Ancient Echoes

CHAPTER 52



New York City

JIANJUN AROSE AND dressed early. He found Phaylor’s house far too creepy. Calvin Phaylor ranked up there on the creepy scale, too. The guy looked like a cadaver on wheels.

Jianjun refused the huge breakfast, settling for tea and toast, then set up his computer.

He found that hacking into Phaylor’s computer security system was child’s play. Phaylor’s bank and credit card data provided a plethora of information about his activities over the past few years. Two of the findings surprised Jianjun.

First, four satellite phones, all with New York City prefixes, regularly contacted Phaylor. Jianjun couldn’t tell where the calls originated, but satellite phones only made sense in remote locations. He suspected Phaylor had bought and given out the phones.

Second, the recent murders of the curator of Paris’ Cluny museum, and in Jerusalem, of a security guard, a paid assassin, and a scholar of ancient Egypt, all interested Phaylor. He had also queried the name Laurence Esterbridge several times without success. Jianjun’s heart practically stopped when he learned that the Israelis were looking for an American woman named Charlotte Reed in connection with the murders.

She was the woman Michael asked him to check on! A security camera had caught her driving away in the dead scholar’s car. Who in the heck was she? Was she a killer, out there with Michael?

He dived into his computer to search for more information on her. Her Virginia home had been fire-bombed some days earlier. Despite both the Virginia and Israeli police trying to find her, she had not been located. Reports speculated that she torched her home to destroy evidence of her wrong-doings, and went into hiding. The only other information Jianjun found about her was a marriage record between her and someone named Dennis Levine. When he searched for information on Levine, he found he was a State Department employee who died in a terrorist attack in Jerusalem some thirteen years earlier. The date struck Jianjun. A lot seemed to have happened between thirteen and fifteen years ago. This background made him think she wasn’t the crazed murderer the press made her out to be. In fact, she might have been a victim.

What did it all mean, and why did Calvin Phaylor care?

After having learned so much about Charlotte Reed, he searched for more information on the other person Michael had mentioned, Simon Quade. When his usual personal data searches yielded not so much as a birth certificate, he went into the CIA’s data base. After coming up with nothing, he tried their human resources. Consultants usually had some fingerprint there, even if only a 1099 or other IRS form. Strangely, he found nothing at all. The name had to be phony, which made Jianjun more curious than ever. But without more information, he was at a standstill.

Searching for six men lost in Idaho some twelve or thirteen years earlier turned up only rumors and denials of same. Everyone involved agreed that six paramilitary types went through the area. He had names starting with their leader, Thaddeus Kohler, and found evidence of the men’s existences before they went to Idaho, but nothing afterward. As one local said when asked if he thought they had disappeared in the wilderness, “Of course not. They left, that’s all. They weren’t exactly the type to drop in to say ‘so long.’” Another standstill.

The men could be dead, but he found no evidence of that—not even death certificates or insurance payouts. Their families all refused to say anything about the men, which made Jianjun immediately suspect that someone had paid for their silence.

Something was seriously amiss.

He then turned to his cell phone to see what information the spy monitor had picked up on Vandenburg. He found a long list of phone calls, but a quick check revealed all to be work or home related.

He turned back to Calvin Phaylor’s files but, again, nothing new jumped out at him.

Time to go to Idaho, he thought, even though he hadn’t yet figured out what he would do once he got there. Also, he had grown increasingly nervous about Michael. The news reported that the sheriff went on a “secret mission” to try to find the students. This happened right after authorities pulled the body of student Brian Cutter from a river. Few believed the “secret mission” story, which caused speculation that whoever killed the student had murdered the sheriff, or that the sheriff himself wiped out the entire university group and fled after one of the bodies turned up.

Jianjun didn’t know what to think, but Michael had been with that sheriff, and now he could no longer be reached.