“The stuff the government guys went through is up on the fourth floor,” Alex shouted from somewhere in the apartment building. “Head on up. I’ll meet you in a sec.”
Sam climbed the two flights of stairs. From what he could see of the landings, the apartments were being stripped out and turned into server rooms.
A moment later, the kid entered the room, holding a beer. “Here, I thought you might need this. You look like you’ve had a pretty crappy day.”
Sam shook his head. “Thanks. But I kind of need my wits about me right now. I think one of those might just put me to sleep. I’d be better off with a coffee or a stimulant.”
“I can get you one of those, too.”
“You have coffee?” Sam asked.
“No. But I’ve got a fridge full of energy drinks.”
“No thanks.” Sam grimaced again. His eyes swept the array of fiber optic cabling being routed throughout the stairwell. “What are you setting up in here?”
“Oh, just a gamer’s paradise.” Alex grinned. “Me and some friends of mine have had this on a ‘someday if I win the lottery’ wish list for years. High-end systems all networked together, games already installed, tech support on hand. We’re going to have a tournament as soon as I can get everything set up in here. It’s gonna be awesome!”
Alex was tall, skinny, pale, and his face had been ravaged by acne. A typical basement-dweller, he seemed a combination of smart and stupid, with two left feet. Friendly enough, he was the kind of guy who’d probably never been on a date. The kind of guy who got left behind in a world full of adults. There was something else there, too. Sam blinked.
Behind his bumbling exterior, Sam was certain the kid’s pale gray eyes were sharp and filled with intelligence.
Was it all a show? Could Alex really be intelligent enough to fake everything?
Sam patted him on his shoulder. “I’m sure it’ll be a lot of fun. Where would I find your grandfather’s things?”
Sam watched, but Alex didn't flinch or seem to respond negatively to the paternalistic gesture.
“Oh, sure. Follow me.”
Alex led him to the rearmost apartment, which had been left more or less intact. A tiny, galley-style kitchen, a bathroom with about six square inches of open space to stand in, a bedroom stuffed with a modest full-sized bed. The sofa was ratty but the television had been upgraded to the point that it reminded him of the military command wall screens found at some military installations he’d been to.
Alex left Sam at the café-sized kitchen table with an archive box full of paperwork.
“This is all Grandpa’s stuff,” he said, then walked into the living room and switched on the TV. In a few moments, he was playing some kind of video game with a set of headphones on, the least concerned guy in the world.
The fact that millions of people could have died today because of his carelessness seemed to have completely escaped him.
Sam shook his head and started going through the box that probably fifty government agents had already pawed through.
Chapter Fourteen
Sam read through the old papers and journals for a couple hours.
What he learned was that William Goodson had been an interesting character, far more driven and purposeful than his grandson. Reading through newspaper clippings, the man appeared to be an all-American hero. He had flown bomber planes during the Korean War, worked for Lockheed-Martin for a number of years, then shifted to piloting commercial jets for American Airlines. He had kept records showing his donations to several charities and his church. He had retired from his position on the advisory board a few years before his death nearly a decade ago and had rented the very same apartment that Sam was sitting in now. This stirred Sam's inner alarms a little, but he couldn't quite put a finger on why.
Most of the records that were in the box pointed toward a normal, everyday life. The life of an ordinary man who had left Germany in the 1940s after World War II, married, had a son, lost his wife in 1995, and watched his grandson grow up. Then he had died. More than a decade later, when his own son had died, he left millions to his grandson.
Where had William Goodson’s generous largess come from?
Had Grandpa Goodson and Alex’s father quarreled or something? Why didn’t the man simply impart his massive wealth to his own son? Why wait until his son had died to bequeath his wealth to his grandson?
The Secretary of Defense might have well been right. It appeared that Alex Goodson didn’t have anything to do with the terrorist threat to Washington, D.C. Yet there was no doubt in Sam’s mind that everything about Alex and his inheritance led to more questions than answers.
He picked up an old photo of William Goodson. There was no question of familial connection. The two men could be the same person, separated by about seventy years. He pictured Alex dressed up in an old American Airlines pilot’s uniform.
Sam’s ocean blue eyes fixed on William Goodson’s gray eyes, strong jaw line, and rigid expression.
Who were you, really?
The man had turned out to be a World War II German bomber pilot carrying a fake passport, who had crashed. Unable to carry out his mission, William Goodman had assimilated seamlessly into the country he had come to destroy.
It was almost as if he had had a change of heart.
Settling in America, he had put down roots after falling in love with a local girl. Margery Pull had a sweet, kind face and worked as a schoolteacher until her marriage.
Sam took another look around the living area. Neither lavish nor stingy, it wasn’t the apartment of a multi-millionaire or a miser. The yellow enamel sink was worn and chipped, but it was clean.
He stood up and stretched.
The kid glanced over at him, paused his video game, and pulled his headphones off.
“Find what you needed?”
“Alex, if it’s not too personal — I don’t see anything in here that explains how your grandfather became a millionaire.”
“I know, right?” Alex grinned. “I had no idea. I don’t think Dad did, either. Grandpa was always complaining about me not getting a job because nobody was going to take care of me when he was gone.”
“So where do you think it came from?”
“German relatives. He inherited the money back in the forties, mostly. I guess Germany was pretty much in an uproar at the time, so he was lucky to get anything at all. But the money was in Swiss bank accounts, so the Germans couldn’t touch it. That’s what I’m guessing anyway. The money’s been sitting in a local bank for nearly eight decades.”
Sam sighed. Money hit some people in strange ways. He’d grown up around it all his life, tended not to think about it — but some people became obsessed with it. William Goodson didn’t seem to fit in that category. If anything, it looked as though the man had simply stored the money away in a bank for safekeeping and lived off the ordinary wage that he’d earned.
None of it made sense, even if Sam believed the story about rich, dead German relatives. Still, it was most likely cash the Reich had put into an account for his grandfather as incentive to blow up D.C.
No need to tell the strange, backward kid that, though. Let him have his fun.
Sam left his cell phone number with Alex. “If you can think of anything at all that might help, give me a call.”
“Sure.”
Thirty seconds later, the kid was back in front of the hundred-and-ten-inch TV with his headphones on.
Sam shook his head and watched the game for a few minutes. It looked like one of those real time strategy games, set in some sort of urban warzone. It was from the perspective of the characters on the ground. He couldn’t see very much of the surrounding city, but it could be set in any modern civilization around the world — possibly even in the U.S.