Typhoon Fury (Oregon Files 12)

“Then how am I supposed to do my appraisal?”

He sighed heavily, raised the phone to his mouth, and clicked a button. It must have doubled as a radio because Tagaan answered, “You can’t be done already.”

Dolap relayed her request.

“I’ll have someone bring a pen and notepad over,” Tagaan said.

Beth interrupted. “Not a pen, a pencil. Pens might damage the art.”

Dolap relayed her request.

“Fine,” Tagaan said. “A pencil. She can’t have Internet, but if there are any books she wants to download, we can give her a tablet computer.”

Dolap looked at Beth questioningly. She nodded and said, “That will be fine.” She recited the titles of several books, though she didn’t really need them. The appraisals would be complete guesswork anyway. She just had to make it look legitimate.

When Tagaan signed off, Dolap said, “How long will this take?”

“An hour, maybe.”

Dolap rolled his eyes. “What about for the other ten paintings?”

Beth looked at him, slack-jawed. “You mean there are more?”

He nodded, exasperated by her apparently stupid question.

“I’ll have to see them” was all she could say.

“Fine,” Dolap replied. “I’ll bring them out when you’re done with this.” He took a sip of his coffee and went back to playing with his phone.

While she waited for the items she’d requested, she mapped out a plan in her mind, surreptitiously checking out her position in relation to Dolap’s.

Beth decided that she’d have only one chance to make it work. Despite the risk, she had to try it if she wanted to get out of this place alive.

49

MANILA BAY

With the Corporation’s senior staff gathered in the boardroom, along with Raven, Juan nodded to Murph, who put Langston Overholt’s craggy face on the main view screen. Because of the thirteen-hour time difference between Washington and Manila, they could see the rainy late afternoon outside the CIA windows even though it was almost dawn where the Oregon was. Maurice finished serving mugs of coffee and breakfast pastries before closing the door behind him.

“I see a lot of bleary eyes there,” Overholt said in his gravelly baritone.

“We’ve had a busy few days,” Juan said, stifling a yawn. “Rack time has been hard to come by.”

“I don’t think what I’m about to tell you will help you sleep any better.” Overholt trained his eyes on Raven before saying, “By the way, Ms. Malloy, this conversation is strictly confidential, and you are bound by the security clearance you obtained while you were a military police officer.”

“Understood,” she said. She was the only one who wasn’t eagerly downing coffee, preferring orange juice to wash down her Danish.

“Have you been able to confirm that Typhoon was developed by the Army?” Juan asked.

“I’m afraid so,” Overholt said. “I pulled a few strings and obtained classified records from Dugway Proving Ground. They’ve been buried in a dusty storeroom for over seventy years. That is, until a chemist in an experimental lab out there found the file. Name’s Greg Polten. He and a colleague named Davis are now missing.”

“Do you think they sold the info to Salvador Locsin?”

“I doubt it. Apparently, using off-the-books wire transfers that we were able to track, Polten hired Gerhard Brekker to help him find more. Given what Ms. Malloy told us about his encounter with Locsin, it doesn’t sound like they were working together.”

Julia Huxley sat forward. “Mr. Overholt, what can you tell us about the drug?”

“The files are not complete, for reasons I’ll get to in a minute. The military considered U.S. involvement in the war inevitable in 1941, so we were conducting all sorts of experiments to see what kind of edge we could give our soldiers in battle. The use of methamphetamine for some of our bomber pilots was one unfortunate result of that project. But Typhoon was on a whole different level. Some in the community considered it a superdrug until its full effects were understood. Its original code name was TYPE-400N, but the scientists started calling it Typhoon.”