ing, a robotic arm was matching their access details to one of the hundreds of bar-coded boxes that were stacked on shallow trays in a fireproof vault. Once located, the box slid from its housing into a tray that carried it to the drawer. On cue, the drawer front buzzed and jumped forward a few centimeters.
Archie pulled the drawer toward him. It contained a battered-looking metal box that he lifted out and placed on the table. The box was about three feet long, a foot wide, and six inches deep.
"Ready?" Tom asked with an anxious smile.
He slowly lifted the lid and they both peered inside.
CHAPTER FORTY
Mobile One, this is Central. Come in, please."
"Go ahead, Central," came the crackled response. "Are you in place, Roberts?" Agent Ben Cody leaned over the female operator's chair and spoke into her microphone. "Affirmative. Stand by to receive transmission." A few seconds later one of the three flat-screen monitors in front of the operator flickered into life. On the large overhead screen a live satellite feed showed the agent's location as a blinking red dot. Five other dots pulsed around it, showing that the rest of the team were also in place. "Are you sure about this?" Cody asked. "Sure about what?" Bailey couldn't help but sound defensive in the face of Cody's skeptical tone.
"I mean I've pulled people off three other teams to cover this thing." Cody indicated the frantic activity that was consuming the CIA's secure operations room — four operators were monitoring the ongoing transmissions with the six field agents, while behind them two more of his staff were fielding calls, accompanied all the while by the constant buzz of computers and the high-pitched shriek of encrypted fax machines. An armed sentry stood by the swipe-card-ac-
tivated door. "I wouldn't have done it for anyone other than Carter. He's a good man. One of the best. But, I gotta tell you, I've had enough bureau wild-goose chases to last me this life and the next."
"I can't promise anything," said Bailey. "Let's be clear, we're following a hunch here. But Carter wouldn't have sent me if he didn't think it was worth running with."
"Well, I guess we'll soon find out whether you're right." Cody sighed. "Either way, we'll get a fix on whoever goes in or out of that hotel. If your guy shows up, we'll nail him."
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
That's it?" Tom understood the disappointment in Dominique's voice. The lengths to which Weissman and Lammers had gone to guarantee the safety-deposit box's safekeeping had had them all speculating feverishly about what exactly lay inside it. They had all been wrong.
No gold. No diamonds. No long-lost Vermeer. In the end, all it had contained was the thin brown leather pouch, cracking along the seams, that Tom had just placed on the tea chest in front of them.
"Someone's having a laugh" was Archie's typically forthright analysis. "It's a practical joke. Must be."
"What is inside, please?" Dhutta inquired, his mustache twitching.
"A map," Tom answered, flipping the pouch open and drawing out a yellowing document that had been folded several times to fit inside. "Where we can pin it up?"
"I have the very place." Dhutta's tongue flicked against the corners of his mouth with anticipation. "This way, please." He darted through to the computer area and pointed at the expanse of bare wall above the printers and scanners. "It will fit there, I believe."
Standing on a chair, Tom tacked the four corners to the wall, then jumped down again.
"Deutsche Reichsbahn — German National Railways," Dominique translated. "It's a map of the Nazi rail network."
"That's right," said Archie. "The various countries of the Reich are shaded the same color as Germany: Austria, Luxembourg, Czechoslovakia, Poland—"
"Given that the Nazis didn't absorb that much of Poland until 1942 or '43," Tom butted in, "this was probably printed toward the end of the war. Before then, central Poland was governed from Krakow as a German colony."
"June 1943," Dominique confirmed, pointing at the date in the bottom right corner.
Tom moved in for a closer look. "It shows all the major towns and cities. The thick black lines are the actual railways. The thinner lines must be sidings or branch lines or something."
"And the dots are stations," Archie added.
"So why keep it?" Dominique frowned.
"Good question," Archie agreed. "They must have produced tens of thousands of these maps."
Tom pinched the end of his nose in thought. "This one must be different in some way… Raj?" Dhutta sprang forward at the sound of his name. "Have you got a projector here?"
"Of course."
"Great. Dom, see if you can find a 1943 map of the German railway network on the Web. We'll blow it up to the same size as this one and overlay the images. That way, if there are any differences, we should be able to see them."
Dominique busied herself at the computer while Tom readied the projector, raising it to the same height as the map so as not to create a distorted picture. A few minutes later, Dominique turned around with a smile.
"Got it?" Archie asked.
She nodded. "You were right: the 1943 printing was standard issue. I found a copy on a university Web site. We may need to play with the sizing a bit, but it should work."
The image flashed up on the wall, and Tom adjusted the focus and the proximity of the projector until he was satisfied that he had got as close a fit as he could. Then all four of them approached the overlaid maps and studied them carefully.
It was almost ten minutes before anyone spoke. Predictably, it was Archie.
"Well, if they are different, I can't see where."
"Me neither." Tom rubbed his eyes wearily.
"Same here," Dominique chimed.
"What about ultraviolet light?" Dhutta suggested brightly. "It might show something. I have a black light here."
"UV?" Archie exclaimed. "Did they know about that back then?"
"It was discovered in the early eighteen hundreds by Jo-hann Ritter, a Polish scientist," Dominique confirmed.
Archie shrugged, experience clearly having taught him not to challenge Dominique on factual matters such as this.
"Have you got something we can use, Raj?" Tom asked.
Dhutta dived into his workshop, emerging a few moments later with a handheld fluorescent tube trailing a long black cord. Dominique killed the lights. Tom, taking the black light from Dhutta, approached the wall and began to move the tube across the map's surface, his face lit with an unnatural purple glow. Almost immediately, black marks began to appear — small circles around place-names, and next to them, numbers.
"You guys seeing this?" Tom asked excitedly.
Archie nodded.
"I'll read them out to you."
A few minutes later, Dominique had compiled a list from the names Tom had called out. "There's a funny mark here too," he said, pointing at a large L shape that had been drawn in the bottom left-hand quadrant of the map. He marked it with a pencil.
Dhutta turned the lights back on.
"Read them back," Archie suggested.
"I've arranged them alphabetically," she said. "Brennberg — 30/3, Brixlegg — 21/4, Budapest — 15/12, Gyor — 4/2, Hopfgarten — 15/4, Linz — 9/4, Salzburg — 13/4, Vienna — 3/4, Werfen — 16/5."
"Werfen?" Archie turned to Tom. "Wasn't that the name of the safety-deposit account?"
"That's right," said Tom.
"So what do you think this is?"
"Maybe those numbers are dates," Tom suggested. "You know, the day followed by the month. What do you get if you order them that way?"