Dane put the matter of his career on a mental back burner. “I’ll tell the guys.”
“Good. Pour some coffee down Bonebrake’s throat. Maybe getting back out in the field will help him straighten up. Oh, and one other thing…”
“Sir?”
“I’ll need my name tag back.”
CHAPTER 4
Alex found sanctuary in a cheap hotel and didn’t venture outside for two days. She paid in cash and the desk clerk hadn’t batted an eye. Come to think of it, he hadn’t even made eye contact. It was the perfect place to lay low until she could figure out what was going on.
Survival was her first concern.
Don’s murder had not simply been a robbery gone wrong; the historian had been tortured, his office ransacked. The killer had been looking for something, and Alex was pretty sure she knew what that something was.
She wasn’t a believer in coincidence. Don had been killed on the very day that he was to receive several recently declassified government documents that he had requested under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act — documents that would have been sitting on his desk when the killer arrived had she not been running late. She still had the envelope from the archives. It only stood to reason that if the killer was still looking for it, he would be looking for her as well.
But who was he? Who did he work for? Until she knew the answer to that question, she couldn’t trust anyone.
Her first stop after fleeing Don’s neighborhood had been a bank ATM where she’d taken the maximum allowable cash advance on her credit cards. Most of the cash had gone toward the purchase of an IBM Thinkpad portable computer, which she felt sure she would need in order to puzzle out the deadly significance of the documents. Afterward, she’d stocked up on non-perishable foods, a few sundries, and then tried to lose herself in downtown DC.
As Don’s research assistant, she had a general idea of what was contained in the documents he had requested. Don’s next book was to be a detailed history of the so-called “hell ships” which had been used by the Japanese during World War II to transport Allied prisoners-of-war to forced labor camps. The conditions on the ships were inhumane, with hundreds of prisoners crammed into holds, deprived of food, water, and even fresh air. Many of the prisoners died of dysentery and other diseases en route. Many more however died when the transports were targeted by Allied planes and submarines who often did not realize that the ships were carrying their brothers-in-arms. More than 18,000 prisoners had been killed when the hell ships carrying them had been sunk. It was a tragic chapter in a brutal story, and one that might prove potentially embarrassing to the Navy and the US government, even fifty years later. But was it something worth killing over?
She spent a full day poring over facsimiles of log book pages from ships and submarines, engagement reports, transcripts and orders, all relating to the sinking of more than a dozen different hell ships. She recognized many of the names from the hours she had spent doing preliminary research for Don, so she decided to start by looking for any discrepancies between what was generally accepted as accurate history and the official and heretofore secret record. There were some, mostly incongruences in time and precise location, but nothing that sounded to her like motive for murder.
Exhausted, she ate a dinner of Ramen noodles soaked in hot tap water, and turned on the local news. There was no mention of Don’s death or her own disappearance. Nor, she discovered had it rated mention in any of the local newspapers.
Someone had moved quickly to cover up the murder. She spent several sleepless hours listening to the noise of the city and pondering the implications of that.
The next morning she changed tactics, focusing her search on the handful of hell ships that she had not previously researched. One document, a message from the commander of the Pacific fleet to the skipper of the submarine USS Stingray, immediately jumped out at her.
She kicked herself for not having noticed it sooner, but it hadn’t seemed conspicuous at first. It was only after reviewing dozens of reports, most of which were told with view to the ‘big picture,’ that the significance of the message became apparent.
The message, just a few lines written for encryption, did not concern a particular ship or area of operations. It focused on a single man, a prisoner who was being transported in one of the hell ships from Singapore to a forced labor camp in the Philippines.
“IDENTITY CONFIRMED XX PREVENT LT HANCOCK TREVOR RA FROM REACHING CABANATUAN BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY”
She read the words over and over, trying to sublimate her incredulity. “Who are you, Trevor Hancock, and why did Allied Command want you dead?”
She turned on her new computer, dialed up an Internet connection, and did a search for: “Trevor Hancock British Army.” The results were disappointing, so she amended her search to: “Trevor Hancock British Army WWII.”
Alex was adept at navigating her way through Internet databases and newsgroups; she also knew how to navigate the labyrinth of tangential leads and separate the wheat from the chaff. Thus it was that, a mere twenty minutes after first discovering his name in the declassified documents, she was reading about Trevor Hancock, lieutenant of the Royal Army and a British baronet, taken prisoner by the Japanese in 1945, and subsequently missing and presumed dead when the transport bearing him to the Cabanatuan labor camp was sunk in the South China Sea.
It took just thirty seconds for a sophisticated automated search monitoring program to make note of the fact that someone was perusing online sources for information relating to the disappearance of Trevor Hancock. In accordance with its coded protocols, the eavesdropping program immediately alerted its user, who in turn passed the information along to the next person in his chain of authority.
Less than fifteen miles from the hotel where Alex sat hunched over her computer, the man who had, only forty-eight hours earlier put a bullet through Don Riddell’s forehead, opened his flip-phone to silence the chirping alert tones. “Scalpel, here.”
He listened, saying nothing. At one point, he took out a notebook and scrawled a street address. Only when the other party was done speaking did he break his silence. “Understood.”
Half an hour later, Scalpel was standing outside a coffee shop in downtown Washington DC, the approximate location of the user who was searching for information about Hancock.
He stepped inside and quickly scanned the faces of the patrons. The woman wasn’t there.
He stepped back outside and turned a slow circle, looking up and down the street in both directions until his spied the sign for the hotel.
Of course.
He crossed to the inconspicuously placed doorway and stepped inside. A man sitting behind a barricade of metal bars seemed oblivious. He rapped on the countertop, and when the bored desk clerk finally looked up, he drew back the hem of his jacket to reveal his holstered pistol. The clerk’s eyes went wide and he sat up.
“Hey man, I don’t—”
Scalpel held up a photograph. “Is she here?”
The clerk’s eyes flicked upward, ever so slightly.
“What room?”
“I…” The clerk swallowed nervously as he consulted a sheet of paper on a clipboard. “Two-sixteen.”
“Thanks for your assistance.” Scalpel shot the clerk between the eyes.
He bolted up the stairs two at a time and continued down the second floor hallway at a walk so brisk it was almost a sprint. When he reached to door marked 216, he squared his body parallel to it, and with the pistol in a two-handed ready grip, delivered a forceful heel-kick that struck just below the doorknob. The door burst inward and Scalpel flowed into the room, finger on the trigger, searching for a target.