Blind Instinct by Fiona Brand Read Free Book Online Page B

her ears had pricked up.
    She knew the basic facts of Todd Fischer’s disappearance and death. She had been secure in the belief that he had died in the Gulf of Mexico in the line of duty, no matter what anyone else maintained. But according to her father, Todd had been on a wild-goose chase, hunting Nazis. The Navy had covered it up, but he had the evidence to prove it .
    Standing, surrounded by dust and old memories that had teeth, the gritty reality of the mass grave at Juarez was sharp and immediate.
    Her uncle had been working undercover south of the border, but the job he had been sent to do defied belief and common sense. Neither of her parents could credit that Todd and seven other SEALs had gone missing on a mission that belonged decades back in time: a mission that in the 1980s could only be described as crackpot.
    Todd had been hunting Nazis, and he had found them, along with a connection to a Colombian cartel. The combination had been brutal. Juarez had resembled the horrific aftermath of a death camp.
    She skimmed the first page of the book. Halfway down the reason she still hadn’t adjusted to the syntax became clear. It was a codebook.
    A cold tingle went through her, a brief flash of unwanted memory. When she’d been a child, one of the nightmares that had regularly played had been about opening a book and memorizing a word. Later on, it had been an easy leap to conclude that she had been stealing a code.
    The content of the book explained why the cover and the spine were blank. Despite the factthat it had been produced by a printing press—a necessity because every communications post of ground, air and sea forces had needed a copy of their own respective codebooks—it would have been a secret document, requiring a security clearance. Putting a title on the book would have been tantamount to waving a red flag.
    The instant she recognized the content, translating became easier. She turned pages and studied the codes, suppressing a queasy desire to drop the book and wash her hands. As fascinating as it was, the codebook had been formulated with the express purpose of aiding Nazi secret communications. The result had been the loss of life of Allied soldiers. She knew that the armed forces had used codes and ciphers, and still did, but all the same, she couldn’t control her natural recoil.
    Even worse, for the book to have been in Todd’s possession meant it had been a part of his investigation and had likely belonged to one of the Nazis he had been chasing. The thought that she could be handling the personal possession of a war criminal and a murderer made her skin crawl.
    She had always been fascinated by puzzles and codes. Her mind, with its memory for detailand bent for lateral thinking, was suited to puzzle solving. She had studied mathematics for a while, along with language and history. One of her papers had included sections on the use of secret writing and one of her thesis subjects had been cryptography.
    Silence closed around her and seemed to thicken as she continued to study the code. She had no idea where or when, but she was certain she had seen this particular arrangement of letters before. That fact in itself wasn’t surprising. The Germans had been excellent cryptographers, the best in the world. The majority of books on codes and ciphers had been written by Germans. It was possible that she had studied a similar code.
    Her gaze caught on a penned note in the margin, and for a split second the room faded.
    Code leak traced to Vassigny Stop Find Traitor Stop
    An owl hooted. She started, almost dropping the book, and the curious moment of déjà vu passed, although the puzzling phrase lingered. She couldn’t remember the last time she had seen a telegram except those slipped into her parents’ old wedding album. They had become obsolete decades ago.
    Taking a deep breath to steady nerves that hadno earthly reason to be shot, she checked her watch. It was