Killer Focus. Fiona Brand

       www.mirabooks.co.uk

      Acknowledgements

      Once again, thank you to Jenny Haddon, a former bank regulator, for her advice and the fascinating insight into the world of international banking, Claire Russell of the Kerikeri Medical centre, New Zealand, for supplying the medical details and for helping me find the right drug to fit the crime, and to Pauline Autet for kindly answering my questions about the French language and providing the perfect phrases. Heartfelt thanks also to my editor, Miranda Stecyk, and the team at MIRA Books.

      For Dad

      Prologue

      Portland, Maine October 12, 1984

      The powerful beam of a flashlight probed the darkness, skimming over breaking waves as they sluiced between dark fingers of rock. Hunching against an icy southerly wind and counting steps as she picked her way through a treacherous labyrinth of tidal pools, a lean, angular woman swung the beam inland. Light pinpointed the most prominent feature on the exposed piece of coastline, a gnarled, embattled birch that marked the beginning of a steep path.

      Breath pluming on the chill air, she followed the track to the rotted remains of a mansion that had once commanded the promontory, and which had burned down almost thirty years ago to the day.

      Memories crowded with each step, flickering one after the other, isolated and stilted like the wartime newsreels she’d watched as a child. The wind gusted, razor edged with sleet, but the steady rhythm of the climb and the purpose that had pulled her away from a warm chandelier-lit room and an ambassadorial reception to this—a mausoleum of the dead—kept the autumn cold at bay.

      Thirty years ago, the man who had hunted her, Stefan le Clerc, had almost succeeded. The Jewish banker turned Nazi hunter had tracked her and her father and the Schutzstaffel, the SS officer who had been tasked with caring for them, through a series of international business transactions. Somehow le Clerc, a former banker, had broken through the layers of paper companies that should have protected them and found their physical address.

      Dengler had shot him, but not fatally. In the ensuing struggle, le Clerc had turned the tables on Dengler, wounding him. Then he had shot her father at point-blank range. She had had no doubt le Clerc would have killed her if she hadn’t barricaded both Dengler and le Clerc in the ancient storeroom, where they grappled together, and set it ablaze.

      The fire had been terrifying, but it had served its purpose. The two men and her father’s body had been consumed within minutes. In the smoking aftermath, any evidence of gunshot wounds the skeletal remains might have yielded had been wiped out by a series of substantial bribes. The weeks following her father’s death had been difficult but, once again, money had smoothed the way and, at eighteen years of age, she had been old enough to conclude all of the legal requirements and make arrangements to secure herself.

      Ice stung her cheeks as she paused by a small, sturdy shed and dug out a set of keys from the pocket of her coat. A gust flattened the stiff oilskin against her body and whipped blond strands, now streaked with gray, across her cheeks, reminding her of a moment even further in the past.

      Nineteen forty-four. She had been boarding the Nordika.

      She shoved the key in the lock, her fingers stiff with cold. She had been…seven years old? Eight?

      She didn’t know why that moment had stuck with her. After years of heady victory, then horror, it hadn’t been significant. The wind had been howling off the Baltic, right up the cold alley that Lubeck was in the dead of winter, and it had been freezing. Aside from the lights illuminating the deck of the Nordika and the dock—in direct contravention of the blackout regulations—it had been pitch-black. After hours spent crouching in the back of a truck, sandwiched cheek by jowl with the other children, the lights and the frantic activity had been a welcome distraction but hardly riveting.

      And yet, she remembered that moment vividly. A crate had been suspended above the ship’s hold as she’d walked up the gangplank, the swastika stenciled on its side garishly spotlighted, the crane almost buckling under the weight as the crate swayed in the wind. The captain had turned to watch her, his eyes blank, and for a moment she had felt the power her father wielded. The power of life and death.

      Slipping the shed key back into her pocket, she stepped inside out of the wind, pulled the door closed behind her and engaged the interior locks. She played the beam of the flashlight over the dusty interior of the shed, then reached down and pulled up the hatch door that had once been the entrance to the mansion’s storm cellar. Her flashlight trained below, she descended to the bottom of the ladder, crossed a cavernous, empty area, ducked beneath a beam and unlocked a second door.

      Here the walls were irregular, chiseled from the limestone that formed a natural series of caves, some that led down almost to the sea. The beam of the flashlight swept the room. It was a dank and cold museum, filled with echoes of a past that would never be resurrected and a plethora of unexpected antiquities.

      A dowry to smooth their way in the new world and ensure their survival.

      Moldering uniforms hung against one wall. For a moment, in the flickering shadows, they took on movement and animation, as if the SS officers they had once belonged to had sprung to life. Her father, Oberst Reichmann. Hauptmann Ernst, Oberleutnant Dengler, leutnants Webber, Lindeberg, Konrad, Dietrich and Hammel.

      It was a terrible treasure house but, despite the fact that by right of her heritage she had become the custodian, she wasn’t locked in the past; the future was much too interesting.