Tracker (Sigma Force 7.5)

He pulled out the chair by the desk and offered her a seat, while he perched on the edge of the bed. He glanced to the video feed and saw that Kane continued to track the two men, now carrying their third teammate, groggy and slung between them. The group threaded through a series of narrow winding streets.

He kept the phone on his knee as he faced her. “So maybe now you can tell me how much trouble I’m in, Miss—?”

She tried to smile but failed. “Barta. Aliza Barta.” Tears suddenly welled, as the breadth of events finally struck her. She looked away. “I don’t know what’s going on. I came from London to meet my father—or rather look for him. He is a professor at the Budapest University of Jewish Studies.”

Aliza glanced back at him to see if he knew the university.

When he could only give her a blank expression, she continued, some family pride breaking through her tears. “It’s one of the most distinguished universities of rabbinical studies, going back to the mid-1800s. It’s the oldest institution in the world for training and graduating rabbis.”

“Is your father a rabbi?”

“No. He is a historian, specifically researching Nazi atrocities, with a special emphasis on the looting of Jewish treasures and wealth.”

“I’ve heard about attempts to find and return what was stolen.”

She nodded. “A task that will take decades. To give you some scale, the British Ministry that I work for in London estimates that the Nazis looted $27 trillion from the nations they conquered. And Hungary was no exception.”

“And your father was investigating these crimes on Hungarian soil?” Tucker began to get an inkling of the problem here: missing historian, lost Nazi treasures, and now the Hungarian national security service involved.

Someone had found something.

“For the past decade he had been researching one specific theft. The looting of the Hungarian National Bank near the end of the war. A Nazi SS officer—Oberführer Erhard Bock—and his team absconded with thirty-six cases of gold bullion and gems valued today at $92 million. According to reports at the time, it was all loaded onto a freighter steaming up the Danube, headed to Vienna, but the party was bombed by fighter planes, and the treasure was jettisoned overboard, near where the Morava River joins the Danube.”

“And this treasure was never found.”

“Which struck my father as odd, since this theft was so well known, as was its fate. And the mouth of the Morava River is quite shallow that time of year, made even shallower by a two-year-old drought at the time. To my father, it seemed like someone would have found those heavy crates before the river mud claimed them.”

“But your father had another theory, didn’t he?”

Her bright eyes found his. “He thinks the treasure was never removed but hidden somewhere here in Budapest, stashed away until Erhard Bock considered it safe to return. Of course, that never happened, and on his deathbed, Bock hinted that the treasure was still here, claiming it was buried below where even the claws of the Jewish dead could reach it.”

Tucker sighed. “Like they say, once a Nazi, always a Nazi.”

“Then, two days ago, my father left me a cryptic message on my answering machine. Claimed he had made a breakthrough, from a clue he had discovered in some newly restored archive of the university’s library, something from the Prague cave.”

“The Prague cave?”

A nod, then Aliza explained, “The university library here contains the largest collection of Jewish theological and historical literature outside of Israel. But when German troops marched into the city, they immediately closed the rabbinical university and turned it into a prison. However, just before that happened, the most valuable manuscripts were hidden in an underground safe. But a significant number of important documents—three thousand books—were sent to Prague, where Adolf Eichmann planned the construction of a Museum of an Extinct Race in the old Jewish Quarter.”

“What a nice guy.”

“It took until the eighties for that cache of books to be found in a cave beneath Prague. They were restored to the library here after the fall of Communism in 1989.”

“And your father discovered something in one of those recovered books.”

She faced him, scrunching up her face. “In a geology text, of all places. On the message, he asked for my help with the British Ministry to obtain satellite data. Something my father in Hungary couldn’t easily access.”

“What sort of data?”

“Ground-penetrating radar information from a U.S. geophysical satellite. He needed a deep-earth scan of the district of Pest on the far side of the Danube.”

She glanced out the window toward the river as the spread of the city glowed against the coming night. “After I got that message, I tried calling him for more details, but I never heard back. After twenty-four hours, I got concerned and asked a friend to check his apartment. She reported that his flat had been ransacked, torn apart, and my father was missing. So I caught the first flight down here. I spent the day with the Hungarian police, but they had barely made any headway and promised to keep me informed. When I got back to my hotel room, I found the door broken open, and all my luggage searched, the room turned over.”

She glanced at him. “I didn’t know what else to do, didn’t know who to trust, so I fled and ended up at the square. I was sure someone was watching me, following me, but I thought maybe I was being paranoid. What could anyone want with me? What were they looking for?”

“Did you ever get that satellite information your father asked about?”

Her eyes widened, and her fingers went to the pocket of her coat. She removed a tiny USB flash drive. “Is this what they were looking for?”

“That, and possibly you. To use you as leverage against your father.”

“But why? Where could my father be?”

Tucker stared down at the cell phone on his knee. The party that Kane tracked had reached a parked sedan beyond the historical district. He saw Kane slow to a stop and slink back into the shadows nearby. The leader was easy to spot, leaning against the hood, a cell phone pressed to his ear.

“Maybe these guys can tell us,” he said. “Do you speak Hungarian?”

“I do. My family is from here. We lost most everyone following the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. But a few survived.”

He patted the bed next to him. “Then listen to this.”