16
“I’m Nils Brooks of the MFAA.” He waited a beat, then asked, “Ever heard of the MFAA?”
Kellen searched her memory, came up with the correct title. “Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives?”
“That’s it. How did you know?”
“I saw the movie. I read the book. I…found some treasure. The MFAA is the Monuments Men.” He wasn’t going to fool her. “But don’t tell me you’re from the MFAA. The group was disbanded after World War II.”
“Can you say secret government agency?” His voice held a trace of humor.
“No, I can’t.” She didn’t believe it. She didn’t believe him.
“Don’t blame you. I came here from Washington, DC. The whole place is rife with liars, thieves and politicians. But I’m none of those things.”
“You’re saying you’re part of a secret government agency?”
“Who else would care about a smuggling ring using Yearning Sands Resort as a delivery depot?”
“Smuggling?” She didn’t stutter and she didn’t shriek. Points to her.
“Those lights you saw aren’t UFOs.” He was nothing more than a voice in the darkness, but he wasn’t trying to circle her or play her. “You’ve got your sidearm. Come on and we’ll talk.” He turned his back and headed for his cottage.
She sorted through his options, and hers.
He had been waiting in the dark. When she stepped out of her cottage, he could have attacked her, raped her, killed her. He hadn’t. Obviously, that made him a gem of a man.
Her own cynicism let her know she hadn’t lost herself to all sense. So she would listen, pistol in hand, and wait to see what Nils Brooks said about mysterious lights on an empty plain where today a body had been found.
She followed him to his cottage. His porch light was on; he ran up the steps, unlocked the door—no fumbling this time—opened it and walked in.
The light streamed out, an inviting square of brightness on the porch boards.
She glanced toward the dock.
That light had blinked out.
She slowly followed, keeping the Glock pointed at him.
He shed his raincoat, hung it on the rack, moved into the kitchen, filled the kettle with water and put it on the stove. He faced her, leaned against the counter and crossed his arms and his ankles.
She stood in the open doorway and studied him.
His act of aimless buffoonery had vanished. Nils Brooks actually was smart enough to wear rain gear and keep track of his pass card. His brown eyes were sharp, yet his glasses were nowhere in sight. The well-toned body she noted earlier now seemed less of a surprise and more of a weapon. “You’ve committed yourself. You might as well come in,” he said.
She stepped across the threshold but hesitated about shutting the door. When he sighed, she snapped, “Pardon me if I don’t want to be one of those women in the movies who hear a noise downstairs, light a candle because the power is mysteriously out and go to investigate.”
He laughed.
Whoa. Those dimples.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll give you that.”
Kellen didn’t smile back. “I had never considered the possibility of smuggling here. Washington is so…”
“Wild? Free? Pure? Organic?” He did sarcasm well.
Which made her feel enough at ease to gently push the door almost shut. “Off the beaten track.”
“It’s Washington. Crazy weather, close to Canada, isolated and insular. There’s a Coast Guard station south of here and one north, good guys, but they’re spread thin and they’ve got a lot of jobs—water rescues, port security, defense readiness and that concern of ours, catching smugglers.”
“Smuggling…what? Drugs?” Kellen’s new security job got more and more onerous by the second.
“That. Immigrants. Anything the bad guys can carry, really. That’s what interests the Coast Guard.” His dimples disappeared. “But not the MFAA. Not me.”
“No, I suppose not. Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives… We’re talking about antiques, cultural treasures.”
“Exactly. There’s a lot of money involved in moving stolen art and looted treasure. Enough to kill for.”
“Kill who?”
“That girl you found today. And Jessica Diaz. The MFAA director.” The kettle started whistling. He lifted two mugs off their hooks. “What do you want? Coffee? Tea? Hot chocolate? Don’t even bother with herbal. You’ll need some kind of caffeine. You’re not going to get any more sleep tonight.”
“What’s going to happen tonight?”
“We’re going to talk. I’m going to fill you in on the situation.”
She latched the door with her heel. Maybe she was that woman in the movie, but she didn’t think so. She might not trust him, not yet, but for some reason she didn’t yet know, he needed her. She placed her Glock on the end table, peeled off her rain gear and hung them beside his and seated herself in a chair facing him. She picked up her pistol and let it rest on the seat beside her hip, pointed it toward the floor.
He watched from the kitchen. “Your trust in me is touching.”
“And easily revoked. I’ll have broth. My body needs at least the pretense of nutrition.”
“Smart.” He used hot water and two dry packets to make two cups of broth. He picked them both up, so his hands were full, and gingerly placed one at her elbow. He backed away and seated himself across the room. “There. Far enough away for you to relax a little, close enough for you to shoot me if you need to.”
That smile, those dimples, that charm irritated her. “I hope I don’t need to. Now—tell me why the government would revive an agency dead for so many years.”
“Look it up. You’re not going to believe anything I tell you, so look it up.”
Fair enough. She pulled out her phone, went online and typed in MFAA. Lots of World War II history, a brief note of its dissolution in 1946 and an even briefer note on its recent revival.
So it wasn’t a secret agency. It was an underreported agency. Suspiciously underreported.
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped loosely. “Are you aware of what’s happening with the world’s treasured historical sites?”
“They’re being looted.” Kellen searched for Jessica Diaz, head of the MFAA.
“More than that. The way it used to work was—local people would search out tombs, archaeological sites, strip them of artifacts and sell them at the market for whatever they could get. The practice supplemented what was usually a poverty-stricken existence, and the pieces of art moved through a chain of resalers to end up on the shelves of wealthy collectors.” He made that all sound like a good thing. “The whole operation was inefficient.” He paused. “How’s the research going?”
“I found Jessica Diaz, first head of the MFAA, but information gives only her date of death in the line of duty.” A pretty Hispanic woman, thirty years old, soft-looking and smiling.
He nodded. “Keep researching.”
Kellen typed in Who is Jessica Diaz’s MFAA successor?
He continued, “Terrorist groups realized what a gold mine—sometimes literally—the antiquities trade could be. They could fund their armies with the money they made stripping every historical site of every ancient piece of art, literature and relic. The previously random looting became organized. The locals were either pushed out or conscripted and forced to find valuable artifacts and hand them over to the terrorists.”
Google showed no answer to her question, nothing but the usual hodgepodge of internet weirdness. “You, um, don’t seem to be a member of the MFAA.”
“I didn’t choose to post my unfortunate promotion. That would be stupid, wouldn’t it?”
It would. But she didn’t have to admit it out loud.
“Search for the Brooks family of Charleston, South Carolina,” he said. “I’ll come up.”
She did as he suggested and found an old and formidable dynasty—and there he was, part of a family shot that included an elderly matriarch, a nervous-looking mother, six languid uncles, no father and enough cousins to populate a small island. Which apparently they did and had for generations among varying amounts of scandal.
Kellen flicked a glance at Nils’s photo and then at his face.
NILS BROOKS:
MALE, 30S, 6’, 180 LBS., BROWN HAIR (BLOND ROOTS?), BROWN EYES (COMPELLING), LONG LASHES, MILITARY HAIRCUT. NARROW JAW. DARK-RIMMED GLASSES (USED AS DISGUISE). CUTE. HANDSOME. NERDY. CONFIDENT. CLOTHING: EXPENSIVE, WELL-WORN. MEMBER OF SOUTH CAROLINA’S DISTINGUISHED BROOKS DYNASTY. GRADUATE OF DUKE UNIVERSITY. LEADER OF NEWLY RE-FORMED MFAA (AS REPORTED BY HIM).
Perhaps her background made her too suspicious.
Maybe she was smart to be suspicious. Her first impression of Nils Brooks had proved to be massively inaccurate. He had set out to deceive, and he had succeeded. In so many ways, he reminded her of Gregory… “You’re saying the terrorists don’t care how they achieve their goals or who or what is hurt in the process.”
“Terrorists are terrorists. They want the world to go up in flames, and they don’t care how it comes about.”
“As long as their cause is the winner.”
“Of course.”
“What you’re telling me is interesting. Fishy, but interesting. But the job of the MFAA in World War II was to—” she looked at her screen and read “‘—to safeguard historic and cultural monuments from war damage, and as the conflict came to a close, to find and return works of art and other items of cultural importance that had been stolen by the Nazis or hidden for safekeeping.’ I can’t believe the MFAA in its current inception will be terrorist fighters.”
“Reopening the MFAA was our idea, Jessica’s and mine. The declared intention of the agency is to interrupt the flow of cash. That’s the only reason we were able to convince the Feds to green-light the restoration of the agency.”
Good, succinct, sensible answer. She wanted good, succinct, sensible answers, because everything she’d looked up so far checked out. But was it possible to manipulate the internet, to make everything conveniently fit? Of course it was. Lies were made truth all the time. The MFAA website was a dot-gov website, so maybe that made it supervised?
Yes, by someone in the US government.
She was so right not to trust this information.
Nils continued, “No one else in the government thought to go at the problem of terrorist funding, but I did.”
“Why’s that?”
“I’m an art major.”
She couldn’t help it. The tension in the cottage was so high and the idea of this manly man studying art was so funny—she grinned.
He didn’t seem to see the humor.
She swallowed the grin and asked, “So what is your agenda with reopening the MFAA? Don’t you want to interrupt the flow of cash to terrorists?”
“Very much so. But more than that, I want to save the museums, the tombs, the libraries. Ancient cultures should be preserved, not destroyed.” He sounded a little like Indiana Jones in the Last Crusade. “When I went for the degree, I knew what I was getting into, job-and salary-wise, so I joined the CIA and got a graduate degree in tough guy.”
“What about the Marines?”
“I served time with them on a mission.”
That explained a lot. His fighting technique, his ferreting out of her military background, his ability to blend into the crowd and pass himself off as a harmless, bumbling author… Sure. CIA tough guy. He had been trained to deceive. But—“Why are you here?” she asked. “You said this was a smuggling depot. That means Yearning Sands Resort is one of many. Why are you here instead of—” she waved an expansive arm “—in Louisiana or Florida or San Diego or Cancún?”
He stood.
She lifted her pistol.
He retrieved a long piece of paper from the stack on the kitchen counter and held it toward her. “Here’s a list of antiquities shipments that we’ve identified over the past five years and, if possible, what they were and where they were delivered.”
She stood up, grabbed the spreadsheet, returned to her seat and studied it. “On the East Coast, it looks as if most art and artifacts were European or Middle Eastern in origin and delivered to wealthy collectors across the country. West Coast—Far Eastern and Central and South American artifacts. Makes sense.”
He pulled out another spreadsheet, handed it to her. “Here’s a list of the bodies we’ve found and approximate dates of their deaths.” He sat back down. “We assume others are undiscovered.”
She examined the list. Eight bodies over the past five years, on both coasts, in remote coastal areas off the beaten track. She compared the two lists. “Huh. The center of the action seems to be here.”
He leaned back in his seat and radiated satisfaction. “That’s what Jessie saw, too. What I saw.”
“With shipments coming in on both coasts—”
“Which we at first didn’t recognize.”
“—and a murder here and a murder there…”
“We couldn’t see a pattern for a long time.”
“It’s not certain.”
“It is if we all saw it. That’s why I decided to bring you in. I’ve read your profile. You can put it all together.”
Yes, she could. “Who’s in charge of the smuggling?” she asked.