She and Steve had been forced to divulge their hiding place, then watch as the remaining fireworks were dunked in water, rendering them useless. The hiding place was here, in the wall of the attic.
Pushing to her feet, she examined the area where the loose board had been, looking for prying marks that had been made by two kids more than twenty years ago. She found the marks. Holding her breath, she worked the board loose, breaking a nail in the process. Lowering the board along with its neighbor to the floor, she examined the shallow vertical cavity. Adrenaline pumped. She hadn’t expected to find anything, but there was something there.
Reaching in, she grabbed a package and the canvas strap of a knapsack. A cold tingle went down her spine when the weight and the bulk of the knapsack registered.
She carried both items into the center of the room, where the light from the single bulb was strongest. Unlatching the flap, she studied the bag’s contents. There was no doubt in her mind that these were the items her father had retrieved from Costa Rica; mementos too painful and too controversial at the time to keep in plain view or to hand on to either Eleanor or Steve.
Maybe it was because she still felt raw and emotional after her father’s death and funeral, but Sara could remember Todd’s disappearance as clearly as if those events had happened last week.
The fact that her uncle—a healthy, fit man in his prime—had died had been shocking to the nine-year-old girl she had been, and so had the circumstances surrounding his death. The entire family had been proud of the medals and honors Todd had won. Her father had steadfastly maintained that foul play must have been involved, that it hadn’t been a case of desertion, but when the scandal had leaked into the papers, the gossip had spread like wildfire. Sara could remember the whispered comments at school, the pointing fingers in the street, and her father refusing to let anyone answer the phone but him because of the crank calls.
With hands that weren’t quite steady, she unwrapped the package, which was only loosely bound, as if her father had inspected the item then wrapped it again before stowing it in the cavity. It was a camera. Any lingering doubt that the things stowed in the wall had belonged to Todd dissolved. Underwater photography had been his hobby; she could remember Steve endlessly vying to use this same camera on dive trips. The camera itself was empty of film, but the side pocket of the soft camera case held a film carton with three letters scribbled on the side: ACE. She opened the carton, although she already knew it was empty. The film had been removed from the camera for processing.
She began extracting objects from the pack. The first was a flashlight still containing batteries that were corroded with age. The heavy shape of the second item was instantly familiar. Guns of all shapes and sizes had been a matter-of-fact part of the Fischer family, and her life, for as long as she could remember. Her father had taught her to shoot at the same time Steve had been taught. As academically inclined as she had always been, she was nevertheless a natural marksman and had given Steve a run for his money during target practice.
The glow of the bulb illuminated the maker of the handgun, Pietro Beretta. She placed the gun on top of the tea chest. The knapsack also contained a magazine and a box of ammunition. When she pulled the box out she could feel loose rounds rolling around, which meant the box wasn’t full. The magazine was empty, which indicated that the missing rounds had been used. That fact more than any other hammered home the intimacy of the items she was handling. They weren’t just objects, they had been the personal possessions of Todd Fischer.
The final item was a battered hardbound book. Her heart automatically beat faster as she picked it up. The camera had been an emotional journey, the gun a window into the past, but to Sara, books always carried an extra zing. Whether they contained reference information or a fictional story, she loved the mystery inherent in page layered upon page, all closed between two covers.
But she was reluctant to open this book.
It didn’t have a title or anything on the spine to indicate the publisher or the contents: it looked like a diary. If it was Todd’s journal, then it was private and most definitely needed to go to Steve.
She opened to the first page. It was written in German.
Frowning, she turned a page and skimmed the text. It took a few moments for her mind to click into the structure and format of the language, because her German, which she had studied along with French at college, was definitely rusty.
Flipping back a page, she found a date— 1942—and directly below that the phrase Schutzstaffel Chiffrier-abteilung.
Cold congealed in her stomach. Schutzstaffel was the full name of the Nazi SS. Chiffrier-abteilung meant cipher department.
Not long after her father had come back from Costa Rica, she had overheard her parents talking. She hadn’t meant to eavesdrop. She had been in her room reading and they had been sitting out on the porch. In the stillness of the evening, the words had floated in her window. At first she had thought the discussion had been a general one about World War II and she hadn’t paid it much attention, but when her father had mentioned her uncle’s name, her ears had pricked up.
She knew the basic facts of Todd Fischer’s disappearance and death. She had been secure in the belief that he had died in the Gulf of Mexico in the line of duty, no matter what anyone else maintained. But according to her father, Todd had been on a wild-goose chase, hunting Nazis. The Navy had covered it up, but he had the evidence to prove it.
Standing, surrounded by dust and old memories that had teeth, the gritty reality of the mass grave at Juarez was sharp and immediate.
Her uncle had been working undercover south of the border, but the job he had been sent to do defied belief and common sense. Neither of her parents could credit that Todd and seven other SEALs had gone missing on a mission that belonged decades back in time: a mission that in the 1980s could only be described as crackpot.
Todd had been hunting Nazis, and he had found them, along with a connection to a Colombian cartel. The combination had been brutal. Juarez had resembled the horrific aftermath of a death camp.
She skimmed the first page of the book. Halfway down the reason she still hadn’t adjusted to the syntax became clear. It was a codebook.
A cold tingle went through her, a brief flash of unwanted memory. When she’d been a child, one of the nightmares that had regularly played had been about opening a book and memorizing a word. Later on, it had been an easy leap to conclude that she had been stealing a code.
The content of the book explained why the cover and the spine were blank. Despite the fact that it had been produced by a printing press—a necessity because every communications post of ground, air and sea forces had needed a copy of their own respective codebooks—it would have been a secret document, requiring a security clearance. Putting a title on the book would have been tantamount to waving a red flag.
The instant she recognized the content, translating became easier. She turned pages and studied the codes, suppressing a queasy desire to drop the book and wash her hands. As fascinating as it was, the codebook had been formulated with the express purpose of aiding Nazi secret communications. The result had been the loss of life of Allied soldiers. She knew that the armed forces had used codes and ciphers, and still did, but all the same, she couldn’t control her natural recoil.
Even worse, for the book to have been in Todd’s possession meant it had been a part of his investigation and had likely belonged to one of the Nazis he had been chasing. The thought that she could be handling the personal possession of a war criminal and a murderer made her skin crawl.
She had always been fascinated by puzzles and codes. Her mind, with its memory for detail and bent for lateral thinking, was suited to puzzle solving. She had studied mathematics for a while, along with language and history. One of her papers had included sections on the use of secret writing and one of her thesis subjects had been cryptography.
Silence closed around her and seemed to thicken as she continued to study the code. She had no idea where or when, but she was certain she had seen this particular arrangement of letters before. That fact in itself wasn’t surprising.