A Tsar's Gold (Parker Chase Book 6) Read online

  The journal’s inside cover caught his eye as he puzzled. A series of numbers had been scratched across it, as though Carl had started a new entry, written the date, and then realized he’d been writing on the cover. Parker’s gaze narrowed.

  The numbers don’t make sense. 32-11-27-5. An extra number had been lumped into the date range, which he’d first assumed to be written in the European style, Day-Month-Year. Different than how most Americans recorded days. He looked from the numbers to the safe. Could that be it, written down in plain sight?

  Unless he’d never expected anyone to find it. It was the sort of thing a person would do if they were worried their memory wasn’t what it used to be: write the combination down.

  “Only one way to find out.”

  Spinning the dial left repeatedly to clear the lock, Parker followed the sequence. Left to 32, right three times to 11, then left twice to 27, back to 5. He didn’t feel the dial catch when he landed on the last digit. Butterflies flapped in his stomach when he reached for the handle and twisted.

  It clicked. “I’ll be damned.” Parker laughed and pulled the door open. Then he nearly dropped the journal.

  “What in the world are you into, Carl?” The desk safe contained a half-dozen gold bars. He pulled out the closest one. Heavy, as it should be. Holding it up to the light, he caught a better look at the writing on this bar. It was wrong.

  No, not wrong. Different. The writing on this bar was German, not Russian like the other one. Did that matter? It could be nothing. Plenty of collectors bought whatever gold they could afford, regardless of where it came from. What mattered was having cash to purchase the metal. Saving up nearly half a million dollars, the value of the bar Carl had brought to his office, would have taken time. Based on how deep this safe was, Carl had at least five more bars in here. Six bars, plus the one in his briefcase, made over two and a half million dollars.

  A booming sounded from the floor above, as though someone were pounding on the front door, heedless of who heard. Again the thunderous blows reverberated through the house. Parker dropped to the floor and twisted around to look out the glass doors behind him. They looked out over Carl’s expansive back yard, currently empty of anything other than the single deer, head low in the grass. A falling sun pierced the autumn leaves. Parker didn’t breathe.

  The pounding stopped. He counted to ten, then got up. Nobody had come around back. Hurrying out of Carl’s office and toward the staircase on silent feet, Parker turned an ear up and listened. Go away.

  Glass shattered upstairs. He heard two voices, both with Russian accents. Then a deadbolt clicked open and two pairs of footsteps crunched over broken glass.

  Time to move. Two guys speaking what sounded like Russian breaking into the house of a man recently murdered by another Russian spelled danger. Parker went for the pistol in his waistband, then stopped short. Anyone willing to break into a dead man’s house in a wealthy suburb in daylight wouldn’t balk at carrying firearms. Two against one. Odds like that meant one thing: get out now. With all the noise those two upstairs were making it didn’t seem as though they had any idea he was here.

  Back into the office, where the journal and the photo went into Carl’s briefcase, along with another gold bar, the one with German writing on it. The rest he left in the safe simply because they were too heavy. The strange skeleton key went into his pocket, and after locking the safe he picked up Carl’s phone and dialed 9-1-1.

  “Two men broke into my home. They’re armed. Please send help.” He rattled off the address before slipping out of the back doors.

  He raced for the woods, the briefcase like an anchor weighing him down until the trees swallowed him. He darted across another back yard and out into the street. He slowed, taking a looping path around the neighborhood and keeping a row of houses between him and Carl’s home. Once his car came into sight, Parker scrutinized Carl’s house for any sign of movement. A few shards of broken glass glittered on the front porch.

  Satisfied he was not being watched, Parker tossed the briefcase onto his passenger seat. He started the car and pulled away, taking the first turn and heading home. Questions filled his head. Why did a team of Russians want Carl Ellis dead? His gut said it was about more than a stack of gold bars.

  The gun lay on Parker’s coffee table alongside Carl’s journal and a steaming cup of coffee. It was either that or a beer, and Parker had serious reservations about whether he’d made the right choice. But deciphering decades of written memories in a foreign tongue required focus. Two computer monitors displayed different translation engines, both of which Parker was furiously loading with German passages. At least Carl had neat handwriting.

  He cracked the heavy journal open and started with the most recent entries, working backwards. He glanced at the back page and whistled; the earliest ones went back decades.

  Parker settled into a groove, translating in reverse chronological order. Last year Carl had traveled home, though strangely enough he didn’t say where and he’d flown there. The entries stopped until Carl returned, then began again with a long one detailing in exceedingly vague terms what he’d done on his trip. Phrases like visited the site and traveled with care caught Parker’s eye, but without any context they could mean anything.

  Another entry about a trip the previous year yielded many of the same phrases, none with specifics. Parker’s coffee had cooled enough that he could actually drink it when a translated phrase nearly sent the entire cup flying.

  “That’s more like it.” This entry detailed a visit to the mysterious home; like the others, it didn’t mention specific places, but included a name for the precious metal bars. Blood-soaked gold.

  “Blood-soaked?” Parker said to the empty room. “That’s a bit frightening.” The fact that there was nearly two and a half million dollars of precious metal in Carl’s safe had made it clear to him that the metal might not be clean in many ways, but this confirmed it.

  Parker kept reading the translated lines, and the very next paragraph brought a new mystery. The royal train. “Who is royal? And what does a train have to do with your dirty gold?”

  He searched online and discovered Russia had once had a luxury train called The Tsar’s Gold, which had serviced China, Mongolia and Russia. Maybe Carl had been on this train – only with gold on his mind, not Siberian scenery. Parker kept searching and a minute later hit pay dirt.

  He studied the screen and whistled. “That’s why they called it the gold train.” The name was related to a legend, which this article laid out for him. Titled “Russia’s Lost Gold”, the journalist laid out a wondrous tale of unimaginable wealth and the unsolved mystery surrounding a tsar’s lost hoard. The outside world faded to nothing as he read.

  Civil war, an abdicated throne, and cold-blooded murder. The bloody end of Russia’s last tsar, which had given rise to the USSR, and later, the Cold War. And somehow five hundred tons of gold had vanished into thin air. Parker dove into the history, losing himself in a tale of deceit and betrayal until one sentence grabbed his eye and wouldn’t let go.

  Enigma device.

  Carl had used the same term in one of his journal entries, writing that he had recently contracted to have this strangely named device cleaned. It had been just a brief note, nothing of import, but it had grabbed Parker’s eye? It didn’t take long to click. Enigma wasn’t just a device. Carl was talking about the Enigma machine. The weird typewriter Parker had seen in Carl’s office.

  Used by the Nazis during WWII, the Enigma was an electromechanical encryption device with a keyboard not unlike a typewriter’s. There was also a set of keyboard lights above the traditional keys that lit up when an incoming message arrived. Each keystroke the sender made caused a light on the receiving device to illuminate. Using those lights, the recipient could unscramble the message. However, sender and receiver could only understand each other if the three rotors on each machine were properly aligned. Each of the three movable rotors had twenty-six possible settings.
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  This exhausted his knowledge of the device. Only one person he trusted likely knew more. Parker took a deep breath. His finger hovered over her name in his phone. Yes, she could help. Yes, she knew a heck of a lot more about this than he did. All that might have been true, but this wasn’t just about the phone call. Dialing Jane White would force Parker to do what he hated to do: face the past.

  Stop messing around. Avoiding thoughts of Erika won’t bring her back. Nothing could. That still didn’t make venturing into the wreckage of what had once been his future easy. Jane had his back no matter what. What had his football coach always said? Only cowards lived in the past.

  He dialed her number. Signals flashed across an ocean to land in Edinburgh. A familiar Scottish voice answered.

  “Dr. White.” A keyboard clicked in the background. As always, Jane White was a woman on the go.

  “Hi, Jane. It’s Parker.”

  The keys stopped clicking. “Is something wrong?”

  “Everything is fine.” He took a breath. “Well, not really. I have a question, and I figured asking the smartest person I know is a good place to start.”

  “Flattery will get you everywhere,” she said. “But business can wait a moment. How are you? It’s been what, six months? Enough time for you to get in way over your head more than once.”

  When Parker had last seen Jane, they’d stumbled across a centuries-old corpse that had nearly got them both killed. A terrifying experience. He hadn’t had that much fun in a long time. “Unfortunately, my life has been mostly boring since I came back to the States. Nobody around here to get in trouble with. I can only imagine what you’ve been up to.”

  Jane snorted a laugh. “Mostly grading undergraduate term papers. Not exactly exciting stuff.”

  “Then maybe this is your lucky day.”

  “Is that so? I’m listening.”

  “I need a history expert. Someone who can tell me about a legend from World War Two.”

  “That’s not my specialty, though I know a thing or two. In fact, did you know Erika and I once—” She stopped mid-sentence. “I’m sorry. I didn’t—”

  His jaw tightened. “It’s fine. Go on. You were saying?”

  “Right.” She took a deep breath. “I had quite a few classes on the war. What do you need to know?”

  “Anything you can tell me about a legend.”

  “Which one? History is good at creating them.”

  “I’m not sure yet,” Parker said. “It all started with a gold brick and a dead body. Two, actually.” He launched into the tale, beginning with Carl’s arrival and his golden secret, followed by the brazen sidewalk attack and Parker’s lethal intervention. Jane kept silent all the while. Given what they’d been through together a few months earlier, he wasn’t surprised. She didn’t speak until he detailed breaking into Carl’s home and walking into the downstairs office.

  “Wait a moment,” she said. “Tell me again what you saw.”

  “The weird typewriter?” He described it. “I actually figured out it’s an Enigma device, which I should have—”

  “Yes. Well done. It’s one of the most famous encryption machines in history.”

  “Why do you think he’d keep an Enigma machine in his office? If they’re valuable, it could have been an investment.”

  “You said Carl was older and had a German accent?” Parker confirmed he had. “Could be Carl actually used one during the war. Maybe he kept it around as a memento.”

  The image of kindly Carl working for history’s most infamous murderers didn’t jibe. “Carl and my dad were business associates. My dad wouldn’t work with Nazis.”

  “I’m sure he wouldn’t have,” Jane said. “If he knew Carl was a Nazi, that is. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. I have no idea about Carl’s past. I’m only going by what little evidence you have. Speaking of which, what else is there? Besides the gold bars, two dead bodies, and a pair of home invasions, that is.”

  Parker laughed. “That’s about it for now.” He picked the journal up, revealing a forgotten photo beneath. “Wait a second. There is one more thing. I found a snapshot of Carl and two other people.” The well-thumbed Polaroid had been used as a bookmark, nestled between the last entry and a blank page. Three names were scrawled in a feminine hand along the bottom. Parker described the pair pictured, a middle-aged woman and a younger man who looked to be in his thirties. “I think two of these people were in a framed photo on his desk, though in this one they’ve aged twenty years.”

  “How recent is the picture?” Jane asked.

  “It’s from twenty-five years ago. There’s a year listed with the names.”

  “Which would make Carl almost sixty, give or take. Does the woman look like him at all?”

  Parker tilted the picture. “You could say that.”

  “It’s possible that’s his sister, and the younger man may be his sister’s child.”

  “Carl didn’t have pictures of other people around his house,” Parker said. “No wife, kids, anyone. Just these two. The house looked like a well-to-do bachelor’s pad.” He sighed. “The picture is my only lead. If it really is his sister, she’d be in her eighties by now. The younger man would be near fifty or so.”

  “If you want to find them, I’d start by looking for names in the journal. Any female ones would stick out. You could use that and Carl’s surname to search for the woman.”

  “Or I could call in a favor and see who’s listed as his emergency contact on the accounts at my dad’s old bank. I still know some people there.”

  “Any idea where these two mysterious people live?”

  Parker looked at the photograph again. No one would describe the colors of its subjects as vibrant. Two metallic cars with more round edges than sharp ones were visible in the background. A rectangular license plate ran along the rear bumper of one. “Give me a second.”

  The plate had a vertical blue bar on the far left, followed by a series of numbers and letters. “That’s a German license plate,” Parker said after finding it online. “Registered in Berlin. That style of tag has been in use since the mid-nineties,” Parker said. “It fits with the date on this picture.”

  Jane seemed to read his thoughts. “You’re thinking about going to Germany.” Apparently, the few weeks he’d spent in her company had revealed more about him than he realized.

  The thought had scarcely formed in his head, but she was right. Not that he would tell her. “I have no idea who these people are, whether they’re alive or dead, or if they even live in Germany. For all we know, this could be an old girlfriend or classmate of his.”

  “You don’t keep pictures of exes around,” Jane said. “And certainly not schoolmates. Carl doesn’t sound like the kind of man to do that.”

  “Fair enough.” He opened his mouth to push back, then stopped. Why bother? If he could get a contact name and address, and if it ended up being in Berlin, why not? “You’re right. If signs point to Berlin, I’m going.”

  “I knew it.” He could hear the smile on her face. “It’s not in your nature to let a mystery like this lie. One problem, though.”

  Parker didn’t like the sound of that. “Which is?”

  “You’re not a historical expert. You need someone with experience, with knowledge of Germans’ culture and their past. Assuming you want to do this properly.”

  “I don’t need to be an expert to find an old lady and a kid. All I need is an address. And a translator,” he added hurriedly.

  “Wrong. I spent a semester in Germany. My grad program had an exchange arrangement with a college in Berlin.” The energy in Jane’s voice picked up. “It’s the same program Erika went to – oh.” She stopped abruptly. “I’m sorry.”

  “To London with,” Parker finished. “I remember. And don’t apologize.” He sighed. “Tell you what. If I run across anything I need professional input about, I’ll call you.”

  “You speak German, I assume.”

  “That’s what translato
rs are for,” he said. Then the other shoe dropped. “Damn. You studied there. I bet you can—”

  “—speak German. Fluently. I co-teach German language classes at our university to stay sharp. And there’s even better news. I won’t charge you. Other than an occasional pint at the pub, that is.”

  Considering Jane lived in an honest-to-goodness Scottish castle, funding was the least of her worries, but still, it was a generous offer. “Fine,” Parker said. “You win. If I find a German contact name at the bank, which is a big if, I hire you to be my guide and translator.”

  “Deal. Now quit wasting time and make the call. I’ll be at my desk waiting for news.”

  Parker rang off and pulled up a directory for his father’s former employer. A few familiar names stuck out, one of them being the current president. He dialed, and as his phone rang, Parker noted the gooseflesh on his arms.

  Parker hung up thirty minutes later. The current president had started in the same department as his father and the two had been true friends. For his old friend’s son, the rules could be bent enough that Parker now had several lines of confidential information scrawled in a notebook.

  Jane answered on the first ring. “Good news?”

  “You’re hired. We’re going to Berlin.”

  Chapter 3

  Berlin Airport

  Humanity flowed around Parker in waves, people brushing past or bouncing off as they hurried in every direction. Languages he couldn’t even guess at swirled in the air as travelers arrived from countries across the globe or headed to parts unknown. Amid the organized chaos of cabs honking, jet engines roaring and suitcase wheels clattering, Parker stood watch. It had been two days since their call. Jane had not yet arrived.