The Red Eagles

One

Josef Stalin stared gloomily out of the limousine window at the rain-swept Moscow streets. It was only eleven o’clock, but the city seemed already to have put itself to bed, and the swish of the limousine’s tyres seemed to echo in the emptiness. His eyes returned again to the piece of paper that rested on his knees, this diagram drawn by a German scientist in far-off America. Just one sheet of paper. There has to be some way of speeding up the process.

But deep down he feared that there wasn’t, that this time the odds were stacked against him. Ten years earlier he’d told the Party of the German danger, had spelled out what needed to be done to prevent the Soviet State from being crushed. It had been close, closer than even the Germans knew, but he’d done it. This, though, was something altogether different. Some things could not be simply commanded, no matter how great a sacrifice was made.

Eighteen months, the GRU told him. The American bomb would be ready in eighteen months, ready for the “peace.” The Soviet Union would have less than three years to match the American achievement while war weariness and the sentimental attachment to the “Grand Alliance” remorselessly ebbed away. A collision course was set. He’d had no illusions about the Germans, he had none about the Americans. A bare twelve months ago the taking of half of Europe had promised an impregnable buffer, and now it seemed almost irrelevant.

He felt a surge of self-pity. Were all his achievements to be reduced to nothing by this single sheet of paper? It was not long since he’d told Beria that he almost felt sorry for Churchill and the English, whose world was being dragged out from under them, who would soon be no more than the curators of an island museum. But was Churchill, with his pathetic faith in American generosity, the only deluded one? He himself had talked to the American generals at Tehran, and it had been like talking to the Germans at the time of the Pact. The stench of raw arrogance. The moment the Germans and Japanese were beaten the Americans would be everywhere, easing out the British and French, buying up the biggest empire the world had ever seen, brandishing their new bomb. Russia would be alone again. And defenseless. He slammed his fist on the seat, making the chauffeur jump. There must be some way of speeding up the process.

The limousine swept through the Spassky Gate and into the Kremlin, which was ablaze with lights now that the air-raid precautions had been lifted. He was, as usual, an hour late for the council meeting and felt able to expend some of his frustration on a brisk walk to the chamber overlooking the Alexandrov Gardens. Perhaps, he thought to himself as he climbed the stairs, but any lingering hopes were erased by the twin rows of gloomy faces lining the table. He wasted no time on preliminaries.

“Well, Andrei Andreyevich?” he barked as he eased himself into his chair.

Comrade Zhdanov, the head of the newly formed Atomic Division, shuffled his papers.

“Well?” Stalin repeated. “Tell me about our atom bomb.”

“Yes, Comrade Secretary,” Zhdanov began. “I have conducted the investigations required, but I regret to have to inform the council that there is no significant change in the forecasts. We simply do not have the materials. It may be possible to complete the ten-year development program in eight years, but the consequences of such a concentration of resources will put immeasurable strains on the rest of the economy.

“And,” he added morosely, “it would also have a severe effect on the development of the aircraft required for delivery.”

It was as he had feared.

“The other option?” he asked.

Zhdanov shuffled his papers again. “The possibility of stealing the material required has been thoroughly investigated. The trains the Americans use to carry their refined uranium from the plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to Los Alamos are not heavily guarded. The actual theft could probably be accomplished by one of our partisan bands without too much trouble. Getting it and them back home might be difficult, and the political consequences of exposure would undoubtedly be grave. But these problems can be overcome.

“Unfortunately,” he continued, “there is another which cannot be. Each train carries only enough atomic material for the making of, at most, two bombs. For us to have anything less than thirty would be worse than useless. The Americans would not take us seriously. We could hardly hope to hold up fifteen trains.”

Zhdanov turned to look at Stalin for the first time, but the General Secretary’s face held a strange expression, almost a quizzical smile. He was in fact remembering a train holdup he’d organized forty years before, in the days of the Georgian armed bands. One hundred thousand rubles had been the prize, but the denominations of the bills had been so large that anyone who’d tried to cash one had been instantly arrested. Those were simpler days.

“Thank you, Andrei Andreyevich,” he said perfunctorily. “Has anyone anything positive to suggest?”

He was answered with a stony silence.

“So we cannot make it, and we cannot steal it,” Stalin said softly. “But make no mistake, we must have it. The alternative is at least five years during which the capitalist world will have the power of life and death over us. I refuse to accept that we shall win this war only to lose the peace. From this moment an atomic bomb is First Priority.

“You” — he looked straight at Zhdanov — “will solve the unsolvable.”

Anatoly Sheslakov thought to himself that it had been all very dramatic, but not very logical. If it was unsolvable, it couldn’t be solved; if it could be solved, it was not unsolvable. The word game did not help very much. But he had appreciated the seriousness of the situation since two that morning, when everyone in the Atomic Division had been summoned from their beds and harangued by a white-faced Zhdanov.

Sheslakov leaned back in his chair, lit a cigarette, and watched the people walking past his door. He left it open for the occasional glimpse offered of Zhdanov’s secretary, Tania, she of the wonderfully erect stance and lovely ankles. He harboured no amorous ambitions — in fact her personality rather grated on him — but he loved watching her; she had that physical arrogance of youth which he, and indeed his much-loved wife, had long ago lost.

He was approaching fifty, and most of his face bore the signs of his age. The eyes though were still bright and sharp, evidence of the undimmed intellect behind them. People had often said of him, sometimes kindly, sometimes not, that he had the perfect planner’s brain, an ability to juggle an almost infinite array of variables into patterns of breathtaking simplicity that was matched only by his lack of imagination. He always replied that imagination was only the ability to stretch logic beyond what seemed, to lesser mortals, logical.

He had been twenty at the time of the Revolution, and had joined the Red Army in a fit of enthusiasm that he still found hard to explain. But it had paid dividends. His brilliance had outweighed his late arrival in the Party, and soon he was a commissar on the way up. After the Revolution he’d risen through the ranks of the state planning organs, prospering as they did with the adoption of a fully planned economy in the late twenties. The purges of the following decade decimated his colleagues but Sheslakov always survived; he had too good a brain for the Party to waste, too austere a brain for the Party leadership to feel threatened. He was a political neuter, a problem solver whose only demand of authority was that it should provide him with an endless supply of interesting problems. The outbreak of war and his assignment to the GRU and Atomic Division had changed the nature of the problems but not, fortunately, the scope they offered to his talents.

The First Priority was clearly a case in point. Sheslakov had all the relevant information — the military reports, espionage reports, industrial reports, scientific reports — scattered across his desk. Most of what they contained was now filed in his brain. He could see no reason to dispute Stalin’s statement that they could neither make nor steal enough atomic bombs, but his intuition insisted that this was one riddle that had an answer. And intuition, he had always thought, was nothing more than logic making use of facts that were stored in the unconscious.

He lit another cigarette and closed his eyes. What were the arguments against the theft? He took a fresh sheet of paper and wrote, in neat capitals, “NOT ENOUGH CAN BE STOLEN.” Not enough for what? For a possible war against the Americans? No, for deterring the Americans from starting such a war. The Americans would know how much of the Uranium-235 had been stolen, and consequently how many bombs could be made. A dead end, it had to be. So why didn’t it feel like one? He could see no hidden assumptions. There had to be something else.

Sheslakov spent the rest of the afternoon attacking the problem from the other end, checking through the reports covering a possible acceleration of the Soviet program. He could find no hopes there. Feeling, for him, unusually frustrated, he ate dinner in the GRU canteen and went for a walk along the river. It was a warm evening for early May, the sky clear after the day’s spring showers, and he surrendered himself to pleasant reveries, secure in the knowledge that parts of his mind were still carefully sifting through the problem.

It was just after eight when, sitting on an old capstan and staring across the water at a factory gutted by a German bomb, he found the hidden assumption he’d been searching for. And in the seconds that followed the pieces of an answer seemed to slip into each other like the parts of a matryoshka doll.

He lit a cigarette and sat for a few moments more watching the evening shadows lengthen. Then he walked briskly back to Frunze Street, collected a bottle from his office, and took the elevator back down to the floor that housed the GRU Secretariat. As expected, he found Olgarkov still at his desk, a mountain of a man surrounded by a mountain of paperwork. Seeing the bottle, Olgarkov produced two glasses from a drawer with a magician’s flourish.

They drank each other’s health and Sheslakov sank into the sofa beneath the window.

“Two things, Pyotr Alexeyevich,” he said.

“First Priority, I assume.”

“Word spreads fast.”

“Words like those do.”

“One, I want a report from Rosa, in Washington, as quickly as possible.” He dictated the questions he wanted answered. “How long?”

“It will have to come out through Alaska,” Olgarkov replied. “A week, perhaps ten days.”

“That’s quick enough. The other half won’t be so easy. I want a man with experience in covert operations and the sort of loyalty rating that Comrade Beria would envy. Plus, he must be completely fluent in American English.”

“And you need him tomorrow, I assume.”

“Of course.”

Olgarkov examined the bottom of his glass, then looked up. “Is the NKVD cooperating?”

“So I’m told.”

“Then I know one possibility,” he said, holding out his glass.

After making the drop, the pilot wiggled his wings in farewell and disappeared over the trees.

“What the fuck do they think we’re doing out here?” Kuznetsky shouted angrily, kicking the half-open crate. “Holding nonstop parties?”

Yakovenko groaned. “Not more vodka?”

“Enough to keep the brigade drunk for a week.”

“Maybe there’s food in the other crate.”

The two men walked around the edge of the clearing, dousing the circle of fires as they went. The other crate had also broken open, spilling chocolate bars across the damp grass.

Yakovenko took the wrapping off one and bit into it. “Better than nothing,” he said. “In fact it tastes good.”

“Chocolate and vodka,” Kuznetsky said disgustedly. “Moscow’s idea of a balanced diet.”

“Imported chocolate at that,” Yakovenko added, passing him the wrapper. “Where’s it from?”

“Made in the U.S.A.,” Kuznetsky translated, “For Military Personnel Only.”

“That’s us. Should make you feel young again.”

Kuznetsky grunted. “Come on, let’s load this up. Plus a few bottles of vodka, say fifty. We’ll leave the rest here.” They picked up the crate and carried it across to their vehicle, a T-34 tank that had clearly seen better days. The bodywork was pitted with the scars of battle, and the gun barrel was missing. But it still moved as long as there was gas in its tank.

“How are we going to carry the vodka?” Yakovenko asked as they lashed the crate behind the turret.

Kuznetsky’s reply was drowned by the sound of another plane, this time unmistakably German, passing overhead at about five hundred feet.

“Good thing we had the fires out,” Yakovenko said placidly, opening up another bar of chocolate.

“That’s three tonight—”

“It’s only the second.”

“I was talking about German planes. There’s going to be another sweep soon.” He stared up at the sky. “The full moon’s due in a couple of days… Forget the booze. We’re going back.”

Driving the T-34 through the forest was a slow, nerve-racking business, but Yakovenko enjoyed the challenge, and Kuznetsky, on the rim of the turret, was left to his thoughts. He wondered whether it would be better to go back underground this time rather than move the whole brigade east for a few weeks. Surely the Germans couldn’t spare that many men anymore, not with the offensive that everyone knew was coming in June. Yes, they should go underground and sit it out. In two months they’d be behind their own lines again. And he’d have to find a new job. And make a decision about Nadezhda.

The first light of dawn appeared through the trees ahead; the birds seemed to be clearing their throats for song. Kuznetsky loved this time of day: its sense of promise was indestructible, immune to human realities. He would miss the forest, really miss it. He’d have to join the bigwigs and get a dacha in the woods, somewhere like Zhukovka but farther out.

They were nearly home now, though no outsider would have noticed signs of habitation. The brigade, some eighty strong, lived in a connecting series of camouflaged dugouts beneath the forest floor; fires were lit only at night, and then only underground. Even the T-34 had a subterranean garage. The lookouts, Kuznetsky noted with satisfaction, were as alert as ever, signaling them in from their perches in the trees. He was reminded yet again of the tales of Robin Hood, which he’d read as a boy.

Nadezhda was still sleeping, her long black hair falling across her face. As he lay down beside her, determined to get an hour or so’s sleep, she snored gently and placed her arm protectively around his chest. He smiled and stroked her hair.

When he was her age he’d been playing hookey from school in Minnesota, bad-mouthing his parents, feeling up Betty Jane Webber in the hay loft, ignoring stupid questions like “What are you going to do when you grow up, Jack?” He had known nothing, experienced nothing, done nothing.

This sixteen-year-old lying beside him had seen her parents and brothers hanged, had killed at least three Germans, and had had at least one lover before him. It was only in sleep that she still looked a child. In sleep she almost had enough innocence for both of them.

He was wakened by Ovchinnikova less than an hour later. “We’ve got a visitor,” she said.

It was a young girl, seven or eight years old, from a nearby village. She was sitting with Yakovenko eating a chocolate bar. “They’ve got an informer,” Yakovenko explained. “They were going to string him up right away, but Mikhailova — remember her? — insisted that they follow all the proper procedures and have a trial. So Liliya here was awarded the fifteen-mile walk to fetch you.”

Kuznetsky groaned.

“Breakfast?” asked Yakovenko, holding out a chocolate bar.

It was a beautiful spring morning, a bright sun warming the air and flooding the eyes with fresh colours. Swiveling his head around, Kuznetsky couldn’t find a single wisp of cloud in the sky.

He was sitting on a piece of rubble waiting for the trial to begin. He’d given Morisov half an hour to put together the evidence, and it seemed like longer. He opened his pocket watch and was caught as usual by the beauty of the face that stared out of the photograph inside the lid. Anna, he called her, but he had no idea what her real name was. The only thing he knew about her was that the man who’d carried her picture had died in a ditch outside Lepel, with both hands vainly trying to stop the hole where his throat had been.

It was almost eleven. “Grigory,” he shouted.

“Ready,” Morisov shouted back. “Bring out the accused,” he said to Mikhailova, who stood holding a pitchfork.

The man was brought out. He was about thirty, with a broad face that seemed ill at ease with his emaciated body. His face was covered in red welts; obviously not everyone had been prepared to wait for the proper authorities. He was clearly terrified.

The same old scene, Kuznetsky thought. The same circle of cottages, the same ring of onlookers, eyes bright with fear and lack of food. The crimes had changed, and the names of the criminals. Counterrevolutionaries, saboteurs, kulak profiteers, Nazi informers. His duty was the same. Liquidation. He listened to Morisov.

“… the accused was seen entering and leaving the Fascist administrative headquarters in Polotsk. That afternoon a Nazi punishment detail arrived here, where they immediately discovered a clearing sown and cultivated against their orders by Comrade Poznyakov. After piling the clearing with loose branches and setting fire to it, they hanged Comrade Poznyakov, his wife, and two children. The accused returned later that day, feigning ignorance…”

Why had he come back? Kuznetsky asked himself. What stupidity.

The accused sat on the ground, his head bowed, his right arm twitching. Kuznetsky wondered which of the stock explanations it would be.

Morisov had finished and was now joking with one of the village women. The other partisans looked bored; they’d seen this play too many times before. “Do you still deny collaboration?” Kuznetsky asked.

The man spoke without raising his head, a torrent of words. “I had to do it. They have my daughter in the brothel at Polotsk. She’s only eleven and they promised to let her go. I only informed on Poznyakov, no one else…”

The rush abated.

“I find the accused guilty as charged,” Kuznetsky said. “Have the straws been drawn?” he asked Morisov.

“Yes.”

Young Maslov walked forward, pulled the accused to his feet, and half dragged him off between two cottages. Why, Kuznetsky wondered, do we still have this need to execute in private? Who was the privacy for — the victim or the executioner?

The shot echoed through the village, silencing the birds for a few seconds. Kuznetsky walked over to the group of villagers.

“You’ll be better off in Vaselivichi,” he told them, but they knew better.

“Poznyakov wasn’t the only one who sowed a clearing,” they told him.

“Stenkin wasn’t a bad man,” one muttered. “He was right; he could have turned in the lot of us.”

Sheslakov arrived early at his Frunze Street office and found the NKVD messenger waiting outside his door with file in hand. He signed for it in triplicate, ordered his usual three cups of coffee from his secretary, and settled himself behind his desk. While he waited he studied the photograph that came with the file. Did the man look American or did he think that only because he knew he was American? Perhaps it was the half-amused expression on the face, not a common feature in NKVD portraiture. He put it to one side as the coffee arrived; faces were Fyedorova’s speciality, not his.

The man’s real name was Jack Patrick Smith; Yakov Kuznetsky was a literal translation of the first and last names. He’d been born in St. Cloud, Minnesota, in 1900 to second-generation Anglo-Irish immigrants. His father had been a cop and his mother a seamstress. There had been no other children.

Jack had joined the U.S. Army in 1918 — “to see the world” he’d told his first Soviet interrogator — and had been posted to one of the battalions used in the American intervention. In August of that year his battalion was guarding the Suchan mines near Vladivostok, the only source of coal for the eastern section of the Trans-Siberian, a footnote helpfully pointed out. For several weeks the Americans and the local population had gotten on well, but when the Revolution reached the area the Americans sided with the Whites and the mining community with the Reds. The Americans occupied the mines. One day one of their officers was shot, and the Americans went out looking for a culprit. Smith and another man, O’Connell, were sent to search the house of a miner who lived some way from the village.

They didn’t come back.

The Americans assumed they’d been captured by Red partisans and offered to exchange two arrested miners. They didn’t believe it when the Reds told them Smith was not a prisoner, so a meeting was arranged between him and the American commander on neutral ground. Smith told him that O’Connell had attacked the Russian miner’s daughter and that he’d shot and killed O’Connell. Smith told his commander he’d joined the Revolution and that was all there was to it.

Sheslakov put down the file, took the handbook of Siberian flora off the second cup of coffee, and watched the steam escape like a smoke signal. An apparently ordinary American boy “joining the Revolution,” just like that. It didn’t bode altogether well. The Mongols had always slaughtered deserters on the grounds that they’d shown they could never be trusted. Still, he mused, the current condition of Mongolia didn’t say much for their judgment.

Sheslakov went back to the file.

After the Revolution, Smith — now Kuznetsky — had been thoroughly investigated. He’d come out clean, and since he’d already proved himself with the partisans, commanding his own group in the Chita area for over a year, he’d been snapped up by the Cheka in Irkutsk. Since then it had been all promotions and special assignments: head of the Chita NKVD 1931–34, commissar attached to special anti-kulak forces in the Saratov area, the West Ukraine, and the Crimea, 1934–37, administrative adviser in Spain 1937–39. He’d been sent back to the Far East in 1939 to a post in the Commissariat attached to Zhukov’s General Staff, had still been there when the Far Eastern divisions were redeployed on the Moscow Front in November 1941. Finally, he’d volunteered for partisan duty and been parachuted into Belorussia in May 1942 as a replacement brigade commissar. For the last six months he’d been commanding the brigade, as the previous commander had been killed and not replaced.

Why, Sheslakov wondered, would a man with Kuznetsky’s glittering record volunteer for partisan duty? The noble-gesture theory didn’t fit with the rest of his career. Had he been trying to recreate his idealistic youth? And why, in twenty years of promotions, had he never gotten himself a position in Moscow? It wouldn’t have been difficult if he’d wanted one. But he hadn’t, and that was unusual.

Sheslakov took the fauna handbook off the third cup and took a sip. In all other respects the man was perfect, and choosing a more difficult life was no indication of disloyalty. The reverse, some would say. He lit his first cigarette of the day, watched the smoke wafting upward, then reached for the telephone.

He was on his third call when Fyedorova arrived. He passed her the photograph without speaking, and she took it across to the window.

Fyedorova was his “administrative assistant,” and had been since the beginning of the war. She was ten years older than Sheslakov, a small, thin woman who had worked for the GRU since its founding. Fyedorova drank to excess, cared nothing for authority, and did next to no work. Her only function, which both she and Sheslakov found self-justifying, was to act as his sounding board. For this she was perfectly equipped. Her intelligence was as purely psychological as his was purely logical; she had a wisdom, an insight into people, which he found as vital as it was irritating.

“First reaction?” he asked as he put down the phone.

“A wild card,” she replied, pinning the photograph to the wall opposite her chair.

“Try this one,” he said, passing across a picture of a young, dark-haired woman.

Fyedorova stared at it for some time. “This one tells me nothing,” she said finally, “and that’s unusual.”

“A good start,” Sheslakov murmured. “Put it up with the other one and I’ll tell you who they are and what I have in mind for them.”

He went through his plan, clarifying his own appreciation of it in the process.

“Ingenious,” she said when he’d finished. “But you know that.”

She looked up again at the two faces, both with the half-smile, as if they were looking at the same thing. “Even the best play…”

“Depends on good acting,” he completed drily.

“And one of our two leading actors has been forced on us by circumstance. Her file is about as useful as the people who wrote it.”

“I’ve got Nikolai trying to trace the man who recommended her recruitment. Luerhsen, Josef. According to her file, he’s in Moscow, but his file’s disappeared.”

She was still staring at the photographs. “Neither of them is Russian,” she said. “Zhdanov won’t like that.”

“Zhdanov will like the alternative even less. Let’s get the script right first, then worry about the actors.”

He picked up the phone again and, after some playful banter with the switchboard girl, whose name he kept forgetting, was put through to Sergei Yanovsky, an old friend and the head of the GRU’s German section.

“I need to talk to you, Sergei Ivanovich.”

“I can’t make it today or tomor—”

“First Priority. How about twenty minutes?”

“I’ll be there.”

“I must remember that for the bread queue,” Fyedorova said. “I assume you want me here.”

“Yes, we have a long day ahead. Yanovsky is only the first.” He picked up the phone again and made three more appointments, two in his office and one at a research institute outside the city. He’d barely put the phone down when Yanovsky arrived. The two men embraced.

“Right,” Sheslakov said, sitting down and twirling his jade letter opener. “All you know of the German atomic program.”

Yanovsky looked surprised for a moment. “There’s none to speak of now, though there could have been. Their technical knowledge in 1939 was the equal of anyone’s.” He lit the cigarette offered by Sheslakov. “Tea?” he asked.

“When you’ve earned it.”

“Okay. In 1939 the Nazis set up a Uranium Society, the Uranverein, and all the prominent scientists they had left after the emigrations were given particular tasks to do in solving the basic problem of how to make the bomb. Uranium exports from Czechoslovakia were stopped, a heavy-water production program was started. By 1941 the scientists reported that they could build a reactor that would make the U-235 they needed for a bomb. The problem — ours, too, as I understand it — was the deadline. Hitler wasn’t interested in anything that would take several months, let alone something that would need a few years, so the program wasn’t given any priority. Our information is that the German scientists, most of them at any rate, were quite relieved about this and were quite happy to work on the theory knowing full well that their consciences would never be troubled by the practice.

“In the last year things have changed, though not that much. The Nazis are getting desperate, and all sorts of desperate solutions are being looked at. Atomic bombs are still seen as too long-term for practical use, but German atomic espionage in America has been stepped up. Fortunately most of their information comes from our Rosa, and she’s been busy confirming their pessimism. That’s about it. They have an atomic development program that might give them a bomb in ten years. Since they’ll all have been hanged within two, it’s completely irrelevant.”

Sheslakov looked pleased. “But they have the scientific knowledge?”

“Yes.”

“If they had the U-235, they could make a bomb?”

“Heisenberg actually told Speer as much. ‘Give us the U-235 and we’ll make you a bomb,’ he said. You’re not planning to give them any?”

“When did that conversation take place?”

“1942. June, I think. I can look it up.”

“No need.” Sheslakov stood up. “Thank you, Sergei Ivanovich. You’ve been most helpful. But,” he added, seeing the other’s expression, “I can say no more. And” — he looked at his watch — “I’m afraid there’s no time for tea. Yelena is well?”

“Fine. Apart from worrying about our son Mikhail.” He smiled ruefully. “You and Vera must come over. I’ll telephone you.”

Sheslakov closed the door behind him, thinking for a second about his own son, killed three years before in the war’s first days.

“Well, no obvious problem there,” Fyedorova said. “Tell me, why are you bothering to visit Kapitza? There’s no doubt concerning the scientific facts, is there?”

“I like to hear everything firsthand.”

A knock on the door heralded their next visitor, a burly man with a sour expression. He sat down without being asked. “Well, Comrade Sheslakov, I am here as ordered. I would be grateful if this business could take up as little time as possible.”

Sheslakov sighed inwardly, smiled outwardly. “I know your time is valuable, Comrade Boletsky, but this is First Priority business.”

Why, he asked himself, were there so many unmitigated bastards in the NKVD external sections?

“Comrade,” he said “tell me about the U-235 trains.”

“You have the report.”

“Tell me anyway,” Sheslakov said coldly, closing his eyes to help him keep his temper.

“They leave Oak Ridge on the first Friday of each month at around 6 p.m., arrive in Los Alamos on the following Tuesday morning. Each carries ten crates, weight approximately fifty pounds, each containing five pounds of U-235. Two military police accompany the train throughout, two state police are picked up and deposited at each state border.”

“It seems an absurdly low level of protection.”

“It is.”

“Why so little, Comrade Boletsky, why?”

“Because the Americans have not considered the possibility of an attack. I think the two policemen are only there because of some instinctive desire to guard something that’s important, not because they seriously think it needs guarding.”

“Good. Now the train — how is it composed?”

“What do you mean?”

“What does it consist of?”

“I don’t have that information.”

“Get it, please. I want to know how many railroad cars, whether the engine is steam or diesel, where and when the engineers are changed over, as they must be on such a long journey. I want the makeup of the train, the order of the cars involved, everything. Who is the source of information?”

“GRU,” Boletsky said with ill-concealed distaste. “Melville, real name Aaron Matson, deputy chief of security at Oak Ridge. Rosa is his contact.”

“Is she? What’s his motivation?”

“Ideological.”

“I want a full dossier on him too. Coordinate it with Barchugov. Also a complete timetable of the train’s journey, where it is at all times. And I want to know why it leaves on Fridays at 6 p.m.

“Finally,” he said, consulting his notes for the first time, “I want everything you have on the situations at Grand Falls and the Alaskan relay station. I particularly want to know the current situation regarding American cargo-checking procedures.”

He stood up. “I realize most of this will have to come from America, but I would appreciate whatever urgency you can muster. This is First Priority.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” Boletsky replied stiffly.

“Why,” Fyedorova asked after he’d gone, “does it matter what sort of engine is pulling the train?”

“Steam engines have to stop for water,” Sheslakov replied as he looked for a particular file in the stacks on his desk.

“I’m going to see Petr Kapitza,” he said, passing her the file. “This is all we have on Walter Schellenberg. When I get back you can tell me whether he’s the man to be tempted by our bait.”

After helping herself to the bottle of vodka that Sheslakov kept at the back of his filing cabinet, Olga Fyedorova settled herself on the old cot under the window and opened the file. Holding the German’s photograph up to the light, she studied it for several minutes, trying to think herself behind the eyes that stared out at her. They were a boy’s eyes, she thought, not unlike Sheslakov’s.

A good beginning.

Her approach to an operation like this was completely different from Sheslakov’s. He approached it like a diagram, she like the writing of a love story, weighing up the interactions in the diagram, the way the people concerned would respond to events and, most important of all, to each other. There would be no more than ten people intimately involved in the unfolding of the plan, and several of them would remain unknown to her. It was all the more crucial then that those she wove into the plot should be known quantities, and that their strengths and weaknesses should be written in from the beginning.

Schellenberg was a special case. He had only one decision to make, and everything that was known about him had to be manipulated in the desired direction. He came from a well-to-do family, had been educated at a Jesuit gymnasium, had studied medicine and law at Bonn University. Soon after graduation he had enlisted in the SD, the SS Security Service. All plus points, Fyedorova thought. Intellectuals were always easier to predict, particularly those who chose subjects like medicine and law. If he had studied history or physics, she would have been much less sanguine.

The move from the Jesuits to the SS was equally indicative. To her it implied the need for an ideological father figure; the ideology itself would be the product of circumstance rather than conviction. In France before the first war she’d known Catholics who had become Marxists at almost the touch of a button; almost the same process, except, she thought with a smile, in that case it was a mother figure that was required. Anyway, Schellenberg’s ideology was sufficiently vague and indeterminate to allow the free play of the sort of intellect that chose to study law and medicine. Neither would provide a driving force, and judging from his rise through the ranks, the man was not lacking in ambition. It couldn’t be money that moved him, and she had a sneaking suspicion that power for its own sake did not attract him. Power for what, then? It must be for play, for the chance to play games at the highest level.

That would make him ideal.

She went back to the file. He had coordinated the intelligence from Austria before the Anschluss, then personally undertaken a spy mission to West Africa in the winter of 1938–39, checking out harbour defenses. And, she remembered it now, he had been the officer at Venlo in 1939 who had lured the two British agents into captivity.

Games.

From 1939 to 1941 he had worked under Mueller for the Gestapo and had reportedly been close to Heydrich. Then, in June 1941, he had been switched to Amt VI, the SD’s Foreign Intelligence Service, as its new chief. With Heydrich gone, he had gravitated to Himmler, and was now thought to be the Reichsführer’s chief political adviser. Early this year his organization had absorbed the discredited Abwehr to form a newly unified intelligence service. He was Hitler’s spy master.

So much for his career: he hadn’t missed an opportunity. He had a house off the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin, a country house at Herzberg. His office was built like a luxurious fortress, with a machine gun built into his desk and alarm sirens activated by photoelectric cells. When traveling abroad he “wore” an artificial tooth containing poison and carried a cyanide capsule in a signet ring.

That, Fyedorova thought, was particularly interesting. What kind of a man carried two suicide devices? An obsessive. In fact, the whole business about the desk reeked, not of paranoia — paranoiacs didn’t go on spy missions — but of perverse perfectionism. The medical/law student again. Here was a man who believed passionately in details, and who would probably have the two weaknesses typical of such people — an inability to see the forest for the trees and, more damning in a spy master, the compulsion to furnish from the imagination those details which were unavailable.

She got up and refilled her glass, fixed the photograph to the wall in front of her, and lay back on the cot. “Will you bite, Walter tovarich?” she asked the picture.

“I think you will.”

Sheslakov had found Professor Petr Kapitza supervising the unloading of crates containing laboratory equipment. The Institute was in the final throes of its return to Moscow and chaos reigned. Kapitza’s state of mind had not been noticeably improved by the appearance of another interrogator from the Atomic Division.

“As far as I’m concerned, the ‘First Priority’ should be saving several years’ work from these vandals,” he had exclaimed, taking in the removal corps with a sweep of his arm. “Which one are you talking about?”

Sheslakov had given him a telephone number to ring and patiently waited in the Institute’s spacious lobby, imagining the swish of tsarist gowns in days gone by.

Eventually the scientist reappeared, motioning Sheslakov to follow him outside. “We can talk in the gardens, where we might conceivably hear each other.”

Sheslakov set out to be disarming. “Professor, I know your time is valuable, and I promise you that after this conversation the work can go on undisturbed. I have read the report of your conversations with General Kostylov, and there are just a few extra questions I need answered. First, if you were given fifty pounds of Uranium-235, could you make an atomic bomb?”

Kapitza looked at him sharply. “Is that a random figure you’ve just thought up?”

“No.”

“I thought not. The answer is yes, or at least the probability is very high. Two bombs, I would say.”

“How quickly?”

The scientist spread his arms. “That is hard to answer.”

“A month, a year, ten years?”

Kapitza looked up at the sky. “Two years, I would think. But I would not like to stake my life on it. The Fuchs diagram has no great surprises — the basic principles are clear. But there are always unforeseen problems.” He looked at Sheslakov again, this time with something approaching a smile. “Of course continued access to the American development process would save us from duplicating their mistakes.”

“How powerful would such a bomb be?” Sheslakov had no reason for asking the question save curiosity.

“Again, hard to say.”

“A guess?”

“I would say powerful enough to raze a city the size of Novgorod.”

It was Sheslakov’s turn to look at the scientist. Kapitza couldn’t possibly know that his questioner came from that city. A chill raced up Sheslakov’s spine. He couldn’t resist another irrelevant question.

“Professor, do you have any qualms about making such a bomb?”

Kapitza laughed for the first time. “Qualms? Of course not. Qualms have never stopped scientific development. We are on a roller coaster, as the Americans say, and the ups and downs keep getting steeper, and there’s no way to get off. What use are qualms?”

The chill was still there, so out of place on a beautiful spring morning. Sheslakov reorganized his thoughts. “The Uranium-235 — how easy is it to transport? How dangerous?”

“It won’t explode if you drop it. But it has to be kept in small quantities or a critical mass is reached. If that happens, radiation is released, and radiation kills.”

“So the idea of carrying five pounds of Uranium-235 in fifty-pound crates makes sense?”

“You are well-informed. Is that how the Americans are doing it? Yes, the container for the U-235 — a steel bottle probably — would be suspended somehow in the middle of the crate, keeping it an adequate distance from the other jars in the other crates.”

“So there would be no danger in handling these crates, no time limit, temperature limit, pressure limit, anything like that?”

“Not that I can see. When can we expect these crates to arrive?”

Sheslakov smiled, “If these crates arrive, Professor, you’ll be the first to know.”

“Yes,” Fyedorova told him on his return to the office. “Or at least I see no reason why not.”

Sheslakov sat himself behind his desk. “I think a drink is called for. In your case,” he added, examining the bottle, “another drink. I’m beginning to distrust this operation. People keep saying yes to me, as if the whole thing is a foregone conclusion.”

Fyedorova got up from the cot and took the proffered glass. “If it’s difficulties you want, don’t despair. They’ve found Luerhsen — in the Lubyanka. And they’ve lost Kuznetsky.”

Two

They had been underground for more than eighteen hours, and the strain of confinement was beginning to tell. The whispering grew louder, the accidental noises more frequent, the smell of the latrine buckets was becoming unbearable. Kuznetsky wondered whether it might have been better to send out scouts and risk the dogs picking up their scent.

There was a soft knock on the partition. He put down his book, extinguished the candle, and eased himself up off the bed. This girl would sleep through anything, he thought to himself as he fastened his belt. The knock was repeated.

“Coming,” he whispered. Nadezhda turned over in her sleep, exposing one milky-white shoulder.

Yakovenko was outside. “Message coming in,” he said.

Kuznetsky followed him through the maze to the radio room, watched the operator transcribe the message from the current code. “Colonel Kuznetsky required Moscow immediately. Pickup points 12 14 15 Tuesday Thursday Saturday. Signal required. Request receipt.”

That was it. What the fuck did they want with him in Moscow? “Tell them the Germans are crawling all over the place and we’re still hibernating,” he told Beslov. “Diplomatically.”

“Situation understood,” came the reply. “Colonel Kuznetsky required Moscow immediately. Request receipt.”

“Maybe it’s a medal,” Yakovenko murmured. “Though they could have dropped that with the chocolate.”

Kuznetsky laughed. “Oh shit. Tell them—” He broke off at the sound of running feet.

Sidorova erupted into the dugout, mouthing the word “Germans.”

“Cut the connection,” Kuznetsky whispered to Beslov. “Make sure everyone’s ready,” to Yakovenko. He made his way to the periscope, squeezing himself between the roots of the tree that concealed it. The tube went right up through the center of the trunk, then into an artificial sapling that could be twisted where the trunk forked. Putting his eyes to the mirror, he could immediately see a single German soldier, a boy of about sixteen, walking slowly toward him, diligently scanning the ground for a sign. Gently swiveling the periscope, he could pick out the line of troops, spread out at around twenty-yard intervals, carefully advancing. Only the boy would actually pass over the camp. Kuznetsky prayed that he’d be nearsighted.

He seemed to be. He was already halfway across without pausing in his deliberate stride. Kuznetsky turned to check that his group and the other group leaders were all there, caught a glimpse of Nadezhda yawning in the background.

The boy stopped and reached down to pick something up, something small and red. A chocolate wrapper! How the bell had they missed it?

“Pretend it’s not there,” Kuznetsky silently pleaded. “Save your own and your comrades’ lives. Just keep walking.”

The German licked the paper, perhaps finding a last crumb of chocolate, and then he blew his whistle. Kuznetsky didn’t dare turn the sapling, but he could hear the sound of running feet crashing through the undergrowth and, more ominously, the sound of motors revving. A lieutenant came into view, examined the wrapper, looked warily around. Then he strode off to the left, and Kuznetsky risked following him with the periscope. The officer was busily pulling dead branches away from the T-34’s underground garage.

Kuznetsky climbed out of the roots, pointed to his watch, and held up one finger. The other group leaders scurried away through the interconnecting passages, counting seconds under their breath. He picked up the loaded antitank gun, checked that the automatic pistol was firmly in his belt, and continued counting.

Thirty-five, thirty-six. Everyone was ready. Forty, forty-one. And at least the light above ground was fading fast. Nadezhda smiled at him. Fifty-five, fifty-six.

Ever so carefully, he released the greased wooden peg that held the trapdoor and let it drop. A square of twilight appeared. Yakovenko placed the stump under the opening, and Kuznetsky used it as a launching pad to throw himself up through the square and onto the forest floor, screaming “Now” at the top of his voice.

Ignoring the nearby group of startled Germans, he picked out the approaching half-track and fired the antitank rocket. There was a whoosh of flame and the vehicle toppled forward like an elephant crashing to its knees. Yakovenko’s machine gun seemed to be going off in his ear, but the group of Germans were all down or falling, and suddenly there was near silence, only the shouts of the Germans farther off and the rumble of other vehicles in the distance.

The partisans were pouring out of the hidden exits, forming themselves into their groups and moving away. Kuznetsky could see the nearest Germans moving back and knew why, having read a captured Wehrmacht manual. They were supposed to form a circle with a radius of three hundred yards.

He checked his own group and led them off at a run on their prearranged compass setting — due west. Fifty yards farther they found another half-track disgorging troops and he dropped to the ground with the rocket gun, felt Yakovenko load it as he took aim, fired. Another inferno and they were running again, zigzagging between the burning Germans, on through the forest. Nadezhda was leading now, through a small clearing and down into a shallow riverbed as a burst of automatic fire shredded the leaves above their heads.

They must have gone three hundred yards by now, Kuznetsky thought, but there’d be a second line not too far ahead. With a supreme effort he managed to regain the front and pulled the group to a halt.

“Down! Quiet!” he ordered, and it was as if a switch had been flicked. There was heavy gunfire to the north, and they could see the flames of the burning half-tracks reflected in the forest roof. To both right and left the passage of vehicles was audible, but ahead of them, nothing.

It would be fully dark in an hour. Should they wait for the second line and hope to pass through it unseen? Kuznetsky was inclined to think so until he heard the dogs.

“Spread — no firing,” he ordered, and they were on the move again, racing across the forest floor in a widening line, running into the enemy before either side had time to think. Kuznetsky’s automatic pistol coughed twice as a silhouette loomed to confront him, and he pumped another bullet between the dog’s yellow eyes as it broke free from its dead master’s grip. To his right and left the forest was again full of gunfire. He kept running, the sounds fading behind him, conscious that at least some of the others were running parallel paths through the trees.

It was not the first time that Sheslakov had visited someone in the bowels of the NKVD headquarters, but familiarity had not bred immunity. The grayness of the place seemed all-embracing, and this somehow seemed to emphasize the sharpness of each human touch. The people incarcerated, and their jailers — they all seemed like pieces of raw meat on an endless, uniform slab.

In the beginning, he thought, walking down another identical corridor, animality bred abstraction, the savage developed language. Now abstraction breeds animality, correcting some cosmic balance. Our rulers run the most perfectly devised system like savages, he thought, while the Germans, still animals, choose anal retentives for their leaders. He felt a surge of sadness.

The NKVD officer opened the door of Luerhsen’s cell. “I must lock it behind you,” he said apologetically.

“Too many mass escapes, eh?” Sheslakov said, unable to resist the gibe.

Luerhsen looked up at him with one of the most peaceful faces Sheslakov could remember. No one upstairs had seemed to know why he was imprisoned, and it had taken Sheslakov half an hour and several irate telephone calls to get his file released. The “antistate activity” with which he was charged — but not, as yet, convicted for — concerned remarks he had made in 1939, five years before. To be precise, he had called the Nazi — Soviet Pact “an error of judgment comparable only with that made by Judas.” The NKVD officer in charge of the records had expressed surprise that the man had not been shot.

Sheslakov introduced himself and sat down on the bunk beside Luerhsen. “I wish to ask you some questions,” he said, “about someone you knew long ago. It has nothing to do with your case. I can do nothing to help you in that respect,” he added, suddenly deciding that honesty was the best policy with this man. “I can only say that the cause you served for thirty years needs your assistance once more. We need to assess how this woman will react in certain situations, and you are the only person in the Soviet Union who has actually met her.”

Luerhsen looked back at him placidly, a faint smile forming on his lips. “My loyalties survived many years in the enemy’s prisons; they will doubtless survive a few more in the prison of my friends. Who is the woman you wish to know about?”

“Amelia Brandt, now Brandon. We understand from your initial submission of her name as a possible GRU recruit that you knew her as a child and that you met again in Berlin in 1933.”

Luerhsen smiled. “She was always called Amy, never Amelia. Our Berlin meeting was very brief, two hours at most. But yes, she made an impression on me, mostly, I think, because seeing her then, in those circumstances, was like seeing her mother brought back to life. They looked so alike, but it was more than that.” He smiled inwardly, as if taken by a memory. “Hard to define,” he said. “Do you have a cigarette?”

Sheslakov offered his package, watched the old man inhale deeply. “I need as complete a picture of her as you can give me.”

“May I know why?”

“She’s a key figure in an operation we’re mounting in America. I can say no more than that.”

Luerhsen looked at him, took another deep drag on the cigarette. “That pleases me.”

“Tell me about when you knew her as a child.”

“Her mother and I were lovers, you know that. We met in the spring of 1918. Her husband had been killed several years before, at Tannenberg, I think. She was totally committed to the Party — the Spartakusbund as it was then. It was what we called a ‘comrades’ marriage’ in those days. Party work and bed and nothing much else. Amy must have been about seven—”

“She was born in August 1911.”

“Six, seven. A lovely child, though I’m afraid we didn’t have much time for doing things with her. You can imagine what it was like in Berlin in 1918 — more meetings than there were hours in the day, more newspapers than there was toilet paper, which was what most of them were used as. Elisabeth Brandt’s house was our center of operations; it was always swarming with people. Another woman, Anna Kaltz, also lived there, and she had a daughter the same age as Amy — Effi — so the two little girls looked after each other. One dark one, one blond one. They’d help out, too, making drinks, rolling leaflets off the printer. In fact they always seemed to have ink on their faces. They both worshiped their mothers, I do remember that. But so did a lot of people in Friedrichshain. They were remarkable women.”

“Can you remember any specific incidents with Amy?” Sheslakov asked. Fyedorova had insisted on that question.

Luerhsen furrowed his brow. “Not really. I bandaged her knee once, I remember that. She’d cut it quite badly, should have had stitches, and it obviously hurt like hell. But she hardly shed a tear. She was a determined little thing. Once she started something she’d finish it. Really stubborn. I expect she still is. People don’t change much, do they?” He gave Sheslakov a quizzical glance, accepted another cigarette.

“Then the roof fell in. January 1919. I was here in Moscow at one of those interminable conferences for setting up the Third International. Elisabeth was one of the Party leaders killed by the fascists, not that they called themselves that then. She was raped and beaten to death by a gang of them in her own house, and while it was all happening little Amy was sitting in the cupboard under the stairs where her mother had hidden her. She came out eventually and found her mother’s body, then walked halfway across Berlin to her aunt’s in the middle of the night. Imagine it! There was gunfire, gangs of thugs roaming the streets looking for Communists, everyone shut up tight in their houses, not daring to go out, and there’s this little girl walking miles across the city. She didn’t say a word for six months. The aunt married an American in 1921, and they all moved to America soon afterward.”

“How do you know all this? You say you weren’t there.”

“From Anna Kaltz. She was in Kiel looking after her sick father during the week it all fell apart, and she didn’t dare return to Berlin for several months. She’s also the link with 1933, because she and Amy kept up a correspondence over the years—”

“Did Amy keep up with Effi too?”

“No. Strange. Or perhaps not. I think Anna was Amy’s link with her mother.”

“1933?”

“The terrible year. It was the summer, late July, I think. I’d been sent back to Berlin to organize the relocation of the Pas Apparat — the underground passport factories. The Nazis were well into their drive against us and we’d decided to move everything to the Saar. Effi Kaltz was the best forger we had — an amazing talent. Anyway, we were there, five of us I think, in this house in Friedrichshain, packing up all the stuff, the inks, papers, rubber stamps, everything. And there was this knock on the door and there stood this beautiful young woman in American clothes. Amy. She was in Germany for a holiday, a pilgrimage really, had tried to find Anna Kaltz and learned that she’d been arrested. So she’d somehow tracked down Effi.

“We didn’t know what to do with her. We were expecting the Gestapo any minute, and for once we weren’t wrong… but I’m getting ahead of the story. We had another couple of hours’ work to do, and Amy said she’d wait, even though she must have known the risk she was running. I finished my tasks before the others and I talked to her for a time — twenty minutes, something like that. It was a strange conversation.

“At first I couldn’t get over how much she resembled her mother — it was uncanny. Then I started noticing the differences. There was a reticence about her that Elisabeth never had, a feeling she was holding herself in, holding herself very tightly. Maybe it was just being in Berlin again, with all that that must have meant for her. But I think it was more than that—”

“She was unhappy?”

“No, not at all. On the contrary, she seemed very happy. She was wearing an engagement ring—”

“Are you certain of that?”

“Yes.”

“But she never married.”

“Engagements can be broken off. No, it wasn’t unhappiness. I sensed divided loyalties, and remember, it was my job to do just that for many years. You get a feeling for it, you know there’s a split somewhere, sometimes even before the person concerned does. Amy was happy in one world but she still had at least half her heart in her mother’s world. And I don’t think she’d ever have been able to pull the two together. She had to choose.”

Luerhsen paused, seemed to be examining the cell floor. “Or have the choice made for her, which is probably what happened that evening.” He paused again.

“The Gestapo arrived,” Sheslakov prompted.

“Yes. A crashing on the door. Those bastards even enjoyed hitting doors. But we were prepared. There was a tunnel from the cellar that ran under the house behind and up through a grating in the next street. The Pas Apparat’s houses were the eighth wonder of the world when it came to hidden exits. We got away down the tunnel and piled into the car that was waiting and half-rammed our way past a Gestapo car that was blocking a crossroads. It was like an American gangster movie. And Amy…”

He smiled at the memory. “In the car I said something to her, something flippant like ‘Welcome home,’ and her face — the reticence was all gone — she was the absolute image of her mother in that moment. It was that look that made me put her name forward, because I knew, I knew, that the German part of her life wasn’t finished, and that sooner or later she would know it, too, and that somehow she would… not avenge her mother, but somehow justify her mother’s death. Do you understand?”

“I think so. What happened next?”

“I know only from thirdhand sources. We had a routine in such circumstances. The passengers would get out one by one, so as to split the pursuit, and I was the first to leave the car that night. What I heard, months later, was that Amy and Effi got out together, managed to shake off the followers, only to find the Gestapo waiting for them in Amy’s hotel room. It seems likely that they’d been following her all day, ever since she started making inquiries about Anna Kaltz.

“They were taken down to Gestapo headquarters on Prinz Albrechtstrasse, put in adjacent cells. They could talk to each other but not see each other. At some time in the night some men came down and crushed Effi’s drawing hand in the hinges of the cell door. Then they all raped her. Amy they left alone, probably because she had an American passport. She tried to comfort Effi through the rest of the night and in the morning they took her out and told her she was being deported. They put her on a train for Bremerhaven and must have held her there until the ship sailed. Effi died in Oranienburg a month later, killed by some pig of a guard for speaking out of turn. It was from one of her fellow inmates that we found all this out.”

The two men sat in silence for a moment.

“I’m giving you facts, but it doesn’t seem enough,” Luerhsen said at last. “It’s hard to imagine what it was like in those days, even for those of us who were there. We were Communists, disciplined Communists, but it was still an adventure. Does that sound crazy? But that’s what I saw in her eyes that moment in the car — adventure. Is that what you’re offering her?”

It wasn’t a word Sheslakov used, but with this man it didn’t seem out of place.

“You could say that,” he said, getting to his feet. “Thank you, Comrade.” He hesitated. “I’m very sorry there’s nothing I can do for you.”

Luerhsen shrugged. “There’s nothing I want. When you’ve been at war for thirty years there’s a lot to be said for the peace of a six-by-four cell. No,” he said, refusing Sheslakov’s package of cigarettes, “I shall only miss them more when they’re all gone.” He smiled his serene smile once more. “We never lose the discipline, do we?”

After finding his way out through the labyrinth of corridors, Sheslakov dismissed his driver and walked back to Frunze Street. Evening was coming on, the office workers pouring into the Metro at the bottom of Gorky Street. He felt profoundly depressed, as much by Luerhsen’s tranquility as by Kaptiza’s cheerful submission to the roller coaster. Anatoly Grigorovich, you’re getting old. Car chases in Berlin seemed like echoes of another age, the romantic underground fighters of the Comintern dancing around the feet of the beast like… an appropriate metaphor failed him.

“There’s nothing I want,” Luerhsen had said. Well, there was something Sheslakov wanted — a problem to solve. The cogs were fitting too smoothly into place.

Fyedorova was still on the cot, glass in hand, staring at Rosa’s photograph. Amy’s photograph. He started to recount his conversation with Luerhsen, then realized that the bottle by the bed was empty. It could wait until morning. He sent her home.

Alone in the office, almost alone in the building to judge by the lack of noise, Sheslakov found a fresh bottle and put his feet up on the desk. He needed a name for the operation, something romantic he decided, something for Luerhsen and the past. Three glasses later he suddenly remembered a favorite book of his childhood, a tale of bandits in the mountains of the Caucasus. Their leader had been a woman called “Armenian Rose.”

Three

The moment he came through the door and breezed by her, she knew something was wrong. No hello, no smile, no kiss. He had that expression on his face that she hated, the righteous-child expression.

“What’s the matter?” Amy asked, more sharply than she’d intended.

“Nothing,” Richard said, in that tone of his that shouted “Something.”

“All right,” Amy said. She’d been through this game before.

He sat in the armchair and stared at the ceiling. She waited.

“Amy, I saw you with a man today,” Richard finally blurted out. “Down by the river. Who was he?”

“Have you been spying on me?” she asked angrily, one part of her mind noting the irony of the question.

“Of course not. I was in the park—”

“He was a foreigner, a Czech, and he asked me for directions. His English wasn’t very good so we started talking in German. He was a nice man…”

“What did you talk about?”

“Oh, this and that. Living in America. The jealousy of the American male.”

He turned back to the ceiling. She could tell that he believed her and was wondering how to climb down gracefully. She would have to be more careful from now on. This might have been serious. What if he’d come up to her and Faulkner and started demanding explanations?

He was still sunk in thought. She and Faulkner had exceeded the usual meeting time, but there’d been more than usual to discuss. This sudden flood of requests from Moscow…

“What are you thinking about?” Richard asked.

“Nothing.”

“Amy, I’m sorry. I do love you, you know.” He held out his arms.

She couldn’t lie to him this time, not with words anyway. She undid her dressing-gown cord, let it slip open. He pulled it off her shoulders and kissed her breasts. She didn’t want to be kissed, not this time.

“Quickly,” she whispered, and in moments they were on the carpet, he pushing inside her, his arms tight around her neck.

He came almost immediately. He hadn’t done that for ages, she thought. Did something inside him know that she was feeling absolutely nothing? She kissed his cheek, put a finger across his lips to still the apology that she knew was forming. He really was a nice man in some ways.

My own hill of beans, she thought.

“I still can’t decide whether your eyes are blue or gray,” he said, gazing into them from a distance of about four inches.

Feeling suddenly irritated, she rolled over and sat against the sofa. “Richard, you’re the only man in my life. If you see me talking to a man, it’s not because I’m asking to go to bed with him.”

“Amy, I’ve said I’m sorry. I know it’s hard for you, but I can’t leave my wife yet. I just can’t do that to her.”

“I know. I’m not pushing you.” She wrapped her dressing gown around her, crossed the room, and turned on the radio. “Coffee?”

The newscaster announced the beginning of the Russian attack on Sevastopol between sales pitches for new vitamin pills. Richard sat back on the sofa and looked around the room. Nothing had changed since the previous Friday; it still looked like no other woman’s room he’d ever known. There were no pictures, no trinkets other than those he’d bought, no obvious keepsakes. It irritated him. Amy was so… so full of life, and her apartment was as exciting as a dentist’s waiting room.

She came in with the coffee, now dressed in a green skirt and cream blouse. “Still redecorating my apartment?” she asked with a grin.

“You could make it look more lived in,” he said reluctantly. They’d had this conversation before.

“It is lived in. I live in it, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“It’s not you.”

“It is. How many times do I have to tell you? I like things unadorned. You native Americans can’t understand that.”

“The Indians are the native Americans. You’re as American as I am.” This mocking anti-Americanism was the one facet of her character which both annoyed and baffled him. “And, anyway, what’s wrong with having nice things?” he asked belligerently.

She smiled sweetly at him. “Nothing, if you find them nice. Americans are brought up to care about their things. I wasn’t. Come on, we’ll miss the beginning of the movie. And don’t look at me like that — if I was an ordinary American girl, you’d find me boring.”

Perhaps so, Richard thought later, as he watched Marlene Dietrich throw chairs at James Stewart. He couldn’t accuse Amy of being boring.

After the movie they had coffee in a diner, then walked through Dupont Circle, kissing each other good night under the fountain. Richard then went home to his wife, Jean, piqued at Amy’s refusal to display any jealousy, angry at himself for wanting her to. Amy walked home slowly, trying to arrange her thoughts for the task at hand.

Back in her apartment, she made herself a pot of black coffee, changed back into her dressing gown, and retrieved Faulkner’s instructions from behind the brick in the fireplace. They were clear enough: Moscow wanted a report on Wim Doesburg, everything she knew and guessed about him, and her opinion of the “relationship” between them. It should be short and comprehensive. Typical.

What relationship? she asked herself, switching on the desk lamp. And what on earth could be behind this request? She sat back in the chair, sipping coffee, wondering where to begin. The first meeting on the ferry, she supposed.

She began to write, describing the German’s rotund appearance, his manner, recounting the gist of their conversation. It had been almost a year ago now, on a cold spring day. The whole encounter had seemed quite bizarre; several times she’d almost burst out laughing. He’d suspected nothing, thinking her just another patriotic German. Had she impressed him? She rather thought she had, almost too much so. She’d been too professional, too cool, and that, she knew, had slightly disconcerted him. But he’d responded in kind, and that had been the way of it ever since. She began to understand what Moscow meant by their “relationship.”

“Our meetings,” she wrote, “have always been conducted in a thoroughly professional manner, with little or no discussion of extraneous matters. He has never made any sexual advances, though he does seem aware of” — how should she put it? — “my femininity.” Suitably neutral. “He has never asked any questions about my private life.”

Funny, she thought, he seems more impressive on paper than he does in the flesh. Perhaps she had underestimated him. “He has never seemed concerned,” she wrote, “at the possibility of exposure, and his confidence, in my judgment, is well-founded. His intelligence is hard to assess. He absorbs information quickly, but his sense of humor, on those rare occasions when it is displayed, is of a coarseness that does not suggest any depth of intellect.”

Like Richard’s, she thought unkindly, quick and shallow.

What else did they want? Doesburg had told her during one of their visits to the zoo that the giraffe was his favorite animal, but she doubted whether Moscow would be interested. They wanted an assessment of his motivation. Well, what made spies spies? Experience in her case, bolstered by conviction. She had no idea what Doesburg had experienced in his fifty or so years, and she found it impossible to believe that any man of his intelligence would work for Hitler on ideological grounds. A blind spot perhaps, but Doesburg didn’t seem the ideological type. He wasn’t even interested in the war. At their last meeting she’d mentioned some current battle and he’d not even heard of it. So for him it had to be money or excitement or both. She tried to picture his flat face, the expression in the pale blue eyes. It was probably both.

“I suspect,” she wrote, “that his allegiance to the German cause is a matter of circumstance rather than conviction. From my limited knowledge I would guess that the possibility of material gain and the enjoyment of intrigue are more important to him.”

Why did she think that? His clothes were always beautifully pressed; he seemed somehow at home in New York, at ease with its excess. Which was more than she could say for herself, particularly since that day with Fuchs. She shuddered involuntarily at the memory, forced herself back to thinking about Doesburg. “Bourgeois,” that was the word that Moscow would understand. And pride too. He was proud, not of what he was doing, but of his skill at doing it.

“His mannerisms,” she wrote, “are unmistakably bourgeois. This, given the nature of his work, is a help rather than a hindrance. He seems to take an unusual pride in his competence. On at least two occasions he has told me how pleased Berlin was with ‘his’ information. Since, as we know, the information passed on to Berlin has been consistently unhelpful to the German cause, these comments would seem to tell us more about him than Berlin’s opinion of him. He clearly places much importance on the latter.”

Was this getting too psychological? If only she knew why Moscow wanted this information. Faulkner would have told her if he’d known, she was sure. She pushed her hair back behind her ears and leaned her elbows on the desk, her hands cupped in front of her mouth. Why?

Suddenly it came to her. Moscow was planning to feed Berlin some false information through her and Doesburg, and they wanted to be sure that he would believe her and Berlin believe him. What could it be? That didn’t matter for the moment.

“There is no reason to suppose,” she continued, “that he considers me in any way unreliable. I have consistently supplied him with information that Berlin must know is scientifically valuable, albeit of no practical use to them in the current circumstances. Berlin presumably values him for the same reason. I have no reason to believe that he will question any information I pass on, or that Berlin will question any information he passes on.”

That would do. She read through what she’d written, making only a few minor changes, and then spent the next three hours laboriously translating it into the month’s prescribed code. It was past five in the morning by the time she finished, and by then both her tiredness and the sense of excitement had passed. Whatever it was that Moscow wanted passed on couldn’t be that important; the Germans were already as good as beaten. It was just a matter of time.

Time. Her thoughts turned to the subject that was beginning to haunt her — the future. What would she do when the war was over? Carry on working against the wider enemy once her personal enemy had been ground under? Probably, but… if only they’d give her something important to do. Perhaps she’d leave it all behind, go somewhere like Africa, somewhere different…

The sky outside was lightening. For the first time in many months she took out another man’s photograph and sat by the window looking at his face. Three days they’d had once, three days on a floating palace. “I loved you,” she said softly. And lost you, she thought to herself. Eleven years, a lifetime ago.

Kuznetsky shifted the antitank rocket launcher from one shoulder to the other and stretched his cramped arm up above his head. Four days had passed since their escape from the German sweep, and the group’s eight survivors were now more than thirty miles from their former home, still ten miles from their pickup point at Lukomskoye. From there he’d be Moscow bound, for whatever reason it was that they wanted him. He didn’t really care, and that surprised him a little,

Nadezhda had been more upset than he’d expected, clinging to him fiercely with the tears pouring down her cheeks when he broke the news. He’d never seen her cry before. Since then she’d ignored him, a reaction which only reinforced the original impression. But there was nothing he could do. Orders were orders, the Party knew best or the Party knew nothing. How many times had he told people that? And there was only one passenger seat in a Polikarpov.

He looked at her now, striding ahead of him through the moonlit forest, her head erect, her black hair dancing on her shoulders. It had all been worth it, he thought, all the years of death, if a hundredth of the new generation were her equal. It was a comforting thought, and comforting thoughts seemed more important as the years went by. It was strange how the more impact a man had on the outside world, on other people’s lives, the more the inner world clamored for attention. Perhaps she reminded him of himself at twenty, another orphan at war with the world, propelled by ideals rather than theory, with nothing to lose but life itself. Perhaps her generation would find a real dawn, perhaps not. History was never sentimental. And how many people had he told that to?

He could hear Yakovenko behind him munching noisily on yet another chocolate bar. The man was becoming an addict. A pawn of imperialist chocolate companies! He laughed out loud, and Nadezhda turned and smiled at him for the first time since he’d broken the news.

Up ahead Morisov was gesturing the line to a halt. They were close to the Ulla River, and the Lepel Bridge would be guarded. If necessary, they could ford it with a rope, but the waters would still be swollen with the spring thaw and extremely cold. Kuznetsky picked out Tolyshkin for a forward reconnaissance, watched him disappear into the darkness, and sat down with his back against a tree.

Yakovenko sank down beside him. “Well, Yakov?” he asked, “why do you think Moscow wants you?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Kuznetsky replied, his eyes on Nadezhda. She came over and sat on his other side.

“I’ve decided to forgive you,” she said only half jokingly.

He smiled and said nothing, slipping his arm around her shoulders and pulling her closer. Morisov was trying to read his map by the moonlight; the others were all propping up trees, looking exhausted. One thing he’d miss, Kuznetsky thought, was being called by name. In Moscow it would be “Colonel” again, complete with the looks of deference for the uniform and fear for the reputation.

Nadezhda, with her usual remarkable facility, had already fallen asleep on his shoulder, but Kuznetsky’s head still whirred with thoughts when Tolyshkin returned. He eased her head gently onto the turf and joined Morisov.

“Good and bad,” Tolyshkin said. “The bridge is guarded by only two men, but the light’s very bright and there’s at least a hundred yards of open ground to cover.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad,” Morisov said.

“That was the good news. There’s a German bivouac another fifty yards down the road on the other side. About twenty tents, four half-tracks, one Panzer III. All the tents are dark, so I guess everyone’s asleep, but they’re close enough to be wakened by footsteps, let alone gunfire.”

Morisov sucked his teeth and looked at the forest roof.

“How about the bridge,” Kuznetsky asked, “along the girders?”

Tolyshkin thought for a moment. “Not too difficult — the trees go right down to the bank on both sides.”

“How’s the river look?” Morisov asked.

“Full and cold.”

“What about the far side?” Kuznetsky asked.

“The Germans aren’t holding their throats over the parapet. I’d say at least twenty yards of open ground between them and any cover.”

“There must be more than a hundred of them,” Morisov muttered.

Kuznetsky looked at his watch. “Look, it’ll be getting light in a couple of hours, but the moon will be down an hour before that. The Germans will probably cross over in the morning and spread out, so we can’t stay here. It’s either tackle the bridge or the river, and I don’t fancy the river. Neither Anatoly nor Nadezhda can swim. Remember the last river crossing?”

Morisov and Tolyshkin grunted their assent. Four lost that time.

“So, we’ll get under the bridge, wait for the Germans to cross, and then deal with whoever they leave behind after dark.”

“And if they don’t cross?” Morisov asked.

“Then we’ll have problems, but we won’t be any worse off than we are now,” Kuznetsky answered. He got up to indicate that the decision had been made. Half an hour later he led the group down toward the river. They came out of the trees a hundred yards downstream from the bridge, whose upper structure was still reflecting the moonlight. Within minutes that light was gone, the bridge no more than a series of triangular shadows against the starry sky. The group edged their way along the bank, the sound of their breathing barely audible above the current.

Yakovenko stretched his legs and almost cried out with the pain of cramp. They had been sitting inside the underslung girders of the bridge for almost twelve hours, darkness had fallen, and Kuznetsky still showed no inclination to move. He sat there, ten yards away, legs crossed like Buddha, a poem on his knees, the one the Hungarian deserter had written out for him the year before.

It was written by a Communist, Kuznetsky said, but Yakovenko thought it sounded too melancholy for a real Communist. The poet’s name was Attila Joszef. And the poem was called “Consciousness.” The Hungarian had said that Attila threw himself under a train years before the war. A messy way to die, and not much fun for the railway workers who had to pick him up. Kuznetsky was always reading it; he had to know it off by heart now, Yakovenko thought.

Yakovenko massaged his calves, still thinking about Kuznetsky. They had been comrades-in-arms for more than two years now, and in that time his opinion of the commissar had changed only for the better. The man’s qualities as a leader had become more and more apparent, but it wasn’t just that. The man himself had changed, and not in the usual way. Yakovenko had seen any number of men — and women too — hardened by the partisan life, but Kuznetsky was the only person he’d known who seemed to have been softened, humanized by it. God alone knew what he’d done before the war — he never spoke of it, never hinted, ignored any direct questions — but whatever it had been, it must have taken a toll.

Yakovenko himself had been an office worker with the railways, had been called up, propelled to the front, and found himself left high and dry by the German advance, all in the space of a few days. For six months he had survived alone in the vastness of the Pripet Marshes, living off lichen and birds’ eggs and whatever scraps he could beg from isolated villages. He’d been picked up by the brigade on the very day that Kuznetsky had been parachuted in as the new commissar and, like everyone else, had loathed him. He wasn’t just hard — that would have been acceptable — but he also was pitilessly correct. If the book said show no mercy, he showed none. If the book said nothing, he still showed none. Yakovenko knew he wasn’t the only one who’d toyed with the idea of putting a bullet through the new commissar’s back.

But slowly and surely two things had changed. The brigade had been honed into a formidable fighting machine and Kuznetsky turned into a human being. Even a likeable one. He still let little slip, but the rules themselves had changed: they were his now, not Moscow’s, and they nearly always made perfect sense. He was still hard, but he now seemed aware of his own hardness, and somehow that made all the difference. Occasionally over the last few months Yakovenko had felt almost sorry for him, for the responsibility that seemed to bear a little more heavily each day. Nadezhda had made him happier but she’d also become one more responsibility.

He had watched Kuznetsky at the trial of that poor peasant bastard the week before. All the old self-righteous correctness had gone. Perhaps a man had only so many death sentences to give, even in times like these. If so, he guessed that Kuznetsky was near the end of his rope.

Kuznetsky was not meditating; he was simply bored. It was too dark to continue with his task of memorizing the poem; he thought he had it all now but he couldn’t see to check. Like a pile of hewn timber, he silently mouthed, the world lies heaped up on itself, one thing presses and squeezes and interlocks with the other, so each is determined. And here we sit, he thought, waiting to shake the pile. By day a moon rises in me and when it’s night outside — a sun shines here within. It was more than a poem, more like a poem full of poems. He’d never read anything like it, never anything that seemed to speak to him so directly, as if he were already living out its lines. Your wound is the world — it burns and rages, and you feel your soul, the fever. Amen.

He folded the dog-eared sheets and replaced them in his tunic pocket, looked at his watch but couldn’t make out the hands. It didn’t matter; he’d always been able to judge the passage of time. Ten to eight, he reckoned, ten minutes more to the halfway point between sunset and moonrise. They had no idea what they would find up top; all five German vehicles had rumbled across that morning, making the girders creak alarmingly, but the occasional footfalls on the planks above told him that at least some men had been left behind. He thought he’d recognized six different voices but that didn’t mean much. There could be fifty men up there.

His head said eight o’clock. “Okay,” he whispered. The partisans stretched their limbs to the limits allowed by the confined space and precarious footholds, then climbed quietly along the inside edge of the lateral girders, four on each side of the bridge. At a hand signal from Kuznetsky, he and Morisov led the others up the abutments in a rush, firing from the hip before any target was visible, the noise of the machine guns shattering the peace of the evening.

Breasting the rise, Kuznetsky saw three Germans already falling in the hail of bullets. Fifty yards away, the rest were sitting around a fire eating their evening meal. He ran for the emplacement the Germans had set up to cover the bridge but the gun wouldn’t turn far enough. Morisov zigzagged down the road still firing while the Germans scrambled for their weapons. “Down,” he screamed, at the same time pulling Yakovenko with him off into the trees. The two men crashed blindly through the undergrowth for a hundred yards or so, the road invisible to their left, their passage rendered inaudible by the continuous gunfire.

Nadezhda had followed them, and Kuznetsky led his two companions to the left, moving more quietly now. They reached the road, concealed from the Germans by trees on a bend. “Grenades,” he whispered, and they advanced stealthily toward the enemy’s rear, Yakovenko and Nadezhda on one side of the road, Kuznetsky on the other.

The Germans had lacked the time or the sense to put their fire out, and their backs were lit by the flames. The grenades weren’t very well aimed. Two overshot and one exploded in the pail of food, but the surprise was enough. The Germans leaped to their feet, their hands stabbing skyward in surrender.

Yakovenko looked at Kuznetsky, who nodded and resisted the urge to turn away as the machine gun cut them down.

There had been nine altogether, and only the sergeant looked a day over seventeen. All were spattered with blood and what looked like vegetable stew. Farther up the road, Morisov lay dead in a pool of his own blood. The only other casualty was one of Sukhanova’s fingers.

“Pity about the food,” Yakovenko muttered. “I could do with a change of diet.”

Kuznetsky waited impatiently while Tolyshkin put a tourniquet on Sukhanova’s hand, and then led the group off into the forest. They still had ten miles to walk.

The moon was high in the sky when the seaplane glided across the tops of the trees and gracefully splashed down on the surface of the lake. Nadezhda let go of Kuznetsky’s arm to help douse the signal fire as the pilot brought the plane in toward the shore. He had expected more tears from her but there hadn’t been any. She had asked him, simply, “Shall I look for you after the war is over?” And he, suddenly decided, had replied just as simply, “I’ll be looking for you, my love.”

Now he stood on the rocks by the lakeshore, waiting for the plane to come nearer, the group gathered above him on the outcrop. Yakovenko was in command now, and to Kuznetsky’s astonishment he’d felt tears on his own cheeks as they’d hugged farewell. It was like leaving family, except that he’d not felt anything like that when he’d left his own back in Minnesota.

He waded out into the lake, feeling the icy water numbing his legs, and clambered aboard the two-seater. Christ, he was tired. The pilot grunted a welcome, revved the engine, and turned the plane back toward the middle of the lake. Kuznetsky thought he had a last glimpse of the group disappearing into the shadows as the craft gathered speed across the water and headed up into the moon. Now the tops of the trees were thirty feet below. He fastened the goggles, felt the bitter wind on his cheeks. The pilot shouted something about the German lines — Kuznetsky supposed they’d be passing over them in a short time. He didn’t really care. What could he do about Germans four hundred feet below? Piss on them, that was all.

Amy put the book back into her bag and got to her feet. She felt too restless to read, too full of suppressed excitement. The train was due in a few minutes, and she began to walk slowly up the platform, wondering again whether there could be any other explanation for the new instructions.

She couldn’t think of one. Moscow was going to order her to “sell” Wim Doesburg something that Berlin would buy. Moscow’s interest in the uranium train had been rekindled with a vengeance. Put the two together and it could add up to only one thing. She still didn’t see how it could be done, but the idea itself was brilliant. And they wouldn’t be able to do it without her because she was the only link with the Germans. This was real action at long last.

The train arrived, its locomotive belching black smoke into the clear blue sky. She took a seat in the front car, listened to the conductor’s cries of “Manassas” reverberating down the platform, and checked her watch as they began to pull out of the station. Exactly nine minutes later she left her seat and walked back two cars, stopped for a minute to make sure she wasn’t being followed, then continued toward the rear of the train. Another two cars down, she and Matson went through their fortnightly ritual, knocking into each other and exchanging dropped copies of The Saturday Evening Post. She had her usual glimpse of highly polished brown shoes, uniform, weather-beaten face, heard the Tennessee drawl intone “So sorry, ma’am” and her own voice say “It’s nothing — really.”

In the club car she took a seat at the bar and ordered a Coca-Cola. No problem, there never was, but still her pulse insisted on racing. She forced herself to sit there until the thumping had subsided, then locked herself in the washroom to examine the contents of the envelope left inside the magazine.

It was all there. A complete timetable, obviously copied from an internal railroad document, annotated with crew changeover points and watering stops. An explanation of the Friday timing — “an optimilization of clear paths,” whatever that meant. A list headed “Locomotives Rostered for This Duty.” And four photographs of the train itself, from different distances and angles, marked May 5 on the backs. That clinched it. Faulkner hadn’t mentioned photographs, but Moscow must have asked for them, and there could be only one reason.

She put everything back in the envelope, the envelope back in the magazine, and caught sight of herself in the mirror as she turned to leave. “Yes,” she told her reflection. “Oh yes!”

Thirty hours after leaving his group at Lukomskoye, Kuznetsky was driven down Lenin Prospekt toward Moscow’s hub. It was his first sight of Moscow, actually of anything bigger than a village, for more than two years.

He had never liked Moscow, and had somehow contrived to spend only a few months of his twenty-six Soviet years in the capital. A homesick Muscovite had once drunkenly explained to him that his city combined the best of the West, its commitment to reason, with the best of the East, its spirituality, and therefore qualified as paradise on earth. Kuznetsky had always thought it was the other way around: the East’s lack of reason allied to the West’s lack of spirituality — a soulless bazaar.

He’d had a good night’s sleep at the Partisan HQ on the city’s outskirts, once he’d given up the bed for the more familiar texture of the floor. It was surprising how quickly one lost the knack of civilized living; he’d had problems with the cutlery at breakfast and the toilet had seemed almost obscene.

He’d also lost more weight than he’d realized. The NKVD colonel’s uniform he’d left behind in 1942 was now several sizes too large, and it reeked of mothballs.

The Kremlin loomed across the river. The car swept across the bridges, past the Borovitsky Tower and across Marx Prospekt into Frunze Street, drawing up at the massive portals of the Defense Ministry. The driver opened his door and Kuznetsky climbed out. The guard at the door examined his pass and called for someone to escort him up to Sheslakov’s office. On the way he consciously pulled himself together. He was out of practice at playing politics, but there was no need for anyone else to know that.

His guide knocked at the door, but Kuznetsky pushed past him and entered without waiting for a reply. Old habits die hard, he thought. Never surrender an initiative.

The man sitting behind the desk seemed unperturbed. He’d probably received the same training. Kuznetsky took the seat offered by the man’s flourish of the jade letter opener and for several moments neither spoke.

His host, Kuznetsky observed, was a medium-built, middle-aged man with graying hair. He was dressed in civilian clothes, a well-cut dark blue suit, white shirt, and dark red tie. Most unusual, the shirt collar and tie were loosened at the neck, giving him a vaguely dissolute appearance. He had high cheekbones and deep-set dark eyes — Tartar blood probably — and a mouth that seemed on the verge of an ironic smile. The eyes contained the same air of amused condescension. Whoever this man was, Kuznetsky thought, he was sure of himself.

Sheslakov examined Kuznetsky with the same thoroughness. He was tall, over six feet, with thick, dark hair and the sort of profile you saw on hero-of-the-revolution wall posters. He did look American, but he could have passed for a Russian easily enough. The eyes — Fyedorova always told him to look at the eyes first — were quite extraordinary. Not because of anything intrinsic — because of the total contrast they offered to the rest of the man. The mouth, the posture, the sense of physical power, all shouted “Fighter”; the eyes whispered “Calm,” the calm of killers and saints. He knew now what Fyedorova had meant by a wild card.

“Colonel Kuznetsky,” he said, “you have been provisionally selected to lead an operation outside the Soviet Union. It is not an NKVD operation, nor a GRU operation. Both apparats are working together under the direct authority of the Atomic Division, which is itself responsible only to the Secretariat.” He paused. Kuznetsky said nothing, only nodded slightly. “Your participation will be on a voluntary basis; you will understand why when you read this.” He passed across a thin folder, the words “American Rose” stenciled on the cover in red.

Kuznetsky stared at the words. “The United States?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He read for twenty minutes, increasingly absorbed, pausing only once to examine the old woman who came in and lay back on the cot under the window. Who the hell was she? And why was she staring at him?

Finally he closed the folder and placed it gently on the edge of Sheslakov’s desk. “When will the bait be offered?” he asked.

“At the moment of maximum psychological impact. After the Allied invasion of France, which we expect on June 6, and before our summer offensive, which is set for June 22. The combination of a known disaster and an imminent one usually provides a potent mixture.”

Kuznetsky looked amused. Very neat as Americans would say. “And what if the Germans throw the Allies back into the English Channel?”

“That is unlikely.”

“I wouldn’t know. There are a lot of hopeful assumptions built into this. Maybe correct ones. But it feels like thin ice.”

“There is very little margin for error,” Sheslakov admitted. “But that is unavoidable when we have to be more concerned with avoiding detection and exposure than anything else… You are willing?”

“I am not a believer in voluntary work, Comrade, but in duty. I will go for that reason.” And, he admitted to himself, out of curiosity. What would America look like after twenty-six years? And how would it feel to be back there?

“Come in, Anatoly Grigorovich,” Zhdanov boomed, “sit down, tell me some good news.”

Sheslakov took the proffered chair. “Thank you, Comrade Secretary. I do have good news — the First Priority is within our reach.”

Zhdanov’s ears pricked up almost visibly. “How?” he asked, offering Sheslakov the first Havana cigar he’d seen since the war’s beginning.

Sheslakov lovingly applied the match, savoring the moment and taking an almost sadistic delight in the other man’s ill-concealed impatience. “You recall your submission to Stavka on” — he consulted his notes — “April 28 concerning the possible theft of American Uranium-235. To summarize — you pointed out that the amount we could steal would be militarily useless even if we could contain the political damage.”

“I have not forgotten.”

“Both problems can be avoided.” He took another puff on the cigar. If only Cuba were run by Communists! “The Americans, knowing how much material had been stolen, would know how many bombs we could make.”

“That seems self-evident.”

“Ah, but there is a hidden assumption, that our building of atomic bombs would necessarily be linked with our theft of the material.”

“But it would be.”

“Indeed, but the Americans need not know that. If we can both steal the material and convince the Americans that we have not stolen it, then the problem is solved. Our possession of atomic bombs will then be ascribed to our own domestic development program, and the Americans will have no idea how many bombs we really have.”

“We’ll still have only two, which the military say will be worse than useless.”

“We will have only one. We must explode the first to show the Americans we actually have the capability. I’m afraid the military, as usual, is behind the times. They just don’t understand that these atomic bombs are not ordinary weapons; the mere threat of using them will be enough. If both sides have them, no one will dare use them, and the calculations that matter will concern men and tanks and ships again. What is important is not actually having the atomic bomb, but instilling that fear into the Americans.”

Comprehension dawned on Zhdanov’s face, then swiftly made room for more furrows of concern. “Who else would steal it then?” It was such a stupid question that Sheslakov let Zhdanov answer it for himself. “A ruse de guerre. Soviet soldiers in German uniforms.”

“No, no, nothing as” — he was going to say “crude” but Zhdanov was notoriously sensitive about his peasant background — “nothing as direct as that. The Germans themselves will steal the uranium. And we will help them.”

Zhdanov looked at him as if he’d gone mad. “Explain,” he said grimly.

Sheslakov did so, going over each point in his plan until he thought Zhdanov had grasped it. When he had finished the head of the Atomic Division leaned back in his chair and looked into space. “Very well,” he said at last, “I can see the possibility. Put it in writing and find the people.”

Sheslakov pulled the file out of his briefcase and handed it across the desk. “We already have the people,” he said.

Stalin pushed the report to one side of his desk and closed his eyes. Why “American Rose”? he wondered. Only the Germans and the Americans made a habit of flattering nature and themselves by applying such names to human enterprises. Sheslakov was a strange man, an oddity. But for now an affordable one.

Would it work? he asked himself. It felt right. The Americans had the scientists and the money and a country that wasn’t in ruins. And ambition. Unlimited ambition. But it wasn’t a calculating ambition. Socialism might be weak now but it saw the way forward, it calculated, it planned. Capital, for all its power, was blind as a river. And what could be more easily bluffed than blind ambition?

There was only the one flaw — the number of foreigners who would know, who could expose the bluff. A German-born woman: an American-born man, the agents in America who would inevitably have been softened by the capitalist life. But that was a flaw that could be corrected at the end of the game.

He called in his aide. “Telephone Zhdanov. Tell him yes.”

Four

“The diagram was drawn by a German scientist who’s now working at Site Y in New Mexico. He was apparently trying to impress his secretary,” Amy told Wim Doesburg as they strolled through the small Manhattan art gallery.

“It will impress Berlin, I think,” he replied, stopping in front of a canvas depicting a dark, almost ominous flower. “What do you think of this one?” he asked.

Amy forced herself to look at the painting. “Depressing,” she murmured.

“Isn’t it?” Doesburg agreed jovially. “But beautiful just the same.”

They walked on, continuing their conversation in the spaces allowed by other visitors to the gallery. Amy couldn’t remember ever feeling as nervous. At the meeting with Faulkner the previous day, he’d been almost unrecognizably tense, and once he’d shared what he knew with her, she wasn’t surprised. Now the strain of listening to Doesburg’s urbane chatter, observing the usual security precautions, and following Moscow’s script was stretching her to the limit.

Doesburg was excited by the diagram — she knew that much. His face and steady stream of conversation might not betray anything, but his walk had become noticeably jaunty in the last few minutes. Now was the time.

“There’s also some other unsolicited material,” she said casually at the next opportunity. “Of rather dubious value,” she added. “Sigmund insisted on explaining it all to me despite the security risk, and he’s included all the necessary information. You’ll see what I mean.” She paused to let a young couple meander by. “He’d just read the Picture Post article on Mussolini’s escape to Germany, and, according to him, it gave him an idea. He says at first he thought it was ridiculous, but then he realized it was feasible. Apparently there’s a train that takes the bomb material made in Tennessee to New Mexico for the bomb production process, and Sigmund has visions of Skorzeny dropping out of the sky and holding it up.” Catching Doesburg’s expression of amused incredulity, she said, “I thought the same, but he has looked into it all with great thoroughness, and the whole idea does have some lunatic logic to it. I can find no fault in his plan, but then I’ve no experience of planning such operations. Of course,” she added almost wistfully, “it would be a spectacular, tremendous coup.”

Doesburg said nothing for a moment, seemingly engrossed in a funereal painting. “I shall find the flaws for you, my dear,” he said finally. “But we must humor Sigmund, if only to keep the flow of diagrams coming.”

An hour later Doesburg was back in his Brooklyn home, spreading the contents of the envelope across the kitchen table. The diagram fascinated him — so much scientific advance represented on a single sheet of paper. His wife, Elke, looked at it over his shoulder. “Is that all?” she asked, unconsciously echoing his thoughts. “One page for a bomb that can destroy a whole city?”

It was only after dinner that he bothered to read Sigmund’s report on the uranium train. He had to admit the idea was attractive, and read on expecting to find the point where fantasy took over from practicality. There was a timetable, a crew schedule, a map with the escape route plotted in, even photographs of the train. There was no mention of Skorzeny; Sigmund specified a long-range U-boat, even the precise class required.

Doesburg scratched his head, ignored Elke’s attempts to interest him in the latest Victory Garden competition, and started from the beginning again. A U-boat drop-off on the coast of Georgia — simple enough. Two English-speaking German officers to be met by American operatives and transported to the hijack point. It was hunting country, so strangers hiring a lodge for a week would not seem unusual. The hijack itself seemed to present no difficulties, provided the information was all accurate. It was certainly comprehensive enough. Then a twelve-hour drive back to the coast for the pickup, with the FBI presumably in pursuit. But probably in total disarray, Doesburg thought. Sigmund had pointed out that the escape route crossed a state line in the first fifty miles, which would suitably complicate police reaction.

He walked out onto the backyard porch and lowered himself into his rocking chair. It was a beautiful evening, the distant towers of Manhattan silhouetted by the setting sun, the street full of children playing stickball. It was hard to believe that America was at war. In Tennessee and Alabama it would seem even more unreal. What a blow to American pride it would be! A coup.

And something of an opportunity. Doesburg knew only too well that when the Allies reached Berlin, as it seemed certain they would, there was every chance that they’d find a file with his name on it. He hadn’t said anything to Elke — there was no point in worrying her in advance — but he had for some time been preparing in his mind for their discreet withdrawal from American soil. If the Abwehr could be interested in this operation, they would pay, and pay a lot. No one in Berlin, he knew from lucrative past experience, had any conception of how cheap espionage really was. He could ask for $10,000, and 80 percent of that, plus the proceeds from selling their brownstone, would set them up very nicely in Brazil or Argentina.

There was even the faint prospect of a successful operation altering the course of the war, leaving his file in safe hands. There were no risks involved that he could see; everything would go through Rosa, and she knew neither his real name nor his address.

He went back indoors, addressed an envelope to his contact in Rio, and enclosed the diagram.

“You must mail this tomorrow morning,” he told Elke, “somewhere on Fifth Avenue. I must go to see Kroeger in Syracuse — there’s something I want sent immediately on the radio.”

After her meeting with Doesburg, Amy took the train back to Washington and went to bed.

The next morning Richard was waiting in her office, looking no better disposed than he had on Friday.

“Good weekend?” he asked sarcastically.

“Yes, thank you,” she said calmly. “You?”

“Wonderful. I listened to the radio Saturday night and listened to the radio all day Sunday—”

“Look, Richard,” she said, suddenly feeling angry, “I’m not obliged to give up my plans just because your wife takes it into her head to go away for the weekend. You don’t own me—”

“I’m going to tell her.”

She stared at him. “Why? To punish me?”

He grabbed her arm. “We had the chance of a whole weekend together. Is your father’s family more important than that? You see them every month. They’re not even real relations.” He stopped, releasing her arm. “Is that where you really were?” he forced out.

“No, Errol Flynn invited me to his yacht.”

“Don’t joke!”

“What do you expect me to say? What do you think I am? Richard, if I wanted to start another love affair with someone, I’d do it in the open, and only after I’d ended this one with you. It’s you who’s in love with secrecy, remember?”

“Okay, okay, you’ve made your point.”

“I just wish I didn’t have to keep on making it. Richard, I know it would have been fun to spend the weekend together, but I am not, not, going to spend my life waiting around for you to be available. Some women might put up with it, but I’m not one of them. And I’ve never pretended any different, have I?”

“No,” he said wearily. “I know you haven’t.”

“Good,” she said, and kissed him on the cheek. “Now leave me alone. I’ll see you Friday.”

He went, leaving her feeling unsure of what she should do. Richard was a habit, one that she’d always considered distracting and harmless. One that helped fill the gap left by the impossibility of a real relationship. Now she was beginning to realize how dangerous a habit he had become.

Twelve days after Wim Doesburg’s trip to Syracuse, Obergruppenführer Walter Schellenberg sat brooding in the back of a limousine as it wound up the hairpin turns toward the Führer’s mountain retreat. His interview with Himmler the previous day had proved less than satisfactory. Not only had the Reichsführer sprayed him with germs, occasioning his present sore throat and runny nose, but he’d also abdicated all responsibility for the matter.

“Take it directly to the Führer,” Himmler had advised, the tone of his voice implying that nothing would persuade him to do so himself.

Himmler thought it too risky because it broke the infamous Goering Law — never offer the Führer anything that you don’t already have at your disposal. Well, no one could accuse Himmler of a surfeit of imagination.

But the Führer would appreciate the plan, Schellenberg was sure of it. There really was no risk; it was just the enormity of the prize that made it hard to believe. If they failed, it would cost them only two soldiers and a U-boat. If they succeeded, then at the very least defeat could be avoided. With an atomic V rocket they could reduce London to rubble in a single strike or, more to the point, threaten to do so. Then the Western Allies would come quickly enough to the negotiating table to talk about the real enemy, about saving Europe from Stalin’s barbarian hordes. A few photographs of disemboweled German soldiers might wake Roosevelt up, and Churchill had always been an anti-Communist at heart.

There seemed no reason why success should elude them. The people in America seemed very efficient, the Kriegsmarine said there were no difficulties involved in the transport, the scientists had confirmed that they could make a bomb if they had the Uranium-2.35. There had been nine English-speaking officers to choose from with the necessary combat experience and firsthand knowledge of America. One of them had even been a physics teacher before the war. An omen, if ever he’d seen one. Himmler was a fool.

The car drew up outside the Berghof. Schellenberg was greeted by Hitler’s adjutant, General Schmundt, and informed that the Führer was still involved in the afternoon military conference. This explanation was somewhat unnecessary: as soon as he entered the Great Hall, Schellenberg could hear Hitler’s raised voice through the open door of the conference room. He sat down as far from the blazing log fire as possible and tried to ignore the suffocating perfume exuded by the myriad bowls of fresh flowers.

Hitler stopped shouting. Schellenberg could hear the obsequious tones of Jodl and Keitel taking turns to explain something. They obviously were not successful, for suddenly Hitler’s harsh voice was echoing through the house once more.

“Rommel does not see the whole picture. The rest of them are cowards and fools. I try to make the orders so clear that even a child could understand them, and what do I get? Requests for authorization to do the exact opposite!” There was silence, then the Führer’s voice again, this time sweet and reasonable, as if he were talking to a favorite young nephew. “I understand the military arguments for withdrawal, but war is more than a purely military matter. It is about people, individual soldiers, about their will to win. Retreat is addictive. It doesn’t matter whether it makes sense militarily. It is psychologically disastrous. Always. Always.”

Keitel and Jodl started talking again. Schellenberg could visualize the scene from past experience: the Führer leaning over the map, his arms rigid at his sides, while all the toadies murmured yes and shrugged at each other behind his back. Why did he bother with them?

The door behind him opened, admitting another perfume.

“Good afternoon, Herr Obergruppenführer.” the woman said. “Or is it evening? I never know when one turns into the other. We haven’t had the pleasure of your company for a long time.”

Schellenberg rose from his seat and bowed. “Good evening, Fraulein Braun. I’m afraid the demands of the war leave little time for the pleasures of life.”

She pouted. “If anyone knows that, I do.” She looked around, as if, Schellenberg thought, she was wondering where she was. “I hope you have some good news for him,” she said absentmindedly. “It’s been so hard on him these last few months,” she added, lowering her voice as if she were betraying a state secret.

“Of course,” Schellenberg said sympathetically, wondering what else to say.

He was saved by the reappearance of Schmundt. “The conference will end shortly, Herr Obergruppenführer. The Führer suggests you wait for him in the upstairs study.”

It was as hot in the study as in the hall, but like everyone else who entered that room, Schellenberg found his attention captured by the huge picture window and its breathtaking view of Alpine peaks fading into the distance.

An hour passed and the mountains receded into the gathering darkness as the stars brightened above them. He was beginning to feel vaguely hypnotized by the effect when the door finally opened to admit Hitler and his pet Alsatian.

“It’s a wonderful view, isn’t it? I designed the house myself, you know.”

“Yes, my Führer.”

Hitler sat down in one of the leather-covered armchairs. He looked pale, but there was none of the trembling that Schellenberg had heard about. There was a half-smile on his face as he stroked the dog’s back and stared out into the night. “When there are difficult decisions to be taken,” he said, “I often come and sit here by myself. I sometimes think that it is the majesty of all this” — he indicated the panorama of the outside world with a sweep of an arm — “that really makes the decisions. I am only its voice.”

Schellenberg said nothing.

“I have studied your plan with the utmost care, Walter, and I have every hope of it succeeding. Of course,” he added, turning to face Schellenberg, “it is doubtful whether we shall need atomic bombs for this war, but a leader has a duty to think ahead, and science never stands still. No, what excites me about your operation is its psychological dimension.”

Hitler paused to pour himself a glass of distilled water from the decanter on the table. “Nations are wonderfully distinctive, and more and more I have been thinking about the resemblance each bears to a particular animal… yes, animals. It is no coincidence, Walter, that throughout history different nations have identified themselves, through flags, crests, emblems, whatever, with certain animals. The Russian bear, the English lion, the German eagle — these are only the most obvious examples. Note the differences — though each is a fine fighter, the bear is stupid, the lion lazy, the eagle perhaps overprone to flights of the imagination. Yet within these nations one rule prevails. The strongest lion, the strongest bear, the strongest eagle — each assumes the leadership. It is the law of history.”

Schellenberg restrained himself and merely nodded.

“Perhaps you are wondering what this has to do with the plan,” Hitler noted calmly. “Tell me, what animal do you associate with America?”

Schellenberg’s mind did not make the association.

“You see? You’ve confirmed it for yourself,” Hitler said. “America is not a true nation, that is the point. It is a herd of disparate animals, a few eagles, a few lions, a few bears, and a host of inferior species. Herds, Walter, herds always, always, respond to the instincts of their weakest members. The German stock, the English stock will forever be at the mercy of the Jews and the Negroes because that is the law of the herd. It may be more numerous, potentially far more powerful than a single predator, but it only requires one member of the herd to take fright and there is general panic. Insecurity is the herd’s strongest emotion. Now do you see the relevance?”

Schellenberg did. “This operation will create a panic that will far transcend the actual importance of the target.”

“Exactly. Exactly. You have understood perfectly. We will put two eagles in among the herd, and the panic will spread around the world.”

The sun disappeared, slice by orange slice, into the distant horizon, its rays reflected in a thousand puddles. Major Gerd Breitner sat astride a rickety wooden fence on the outskirts of Beresino and drank in the splendour. At first he’d hated the Russian landscape, found it flat and boring, but after eighteen months he’d come to love its subtleties, its infinite variations on the same theme. A small compensation perhaps, but better than none at all.

The last slice slid away. Breitner lit a cigarette, looked once more at the moth-eared photograph of his wife. It was more than a year now, and the pain had lost its sharpness; like everything else, it had been flattened by the war. Only the irony remained: while he had survived countless brushes with death in France, Africa, and the East, she had been buried in the rubble of their safe Stuttgart home during an Allied bombing raid.

He put the photograph away and tried to picture her face. It grew harder with each passing month. Breitner felt the tang of tears forming and jumped down from the fence, angry with himself.

He turned and stared into the east. It was quiet. It seemed to get quieter each day. Intelligence put the attack four days hence, and they weren’t often wrong these days. Four more days of sitting around, then all hell would break loose again. He wasn’t sure which was worse. “Fuck you, Adolf,” he muttered, “and all the other bastards.”

He found his friend Paul Russman sitting on the running board of the derelict staff car with Burdenski, practicing his wretched cigarette trick. Paul placed the cigarette on his palm, pointed it away from his body, and brought his other hand sharply down on the wrist. The cigarette cartwheeled through the air, missed the waiting mouth, hit him in the nose instead, and dropped into the mud.

Burdenski was unimpressed. “Where did you pick up that stupid habit?” he asked.

“Africa,” Paul replied, retrieving the sodden cigarette. “I watched an English prisoner practicing for hours in the compound at Mersa Brega. He said it helped to pass the time. He was right. And of course I couldn’t let the English prove their superiority in such a crucial field of combat.”

“I can see that,” Burdenski said wryly.

“But there’s more,” Paul said. “The Englishman promised me the war would be over before I mastered the technique, so I reckon that mastering it will probably end the war.”

“That’s why I encourage him to practice,” Breitner said.

“Clowns,” Burdenski grunted.

Paul looked up at Breitner. “I have some rather disturbing news, Gerd,” he said, lighting a dry cigarette. “We are shortly to receive an uninvited guest here at our summer residence — an SS colonel.”

“Soldier or policeman?”

“That’s the disturbing part.”

Breitner felt a slight surge of panic. Absurd. “What can they want with us?” he asked. “We do nothing but fight wars.”

“Perhaps it’s the fact that we’re losing this one,” Paul suggested with a straight face.

“Paul, I hope you don’t intend making jokes like that in his exalted presence,” Breitner said. “It’s possible that he may not share our sense of humor.”

“He certainly isn’t sharing our war,” Paul observed.

The SS colonel arrived at Beresino in the middle of the night, looking as shiny-smart as only an SS colonel could. A rather disheveled Russman and Breitner went out to greet him, and despite the lateness of the hour, Paul managed a “Heil Hitler” of such vigor that the black-uniformed officer was set back on his heels. Breitner concealed his laugh with a cough.

Sturmbannführer Rademacher was a man of few words. He declined schnapps, coffee, food, and small talk, all to the evident but unvoiced disgust of his escort. He simply withdrew two documents from his shiny briefcase and handed them to Breitner and announced that they should be on the funeral train leaving Baranovichi at ten that morning. The colonel then performed his own, more austere salute and climbed back into the motorcycle sidecar. His driver shrugged sympathetically at the two officers and opened the throttle.

“We must be neglecting our personal hygiene,” Paul said.

“It’s Russians he smells,” Breitner muttered, glancing through the documents. One was a release signed by Pan-zergruppe Command. The other was a summons to Berlin, to the office of Obergruppenführer Schellenberg, head of Amt VI, the external security section of the Reich Intelligence Services.

Paul was reading them over his shoulder. “How did nice girls like us get mixed up with a man like that?” he asked.

Breitner flung the empty vodka bottle out the train window and into the Polish night. “Goddamnit, Paul, there must be English-speaking apes in the Waffen SS.”

Paul shook his head vigorously. Both men were drunk, having chanced upon an enterprising Polish peasant selling homemade vodka in the middle of nowhere. Presumably the peasant had seen trains stop at the same place before, and the same type of train at that. He’d been disappointed but not surprised to learn that all his other potential customers were dead.

“There are no apes in the Waffen SS,” Paul enunciated carefully. “Their hair is the wrong color.” He pried the cork free from another bottle. “But to answer your question with the seriousness it deserves, I can only suggest our excellent record in the service of the Führer. Whatever they want done we’ll have already done it on some continent or other.”

Breitner smiled ruefully. “We’ve even survived a trip home in a funeral train. Unfortunately,” he said, taking another swig from the bottle, “we have enough intelligence — not that it requires much — to know that this particular war is lost. Dying in a Russian ditch may not be everyone’s idea of destiny, but it was one I was becoming almost fond of. Dying for the goddamn SS is something else entirely. It’s—”

“It’s not who that worries me, it’s what. For all we know, they may have decided to kidnap the King of England.”

“That’s tame. I was thinking of Stalin.”

“Easy. What about recapturing Marlene Dietrich?”

“I volunteer.”

The train was drawing slowly to a halt, clanking over points. The lights of a city could be seen outside. “Where the hell are we?” Breitner asked.

“Posen, I think. Christ, look at this.” Both men stared out on a panorama of ruin, pillars of masonry sticking into the night sky, empty streets choked with rubble. As the train chugged slowly forward they saw the body of an old woman lying beside the track, one arm rigidly extended upward, the light of the yard lamps reflecting off her spectacles.

“Who the hell would be bombing Posen? It’s too far east for the Americans.”

“Where there’s a will there’s a way,” Paul murmured, suddenly feeling sober. He sat down heavily. “You know, sometimes I can’t see how this war will end. It’s just bitten too deep. There’s more to forgive than there is forgiveness.”

“They said that after the last war,” Breitner said, pulling himself away from the window. “They’ll probably say it after the next one.”

Paul laughed. “You’re an optimistic bastard, aren’t you?”

“No. You know what really depresses me?”

“I’m not sure I want to.”

“If we were winning, we wouldn’t care.”

Schellenberg stared through the peephole at the two officers waiting in the anteroom. Major Breitner, Hauptmann Russman. They looked younger than he’d expected; perhaps he was too accustomed to being around the old and the wounded who made up his staff. He went back to their dossiers on his desk. Breitner was thirty-five, Russman thirty-four. Well, perhaps the excitement of war had kept them young. He looked at his watch. It was time to let his two eagles in.

“Gentlemen,” he said, still smiling as they seated themselves, “the Reich has a new need for your talents. An operation is being mounted by the external section of the Reichssicherheitshauptampt at the express instructions of the Führer himself. It has the highest security classification imaginable — only three men in the Reich are aware of its existence. When—”

“With great respect, Obergruppenführer,” Breitner interrupted, “but before we are made privy to the nature of this operation, I would appreciate some clarification regarding our position. Are we still under the jurisdiction of the Wehrmacht or have we been officially transferred to your authority?”

Schellenberg’s smile faded slightly at the edges. “Officially, this operation does not exist. To answer your unspoken question — I require volunteers, not conscripts. Though I must in all fairness add that if you decline this assignment, you may have to be temporarily detained. For security reasons, of course. There would be no imputation of disloyalty: you have both served the Reich with distinction in the past.”

Breitner nodded and said nothing. Christ Almighty, he thought.

“I hope, however,” Schellenberg continued, “that this operation will appeal to both your sense of duty and your spirit of adventure. This is no ordinary operation. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the fate of the Reich may rest on its success. You have been selected, after exhaustive inquiries, because you are not ordinary officers. You both speak excellent English, you work well together, and you, Major Breitner, have professional scientific experience. Above all, you have both lived in America.”

The two men glanced at each other in astonishment. Science? America? What crazy scheme was this?

“As I said,” Schellenberg continued smoothly, “this is not an ordinary operation. It is, however, a relatively straightforward one. You would be transported across the Atlantic to the state of Georgia by U-boat. You would then carry out a single, simple military operation of a kind you have performed in the past. You would then be transported back.”

“And the objective?” Breitner asked.

“Ah, the objective. First I must fill in the background.” Schellenberg explained the development of the new bomb, the state of German progress in the same direction, the significance of Uranium-235, the train itself, traveling through “thousands of miles of virtually empty countryside.” He described the “wholly inadequate” American security precautions. “The Americans may not be stupid,” he concluded, “but they are overconfident to the point of stupidity. To them the war is elsewhere. It would never occur to them that German officers might suddenly turn up in their own country. It would be a complete surprise.”

Yes, Paul thought. That at least rang true. Perhaps this operation was less insane than it sounded.

“When?” Breitner asked.

“One thing we lack is time. The U-boat must sail from France, and regrettably the French ports may have to be sacrificed in the not too distant future. So we must aim for the August 4 train, which means a departure from La Pallice within the next three days. This of course will prevent any detailed advance planning. Our agents in America will have to brief you fully when you arrive.”

There was a silence. Breitner looked at Paul and then turned back to Schellenberg. “We would like a few minutes to discuss the matter, Obergruppenführer.”

“You may have the use of my office.”

“We’d prefer to stretch our legs,” Breitner said. “We’ve been on a train for the last thirty-six hours, and those gardens look most inviting.”

“Very well.”

Once outside the two men walked about fifty yards in silence. “Why did we have to come out here?” Paul asked eventually. “That was the most comfortable chair I’ve sat in for years.”

Breitner lit a cigarette. “Christ, you’re so naive sometimes. That office must be knee-deep in microphones.”

“You think the garden isn’t?”

Breitner laughed. “You’re probably right. Okay, give me and the microphones a good reason for saying yes to this mad scheme.”

Paul lit his own cigarette. “I’ll give you three. One, if we say no, we’ll at best end up back in the East.”

“Good, but not very positive.”

“Two, how does duty strike you?”

“Like the song says: My comrades and my sense of duty, they died together in the snow.”

“Three, it’s not such a mad scheme.”

“Yes, you have to admire the nerve. Train holdups in America! In 1944!”

“And I’ll give you a fourth. We’re going, whatever we say. Like the man said, the U-boat leaves in less than three days, so they’ve decided it’s us. And we’ve both still got living relatives.”

Paul looked at him sharply. “You think they’d go that far?”

“Yes.”

They walked in silence for a while. Paul was remembering another Atlantic crossing many years before, his first sight of her face across the smoky room, their first embrace on the promenade deck, surrounded by ocean and stars. Breitner was thinking that it had been American bombs that had killed his wife and son, and wondering why he felt no thirst for revenge.

He shook his head. “I don’t suppose it’ll be much different from holding up trains anywhere else.”

“Gerd, what is this stuff? Uranium-235?”

“God knows. Atomic physics was taboo in my time. ‘Jewish physics’ they called it. Now there’s an irony to savor.” He ground out his cigarette. “I expect they’ll enlighten us further before we go.”

“We go, then?”

“As your superior officer, I strongly advise it. Let’s indulge our spirit of adventure. It’s been so dull in the East.”

Paul winced.

Three days later the two men stood on the conning tower of U-107 as it eased its way out of La Pallice docks past groups of sullen-looking Frenchmen. The crew, which seemed extraordinarily young to the two soldiers, had just been told that this was not to be a fighting voyage and were trying not to express their relief too openly.

The young Bavarian captain had made less effort to hide his feelings. “Welcome to the longest taxi ride in history,” he had greeted them. Paul promised him a good tip if they made good time.