Blood Flag: A Paul Madriani Novel (34 page)

I asked her if she knew who made Tony’s travel arrangements, whether it was done by one of the secretaries at the bank, by a travel agency, or if Tony made the arrangements himself on a computer. She didn’t know.

I asked her if she had access to Tony’s computer. She said no. They each had separate laptops. Tony had another desktop at the bank. She said the girls shared a separate computer in a room upstairs. She told me that access to Tony’s computer, the laptop at home, was locked behind a password. Lillian didn’t know what it was.

I asked her if she ever worried about him when Tony was on the road. She said no. Whether he was home or away, whenever it was necessary to get a hold of him, Lillian said, she could always reach Tony on his cell phone. If he didn’t answer she could leave a message or text him, and he would always get back to her, usually within minutes. Whenever he was out of town on business he would invariably call home in the evening, before the girls went to bed. He would talk to each of them and say good night. It was a habit, part of their family culture. Tony had done it since the girls were little. Lillian said she had visions of him on the phone even when the girls were married and with children of their own, of him calling them at night to tuck them in.

It was then that she went silent on the phone for a long moment. I could hear sniffling at the other end, and I knew that she was crying. She could put a brave face on it, but reality was beginning to close in on Lillian Pack. According to Herman there has been no signal from Tony’s cell phone through his carrier since shortly after his arrival in Las Vegas.

At the moment Zeb Thorpe had his hands full. This wasn’t unusual. It came with the turf. Anyone with the title Executive Director for the National Security Branch of the FBI should expect to have his ass in the flames of a crisis at least half the time. Right now Thorpe seemed to be exceeding the quota.

There were at least forty cases of suspected lone wolves, active files of potential terrorists, some of them under surveillance, others being periodically monitored. There were three cases for which arrest warrants had already been issued under sealed grand jury indictments. These were people being tracked by Thorpe’s agents, US marshals, and local authorities, usually working in tandem through multijurisdictional task forces. Their job was to apprehend these people before they could detonate explosive devices in a crowd, poison a reservoir, set fire to a chemical plant, or wreak havoc on any one of the thousands of soft targets that make up America’s infrastructure. The challenge was to do it safely, quickly, and quietly, without causing public panic or igniting a media frenzy. It wasn’t just a tall order; over time it was an impossible one.

So far Thorpe and his people had been fortunate. They were blessed by a civilian and military intelligence apparatus, armed with technology that was second to none. But as time went by, this was becoming increasingly fragile. The further removed the American public got from the last great trauma of terror, the more complacent they became. Politicians and lawyers started picking at the delicate web of data collection and information sifting that to this point had managed to keep the nation safe. Sooner or later they would rip a hole in it and there would be hell to pay.

America was already missing having feet on the ground, the military intelligence resources that provided eyes and ears in various trouble spots of the Middle East. Many of its assets, mostly foreign nationals sympathetic to the Western democracies, were either dead or on the run. Hundreds if not thousands had been forced into exile by ISIL and other radical groups claiming a new caliphate, with its eyes already shifting from Africa to the soft underbelly of Europe.

Thorpe settled into the chair at the head of the conference table and said, “OK, what have we got?”

“Two items.” The agent to the right of Thorpe started the briefing. “You asked that we keep you posted as to any progress regarding the investigation in Los Angeles. The matter of the Israeli consul’s office, whether the Israelis had an active ongoing intelligence operation out of the consulate.”

“I remember. The attaché with the cell phone SIM cards,” said Thorpe. “Don’t tell me you found something.” He didn’t want to hear it. It was the kind of message filled with political toxin that you never wanted to have to carry up the chain. One of those thankless tasks where political types usually shoot the messenger.

“Not exactly,” said the agent. “We’re not sure. It seems the attaché is dead.”

“What?”

“The man’s name was Ari Hadad. He was found stabbed to death in an open outdoor market near downtown Los Angeles about ten days ago.”

“Why are we only hearing about this now? What’s the State Department saying?”

“It seems they only found out about it two days ago.”

“What?”

“I know, it doesn’t make any sense,” said the agent. “You would think the Israeli government would be climbing up into the rafters, and screaming.”

“Let me see that.”

The agent handed the file jacket with the report to Thorpe.

He scanned it quickly. One of their nationals gutted like a fish in a public market in broad daylight, an attaché attached to their diplomatic mission no less. He read the public statement issued by the Israeli consul general. The printed half-page item was sanitized so well that if you didn’t read it carefully you might conclude that Ari Hadad died of old age. Thorpe looked up and asked, “Who killed him? Do they know?”

“Apparently a woman,” said the agent. “LAPD has some security video, but from what we understand it’s unlikely they’ll be able to make the suspect from any of the video. Her face was pretty well covered.”

“Do they have any theories?”

“Well, they don’t think it was a jealous lover,” said the agent. “I’m told you’d have to see a print of her backside to get the full picture, but according to one of the homicide detectives it didn’t look from the video as if the two of them knew each other. He didn’t seem to want to have anything to do with her.”

“I can understand that,” said Thorpe. “Woman with a knife. What else do they have?”

“That’s it.”

“Have we turned up anything on the ground here involving an Israeli intelligence op?”

The agent shook his head. “Not yet. But we’re still looking.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” said Thorpe. “So what are we supposed to make of all this?”

“All what?” said the agent.

“Mata Hari stepping up out of nowhere and stabbing a perfect stranger who just happens to be a foreign diplomat while the unlucky man is having his lunch? And the Israeli consul who seems to want to sleep through the aftermath.”

“Pretty obvious,” said the agent. “They’re covering something they don’t want us to know about.”

“In time, if you last long enough, you’ll learn not to be so cynical,” said Thorpe. “If the Mata Hari theory makes the rest of whatever it is all go away, I’m prepared to buy it.”

The agents sitting on each side of the table looked at one another.

“Let me suggest this,” said Thorpe. “Why don’t we have the agent in charge of the L.A. office go over and have a chitchat with the consul general, or if he’s not available, one of his legal attachés. Convey our sympathies for the passing of Mr. Hadad and suggest to them that maybe they should take whatever games they’re playing home. Otherwise we’re going to have to open a very detailed and public investigation of the untimely death of their fallen comrade, an investigation that might end up inconveniencing and embarrassing a lot of important people—which, unless they want to force the issue, would be entirely unnecessarily. Given the wisdom of Solomon I think they’ll understand.”

“Should we coordinate with the State Department?” asked the agent.

“Leave the Foggy Bottoms alone,” said Thorpe. “Why bother them? They’ve got enough problems trying to figure out which American ally to alienate next. Just do it. OK, what else is there? You said there were two items.”

“The other matter relates to James Arnold Pepper.” This time the arrow came from the agent on the left side of the table.

“I remember the name; refresh my recollection.”

“Mr. Pepper was a former chief naval petty officer involved in a highly classified DARPA project having to do with subsurface drones, antisubmarine warfare.”

“I remember,” said Thorpe. “As I recall, didn’t he have some connection with the last item. The Israeli attaché?”

“We’re not sure,” said the agent. “It’s possible. But there’s some new developments.”

“Pray tell,” said Thorpe.

“Police in Las Vegas found an unidentified body, badly mangled at an abandoned industrial site not far from the airport, a little less than a week ago. There was nothing in the man’s pockets, no identification, no phone, no wallet. The head was pretty much gone. There was a lot of blood splatter, but the site was heavily contaminated by metal fragments and filings, caustic chemicals and the like. So getting any useful DNA from around the site is almost impossible. We can get it from the body. But that’s it. According to the initial forensics, the death was not an accident, it was a homicide. They found tissue scrapings and blood under the victim’s fingernails. And the piece of equipment used to kill him, a large industrial press of some kind, showed signs of having been prepared and primed in advance.”

“What does this have to do with Pepper?”

“Investigators found a US Navy ID card on the floor buried under some of the metal shavings near the press where they found the body. The name on the card was James Pepper. The minute we found out Pepper was involved, FBI in Las Vegas moved in and took over the investigation. They saw the BOLO we had out for him. They took charge of the body and sent it to Dover and had the military do the autopsy. They expedited the lab work, including the DNA.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought Pepper died in a tallow plant somewhere,” said Thorpe.

“We’re pretty sure he did,” said the agent. “We think whoever killed him took his identity.”

“Meaning the headless body,” said Thorpe.

“Either that, or whoever set up the press and killed him. Now here’s the interesting part,” said the agent. “You’re gonna love this. We took prints from the headless body and we ran them. We got no hits. And Pepper’s prints are on file from the navy. So we know it’s not him. They took the scrapings from under the victim’s fingernails, tissue and blood from whoever laid him out on the industrial press. The got a DNA profile. They ran it, and they got a hit.”

“Go on,” said Thorpe.

“It’s an unsolved homicide in Southern California, San Diego County, a young woman by the name of Sadie Marie Leon, aka Sofia Leon. The DNA was a match with scrapings from under her fingernails. Whoever killed the man in Las Vegas also killed her.”

“But’s that’s not all,” said the agent. He reached into a file and pulled out a copy of a newspaper article. He handed it to Thorpe.

The headline read:

HISTORIC BLOOD FLAG CONNECTED TO TWO SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA MURDERS

FORTY-EIGHT

T
ook us a while, but we finally nailed it all down. Turns out you were right,” says Herman. He sits in the client chair on the other side of my desk, dark, brooding eyes looking at his notes. Herman and his crew have dug up some interesting details. As he talks, I look through the file he has handed me.

“Andreas Bauriedl was forty-four years old when he died on November ninth, 1923. The Beer Hall Putsch, as you know,” says Herman. “Given the fact that he followed Hitler to an early grave he may have been the original ‘mad hatter.’ That was the man’s occupation. He made hats.

“Bauriedl was shot in the abdomen by the Munich police during the march. He was walking directly next to the flag bearer at the time of the shooting, a man named Heinrich Trambrauer. This was before Grimminger took over the duty. When the police opened fire, both Trambrauer and Bauriedl were hit. Trambrauer survived his wounds but died a few years later after a brawl with some communists. Bauriedl fell on top of the flag mortally wounded and bled out. There is no question, according to everything we could find, that it is in fact Bauriedl’s blood on the flag. Every source confirms this. There is no dispute. The reason they know,” says Herman, “is that at some point after the shooting stopped, Trambrauer, the flag bearer, was able to grab the flag and escape. He transferred it to comrades who removed the flag from its original staff and hid it. Shortly after this it was handed off to a man named Karl Eggers. Eggers hid the flag in Munich until shortly after December twentieth, 1924, when Hitler was released from Landsberg Prison.

“Hitler had finished a nine-month stretch for a conviction on charges of treason for his part in leading the putsch in an attempt to overthrow the Bavarian government. At that point Eggers transferred the flag back to Hitler, who made an icon out of it. He had it attached to a new staff, capped by a finial, and he put a silver dedication sleeve around the top of the pole engraved with the names of the sixteen men who died during the march. After Hitler took power in ’33 he had the dead martyrs dug up and reburied in a special temple. He consecrated the place and had them declared patron saints. By then there were very few survivors of the early Beer Hall days still living. Any of those who made it through the march and who might have been positioned to challenge Hitler for power in the party were assassinated. The few who remained were followers who quickly got the message and fell into line,” says Herman. “Honoring the old dead martyrs was the fastest way of elevating himself to a kind of godhead who was beyond question.

“In 1926, before he took power, Hitler assigned the SS to provide an honor guard for the flag. Seems a contradiction in terms,” says Herman, “but then this was three years before Himmler came along and turned the SS into the fully fledged product of a diseased mind. The SS stored the flag in a special display at the old Nazi headquarters in the Brown House in Munich. The rest you know. So much for the chain of custody,” says Herman.

“Now as to the other matters. The continuing saga of Dr. Ed, Tony’s dad. We did some checking. I don’t want to bust your bubble, but it turns out Joselyn was right on both counts. Female intuition. You never want to discount it,” says Herman.