had been his hobby; she could remember Steve endlessly vying to use this same camera on dive trips. The camera itself was empty of film, but the side pocket of the soft camera case held a film carton with three letters scribbled on the side: ACE. She opened the carton, although she already knew it was empty. The film had been removed from the camera for processing.
She began extracting objects from the pack. The first was a flashlight still containing batteries that were corroded with age. The heavy shape of the second item was instantly familiar. Guns of all shapes and sizes had been a matter-of-fact part of the Fischer family, and her life, for as long as she could remember. Her father had taught her to shoot at the same time Steve had been taught. As academically inclined as she had always been, she was nevertheless a natural marksman and had given Steve a run for his money during target practice.
The glow of the bulb illuminated the maker of the handgun, Pietro Beretta. She placed the gun on top of the tea chest. The knapsack also contained a magazine and a box of ammunition. When she pulled the box out she could feel loose rounds rolling around, which meant the box wasn’t full. The magazine was empty, which indicated that the missing rounds had been used. That fact more than any other hammered home the intimacy of the items she was handling. They weren’t just objects, they had been the personal possessions of Todd Fischer.
The final item was a battered hardbound book. Her heart automatically beat faster as she picked it up. The camera had been an emotional journey, the gun a window into the past, but to Sara, books always carried an extra zing. Whether they contained reference information or a fictional story, she loved the mystery inherent in page layered upon page, all closed between two covers.
But she was reluctant to open this book.
It didn’t have a title or anything on the spine to indicate the publisher or the contents: it looked like a diary. If it was Todd’s journal, then it was private and most definitely needed to go to Steve.
She opened to the first page. It was written in German.
Frowning, she turned a page and skimmed the text. It took a few moments for her mind to click into the structure and format of the language, because her German, which she had studied along with French at college, was definitely rusty.
Flipping back a page, she found a date— 1942—and directly below that the phrase Schutzstaffel Chiffrier-abteilung.
Cold congealed in her stomach. Schutzstaffel was the full name of the Nazi SS. Chiffrier-abteilung meant cipher department.
Not long after her father had come back from Costa Rica, she had overheard her parents talking. She hadn’t meant to eavesdrop. She had been in her room reading and they had been sitting out on the porch. In the stillness of the evening, the words had floated in her window. At first she had thought the discussion had been a general one about World War II and she hadn’t paid it much attention, but when her father had mentioned her uncle’s name, her ears had pricked up.
She knew the basic facts of Todd Fischer’s disappearance and death. She had been secure in the belief that he had died in the Gulf of Mexico in the line of duty, no matter what anyone else maintained. But according to her father, Todd had been on a wild-goose chase, hunting Nazis. The Navy had covered it up, but he had the evidence to prove it.
Standing, surrounded by dust and old memories that had teeth, the gritty reality of the mass grave at Juarez was sharp and immediate.
Her uncle had been working undercover south of the border, but the job he had been sent to do defied belief and common sense. Neither of her parents could credit that Todd and seven other SEALs had gone missing on a mission that belonged decades back in time: a mission that in the 1980s could only be described as crackpot.
Todd had been hunting Nazis, and he had found them, along with a connection to a Colombian cartel. The combination had been brutal. Juarez had resembled the horrific aftermath of a death camp.
She skimmed the first page of the book. Halfway down the reason she still hadn’t adjusted to the syntax became clear. It was a codebook.
A cold tingle went through her, a brief flash of unwanted memory. When she’d been a child, one of the nightmares that had regularly played had been about opening a book and memorizing a word. Later on, it had been an easy leap to conclude that she had been stealing a code.
The content of the book explained why the cover and the spine were blank. Despite the fact that it had been produced by a printing press—a necessity because every communications post of ground, air and sea forces had needed a copy of their own respective codebooks—it would have been a secret document, requiring a security clearance. Putting a title on the book would have been tantamount to waving a red flag.
The instant she recognized the content, translating became easier. She turned pages and studied the codes, suppressing a queasy desire to drop the book and wash her hands. As fascinating as it was, the codebook had been formulated with the express purpose of aiding Nazi secret communications. The result had been the loss of life of Allied soldiers. She knew that the armed forces had used codes and ciphers, and still did, but all the same, she couldn’t control her natural recoil.
Even worse, for the book to have been in Todd’s possession meant it had been a part of his investigation and had likely belonged to one of the Nazis he had been chasing. The thought that she could be handling the personal possession of a war criminal and a murderer made her skin crawl.
She had always been fascinated by puzzles and codes. Her mind, with its memory for detail and bent for lateral thinking, was suited to puzzle solving. She had studied mathematics for a while, along with language and history. One of her papers had included sections on the use of secret writing and one of her thesis subjects had been cryptography.
Silence closed around her and seemed to thicken as she continued to study the code. She had no idea where or when, but she was certain she had seen this particular arrangement of letters before. That fact in itself wasn’t surprising. The Germans had been excellent cryptographers, the best in the world. The majority of books on codes and ciphers had been written by Germans. It was possible that she had studied a similar code.
Her gaze caught on a penned note in the margin, and for a split second the room faded.
Code leak traced to Vassigny Stop Find Traitor Stop
An owl hooted. She started, almost dropping the book, and the curious moment of déjà vu passed, although the puzzling phrase lingered. She couldn’t remember the last time she had seen a telegram except those slipped into her parents’ old wedding album. They had become obsolete decades ago.
Taking a deep breath to steady nerves that had no earthly reason to be shot, she checked her watch. It was almost nine. With the half hour drive into town, it was long past the time she should have left, and besides, she had what she had come for.
Shoving all of the items back into the knapsack, she hitched one strap over her shoulder, picked up her handbag and descended out of the attic. After closing windows and switching off lights, she stepped onto the front porch and pulled the door closed behind her. The night was pitch-black, the temperature a few degrees cooler than earlier. Heavy clouds had blotted out the faint light of the moon and stars.
Feeling in the dark for the railing, she made her way down the steps. On impulse, she dug in the knapsack and pulled out the flashlight. When she flicked it on, there was no response, not that she had expected one. At a guess, those particular batteries had been dead for almost twenty-five years.
As she negotiated the
