"Only God knows the hell they suffered," Acosta muttered, his face reddening with anger, the bile rising in his throat. He fingered a cross hanging around his neck. "How were they murdered?"
"No sign of bullet injuries. They must have suffocated after being sealed in."
"Those who gave the orders for this mass execution must pay."
"They're probably dead, killed in the slaughter around Manila by MacArthur's army. And if they're still breathing, their trail is cold. The Allies in the Pacific were too forgiving. No prolonged manhunt was launched after those responsible for atrocities, like the Jews did with the Nazis. If they haven't been found and hanged by now, they never will."
"They must still pay," Acosta repeated, his anger turned to frustrated hatred.
"Don't waste thoughts on revenge," said Mancuso. "Our job is to locate the gold."
He walked toward the first truck in a long column that stood parked amid the dead. The tires were flattened and the canvas top over the bed had rotted under the constant drip of the water. He jerked down the rusty tailgate and shone his light inside. Except for a litter of wood from broken crates it was empty.
A foreboding began to squeeze Mancuso's stomach. He rushed to the next truck, carefully stepping around and over the dead, his boots splashing in the slime-covered water. His sweat from the dampness had turned cold. He needed a strong effort of will to go on, a growing fear now of what he might not find.
The second truck was empty, as were the next six. Two hundred meters into the tunnel, he came to a blockage from a cave-in that his miner's eye recognized as caused by explosives. But the shocker was the sight of a small auto house trailer whose modern aluminum construction did not fit in the time frame of the 1940s. There were no signs on the sides, but Mancuso noted the manufacturer's markings on the tires.
He climbed a metal stand of steps and stopped in the doorway, playing the beam of his flashlight around the interior. It was furnished as an office, the kind often seen on construction sites.
Acosta came up, followed by four of his men who unreeled the cable to his floodlight. He stood back and lit the entire trailer in a bright halo.
"Where in hell did this come from?" Acosta said in astonishment.
"Bring your light inside," said Mancuso, his worst fear realized.
With the added brightness they could see the trailer was clean. The desks were uncluttered, the wastebaskets emptied, and no ashtrays were to be seen anywhere. The only sign of previous occupancy was a construction worker's hardhat perched on a hook and a large blackboard hung on one wall.
Mancuso studied the lined columns. The numerals were in Arabic, while the headings were written in katakana symbols.
"A schedule?" asked Acosta.
"An inventory of the treasure."
Acosta sank into a chair in back of a desk. "Gone, all of it smuggled away."
"About twenty-five years ago, according to a date on the board."
"Marcos?" asked Acosta. "He must have gotten here first."
"No, not Marcos," Mancuso answered as though he'd always known the truth. "The Japanese. They returned, took the gold, and left us with the bones."
Curtis Meeker parked his wife's Mercury Cougar and casually strode the three blocks to Ford's Theater between E and F streets on Tenth. He buttoned his overcoat against the brisk fall air and fell in step with a group of senior citizens who were on a late Saturday evening walking tour of the capital city.
Their guide stopped them in front of the theater where John Wilkes Booth had shot Abraham Lincoln and gave a brief lecture before taking them across the street to the Petersen House where the President had died. Unobtrusively, Meeker slipped away, flipped his federal shield at the doorman, and passed into the lobby of the theater. He conversed briefly with the manager and then sat down on a sofa, where he appeared to be calmly reading a program.
To any late first-nighters who quickly passed by Meeker to their seats, he looked like an indifferent theatergoer who was bored with the restaging of a late-nineteenth-century play based on the Spanish-American War and preferred to sit it out in the lobby.
Meeker was definitely not a tourist or a theatergoer. His title was Deputy Director of Advanced Technical Operations, and he seldom went anywhere at night except to his office, where he studied satellite intelligence photos.
He was basically a shy man who rarely spoke more than one or two sentences at a time, but he was highly respected by intelligence circles as the best satellite photo analyst in the business. He was what women refer to as a nice-looking man, black hair specked with gray, kind face, easy smile, and eyes that reflected friendliness.
While his attention seemed locked on the program, one hand slipped into a pocket and pressed a button on a transmitter.
Inside the theater Raymond Jordan was fighting to stay awake. Under his wife's sideways glare he yawned as a defense against the hundred-year-old dialogue. Mercifully, to the audience sitting in the old-style hard seats, the plays and acts at Ford's Theatre were short. Jordan twisted to a more comfortable position in the hard wooden seat and allowed his mind to drift from the play to a fishing trip he'd planned for the following day.
Suddenly his revery was broken by three soft beeps on a digital watch on his wrist. It was what was called a Delta watch because of the code it received, and was labeled as a Raytech so it looked ordinary and wouldn't stand out. He cupped one hand over the crystal display that lit up on the dial. The Delta code alerted him to the severity of the situation and indicated someone would fetch or meet him.