After that conversation, the Commissioner agreed that nothing would happen from his department. We thanked him and left. Since that was taken care of, we felt confident that any further reports coming to the Commissioner’s office would be put aside. We made it clear that he was to notify us of any information he had received or speculations coming from other people. The Commissioner also contacted the coroner with instructions to let him know similar causes of death of young women.

  The three of us now had to perform the emotional task of burying Barbara. We knew that she had been through hell and wanted her to have a decent funeral. No head stone would be placed at the grave site, at least not now. I couldn’t help thinking that it was sad to die and no one to grieve for you. Since I had only worked with her one time, my feelings were a bit reserved, but knowing what had happened to her, made it more personal. It angered me that someone had taken the life of young attractive woman, without having a personal grudge against her. She was just at the wrong place at the wrong time, and being used as a pawn. I was going to do everything I could to put a stop to the murders, and Heinman and Mead’s plot.

  Another trip was being planned for Washington and Braxton was making the usual arrangements. A trip to New York and another one to Miami were to precede it, so I had enough time to set up things before going to Paris. He told me I was to go on all three trips and then of course be prepared to go to France. Since we knew what had happened in Switzerland, we anticipated that five more “Special Assignment” models would be chosen.

  If I was going to get anywhere, I’d have to find out how the film was getting overseas. My first thoughts were that the girls were carrying them in their luggage ...... in jewelry boxes or cosmetic cases, but it would be to easy to spot. It had to be a more ingenious method, and the commies didn’t condone failure ...... meaning the end of Heinman and Mead if something went wrong. Since Jerry was staying in L.A. now, it made it easier for us to communicate. We met at the zoo in front of the bear cages with me sitting in a bench across the walkway. Jerry joined me by sitting in the bench next to mine. When we were sure that no one was following us, we walked to the different sections of the park.

  “Sorry about the model,” he said. “I feel bad about it even though I didn’t have any contact her at all.”

  “I’m convinced, they would do whatever it takes, and that means doing away with anybody.”

  “I guess you know that there may have been as many as eight or ten killed the same way,” he said.

  “In the four months, they made two trips to Paris, so I guess that’s about right.”

  “I had my men check every prominent model agency in California and none of the other four models are registered. Then they checked New York and still nothing. There’s a national central listing for models and that’s our next step,” he said.

  “Knowing what is going on now, the chances are slim to none that their names will show up, except at the morgue.”

  “I hate to admit it, Harry, but I think you’re right.”

  “Do you have the details on how to handle the Washington and Paris thing coming up?” I asked.

  “I’m still working on it , but we’ll be ready by the time you leave.”

  “I’ll let you know the departure time as soon as they let me know.”

  “By the way, we found out how the information on the documents are being taken and removed from an office in Washington.”

  “I hope it’s no one I know,” I said.

  “As a matter of fact, it wasn’t any of our people at all.”

  “How can that be?” I asked. “We are in control of those files.”

  “We’re in control of them, but they are also transported to high ranking Pentagon personnel in other offices. It seems they were revising some of the weapons systems components. The documents were taken by couriers from the file room to the Pentagon offices. We ruled out the courier, since everything was sealed, marked, and nothing was tampered with. Then we came up with the thought that they weren’t being safeguarded during certain short periods of time, while on someones desk.”

  “How much time was involved in these short periods?” I asked.

  “As little as five minutes and as much as twenty minutes depending on what the person was doing at any given moment.”

  “The room was secured, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah, and that means that classified papers can be left on desks without someone being right there all the time. It was baffling at first, so we had a small two-way mirror installed after all personnel went home for the night. The very next morning, we had our answer. This secretary would come into the room with a small stack of papers, to put in the box on this one particular desk. She pretended to be straightening other papers and at the same time taking a picture of documents with a camera mounted in a broach she was wearing. Each time she leaned over the desk, she took a picture. The others in the office were busy working on their projects and she didn’t act suspicious at all. Everyone in there was cleared for Top Secret and other secretaries were in and out of there all day long. Then two of our agents followed her to a small jewelry shop after work that night, and watched her take off the broach and hand it to the owner of the shop. At the same time, he would hand her another broach. When the jeweler disappeared into the back room, one of the agents slipped around the building and had a view from a transom window. The film was placed in a container and in a few minutes, a man entered the shop and was handed the film. They followed him out of Washington and to an old farm house about twenty-five miles west of Alexandria, Virginia.”

  “They must have a lot of the papers by now,” I said.

  “That’s the good news, even with all that’s happened.”

  “Good news! How can that be good news when Russia has our weapons secrets?”

  “Unless they have a complete set of files, it won’t mean a thing to them,” he said. “Heinman has his work cut out for him, and has a long way to go. That’s why it’s vital that we stop him before he gets too many more of those papers. At the rate they’re being compromised ...... I’d say it’ll take about four or five months before they get what they need. We’re going to let everything the way it is now, and that means letting that secretary continue taking her pictures.”

  “Well ...... we can’t just stand by and watch more murders take place without doing something about it. I can’t let that happen,” I said.

  “Stall them somehow ...... to make sure that the models don’t take that second cruise.”

  “And how do you think I’m going to do that?”

  “You’ll come up with something......I know you will.” He said.

  “Thanks for the confidence,” I barked back at him.

  “We’ll give you all the help we can, but we’ve got to take it slow and easy. No screw-ups.”

  “I’ll find a way,” I said.

  “That’s the spirit, old boy,” he said in his best accent. “See you later. It’s going to be all right, Harry. I can feel it.”

  Jerry strolled up one of the paths, striking the point of his umbrella to the pavement with every other step he took. A typical walk with an umbrella, I said to myself amusingly, but one of the best damned intelligence agents around. Sometimes, I think he has a sixth sense in dealing with foreign agents and I was glad he was on our side. As I was walking to the main gate, I stopped at a telephone booth to check in with Bill. He wasn’t in, but I was given a phone number where he could be reached, at a small town up the coast.

  “Sheriff’s Department,” said the voice on the other end.

  “This is Harry Silver. Is Mr. Maxwell there from Los Angeles?”

  “Just a minute and I’ll check,” he said.

  The telephone booth was across from the ticket window and a pretty young girl in her mid-twenties glanced at me several times. The next time she looked my way, I winked at her as she turned her head in embarrassment, and I could see her blushing slightly.

  “Harry! I’ve been trying to get in touch with you for hours. Where the hell have you been?” he asked.

  “At the zoo.”

  “At the zoo? What the hell are you doing at the zoo?”

  “Just met with Jerry,” I said.

  “Oh! Well ...... I’ve got something here that may be one of the girls. Don’t know for sure and I need you to come up here to see if you can identify her. Can you meet me here at Carpinteria?” he asked.

  “Yeah! I’ll be there in about two hours.”

  I hung up the receiver and looked in the direction of the ticket window, but the girl was gone and a much older woman had taken her place. Walking over to the window, I asked where the girl had gone and she pointed in the direction of a little coffee stand. She was seated in a booth next to the outside railing, and saw me as I got a cup of coffee and looked at her. As I came up to her table, I introduced myself and asked if I could join her. She motioned for me to sit down and I started the usual conversation. Out of nowhere a man appeared at the edge of the table. He asked what I was doing sitting and talking with his girl, as I stammered with some sort of unintelligible explanation. He made it clear that if I didn’t leave immediately he was going to bash my head in. I put up my hands in surrender and quietly made my way to the gate, jumped in my car and headed for Carpinteria.

  After identifying the body as one of the models and reading the coroners notes, we concluded that the report on the other model, and this one were almost identical, with the same traces of drugs found. We noticed that the time of death was approximately the same also.

  “We need to find out where that damn yacht was located at about the same time these two were dumped over the side,” I said.

  “How are you going to do that?” he asked.

  “From the Coast Guard.”

  “Since they weren’t following the yacht this time, how will they be able to tell us?”

  “From the water current charts. They have all that information.”

  “Even if you do find out where they were, you can’t prove anything.”

  “No, but if someone saw the yacht out there in the same area, we could come up with something. Like the time it takes a body to get to shore and the distance from where there boat was.”

  “I know Commander Jacobs at the Coast Guard,” he said.

  “I was hoping you’d say that,” I remarked.

  We arrived at the Coast Guard Station a short time later and Bill introduced us. I told him what we needed and without questioning the reason behind it, he took us to the briefing room. One man was on each side of a large table in the center of the room that had a map of the California coast line marked off in latitude and longitude. The men were plotting the positions of ships traveling in all directions. Every few minutes the men would reposition the tiny model ships with long poles that looked like pool cues with a flat squared end. The Commander told us that all ships along the coast and in the twelve mile limit were required to maintain contact with the Guard. He said he had ships from all over the world coming in here and for security purposes, the Air Force flies the coast 24 hours a day. Further, they were responsible for violations of unknown ships entering our coastal area.

  Removing several charts from their rack, he laid then on a table next to the wall. Thumbing through the charts, he said, “Let’s see, you wanted to know the water currents for August 4, right?”

  We replied in the affirmative. Separating one of the charts from the others, and checking the tide table book, he made several notations on a piece of paper. Using a mariner’s compass and a gadget that looked like a mechanical arm, he plotted the information on the chart. Rechecking his calculations, for accuracy, then drawing some lines on the chart, he stepped back from the table a couple of feet.

  “What time of day on August 4?” he wanted to know.

  “Let’s try between noon and four P.M.” I said assuredly.

  “Alright. Now if you can be more specific about the information you need, I can most likely be of some assistance.” he said.

  He looked at me, then toward Bill and then back to me again.

  I broke the silence. “Ah, we think that a couple of women were drowned. Since you know who I am and who Bill is ...... you know that it involves more than that, but we can’t go into details with you. It has to do with security problems and your help may be what we need to put these pieces of the puzzle together.”

  “I remember a report coming across my desk that a woman was found along the coast and that some of our men recovered the body,” he said.

  “Anyway ...... what we need is the location of a yacht during the period of time we mentioned. The first woman was picked up at close to 9 A.M., the morning of August 5th and all we know about the second girl is that she was in the water for about twenty six hours.”

  “Can you tell me the height and weight of each of the girls? That would be one of the most helpful things,” he said.

  Reaching into his coat pocket, Bill took out the coroner’s reports and read the descriptions of the women. The Commander scratched the back of his neck with his index finger and leaned over the table again. After going through many mathematical equations and the plotting of lines on the chart, he placed an “X” inside a circle, put down the pencil and turned toward us with a pleased look on his face.

  In a positive voice he said, “There she is. That is where your boat would have to be for us to pick up the first woman and for the other one to wash up on the beach where she was found.”

  “It’s amazing how you can come up with those calculations. It looks very complicated,” I said.

  “Well ...... it’s what I was trained for, part of my job, and really it’s mostly in time table books that do a lot of the calculation for me. You just have to know how to extract the information.”

  “Can you tell us if any ships or boats were in that location that afternoon?”

  “That was my next task. I’ll check the log books and see what we have.”

  He walked to the file cabinet and opened the second drawer from the top, removing a large, hard covered ledger binder. On the outside of the top edge was inscribed in bold red letter the words, “Daily Log of Ship Movements.” Flipping the pages, he stopped on the date of August 4th. Using the coordinates of a latitude and longitude from the chart where the boat would have been, he ran his finger down one page, then another, stopping about one fourth down the next page.

  ‘Here is one,” he said, writing down the information on a tablet. I’ll check to see if there are any others.”

  Scanning the balance of the pages he said, “No! That’s the only one.”

  “That’s great.” Bill said. “At least we’ve got something to go on. What kind of a ship is it? It isn’t a yacht, is it?”

  “No, it’s not a yacht. It’s a merchant ship.” he replied.

  He tore off the sheet of paper from the tablet and handed it to Bill. It was a cargo ship with a U.S. Registry, giving the Captain’s name and where it was docked at the present time. It may not turn out to be anything, but we had to check it out.

  “Is there a chance that this ship is still around here?” I asked. “I see where it is supposed to be docked right now, but do they ever move from port to port up and down the coast without having to check in with your office.”

  “They have to check in with us, even if they untie a dock line, and that is maritime law as far as we’re concerned.” he said. “It isn’t due to leave port for another two or three days.”

  “Can you contact the Captain and tell him that we’d like to talk with him this afternoon?” Bill asked.

  “I’ll do that right now.”

  We thanked the Commander and left. We drove to the Merchant’s Shipping Yard docks, and after checking in with the Dock Master’s Office, they gave us permission to proceed to the ship in question. They had called ahead and we were met by the first officer as we reached the loading ramp. He asked that we come aboard, and took us to the Captain’s office and knocked on his door.

  “Come in,” the voice said on the other side.

  The burly figure seated behind the desk stood up as we entered the room. He was at least six foot, six inches tall and weighed about 225 pounds. He had a forceful appearance that signified his position as master of the ship. When someone that size stands up, you immediately recognize that you should be very polite and call him Sir.

  “I’m Harry Silver and this is Bill Maxwell, “Sir”.”

  “Captain Sloan. I received a call from the Coast Guard that you’d be stopping by. They didn’t tell me what it was about ...... but they did mention something about you being with the Government. Always glad to do whatever I can. What’s on your mind, Gentlemen?”

  Explaining the information we had from the Coast Guard about his ship being where it was during the afternoon of August 4, and of the need to know if he had spotted any yachts around his location during that time period. He sat back down in his chair, took the ships log from a table behind him and glanced at the date in question.

  “At that time of day and those coordinates, a 75' yacht was spotted off our port side. The name painted on the transom was “TIDEWATER-SEVEN.”

  “Did you or any of the crew notice anything unusual aboard the boat?” Bill asked.

  “We always keep an eye on any vessel close to us for proper clearance. Several of the men mentioned that there were some women on board, but of course that isn’t mentioned in the ships log. According to the men, the women didn’t return the waving arms of the men as usually takes place. Just friendly gestures from the men, that are common between ships crews.”