Killer Focus. Fiona Brand
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remembered response to the experience. The way out was simple: instruct the mind that there was nothing to fear and so invalidate the body’s responses.
Inhaling again, she forced her focus outward, away from the coiled tension, away from the memories. Her gaze skated over shelves of books, a wooden stepladder, and snagged on her own reflection, white faced and strained, in a window.
Not a dim, claustrophobic shed with bars at the window. Endless shadows, the snick of a briefcase, the sting of a needle. The smothering paralysis as the drug anesthetized her body, leaving her formless, floating, eyes wide, staring into a darkness that shifted, reformed—
Stop.
Don’t let the mind go back.
It was late. Instead of working she should have gone home and eaten dinner. She was tired; her therapist had warned her that tiredness and stress were, in themselves, triggers.
As dangerous as briefcases and needles.
She drew in another controlled breath and checked her watch, anchoring herself in the normality of that small gesture. The hostage crisis was over, finished. Earl Slater was behind bars, Diane Eady and Senator Radcliff, the man whose property she had been held on, were both dead. She had escaped; she was safe. But Alex Lopez, head of a Colombian drug cartel, and the man who had drugged her with a powerful hallucinogen called ketamine hydrochloride, had gotten away.
Rain swept against the windows, and the sense of cold increased.
Don’t go back.
But in order to catch Lopez, she had to.
He was dangerous, a psychotic killer, and she needed him caught. When he had injected the first dose of ketamine he had stated that he would kill her, regardless of whether Rina Morell—Lopez’s former wife and a federal witness—handed herself over in exchange for Taylor or not. The only question was when.
Normally, that kind of rhetoric wouldn’t have shaken Taylor. Lopez was powerful and influential; if he had wanted her dead, she would be dead. But caught in the grip of a hallucinatory drug, her normal reasoning process hadn’t worked. She would never forget the experience, and she was going to make sure it didn’t happen to anyone else.
Apart from her own determination to capture him, her appetite for the hunt was further whetted by the fact that Rina Morell was a personal friend. The damage Lopez had done the Morell family was a matter of record now, but that didn’t alter the horror of the ordeal Rina and her parents had endured.
She registered a second click as the briefcase was closed. Jaw tight, she swiveled around in the chair and studied the owner of the briefcase who was strolling toward the front desk, the box of microfilm he had been studying tucked under one arm. He was midforties, about one hundred and forty pounds, six feet tall, give or take an inch. Height was always the most difficult detail to estimate.
She wondered what he had been doing here this late on a Sunday night, but the flare of curiosity was brief. It was automatic for her to notice people. The clinical assessment was part of the job, but for as long as she could remember she had been aware of the people around her, how they looked and what made them tick. Her mother’s standard complaint had been that she hadn’t produced an eight-pound baby girl, she had given birth to a cop. It had been a mild form of rebellion for Taylor to become an agent instead.
Still on edge, she returned to the screen. A heading caught her attention, drawing her once more into the past. None of the key search words she had noted down were included, but the name was familiar.
She flipped through the files in her bag until she found the relevant one. It contained research she’d done while she was recovering from the hostage situation and the depressive effects of the ketamine. Locked out of the office for a month on mandatory sick leave, she’d had nothing better to do than attend therapy sessions and try to break open the Lopez/Morell case, which had unaccountably stalled.
She’d combed FBI files, the Internet and microfilms of old newspapers for anything to do with Lopez who, aside from drugs charges, was wanted for illegal entry into the United States, collusion in the theft and sale of decommissioned missile components, fraud, grievous bodily harm and murder.
Lopez’s real name was Alejandro Chavez, and he had been living in the States under a false identity from the age of twelve, courtesy of a brutal series of mass murders in Colombia that had made it impossible for him to live in his own country. Marco Chavez, Lopez’s father, had orchestrated the murders to force his son’s release from prison. Marco had succeeded in obtaining a pardon for Alex, but with the public outcry surrounding the massacres and a number of death threats, Alex had been forced into hiding.
She was also searching for anything to do with Marco Chavez, now deceased, and—just to pull this one into the region of the seriously weird—international banking and Nazis. The Nazis, according to the testimony of Slater—one of the few arrests they had made in the case—formed the backbone of a secretive cabal that had bankrolled Lopez and his cartel.
She opened the file, found the reference and returned her attention to the microfilm, a Reuters report dated 1954. Noted Jewish banker and self-professed Nazi hunter Stefan le Clerc had disappeared and fears were held for his safety. His last known location, New York, had been established from a letter he had posted to his wife, Jacqueline le Clerc, who was appealing for any information about her husband’s whereabouts. Apart from the years he had spent in international banking, le Clerc had founded an organization that worked to reunite families separated during the war and help survivors recover family money and assets. He was also noted for his campaign to track Nazi war criminals, and had been searching for a group of SS officers who had escaped Berlin in 1944 just weeks before Hitler had committed suicide in his bunker.
According to le Clerc, the officers had hijacked a cargo ship, Nordika, from Lubeck and escaped, taking with them an enormous quantity of looted goods and a group of children with IQs that ranked them as geniuses, part of a research project designed to establish a superior genetic seed pool for the Reich.
Taylor didn’t know how common the name le Clerc was, but the fact that Stefan had been Jewish and in banking made the likelihood that he was related to the le Clerc who had surfaced in the Lopez case stronger.
Xavier le Clerc was a Jewish banker turned international thief. He was infamous for collapsing a Swiss bank that had had a large base of Nazi investment, then having the audacity to make a clean getaway. Interpol had an old sheet on him, but despite that he was still at large. It was suspected, although not proved, that Esther Morell, the wife of one of Lopez’s business partners and a former international banker herself, had used her connection with le Clerc to pull off a multibillion-dollar theft, emptying Alex Lopez’s main operating account. The money had since been recovered by the feds but after more than twenty years, any trail that might have led to le Clerc was gone.
She leafed through the information she had collected on Xavier le Clerc, and found the connection she was looking for. Xavier was Stefan le Clerc’s son.
She made a note, then read through the Reuters report on the screen again, double-checking the name of the ship, a second reference that made the article even more interesting.
Two weeks ago, she had found an article that had been printed in 1984, about the wreck of a ship purported to be the Nordika, which had been discovered off the coast of Costa Rica. A naval team that had dived on the wreck had disappeared and had been presumed drowned. There was no mention of any cargo, but the fact that Costa Rica wasn’t far from the coast of Colombia and was well within Marco Chavez’s sphere of influence had been enough to pique her interest.
The tie-in was tenuous. She wasn’t certain any of it would add up to anything productive, but she couldn’t ignore the picture that was building. The disappearance of the Nordika from Lubeck had been a wartime mystery that had stumped a lot of people, including Stefan le Clerc. Marco Chavez was known to have harbored German nationals after the war. Crazily enough, the pieces of that old wartime puzzle seemed to be fitting into the Lopez case.
She hit the Print button. While