She shrugged it off, realizing it wasn’t important at this point.
She also found an old map, stuffed in the back of the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. She took it out and opened it. It showed southern Asia. There were two red lines drawn on it, both originating in Turkmenistan. One went south and west, crossing Afghanistan and terminating at the Arabian Sea. The other went south and east across Afghanistan and ending in Pakistan.
Hannah frowned. John’s work at Tyro involved pipelines so she assumed that’s what these lines represented but she had never heard of any such lines being built. The map was old so she had to assume these were proposals that had never come to fruition. She folded the map up and put it back in the rear of the drawer.
The thing that was curious to her was that there was nothing in John’s office that predated the time they met. No school records, photos, army records — nothing. John had always kept a veil around his past, but it had never bothered Hannah because she felt the same way about her past. The last thing she had wanted to do with John was discuss her childhood. They’d met in college and for her all that had occurred since then had been enough. Apparently not, she thought as she slammed shut his file drawer.
She looked at his computer. She pushed the on-button and waited. It booted, but instead of getting a desktop, it stopped loading and a flashing box appeared, asking for a password. Hannah knew John worked with classified material at his job, so she figured this was just an extension of that. She tried his birth date, their anniversary, every name or number combination that came to mind. None worked.
Hannah sighed and leaned back in the chair. She was no closer to understanding why John had done what he did.
How could she have been so ignorant?
CHAPTER 5
The man had been in the tree line for four hours, since well before dawn. It was cold in Vermont, especially at this elevation, but he wore heavy clothing underneath his white camouflaged Gore-Tex pants and parka. There had been no sign of life in the cabin. The information he'd received had listed a pickup truck as current mode of transportation for the owner of the cabin, but there was nothing parked outside.
There were tire tracks. As near as the man could tell from his position, they had been made before last night's light snowfall.
He scanned the cabin with the thermal scope one more time, picking up no heat sources. Still, he took no chances as he moved forward. He kept his silenced submachine gun at the ready as he crept to the cabin. It took him forty minutes of stealthy crawling to make it to the back wall. He waited there another fifteen, listening. Nothing.
He entered via a window, watching carefully for tripwires. He hated jobs like this, checking on another professional.
But there were no traps. The interior was empty except for an old double bed. There wasn't even any food in the cabinets. He began his search, top to bottom, in a clockwise direction as he'd been taught and as he'd taught others. If there was anything hidden in the cabin, he knew he'd find it. After several hours he came to the conclusion that the place had been swept, and, most interestingly, swept by a professional.
Finally he paused at the small window and looked at the small mound of frozen dirt. He walked outside. Sighing, he pulled the head of a pick out of the backpack he wore and slid it onto the wooden handle that had been tied on the side of the pack.
Leaning the pick against his leg, he pulled out a pack of gum. Methodically, he unwrapped one stick, rolled it into a tight log and popped it into his mouth. He was careful to push the wrapper deep into his pocket and seal the Velcro flap before retrieving the pick.
He took off the parka. He was in good shape despite being in his mid-fifties. He had sandy hair, lightly tinged with gray and a bland face, one that would never be noticed in a crowd.
He began digging, eventually stripping down to his t-shirt as the work progressed. The dirt was like concrete for the first two feet, grudgingly chipping away. Then the going got easier. Eventually he got to the frozen body. He carefully brushed dirt away from the corpse. It was wrapped in a camouflage poncho liner. He peeled the liner away and looked at the face. The cold had preserved it. He stared at it for a minute, remembering other times he had seen that face, alive.
With great difficulty, he checked the corpse's clothes, going through the pockets. The only thing he found were a few strands of dark hair on the man's clothes. He peeled one loose and put it in a plastic bag, inside his backpack.
Satisfied, the man stood in the grave, straddling the corpse. He pulled a specially modified satellite phone out of his backpack and punched in a number. The signal was up-linked to a military MILSTAR satellite, frequency hopped and scrambled and then broadcast on a tight beam down to a receiver at the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, and then relayed to the bunker below ground.
"Yes?" a strangely mechanical voice asked.
"Anthony Gant is buried here, Mister Nero." The man’s accent was English, filtered by years of living in the States.
"You've confirmed this?"
"I'm standing on top of his body."
"How long has he been dead, Mister Bailey?"
Bailey looked at the body. "Hard to tell. He's been in the ground for a while, but it's cold up here."
Even through the cipher scrambling Bailey picked up the sarcasm in the voice that rasped at him — no one else might have, but Bailey had known Nero for many decades. "More than a day? Less than a week? A month? A year? Since the Second World War?"
"I'd say about a week."
"Cause of death?"
What am I, Bailey thought, a pathologist? But he kept his tongue. "I can't tell."
There was a spate of coughing, and then the voice came back. "Is there a bullet hole in his forehead? Did he die violently?"
Bailey clenched his teeth, more from the cold than his superior’s harsh words. The corpse looked gaunt, as if it had suffered a terrible disease. Bailey knelt down, tucking the phone under his chin. He lifted the body up, ignoring the cracking noise it made as it broke contact with the ground underneath. "No sign of violence. Looks like he was sick. He's wasted away. I'd say he weighed less than one-twenty pounds when he died."
There was a pause as Nero digested that information, then his rough voice came back. "Did you find the videotape?"
"No."
"You searched thoroughly?"
"Yes."
"Then we will have to assume whoever buried him has the object in question or at least knows where Mister Gant hid it. Any clue as to that person’s identity?”
“I would assume it is the woman from Berlin — Neeley.”
“All right. That's all."
"What do you want me to do with the body?" Bailey asked.
"Rebury him. We will let Mister Gant go in peace. We owe him that at least and his brother would expect us to." The phone crackled with what sounded like coughing before the voice came back. “Miss Neeley is another matter.”
Bailey looked at the large pile of earth and shrugged. “Anything else?”
“Rebury him and return here.” The phone went dead.
Bailey folded the phone, put it away and returned to his work.
Over six hundred miles away, three hundred feet underground at Fort Meade, a wrinkled hand cut off the speakerphone that had been connected to Bailey. The hand then retrieved a burning cigarette and brought it to his lips.