Blood Flag: A Paul Madriani Novel (31 page)

Tony has my cell number, but I give it to her anyway. “Also, tell him I am sending him an e-mail in response to his. Tell him to read it and not to do anything more until he and I talk.”

“What’s going on?”

“Nothing important. It’s just business,” I tell her.

“How’s Joselyn?”

“She’s fine,” I tell her, except she would kill me if she knew I just blew Lillian off. “Listen, I’ve got to run.”

“I understand. Thanks for calling. I’ll give him the message when he wakes. Bye.” And we hang up.

I punch the intercom for Harry. When he answers, I tell him what’s happening and ten seconds later he’s in my office. I tell him about Tony’s key, the file labeled “B.F. Instructions,” and the encrypted thumb drive. I print out a copy of Tony’s e-mail and hand it to him.

Harry studies it for a couple of minutes while I study maps on the computer, a place where Tony and I might meet that would cut down traveling time and distance for both of us.

“It’s not hard to figure out what the instructions are,” says Harry. “Not the content. That’s hidden behind the encryption, but the purpose,” he says. “Assuming three soldiers find something in Europe and bring it home. Years later they discover its value and suddenly they need help. They aren’t sure precisely what it’s worth and they want to avoid a dispute, probably between themselves.”

“Or maybe they can’t be sure if they own it.”

“That too,” says Harry. “So they’d want to know what their rights are under the law. They’d go to a lawyer.”

“Fish.”

Harry and I are on the same wavelength. Fish probably advised them as to their ownership if others came forward and laid claim to the flag.

“It could be that that’s why it’s remained subterranean, undercover all these years,” says Harry. “Maybe there’s a statute of limitations and Fish told them to wait until it lapsed. That might cut off other claims, say the German government, Hitler heirs, assuming there are any, anyone else coming forward.”

“That would explain why they waited. But why were they scared?”

“I don’t know,” says Harry. “But I’m guessing that if Fish is any kind of a lawyer, and it sounds like he is, he would have had the three men sign off on the instructions to avoid any later disputes among themselves.”

“You mean an agreement.” I look at him.

“Absolutely. I’m assuming Fish isn’t a fool. If he were to write instructions on his own without their mutual consent, Pack, Jones, and Brauer, any one of them, or their heirs could sue him later for damages if somehow they were frozen out. But not if the men agreed. Especially if each of them had the agreement reviewed by independent counsel before they signed it. I have a feeling when we see this thing, assuming that we do, we’re going to see signatures all over it. Clients and their lawyers,” says Harry. “Assuming that’s what’s on this thumb drive, do you think we can crack the encryption?”

“You and I can’t.”

“I meant someone who knows what they’re doing.”

“Maybe, I don’t know. Give me a hand here. I have to find a place to get together with Tony, so we can compare keys and talk about the thumb drive. I want to make sure he doesn’t put it back in his machine. If he tries to open it with the wrong software he might erase it or destroy it.”

I make a note to tell him in my e-mail to hang on to it, not to do anything more until we meet. Harry and I look at the map, Google Earth, and try to plot a point somewhere easy for both of us to reach.

“What about Denver? Denver’s a possibility,” I say.

“Yeah, if you both want to go north out of your way, and the weather this time of year can be nasty,” says Harry. “Here’s another option.” He points with his finger. “It’s closer for you and farther for him.” He checks the flight schedules on his phone. “There is a nonstop out of Oklahoma City on Southwest.”

“To where?”

“Where you just went,” says Harry. “Las Vegas.”

I make a note. I check the flights and write them down. Given the fact that I’ll be asking Tony for a favor, I’ll let him pick the meeting site. What I want is to borrow his encrypted thumb drive, or at least steer it to the right computer lab, and do it quickly.

“What do you think happened to Brauer’s copy?” says Harry.

“What?”

“The thumb drive,” he says. “Assuming it’s in the nature of an agreement, Fish would have given each of them a copy. The original is probably in the lawyer’s safe. In which case I’m assuming he would have given each man a copy on an encrypted thumb drive.”

“I hadn’t thought about it,” I tell him.

“It’s possible the police snagged it,” says Harry. “When they did their search at Emma’s house the day they arrested her. I didn’t notice it on the list of items they took. But then I wasn’t looking for it.”

“You’re full of all kinds of positive thoughts,” I tell him. But he’s right. If Brauer had a thumb drive and the police found it, they know more than we do at this point. They would know about the flag and its speculative value from the news stories. If they got curious and cracked the encryption on the thumb drive, they might know where it was and, more to the point, who has a claim to it, which sets off another alarm. “You know more about this stuff than I do.”

“What’s that?” says Harry.

“Do you think this agreement, assuming there is one, might have addressed questions of succession as to ownership in the event that any or all of three men died?”

Harry looks at me. “Why do you ask?”

“Would it?”

“It’s entirely possible. Why?” says Harry.

“Fish’s statement to me on the phone, and the way he said it. At the time it didn’t seem important, at least not to me. But it did to him. That Brauer was the last of them to die.”

FORTY-THREE

N
ino leaned back in the chair and put his stockinged feet on top of the open drawer of the desk in his hotel room. He read with interest the latest missive on his laptop. The two of them finally agreed. It was about time. These guys were worse than politicians. It took them forever to make a decision. Nonetheless, Nino was happy with their choice. He hadn’t been to Vegas in years, so a trip there was just what the doctor ordered.

What he couldn’t figure out from reading all their e-mails was the stuff about the two keys. Still, he knew he’d find out soon enough.

For the most part Nino already knew everything they knew. More, in fact. Ari had accused Nino of trashing Brauer’s house for no reason and faulted him for not taking anything when he left. Just because he didn’t share it with Ari and his Israeli employers didn’t mean that Nino came out empty-handed. People always seemed to misjudge him.

The fact was, Nino already had a deciphered set of Fish’s written instructions, the agreement he wrote up between the three soldiers and which they signed. He had found them already printed out, in Robert Brauer’s home office, when he tossed the place. This was something Pack and his new friend, the lawyer from Coronado, were still trying to figure out.

This was how Nino found Pack. Edward Pack’s home address was listed in the agreement, as were the home addresses of the other two platoon members. With the written instructions and knowing where they lived, it didn’t take Nino long to figure out what he had to do. He went to Oklahoma City to check things out.

He started with the lawyer, Elliott Fish, observed his office, and followed him until he found out where he lived. Nino kept his distance. He didn’t want to get into a situation where he had to kill the man, because he knew he needed him. Fish’s signature would be required to gain entry to the bank vault where the flag was locked away, along with what Nino understood to be a single safe-deposit key. Now he had to wonder if perhaps there was more than one key.

Nino had been tapped into Anthony Pack’s e-mails through the man’s home server. This was accomplished well before Pack hooked up with the lawyer in Coronado, and well in advance of the media buzz over the flag, which seemed to set them off and fired up the frequency of their e-mails. Nino chuckled at his good fortune. The banker was the weak link. His server was wide open. It took Nino and an underground hacker parked in a van outside Pack’s house in Oklahoma City less than an hour to get past the simple password on the home’s wireless router. Ten minutes later they discovered that Tony Pack had foolishly used the same weak Wi-Fi password to secure the server.

Once they had root access to the server the hacker set up a “back door” that provided Nino with all the tools required to read all incoming and outgoing mail from Tony’s system. The server was configured to drop a copy of each message into a disposable e-mail account that Nino could access anytime he wanted without being noticed or leaving a footprint. He could do it remotely from anywhere in the world. Nino didn’t bother to hack the man’s work e-mail at the bank. He suspected that this would be more highly regulated, and for that reason, the banker and the lawyer were not likely to use that system for this type of private communication. Increasingly whenever Pack and the lawyer named Paul Madriani wrote, the subject turned to the Blood Flag. They used the code initials BF, but of course Nino knew what they meant. He would sit there looking at his computer screen as if it were a crystal ball, reading their minds.

The thread of e-mails back and forth over the last two days ballooned out to seven before the two men nailed everything down. Nino knew their flight itineraries, the airlines, flight numbers, departure times, exactly when they were to arrive and where. They were both taking nonstop flights. Nino knew how long they’d be in the air and where they were planning on meeting. Madriani wanted to meet in a restaurant at the airport. He was planning on catching an early evening flight back to San Diego.

Pack wrote back and told Madriani that he was tired. He wanted to spend the night and fly back to Oklahoma City the next morning. He was staying at one of the big casino hotels on the Strip because he got a good rate. He suggested they meet at a small restaurant about a mile from the airport, halfway between the airport and the Strip. The restaurant would be a good place to meet, he said, because it had large private booths. It was suggested by a friend of Pack’s who knew Las Vegas well and who told him it was a perfect meeting location because they could talk and do their business without being disturbed. Madriani agreed, and it was done.

Nino worked backward in terms of planning. Each of them would be carrying a key. They were hoping to compare them. Anthony Pack would also be carrying the encrypted thumb drive. It was probably nothing Nino needed since he already had a copy of the lawyer’s instructions. Still, it might be important. Maybe there was something else on the drive. Something he didn’t know about. And since he was taking the key anyway, why not get the drive at the same time? Besides, why allow someone else to get their hands on it? They might beat him to the prize.

Pack was flying out early. He was covering the longer distance, but according to the itinerary he would land first, almost an hour ahead of Madriani, assuming their flights were on time. It presented Nino with the perfect opening.

The beauty of the e-mail hack was that it gave Nino everything he needed. He had both men’s e-mail addresses from their messages. It would be an easy thing to step between them and shoot one of them a “ghost message.” By spoofing the “From” line on an e-mail to Pack, Nino could make it look as if it came from Madriani. If he could change the location of their meeting in Las Vegas and direct Pack a new location where there was no one around, he could pick him off. A last-minute e-mail sent by Madriani as he was boarding his flight in San Diego couldn’t be checked or confirmed by Pack using his cell phone, not once the lawyer was in flight. The timing would be critical, but apart from that it would be easy to do.

Once Pack was on the ground in Las Vegas, confronted with the change of plans, he would have to make a decision. The question was, what would he do? If he called Madriani on his cell he would get no answer. He might just go to the new meeting site, in which case Nino would have him. Or he might decide to be cautious. He might choose to wait at the airport for the lawyer to arrive. After all, he had Madriani’s itinerary. He would know what airline he was coming in on and when. Pack struck him as the cautious type.

Nino decided he needed something more. He glanced at the open attaché case on the bed, the loose business cards inside on the bottom, Nino’s various personas, and racked his brain for variations on the theme.

FORTY-FOUR

E
vening at home with Joselyn and I am worried about Emma, her case, and where it may be headed. Harry and I grilled her in the office this afternoon, making sure she has told us everything she knows. Our growing fear is that there may be elements, facets of the case we can’t see. We don’t want to stir up the cops because of concerns they may bump up the charges and rearrest her, but Harry was compelled to burnish his motions for discovery in hopes of finding anything that prosecutors may have withheld.

We braced Emma about the Blood Flag, and not for the first time. She has told us before that she knows nothing about it. She’s never heard of it. She said her father never mentioned it. When we told her about the history she seemed legitimately surprised. I asked her today whether she had ever seen her father in possession of a thumb drive. She didn’t know what one was. When we showed her one from my desk drawer, she looked at it and simply shook her head.

The question here is what she knew and when she knew it. If the agreement between the soldiers, the instructions crafted by the lawyer Fish, dealt with the issue of ownership following death among the platoon members, Harry and I have to know what the terms are. If, as a result, ownership of the flag devolved upon heirs who might include Emma, and if there was some limitation on this, cutting off claims, say after a period of time or on a certain date specified in the agreement, it could be a problem. The police already know that she receives title to the house and whatever money Robert Brauer had in the bank. These she would have inherited in any event, regardless of when he died.