kind of hard currency does China have–the place is Zambia with nukes. I
mean, let’s get real.” Hampton’s voice seemed to soften. “So what are
you calling me for? Want our current missile codes to sell to the Red
Chinese? Just let me jot down your fax number.”
“Give me a break.”
“That’s my hot tamale,” Hampton teased, relaxing further.
“Screw you. Listen, before all this shit fell from the sky, I had a
meeting with your friend Phil Ostrow …”
“Ostrow?” Hampton said, guardedly. “Where?”
“In Vienna.”
There was a flare of anger: “What are you trying to pull, Navarro?”
“Wait a minute. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Something in her voice gave him pause. “Are you shitting me, or was
somebody shitting you?”
“Ostrow’s not attached to Vienna station?” she asked hesitantly.
“He’s on O-15.”
“Help me out here.”
“That means he’s kept officially on the lists, but he’s really on leave.
Sow confusion among the bad guys that way. Diabolical, what?”
“On leave how?”
“He’s been stateside for a few months now. Depression, if you want to
know. He had episodes in the past, but it got real bad. He’s actually
been hospitalized at Walter Reed.”
“And that’s where he is now.” Anna’s scalp became tight; she tried to
quell a rising sense of anxiety, “That’s where he is now. Sad but true.
One of those wards where all the nurses have security clearances.”
“If I said Ostrow was a short guy, grayish-brownish hair, pale
complexion, wire-rim glasses… ?”
“I’d tell you to get your prescription checked. Ostrow looks like an
aging surfer bum tall, slim, blond hair, the works.”
Several seconds of silence ensued.
“Anna, what the hell is going on with you?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE.
Stunned, she sat back on the bed.
“What’s wrong?” Ben asked.
“I really can’t get into it.”
“If it concerns the business we’re both working on–”
“It doesn’t. Not this. Those bastards!”
“What happened?”
“Please,” she exclaimed. “Let me think!”
“Fine.” Looking irritated, Ben took his digital phone from the pocket
of his jacket.
She thought: No wonder “Phil Ostrow” had called her late at night-when
it was too late to call the American embassy and check out his bona
fides. But then who was it she’d met with at CIA station?
Was it in fact CIA station?
Who were “Ostrow” and “Yossi”?
She heard Ben speaking quickly in French. Then he fell silent,
listening for a while. “Oscar, you’re a genius,” he finally said.
A few minutes later, he was talking on his phone again. “Megan Crosby,
please.”
If “Phil Ostrow” was some kind of impostor, he had to be an enormously
skilled actor. And what was he doing? “Yossi” could indeed have been
Israeli, or of some other Middle Eastern nationality; it was hard to
tell.
“Megan, it’s Ben,” he said.
Who were they? she wondered.
She picked up the phone and called Jack Hampton again. “Jack, I need
the number of CIA station.” “What am I, directory assistance?”
“It’s in the building across the street from the consular office,
right?”
“CIA station is in the main embassy building, Anna.”
“No, the annex. A commercial building across the street. Under the
cover of the Office of the United States Trade Representative.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. CIA doesn’t have any cover
sites outside of the one right in the embassy. That / I know of anyway.”
She hung up, panic suffusing her body. If that hadn’t been a CIA site
where she’d met Ostrow, what was it? The setting, the surroundings
every detail had been right. Too right, too convincing?
“You’ve got to be kidding,” she heard Ben say. “Jesus, you’re fast.”
So who was trying to manipulate her? And to what end? Obviously
someone, or some group, who knew she was in Vienna, knew what she was
investigating, and knew which hotel she was staying in.
If Ostrow was some kind of impostor, then his story about the Mossad had
to be false. And she had been the unwitting victim of an elaborate
scam. They’d planned to kidnap Hartman and have her deliver the
“package” right into their clutches.
She felt dazed and lost.
In her mind she ran through everything, from “Ostrow’s” phone call, to
the place she’d met him and “Yossi.” Was it really possible the whole
thing had been an elaborate ruse?
She heard Hartman say: “All right, let me write this down. Great work,
kid. Terrific.”
So the Mossad story, with all its rumors and undocumented whispers, was
nothing but a tale spun by liars out of plausible fragments? My God,
then how much of what she knew was wrong?
And who was trying to mislead her and to what end?
What was the truth? Good God, where was the truth?
“Ben,” she said.
He held up an index finger to signal her to wait, said something quickly
into his phone, then flipped it closed.
But then she quickly changed her mind, decided not to reveal to Ben
anything of what she’d just found out. Not yet. Instead, she asked,
“Did you learn anything from Sonnenfeld?”
Hartman told her about what Sonnenfeld had said, Anna interrupting every
once in a while to clarify a point or ask for a fuller explanation.
“So are you saying your father wasn’t a Nazi, after all.”
“Not according to Sonnenfeld, at least.”
“Did he have some inkling as to the meaning of Sigma?”
“Beyond what I said, he was vague about it. And downright evasive when
it came to Strasser.”
“And as to why your brother was killed?”
“Obviously he was killed because of the threat of exposure. Someone,
maybe some group, feared the revelation of those names.”
“Or of the fact this corporation existed. Clearly someone with a major
financial stake. Which tells us that these old guys were ” Suddenly she
stopped. “Of course! The laundered money! These old guys were being
paid off. Maybe by someone controlling the corporation they’d all
helped form.”
“Either paid off, as in bribed,” Ben added, “or else they were receiving
an agreed-upon distribution, a share of the profits.”
Anna stood. “Eliminate the payees, then there’s no more wire transfers.
No more big pay days for a bunch of doddering old men. Which tells us
that whoever’s ordering the murders stands to gain financially from
them. Has to be. Someone like Strasser, or even your father.” She
looked at him. She couldn’t automatically rule it out. Even if he
didn’t want to hear it. His father might have been a murderer himself
might have blood on his hands, might have been behind the murders at
least.
But how to explain the intricate deception of Ostrow, the false CIA man?
Might he have been somehow connected to the heirs to some vast hidden
fortune?
“Theoretically, I suppose, my father could be one of the bad guys.” Ben
said. “But I really don’t believe it.”
“Why not?” She didn’t know how far to push him on this.
“Because my father already has more money than he knows what to do with.
Because he may be a ruthless businessman, and he may be a liar, but
after talking with Sonnenfeld, I’m coming to think that he wasn’t
fundamentally an evil man.”
She doubted Hartman was holding anything back, but surely he was
hampered by filial loyalty. Ben seemed to be a loyal person an
admirable quality, but sometimes loyalty could blind you to the truth.
“What I don’t get is this: these guys are old and failing,” Hartman
continued. “So why bother hiring someone to eliminate them? It’s
hardly worth the risk.”
“Unless you’re afraid one of them will talk, reveal the financial
arrangement, whatever it is.”
“But if they haven’t talked for half a century, what’s going to make
them start now?”
“Maybe some sort of pressure by legal authorities, triggered by the
surfacing of this list. Faced with the threat of legal action, any one
of them might easily have talked. Or maybe the Corporation is moving to
a new phase, a transition, and sees itself as peculiarly vulnerable
while it’s happening.”
“I’m hearing a lot of conjecture,” he said. “We need facts.”
She paused. “Who were you talking to on the phone just now?”
“A corporate researcher I’ve used before. She found some intriguing
background on Vortex Laboratories.”
Anna was suddenly alert. “Yes?”
“It’s wholly owned by the European chemicals and technology giant
Armakon AG. An Austrian company.”
“Austrian …” she murmured. “That is interesting.”
“Those mammoth technology firms are always buying up tiny tech startups,
hoping to snag the rights to stuff their own in-house research
scientists haven’t invented.” He paused. “And one more thing. My
friend in the Caymans was able to trace a few of the wire transfers.”
Jesus. And her guy at the DOJ had turned up nothing. She tried to
conceal her excitement. “Tell me.”
“The money was sent from a shell company registered in the Channel
Islands, a few seconds after it came in from Liechtenstein, from an