The Empire Dreams td-113 Read online

  No, it would be his. That was what had been troubling him since he found out. He must find the courage to speak. Must tell what ha-

  "You are more fidgety than usual," Schatz said abruptly.

  The banker jumped in his seat, shaken from his trance.

  When he looked over, he saw that Schatz was peering up at him. The German didn't lift his head from the handful of checks, but had merely rolled his eyes up to the tops of their sockets. His eyes, hooded beneath his brow, lent his face a demonic cast. The banker glanced at the others. They were all staring at him, expecting him to speak, but he wasn't sure he wanted to any longer.

  He swallowed again, hard.

  "It is just-" D'Ailerons hesitated, fearful of what he was about to say. He closed his eyes. Perhaps it would be easier if he didn't have to look at Nils Schatz. "Does Mr. Kluge know of all this?" he blurted.

  His question was met with silence. After what seemed like an eternity of utter quiet, Monsieur d'Ailerons opened his eyes. Nils Schatz was staring at him with those icy, washed-out blue eyes.

  "What do you mean?" the German asked flatly. D'Ailerons swallowed again. His throat had turned to dust.

  "With respect, Herr Schatz, you informed me when we began these transactions many months ago that this operation had the blessing of Herr Kluge," the banker said.

  "And?"

  "I have learned of some irregularities in the accounting methods of my subordinates. These were per your specific instructions, I am told."

  "And?" Schatz repeated coldly.

  "The way it has been done lends one the impression of someone attempting to cover his tracks," d'Ailerons suggested. "There has been much money taken from IV accounts but in a most secretive manner. It is almost as if you are...embezzling the funds, Herr Schatz."

  Schatz finally lifted his head completely. Frigid eyes stared fully at Monsieur d'Ailerons.

  "That is a very interesting conjecture," Schatz said thoughtfully. "Do you realize, d'Ailerons, that in my younger days I might have killed you with my own hands for even suggesting that I was a thief?" Some might have treated the words as a joke. Not Nils Schatz. Schatz never joked. He stared, unsmiling, at the banker.

  D' Ailerons shrugged helplessly. "I did not mean to insult, surely. If you give your word that Herr Kluge knows of this, then I consider the matter settled." He nodded emphatically. He suddenly noticed that his desk drawer was still open. He made a great show of closing and locking it once more.

  "I have already told you Herr Kluge approved of the appropriation of funds," Schatz said slowly.

  "Indeed," d'Ailerons said with a carefree motion of one shaking hand. "Absolutely. That is that." He clapped his hands together to brush off the last remnants of some imaginary dust.

  "Who have you mentioned this to?" Schatz pressed.

  "Pardon me?"

  "This-" Schatz waved his cane in the air "-this notion of yours?"

  D'Ailerons was suddenly deeply offended.

  "No one, sir, certainly. It was only a thought. I am certain Herr Kluge has his reasons for conducting business in this manner. Remember, the Banque de Richelieu has had a history with IV going back to the war."

  "I am aware of your fine history, Frenchman," Schatz offered contemptuously.

  "Yes." The banker fussed with his desktop, not making eye contact with any of the men in the room. D'Ailerons was uncomfortable now for an altogether other reason. He knew of the bank's shaky history prior to World War II and of its sudden revival immediately after the war. Back then, through circuitous means, IV had bailed the bank out of its immediate financial difficulties. In the time since, the Banque de Richelieu had been more indebted than its owners would have liked to the secret organization.

  "I will let you in on a little secret, d'Ailerons," Nils Schatz whispered. He leaned over the desk. His cane-clenched in his fist-rested parallel to the desk surface. "Your assumptions are correct. The money you have given me these many months? All stolen from the coffers of IV."

  D'Ailerons was taken aback by Schatz's candor. He began fussing at his desk more furiously. He straightened his blotter, pen and pencil holder, and a small bronze barometer that had been a gift from his sister.

  "I am certain you have your reasons." The banker nodded sharply. The pounding of his heart made his ears ring.

  He had suspected Schatz was stealing. Now, confronted with an admission of guilt, he wished more than anything he had kept his suspicions to himself.

  "Oh, I have a reason," Schatz said, voice still low.

  "Of course," d'Ailerons agreed. He studied the corners of his blotter.

  "Look at me!" Schatz screamed, his voice suddenly loud and shrill in the tiny office. Even his own men were startled by the sudden jarring change.

  D'Ailerons's head snapped up as if shocked by electricity. Schatz leaned back and aimed the bronze end of his walking stick accusingly at d'Ailerons.

  "I mean to finish what was started more than fifty years ago by a visionary the world has chosen to blindly vilify. Kluge does not appreciate the importance of the goal. We do," he said, indicating with a swirl of his cane the other men in the room. "You have given us the funds we need to see this vision to fruition."

  Schatz still clenched the bank notes in his other hand. He held them aloft. One of the older men dutifully collected them and tucked them away in the pocket of his black suit jacket.

  D'Ailerons didn't know how to respond. In the next moment it didn't matter.

  "I suppose I should thank you for your generous help these many months," Schatz said with an indifferent shrug. "I think, however, that I will not."

  The cane was up in an instant, held firmly in the German's hands. Using a batter's grip, he swung the metal tip at the man behind the desk. It met with the side of Monsieur d'Ailerons's head with a resounding crack.

  The banker's bifocals were thrown from the tip of his nose. They clattered across the floor.

  Schatz brought the cane back and swung. Another crack. This shattered the bone into the brain and brought blood to the surface. D'Ailerons fell forward.

  Again.

  Swing and hit.

  D'Ailerons was sprawled across his desk by now. Blood seeped out, staining his blotter.

  Feverishly, wildly, Schatz pounded him again and again. His eyes sparked with an internal rage as he brought the cane repeatedly down atop the battered head of the banker, dead now for minutes.

  Blood spattered across Schatz's clothes and around the walls of the office. His men backed away at first, avoiding the spray. Eventually they stepped in, pulling Schatz away from the mangled corpse.

  He allowed himself to be restrained.

  The end of the cane was covered with blood and gore. D'Ailerons's face was an unrecognizable pulp. Panting, catching his breath, Schatz went around the desk. He used the tail of the banker's jacket to clean the reddish slush from his walking stick. Once it was clean, he pulled his handkerchief from his pocket.

  "The Frenchman always shuts off all of the alarms and cameras. Perhaps now we should liberate what we can from the vault?" He wiped at the blood on his face with his handkerchief. "I believe, after all, that this may be our last chance for a withdrawal."

  "Go," one of the older men ordered. The two young men with the shaved heads left as directed. One of the older men went along, as well, in order to keep an eye on them.

  As the rest of them were leaving the office, Schatz cast a last glance at the late Monsieur d'Ailerons. He tipped his head pensively.

  "I have always found the company of the French to be invigorating," he said without malice or humor. He glanced at his men. "For their sakes let us hope they feel the same."

  Still breathing heavily, Schatz left the office.

  The lifeblood of Monsieur d'Ailerons ran in drizzly red rivulets from the gleaming desk surface.

  Chapter 4

  Before the morning sun had even peeked over the easternmost horizon of the continental United States, Harold W. Smith was snappin
g off his alarm clock. As usual, he had shut off the alarm a minute before it was due to sound.

  Sitting up on the edge of the bed, Smith slipped his feet into his ratty slippers. Behind him his wife continued to snore lazily beneath the covers. He left her there in the dark, oblivious to her husband's movements.

  While his wife and his nation slept on, Smith made his careful way across the cold floor to the bathroom. As a boy there was an expression common to his native Vermont. "Up with the sun," people used to say. Even as a child Smith had always considered to be slugabeds those whose day began only with the inevitable arrival of a star.

  Smith was always up before the sun. After all, there was always much to be done.

  This had been Smith's guiding principle his entire life. There was always much to be done. And, he noted ruefully, more and more these days there seemed less time in which to do it.

  He shut the creaking bathroom door behind him. Only then did he turn on the light.

  For a time a few years before, he had thought that the dull fluorescent glow of the light was casting unflattering shadows across his gray features. It was giving him the appearance of an old man. Eventually he had realized that the light was only reflecting reality. Smith was old.

  Somehow age had taken firm hold of Dr. Harold W. Smith and-like a dog with a tattered rag-refused to let go.

  He felt old now as he took his antiquated straight razor from the medicine cabinet.

  Smith wasn't a man given to extravagances of any kind. He considered shaving cream to be just such an unnecessary expense. First lathering up his face with soap, he went to work with the sharp edge of the razor.

  The cost of heating the water was avoided simply enough. Harold Smith set the tap on Cold. Miraculously Smith somehow managed to get through the same ritual every morning without slicing in his gaunt, gray flesh. It required a knack that few men had. Nor were there many men who would want to develop this skill.

  He allowed himself tepid water in the shower. Smith had had difficulties with his pacemaker-equipped heart in recent years and didn't wish to jar his system any more than was absolutely necessary. Ice water from the showerhead-no matter how bracing he had claimed it to be in youth-could easily give him a heart attack at his age.

  His morning bathroom ritual over, Smith reentered the bedroom.

  As always he had laid his clothes out the night before. It was easy enough getting dressed in the dark.

  His wife continued to snore softly from beneath the massive pile of bedcovers. He watched her sleep as he drew on his gray three-piece suit.

  How many mornings have I left her like this? Smith wondered.

  He knew how many years it had been. Fifty. Fifty years of marriage. Quite an accomplishment in this day and age.

  They had married young. After Smith had returned from the war.

  Maude Smith had stuck by him during those early days when the war's Office of Strategic Services was being transformed into the peacetime CIA. She had been a dutiful wife up to and beyond the time of Smith's "retirement." When he had settled in as director of Folcroft Sanitarium, a private health facility here in Rye, New York, Maude Smith had gone with him. Just as any good wife would.

  What Maude never knew-could never know-was that Harold Smith hadn't retired from the intelligence service.

  His appointment as head of Folcroft had been a cover. The sleepy sanitarium on the shores of Long Island Sound was in reality the headquarters of the supersecret government organization CURE. Smith had been its one and only director for more than thirty-four years.

  As the incorruptible head of CURE, Smith directed vast amounts of information to covertly aid law-enforcement agencies in their fight against crime. Set up as an organization whose mandate was to rescue a country so endangered that the Constitution had become an impediment, CURE used extralegal means to achieve its ends.

  If his quietly sleeping wife only knew the power wielded by the nondescript gray man who had shared her bed for the past five decades, she would have been shocked. And Maude Smith would have been even more stunned to learn that her seemingly unassuming Harold would have liked nothing more than to level the most fearsome power at his disposal directly at the woman whom Mrs. Smith had considered to be her best friend for the past fifteen years.

  The lump beneath the mound of blankets stirred. The snoring grunted to a stop.

  "Are you going to work, Harold?" Her voice was hoarse in the early-morning hours.

  "Yes, dear."

  "Don't forget our flight,"

  "I won't, Maude."

  Maude Smith was already rolling over. Already going back to sleep. The snoring resumed.

  Smith left her in the predawn darkness. Let her enjoy the rest he couldn't. He made his quiet way downstairs.

  Two minutes later, Smith was backing his rusting station wagon out of his driveway.

  Four houses down he passed the sleeping home of Gertrude Higgins, a matronly widow who had made it her business to regularly poke her nose into the affairs of everyone else in the neighborhood.

  Gert Higgins was the person against whom Smith had-however fleetingly-contemplated employing the most lethal power in CURE's arsenal.

  Of course, it had only been a flight of fancy. Brought on by...what?

  Not anger. There was little that could get Smith truly angry these days. He had seen so much that inspired anger in his long life that he had become desensitized to much of it.

  What Smith felt was just a hair over the other side of perturbed. This peevishness had surfaced the day Maude Smith had presented him with the plane tickets.

  It was for their fiftieth wedding anniversary, she had said. He worked so hard. Other people had vacations. They had never gone anywhere together.

  The list was well-rehearsed. It was unlike Maude Smith to do anything as spontaneous as purchasing airline tickets to Europe. Even to celebrate fifty years of marriage.

  It hadn't taken Smith long to learn that it was Gert Higgins who had pushed Maude along. She was the one who had encouraged Maude to buy the tickets without "bothering poor, overworked Harold."

  Of course, his first impulse was to return the tickets.

  Maude had prepaid for them.

  He was going to cash them in just the same. He had even gone so far as to contact the airline from his computer at Folcroft. But at the last minute he hesitated.

  Fifty years.

  There was a small part of Smith that felt a pang of guilt for the many years of deceit. For the years of placing his own life in danger without concern for his family. For years of being a bad husband.

  In the end Smith had kept the tickets.

  His wife had been overjoyed. Her reaction had produced even more guilt. The feeling had lasted several weeks.

  Later that afternoon Harold and Maude Smith were scheduled to leave for Europe together. A couple in the twilight of their years enjoying a second honeymoon together. And Harold W. Smith had every intention of hating every minute of his time away.

  For now, Smith had work to do. As the earliest streaks of dawn painted the sky, Harold Smith crawled through the silent streets of Rye to Folcroft.

  Chapter 5

  When Claude Civray had first come to work at the old deminage depot in the town of Guise one hundred miles northeast of Paris, he was more than just a little ill at ease. After all, he knew the history of the depository for old mines.

  The depot had originally been constructed on the banks of the Oise River. A foolish decision, it was later learned, as no one had taken into account the fact that water had a messy tendency to rust metal. If such a consideration had been entertained, the location would certainly have been changed because no one at the Guise facility wanted the metal casings of the old mines to deteriorate.

  It had.

  The French government only discovered the shoddiness of its planning when the original facility had blown itself to kingdom come after a particularly soggy spring.

  Afterward the Guise depot had
been moved far away from the river. It was an easy move. After the explosion, what was left of the base fit into the back of an old dairy farmer's truck.

  The accident had occurred back in 1951. The French government was never certain what had caused the base to go up the way it had. It could have been a sudden jostling of stored materials. A guard might have tripped and fell.

  Eventually the blame was placed on a single chain-smoking watchman and a carelessly discarded cigarette. However, this was mere speculation. The real truth of what had happened would never be learned. Fiery death had erased all traces.

  Claude wasn't sure what had caused the accident, either. But one thing was certain. Given the possibility of even a kernel of truth to the rumor, Claude Civray never, ever smoked at work.

  He toured the facility now, cigarettes tucked away inside his pocket, careful of where he stepped. Though it was night, there were small spotlights positioned at strategic points around the various yards and buildings.

  Claude found that the lights helped very little. Several had been angled, it seemed, to blind a casual stroller. One misstep and it could be 1951 all over again.

  Worse than 1951. There were many more bombs now.

  They were everywhere. Even in the shadows cast by the uncertain spotlights, Claude could make out the rusted casings piled high in the open yards. It wouldn't take much to set them off.

  France had had the unlucky fate of being a focal point of the two major global conflicts of the modern era. For the French people, even after the armies had left, the wars were not over. By some estimates more than twelve million unexploded shells from World War I alone lay hidden in the fields and forests of Verdun.

  The closer an area was to conflict, the more densely packed were the bombs that were left behind. And while Guise was certainly not Verdun, it had still seen its share of military action.

  More than its share, if anyone had bothered to ask Claude Civray.

  Claude was acutely aware that there were dozens of deaths or injuries every year directly attributed to shells that turned up in unexpected places. French farmers tilling their fields seemed to suffer casualties most frequently.