A Quarter for a Kiss Page 10

  During the announcements, a special prayer request was made for Eli Gold, who was said to be “in a coma at the hospital,” with no mention of the shooting, the sniper, or the vandalism. I supposed the pastor didn’t want to upset his more delicate parishioners.

  Through no fault of the choir, I found my mind wandering during the anthem. Tom and I had both felt it prudent to keep Eli’s notes with us at all times, and I just couldn’t concentrate knowing that right now the whole file was stuffed in my largest bag, which was on the pew next to me. I wanted to be in a worshipful mood, I really did, but I kept going over the case in my mind, working through it bit by bit. I knew if we couldn’t find more answers by poring through Eli’s files, our next step would probably be to get on a plane and go down to St. John and investigate Nadine firsthand.

  I asked the Lord to help me focus, and I was blessed in turn by a wonderful sermon. The pastor spoke of trust and faith, reminding us that even in the midst of an evil and sometimes-frightening world, God is still firmly in control. I realized that all of my prayers of late had been merely prayers of petition—give me this, help me with that. I resolved to spend some time on my knees tonight before going to bed, remembering to praise God for His sovereign magnificence.

  Once the service was over, we made a beeline for the door, knowing we didn’t have time to get caught up in any long conversations. We passed the red-headed soloist in the parking lot, and I did stop to take a moment to thank her for the beautiful song.

  “Kierstin, right?” I said, recalling her name from the bulletin. “That was amazing.”

  “Thanks,” she said, smiling shyly, and I realized she wasn’t more than 17 or 18 years old.

  “That’s a lot of voice for one so young,” I said to Tom as we drove away. “I’d give anything to be able to sing like that.”

  “I used to be a singer,” he said. “Had a garage band and everything.”

  “Are you any good?” I asked, laughing.

  “I’ll put it this way,” he replied. “There’s a reason we never got out of the garage.”

  We found Stella in the intensive care waiting room, as expected. Tom offered to run down to the cafeteria to get her a sandwich, which she gratefully accepted. Apparently she had had a steady stream of visitors all morning, but none of them had come bearing food.

  I was allowed to go in with her for her next visit, and together we spent those precious five minutes talking to Eli and encouraging him to wake up.

  Jodi was there in the waiting room when we came back out, so Tom and I left Stella in her capable hands and headed back to the condo to proceed with the case.

  By the time Tom and I arrived at the house again, I was eager to get down to work. As soon as the next-door neighbor saw us pull up, she came running over with several food items that well-wishers had brought. Tom handled her with warmth and charm while I disappeared into the bathroom to change into something a bit more comfortable. I slipped on jeans and a knit shirt and then hung my suit carefully on a hanger.

  Once the neighbor was gone, I came back out to the living room and tried calling my parents in Virginia. My dad needed to know that Eli had been shot, and I thought I ought to be the one to tell him.

  I reached my brother, Michael, instead, who had just stopped by our parents’ house to drop off some tools he had borrowed.

  “They’re not here,” he said. “I think there was a dinner on the grounds after church today or something. I went to the early service, so I didn’t pay much attention.”

  I glanced at my watch, calculating when they might be getting home.

  “You wanna leave a message for ’em?” he asked. “I can stick it on the fridge.”

  “Sure,” I replied, wondering what kind of message to leave. They didn’t need to find out the bad news from a Post-it Note. “Just put ‘Call Callie ASAP.’ They have my cell number.”

  I glanced up to see Tom gesturing to me. He was going into the kitchen to get himself some food, and he wondered if I wanted anything. I shook my head.

  “Where are you?” Michael asked.

  “Cocoa Beach, Florida. I’m at Stella Gold’s house.”

  “Oh, cool. How are they?”

  “Not well. Eli is…” My voice trailed off as I tried to think of the right words. “Eli’s in the hospital.”

  “Gosh, is he okay?”

  “No, he’s in a coma right now. He was shot by a sniper.”

  “You gotta be kidding. What’s going on? There’s not some new nutcase on the loose down there, is there, some random-shooting wacko?”

  “No, this seems to have been something altogether different. Eli was working a case, and I’m pretty sure it was related to that.”

  Michael was a cop, and as he asked me questions about the shooting, I could hear his voice slipping into “detective” mode. All business now, he wanted to know the who, what, when, why, where, and how of what had happened. I told him what I could but said that he needed to keep everything to himself for now. He promised not to tell a soul.

  “So what’s being done for Eli’s safety in the meantime?” he asked.

  “Tom hired a security service. They’re keeping a guard on duty around the clock.”

  “Good. Tom who?”

  “Tom Bennett,” I said, looking up to see him just coming back into the room, carrying a plate piled high with food. “My boss.”

  Tom looked up at that comment and raised one eyebrow.

  “Your boss?” Michael said. “Oh, that’s right. He knows Eli too.”

  “Yeah. He does.”

  I wanted to elaborate, to say something that would indicate Tom had become more than merely my boss. My family knew I had been thinking about dating again, but I wanted to ease them into this boyfriend thing as gently as I could. Michael wanted me to move on with my life, but he also had loved Bryan like a brother, and I knew it wouldn’t be easy for him to see me with someone else.

  “Tom’s great,” I said. “I think you’d really like him.”

  “Hey, he pays you to go around and give his money away. Sounds like a pretty cool guy to me.”

  “That he is, Michael,” I said, smiling up at the man I loved. “A cool guy for sure.”

  Fifteen

  After finishing the call with my brother, I settled at the dining room table with Tom to work.

  “So what’s the game plan here?” he asked.

  Because his government contacts had not been of any help to us after all, I realized this case would have to be solved the old-fashioned way, with some serious sleuthing. We would begin by reading the photocopies of the old documents Eli had collected from the National Archives. There might be information in and among the blackened-out pages that could help us learn more about Nadine Peters and what she had been involved with back in the ’60s.

  “Let’s just read and take notes for now,” I said, opening the database on my computer to input the facts.

  We divided the papers in half and got started. My intention was simply to read each page as we got to it, but it was too confusing. Soon, it became obvious that we needed some sort of system. After a bit of discussion, we decided to try and put the different reports and memos and letters and things into chronological order. Better to start at the beginning, if possible, and work our way up through time. As Tom sorted the papers into piles, I served myself from the delicious food in the kitchen, ate quickly, and then put my empty dishes in the sink.

  Back in the dining room, we scooted our chairs side by side and read each page together. I thought it might be hard to concentrate with Tom sitting and reading with me, but I was soon lost in the story that unfolded in the papers in front of us.

  The documents started with Eli’s military career, which began in the late ’50s. He joined the Navy right out of high school, and according to his training placement papers, because he was already an accomplished ham radio operator, the Navy sent him to school for signals intelligence—SIGINT for short. He eventually was promoted to seaman firs
t class and assigned to the USS Oxford, a communications ship that hovered off the coast of Cuba, intercepting radio signals.

  Judging by several memos with his name on them, Eli seemed to be one of the people monitoring the cargo manifests of Soviet ships sailing into Havana. Eventually, of course, the United States confirmed that those Soviet ships were bringing in more than small shipments of palm oil or farm equipment: They were bringing arms and ammunition, light aircraft, military vehicles, and equipment for military installations. The buildup of arms and equipment so close to the United States eventually came to a head in 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis. I didn’t know much about that period in American history, but I found it fascinating to learn that Eli was one of the unsung heroes of the U.S. military at that time.

  “CMC,” Tom said, nodding his head.

  “What?” I asked, watching as he grabbed Eli’s case notes and began flipping through them.

  “‘Sold secrets to Russians during CMC, worked as mathematician for NSA,’” he said, reading from Eli’s notes. “I thought so. CMC is the Cuban Missile Crisis. Nadine sold secrets to the Russians during the Cuban Missile Crisis, while working as a mathematician for the National Security Agency.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Wow. What a traitor. How do you think Eli got mixed up with her?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Let’s keep reading.”

  It didn’t take long to see what had happened. Apparently, when the crisis was over, Eli was debriefed in Key West, where Nadine was stationed. Her name was even on the list of people who signed off on his debriefing sessions.

  “Eli and Nadine must’ve hit it off and started a relationship,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Tom replied. “Too bad it had to end with him shooting her.”

  We kept paging through the documents, and it looked to me as if Eli had stayed on in Key West and done some SIGINT work for the NSA after his discharge from the Navy, though whether as an employee of the NSA or as a consultant, it wasn’t clear.

  “He never told me,” I whispered, looking at a memo with Eli’s name on it. Though some of the lines had been blacked out by a censor’s permanent marker, Eli was definitely working for the NSA in January of 1962.

  “I knew,” Tom replied softly. “I knew he worked there.”

  I glanced at him and then back at the papers.

  “But this was back in the early sixties,” I said. “You weren’t even born yet.”

  “No, I mean Eli told me. He told me when we first met that he had done contract work in the past for the NSA.”

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, surprised to find myself feeling hurt. In a way, I was closer to Eli than anyone on this planet—with the exception of Stella and maybe my father. Had he really kept a secret of this magnitude from me all the years we had known each other while volunteering the information to Tom the first time they ever met? Surely there was more to the story than that.

  “Why did he tell you, Tom?” I asked. “How did you and Eli meet in the first place?”

  There was a long silence before he finally spoke.

  “There was an…intersection of interests,” he replied evasively.

  I glared at him, so he tried again.

  “Eli was working a case as a private investigator,” he said. “His investigation led him to me because of the person he was investigating. There were connections there.”

  “Connections?”

  “Eli came to me and said that he was a former NSA agent and that he knew the rules about secrecy, but he needed my help in understanding this particular situation with this particular person. I did as much for him as I could. We became friends after that.”

  “When was this?” I asked, running through Eli’s old cases in my mind. Even when I was completely distracted with college and working for Eli only a few hours per week, I always kept up with his cases. I knew for a fact none of them had ever involved the NSA.

  “Several years ago,” Tom said. “It was after you had left the agency.”

  We continued through the pile, frustrated that most of the interoffice documents were full of secure information that had been blacked out by a marker. But we could read enough to understand that Eli and Nadine worked together for nearly a year. I expressed the assumption that they had fallen in love during that time, a guess that was confirmed by an internal affairs report regarding the “emotional and sexual ties” between Nadine Peters and Eli Gold. Eli and Nadine began spending weekends together in the privacy of an old fishing cabin on one of the smaller keys. I looked again at the fuzzy photos of the dilapidated shack that were with the file, particularly the one that showed the two of them through the window.

  I sat back, wondering what that must be like, to learn that your employer had been photographing your extracurricular activities with the woman you loved. With a shudder, I wondered if Tom was ever followed and photographed as well.

  “What gave the NSA the right to do this?” I asked softly, studying the picture.

  “This, apparently,” Tom said, lifting the next batch of papers from the pile. It was a dossier on the illegal activities of one Nadine Peters, paid informant for the KGB.

  He read through the dossier, describing a woman of humble beginnings who had been irresistibly wooed into selling U.S. secrets to Russian operatives. Her duplicity started with $1000, which Nadine was given in exchange for some key settings to a cipher machine. The KGB had then used that information to decode certain U.S. military communications.

  From there, Nadine and one of her coworkers developed an ongoing relationship with a KGB operative, a man who coordinated “dead drops” for the exchange of money for information.

  “What’s a dead drop?” I asked.

  “Making an exchange without ever actually having any contact. For instance, they put the money in a bag and leave it beside a trash can. You pick it up there and then drop your papers near a predetermined park bench.”

  “I see.”

  “It says they would occasionally meet in person. Whenever one of them wanted to call a meeting, they would put an innocuous-seeming ad in the Sunday Washington Post classifieds that would specify the date, time, and location.”

  “Doesn’t sound very secretive to me. Anybody could read that.”

  “It was all done in code,” Tom said. “See here? We have some examples.”

  I looked at photocopies of newspaper classified ads. One said “Midnight blue couch for sale. Call 721-0800. Ask for Piper Firve.” Another read “Midnight lace satin gown. Call 903-2300. Ask for Lomus Baer.”

  “These look like normal ads,” I said. “I don’t see what’s so secret about them, except maybe those names are a little weird. And they both start with ‘midnight.’”

  Tom took the paper from my hand and looked at it for a moment. Then he held it out to me and traced his finger along it.

  “If I had to guess,” he said, “I’d be willing to bet this is a request for a meeting on July 21 at eight o’clock in the morning at Pier Five, wherever that is. This one is for September third at eleven P.M. at some place called Lou’s Bar.”

  I looked at the ads again.

  “How did you get all of that?”

  “I’d be willing to bet there’s no 721 exchange for the DC area, especially not back then. The 721 is the date, the 0800 is the time. Pier Five comes from removing every third letter of the person’s name. Same with the other one. Lomus Baer becomes Lou’s Bar. It’s an extremely simplistic code, but I guess it served their purposes.”

  I stared at it for a moment, finally nodding.

  “Which is why you’re a cryptologist and I’m just an investigator,” I said.

  He smiled.

  “Look at this,” I said, moving on to the next set of papers. It was a heavily censored report on the interrogation of Eli Gold, dated December 1962. I read what I could, trying to understand what I was seeing. The best I could tell, the NSA had finally made their move by bringing in Eli and questioning him exha
ustively to see what he knew about Nadine’s ongoing espionage. From the looks of the report, Eli was found to be innocent of any knowledge and absolved of any complicity in the matter. I could only imagine how heartbroken he must’ve been, however, to learn that the woman he loved was a traitor to him and to the country.

  That was it for the official documents, except for the autopsy report on Nadine and a December 1962 police report about the facts of her death. That hadn’t been censored at all, and I could only assume Eli hadn’t obtained that particular report from the NSA but from an old police file.

  “What’s it say?” Tom asked, handing it to me and rubbing his eyes. After scanning all of these old documents, my eyes were feeling tired and sore as well.

  “Looks like Nadine was caught trying to flee the area about an hour after Eli’s interrogation ended. She was shot down by five armed gunmen.”

  “Wow.”

  I read further and then looked up at Tom.

  “Here’s a list of the gunmen,” I said. “One of them was Eli Gold.”

  “The shot in the thigh, I’d bet,” he said. “No wonder he recognized the scar.”

  I put down the paper and closed my eyes. I could understand Eli feeling betrayed and angry and upset with Nadine. What I couldn’t comprehend was how he could have shot her. Betrayal was one thing. Shooting the woman you loved in cold blood was quite another.

  “She was ‘killed’ in December 1962,” Tom said softly. “What do you know of Eli’s life since then?”

  I shook my head and opened my eyes.

  “I know he moved to Virginia at some point and enrolled in the police academy. He and my dad graduated together, somewhere around sixty-three or sixty-four. Eli stayed with the force until he quit to become a private detective in seventy-five.”

  “I wonder if your father knows any of Eli’s secrets.”

  As if on cue, the phone started ringing.