Dennison pocketed the newspaper clipping of Ben Fischer's funeral that he'd had printed off the online records maintained by the library where Sara Fischer worked. The photo of Sara was distant and blurred, but that, and the fact that she was Steve Fischer's cousin, made her easy enough to identify.

He had only seen Fischer twice, both times in circumstances he preferred to forget, but the family resemblance—dark hair, dark eyes, distinctive cheekbones—was clear.

The fact that she had a couple of feds with her made her even easier to identify and underlined that his instincts were right. Something
was
happening.

Climbing behind the wheel of the Lexus he had rented shortly after he had exited his flight into Shreveport, he turned in the opposite direction, heading toward the Fischer farmhouse and away from the feds.

She had been carrying an envelope tucked under one arm.

She hadn't had the envelope when she had walked into the bank. It was possible it contained investment material but, with two agents watching her every move, he didn't think so.

He had searched her apartment, and found nothing of interest. Judging from the mess, someone had beat him to the punch.

If he didn't miss his guess, she had found something important—information or items that either Sara's father or Todd Fischer had secured in a safe-deposit box.

If the box had belonged to Todd Fischer and hadn't been accessed since his death in 1984, then Dennison was willing to bet that it had contained material that had been part of his undercover work.

From the information that had been leaked to the press over the years, Dennison was certain Fischer hadn't taken the Costa Rican job that had
cost him his life seriously, but if he had taken the precautionary measure of securing information before he had gone south, that meant he had found
something
.

It was possible he had gotten hold of sensitive information pertaining to Admiral Monteith, Fischer's commanding officer.

Monteith had been in hip deep with George Hartley on some deal. The pair had instigated the dive on the
Nordika
, and he didn't think it had been for reasons of national security, as stated. Monteith had been as corrupt and greedy as they come. In his opinion, they had done it solely to panic Helene, which they had, only not to their advantage. By the time the crisis Monteith and Hartley had instigated was over, Helene had used the excuse of Hartley's security leak to restructure the cabal. Think major bloodbath.

When the killing spree had stopped, all links to the upper echelon had been severed. Helene had ruthlessly dropped almost all organized crime activities and, from what he had gathered from newspaper articles, had liquidated assets and poured what was left of the cabal's resources into the vast, amorphous sea of global commercial
business interests. Within the space of a few days the cabal had morphed into a group of extremely wealthy and powerful shareholders hiding behind a complicated maze of shell companies. Monteith had resigned and Hartley was dead.

Helene's continuing contact with Lopez and the Chavez cartel and some high-risk dabbling in terrorism had been the only aberration. The risk had been huge and in the end it had bitten her on the ass. It was a glaring lack of foresight that had always puzzled him.

Back to the envelope. It didn't in any way fulfill his idea of the “personal effects” Sara's father was supposed to have brought back from Costa Rica, and it had been relatively flat—no diamonds.

He could be too late, and the lead on the cache of gold and diamonds the
Nordika
was supposed to have carried was in the envelope she had been carrying. But he was the eternal optimist. He was certain there was more to find than an envelope.

He was clutching at straws, but he was used to that. And he had a gut feeling.

Now
that
didn't come along very often. He would keep digging.

Sara checked her watch as she finished packing her suitcase, carried it out to the sitting room and set it beside the envelope and the knapsack. Aside from the visit to the bank, the morning and the early afternoon had dragged by, the boredom relieved by making sandwiches and coffee and watching TV. Bayard, who had been delayed, was due any minute. She never thought she'd be so glad to see him.

She needed to disappear. Now.

She had almost reached that conclusion anyway, but the moment she had realized that she had a photo that could help identify Helene Reichmann, the necessity had become real.

The photographs and the warehouse manifest were hard evidence against Reichmann and the cabal. The fact that she had been the one to recover them made her a witness for the prosecution. Whether she was being actively hunted now or not, the moment her name became linked with the case, she would become a target. She would need ongoing protection.

A tap at the door jerked her head up.

Hicks opened the door. Bayard strolled into the room his gaze pinning her. He was obviously
dressed for work in a dark suit, a light shirt—no tie. If she didn't miss her guess, he was wearing a shoulder-holstered gun.

She became burningly aware of her rumpled jeans, pink sweater and the shadowy hint of cleavage. Normally, she was toned down and controlled, her hair neatly pinned, and with a strategy in place to avoid Bayard.

After a brief conversation, Hicks departed. Crombie had gone earlier, as soon as they had gotten back from the bank.

Bayard closed the door and put the chain back on. “Okay. What's going on?”

She moved into the cramped kitchenette, deliberately putting space between them as she briefly chronicled the events of the last few days, omitting the information she had gotten through the dreams.

Bayard's questions about the progress of the police investigation were clipped. She watched as he began examining the contents of the knapsack. Rousseau and Thorpe hadn't believed her. Bayard was reserving judgment, but he had the advantage of an intimate view of the Chavez Cartel, the cabal and the details behind Todd's death. What sounded crazy and wild to most people was real to him.

The fact that he hadn't dismissed the idea that she had been targeted made her feel oddly shaky. She hadn't realized how much she had needed someone to believe in her.

While Bayard handled the objects in the knapsack, she ran water, filled the coffeemaker and added ground coffee.

A few minutes later, he joined her in the kitchen, leaning on the counter while she poured coffee. She placed a cup beside him on the counter. “No milk or sugar. Sorry.”

“I don't take either.”

That figured. Sharp and strong and absolutely no frills. She reached for her own cup.

Instead of drinking, he took her cup and set it down beside his. “Are you all right?”

“Fine.”

He pulled her close. “Liar.”

Her breasts brushed his chest. His clean, masculine scent filled her nostrils, along with the hint of some citrusy cologne. The awareness that had been hovering at the edge of her consciousness sharpened. She stiffened, her fingers sinking into the taught muscle at his waist, off balance and at a definite disadvantage. He had hugged her at Uncle Todd's memorial service, then again at her
father's funeral. This shouldn't have been any different. A split second later the unmistakable bulge of his erection brushed her hip.

Bayard released her, seemingly unconcerned by the fact that he was semiaroused, or that she knew it. He drank the coffee, then asked to see the photos and the warehouse manifest she'd retrieved. While he studied the items, Sara leaned against the kitchen counter and sipped her coffee, glad for the respite. He made several calls on his cell phone, his voice laid-back but incisive. When he was finished, he slipped the phone back in his pocket. “That's it. We're out of here.”

She eyed him warily. There was something different about Bayard. She just couldn't put her finger on it. “Where are we going?”

“For tonight, my mother's house.”

House
was an understatement. Mariel Bayard lived in a Grecian Revival mansion just minutes from the Fischer homestead. The house was more like a museum than a home, which was one of the reasons Bayard had spent so much time in Fischer territory.

He unlocked the front door, dropped the cartons of Chinese takeout he'd bought before
they'd left town on a side table, and showed her into the sitting room. “Mom's in Florida, but Amalie's here during the day. It's after six, so I'll have to make up a bed.”

He disappeared down a hallway, reappeared with an armful of linen and jerked his head at the stairs. Reluctantly, she followed him. Whenever she visited the Bayard mansion, she always felt as though she was on the movie set of
Gone With
The Wind
. The room Bayard showed her to ran true to form. It was massive and airy, with a bank of tall windows draped in muslin, dark polished floors and a king-size bed dwarfed by the proportions of the room.

When the bed was made, Bayard disappeared, then returned with towels, a length of what looked like pink silk and a shirt. He deposited the pile on the end of the bed. “The nightgown belongs to Mom, the shirt's mine. You can use either to sleep in until we get your clothes from your apartment. I'm just next door if you need anything.”

“Thanks, but I won't.” Ever since she'd been seven, she was aware that Bayard was dangerous. It had been a well-documented fact that he had gone through girlfriends like a hot knife through
butter. It hadn't been a hard choice to decide she was never going to join that particular queue.

But, like it or hate it, he still attracted her.

When he was gone, Sara examined the nightgown. When she'd shopped for clothing, she hadn't thought to buy nightwear, a fact she had admitted to Bayard when he had questioned her on the drive out of town.

She folded the nightgown and placed it on top of a dresser. There was no way she was wearing one of Julia's outrageous confections. The soft white shirt was more her style, although the fact that it was Bayard's made her hesitate. In the end she decided that, cliché or not, she was too tired to give a damn. She had slept in her clothes last night and she could do it again, but the thought wasn't appealing, and the soft shirt was large enough that she wouldn't need to wear jeans to preserve her modesty.

After eating reheated Chinese in the large, airy kitchen while Bayard conducted a number of curt conversations on his cell, she made her excuses and escaped upstairs. Walking through to the ensuite bathroom, she showered, changed into the shirt and brushed her teeth. Next door, she could hear Bayard's shower running. Half an
hour later, after reading a novel she found in one of the top drawers of the bedside table, she tied her wrist to the bedpost using a thin cotton belt that had come with the turquoise pants she had bought and switched off the light. Immobilizing her arm wouldn't make for a comfortable night's sleep, but if she did sleepwalk, this time she wouldn't get very far.

Vassigny's predawn darkness was close to impenetrable, the temperature, as Sara lit a candle, icy. After stoking the wood range in the kitchen to warm the house and boil water for coffee, she dressed carefully for work, wearing a crisp blouse, a shapeless but warm jacket and an unfashionably long woolen skirt that reached almost to her ankles. With her hair clipped back in a neat French braid and her spectacles in place, the effect was low-key but businesslike. She wished to emphasize the fact that she was efficient and utterly devoid of personality, a tactic that, so far, had worked. Reichmann knew she held a doctorate in mathematics from Oxford and that she had lectured at the Sorbonne, and yet her credentials had barely registered.

Her German citizenship had been her passport
to this job. Reichmann acknowledged her background and her education, but he had made it clear that he considered her inferior on two counts: she was female, and she had married a Frenchman.

The cold of the Château bit deep as she sat down behind her desk just before eight. Reichmann called her into his office and introduced her to Gerhardt, a slender, bespectacled man in a neat, dark suit. Stein was also present.

The reason she was required to work on a Sunday, Reichmann explained, was that Gerhardt, a Gestapo officer from Lyon, was conducting an audit of their systems, and she was to show them a full set of accounts and their filing system.

Gerhardt wasn't in uniform, but that wasn't surprising. The Gestapo weren't required to wear a uniform, and, like Stein, usually wore the uniform of whatever unit they were stationed with. When Stein deferred to Gerhardt, indicating that he outranked him, she stiffened.

Stein had been in residence at the Château for approximately a month. The Gestapo, now a part of the SS, was the Reich's secret police. The death's head units ran the concentration camps. They had carte blanche to investigate anyone they considered to be a threat to the regime, including
German civilians and the military. Their powers were wide-ranging, with a license for murder.

For a small posting like Vassigny, a resident Gestapo officer was overkill. The arrival of a second officer signaled that they were more than ordinarily interested in Vassigny. Sara was almost certain they were here to investigate the code leak.

By lunchtime Gerhardt had finished going through the accounts with a fine-tooth comb and, assisted by Stein, was immersed in correspondence files.

Gerhardt stopped by her desk. For most of the morning he had ignored her, but his sharp, colorless gaze was a reminder that she couldn't allow herself to relax.

“You know shorthand, madame.”

Alarm feathered through her. Shorthand had originally been secret writing. It was commonly used nowadays, but nonetheless was one of the many branches of cryptography. The only conceivable reason Gerhardt could have for mentioning it was to test her in some way.