Forty-Eight X (26 page)

“Put ’em up, asshole.”

Krantz began walking toward him.

“No comprende ingles?”
he said, mustering his meanest growl. “I’ll fuckin’ blow your head off.”

But Krantz kept coming. He simply ignored the gun, picked the diminutive detective up by the collar of his shirt, and set him gently on the couch. Then he turned to Maggie.

“Please,” he said, and pointed for her to sit on the couch next to Stumpf. She complied, and Krantz pulled up a chair and sat opposite them, knee to knee.

“Dr. Wagner,” he went on, “you have nothing to fear from me. I believe we are on the same side. Searching for the same answers.”

“You know,” Stumpf said, still waving his gun, but now with far less bluster, “I could fuckin’ blow you away.”

Krantz hesitated a moment and then simply leaned over, slapped the gun aside with one hand, and yanked it from Stumpf’s hand with his other. Krantz hefted the weapon for a moment and manipulated the trigger.

“This is a very good replica,” he said. “You know, you could go to jail for having a toy gun like this. Your federal law requires that a yellow plug be visible on the barrel. You have taken it out.”

Nate Stumpf smiled sheepishly. “I wasn’t going to shoot you. I was just protecting my client.”

“Perfectly understandable.”

“How did you know the gun wasn’t real? I got it from a friend who works props for the studios. The gun has gotta look real for close-ups. Nobody can tell the difference.”

“The trigger action is different,” Krantz replied and demonstrated.

“But how could you know that with me pointing it at you?”

Krantz just smiled. “I am an expert on weapons. But I am more of an expert when it comes to judging people. Please do not take offense, but you do not look like the kind of man who could ‘blow my fuckin’ head off.’ Mister, mister?”

“Stumpf. Nate Stumpf,” he replied, extending his hand to shake. “I’m a private detective. I work for Ms. Wagner.”

“No, you don’t,” Maggie snapped back.

“We have a contract,” Stumpf reminded.

Krantz ignored their tiff and introduced himself. “My name is Joshua Krantz.”

“It’s Colonel Krantz,” Maggie clarified. “He’s a spy. He works for Israeli intelligence.”

“As I told you, I am not so much a spy. I am an archaeologist. And I am here because understanding why your father died will help me find my—my wife.” Sometimes, he thought, it was simpler describing Fala as a wife than describing their complex relationship.

“Do you know why Professor Wagner was murdered?” Stumpf asked excitedly. He was counting his money already.

“I know nothing of that.”

And poof, Stumpf was broke again. “Then why are you here?”

“The clues have led me here.”

Krantz went on to explain the last month of his life, beginning with what seemed his long-ago former life—his suntanned tranquil explorations off the coast of Acre. Then he described the convoluted events that led him to Southern California—the discovery of the Alexander battle scythe, which led him to a survivor in the Hindu Kush who spoke of his attackers as Maimun; to his search in Iran for a nonexistent terror cell called the Right Hand of God; to a massacre in the Philippines and the disappearance of Fala there; and finally to his dismissal by
Aman
, his furtive flight from Israel, and new evidence that the soldiers who wielded the battle scythe were genetically similar to a chimpanzee stem cell line that a Nobel Laureate, Dr. Julius Wagner, had created.

“I am no longer working for
Aman
, or for Israel,” Krantz stressed. “I am working now only to find a woman named Fala al-Shohada.”

“My father was working on something called the Lemuria Project,” Maggie told him. “Do you know anything about that?”

“No. What is this Lemuria Project?”

“That’s what’s so damn unusual. No one knows. Or no one is saying.”

“We think it refers to an ancient civilization,” Stumpf piped in. “Like Atlantis, Lemuria was a place that disappeared in a great flood thousands of years ago.”

Stupid man
, Krantz thought. “That is a myth. What else have you learned?”

Krantz clearly focused his attention on Maggie; after all, she was the daughter of the next link in his “dig” for the truth. Stumpf, however, resented being ignored.

“Do we really want to talk to this guy?” Stumpf interrupted. “We only know who he is from who he says he is.”

Krantz leaned forward, putting his face inches from Stumpf and staring at him with a gaze that Stumpf understood quite clearly. It said,
don’t fuck with me
. It was sufficiently sudden and threatening to silence Stumpf. And just as quickly, Krantz relaxed.

“Please, I am not here to hurt anyone. My wife, the woman I love, has disappeared, and the information I have has led me here. I would like to be a patient man, but I am impatient. You must understand.”

“We talked to an associate of my father’s who was clearly very scared to talk about Lemuria,” Maggie went on. “So it must be important. He gave us one word and ran off, and I haven’t been able to find him since.”

“And what did he say?”

“He didn’t say a thing,” Stumpf said, again wanting to be a team player.

Krantz looked him over and decided to be more tolerant of the annoying detective.

“I slapped him about a bit, and this is all he gave us before running off,” Stumpf said, trying to regain his gravitas. Then he pulled the scrap of paper from his pocket and handed it to the colonel.

“We thought
Biot
was this biomedical convention, so I took my client there to make inquiries, but some people plainly didn’t want us looking into this and we got screwed there. They drugged us.”

“I got drugged,” Maggie corrected.

“That’s right,” Stumpf said, still apologetic. “She was drugged.”

“B-I-O-T,” Krantz read the letters aloud. They were all caps. Working in military intelligence, he had seen reports about BIOT before and they never referred to anything about biotechnology.

“Do you know what it means?” Maggie asked.

“BIOT. I think it’s a place,” Krantz said, and then added, somewhat surprised himself, “a place like Lemuria.”

“Hey, buddy,” Stumpf sneered, tired of being put down. “I know Lemuria is a myth, a legend, like Atlantis. I know it doesn’t exist. I’m not stupid.”

But Krantz, an archaeologist and historian, had his own wealth of knowledge about ancient legends and myths.

“Many people think it did exist,” Krantz continued. “Plato’s stories put Atlantis somewhere in the Aegean near Crete. Lemuria is supposed to have been in the Pacific, somewhere near Asia or Australia. And some believe it is in the Indian Ocean. Today, I am sure Lemuria is in the Indian Ocean.”

“You’re sure?” Now Maggie was surprised.

“The only BIOT I have ever heard of in all my years working with Israeli intelligence always referred to the American and British secret military base on Diego Garcia. It was called BIOT because it is a British Indian Ocean Territory. BIOT and Lemuria, I think they must refer to the same thing.”

Ka-ching. Jackpot. Stumpf was counting his money again. Now this made sense.

“So,” Stumpf verbalized his conclusion, “Dr. Wagner was murdered because he knew too much about some secret military project called Lemuria on a secret military base in the Indian Ocean?”

“Possibly,” Krantz agreed.

“So how do we find out for sure?” Maggie asked.

There was a long lull—at first to allow them to emotionally absorb that the three of them were now collaborators, and a bit longer to conceive of how to proceed.

“We need to shake the tree.” Krantz was first to respond. “We need to ask questions. By e-mail and on the blogs, we need to mention this information we know about Lemuria and BIOT and Dr. Wagner and his research. And then we must wait and see if important people become uncomfortable. And then we will know for sure. But if we do this, we should do it from a safe house.”

“I have a safe house,” Stumpf jumped in.

“You do?” Maggie asked, surprised.

“Where?” Krantz asked.

“Anywhere,” Stumpf replied, feeling puffed with power again. “It’s a twenty-four-foot Fleetwood Tioga and it sleeps six comfortably.”

I
n 1999 a newly assigned Russian diplomat walked into the Harry S. Truman Building a few blocks from the White House in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Washington, DC. The Truman Building, which housed the offices of the Department of State, was built as one of Roosevelt’s make work construction projects during the Depression. The old building was in a perpetual state of remodel. The diplomat was scheduled for a routine introduction with the secretary of state, a moment of polite face time. During a minute alone in the secretary’s office, he simply pried back a piece of molding on the floor and planted a powerful listening device. No one took notice of the warped baseboard. Cracked molding, half-finished newly painted walls, and dangling wires were a consequence of work performed by the lowest bidder. It was only during more routine renovations six months later that the bug was found. Everyone in government agreed that security—in the White House, the executive offices, the State Department, and especially in the Capitol building—places where both the public and foreign dignitaries frequently tread, was leaky. If the president really had something to say that he never wanted to hear played back, he said it on the south lawn with the noise of Marine One’s chopper blades in the background.

“I think we’ve got a problem,” Senator Berger told the president as he was preparing to board his helicopter. “The Israelis know about Lemuria.”

“They’re allies,” the president responded. “I think I can shush it with the prime minister.”

“And people are calling their congressmen about it. Congressmen who are not our friends.”

“You are Congress. You need to meet and figure this out before the press makes it a headline. And put General Shell on it. It’s his baby.”

The “people” calling their congressmen were easily identified. They were Margaret Wagner and Nathaniel Stumpf. A dozen select FBI agents were tagged with a simple mission—gather them up. They first knocked on their doors, and then, with no answer, they broke them down. Lots of inquiries were made; phone records and credit cards were checked. Surveillance monitors in the neighborhood were reviewed. They were not to be found in the “usual places.”

One of the benefits of being pretty near broke was that Stumpf had never bothered to register his motor home when he took it over several years before from a deadbeat client. So, of course, the feds never thought to check out the beachfront motor home sites along the California coast. Stumpf’s rundown twenty-four-foot motor home was one of several dozen parked at Carpinteria State Beach, just twelve miles south of Santa Barbara on Highway 101. Krantz felt right at home. It reminded him of the some of the beaches in Israel. And the climate was very much like Israel’s. Los Angeles and Tel Aviv shared the same latitude.

That same evening, two senators and four congressmen, the leadership from the Armed Services Committee, met in secret to discuss Lemuria. They met after hours at Ciao, an intimate Italian restaurant in Arlington owned by the senator from Rhode Island. Everyone agreed that what they said there would be more private than any speech could be in the Capitol Building, where past talk held in “secret sessions” had ended up as quotes in front-page headlines. There were, nevertheless, no guarantees to secrecy anymore with an increasing array of sophisticated listening devices—that ranged from a tie clip to microwave antennae on satellites a thousand miles up. And while these men all felt they were “honorable,” they were all worldly enough to know that too many elected officials had sworn to uphold the nation’s secrets and later simply decided that they had a special privilege to ignore that oath. Secrets leaked and oaths were no longer sacred. They were confident, however, the words said here would be as secret as possible because to reveal them would be political suicide and these men were all professionals—professional politicians. Not one had spent less than two decades in one high political office or another. And they were disciplined professionals—meaning they knew how to raise funds, were comfortable in the business of coddling special interests, and could adjust their positions to run with any political wind. It was not that they didn’t have strong opinions; they did. But they were survivors. If the game of politics was like playing rock, paper, scissors, they would always win—because they were water.

Most of the men in the room were septuagenarians. The youngest, Congressman Adler from California, was sixty. All were balding or gray haired. They sat around a long table in the empty restaurant and picked at several huge bowls of baked ziti set in the middle of the table. And there was plenty of wine. They looked more like Mafia bosses planning a hit than a congressional committee in secret session.

Theodore Berger, the senator from Rhode Island, the committee chair, and their host, began the discussion. Although he was a Republican, the conservatives in his party still thought of him as some East Coast liberal—and he probably was except for when it came to the armed forces. He gave the military anything they wanted. And General Shell and his fellows in the joint chiefs wanted Lemuria.

“People who shouldn’t know, know,” Berger began. “The Israelis know. And Dr. Wagner’s daughter has probably figured it out.”

“The Israelis are allies,” Congressman Adler entered the fray. “And eventually we share information with our allies.”

“And this Egyptian woman we’re holding,” the congressman from Wyoming asked, “does that mean the Egyptians know and by extension the rest of the Arab world? Maybe we should think about shutting this business down.”

“I don’t know,” Berger responded solemnly.

“We ought to shut nothing down,” Senator Leland Bruce spoke up. He was the senior senator there. Of all the congressmen sitting around the table, he was perhaps most intimate with the results of the Lemuria Project. He had arranged to receive firsthand reports on progress from the “formerly disgraced” Colonel McGraw, whom he admired very much. Senator Bruce considered McGraw a maligned hero who had risen, phoenix-like, to an even greater heroic status.