Killer Focus

The documentation of the link they all shared was an unconscionable risk and a protective mechanism. They were all ex-Nazis and illegal aliens; the surviving Schutzstaffel were gazetted war criminals. Collectively, they were all thieves. They had stolen the spoils of war from a dozen nations to cushion a new life, and murdered to secure it.

Every one of them was vulnerable to discovery. The agreed penalty for exposing a member of the group or compromising the group as a whole was death.

She turned to the last section of the book, and the half-dozen names noted there, and added a seventh: Johannes Webber, now known as George Hartley. It was an execution list.

Slipping a plastic bag from the pocket of her coat, she wrapped and sealed the book, which was no longer safe in this location. She would make arrangements in the morning to relocate the rest of the items, and destroy those that couldn’t be moved.

Cold anger flowed through her as she locked the door of the shed and started down the steep path, hampered by the powerful wind and driving sleet. She hadn’t used the book for almost a decade. But then, as now, the need to use it had been triggered by a betrayal. Webber, the old fool, had talked.

After all these years, the Nordika had been located.

CancunOctober 14, 1984

She stepped into the foyer of a popular resort hotel, took a seat and waited. Seconds later, she was joined by a narrow-faced Colombian. Her Spanish was halting and a little rusty, but her lack of fluency scarcely mattered. Mendoza spoke English and he already knew what she wanted.

The conversation concluded, she got to her feet and left, leaving an envelope on the seat. She didn’t turn to check that the man had picked up the envelope. He was there for the money—a very large sum of money. Twenty-five percent now, seventy-five percent when the job was done. She had found that if she paid fifty percent up front, the hitter invariably took the money and ran. With the majority of the money on hold, greed guaranteed completion.

A street urchin trailed the blond gringa through the streets. She was easy to spot but not so easy to follow. Unlike most of the tourists who crowded the resort town, she checked her back every few seconds.

She entered a crowded market. Sidling close, he snatched at the large tote bag she was carrying. She spun, her fingers hooked around the strap, preventing a clean getaway. Surprised, he yanked. The strap broke and he stumbled back. She reacted with unexpected ferocity, lunging after him. Bony fingers closed on one arm, hard enough to bruise. A fist caught him in the cheek, the impact snapped his head back and made his ears ring, but he’d been hit worse, and for a lot less money. With a vicious jerk, he yanked the bag from her fingers, twisted free and darted down a side alley.

Automatically scanning the narrow streets for policia, he sprinted across the road, through a darkened, almost deserted cantina and out onto another dusty street. He could hear the gringa behind him, her heels tapping sharply on the cobbles. That was another thing that was different about her. Most women screamed and made a fuss, they didn’t chase after him.

Ten minutes later, as arranged, he met the man who had paid him to steal the gringa’s bag on the beach. Tito Mendoza was narrow faced and feral, with a reputation as a killer.

Heart pounding, avoiding Mendoza’s stare, he handed over the bag. Mendoza examined the contents, drew out a musty old book wrapped in plastic, then slipped his hand in his pocket and handed over a wad of bills.

The following evening, Mendoza stepped out of a dim, smoky bar and made his way through streets filled with strolling tourists. The beach was dark and empty, the absence of the moon making the night even darker.

He reached the rendezvous point, the shadowy lee of a rock formation, and settled in to wait, gaze drawn to the faint luminosity of the breaking waves, the empty stretch of sand. He was early, but with the money at stake, he didn’t want to leave anything to chance, and the Frenchman had a reputation for being exacting.

A faint vibration drew him up sharply. He could hear two men, not one, as agreed, and a primitive jolt of warning had him reaching for his gun.

The first slug caught him in the stomach; the second went higher. Mendoza clawed at his chest, his legs buckling. His gun discharged as he hit the ground, the round plowing uselessly into the sand.

Pain sliced through him as he was rolled over in the sand and the rucksack, which contained the book, was stripped off his shoulders. More pain as he was kicked onto his back. A spreading numbness in his legs, the fire eating into his chest and stomach.

Cold, dark eyes met his. Muerte. Death.

He must have lost consciousness; when he came to, the Frenchman was leaning over him, his palm jammed over the wound in his chest. He could hear sirens, the babble of voices.

Xavier le Clerc’s gaze was fierce. “The book. Where is it?”

Mendoza coughed, pain spasmed. “Gone.” He couldn’t breathe; his mouth kept filling with blood.

“Who took it?”

Mendoza spat a name.

Faces appeared. The pressure on his chest eased, and le Clerc melted into the shadows. Someone, a doctor, set a bag down beside him. A uniform sent an automatic chill of fear through him. He recognized Franco Aznar, a senior detective. The questions started.

The doctor muttered something sharp.

Mendoza caught the phrases, collapsed lung,lacerated intestine. The numbness was spreading. He was a dead man; he had nothing more to fear.

Choking on his own blood, he began to talk.

Ten miles off the coast of Costa RicaOctober 21, 1984

The anchor dropped through murky blue-green water and lodged on the reef bed sixty feet below. The rope went taut, stopping the drift of the chartered launch as it swung south, pushed by the current and a stiff offshore breeze. In the distance a fishing boat moved slowly against the chop, reeling in a long line. Closer in, another charter boat trolled for marlin and tuna.

Lieutenant Todd Fischer eased a single scuba tank onto his back, buckled up, slipped the snorkel into his mouth and flipped backward off the railing. Seconds later, the other seven members of the naval dive team were in the water, leaving Rodrigo, the charter skipper, to man the launch. After pairing off, they replaced the snorkels with regulators and began the descent, following the anchor rope down.

Minutes of patient grid-searching later, the encrusted hull of the Nordika loomed where it perched on the edge of a deep trench.

The ship had broken into three pieces. The hull had snapped in two and everything above deck had sheared off and fallen into the trench. Todd’s interest sharpened when he noted the way the steel hull had ruptured. The blast pattern was unmistakable, indicating that the ship hadn’t foundered; it had been scuttled. There was no sign of the ship’s name, but near the stern three numbers were still visible. They matched the Lloyd’s Register number for the Nordika.

Removing the lens cover from his underwater camera, he began to take photos. The visibility was poor, but all he needed was proof that the Nordika was there. Archival records compiled from an eyewitness report and the shipping records at the Baltic seaport of Lubeck stated that the Nordika had disappeared on the sixteenth of January, 1944, allegedly hijacked by SS officers just weeks before the fall of the Third Reich. The unsubstantiated report had claimed that the Nordika had been bound for South America, loaded with passengers and an unspecified cargo. Intriguing as those facts were, it wasn’t enough to spark the interest of either the coastguard or the U.S. Navy. But a report from a civilian source that Nazi war criminals had been involved with drugs and gunrunning, liaising with U.S. military personnel and using the scuttled carcass of the Nordika as a drop-off point, had been enough to make someone in the admiralty curious.

Todd’s brief was to investigate gunrunning with a possible military link, and, crazily enough, the weird slant that there was a Nazi connection even after all this time. South America was a known haven, but Todd was no Nazi hunter. Despite the fact that their information had supplied him with documents dating back to 1943, his money was on drugs, and possibly weapons, attached to a buoy or a wreck that might or might not be the Nordika.

He moved through the ship, snapping pictures. After finding no evidence of any cargo, forty years old or more recent, he swam through the blasted area and into the detached stern. The four diesels were still bolted down in the engine room, the name Wiesen Bremerhaven still legible. He took more photos, checked the luminous dial of his watch, then swam back the way he’d come. From what he’d seen, the ship was quite possibly the Nordika. The tonnage was right, and the four Wiesen diesels matched the Nordika’s specs.

He passed through the hold and swam out onto the deck area. Thirty minutes had passed. At this level he could spend longer, but with nothing more to investigate there wasn’t much point. It was possible they would do a second dive down into the trench, just in case the stash point was farther down, but that wasn’t likely. According to the charts, the trench was more than two hundred feet deep. As a stash site, it was neither safe nor convenient.

He swam around the side of the Nordika, searching for his dive buddy, Verney, and the rest of the team. Verney had followed him into the cargo hold, but he’d disappeared shortly after. None of the other divers were in sight. Mathews, Hendrickson, McNeal and Salter were supposed to be grid-searching the reef. Brooks and Downey should have been checking along the edge of the trench. He glanced at his watch again. Thirty-five minutes had now passed. At this depth they were easily good for forty. Unless he’d given the order, the rest of the team should still be working.

A diver appeared over the lip of the trench and swam directly toward him. For a split second Todd was certain it was Downey, then something wrong registered; the neoprene suit and the gear were regulation, but the mask and the tank weren’t. Adrenaline pumped. It was possible the stranger was a diver from the charter launch that had been trolling in the area earlier. He couldn’t hear the sound of the launch’s engine, which meant they could have dropped anchor nearby, but recreational diving wasn’t compatible with game fishing, especially not this far out and with the visibility so poor.

The second possibility was that the diver was one of the bad guys, protecting their drop site. Instinctively, he depressed the shutter on the camera, then reached for the knife sheathed at his ankle. The diver veered off to one side. Todd spun in the water as a second diver swam up out of the trench. A hand ripped at his face mask. Salt water stung his eyes and filled his mouth: his oxygen line had been cut. An arm clamped around his neck. He slashed with the knife. Blood clouded the water and the arm released. With a grunt, he kicked free, heading for the surface. With a lungful of air he could make twice the distance with ease.

A hand latched around his ankle, dragging him back down. Jackknifing, he dove at the man, slicing with the knife. Blood and air erupted. He glimpsed the camera as it drifted down to the seabed, the strap cut in the struggle, and he registered that the other diver had also used a knife.

Vision blurring, he grabbed the limp diver’s regulator and sucked in a lungful of air. He had a split second to register a third diver, then a spear

punched into his shoulder, driving him back against the hull of the ship. Shock reverberated through him; salt water filled his lungs. Arm and shoulder numbed, chest burning with a cold fire and his throat clamped against the convulsive urge to cough, he kicked upward.

Sixty feet above, the ocean surface rippled like molten silver. Sunlight. Oxygen.

A sudden image of his wife, Eleanor, and small son, Steve, sunbathing in their backyard in Shreveport sent a powerful surge of adrenaline through his veins. He cleared the edge of the hull.

A split second before his vision faded, he spotted Mathews and Hendrickson, floating. Distantly, he felt hard fingers close around one ankle, the cold pressure of the water as he was towed down into the trench.

Shreveport, LouisianaOctober 21

Eight-year-old Steven Fischer dropped the ball.

“Aw, Steve. Didja have to—”