The file, p.6
The File, page 6
“I’m so sorry, darling. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Of course you didn’t, honey. I was just lost in these papers,” she said, then started to tell him what she had read.
Robert cut her off and turned to the day’s routine. “Tell me later, baby. We need to finish today’s samples or the whole project will be delayed. Your dad and the team are waiting for me.”
“OK. But I really need to talk to you. I need to talk to both you and Dad. This file is unbelievable.”
She started again to summarize what she had read, but he stopped her in mid-sentence.
“You’re right. It really does sound bizarre. But tell us this afternoon,” he said hastily. “We’ll be back to camp around 3:00, and I’m dying to hear. But tell me then. Big kisses, honey.”
He gave her a hurried hug. Then he released her, glancing at the morning sun and his watch, eager to get on with his lab work.
“O.K. Talk tonight,” she said, as he turned to leave.
Robert disappeared through the tents, heading up towards the trail. She turned back to the stack of documents and continued to read. After a moment though, she realized that she needed to go back to the wreck. She had taken what looked like the most important documents from the file, but only based on a few minutes’ review. She needed to properly examine what remained — or at least examine as much as she could manage in the time they had.
She also realized that they shouldn’t leave the files up there in the jungle. They were historical archives, maybe very important historical records, that ought to be preserved. That gave her one more thing to do today, before they closed down the camp. She would take Jackson up to the wreck, and together they should be able to bring down the contents of the file cabinet.
She spent the morning racing through the tasks that she had planned for herself and packing their gear for the porters to carry back to the road to Kampala. She left her fleece and raingear out of the crates, in case she needed them in the morning, as well as her sleeping bag. She put the clothes and the sleeping bag in her largest backpack, instead of her daypack — she would need the larger pack to bring the files down from the wreck.
Then she went around to the villagers who tended the camp, thanking each of them with smiles and hugs. They were friends at this point, after three months in the bush with no visitors. The goodbyes took the better part of two hours. She and Jackson weren’t ready to start for the ridge until nearly 1 p.m.
The sun was beating down as they shouldered their packs. The air was heavy with moisture, and she suspected that the monsoon rains might come that afternoon. She felt mildly ridiculous, lugging a half-full pack up a thousand-meter cliff in the heat, laden with rain gear and a sleeping bag. But her father had always taught her that you never knew when the weather might change, or whether you would pick that day to lose the trail and have to spend the night in the wild. So she sweat under the weight of the pack as Jackson led them across the valley and up the trail on the side of the ridge.
There was really no trail to lose, she thought, as they slogged their way through the dense undergrowth. Only the faintest signs of use, often missing for dozens of meters or more, hinted at the direction that they should head. When they reached the edge of the rain forest, the shade stole the breeze, but also shielded them from the sun, while they worked their way along the muddy paths and through the fallen tree trunks and undergrowth. It took them nearly two hours to reach the edge of the ridge. They were both drenched in sweat and breathing hard when the wreck finally came into sight.
It sat there, silent and forbidding, in the undergrowth at the edge of the ridge. Nothing had moved in the last three days. She made her way to the back of the plane and let herself into the cargo hold again. In the meantime, Jackson headed off further up the ridge, taking his hunting rifle and hopes of a deer, one of the small duiker that lived in the rainforest on the cooler hills, above the valley floor.
The cargo hold was still dark and cool. She walked to the front of the hold and opened the metal box that lay on the floor and began sorting through its contents. She worked by the light of her flashlight — she had brought extra batteries and used the light freely.
The papers in the file were a hodgepodge. Some of them looked like they had been dumped into the cabinet without any care, almost as if they had been scooped up at the last minute. There were stacks of account statements and corporate certificates, files of shareholder minutes, telegrams, and a collection of other papers. She had no clue what most of these meant, if anything, and had no idea how to figure it out. She placed these papers into a large bag they had brought, that Jackson would carry down from the site.
There were a few more detailed files on the secret circle of Nazi supporters — these she collected and put into her pack. There was also a file folder of correspondence with a Swiss bank, together with some official-looking legal documents. She put those papers into her pack as well. And that was almost it.
There was one other thick cardboard folder, like the first one she had taken, that contained an interim report on the collection of assets for the post-war survival fund. The report was dated December 1944, only three months after the first memorandum, and it listed an impressive collection of corporate shares, real estate, artwork, and bank accounts, the proceeds of which had already been deposited into the Nazi fund. It was clear as well that this was just the start, the tip of the iceberg. There was a rough estimate at the end of the memorandum of the total value of the fund — 15 billion Nazi Reichsmarks or $3 billion, in 1944 dollars.
The memorandum concluded with the observation that this was a reasonable start, but not even 5% of the overall target. She drew another breath, then closed the file. She hadn’t focused on the amounts of money that the project involved. The figures were staggering. She wondered what the Nazi fund would be worth today, if it still existed. She wondered where the money had gone.
There was one more place she needed to look before leaving. She steeled her nerves and walked over to the three corpses, strapped into their seats along the fuselage. She inspected their uniforms, trying hard to ignore the gaping eye sockets and toothy smiles. The name plates were tarnished, but still legible. Two names meant nothing to her. Two faceless Nazi officers. The third name — the tallest one, whose decorations were the most elaborate — rang a bell. “Von Wolff.” Then she remembered the author of the memorandum, the Führer’s adviser on economic security. She smiled to herself, pleased that she had figured out this little bit of the plane’s mystery.
“And what do you, Herr von Wolff, have here in your uniform?” she asked.
It took her a moment, and then she found a silver locket, with the faded photograph of a beautiful woman, and a heavy gold fountain pen. In another pocket she found a leather wallet, with two carefully folded sheets of paper — but nothing else. The same was true of the other bodies. A few personal belongings, but nothing more.
She went outside with her pack and von Wolff’s wallet and found a log to sit on, away from the corpses. She opened the wallet and scanned the two letters. More surprises, although she might have guessed.
The first letter was addressed to a Rhodesian banker, recording the Führer’s friendship, thanking him for having supported the Nazi cause so faithfully, and commending von Wolff to his care. The other letter, more peremptory and businesslike, was addressed to the head of the management board of a leading Swiss private bank — an old bank, that even she had heard of. The letter directed the bank to comply with von Wolff’s directions and referred to the protocol of a meeting in Berlin in late 1944. Both letters were signed “A. Hitler.”
She folded up the letters and tucked them into her pack, alongside the other papers from the file. By this point, her collection was bulky — twenty centimeters of papers, two thousand pages or so — and took up one compartment of her backpack.
While she waited for Jackson to return, she made her way to the front of the plane wreck, at the edge of the ridge. The jungle there was thick, with dense stands of saplings and almost impenetrable thorn bushes. But her jeans and windbreaker protected her, as she forced her way through the vegetation to the front of the fuselage. She noticed then that there was a break in the foliage at the side of the ridge, and that she could look down the valley to where the camp lay, two or three kilometers away. If she sat on a dead log near the edge of the ridge, she could even make out figures in the camp. She watched for a moment, then opened up her pack, took out the file, and continued to read.
Chapter 9
Jeb Fisher
The room was long, with windows along one side, looking out onto the dirt runway. A single ancient air conditioner struggled noisily against the midday heat, dripping water onto the bare concrete floor. The walls of the room were plain, painted white years ago, with a well-used blackboard at the front of the room, facing thirty or so wooden chairs, arranged in haphazard rows. The faded photograph of a handsome black man, dressed in a general’s uniform, hung above the blackboard. Most of the windows were open and the smell of dust, smoke from cooking fires, animal dung, and gasoline came in with the breeze.
Fifteen men sat in the chairs. Most had flown overnight, connecting through various airports around the world, to arrive in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, earlier that morning. They had been escorted, without passing through immigration or customs, to a hangar at the end of the Addis Ababa airfield, where they had boarded a privately chartered plane. Hours later, they had landed at a military airstrip somewhere in South Sudan.
Nobody had told the men where they were, or the name of the nearby native village — a dusty collection of mud huts. Before they disembarked from the plane, they had been told what to do: take your bags and go into the main building, next to the airstrip. Then wait for instructions. The orders had come over the plane’s loudspeaker system, delivered in clipped military commands by one of the two older men who sat at the front of the aircraft.
As they disembarked at the South Sudanese airfield, a single African soldier appeared for a moment. He was a Dinka — tall, lanky, and black as asphalt — wearing a uniform with no insignia or badges. His only interest in the group was to collect a small package from the grey-haired man who had given them their orders on the plane. The soldier’s bearing was erect and poised as he opened the package and thumbed through the banknotes it contained. When he was finished, the soldier nodded with satisfaction and walked back towards the buildings on the opposite side of the airstrip. The only other signs of life came from a handful of local troops who patrolled the perimeter of the airfield in the distance, keeping whoever might be curious away — and keeping the visitors inside.
Jeb Fisher sat in one of the chairs, near the back of the room. His hair was dark brown, just touching the tops of his ears. At thirty-seven, the first hints of gray were starting to show at his temples, framing deep blue eyes and clean-shaven cheeks. He was smaller than most of the men in the room, standing 1.85 meters and weighing eighty kilos. His arms were sinewy, like his torso, tapering to a slim waist and powerfully muscled legs. He sat alone, apart from the other clusters of men, who were laughing and telling tales of supposed exploits in battlefields and brothels around the world.
Until two days before, he had been one of the CIA’s star field agents. He had grown up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, the fourth of seven children of a steel mill foreman. After Catholic high school, he attended Princeton, courtesy of a track scholarship. Four years of straight As, a Political Science major, and two Ivy League records in the long jump followed.
In his senior year, life after college had loomed. He had no idea what to do next. The Peace Corps and life as an Outward Bound instructor were the least unattractive choices that he could identify. Wall Street and consulting jobs had been easy to come by, and his father, then unemployed, and his girlfriend, lobbied hard for investment banking or business school. But sitting in a box as a junior analyst in a New York bank, gambling with other peoples’ money, was pretty close to his idea of hell on earth, and he kept finding excuses not to accept any of the offers that filled his mailbox.
He was close to capitulating when a notice in the career office caught his eye — the CIA was looking for fluent Spanish speakers. An on-campus interview, which he attended as much for fun as anything else, further whetted his interest.
A week later, he spent a day at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, without telling either his father or his friends. After that day, though, he was sure about what he wanted to do. The idea of fighting for his country, in exotic places around the world, hooked him. He had been brought up in a world of right and wrong, good and evil, and the Agency promised to let him join the forces of good. And to have lots of fun along the way. Three months later, minus a girlfriend, he was in the middle of CIA orientation in rural Virginia with a couple dozen other recruits.
His performance in the Agency’s training program was exceptional. His scores on all the tests — mental, physical, and emotional — were among the best in Agency history. After a month of training, he was dispatching martial arts instructors with a combination of feline agility and overpowering strength. He outwitted the drafters of logic games and puzzles, both in the classroom and in training exercises. And he endured the toughest marches, climbs, and obstacle courses that his trainers could devise. He graduated from training school with some of the highest expectations in CIA history.
His career as an operative fulfilled the promise of his training. He worked undercover throughout Latin America, infiltrating a Columbian drug-lord’s inner circle for more than a year. The information he collected about the gang’s operations would have been invaluable in rolling the organization up. But he conceived, and then ran, an operation that lured the members of both that gang and its main rival into a bloody showdown at the drug lord’s estate, letting them wipe one another out in a way that no DEA prosecution would have begun to achieve. He walked away from the cartel’s former headquarters without a scratch, leaving behind fifty corpses, including two of the DEA’s ten most wanted fugitives.
He was just as resourceful, and ruthless, in a series of other operations, first in Nicaragua and then in Brazil, before moving on to Africa. He hunted Russian arms dealers in the Congo, Al Qaeda in Sudan, and slave traders in Hong Kong, again eliminating scores of serious evildoers with brutal efficiency — all without running afoul of CIA regulations. Along the way, he attracted the attention of Franklin Kerrington, the Agency’s Deputy Director, who made sure that Fisher got the recognition, and the support, that he needed.
He hadn’t planned to leave the Agency. But two days ago, Kerrington summoned him for a one-on-one meeting. They met for coffee at Kerrington’s home, in an opulent room looking onto a sunlit courtyard. The Deputy Director outlined a proposal — one that Fisher really had little choice but to accept.
The proposal was that Fisher join a firm run by another former Agency star, who had left the CIA a decade ago to found a company specializing in assignments that nobody else could do, charging prices that nobody else dared quote. Kerrington assured him that the company wanted his services, and that it would offer a salary that added a zero to his Agency wages, plus performance bonuses. Kerrington said that he had already talked with the company’s principal shareholder and CEO — Reginald Reid — and confirmed the offer. It was a chance to do the right thing, to do even more for his country than he could at the Agency. And, although Kerrington didn’t threaten him, he worked in a reference to the pending proposal for a retirement policy at the CIA — which would be twenty years for field operatives. Who knew what might be on offer for Fisher in another three years?
Kerrington also mentioned the times that he had stepped in with help — in internal political squabbles of the sort that Fisher hated. Kerrington promised to be there, with the same help, if Fisher joined the private sector. Fisher was pretty sure that the promises were real ones, and that life would be better outside the Agency from here on, than inside it. Kerrington sealed the deal by confiding that he needed his own eyes and ears at Reid’s company. Reid and his team were first-class and had been delivering tremendous results. But the outfit had grown, and Kerrington wanted to be able to keep a closer eye on things, if the need arose. He wanted someone who he could be sure had the Agency, and the country, fully in mind at all times. And he wanted Fisher to be that man.
That convinced him. Kerrington was his idea of a perfect boss. A man he admired and respected. He wasn’t another Washington politician, but a man dedicated to the Agency and to doing the right thing. And Kerrington promised again to give him the freedom and the tools that he needed to do the right thing himself. They had shaken hands on his new job over glasses of 40-year-old Scotch, Kerrington’s firm handshake and level gaze leaving him with no doubt that this was the right decision.
Later that day, Fisher spoke with Reid by telephone, and then met with two of his team, at what looked like corporate offices on M Street near Georgetown. He hadn’t expected things to move slowly, but also hadn’t expected them to move quite so quickly. Over dinner, he was listening to one of Reid’s men outline a mission that had him leaving for Ethiopia the next day.
The operation was simple on one level: find a plane wreck, whose approximate GPS coordinates would be provided, and recover the plane’s cargo. It was the details of the mission that were more complicated, a lot more complicated — but then, he loved challenges. It turned out that the wreckage of the plane was in a remote part of Uganda, or maybe the Congo, and that there was likely to be a Russian special forces team hunting for the same cargo.
Reid’s lieutenant, a former Agency operative named Sam Wilson, was a slightly built man, with none of the muscle of many in their business. But when Wilson caught his eyes, there was nothing soft about him.
“The cargo isn’t a nice to have. It’s critical to this country’s security. It doesn’t matter what we have to do, or who gets in the way. That cargo comes back here with us. Period. Got it?”
