Tipton shook his head. “Not a soul, so my dad assumed nobody knew about it but him. The crumpled sheet of paper, though, was another matter. Henry Morgenthau came to my father a few days after they buried FDR. He seemed to know all about what Mellon had done. Apparently the president told him, too.”
She knew her history. Morgenthau had worked as Treasury secretary for nearly the entire twelve years Roosevelt served. He was perhaps the closest friend and adviser Roosevelt had.
“Morgenthau asked about the crumpled sheet. He wanted to know where it might be. So Dad gave it to him. He didn’t ask about the books in the crate or the dollar bill.”
“Can we see that dollar?” Danny asked.
“I thought you might want to, so I got it out.”
Tipton opened the top book in the stack on the side table and handed Danny an old, faded bill.
She saw that it displayed ink lines, forming a six-pointed star, that connected the five letters forming the word Mason.
Similar to the one Danny had created.
“According to my father,” Tipton said, “Mellon himself drew those lines and gave that bill to FDR. You can see that it’s a true 1935 issue. We don’t have bills like that anymore.”
She’d already noticed the biggest difference. No IN GOD WE TRUST was printed above the ONE. That didn’t come until the 1950s.
“Did your father ever find out anything about this bill?” Danny asked. “Any details?”
Tipton shook his head.
“Did he have any thoughts about that crumpled sheet?”
“He told me that what was on it made no sense. Just a few rows of random numbers.”
Stephanie instantly knew. “A code.”
Tipton nodded. “That’s what Roosevelt thought.”
“Why not have a cryptographer break it?” Danny asked.
“FDR wanted no one else involved, except him and my father. At least that’s what he told him. It was only later that Dad realized Morgenthau knew some of it, too.”
“Numbers could mean a substitution cipher,” she said. “They were popular between the time of the two world wars. The numbers represent letters, which form words. But you’d need the key from which the code was assembled. The master document. Without it, there’s little to no chance of breaking a cipher. That’s why they’re so effective.”
“Where’s the coffin?” the president asked.
Tipton pointed. “In the hall closet.”
“Do you have any idea what it is we’re facing?” Danny asked. “Anything?”
Tipton shook his head. “After Roosevelt died and Morgenthau took back the crumpled sheet, my father never dealt with this again. It seemed not to matter anymore. No one ever mentioned a word about it, so Dad just stored the crate away. I’ve held it since he died. Nobody, until yesterday, ever asked about it.”
“I don’t have to say that—”
Tipton held up a hand that halted the president’s warning. “I’ve kept this to myself for a long time, I can keep doing that.”
Stephanie had more questions, but a soft knock from the front door disturbed the silence. One of the agents stationed outside?
Tipton rose and answered.
The first man to enter the house was Edwin Davis, White House chief of staff. He was a tidy man, near her age, dressed in his usual dark suit, face alert and clean-shaven, nothing even hinting that it was the middle of the night. He acknowledged her with a smile and a wink. They’d been through a lot together and were close friends.
Davis faced his boss and said, “He’s here.”
She glanced at the president.
“When I arranged this meeting, I asked Mr. Tipton if we might borrow his den for another talk I need to keep private. He graciously agreed.”
“I’m going to bed, Mr. President,” Tipton said. “Please switch off the lights and lock the door on your way out.”
“I’ll do that. Thank you, again.”
“My father would have wanted nothing less from me.”
The older man headed for a staircase and climbed.
The next man to enter through the front door was in his fifties with Asian features. His thick black hair was long and cut stylishly. He wore a tailored suit—Armani, if she wasn’t mistaken—the jacket buttoned in front, his cordovan shoes polished to a mirror shine.
She knew the face.
Ambassador to the United States.
From the People’s Republic of China.
TWENTY-FIVE
VENICE
Isabella stood just inside the cruise terminal, near the customs stand. Passengers continued to stream out of the building, luggage trailing behind them. She was soaking wet, embarrassed, and angry. Luckily, her cell phone was waterproof, standard issue at Treasury. She’d not caught a look at the man who’d shoved her into the lagoon, only what he was wearing. She didn’t want to make the overseas call but had no choice. The Treasury secretary was waiting for a report, and he’d earlier made clear that success on her end was imperative.
“The documents are gone?” he asked, when she finished talking. “That’s what you’re saying.”
“My guess is we were made and whoever shoved me off that wharf was working with the woman.”
“We don’t even know who she is?”
“She only came into this during the past few hours. But if I had to guess, I’d say she’s working with Anan Wayne Howell.”
She’d read the transcripts from the intercepted phone calls and emails among Larks, Howell, and Kim. Though Kim had used an alias when communicating with both Americans, voice comparisons made at NSA confirmed his identity. Originally, Treasury’s plan had been to use this overseas trip as the perfect way to bring it all to a head since there would be no worries here about constitutional protections. Foreign intelligence operations ran on few to no rules. Just results.
“This is not good, Isabella. You know that, right?”
She hated failure, too. “Larks was killed for a reason. Kim had to have done it. Malone stumbled into this, and Kim tried to take him
out by implicating him in Larks’ death. The good thing is, I don’t think Kim has the documents, either. So he’s probably in a quandary.”
“The documents, Isabella, that’s what we’re after. That’s all we care about. I’m sorry Larks is dead, but he chose to deal with the devil. He got what people get when they do that. We have to retrieve those documents.”
She was the only agent assigned to this mission. Everything rested with her. “I found the trail before, I can find it again.”
Silence filled her ear for a few moments.
“Okay, stay with it. But another agency is about to be involved.”
And she knew who. “The Magellan Billet?”
“That’s right. You’re all Treasury has there, Isabella. This has to be contained. Do what you have to do.”
The call ended.
Damn, she’d screwed up bad. But where before it was just Larks and Kim, now an assortment of new characters had entered the field. Too many for her to know for certain who was who, or what was what. She was flying blind, and that was never a good thing. Perfection. That’s what her boss wanted and that’s what she’d deliver.
Her father and grandfather had both worked for the FBI, her grandfather as one of Hoover’s trusted assistants. Law enforcement coursed through her veins. She could think of nothing she’d rather do with her life. That was one reason why she remained unmarried. Men had never interested her, and she wondered if that might be more significant. But women carried no fascination, either. Work, that was her aphrodisiac. Her record with Treasury stood unblemished, her arrest and conviction rate superb. She’d investigated major bank fraud, embezzlements, government corruption, and countless tax evaders. Many Treasury agents were CPAs and dealt more with accounting. Her training was all law enforcement. The old-fashioned kind. Legwork and brains, working together. That’s what her father taught her.
She was thirty-six, but looked older, which she actually liked. She worked long and hard and had been fortunate. People envied her, that she knew. Since day one she’d felt a pressure to succeed, and the results spoke for themselves. Some of the biggest tax evaders in U.S. history went down thanks to her. A few years ago she gathered most of the damaging evidence in the massive United Bank of Switzerland debacle, which led to sweeping changes in Swiss bank secrecy. No mistakes there. That operation ran perfectly. She hated people who cheated the government. To her tax evasion was a form of treason. Government existed to protect the people, and the people owed their allegiance. To violate that trust, to steal from it, was tantamount to declaring war. Right is right, her grandfather would say. That it was. When he retired, J. Edgar Hoover himself was there to shake her grandfather’s hand. A photo of that moment hung in her office back in DC. One day, when her time was done, a president might congratulate her in the same way.