The Red Eagles

Five

Amy walked slowly across Battery Park, savoring the touch of the cool breeze blowing in from New York Harbour. She was early for the meeting, and the grass was still covered with office workers taking in the last minutes of sunshine from their lunch hour. At the café near the ferry dock she bought an iced tea and sat down in the shade at one of the outside tables. Across the bay she could see two ferries crossing. Behind them a troopship was moving out toward the Narrows and on to Europe.

When the clock showed five mintues to two she made her way across to the terminal, bought a ticket, and joined the crowd by the embarkation doors. Looking around, she could see neither Doesburg nor the young man from the Soviet Consulate.

Doesburg, arriving a few minutes later, recognized the dark-haired slim figure near the front of the line. He mopped his brow with an already soaked handkerchief, wondering if the heat was solely responsible for the sweat. He hadn’t fully recovered from Kroeger’s dramatic appearance the previous Friday night, and the cavalier disregard of security on Berlin’s part that it implied. It might have been necessary, but he still found it hard to live with the knowledge that there was someone in America who could telephone the FBI and give away his address. But there was the money. Even $6,000 would go a long way.

The doors clanged open and the crowd surged onto the ferry. He found Amy in the usual place on the western deck, and for several minutes they stood side by side, staring at the New Jersey skyline and saying nothing. Then they went through the prescribed routine, exchanging pleasantries about the weather, her sitting down, then him, for all the world like a pair of strangers passing the time on a voyage that both found boring. Doesburg carefully placed his folded newspaper between them on the wooden seat.

“It’s on,” he said without changing his tone of voice. He wished she’d take her sunglasses off; he found her vaguely unnerving at the best of times, and with her eyes concealed the effect was multiplied.

Amy, her pulse racing, smiled sweetly at him. “When?” she asked, indicating with the slightest nod of her head that someone was approaching them.

“On August the fourth,” Doesburg said, beaming at her. “Our relations will arrive late on the second, so they’ll have two days sight-seeing before, and then they’ll go back the next day. It’s a long trip.”

When they were alone again Amy asked, “Am I handling the operation from this end?” This was the big question, the one on which everything depended. If Berlin or Doesburg had dealt her out of the plan, then she’d have to use her only weapon — her access to Matson. She could try and cover the threat with patriotic zeal, but it would still be a threat, and she didn’t think Doesburg would take it kindly. He wasn’t the sort of man who’d like being dictated to by a woman.

“Not alone,” he said, slightly raising his hand to avert her protest. “Berlin insists that a man be in charge, but you will be his girl Friday. The two of you will be busy enough.”

“When do we meet?”

“I was about to tell you,” he said with a rare note of irritation. “He’ll be on the next ferry across, and you can go back with him. He’ll introduce himself by asking you if you know how many stories the Empire State Building has. Read the instructions before you meet, fix your arrangements, and Joe — that’s his operating name — will report back to me. Any questions?”

She couldn’t think of any. “Joe” might be a problem, but he might also be useful in establishing the German connection. The important thing was that she was in. Moscow could decide the rest. “No,” she said coolly, picking up the newspaper. “I hope your wife feels better tonight,” she said in a louder voice as she got to her feet. The ferry approached the Staten Island dock.

Amy made her way forward to the disembarkation end, passing the Soviet consular official with no more than an affirmative glance. Once ashore she went straight to a washroom and tore open the envelope. It contained three pages of neatly typed orders under the heading Fall Doppeladler. She took a deep breath and began to read.

The further she got, the more elated she felt. They had simply sent back the plan Faulkner had given her, and which she, attributing it to Sigmund, had passed on to Doesburg. There would be two German soldiers, and only two — Faulkner had been worried that someone in Berlin would decide to send a platoon, regardless of the difficulties involved in concealing them. The two would be put ashore off the Georgia coast at a quarter to midnight on August 2. The location would be checked beforehand by the “American-based operatives,” and a list of possible reasons for changing it was attached. These included a Coast Guard station on the relevant beach.

The American-based operatives were also assigned other tasks. They were to check out the hijack location — Berlin had accepted Sigmund’s choice, though on what grounds Amy couldn’t imagine — and to observe the train on its July 7 run. That was this coming Friday. They were to hire “appropriate accommodation and vehicles” and acquire the necessary weaponry — another list. “Joe will deal with this” Doesburg had scrawled in the margin against the latter.

There was nothing else of significance. All in all the three pages, which must have taken a whole night to send in cipher, amounted to little more than an announcement of the soldiers’ arrival and departure times, with a few pieces of advice thrown in. They’d bought it hook, line, and sinker.

Amy walked back to the dock, where the next ferry was already discharging its passengers. We’re halfway there, she thought. The papers in the envelope would convict the Germans on their own, and if the man from the Russian Consulate had done his job, they’d soon have Doesburg’s address.

She walked aboard, watched the water bubble and thrash as they got underway.

“Do you know how many stories there are in the Empire State Building?” a voice asked her.

“A hundred and two,” she said, turning around. “Hello Joe.”

“Rosa, I presume,” he said, treating her to a display of perfectly even teeth.

He was not what she’d expected. If anything, the opposite. He was probably younger than she; his hair was light brown and wavy above a friendly face. He had the soft drawl of the South in his voice, and though he wasn’t big, she felt he could take care of himself. Or at least thought he could.

He wasted no time on pleasantries. “We’ve got an outing to arrange,” he began, and proceeded to tell her the arrangements. He had the car and the gas-ration coupons; he’d pick her up in Washington opposite the Library of Congress at 7 P.M. on Thursday. She must get hold of the necessary maps. He liked night driving. And then he left.

She watched him thread his way down the deck, the Manhattan skyline rearing above him, and remembered her feelings as a ten-year-old, seeing it for the first time. The Statue of Liberty, the amazing skyscrapers, the huge liners at their berths on the Hudson piers. The New World, which had turned out to be just another slice of the old.

Joe picked her up in a black Buick at the appointed time, and within half an hour they were driving west through Virginia horse country, the mountains ahead a dark line against the sunset. He drove fast but well, a fact which impressed Amy, who had never liked cars and found no pleasure in driving.

He talked almost incessantly as he drove. His favorite subject was war, the present one and all those that had gone before. As they crossed the foot of the Shenandoah Valley he treated her to a detailed account of Sherman’s March, adding for good measure an analysis of its significance in the development of modern military strategy. She made what she hoped were appropriate noises on those rare occasions when he paused to draw breath.

He said nothing about the job at hand, and while he talked Amy occupied her mind writing an imaginary report to Moscow on his motivation. She was just concluding that the game alone was what interested him when he switched subjects and started talking political philosophy. She’d been wrong. He really did believe in the Nazi cause; it fitted perfectly with his views on life in America. Miscegenation was the great evil, Roosevelt a Communist dupe, and Hitler a shining example to the white race.

“If Roosevelt wins the war,” he said earnestly, “you know what will happen? All the goddamn liberals will make a lot of noise about world democracy and racial brotherhood and all that crap. And there’ll be about two million goddamn niggers coming back from the war who’ve learned to use a gun, and their heads will be full of the same crap. The Klan will have a hard time keeping things under control.” He looked at her briefly, a look of boyish intensity that almost took the sting out of his words.

“He won’t win the war,” she said. “Not if we’re successful, he won’t.” The Klan, she thought. She suddenly felt as if they were driving into a foreign country. She’d always known it, but feeling it was different.

He was silent for a few minutes as he guided the car through the center of Harrisonburg. It was almost midnight now, but the main street was still full of people, most of them the worse for drink.

“Maybe,” he said as they emerged into the country once more. “But the times are against us at the moment. This is a bad century to live in, I reckon. But we’ll come back. Technology’ll do it, you’ll see. The machines’ll get so good we won’t need the niggers anymore. Then we can ship ’em all back to Africa, let ’em learn to look after themselves. See where democracy and equality gets ’em.”

“But it’s not just the… niggers,” Amy murmured.

“True enough. But I don’t rightly know where we can send the Jews.” He laughed. “New England maybe. And put a wall around it. Let ’em work for their Friday bread.” He looked at her again, his face so innocent of guile that she felt a shiver.

“It’s cold in the mountains at night,” he observed equably. “There’s a blanket in the back — why don’t you try and get some sleep? It’s another ten hours yet.”

“You’re going to drive right through?”

“Maybe. I slept all day. If I get tired, I’ll pull off the road somewhere and take a nap.”

She took the blanket and closed her eyes, grateful for the silence even though sleep refused to come. She wondered why he’d said nothing about what her role was. Southern chivalry, she supposed. Marble columns and lace and happy black faces picking cotton…

It was light when she awoke, and they were parked by the side of the highway in a deep valley. Joe was asleep, snoring softly with his head against the window. She opened the door as quietly as she could and got out. In the near distance she heard a river and walked down through the trees toward the sound. Sunlight hadn’t yet reached the valley floor but it was already getting hot, and the night dew was rising like steam from the ground, spreading the thick fragrance of fresh grass.

Amy relieved herself in the middle of a thicket, feeling foolish that she felt the need for concealment in the middle of nowhere, and then washed her face in the fast-flowing river. Looking around, she could see nothing but trees and, above them, the higher slopes of the valley. The highway was invisible and there was no sound of traffic. It was years since she’d been so physically alone, and it felt intoxicating. Her feet wanted to dance, but this impulse, too, made her feel foolish for no good reason. She walked back up the slope, taking an almost furtive pleasure in the springiness of the turf.

Joe was awake when she returned, looking a lot less sprightly than she felt. “Okay,” he grunted, and swung the car back onto the highway. “Let’s find some breakfast.”

They ate at a truck stop outside Bull’s Gap and continued south through Knoxville, Athens, Cleveland, Chattanooga, the valley widening before them. Soon after eleven they reached Bridgeport, Alabama, found the railroad depot, and cruised the surrounding streets looking for a suitable hotel.

“That one,” Amy said, pointing out a three-story white building.

They parked the Buick and went in. “Two rooms at the back, on the top floor,” Joe told the proprietor. “We’ve got work to do,” he explained, “and we need some quiet.”

“Your secretary, I suppose,” the proprietor said with a grin, looking across at Amy, who was studying a painting on the wall.

“If she wasn’t, I wouldn’t need two rooms,” Joe said coldly.

“Okay, no offense intended.” He led them up the carpeted stairs. “This is a decent house. You won’t be troubled by any noise.”

The rooms looked surprisingly comfortable. Amy went to the window and examined the view. “Fine,” she told Joe. He went downstairs for their luggage, and a few minutes later he pulled two identical leather cases from his bag. “German officer issue, 1910,” he said, handing her one and pulling the binoculars from the other. He studied the railroad depot through them. “Perfect,” he muttered. “As long as Sigmund has his facts right,” he said, turning to her.

“He hasn’t been wrong yet,” she said, joining him at the window. “What about the light?” she asked.

“There’s yard lamps all over the place. No reason why they won’t be on. I’m going to get some sleep.”

“I’m going for a walk,” she called after him.

It wasn’t a big town, with just the one main street and about ten perpendicular roads on each side. The faces were mostly white; this was still hill country. She walked down to the Tennessee River, which looked narrower than she’d expected until she realized that the far shore was an island in midstream. The water had none of the blue-green purity of the mountains; it was a dull brown, rolling rather than running.

She heard giggling behind her and turned to see three black children staring at her over the trunk of a fallen tree. She smiled and walked toward them. They fled, laughing.

She suddenly felt a little dizzy, and cursed herself for not wearing a hat. The heat was stifling. Back on Main Street, she bought a Coke in a general store, aware that everyone was staring at her. “Where you from, honey?” the woman serving asked her. “If’n you don’t mind me asking.”

“Washington,” Amy said, adding that she and her boss were driving down to Birmingham on business.

“Gadsden road would have been quicker,” a man observed.

Amy didn’t reply. What was she doing wandering about the town, hat or no hat? The fewer people saw her the better. She paid and walked out, feeling the looks aimed at her back.

From nine o’clock on they took turns at the window in Amy’s room. While she watched he read a well-thumbed copy of a Civil War history; when the roles were reversed she tried without success to begin a Sinclair Lewis novel. As it grew darker the depot buildings grew indistinct, but there was no sign of the lights being switched on. The yard was bereft of activity.

“I’ll have to go down there,” Joe said, putting down the field glasses.

“Wait,” she said. “It’s not quite midnight yet.” For the twentieth time she looked at Sigmund’s timetable. “Bridgeport arrive 12:15, depart 12:25.” She was just about to agree that he go down when a car pulled into the yard, passed behind the shadowy bulk of a switching shed, and stopped, its headlights illuminating the side of the depot. Through the glasses they could just make out a figure disappearing through the door. The light inside went on, and a few moments later the whole yard was suddenly bathed in a yellow glow from the yard lamps. The car, they could now see, belonged to the state police. Two men came out of the office and stood by the car. Both lit cigarettes. One roared with laughter at something the other said.

A whistle sounded in the distance, and both men looked east down the tracks. Another man got out of the car and hitched up his belt. He took two rifles out of the backseat, walked over to the others, and gave one to his partner. They could now hear the train.

A couple of minutes later it drew smoothly into the depot and stopped, letting off steam, where Joe had predicted, alongside the wooden water tower. The train looked exactly like the one in Matson’s photographs: the black engine and tender, the single long boxcar, and the caboose. The brake-man jumped down from the caboose and joined the state troopers while the engineer and fireman manhandled the hose into the tender. Four more men emerged from behind the train, having presumably come from the boxcar. The engineer left the fireman to turn off the water and joined the others. There were nine of them now in a circle, the low murmur of their conversation barely audible above the hiss of the locomotive.

The fireman, his task finished, walked out of sight of the others and urinated against the wall of the depot. He then moved down to join them, and for several minutes they stood together some twenty yards from the rear of the train. Then the gathering broke up. The two state troopers joined the pair in the boxcar, the crew returned to the engine, the brake-man to the caboose. The car swept out of the yard; the train, blasting smoke, began to move. The depot lights went out, followed by those in the office. Amy and Joe looked at each other.

“Couldn’t be better,” he said.

Next morning Amy and Joe checked out of the hotel and drove another thirty miles down the valley to the larger town of Scottsboro. The realtor’s office was in the center of town and Amy stayed in the car while Joe conducted their business inside. She could see him through the window talking to a gray-haired man, who then disappeared and returned with a set of keys. The two men shook hands. The agent mimed the shooting of a rifle, and laughed. Boys will be boys, she thought.

“No problem,” Joe said as he climbed back into his seat. “They’re glad to have us. We’re the first this year. Probably be the only ones this year. The war’s not helping the hunting business.”

“It is now,” she murmured.

He laughed.

They took the Guntersville road along the banks of the newly created lake, another New Deal creation which Joe found unfortunate in principle but probably useful in practice. “Technology needs power,” he told her.

After ten miles or so they found their turnoff, a dirt road leading up the side of a steep ridge. They passed through two shanty towns, seemingly empty save for staring groups of children in ragged clothes. Scottsboro was only an hour behind them, but it seemed to belong to a different century.

Another hour and they’d left all signs of civilization behind. The road wound up and over the highest ridge, presenting them with a panoramic view of mountains stretching into the distance. A sign pointing drunkenly into the ground bore the legend “Jefferson Lodge.”

“Nice name,” Joe said, bumping the Buick onto a dirt track that made the one they’d left seem smooth as Pennsylvania Avenue. A quarter of a mile farther and they reached the lodge, a sprawling wooden cabin built against the ridge slope, flanked by enormous hickory trees. Above the door the skull of a deer gazed sourly down.

“It was built by some Birmingham big shot who went bust in ’29,” Joe told her. “He shot himself here. With a derringer, would you believe?”

There were six rooms and a kitchen. The furniture was minimal but clean, the kitchen adequately equipped. A large pile of logs was waiting by the stove.

“It’ll do,” Amy said, sitting down on one of the bunk beds. “But that rough road worries me. There won’t be any time for changing tyres if we run into a problem.”

“Not much we can do about that. We have a couple of spares for the car and I’ll check out the road for sharp stones.” He walked to the window, pushed back the shutters, and looked out. “Now that’s America,” he said.

She joined him. Far to the west the lower Tennessee Valley could be seen, a yellow-green swath framed by the dark green slopes of the forested hills. To the north there were only mountains, ridge after ridge fading into the blue haze of the horizon. In front of the cabin the dust-coated Buick looked like a bedraggled alien spacecraft.

“Yes,” she murmured, turning away. That was one America. She didn’t understand him and didn’t want to. Though she loathed his opinions, there was something about him she found disturbingly likable, some boyish innocence that seemed far removed from the evil he represented. She took a conscious grip on herself. They were enemies, enemies at war, only that. In a few weeks he would be dead.

He went out to check the road, and she did another tour of the cabin, wondering which room the unfortunate “big shot” had killed himself in.

“Okay,” he shouted from the door. “Let’s move.”

The Buick bounced its way back to the main road, where they turned north, motoring gently downhill across the plateau. A solitary peak — McCoy Mountain, the map said — loomed in front of them, but as they approached its base the road plunged down to the right, and before the pines engulfed them Amy could see road, river, and railroad tracks sharing the narrow valley below.

They hit bottom at the small town of Lim Rock, another group of shacks seemingly devoid of inhabitants, though rather more modern than those on the mountain. Following the valley westward, they reached their destination in less than a mile. Here the road and the main railroad line pushed on toward a gap in the ridge ahead, while the stream, a spur line, and another dirt track veered north up a narrow valley.

Joe stopped the car at the point closest to where the tracks diverged and they both got out. “Keep your eyes peeled,” he told her, and she leaned back against the hood watching the road while he took the large iron key from the boot and carried it across the tracks. She heard a click, a grunt, and a metallic thud. “No problem,” he shouted.

“Nothing coming,” she shouted back.

The noises repeated and he returned to replace the key in the boot.

“A truck,” Amy said, and they watched it approach and thunder past. The driver acknowledged Joe’s cheerful wave.

He turned the car and drove it up the dirt road and into the narrow valley. It ran straight for half a mile, then took a bend that brought them out of sight of the main road. Joe drove slowly forward as they both surveyed the area.

“This’ll do,” he said.

“The bridge will do for a marker,” she added, pointing forward to where both road and rails crossed the stream on a wooden trestle.

They continued up the valley to its head, turning the car in the space between some old abandoned mine buildings. On the way back they stopped again at the chosen spot. Visibility in each direction was about a quarter of a mile; the valley sides were covered in densely packed pines and already, in the late afternoon, the rays of the sun had departed for the day. The valley floor was no more than fifteen yards wide, leaving room for just the stream, the tracks, and the road. It was easy to imagine how dark it would be at night, even with the half-moon.

Amy took out her camera and took several pictures, making sure that at least one of them included Joe. He rolled the car forward to pick her up and they drove back to the main road.

“No problem, no problem at all,” he said contentedly.

Neither of them spoke again until they reached Scottsboro, where they checked into another hotel, this time as brother and sister.

The long drive back to Washington consumed most of Sunday, and by the time Amy reached her apartment she wanted nothing more than an early night. She stepped out of the elevator to find Richard sitting against the wall by her door, obviously drunk.

“The lady no longer vanishes,” he said solemnly, pulling himself to his feet.

“The lady’s tired,” she said, more kindly than she felt.

“Then let’s go to bed,” he said, following her into the apartment and half-collapsing into an armchair.

She looked at him. He wasn’t given to drinking, at least not to this extent.

“What’s the matter?” she asked, sitting down in the other chair. She knew he wanted her to make some physical gesture, but for some reason the thought of touching him filled her with revulsion.

“Nothing’s the matter. I’ve been celebrating. Why don’t you keep anything to drink?” he asked, looking around wildly.

“Stop playing the drunk,” she said acidly, “it’s not your style. I’ll make some coffee.”

He followed her into the kitchen. “I said I’ve been celebrating,” he said. “Don’t you want to know what I’m celebrating?”

“Enlighten me.” She sighed inwardly. Were all men in their late thirties just larger adolescents? “Has Jean kicked you out?” she guessed.

He laughed. “Oh no, it’s much worse than that. She’s pregnant. She’s locked me in,” he said, as if he was shocked by the discovery.

Amy had difficulty restraining the impulse to throw the coffee at him. “I suppose you had nothing to do with it,” she said, brushing past him as she carried the cups into the living room.

He almost ran after her, and for a second she thought he was going to hit her. But his face relaxed and he sank back into the chair. Poor Richard, she thought, you can’t even make it as a full-fledged bastard.

They sat for several minutes in silence. There had been a time, she thought, when this would have mattered to her, a time when she’d even flirted with the idea of giving up everything for him. It hadn’t been for long, just a couple of weeks after they’d come together, when his kindness — and, she had to admit, his imagination in bed — had concealed his lack of character. But the romantic glow had soon disappeared as if it had never been, and she had settled for the sex, safe in the knowledge that Richard had nothing else to offer. Now she just wanted to be rid of him.

“Can I stay tonight?” he asked without looking up.

“No.”

“Why not?” he asked angrily.

“Because I don’t want you to.”

“Amy, I love you. I—”

“No, you don’t. You don’t know the meaning of the word.” She felt angry, angrier than she wanted to be. She ought to be showing him that she didn’t gave a damn about Jean’s pregnancy.

It was too late. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. Look, I’ll sort it out. I do love you. I don’t love her. It’s as—”

“No — no — no,” she shouted. He looked at her with astonishment. “Richard,” she said, her eyes closed, her fists clenched on her thighs, “will you just go?”

He didn’t move. “Look, I’ve said I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

“Just go.”

“Is there someone else?”

“What?” She couldn’t believe it.

“You heard.”

She laughed. “You come here, tell me you’ve gotten your wife pregnant, and then ask me if there’s someone else?”

“Is there? I need to know.” He was looking straight at her, his voice completely calm. He might have been asking someone the time. She suddenly realized that he was holding himself together only by a thread.

“No,” she said softly. “Satisfied?”

He smiled, an utterly meaningless smile. “Of course.” He looked at his watch. “Time I was getting back,” he said, and without another word walked out of Amy’s apartment.

Six

Kuznetsky lowered himself through the hatch and dropped nimbly onto American territory. After almost four days in the air, frequently punctuated by stops at godforsaken airstrips in the middle of the Siberian wilderness, his mind felt like running a hundred-yard sprint, his body like collapsing in an exhausted heap. He compromised, leaning against the Antonov’s wing and surveying the Alaskan landscape.

For a minute he thought they’d landed at the wrong location, then remembered what he’d been told about Ladd Field, that it was built underground. Above ground there were only the gaunt hangars and a few offices, and it was to one of these that the pilot led him. Inside, a flight of stairs led down into a brightly lit tunnel. “It’s five miles long, in a circle,” Brelikov told him. He tried to look suitably impressed.

“Welcome home, Jack,” he murmured to himself as Brelikov led him along the tunnel toward the Soviet pilots’ mess.

It was hard to believe they were in America; the only non-Russian speakers were conversing in Uzbek. The mess hall was crowded with fifty or so Soviet pilots, most of them washing down hamburgers with bottles of Coca-Cola. Kuznetsky asked an officer the way to Anisimov’s office, and was coldly pointed farther down the tunnel. The local boss was apparently not popular with the masses.

It didn’t take Kuznetsky long to understand why. Alexei Anisimov, the Soviet head of the Lend-Lease Purchasing Commission, was a prime example of a particular NKVD stereotype — slightly built, elegant, with a supercilious air and an ascetic’s face. He was probably younger than Kuznetsky, but the way he said “Welcome, Colonel” was nicely judged to emphasize his superior rank. Kuznetsky replied in kind, passing over his First Priority credentials with a condescending smile and making himself comfortable in the seat he hadn’t yet been offered.

“Yes, Colonel,” Anisimov said, offering him an American cigarette and lighting it with a contraption bearing a portrait of Mickey Mouse. “I cannot see any difficulties. I have of course been given advance warning of your requirements, but there is really nothing to it. We’ve been sending men into the United States for three years now without any trouble. They just hop off the plane at the Lend-Lease staging post in Great Falls, Montana, and catch a taxi to the railway station. No one has ever been stopped.” He smiled contemptuously and carefully scraped the ash from his cigarette on the rim of the ashtray. “I sometimes think we could land a platoon of T-34s and they’d be halfway to Washington before the Americans delivered a mild protest.”

Then any fool could do your job, Kuznetsky thought. But there was no point in antagonizing Anisimov, no point at all. “What about the return journey?” he asked. “There’s still no inspection of outbound planes?”

“None whatsoever. Well, there was one incident in January. The American in charge at Great Falls, Major Jordan, took it into his head one night to inspect one load, and he found quite a lot of… well, to call it diplomatic baggage was stretching the usual meaning of the term. Jordan was quite upset. He raced off to Washington and kicked up a fuss. Nobody took any notice of him. In fact we received an apology from the State Department, here…” He pointed out a framed letter on the wall behind him. “Since then, no more inspections. We could probably bring out the Statue of Liberty.”

Kuznetsky was glad that he’d already heard much the same in Moscow; Anisimov’s complacency wouldn’t have been very convincing on its own. Still, everything seemed okay.

“This First Priority business,” Anisimov said cordially, “it must be of extraordinary importance.”

“It is. I regret that I can tell you no more. Now I would like to get some sleep…”

Anisimov hid his disappointment well. “Of course. You’ll be on a plane at ten in the morning, if that is satisfactory?”

Kuznetsky nodded.

Kuznetsky might have been tired, but sleep refused to come. He hadn’t found it easy to fall asleep since leaving the forest. And Nadezhda. He’d had no idea how much he’d miss her; he still didn’t understand it. Little things, like the way she put her hand on his shoulder and leaned against him…

In Moscow there hadn’t been time to think. For two weeks he’d been submerged in the affairs of his native country, memorizing political events, reading newspapers, watching Hollywood movies, reading radio scripts and comics. “Smooching” was the new dating game. “Well, cut off my legs and call me Shorty” was what the “drools” were saying to the “meatballs.” In Florida they’d just built a drive-in church; the congregation listened through huge loudspeakers and honked their car horns, once for “amen” and twice for “hallelujah.” Everyone was worried about Roosevelt’s health, and the whole country had gone mad on vitamins. Most of the top baseball stars had been drafted and basketball had suddenly become popular. There was a national shortage of bobby pins!

If Nadezhda had a bobby pin, she’d probably stick it in a German. But after the war… he’d get her one, shortage or no shortage, a piece of America for his girl…

He was awakened by a hand gently shaking his shoulder. “Comrade Anisimov wants you,” a voice said. He opened his eyes and saw the man who’d shown him to his room. “Tell him I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“I believe it’s urgent, Comrade Colonel.”

“That’s why I said minutes.”

The messenger retreated. Kuznetsky looked at himself in the minuscule mirror above the washbasin. He’d shave first, if only to keep Anisimov waiting. No, he wasn’t worth it. Why was he feeling so petty?

There was another colonel in Anisimov’s office whom Kuznetsky knew by name but not by sight. Colonel Kotikov was nominally in charge of the Soviet operation at Great Falls, though the real authority lay with Anisimov’s NKVD surrogate, one Sergeant Vinogradsky. Kotikov was almost Anisimov’s opposite in appearance — a big burly man with a wide smile; in years gone by he’d have been a prosperous Ukrainian kulak. Kuznetsky could see that he’d get on with the Americans, who’d fall for the hearty exterior and put down the bullying side to language difficulties. A real Russian, they’d think. Our gallant allies! Anisimov, on the other hand, would seem like a well-bred snake wherever you put him. These tunnels seemed ideal.

He did not, however, look so disgustingly self-possessed as he had the previous night. “We have a problem, Colonel,” he explained between taking jerky puffs on his cigarette. “Colonel Kotikov will explain,” he added, in a tone that implied his own blamelessness.

Kotikov shook hands with Kuznetsky and leaned back wearily in his seat. “I left Great Falls on Friday evening,” he said. “I’m afraid the Americans have had another brainstorm. Comrade Anisimov tells me that you have already been informed of the nonexistent security… Well, three days ago there was a meeting at the State Department in Washington. The FBI, Military Intelligence, Customs, everyone. They intend to call a meeting with our embassy people and to inform them that in future the border and customs regulations regarding us will be strictly enforced.”

Kuznetsky looked at Anisimov, who looked at the ceiling. “Of course this may be nothing but words,” he said stiffly. He obviously found the whole business thoroughly embarrassing.

“That may be,” Kotikov continued unperturbed, “and what the Americans know about security could be written on the edge of a kopek… but I have expected this for some time. Ever since the January episode. And since Jordan left, the atmosphere has changed considerably. On Friday the new liaison man made a point of showing me around the rooms reserved for the new inspection unit. Sooner or later the bastards are going to start checking everyone and everything going out. It may be later, but I don’t think we can depend on that.”

“No,” Kuznetsky said thoughtfully. “How about entry? Will I have any trouble getting in?”

“Nothing is certain, but I will be very surprised if the Americans act that fast.”

“Very well.” He turned to Anisimov. “I presume you have already written a full report for Moscow. It must go direct to Comrade Sheslakov at Frunze Street, First Priority, and as fast as is humanly possible. I shall go in as planned.”

The flight to Great Falls took the best part of two days, each stretch of mountain or tundra culminating in an hour spent stretching his limbs at some small settlement airstrip. The American pilot fed the guardians of these lonely outposts with conversation, and Kuznetsky walked around examining the pinups of Betty Grable and listening to the vast Canadian silence. As far as the pilot knew, he spoke no English, and as such was treated as no more than a mobile piece of cargo whom it was necessary to feed but not to recognize as a fellow human being.

Great Falls was sighted soon after nine on Wednesday morning, a small but sprawling town where rivers and railroads converged. The airstrip, Gore Field, was perched high above the town on a plateau. Alongside the one lengthy runway Kuznetsky could see scores of fighters awaiting delivery to the Soviet Union, each one already adorned with its gleaming red stars.

He was met by Colonel Kotikov’s wife, a petite, nervous-looking woman in her mid-thirties whom Kuznetsky would have thought more suited to Anisimov. She took him to the living quarters above her husband’s office, provided a welcome breakfast, and left him to eat it in peace. He’d not yet seen an American, much less been challenged by one.

She came back as he was finishing his coffee, poured him another cup, sat down. “I suggest we make the switch between here and the station,” she said. “I have a suitcase full of American clothes” — she pointed it out — “and there’s an eastbound train at five this evening. You have to change several times, but it’s all written out here. In English.”

He inspected the paper. Minot, Fargo, Minneapolis. Familiar names.

“There’s some newspapers here,” she said. “Out of date of course. And there’s the radio. Jack Benny’s on at eleven. He makes $17,000 a program,” she said wistfully. “Of course,” she added quickly, “after the war our radio will be just as good.”

“I doubt it,” Kuznetsky said calmly. “There are some things Americans do well. Fortunately they’re mostly things that don’t matter very much.”

“I’ll leave you to rest then,” she said, reverting to her nervous expression. She wasn’t sure how to deal with this man. She wasn’t even sure which nationality he really was.

“Thank you,” he called after her.

At four they drove out of the airfield and down toward the town. The American guards on the gate merely saluted, and halfway down the mountain they stopped for Kuznetsky to change clothes. Kotikov’s wife left him waiting at the station, sitting on his suitcase, leaning against the wall of the depot. The train was late, only an hour the clerk said, but Kuznetsky doubted it. He took out the copy of The Grapes of Wrath that he’d found and pocketed in the plane from Fairbanks. He’d never heard of the writer, but he’d just seen the film in Moscow and been grudgingly impressed.

A car turned into the station yard and two men got out. One pointed in his direction, and they walked slowly across until they were standing looking down at him. “What’s your name?” one barked out in Russian.

“Uh?” Kuznetsky said, shielding his eyes against the sun as he looked up at them. “I don’t get your drift, fella.”

They looked at each other. The dapper-looking one smiled at him. “You’re not a Russian, then?” he asked innocently.

“You a coupla smart guys? What’s the game?”

The bulky one intervened. “Maybe we’ve made a mistake, mister. Do you have any means of identification?”

“No. Yes. Driver’s license.” He pulled the card from his inside pocket.

“Jack Tillotson. St. Cloud, Minnesota. Is that where you’re heading?”

Kuznetsky showed him the ticket. “Who are you?” he asked. “Cops?”

“Something like that.”

He snatched the ticket back. “Hey, this is a free country. Who the hell are you?”

The bulky one showed him a card. Military Intelligence.

“Okay. Why pick on me?”

The dapper one smiled again. “Because you left Gore Field with the Russian chief’s wife, that’s why, Mr. Tillotson. Or is it Tillotsky?”

“You’re crazy. I’m as American as you are.”

“So how come you seem so cozy with the Russians?”

“She gave me a lift, that’s all. I didn’t know she was Russian till I got in the car. They’re our allies, aren’t they?”

“Sure. How did you come to be up there?”

“I got a lift from Edmonton on a plane. One of the pilots is a friend of mine.”

“Name?”

“Bob Simpson.” Kuznetsky hoped that Simpson was on his way back to Fairbanks by this time. “Check at the airfield.”

“What were you doing in Edmonton?”

“Visiting my sister. She married an oilman — they’re prospecting up there.”

“Close family, eh.”

“Something wrong with that?”

“No. Would you mind if we checked your suitcase?”

“Would it make any difference if I did?”

“Nope.”

They rummaged through the clothes, found nothing, and asked him to turn out his pockets. Kuznetsky blessed the inspiration that had told him to destroy Kolikova’s note.

The bulky one looked relieved, the dapper one chagrined. “Okay, Mr. Tillotson, sorry to have troubled you. There’s been a lot of Russians slipping into the U.S. of A. with trouble in mind. We have to be careful.”

“Okay,” Kuznetsky said, “sorry I got a bit ticked.”

They started to walk away, then the dapper one said “Good-bye” over his shoulder in Russian. Nice try, Kuznetsky thought to himself. They’d obviously seen the same movie.

When Kuznetsky woke the next morning the mountains were gone, the sun was rising, and the train was clanking into Minot, North Dakota. He was supposed to make a connection here for Fargo and St. Cloud, but after the business of the evening before with the American counterintelligence agents he had decided to wait for the through train from Moose Jaw to Minneapolis. If Simpson hadn’t left, someone might be waiting for him in St. Cloud.

It was a slower train, and for most of the day it chugged across the plains passing through no towns of any size. On either side of the tracks the yellow-green, treeless country stretched toward a flat horizon, and every twenty miles or so a road would cross the tracks and arrow away into the distance. Occasional farms and occasional stations, dwarfed by grain silos, were all that broke the monotony.

It was hypnotic, and something more. For the first time Kuznetsky understood why so many Russians had preferred the labour camps to exile. Home was like a magnet, the more powerful the nearer you came. But you could step beyond the magnetic field, as he had, and cut yourself loose. It wasn’t that they would miss Russia; what they dreaded was that they wouldn’t, and that in some sense they’d then be forever homeless. Bravery and cowardice, hand in hand. They knew they could never go back, and Kuznetsky knew, even as he looked out on the Minnesota plains, as he came within the magnetic field, that neither could he. He longed to get off, to catch a ride to St. Cloud, see his mother and father if either was still alive, but he knew he wouldn’t. It wasn’t just a matter of duty; it was the way things were, the way the cards had been dealt. Regrets were the price of any choice. They couldn’t be cashed in.

He changed again in Minneapolis, remembering the day in this station twenty-six years before. They’d taken the train west, forty men, boys really, all full of nervous bravado and curiosity. On to crisp uniforms and rifles that would feel strange in their hands.

Now he took the train east for Chicago, a forty-three-year-old NKVD colonel, immune to nerves, immune to bravado, not yet immune to curiosity. He lay back in his seat, drifting to and fro between sleep and wakefulness, between darkness and images of a young girl walking before him through a moonlit forest.

“Amy looks as if she’s got something on her mind,” Harry Brandon whispered to his wife.

Bertha Brandon looked across the room at her niece. “She’s always been like that,” she replied. “It’s just one of her moods. She might make more of an effort for James’s sake.”

Her husband laughed. “James isn’t here.”

“No, but that’s not his fault, and we are celebrating his twenty-first birthday.”

“James always adored Amy when he was a kid.”

“What a romancer you are!” She patted him affectionately on the knee. “Amy, dear,” she called across the room, “have you heard from James lately?”

“Not since he crossed to France, Aunt Bertha,” she answered automatically. She couldn’t seem to get Richard off her mind, though there didn’t seem any real reason for concern. She hadn’t seen him since the Sunday before, though on the next day he had sent her a huge bouquet of flowers with the message “Sorry about last night.” Now he was halfway to New Hampshire to take part in a conference at Bretton Woods. He’d be gone all week.

Perhaps she was just getting tense about the operation and using him as a focus for her anxiety. The Russian — no, the American from Russia — would be arriving any day, might even be in Washington already. He was probably as anxious about her as she was about him. But he had to be good or they wouldn’t be sending him.

Her aunt and uncle were now discussing, of all things, the recent spate of spy trials that had just ended in New York, and her uncle, noticing that she was listening, asked her, “What do you think, Amy?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose it’s the motive that matters. If someone sells secrets for money, then they deserve all they get. But someone who does it because they believe in it… I think that’s different.”

“How could anyone believe in the Nazis?” her aunt asked sharply.

“Ah, but that’s not the point,” her husband said. “We’re talking about morality. If it’s wrong to spy, then why do we do it? Would you condemn a German who spied for us against the Nazis?”

“That’s different, dear. This is a democracy.”

“The land of the free,” Amy murmured.

“Yes, yes it is,” her aunt insisted. “We should be grateful. I don’t care what they say. Anyone who helps the Germans should go to the electric chair.”

“But that’s what Amy’s saying. We’re fighting the Germans because they’re wrong, not because they’re Germans. It’s the wider morality that counts, not the nation that happens to represent it.”

If only you knew, Amy thought. She was fond, very fond, of her Uncle Harry, had been ever since her return from Germany in 1933, when he’d been so patient with her, so understanding, even though she’d told him hardly anything of what had happened. The fact that she’d worked through a lot of her pain in being like a second mother to his son, James, had brought them together. If she felt any regrets, they would be on his account. She knew how much he was going to be hurt by it all.

Her Aunt Bertha didn’t matter. They had never liked each other, never really pretended to. Amy thought it was jealousy, not of her but of her mother, Bertha’s sister. Elisabeth had died young, a heroine to some, leaving her memory to hang like an unliftable pall over Bertha’s more mundane existence and Amy to serve as a constant reminder. Now she might live to see her niece strapped into the electric chair. The chill of the thought couldn’t quite obliterate an almost pleasurable sense of irony.

Amy had thought about such consequences, not often, but she knew the possibility lay there at the back of her mind. Every time a German spy was caught and paraded across the newspapers and newsreels she pictured her own face in his or her place. People would spit on her picture, would press their ears to the radio for the details of her execution.

She knew it was real, but it didn’t seem so, not really. Fear, yes, an underlying fear, a subterranean darkness. But she could cope with it, she knew that much; she would hold herself together to the end. She had promised her mother, promised Effi. She was only offering up her life, like so many millions of soldiers, like James in France. The manner of the death was neither here nor there. What mattered was to be true.

“One more time,” Fyedorova asked him, “what’s wrong with Vladivostok?”

“I’m not convinced it’s the best solution to our problem,” Sheslakov muttered, tracing his finger across the Pacific on the wall map.

“But it is a simple answer.”

“Yes, it is,” he conceded.

“And that’s why you don’t like it.”

“No. It’s more than that.” He filled both their glasses with vodka and walked to the window. The streets were empty, but he thought he could make out a lightening of the sky above the cupolas of the Kremlin. A whole night they’d been going around in circles. A decision had to be made, but he felt too tired to make it.

Fyedorova swung her legs off the couch and leaned forward. “Right. Let me assume your usual role. Fact one — the earliest we can get a ship to Seattle or Portland is August 12. Fact two — the earliest we can get one there by the safe route is August 20. Fact three — if the Americans find one of our ships in mid-Pacific…”

“It’s a big ocean.”

“It’s still possible, and would be highly suspicious. Fact four — an August 20 arrival would leave our people and the material stranded in America for almost three weeks…”

“And then find the ship surrounded by American customs. If they’re tightening up at Great Falls, there’s no reason to suppose they aren’t tightening up everywhere…”

“Which is why we ruled out the Atlantic convoys.”

“Yes.”

“Well, we’ve still got to cross an ocean.”

“Apparently.” Sheslakov rubbed his eyes. “So, the short route or the safe route?”

“The short route,” she said.

“Zhdanov will want to play safe,” he said morosely.

“Zhdanov…” Fyedorova’s eyes suddenly lit up. “Oh yes, yes!” she said.

“What?” he asked irritably.

“I was talking to one of the secretaries at Trade about a year ago. Do you know how Zhdanov gets his Havana cigars?”

Kuznetsky’s train from Chicago pulled into Union Station early the next morning. He checked into a nondescript hotel on Massachusetts Avenue, shaved, and went out to shake the long train journey out of his limbs. He’d never been to Washington when he was young; in fact he’d never been farther east than Chicago, and the sights, familiar from school textbooks, seemed almost artificial, like life-size versions of photographs. At noon he put through a call to the prearranged number and informed the unknown answering voice that Rosa’s brother was in town. “Five o’clock,” the voice said, and the connection was cut.

He then walked to the Capitol, past the White House, and to the Lincoln Memorial. The sun seemed to get hotter by the minute, and he sat in the shade listening to the sightseers talking about Lincoln. He could tell that most of them seemed to come from the South, and few of them had anything complimentary to say.

Yakovlev arrived precisely on time, looking as hot as Kuznetsky felt. He was dressed American style, loose trousers, shirt unbuttoned at the collar, jacket thrown over one shoulder, a jaunty hat hanging on one side of his head. “Well, Comrade,” he said in thickly accented English, “how is Moscow?”

“Same as ever,” Kuznetsky replied. “Not as hot as this.”

“Ah, Washington was built on a swamp, you know.”

“Yes.”

Yakovlev took the hint. “It’s better we complete this quickly,” he said. “I won’t see you again — any problems, you have the telephone number. Call any hour, day or night.”

“We already have problems,” Kuznetsky said. He explained the situation at Great Falls.

Yakovlev swore in Russian, thought for a moment, and then shrugged. “That’s for Moscow to sort out,” he said. “Today is July 16 — there won’t be any word for at least a week. Start telephoning on the twenty-fourth. As for this end, everything is going as planned. The Germans arrive on the night of August 2, and all the advance work has been done. The July train ran as scheduled and the plan was checked through by Rosa and her friend from the Abwehr. They’re picking up the weapons Tuesday night. You meet her tomorrow, at the Tidal Basin, just west of the Jefferson Memorial, at six o’clock. She’ll be wearing a white blouse, burgundy suit, and carrying an orange.”

“I’ve seen her photograph.”

“Of course. Attractive, don’t you think?”

“So’s Ingrid Bergman,” Kuznetsky said dryly.

“I don’t think you’ll find Rosa lacking in other qualities,” Yakovlev said with a trace of irritation. “Now, what do you need?”

“A gun. Preferably a Walther automatic. A reliable car and enough gas coupons to run it.”

“There’s no difficulty there. The car is ready. It was hired in the Abwehr agent’s name last week. It will be left outside Union Station tomorrow morning at nine. The number, key, and coupons will be delivered to your hotel tonight. With the gun.”

Kuznetsky told him the address and got up to leave.

“Good luck,” Yakovlev said.

Kuznetsky had an enormous steak for dinner and then went into the first movie he could find. He got back to his hotel at around eleven, was handed a package by the night clerk, and persuaded the man to dig him out a bottle of ersatz whiskey. Once in his room, he inspected the gun, took off his clothes, and lay down on the bed with a glass of the amber fluid. It tasted awful, but he assumed it would eventually relax him.

He thought about the movie, had to admit that it had been an enjoyable enough piece of propaganda. The hero had not only discovered his sense of duty, but he’d also won the beautiful heroine as well. “You do know how to whistle, don’t you?” she’d asked him. Kuznetsky laughed. A partisan who didn’t know how to whistle wouldn’t last long. He remembered Bogdanov, who’d claimed he could imitate thirty-seven different species of birds. Dead now.

Amelia Brandt, alias Rosa. He’d read the file in Moscow, listened to Sheslakov’s account of his talk with Luerhsen, and for some reason he’d been filled with a deep sense of foreboding. He couldn’t put his finger on it. Perhaps it was just that her life had been so different from his own, almost the reverse in fact. Perhaps it was her being a German, perhaps being a woman. What he wanted to know, he told himself, feeling the alcohol beginning to loosen his body, was whether she was ready to die. Like Nadezhda. How could she be?

Yes, she’d known tragedy, she’d met the enemy face to face, but only fleetingly — the rest of her life had been, no, not easy, but… removed. Espionage was a fantasy world, a game played out on the war’s margins. How could she, how could anyone in America know, really know, what thirty years of war had done to Europe, how thin the civilized crust had grown, how utterly cheap a mere life had come to seem?

He emptied the glass Russian style, feeling it sting his throat. No, he didn’t think he knew how to whistle anymore.

Amy sat on the edge of the basin with her legs dangling over the side and watched him walk toward her around the rim. He looked American, dressed in chinos and a checked shirt, but she knew it was him. She took the orange out of her bag and absentmindedly tossed it from one hand to the other like an impatient baseball pitcher waiting to be relieved.

He bought a Coke and sat down about fifteen feet away, separated by a fat man, watching, she knew, to make sure he hadn’t been followed. They’d done a good job in Moscow. The haircut was perfect, the army boots looked as if they’d seen a few Pacific Islands. She wondered how good his English would be — twenty-six years was a long time.

After about ten minutes the fat man got up to leave and Kuznetsky took out a cigarette, patted both shirt pockets, and discovered that he had no matches. “Would you like a light?” she asked, taking her cue. “Thanks,” he said with a flat Midwestern twang. He moved closer and casually took the matches and offered her a cigarette. As he lit hers their eyes met.

The last thing he’d expected to see was her half-veiled amusement. Nervousness yes, cold efficiency perhaps. She was either very right or very wrong for this sort of work, and he wasn’t in an optimistic mood. She looked so young too. You could go from one end of the Soviet Union to the other and not find a thirty-three-year-old that the years had treated so kindly.

“I’m sorry,” she said in a soft, almost accentless English. She picked up the orange. “The absurdity of things like this…” He was a remarkable-looking man. Not in a purely physical sense, but he seemed to radiate… power, that was the only word for it. His eyes had seemed to look straight through her, utterly clinical. And yet, as he walked around the basin, even as he’d sat not five yards away, she’d had an almost opposite impression, a sort of bearlike shambling…

He seemed to relax. The eyes switched to neutral, gazing blankly across the water. He was thinking about something that woman with Sheslakov had said. “She will be driven, she will drive herself…” Now that did sound absurd on a day like this, in a place like this.

He told her, slowly but precisely, what he had told Yakovlev about their problem with the escape route. She didn’t interrupt, merely asked whether it was still on.

“Until we hear otherwise, and I doubt whether we will. The Party would have us cross the Pacific on a raft rather than let this chance go by.”

She was pleased, he could see that. That was something. “All I need for now,” he said, “is a good look at your German friend.”

“He’s American. He’ll be picking me up outside the Library of Congress at six on Tuesday evening and dropping me at the same place later, I don’t know how much later.” She reached into her bag, brought out the photo of him she’d taken on their trip. “That’s him. Joe Markham is the name he’s using.”

“No trouble with him?”

“Not yet. He’s not the type to have doubts, but he’s not a fool. And he’s an excellent shot, or so he tells me.”

“I’ll bear that in mind.”

She got up, leaving the cigarette pack. “You can keep them,” she said.

He watched her walk away past the memorial, cursed softly under his breath in English, and then started off in the opposite direction.

Back in his hotel room, he removed the tightly folded rice paper from the cigarette package, memorized the address and telephone number it contained, and flushed the paper down the toilet at the end of the corridor.

Seven

Sheslakov watched the streets of Gothenburg roll past the open window of his limousine. The drive from Stockholm had taken most of the day, but he’d spent much of it asleep, recovering from the previous night’s flight across the Baltic. Perhaps it wasn’t really necessary for him to deal with Lorentsson personally, but he knew he couldn’t have trusted such a task with an underling.

They drove through the city center now, old buildings and young blondes, so many blondes, a nation of not-quite-Garbos. Sheslakov recalled the film he’d watched with Kuznetsky a few weeks before — Ninotchka — and smiled at the memory. Garbo had been so beautiful, and the bright young NKVD men watching had been too busy expressing their ideological outrage to notice. What did they expect from Hollywood — Alexander Nevsky?

“We’re nearly there,” the driver told him.

They had left the city behind, were close to the sea, and every now and then a gap in the trees would reveal the waters of the Kattegat bathed in the gold of the setting sun. Houses were few and far between, but they made up in size for what they lacked in numbers. It was a fitting place for a shipping magnate to make his home.

Lorentsson’s mansion was built like a castle, complete with stone walls and crenellations, perched above the rocky coast. Sheslakov was admitted by a butler and ushered into a reception room that, from the sensuous depth of its carpet to the exquisite workmanship of its chandeliers, reeked of affluence. There was no doubting that capitalism worked for this capitalist.

There he was left to his own devices for more than half an hour — a little lesson, he told himself, that Swedes don’t like the thought of being pressured. In his younger days Sheslakov would probably have been annoyed. Now he found such stratagems amusing.

The butler returned and led him up through the house to a study that overlooked the sea. Lorentsson sat behind a polished mahogany desk, a big man with blond hair and beard, fifty-five years old, according to the NKVD file in Sheslakov’s pocket. The shipping magnate didn’t rise to greet his visitor, merely gestured him to a chair. Another little signal.

Sheslakov sat down, savored the comfort of the chair, and smiled at the Swede. “We can speak English, yes?”

Lorentsson nodded.

“It has been made clear to you that I represent the Soviet Government, and doubtless you have made certain that this is so…”

Lorentsson nodded silently again.

“Good, I will come straight to the matter. We understand that according to an agreement between the British, the Germans and your own government, four Swedish ships are permitted to travel, unmolested, between Gothenburg and transatlantic destinations. Is that correct?”

Lorentsson nodded again, looking a trifle more wary.

“And this agreement is still honoured? We understand there were some problems in January but that since then everything is fine.”

“You are well-informed…”

“There is no reason to expect problems in the months to come?”

“Not that I know of. Where is all this leading, Mr. Sheslakov?”

“I am coming to that. We understand you are the owner of two ships involved in this arrangement, and that one of them, the Balboa, is due to dock in Maracaibo, Venezuela, in the next few days…”

“The point?”

Sheslakov smiled. “The Soviet Government wishes to give you some business, Mr. Lorentsson. We want that ship to call at Havana, Cuba, on August 12 and collect something for us.”

“What is the cargo?”

“For your information, it will be two naturalists, two German naturalists, and their crates of specimens. I am assured by our own shipping experts that such a diversion would not add long, either in time or distance, to the homeward journey. And you would of course be generously paid.”

The Swede’s expression had gone through surprise, amusement, and anger. “What can two German naturalists possibly be worth to the Soviet Union?” he asked.

“We will pay a million Swedish krone on delivery in Gothenburg,” Sheslakov said drily. “As far as your company — and your ship’s captain, a Mr Torstennson I believe — are concerned, this is a request from the German Government, a humanitarian request.”

Lorentsson stood up. “I’m sorry, Mr. Sheslakov, but Sweden is a neutral country.”

Sheslakov didn’t move. “I’m aware of that. I can assure you that this transaction has nothing whatsoever to do with the current war, and cannot therefore in any way compromise your country’s neutrality.”

“You’ll have to do better than that,” Lorentsson said. “Who are these ‘naturalists’ really? What are their ‘specimens’?”

“I am also obliged to inform you,” Sheslakov said quietly, “that a refusal to accept this contract will be considered a most unfriendly act by the Soviet Government.”

Lorentsson stared at him, and for the first time seemed unsure of himself. “Am I being threatened?” he asked incredulously.

Sheslakov remembered Fyedorova saying that the Swedes had not known terror since the Middle Ages. “Mr. Lorentsson, I will be perfectly honest with you,” he said, looking the other man straight in the eye. “I do not know who these ‘naturalists’ are, nor the nature of their ‘specimens’. The fact that half the Politburo smokes Havana cigars may be of some relevance. I have no need to know, and neither do you. My government is willing to pay you well, very well, for collecting them. Where is the problem?”

The shipping magnate stared out of the window, seemingly engrossed in the embers of the sunset. “What if I refuse?” he asked without turning his head.

“Why even consider it?”

“I’d like to know.”

Sheslakov sighed. “You’ll be dead within a month.”

Lorentsson whirled around, seemed on the verge of an angry outburst. “For a few crates of cigars?” he half-shouted.

“I understand,” Sheslakov said matter-of-factly, “that the Swedish people take a pride in being practical, and nonideological. You had nothing to gain and much to lose from entering the war, so you stayed out. You have nothing to gain and much to lose from refusing this contract, so why not accept it? No country, no person, is free of pressures.”

Lorentsson still said nothing, but Sheslakov knew he was beaten, knew from the blinking eyes, the turned-down mouth, the slightly sagging shoulders.

“You have no choice,” he said gently, “because, like most people, you want to live.”

Sheslakov stood up, took the envelope from his pocket and placed it on the desk. “It’s all written down. When we hear from our people in Venezuela that your cargo has arrived, you will receive half the payment.”

And your death will be ordered, Sheslakov thought as he descended the stairs. Outside, a red moon was hanging low in the eastern sky, edging the trees with blood. As they drove back toward Gothenburg he felt a profound sense of anticlimax. His part was over. All that remained was the waiting and hoping.

Kuznetsky wiped his brow for the hundredth time that day. He was used to heat, but of the dry variety. This damn humidity was something else entirely; it was like floating in a steam bath. His shirt and trousers clung, his feet squirmed inside his shoes. The end of his cigarette was sodden with sweat.

He tossed it out of the car window and sat back, watching the denizens of Washington going home for their supper. He still wasn’t accustomed to the new fashions, particularly the women’s. All these skirts tight around the hips and the broad belts with buckles. All the legs on display! He smiled as he imagined the reaction of the Party bosses back home — bunch of hypocritical prudes. It had been so different in the Revolution years; maybe this war would have the same effect. There was nothing like death for breaking down the mystique of the human body.

The atmosphere in Washington was difficult for him to judge. He’d known America was a long way from the war, but it was at war, and yes, there were some shortages, the casualty lists, the newsreels, and the radio programs full of letters from the boys at the front. But it didn’t feel like a nation at war. It felt more like a nation engrossed in watching a war movie. The faces walking past were free of strain, smartly dressed and made-up, unconcerned…

His fellow Americans. An alien species, yet somehow achingly familiar. It was the physical gestures, the way they moved their arms, tilted their heads — those were his gestures, American gestures.

He looked at his watch. A minute to go and, sure enough, there she was, walking toward the pickup point. He studied Amy’s walk, wondering if there was anything particularly Germanic in the graceful, upright stride. Everyone else, all the Americans, seemed to be slouching in comparison.

She had just reached the library steps when a black Buick drew up alongside the curb. He watched Amy feign surprise, say something with a smile, and get into the car. She was a good actress if nothing else. The driver’s face was in a shadow; as expected, he’d have to wait for their return and then follow the man home.

The Buick made a U-turn and headed west at the next intersection along Independence Avenue. Kuznetsky took out a cigarette, and as he did so noticed a red car, a Pontiac, draw away from the curb and into the Buick’s slipstream. It might be coincidence, it probably was, but a little alarm bell went off in his mind. It would do no harm to make sure.

“Who are these people?” Amy asked Joe as they drove the Buick deeper into the Maryland countryside.

Joe thought for a moment, an impish look on his face. “Let’s call them our Axis partners,” he answered.

So it was the Mafia. Faulkner had thought it would be. “What do they know?” she asked.

“Nothing. Only that we want the guns and have the money. A simple business deal.”

“What’s the connection?”

He ignored the question. “Have you ever noticed,” he said, “the similarity between the Mafia and the federal government? They both love competition so much, they spend all their time trying to kill it.”

She grinned in spite of herself. “And the connection?”

“There’s no need for you to know,” he said flatly.

“Okay. But since I’m here in this car, I’d like to know how you’re so certain we can trust them.”

He stretched his right arm in front of her and sprung open the glove compartment. A fearsome-looking Colt revolver was clipped to the inside. “You’ll stay in the car with that,” he said. “But I don’t expect any trouble. They have a code of sorts. They like doing business properly — makes them feel like upright American citizens.”

“I hope so,” she said, slipping the gun out of its clips and feeling its weight.

“I assume you know how it works,” he asked.

“An American’s birthright,” she replied in the same tone. “It’s heavy,” she added. The GRU training hadn’t included Colts. She looked out of the window at the flat country surrounding them. The sun behind them was still bright but its shadows were lengthening, and the fields, thick with grain, seemed to emit a golden haze.

“We’re nearly there,” Joe said.

Ahead she could see a truck stop, a large diner surrounded by parking spaces. He turned the car in, making for the far corner of the lot where a long gray sedan waited under the trees.

Kuznetsky saw the Buick turn in and followed the Pontiac past. A quarter of a mile farther and his last doubts were removed. The red car pulled onto the grass turnout, and Kuznetsky, passing at speed, watched it make a U-turn in his rearview mirror. He continued on around a bend and made one himself. Passing the truck stop again, he saw the Buick in the distance, the Pontiac sitting by the diner a hundred yards away.

He drove on, wondering what to do. They would be returning to Washington once the deal was done, and there was no point in him interfering. He drove another half mile and pulled off into a side road, reversed the car, and settled down for another wait.

There were two of them. Joe shook hands with the younger one, a slight, dark-skinned man in a smart blue suit. The older man, who wore a light gray suit that was too tight for him, seemed to be staring straight at Amy, though it was hard to be certain through his sunglasses.

“Your partner doesn’t walk?” he asked Joe.

Joe grinned at him. “She’s nervous. It’s okay.” He lifted his arm to indicate the paper bag in his hand. “Here’s the money.”

The young one took it and disappeared into the car. Joe and the older one stood there smiling at each other. “I’ll bet she has a gun, your partner,” the Italian said conversationally. “Don’t you trust us?”

“Like I said, she’s the nervous type.”

The Italian looked at Amy again. “Rather you than me,” he said to Joe. “I like low-strung women, if you know what I mean.”

“I like ones who can hit what they aim at.”

The younger one had finished counting the money. “Okay, Paolo,” he yelled through the window.

Paolo opened the sedan’s trunk and took out a long canvas bag. Joe put it on the ground beside the Buick and examined the contents — three gleaming black tommy guns. He took one out, checked the action, and peered up the muzzle. “Needs greasing,” he muttered to himself.

“Okay?” Paolo asked indifferently.

“Fine. It’s been a pleasure doing business with you.”

“Are you planning a war?” the young Italian asked sarcastically.

“There’s one on already,” Joe said, throwing the bag onto the backseat. “We just collect guns, that’s all.”

Paolo shrugged, stared at Amy once more, and climbed into the sedan. His partner pulled away with a squeal of tyres.

“Mama mia,” Amy murmured.

Kuznetsky watched the black Buick sweep past and, a moment later, the red Pontiac. He pulled out of the side road and concentrated on keeping the second car in sight. As they entered the Washington suburbs he shortened the distance between them, preferring discovery to the loss of his quarry.

The Buick stopped outside the Library of Congress, let the woman out, and continued on its way. The Pontiac didn’t move. Kuznetsky cursed; whoever it was, he was following Amy, not the German agent.

She succeeded in hailing a taxi and the procession resumed, this time heading west. Presumably she was going home. Kuznetsky took a chance and let the distance between himself and the Pontiac widen as they turned up Connecticut Avenue. He was right. Arriving at Amy’s home, near the zoo, he saw the Pontiac park opposite her apartment building, its occupant get out on the sidewalk and light a cigarette. Kuznetsky stopped and watched. The man looked up, looked at his watch, and looked up again. As he did so the light went on in Amy’s apartment. The man threw the cigarette down, causing a cascade of sparks, and got back into his car.

He drove straight toward Georgetown, down Wisconsin, and stopped in front of a seedy-looking building near the Potomac. After exchanging a few words and a laugh with the building security guard, he disappeared inside. Kuznetsky watched until a light went on in a sixth-floor window.

He got out of his car, crossed the street, and slipped into an alley that ran behind the building. At the back he found the fire escape, raised out of harm’s way, but managed without much difficulty to climb a drainpipe to the first floor, then took the fire escape up. At the sixth floor he forced the sash of a window overlooking the fire exit and clambered inside. The building seemed empty; there were no sounds at all and the only visible light came out from under the door at the end of the corridor. A panel on the door announced that the office belonged to James Duncarry, Confidential Investigations.

Kuznetsky listened but could hear nothing. As far as he could tell it wasn’t locked — why should it be? Slipping the Walther from his shoulder holster, he opened the door, stepped inside, and closed it behind him, all in one fluid movement. Duncarry sat behind his desk, pen in hand, a glass of whiskey in easy reach.

“What the hell…”

“Shut up,” Kuznetsky said softly. “Let me make something crystal clear to you. If you make any unnecessary noise or movement, I will kill you. Understand?”

The man tried to look defiant but failed. He nodded.

“Couch,” Kuznetsky said, gesturing with the gun. He moved across the room to where he could see both the man’s side of the desk and the door.

“Well, Mr. Duncarry, tell me why you were following that woman all evening.”

The detective’s face visibly relaxed. “Ah shit,” he said, “is that what all this is about?”

Kuznetsky searched the desk drawers. “I’m waiting,” he said.

“I can’t give you the name of my client. It’s—”

“Would you rather give me the name of your undertaker?”

The voice was so matter-of-fact that Duncarry shivered. “This guy came in last week—”

“Name?”

“Lee. Richard Lee. He wanted me to follow this woman — his girlfriend, I guess, he didn’t tell me — while he was out of town. Find out if she was sleeping around with some other guy, I guess. That’s all.”

“And what happened tonight?”

“She met a guy all right, and they went for a drive. Met some other car at a truck stop on the Annapolis road — he was doing some sort of deal, I guess — and then they drove right back. He didn’t even take her home. That’s all.” He was regaining his confidence. “And what the fuck’s it gotta do with you? She your sister or something? Waving guns around…”

“If you have to drivel, do it quietly,” Kuznetsky said. The evening’s events might not mean anything to Duncarry, but they’d probably mean something to Lee, whoever he was. Therefore Duncarry must not pass the information on. There seemed no way around it. Why was he looking for one? “Where are your case notes?” he asked.

“They’re all on the desk.”

“No file?”

“Not for this sort of job.” The tone was contemptuous.

Kuznetsky put the detective’s notepad in his pocket, glanced quickly through the other papers. Three more sheets followed the notepad. “We’re leaving,” he said.

“What? Where to?” Duncarry asked, the tremor back in his voice.

“You can tell the lady what you told me.”

“Okay, okay.”

They walked down the corridor toward the elevator, and as they approached the fire-escape door Kuznetsky brought the Walther down on the back of the detective’s head. He opened the door and looked down into the alley six stories below. There were no lighted windows, no sign of life at all. He pulled Duncarry out and levered him over the railing and down into darkness. There was a distant thud as the body hit the ground.

Closing the door behind him, he descended the steps. At the bottom he made sure that the detective was dead, then walked back to his car. He lit a cigarette and stared out through the windshield. The world lies heaped up on itself. He started the engine and headed back downtown.

It was past midnight when he reached Amy’s apartment. There was no light showing. It was several minutes before she responded to his soft rapping on the door, and when she did he walked straight in, holding his finger against his mouth to signal the need for silence.

She closed the door and stood with her back against it, her arms crossed over her breasts, a half-questioning, half-accusatory look on her face. One part of Kuznetsky’s mind took note of how desirable she looked, sleepy-eyed, her dark hair falling across her face. The other part took charge.

“It’s all right, I’m not here for your body,” he said with a thin smile.

“What is it then?” she asked, inadvertently acknowledging her suspicions.

“Do you know a Richard Lee?”

She felt as if she’d just taken off in a high-speed elevator, leaving her stomach behind. “What about him?”

“Who is he?”

She shrugged. “My boyfriend, I suppose. Or I’m his mistress. Call it what you like. He knows nothing—”

“I’d call it incompetence,” he said flatly, sitting down on the sofa.

Her eyes flared. “I’ve been working ten years in this city. You’ve been here less than a week. How the hell—”

“You were followed this evening,” he interrupted without raising his voice.

“I thought that was the idea.”

“By someone other than me.”

“What?” She was astonished. “But Richard’s in New Hampshire…”

“He hired a private detective to make sure you weren’t cheating on him.”

“Oh Christ,” she muttered, sitting down and pulling the dressing gown across her legs.

Kuznetsky offered her a cigarette and lit one himself. Would she accept the obvious? For some reason, he wanted to share this decision. She looked at him silently, a bleak expression etched on her face.

“When is he coming back from New Hampshire?” he asked.

“Friday, probably. He calls me up most evenings. To check up on me, I suppose,” she added bitterly. “But the detective may call him there.”

“He won’t.”

She looked at him again, an expression on her face that he couldn’t read. “Faulkner said you’d be thorough.”

“I do what has to be done,” he said calmly. “There’s no pride in it. No shame either.” In his mind’s eye he saw Duncarry’s body plummeting down into the dark.

She didn’t seem to hear. “So Richard will come back, go to collect his report, and find out the detective’s been killed.”

“There’s a chance the police will think it’s suicide. A thin chance.”

“Is that a chance we can take?” she asked, looking him straight in the eye. Her voice was hard, her eyes bewildered.

“No,” he said gently, replying to the eyes rather than the voice. “How long have you and he…?”

“Two years, more…”

“A long time.” He’d known Nadezhda for half that.

“He’s married. We met only once a week. He’s not…”

“Ah.” He lit another cigarette, wishing it was Russian. These American ones were like smoking thin air.

“He might not go to the police,” she said. “I don’t think his pride would let him admit that he’d had a woman followed. And there’s his wife as well — she might find out.”

“Can he risk not going? He won’t know what the police have found in the detective’s office.”

“And Richard is suspicious,” she said, almost as if she were talking to herself. “I’ve been away so often recently. He kept thinking it was another man, but this will make him consider other things. He’s not a fool.” She looked down at her bare feet. “There’s no alternative, is there?” she whispered.

“If he’s eliminated” — the word seemed curiously out of place here — “will the police come to you? How secret is your…?”

“Probably,” she said. She seemed calmer now that the issue was out in the open. “No one really knows, but people at work, they guessed long ago.” She gave him a wintry smile. “This is the point in the movie where someone says it’ll have to look like an accident,” she said, taking another cigarette from his package, her hand visibly shaking. “I’m sorry,” she said between puffs, “but I’ve never killed anyone. I think I should tell you that.”

“I will do it. Do you accept that it has to be done?”

“Yes.” She did. It surprised her how easy it was.

“I’ll need his address. A photograph if you have one. And you’ll have to find out the details of his return trip. He’ll be flying, I suppose?”

“No, he hates flying. He’s taking the train. He was going to call me from Union Station.” She rummaged through a pile of books. “Here’s a photograph. That’s him,” she said, pointing out a tall man in his late thirties standing at the back of the group.

“Who are the others?”

“Colleagues. It was a State Department picnic, last summer. He gave me the picture.” She was businesslike now, her hands steady, her eyes devoid of expression.

He got up, feeling sorry for her, wondering why. She stood by the door, hugging herself tightly while he let himself out.

Rafael Soto threw the remains of his lunch into the water and started to make his way along the dockside to the empty berth. He’d spent the last hour watching the Swedish freighter inch its way through the San Carlos narrows toward Maracaibo; now it was so close that he could make out the captain’s face on the bridge. Gustav Torstensson. Soto’s comrade at the post office had let him see the cable, and Torstensson would soon be learning that he had an extra week for loading the mountains of coffee beans. Doubtless the Swedish crew would be pleased to discover that a fresh consignment of virgins from the interior had just been delivered to the whorehouses on the Ramblas.

Soto took up position some fifty yards from the gangplank and waited for his quarry. He’d been given a description of Sjoberg, but it seemed to fit every seaman he could see. It didn’t matter though. There wasn’t a customs official in Maracaibo who wasn’t willing to help for an extra peso or two.

It was several hours before the crew came ashore, and as they went through the customs shed Soto received the nod he needed. His Swedish comrade was in a group of four men, and he followed them into the town, to a restaurant in the Cathedral Square. After an hour of drinking, the visits to the lavatory began, and Soto introduced himself to Sjoberg as they stood side by side above the stagnant trough. A proper meeting was arranged for the next day.

Kuznetsky watched the passengers from the Boston train stream out into the Penn Station concourse, recognized Richard Lee, and followed him into one of the bars. Richard ordered a whiskey, and from his gestures and the slight slur in his voice, Kuznetsky knew that it wasn’t his first drink of the evening. He ordered one himself but didn’t touch it, smoking a cigarette and taking occasional glances in the bar mirror at his intended victim. He had as yet no idea of how he was going to do it, but that didn’t worry him. It’s for nothing that I seek something more sure than the throw of the dice. That was one thing he hadn’t needed Joszef to teach him.

Richard ordered another, looked at the clock, and swigged it down in one gulp. Good, it was the 9:30 train to Washington. Kuznetsky followed him out, across the concourse and onto the platform. As expected, Richard headed straight for the club car. He ordered another whiskey, took a seat, and picked up a used copy of The Washington Post. It was the previous day’s copy, the one with the short report of Duncarry’s demise. “Detectives investigating the case would neither confirm nor deny foul play.” How conscientious of them, Kuznetsky thought, as he watched Lee turn the pages.

Lee found the piece about Duncarry just as the train eased its way out of the station. His hands gripped the newspaper, crumpling the edges; his eyes were wide with the shock. Well cut off my legs and call me Shorty, Kuznetsky thought.

Richard quickly ordered another drink, and once he returned to his seat seemed to stare blankly out of the window, perhaps at his own reflection. Judging from what the woman had said, Kuznetsky could guess what was going through the man’s mind. The detectives were “looking into the dead investigator’s recent cases.” That must have given him a jolt.

The train emerged from the tunnel under the Hudson into the New Jersey night and gathered speed. Richard still sat motionless, the half-empty glass in his hand, the newspaper spread across his knees. The train rushed through Newark, its whistle shrieking, on to Philadelphia, and then out into flat open country.

Midway between Philadelphia and Baltimore, Kuznetsky went to the bar himself, less for a drink than for a look at Richard’s face. The man’s eyes were closed, but he wasn’t sleeping, for one hand was beating an invisible tattoo on the arm rest. Kuznetsky wondered what Amy had seen in him. He was good-looking enough, but the mouth was weak, and there was something vain about the neatly trimmed mustache. He looked younger than his age, but not in a good way.

The clink of Kuznetsky’s glass on the bar seemed to rouse Richard from his trance. He gulped down the rest of his drink, rose from his seat, and walked down the car toward the toilet. Kuznetsky followed, stood outside the door listening to the sounds coming out and watching the doors for other passengers. He heard the toilet flush, saw the latch begin to move, and threw his full weight against the door, the Walther in his hand.

There was no need for it. The impact had thrown Richard back, hitting his head against something, probably the washbasin. He was out cold.

Kuznetsky examined the window. It was large enough but he couldn’t get it open. It would have to be the door outside. He eased the toilet door open, found the vestibule empty, and dragged Richard out and into an upright position. Just in time. Someone passed by on his way to the club car, taking only a cursory glance at the two men standing in apparent conversation by the door.

Kuznetsky let Richard slide to the floor and jerked open the outside door. The force of the train’s passage blew it back, but he managed to push the folding steps out and down, jamming it open, and then, with both arms and a leg, to scoop Richard out. For a few moments Richard’s feet were trapped in the steps, his head bouncing on the rushing tracks, but then the body was gone, sucked into darkness. Kuznetsky pulled back the stairs, let the wind close the door, and stood there, his pulse racing, his mind a jumble of deaths.

Eight

The church emptied its flock as Joe and Amy drove into Scottsboro, the men in their best string ties, the women in their pastel frocks. If the coattails and the hem lines had been longer it could have been a scene from Gone With the Wind. There were even a few horse-drawn buggies mingling with the farm pickups and rusty Cadillacs.

Joe pulled the car up outside the realtor’s house, climbed out, and walked up to the door. An elderly black woman ushered him inside. Amy examined her face in the rearview mirror; she looked as tired as she felt. This time the drive had seemed longer and felt different; this time she was leaving Washington, her family, the few friends she had forever. Soon she would be leaving America, her adopted home for more than twenty years. She would miss her uncle. James too, if he survived.

She wondered if Kuznetsky — she must remember to call him Smith — if he had such feelings. She couldn’t make him out. He seemed a reflection of the world rather than one of its inhabitants, like a force of nature — no, like a force of the opposite, of human order…

She had once read a novel, an awful novel called Orphans of the Storm, and, being a fourteen-year-old orphan at the time, had romantically identified herself with its title. But Kuznetsky really did seem to fit the words, he seemed to carry the storm within him, to live in it, to deal it out in controlled bursts. And that was why, she realized, she felt no fear of him. There was nothing irrational in his actions, nothing at all. He would succeed in this operation or die trying, would kill or die without hesitation.

She could see Joe through the window talking to the realtor. Why was he taking so long? He’d hardly spoken during the long journey and seemed to have lost his cockiness. She guessed that he’d suddenly realized that it wasn’t a game, that the master plan might go wrong, that the Feds he so despised might strap him into an electric chair. But he would come through, she was sure. His pride wouldn’t let him back out. It was a pity that such determination should be wasted on such a twisted morality.

And you? she asked the mirror. Where are you going? What would the Soviet Union be like? Once she had longed to see Moscow, Leningrad, the other side, her side, but now she felt almost indifferent. The thought of a new life seemed unreal, anticlimatic, not so much a beginning as an end.

Joe came out of the house, keys in hand, and climbed back behind the wheel.

“What took you so long?” she asked.

“He wouldn’t stop talking. Nothing important.”

An hour later they reached the lodge, and while he unloaded the supplies they’d brought from Washington, she lit the wood stove and made coffee. But by the time it was ready she found him fast asleep on one of the bunks. She drank her own cup, smoked a cigarette, and stared at the three shiny tommy guns leaning against a wall. She felt more tired than sleepy, and after concealing the guns under a bunk, went outside.

It wasn’t so hot under the trees, and she found herself walking farther and farther along the side of the ridge, taking a sensual pleasure in the play of colors, the panoramic views, and the feel of the forest floor. After half a mile or so she spotted a clear green pool in a hollow below and walked down to it through the pines. Looking at the water made her feel twice as sticky. “Why not?” she murmured to herself, looking around to make sure that the silent pines were the only witnesses. She stripped off her clothes, piled them on a rock, and waded into the water. It was only a few feet deep at the pool’s center, and for several minutes she floated on her back, wallowing in the delicious coolness.

Lying on the rock to dry herself, she felt a sexual tremble run through her body. She touched herself, at first tentatively, then with a pleasure she had not known for years. His face was clear in her mind, the ivory light shining in through the porthole, the feeling of not knowing where the one ended and the other began.

She opened her eyes. Physically satisfied, she had never felt so alone. The trees towered over her, both graceful and threatening. She sat up, feeling suddenly cold, tears gathering in the corners of her eyes.

Joe was awake when she got back to the lodge, seeming more like his normal self. Perhaps he’d just been tired.

“Where are the guns?” he asked. “Found a swimming pool, I see,” he added, noticing her wet hair.

“Under the bed in the middle room, and yes,” she said, brushing past him. “I’m going to try and sleep now.”

“If you hear gunfire, it’ll be me testing them,” he called after her.

She took the room farthest from his and lay down, feeling tired and confused. The tiredness triumphed, and when he woke her the light had gone and the lodge was full of the smell of cooking. “Just some canned goods,” he said as she entered the kitchen. “I didn’t find anything to shoot.”

“The guns are okay?”

“Yep.”

They ate in silence, and washed down the meal with strong coffee. “Do you play checkers?” he asked. She nodded and got up to wash the dishes while he set up the board. They played several games, and he won all but the last. She was convinced he’d lost it on purpose, a thought that almost brought back the tears. What was the matter with her? She suddenly had a picture of jailers playing such a game with the man in the condemned cell, the man feeling sorry for the jailers. It was too much. She had to be alone, physically alone.

He watched her leave the room and felt slightly worried. The whole business was obviously getting to her. He’d hated the idea of working with a woman from the beginning, but had reluctantly conceded to himself that in her case he’d been wrong. She knew what she was doing, and until now she’d shown no trace of nerves at all. Perhaps she needed some comforting, physical comforting. She wasn’t his type — he preferred women with more flesh on them — but…

He knocked softly on her door, put his head around it. “Don’t suppose you want some company?” he asked softly.

“No,” she replied coldly. “Thank you,” she added more gently, “but no.”

“Just thought I’d ask,” he said cheerfully. “Sleep well.”

He lit a cigarette and went outside. Her part was almost over in any case. He and the Germans would do the rest — give all those fucking Yankee liberals a jolt they’d never forget. Two more days.

And then, as I stand up, the stars and the Great Bear glimmer up there like bars above a silent cell. The poem was beginning to haunt him, to follow him around like a running commentary on his life. In the goods station yard I flattened myself against the foot of the tree like a slice of silence… Well, that had been a Hungarian goods station yard, not this one. There were no trees in this one, no gray weeds… lustrous, dew-laden coal lumps.

Kuznetsky had checked into the hotel in Bridgeport late that evening and been given, without knowing it, the same room Joe and Amy had used for their earlier vigil. He’d walked down to the station, awakened the sleeping clerk to inquire about the next day’s trains, and familiarized himself with the layout of the yard. A tree would have been useful, but the decrepit boxcar in the siding adjoining the main line would serve the same purpose. Everything seemed as Amy had reported it.

Now, back in his room, he sat by the window, staring across at the darkened yard, wishing he had a Russian cigarette. He thought he could detect the first hint of moonlight; five days hence it would be earlier, making this end of the operation harder, but the other end easier. The cat can’t catch mice inside and outside at the same time. True. And somewhat facile in this context. It was time he got some sleep.

Next morning he took his car in for a final checkup, arranged to collect it that evening, and walked down to the station. Waiting for his train, he again checked the layout of the yard, measuring distances in his mind, calculating the safest angle of approach.

The train was on time, a good omen, and almost empty. A group of boys in uniform, presumably on their last leave before going overseas, were good-naturedly pestering a solitary young woman. She seemed to be enjoying the attention. Kuznetsky took a window seat and set out to memorize the route. For half an hour they chugged down the valley, mountains to the right, the river occasionally visible several miles away to the left. The train stopped at every country junction, though no one seemed to get on or off. The conductor inspected his ticket, tried in vain to start up a conversation about some circus fire in Connecticut, and took out his irritation on one of the young soldiers who’d had the temerity to soil the upholstery with a dirty boot.

After stopping in Scottsboro, the train climbed away from the main valley and up into the hills. It stopped in Larkinsville but not at Lim Rock, which looked like a ghost town. A few minutes later it passed the point where the old mining spur diverged, and Kuznetsky had a brief glimpse of the narrow Coon Creek Valley stretching north toward a high ridge.

Thirty-five minutes later the train pulled into Huntsville. Kuznetsky got off, had some lunch, and spent several hours sitting on a park bench with nothing but his thoughts. He remembered how, when he’d first lived with Russians, their slowness, their ability to sit doing nothing for hours, had infuriated him, partly because they could, partly because he couldn’t. Since arriving back in America he’d had the opposite sensation: everyone seemed so impatient, so determined to be doing things, so incapable of just being. It was sad. Amusing as well.

He walked back toward the station and was about to cross the road outside when a familiar black Buick cruised past. He and Amy exchanged indifferent glances.

Amy felt relief at seeing Kuznetsky. She had no doubts about his efficiency, but it was still good to be certain that he was around. That morning she’d suddenly imagined his being killed in some ridiculous accident and Joe coming back to the lodge with the Germans. What would she do then?

She checked in the mirror to see that the camper Joe was driving was still following her as she took the Scottsboro road. Everything was going so smoothly, it was almost too good to be true. She and Joe had spent the day driving to and from Birmingham, where they had picked up the camper, complete with fishing rods, hunting rifles, and enough food for a businessmen’s sporting holiday. Unknown to Joe, Amy had also been checking out their eventual escape route, making sure that there would be no unexpected impediments to their flight. According to the radio, some bridges along the route had collapsed in the summer storms, but the road to Birmingham was clear.

They arrived back at the lodge as the last rays of the sun cleared the ridge, and Joe started preparing supper. He obviously enjoyed cooking, if only from cans. Amy pulled some water up from the well and washed herself. In thirty-six hours the Germans would be here.

“Where are you headed when it’s over?” Joe asked.

“Back to Washington.”

“It’ll be a bit tame after this, won’t it?”

“Joe, what are you in this for?” She hadn’t meant to ask, hadn’t wanted to know, but the question came out just the same.

He stirred the corned-beef hash thoughtfully. “Funny you should ask that,” he said finally. “Don’t get me wrong — I believe in the German cause, but it doesn’t take a genius to realize that they’ve lost this war. Maybe what we’re doing will change things, but to be honest, I doubt it. It’s a mixture, I guess. Idealism, adventure, getting my own back…”

“Own what?”

“My family used to own a farm up the valley, near Louden. It wasn’t big, but it was beautiful. My folks just lived their life, hell, my pa was even good to the niggers, lot of good it did him. Then one day, just like that, man from Washington knocked on the door. It was 1935. Told us that in a coupla years time our land would be at the bottom of a lake. Nothing we could do about it. Pa just gave up, died rather than see the land drowned. And Ma died because she couldn’t live without him. Government killed them both, men in Washington who didn’t give a damn about people.”

Amy couldn’t think of anything to say.

“And you?” he asked.

“I’m a German.”

“Yeah, but there’s a lot of Germans fighting for the U.S. of A.”

“Not real Germans.”

“Maybe.”

“And my father died in the first war.”

“Where?”

“Tannenberg.”

“It must be worse dying in a battle that your side’s won.”

“I doubt if he knew.”

“No, I meant for the relatives. Seems more of a waste somehow. Crazy, I know. Tannenberg was a fascinating battle…” He went on to discuss the merits of Ludendorff’s strategy, stirring the hash, completely oblivious to the fact that Amy might find the topic distressing.

She wasn’t even listening. He died rather than see the land drowned. She couldn’t understand a person feeling like that. She’d lived in big cities all her life. She looked at Joe, suddenly seeing him as a farm boy in city clothes. They shared a need for revenge if nothing else.

After supper they played checkers again, but this time she didn’t win a single game and there was no tap on her bedroom door. She lay in bed and tried to consciously relive the past, those dreadful nights in Berlin that now seemed so long ago. But the anger that had lain so long so close to the surface had either burrowed deeper or been eroded by time; she wasn’t sure which. Images of Effi kept interrupting her thoughts, images of her as a seven-year-old, happy, laughing, running through the Tiergarten with her socks around her ankles and one pigtail half-unraveled.

Forty miles up the valley, on the stroke of midnight, Kuznetsky called the number in Washington.

“Yes?” the voice asked.

“American Rose.”

“Melville says that train will do fine.”

He put back the receiver, walked along the corridor to tell the night clerk that he wanted an early call. Tomorrow — no, today — he would kill Joe Markham. Only what will be is a flower, what is crumbles into fragments.

By midmorning Joe was driving the Buick south toward Atlanta. He knew the road well, having spent two vacations visiting the old battlefields where Johnston had fought his brilliant rearguard campaign against the butcher Sherman. Kennesaw Mountain, Marietta, Peach Tree Creek — rolls of glory reflected in the road signs. Confederate flags still fluttered on flagstaffs in the gardens of suburban Atlanta.

He didn’t feel the slightest bit nervous or tense, which surprised him. This was by far the most dangerous part of the operation; it needed only one pair of unwelcome eyes to spot the surfacing U-boat and the FBI would be pouring into Georgia like Sherman’s army. But Rosa had said the spot was well-chosen, and she hadn’t been wrong yet. She was quite amazing, though about as human as a block of ice. He wondered how the man in New York had found her. Or had she found him? Not that it mattered.

Beyond Atlanta he followed Sherman’s route to the sea. He imagined the smouldering barns, the blazing fields, the women raped in the plantation mansions while the torches were laid. But he had to admit that militarily it had been a brilliant move. If Lee had shown such ruthlessness, things would have been different. Might have been, anyway.

The Buick purred onward. He loved driving, was proud of his skill behind the wheel. In his late teens he’d entered dirt-road car races as far away as Memphis and won quite a few of them. Trouble was, there were too many kids who didn’t care whether they lived or died, and though you could outlive them, they were hard to beat. He’d never been able to understand kids like that, kids who just ignored the odds.

Savannah lifted his spirits with its beautiful buildings. It was how a city should look. He stopped by the old harbour, checked his watch and odometer. Just over four hundred miles in under nine hours, and Rosa had been worried he’d be late! He had a doughnut and coffee in an empty diner and took to the road again. Another sixty miles.

At Richmond Hill he took out the map she’d marked and perched it on the dashboard. Turning off the main highway, he followed the route toward the coast, crossing the long trestle bridge that connected the mainland to Ossabaw Island. There was hardly anything on the road, and the island’s only town boasted few vehicles or people. The final stretch of road to the sea was hardly a road at all. The coastline was an unspoiled wilderness, heavily vegetated low cliffs and a rocky beach pummeled by the Atlantic waves.

He parked the Buick under the trees and took the signal lamp out of the trunk. The sun had almost set; there were four hours to wait. He clambered down the cliff and settled himself in a comfortable niche between two large rocks. Remembering the extra doughnut in his pocket, he devoured it with relish, the jelly oozing out over his fingers. Still feeling stiff after the day’s driving, he lifted himself out of the niche and went to wash his hands in a tidal pool. Leaning forward to splash his face, he caught a momentary glimpse of a shadow crossing the sky before the bullet exploded through his brain, knocking his body forward into its reflection.

Kuznetsky dragged Joe’s body out of the pool, across the rocks and up the bluff. Markham wasn’t heavy but it was still hard work. At the top he stopped to get his breath back, then pulled the body through the trees, past Markham’s car, and well into the woods. Then he returned for the car and brought it forward to the same spot. He got into the backseat and fired a single shot through the windshield above the steering wheel, hoisted Markham’s body into the front seat with the head pushed down on the wheel, resisting the temptation to close the staring eyes. After checking the car’s visibility from twenty yards away, he lightly camouflaged the chrome bumper with vegetation. He looked again and was satisfied. Anyone looking for it would find it, but it was unlikely to be found by accident.

It was quite dark now, and he had some difficulty in picking out the spot where he’d concealed his own car. He moved it out of the trees and onto the flattened area where the road reached the cliff. Judging by the empty bottles littering its perimeter, it was used as a picnic area.

He next eased the crate out of the backseat and carried it across to Markham’s car. There he jimmied it open and, using his weight, cracked one of the sides in half. It looked convincing enough — provided that Matson’s description of the uranium crates was accurate.

Clambering back down to the beach, he took up position in the niche Markham had found. It was a quarter past eight — three and a half hours still to go. He lit a Lucky Strike, leaned back against the rock, and inhaled deeply. He’d killed three men in America, two he’d never even spoken to, but his conscience remained untroubled. He supposed that most people would consider Duncarry and Lee innocent victims, but as far as he was concerned, innocence had vanished with mass newspapers and the radio. No one could claim innocence anymore. Except children and animals perhaps. Everyone else had been free to choose sides, consciously or not.

The evening star was sinking toward the ocean. He guessed it would be dawn in the Russian forest, wondered if Nadezhda was still faithful to him. The thought didn’t disturb him; if she wasn’t, it wouldn’t change anything.

He sat up suddenly, listening to the sound of an approaching car, then ran nimbly across the rocks to the base of the low cliff, watching the light from the car’s headlamps illuminating the air above the rim, and flattened himself against an outcrop.

He heard a door open, the last indistinct words of a conversation. Footsteps walking toward the cliff’s edge, a silhouetted figure above him appearing and disappearing.

“Who the fuck is it?” It was a young voice, a boy of fifteen, sixteen.

“No one local. It’s got D.C. plates.” A young girl, a Georgia peach of an accent.

“Shit.”

“C’mon, Jeff, there’s no sense in gettin’ fired up. Let’s go somewhere else.”

“Like where?”

A giggle. “Well, we can’t do it here, can we?”

“I’ll flatten the bastard. This is our place.”

“There might be more than one of them.”

“Umm.”

“C’mon, I’ve got to be home by ten.”

“Okay, okay.”

The footsteps receded, car doors slammed, a revving motor. The headlamps drew a circle of light as the car turned and headed back inland. Kuznetsky put his gun in the shoulder holster. What had he been thinking about children and animals? If they’d found the other car… He hoped they were the only young couple who thought they owned this trysting place.

But there were no other interruptions as the hour hand on his watch crept slowly forward. At 11:30 he started flashing the signal lamp at five-minute intervals, straining his eyes for a sight of the submarine. Several times he thought he glimpsed a periscope slightly to the north, but it must have been something else for, at precisely a quarter to midnight and directly ahead, U-107 broke surface with disconcerting abruptness. He flashed the light again, and thought he could glimpse figures climbing down from the conning tower onto the hull.

Breitner and Russman shook hands with the captain and launched the inflatable raft. Paul eased himself in and held it fast for Breitner to follow. Conscious of the U-boat descending behind them, they paddled for the shore, a dark wall that gradually resolved itself into a forested line of cliffs. The light blinked again and they shifted direction toward it.

“There’s not many who’re going to be able to say that they took part in the Wehrmacht’s invasion of America,” Gerd whispered.

“Or the strategic withdrawal.”

“Optimist.”

When they were nearly there they could see the man waiting on the rocks. He waded out into the surf to help them beach the dinghy and indicated that they should follow him. He’d dug a hole for their boat and all three shoveled the sand back in on top of it.

“The clothes will do,” he said after looking them over. “I’m Jack Smith. Call me Jack,” Kuznetsky said in English.

“Gerd Breitner, and this is Paul Russman,” Gerd said, holding out his hand. The stranger’s grip was brief but strong.

“My German’s not very good,” Kuznetsky said, “but we speak English only from this moment in any case.”

“Understood.”

Kuznetsky led them up the cliff to the car. Gerd took the seat beside him, Paul the back. As they drove inland Paul watched the strange shapes of the foreign trees silhouetted against the sky. Here they were, he thought, casually driving through the American night, two officers in an army that was losing battles almost everywhere else. The whole business was absurd. Daring, perhaps, but if the Führer and his friends hadn’t yet learned that daring had its limits, then they were even madder than he’d thought.

Paul looked at the back of the stranger’s head. Who the hell was he? An Abwehr agent obviously, but he wasn’t a German. What reasons could any non-German have for supporting the Nazi cause? There were enough Germans with doubts. He didn’t suppose it mattered — the man seemed to know what he was doing. There was an air of authority about him that was almost chilling. And most un-American. Paul closed his eyes and listened to the purr of the car.

He was awakened by a prod from Gerd. They had stopped outside a hotel. Kuznetsky handed him a collection of documents: driver’s license, military deferment, there were about ten of them. “Memorize them,” he said.

“Where are we?” Paul asked.

“Savannah,” Gerd replied.

“We’re staying the night here,” Kuznetsky said.

He led them into the hotel, where rooms had already been booked. A sleepy clerk showed them up, explaining that he got a tip for carrying the luggage even if there wasn’t any. “It’s the principle,” he said. Kuznetsky gave him one, pointed the two Germans into one room and disappeared into the other.

They didn’t bother to undress. “Very strange,” Paul murmured, looking down from the window at the empty street.

“Ja. Yeah.”

“Very good.” Paul indicated the next room. “He’s not what I expected. He’s no amateur.” He lay back on the bed. “I wonder how he’s avoided the Army.”

“Too old,” Gerd answered. “The Americans have still got some young men to spare.”

“It feels strange wearing these clothes. Do you know how long it is since we were out of uniform?”

“Too long, Paul. Go to sleep.”

It was a blazing hot morning, the heat of Africa wrapped in a clammy Georgian blanket. Paul was glad to see that their driver was sweating as profusely as he was, and that he’d had the sense to place a case of beer on the backseat.

Smith didn’t say much though. They learned that he’d had military experience in South America and Spain, but beyond such bare facts he offered nothing. He refused to discuss the operation until the fourth member of the unit — a strange name for it, Paul thought — was present.

“We have to know everything each other knows,” Kuznetsky said.

They asked him about the fourth member. He was a she. A German woman who’d lived twenty years in America. It was at this moment that Paul wondered if it were possible, only to dismiss the idea as ridiculous. She would never fight for Hitler’s Germany. “How old is she?” he asked.

“About thirty-five.”

That fit. But it couldn’t be. “What’s her name?” he asked.

“Rosa, as far as we’re concerned.”

Rosa. She’d had a doll called Rosa. “Is she attractive?”

“I suppose so. Why do you ask?”

There seemed no reason not to explain. “I knew a German girl who lived in America. She’d be about that age now. Just curiosity. It couldn’t be the same woman.”

“Why not?”

Was he imagining it, or was there an edge to Smith’s voice? “She had no reason to help Germany, rather the opposite.”

“What did she look like?”

“Slim, dark-haired, a lovely face. Full of life.” It was funny, he could see her so clearly, even after all these years. “Amy,” he murmured.

Kuznetsky could hardly believe his ears. His mind raced. How could this have happened, how could something so vital have been ignored? Question followed question. When had they known each other? How much did he know about her — was her cover blown? The German might be talking about a chance meeting at a party when they’d both been in America. He might be talking about a love affair lasting months. He knew she had “no reason to help Germany.” What did he know? Christ, what a mess.

What could he do? There was no way of warning her — they’d just come face to face at the lodge. He’d have to play it off the cuff. But could he and she do it on their own? He unconsciously tightened his grip on the steering wheel.

“She is slim and dark-haired,” he said, measuring his words. “I wouldn’t say she was — what did you say? — full of life. But people change. It could be the same woman. But there are a lot of Germans in this country who support Germany without loving the Führer. How well did you know her?”

“Oh, I don’t know. We knew each for only a few days. A long time ago. 1933.”

“Not a memorable year,” the other German said ironically.

Kuznetsky breathed an inner sigh of relief. That was before her recruitment; the German couldn’t know anything specific. But… if there was one complication they hadn’t needed, it was something like this. He wondered how she’d react. Coldly, he supposed. The death of a current lover hadn’t seemed to upset her that much, and eleven years was enough to kill off any emotion, certainly anything generated by a few days’ romance. If that’s what it had been. And what else could it have been? He pulled the car off the highway and drew up outside a diner.

“Lunch,” he said calmly.

Nine

Amy spent the morning trying to read, and constantly found her mind wandering off in other directions. The tension in her body seemed to grow by the minute, and she doubted if the endless cups of coffee were helping. She felt like a real drink, but Joe had decided against bringing any.

She crushed out her cigarette, retrieved one of the tommy guns from their hiding place, and walked west along the lee side of the ridge. Under the trees it was cool, and even on the stretches of open ground the breeze made the heat bearable, even pleasant. She passed above the pool feeling no communion with the woman who had lain there two days before. Her body today felt like an alien attachment, just a means of transport for her mind.

After she’d walked a mile from the road, she unslung the gun from her shoulder, took aim at a line of hickory trees, and fired a short burst. The gun was a good one; the action was smooth, the recoil minimal, and it was not as loud as she’d expected. Her marksmanship was good too; she’d always been an excellent shot. Three of the trees had been hit, and at an even height. If there turned out to be a need for her to use the gun, there’d be no problem.

She walked back to the cabin slowly, feeling more relaxed than she had. A few more hours and they’d be here. Two German officers, two of her fellow countrymen. She hoped they’d be SS, real Nazis.

The afternoon dragged. She lit the stove, mixed a stew from an assortment of cans, and left it to simmer. Then she sat by the window, staring at the forested ridges receding into the haze. This is it, she told herself, the moment of commitment. From today there would be no turning back, no more choices. The thought comforted her. No more choices. And no more deception. The debt would be paid in full.

The light had begun to fade when she heard the approaching car. She walked out front, shielding her eyes from the glare of the setting sun. Her first concern was the driver, and she felt immediate relief on seeing Kuznetsky’s profile behind the wheel. The German in the front got out, then the one in the back, and her heart did a somersault. Eighty million Germans to choose from and they’d sent him.

Her heart thumped, her mind whirled. She had just a few seconds to change her story — he would never believe she was a simple German patriot. With an enormous effort, she propelled her legs forward out of the shadow to greet them.

“Hello, Paul,” she said quietly.

“It is you,” he said. “It’s been a long time.”

“Eleven years,” she said automatically, suddenly conscious of the expression on Kuznetsky’s face. He knew, was hanging back, waiting for her cue. Oh God. “Let’s get inside,” she said cheerfully, turning back toward the door. “There’s some food almost ready,” she called back, disappearing into the kitchen and praying that he wouldn’t follow. He didn’t. She heard Kuznetsky showing them their rooms.

The shock was wearing off slowly, ever so slowly. After all, the number of Germans of his age with the necessary experience of America was bound to be limited — it shouldn’t have been such a surprise. And she’d been anti-American even when she knew him. That would have to do: patriotism and anti-Americanism outweighing her hatred of the Nazis. It was thin, but what reason would he have to doubt it? She was here. Eleven years was a long time; she could have changed. She had changed, if not in that direction.

What would Kuznetsky be thinking? First Richard, now this. Hearing footsteps, she turned, thinking it was him, but it was the other German. “Gerd Breitner,” he said, offering his hand. “We weren’t introduced.” They shook hands, and he ambled over to inspect the stew on the stove. “Smells good,” he said. “Anything would smell good after four weeks in a U-boat. Rather a surprise, yes?” he added.

She knew what he meant. “Yes, it is.”

He looked at her with a steady, not unfriendly gaze. “For a moment I thought Paul had seen a ghost.”

She returned his gaze. “We were close once. Things got in the way. I never thought I’d see him again, and I suppose he thought the same. But,” she continued, turning away to stir the pot, “it won’t make any difference to the operation. It was all a long time ago.”

“Eleven years,” he muttered.

The four of them ate at the trestle table. The two Germans talked incessantly to each other, Kuznetsky said nothing, and Amy concentrated on feeding a nonexistent appetite. As soon as they were finished she cleared the dishes away and disappeared into the kitchen, refusing any assistance.

She returned to find Kuznetsky placing a large map across the table. He went through the plan, first running through the intended chain of events, then the emergency procedures devised to cover conceivable failures. He showed the Germans the photographs of the train and Coon Creek Valley, produced a diagram he’d drawn of the attack itself. Tomorrow they would see the valley for themselves.

“There can be no survivors,” he said impassively. “The train will be missed at Huntsville, that’s one hour. They won’t be able to contact Scottsboro or Bridgeport, that’s another. If they start looking immediately, they could find it in one more. That’s three hours. By that time we won’t be a third of the way to the coast, and if anyone’s alive to identify us or the vehicles, we’ll never reach it.” He looked at the two Germans.

“Agreed,” Gerd said grimly.

Paul said nothing, but gave an infinitesimal nod.

“Delivery,” Kuznetsky continued. “Rosa — Amy — and I will take the crates in the camper. A woman will arouse less suspicion, and as an American I’m the best qualified to deal with any unforeseen trouble. You two will take the car. We’ll take different routes” — he indicated them on the map — “and meet at Ossabaw Island the following evening.”

“So we’re just here for the shooting,” Gerd said.

“You’re here as soldiers. Any suggestions?”

“No, it seems tight enough.”

“Are you coming back with us?” Paul asked, not looking at Amy. “We weren’t told, and neither was the U-boat captain.”

“Not unless something goes wrong. We plan to be back here next morning, continuing our vacation,” Kuznetsky said, treating them to a rare smile.

Paul turned to find Amy looking at him. He held her gaze for a second. She broke the contact, saying she’d make some more coffee. He watched her carry the bucket out to the well, thought of following and decided not to. Since seeing her, since hearing in the car that it might be her, he’d been experiencing an apparently inexhaustible variety of emotions. She was as beautiful as ever, he thought, but harder, much harder, at least on the surface. Yet she didn’t want to look him in the eye.

He wanted to tell her about the letters, but this obviously wasn’t the time. There probably never would be a good time. The past was better left as it was. They’d both changed, and though he knew it was unjustified, he couldn’t help feeling a deep resentment. He wished she’d been anyone else, leaving his memories intact, unsullied.

Amy and Kuznetsky sat on the only chairs; Gerd had found the checkerboard and played with Paul, the two of them sitting against the wall with the board between them on the floor. Two oil lamps were burning but the light was still dim, and the room seemed full of moving shadows.

Amy was trying her novel again, but every now and then she glanced across at Paul, who was sitting, purposely she guessed, with his face turned away from her. He seemed so unchanged in some ways: there was still the physical reticence complementing the withdrawn eyes, the feeling that he was watching the world rather than taking part in it. There’d been flashes of the old sense of humor, the thread of irony that seemed to run through most of his utterances. His companion’s too. The boy was still there in the man.

But there’d been one change, one that was both subtle and all-embracing. Each of the characteristics seemed to have been exaggerated: the eyes were more withdrawn, the humor more bitterly manic, as if the parts of his being were straining at each other, as if the boy and the man were finding it harder to get along with each other.

His partner was quieter, more watchful. He seemed as diffident as Paul, but she knew he was taking in everything. Gerd had noticed her glances at Paul. Physically he was heavier set, but in some manner he reminded her of a big cat; there was the same blend of self-confidence and constant wariness. And she could almost feel the protective mantle he threw around Paul. In fact the relationship between them seemed almost symbiotic. She felt a twinge of jealousy, then laughed at herself for being ridiculous.

Kuznetsky was doing nothing, just sitting there smoking cigarettes and staring into space. “I’m going to bed,” she announced, getting up. “Sleep well,” Gerd said. Kuznetsky and Paul said nothing.

“Where’ve you seen combat?” Kuznetsky asked after she was gone.

“Almost everywhere,” Paul said, moving one of the black pieces.

“France, the East, Africa,” Gerd answered.

“Where in the East? I’ve taken a particular interest in the Russian campaign.”

“So have we,” Paul muttered.

“The march to Moscow. Almost to Moscow. Kharkov, Kursk, Vitebsk.”

“Which division?”

“Seventh Panzer.”

“The Ghost Division.”

Paul looked up. “Yes,” he said ironically. “Nothing but ghosts now.”

Extraordinary, Kuznetsky thought. The four people in this lodge, like intertwining threads of the twentieth century. First her and the German, now this. They’d fought in the very division his Siberians had faced on the northern outskirts of Moscow in the last days of 1941. Wonderful, terrible days, when every mile recovered had contained a thousand frozen German corpses, when everyone knew that Hitler had been halted in his tracks. It had felt like spring, a blood-soaked frozen spring. Each morning the drop in the temperature had been announced, and his Siberian troops had cheered, knowing that each degree colder would kill another division of the Nazis.

And yet the Germans had fought on, most of them still clothed in denim, many of them half-crippled with frostbite. It had been pathetic, wonderful, beyond reason, beyond humanity. And these two had been through it. He’d known before they answered. It showed in their faces, seeped out through their humor. I have heard the iron weep. In those days there’d been nothing else to hear.

“Lovely day,” Gerd said, stopping by the window to examine the view. Outside, he could see Smith giving the vehicles a final check.

“It’ll get a lot hotter,” Amy said. She turned to Paul, the list in her hand. “Right, what’s your name?”

“Paul Jablonsky.”

“Date of birth?”

“August 5, 1908. Milwaukee, Wisconsin.”

“Army record?”

“One Hundred and Thirty-fourth Division. Purple Heart and medical discharge after Battle of Kasserine.”

“Present employer?”

“General Motors. War production consultant.”

“That’ll do.”

“Am I married?”

“No.”

“I wonder why.”

“You never found the girl of your dreams, perhaps.”

“Or found her and lost her.”

Kuznetsky came in at an opportune moment. “Everything’s ready.”

He drove, Paul beside him, Gerd and Amy in the back. There was nothing on the road down the mountain; between Lim Rock and the valley they passed only two trucks. Paul had forgotten how vast America was, remembered Schellenberg’s remark about empty territory, which no longer seemed quite so absurd.

They drove up the narrow, claustrophobic valley, stopping just short of the trestle bridge. “It’s going to be very dark,” said Paul to no one in particular.

“Our eyes will get accustomed,” Gerd said.

“Yeah.” Paul walked across to the area assigned to him, imagined the train pulling to a halt, the doors opening… Another graveyard. The place reminded him of one of those narrow valleys in the Ukraine — where had it been…?

“Outside Rzhavets,” Gerd said, reading his mind.

“The day I drove the T-34,” Paul said, smiling.

“The day you tried to drive a T-34,” Gerd corrected him.

Paul didn’t respond. He was looking at Amy, sitting on her haunches by the side of the stream, noting the vivid contrast between the raven hair and the cream blouse.

“Memories,” Gerd murmured.

Paul wasn’t sure whether he was referring to the T-34 or her. “This is going to work,” he said thoughtfully.

Gerd grunted. “Seems almost too easy. Someone in Washington’s going to suffer,” he added. “And deserves to.”

“We’ve still got to get home, and the problems won’t end when we reach the U-boat. If we reach it. They’ll be scouring the Atlantic for weeks.”

“Big ocean.”

“The approaches to the ports aren’t so big.”

“Well, one step at a time.”

They walked back to the car, where Kuznetsky was already waiting. Amy followed, carrying a posy of small white flowers in her hand. Flowers from a graveyard, Paul thought with a shudder.

At the end of the lodge road the two Germans got out, and Smith wished them good luck with one of his rare smiles and drove himself and Amy off toward Scottsboro. Paul and Gerd ambled along the track, the former engrossed in his own thoughts, the latter wondering how to broach the subject. Straightforwardly, he decided.

“How does it feel to see her again?”

Paul grunted. “How indeed?”

“Why did you never mention her? You’ve talked enough about other women.”

“Good question.” He kicked a stone into the undergrowth. “The one I’ve been asking myself, in a way. What made her so special? Gerd, this sounds crazy, but maybe first love really doesn’t die. Or maybe it was just the time. It was 1933, and I was coming back to Germany, a different Germany, and my father was dying — it felt like a moment between two lives. We met on the ship, had three wonderful days together, and then never saw each other again…”

“Why not?”

“Oh, a series of accidents really. It doesn’t matter. What I’m trying to say is that we, the two of us, those few days, they seemed — not at the time but afterward — as if they’d existed outside normal time, as if they had nothing to do with this world. Again, it sounds crazy, but it was like a moment of innocence — of adult innocence — and everything since has seemed corrupt in comparison…”

“Not only in comparison.”

“True. And she and I were outside all that.”

“But no longer. I’m sorry, my friend.”

“So am I. Maybe she is too.”

“And you never saw each other again,” Kuznetsky repeated. “Regrets?”

“At the time.”

“Now?”

“No.” She didn’t want to talk about it with him, because all he cared about was whether it would affect the operation. And it wouldn’t. The Germans would be left for the FBI to pick up as planned, and that was that. Her feelings were irrelevant. But… it was cruel. She felt as if she was being tested, tempted almost, as if some malicious fate had decided to find the one person she’d least like to sacrifice…

They drove through Scottsboro. She looked at the bunch of white flowers on the dashboard, already beginning to wither in the heat. “Are you married?” she asked Kuznetsky.

“In a way,” he said. “What’s the old word? ‘Betrothed.’” He smiled at some unspoken thought, looking for a moment almost vulnerable. What a life he must have led, she thought. Or was she just romanticizing?

“Tell me about the Soviet Union.”

He was silent for a while. “It’s a place where the present hardly exists,” he said finally. “The past and the future are both very real, but the present — you have to steal it piece by piece.”

She hadn’t expected this. “Where do you live, before the war I mean?”

“In a lot of ways we hardly noticed the war. There was no one moment when peace turned into war. There’s been no real peace since Kirov was shot, ten years ago. I’ve lived all over, wherever my work was.”

“I don’t think you can have been a propagandist.”

He smiled. “You don’t hear people saying how wonderful breathing is. It depends on what inspires you. We have crammed two hundred years of development into twenty, and most of it will have to be done all over again when the war ends. All the children have schools, there are no famines, everyone has work and purpose, sometimes too much work. You should go to Siberia. There the past is weakest, the future strongest. And it’s beautiful, beautiful beyond imagining.”

“Moscow?”

“Just another city.”

Another country boy. But she felt like a child with this man. He couldn’t be more than ten years older than she, but it was like what she’d always imagined talking with a father would be like. Stern, distant, wise, sure of himself, above all, sure of himself. The way adults were supposed to be, the way so few were.

They were coming into Bridgeport. He stopped a block down from the hotel and got out. “Take care driving back,” he said as she slipped across behind the wheel. “I’ll see you later.”

“Good luck,” she said, not sure that he’d consider luck relevant.

He was already walking away, turning into the shambling bear once more. She turned the car and headed back out of town. It was four o’clock — nine hours to go. She’d often wondered how soldiers felt waiting to make an attack and now she knew — a mixture of impatience, terror, and curiosity.

And in nine hours she’d say good-bye to Paul again. Siberia, she’d go to Siberia, where the past was weaker.

At ten o’clock Kuznetsky put a call through to a hotel in Knoxville. The telephone rang only once. “How is Rosa’s uncle?” he asked.

“Fine. She took the train this evening.”

“And her cousin?”

“I’ll be seeing him tonight.”

“Good.”

He went back up to the familiar room, studied the yard through Markham’s binoculars for the last time, and then hid them under the mattress, taking care to leave the cord visible. He left by the fire escape and followed the preplanned route through the darkened back streets and alleys to the perimeter of the freight yard. There was no sign of life. He climbed through the rail fencing, under a couple of Pullman cars, and found himself forty yards from the solitary boxcar. Still nothing. He darted across the open space and took up position underneath it. It was 10:20. If everything went well, they’d be at sea in just over twenty-four hours.

Kuznetsky felt intense relief at the thought. Was it only two weeks ago that he’d been considering espionage one of the lesser forms of endeavour? Well, he’d be glad to get back to where the enemy wore a different uniform and openly challenged you. Deception was a tiring business, and, he thought, probably as self-damaging as anything he’d ever done. He didn’t know how Amy had held herself together all those years. With people like Richard Lee, he supposed. And a capacity for self-delusion.

The noises of the town slowly died down and the lights finally went out on Main Street. It must be the war — Friday nights in St. Cloud had never been so quiet. He had a fleeting image of Nadezhda at a barn dance, smiled to himself in the gloom. America! So much energy so ill-directed. He was glad he’d come back, glad he’d seen the Minnesota plains again. It seemed like an end, a welcome end. The war would soon be over, and they could start to build again, this time with the people as one. Taming the wildernesses, the one outside and the ones within.

He heard the sound of a car approaching. He mentally ran through the sequence of events Amy had written out, as he watched the state troopers, both of them this time, walking across to the depot. He heard the rap on the door, the greetings, a laugh. The lights went on, brighter than he’d expected. Three men came out, lit cigarettes, and gazed hopefully down the track. The train was late. They sat down on the edge of a loading platform, their voices unnaturally loud in the overall silence.

Then the toot of a whistle, the distant chuffing of the engine. Kuznetsky watched it pull around the curve into the station and stop at the predicted place. Damn. He had miscalculated the length of the train: the caboose didn’t cut off his line of approach from the group of men. He would have to cross the first ten yards in clear line of sight.

The fireman stood atop the tender, holding the hose as the water glugged through. As he disappeared over the other side, the meeting began to break up. Now or never. He crawled across the rail, out from under the cover of the boxcar, and wriggled his way across the first ten yards. There were no shouts. He got to his feet and sprinted the remainder, drawing the Walther as he did so. Hauling himself up the cab steps, he found himself face-to-face with the fireman, who had just lifted a sandwich to his mouth.

“Silence or you’re dead,” he whispered harshly. The sandwich dropped as the man lifted his arms, shock giving way to indignation on his face.

The engineer was coming, shouting something back to the men he’d left. “I mean it,” Kuznetsky said, maneuvering himself into position for the driver’s appearance. At least the engine was making enough noise to half-drown a shot. But the fireman’s face relaxed; the moment of immediate danger for him had passed.

“Keep coming,” Kuznetsky said, holding the automatic a foot from the engineer’s face as he climbed into the cab. “Now let’s go,” he said, moving back to where he could cover them both.

“Hey…!”

“Do it. Your life is hanging by a thread, mister. Believe me.”

The two men stared at him, found nothing in his eyes to doubt. The engineer opened the regulator, and the engine began moving forward. “There’s easier ways to get a ride, bud,” he muttered.

“Just drive the train. Normal speed, normal everything.”

“Can we talk?”

“Just drive the train.” Kuznetsky shifted position to allow the fireman to shovel some coal while he watched the engineer’s actions. “Now slow down slightly,” he ordered. The man did so. “Okay, back to the usual speed.”

“What sort of game are you playing, bud?” He sounded curious rather than belligerent.

“No games. I wanted to know how to slow this thing down if you two happen to meet with an accident.”

The two men exchanged glances. The train rattled across a bridge. Kuznetsky lit the cigarette he’d been wanting for two hours.

“Where are you heading, bud?”

“Down the line. Shut up.”

Behind him, as if in pursuit, the half-moon was rising.

Fifty feet farther back, and considerably closer to the ground rushing by, Bob Crosby was tightening the strap that held him to the girders beneath the boxcar. He’d run away from home that evening and was already beginning to regret it. The noise was unbearable, his mouth seemed choked with dust, and he felt as if his bones were all being wrenched loose from their sockets.

He’d boarded the train at Chattanooga, more from desperation than choice. He’d expected a long train of boxcars with straw-filled interiors and sliding doors, not this strange short train with one car and a cargo that seemed to consist solely of policemen. But he’d had to get away before his father alerted the local cops, and at least he’d done that.

There were probably better places to travel; he’d learn as he went, he supposed. God knew where that guy at the last stop had ended up. He’d watched him crawling, then running toward the locomotive. There must be places to hide there too. He’d have to find out. There was lots of time: he was only fourteen. He’d go back home in a few years, when he was big enough, and show his father what a beating was really like. The bastard. He couldn’t understand why his mother stayed with him.

The train approached Scottsboro. “We stop here,” the engineer shouted over his shoulder.

Not according to Melville’s information, Kuznetsky thought, and there’d been no other way of checking. If the driver was telling the truth, and they went straight through, then the wires would start humming, to the north at least. If they stopped, and the driver was bluffing, the guard and the troopers would get suspicious. He had to trust Melville.

“We go straight through,” he shouted over the noise of the engine.

The engineer turned to protest, but Kuznetsky could see the bluff in his eyes. “Straight through,” he repeated. It was the correct decision: Scottsboro station was dark and deserted.

The driver spat over the side, an empty gesture of defiance. “Huntsville, then,” he shouted.

“Okay. Huntsville.” The train climbed away from the valley floor, bellowing smoke across the stars. Another ten miles. The road on their left was devoid of traffic, the houses dark. Kuznetsky felt a sense of rising exhilaration, swaying with the passage of the train, feeling the warm gusts of air from the firebox whipping past his face.

At the spur turnoff Amy stood by the car, straining her ears for the sound of the approaching train. Her eyes had grown used to the darkness since their arrival an hour before, but even so she could barely make out the line of the main road two hundred yards away. Paul and Gerd had taken the camper up the valley. The switch had been thrown.

She gripped the tommy gun in one hand, hoping she wouldn’t have to use it. If Kuznetsky had failed, if the train failed to slow down, there was every chance that it would come off the rails at the turnoff, and she alone would have to take on the occupants, at least until Paul and Gerd arrived. And it would all be in full view of the main road. Only one car had passed in the last hour, but it needed only one at the wrong time. That car had swept past only seconds after Paul had finished cutting the wires above the road.

An orange glow could be seen in the distance, climbing the valley toward her. For a moment it disappeared, sheltered from sight by the invisible buildings of Lim Rock, and there it was again, growing larger and brighter. Now she could see the long, moving shadow that was the train, now she could hear it above the natural sounds of the night.

“Slow down,” Kuznetsky said.

“On this grade — you’re crazy!”

Kuznetsky moved forward, immediately behind the engineer, jamming the Walther into the back of his neck. “We’re taking the spur. Slow down.”

“We’ll have to throw the switch.”

“It’s already thrown.”

At least he hoped it was. There was a sudden movement behind him; he ducked by instinct, glimpsed the shovel flash past his head. Straightening up, he put a bullet through the fireman’s face, reached out too late to catch his body as it tumbled from the cab, and turned the gun quickly enough to stop the engineer in his tracks.

“Slow it down,” he screamed, and the driver, his mouth hanging open, turned to obey.

It was almost too late. The locomotive’s wheels screeched as they hit the points and the whole train swayed alarmingly. Beneath them the trestles of the river bridge creaked and snapped, but they were across, moving up the narrow valley.

Amy watched the train rock its way through the points and the bridge, saw a silhouetted guard emerge from his lighted sanctum and apply himself energetically to the hand brake on the rear platform. Blue-white sparks flashed across the valley as the braked wheels ground against the rails, but the train kept moving away as the engineer overrode the hand brake. The noise seemed deafening. She looked up and down the road — nothing.

Half a mile ahead Paul and Gerd heard the train, stamped out their cigarettes, exchanged grim smiles, and moved to their positions. Soon they could see it rounding the bend in the valley, first the glow from the locomotive, then the sparks from the wheels at the rear. The train’s shape slowly swam into focus, and two figures were visible in the engineer’s compartment. And one on the roof of the boxcar! Someone was going forward to see what had gone wrong.

Suddenly the boxcar door slid open, throwing light across the road and the valley. The train pulled to a halt, and as the engine subsided into relative silence, the noise of the man running along the car roof mingled with shouts from the men hanging out of the boxcar door.

The first rattle of Paul’s tommy gun blew the man off the roof and out of sight; simultaneously Gerd sprayed the open door, knocking at least two troopers back across the car.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the engineer kneeling as if in prayer, Kuznetsky standing above him, holding the gun to his head and pulling the trigger.

Paul and Gerd reached their positions on either side of the open door. They could hear talking inside, frightened, bewildered talking, then the rasp of the other door being pulled back. At a signal from Gerd they moved forward in unison, firing as they went. Two bodies plummeted out through the far door, thumping into the gravel. Kuznetsky stepped past them, pulled himself up into the car. Inside, one man was dead, another whimpering from wounds in his thigh and chest. Kuznetsky walked behind him, placed the gun to the back of his head, and fired. The man slumped forward across the makeshift table of crates, scattering cards and quarters.

His face blank, Kuznetsky turned to look down at the Germans. “Check the others,” he said.

Paul walked around the train muttering “Ja, mein führer” under his breath. The two other troopers were dead, and so was the guard, lying face down in the stream, the rippling waters pulling his hair above his head. Murder or an act of war? Paul was damned if he knew.

Amy pulled the car up by the camper, walked across to the scene of carnage. Kuznetsky and Gerd were already moving the crates to the door, easing them down to the ground.

“Thrown the switch?” Kuznetsky asked her.

“Of course,” she replied coldly.

“Open the camper doors,” he ordered.

She walked across, passing Paul, who smiled bitterly at her. She slammed the doors open, the sound echoing from the valley sides. Gerd staggered across with the first of the crates, and she helped him load it.

In the darkness under the boxcar Bob Crosby watched the unloading. Who were these people? They sounded like Americans, but the thin one had muttered something in German. And they had killed everyone, everyone but him.

Not three feet away from his hiding place, within reach of a lunge, one of them had placed a fearsome-looking machine gun, leaned against the rail beneath the door. The shiny metal had an almost hypnotic appeal lying there, just lying there, but he silently fought the desire to make that lunge. What business was it of his? But he liked guns, had always been fascinated by them…

No, they’d soon be gone—“One more” someone had just said. Then he’d be gone, too, far away from all this. He could see the upturned face of one of the troopers lying by the track, the hole where his left eye should have been.

They were standing in a group now, over by the camper, talking. Eight legs in all. Perhaps they’d forgotten the gun, would leave it behind, and he could try it once before taking off. He could even sell it — no, that was stupid. There was movement now: one pair of legs had disappeared. He wriggled his body around to get a better view and his leg slipped off the girder. For a second he teetered, thought he was going to fall, but with a supreme effort managed to lower himself to the ground, causing only a soft thud as his legs dropped onto the ballast between the tracks.

They’d stopped talking. Had they heard anything? His breathing sounded too loud. Shit! One pair of legs walked back toward the train; he had to do something fast. He squirmed across the rail and took the gun in his hands. The legs stopped their approach; the stream gurgled in the silence. He got to his feet, leaned against the side of the boxcar, wondering how to do it. He remembered the Marines training film — run, roll, and fire. Surprise was everything. He could do it.

Taking a deep breath, he took off, rushing along the back of the train, conscious of shouts and other feet running after him. Bursting into the field of light at the rear, he threw himself into a perfect roll, just the way he’d practiced in the garden at home, and pulled the trigger. He had a flashing glimpse of people falling, could have cried out with exaltation. Run, roll, and fire. His chest seemed to burst with burning pride.

Gerd walked over to the body, rolled his victim, face up, with his foot. A freckled adolescent face stared past him, an obscene smile creasing its lips. “Jesus,” he muttered, “Jesus Christ.”

“Gerd.” It was Amy’s voice, soft, shaking. He ran across to where she and Paul had collapsed against each other. She was holding her right side, just below the breast, blood trickling between her fingers. Paul was unconscious, and for a second Gerd feared the worst, but he couldn’t find any bullet wounds. Gerd pulled him forward, found a lump still growing on the back of his head. Something had hit him but good.

“Is he dead?” she whispered.

“No, just unconscious.” He moved on to Kuznetsky, who was lying a few feet away. A bullet had plowed a furrow across the side of his head, just above the left ear. It had probably thrown him back against the camper door, and it was the door, Gerd guessed, that had hit Paul. Some luck, but it could have been worse. None of them was dead — yet.

He got the flashlight from the car and went back to Amy. “He’s out cold too. Let’s look at you.” He gently pulled her hand away and lifted the blouse. It was a nasty flesh wound, but not serious.

“There’s a first-aid box in the front,” she said.

He found it, soaked a cotton ball in disinfectant, and applied it to her wound and then to Kuznetsky’s. Then Gerd wound bandages around his head and her lower chest. Time to go, he told himself, and it looks like I’ll be driving.

She was on her feet, somewhat unsteady; the blood was already seeping through the bandage. “Get in the front,” he said.

“But…”

“Get in the front. I don’t want to carry three bodies.”

She seemed to smile at some private joke, then did as she was told.

He lifted Paul into the back, laying him out alongside the crates. He then pulled Kuznetsky up on the other side, folded the steps up, and closed the doors. “Jesus,” he muttered again. Now for the car. He took off the emergency brake, turned the wheel, and shoved. It stuck against the near rail; he’d have to use the motor. He climbed in, switched on the ignition, and forced the car back over the rails, too far almost — the rear wheels were left spinning in space above the stream. But the road was now clear.

He clambered aboard the camper. Amy didn’t look too bad; her face was pure white, but there was life in her eyes. He pulled away down the valley, trying to remember the route. Left at the end.

“Turn right at the end,” she said.

“No, left.”

“Just do it,” she said with an effort, “I’ll explain as we go.”

He glanced at her, knew she wasn’t rambling, that there was something here he didn’t know about. He swung right onto the main road, waiting for the explanation.

Amy tried to get her thoughts in order, to override the pain in her side. For one terrible moment she’d thought Paul was dead, had wanted to die herself, but he wasn’t, and she couldn’t, and it had to go on. Since climbing into her seat she’d thought more quickly than she could remember, and it seemed foolproof. If only she could be sure she was thinking straight.

“You and Paul weren’t told the truth,” she said.

“Go on.”

“The crates were never meant to go back to the U-boat. Berlin wanted the U-boat, and you and Paul, to be unwitting decoys. You were meant to be caught, and the U-boat sunk. You see, the crates contain only enough material for two atomic bombs at most, which is almost useless to the military. We’d need dozens of bombs to turn the Allies back. So it had to look as though this uranium never reached Germany, that the eventual German bombs were made from German-produced material…”

“But they’d never find the crates.”

“They’ll find one identical empty crate on the beach at Ossabaw Island. Smith left it there when he picked you up.”

“Wonderful,” he said bitterly. “And the U-boat?”

“A telephone call to the local FBI. The U.S. Navy will sink it, and they’ll assume the rest of the crates have gone down with it. Even if it escapes, there’ll be no one looking for us.”

He sighed. “Makes sense, as Paul would say. Just where are we going?”

“South. Mobile, than a boat to Cuba, then a Swedish freighter to Gothenburg.”

“We’re coming into a town,” he said, his mind whirring at what Amy had told him.

“Huntsville. Go left at the… Farley road, I’ll tell you when.”

The streets were empty. As they passed the station Amy could see lights but no sign of activity. The train was now half an hour late; soon someone would be picking up the telephone to find out that the lines east were dead. Then the police would be called, then a search back up the line, then…

“Turn here,” she said. They passed an empty police car parked by a house whose lights still shone in the upstairs windows. Soon they were back in open country, a large lake to the right, a line of low hills to the left, the road pointing straight and south.

“How far to the coast?” he asked.

“About four hundred miles, but we didn’t plan to do it in one go. The idea was — is — to spend the daylight hours in the Talladega Forest, which is about halfway. We should be there by dawn.”

“And by the time we leave for Cuba, the U-boat will have been sighted by your conscientious citizen.”

“That’s right.”

He admired her for not expressing any contrition. “How’s your side?” he asked.

“The bleeding’s stopped, I think.”

“Give me the map,” he said, “and try and get some sleep.”

She passed it over and leaned back in the seat, a faint smile on her lips.

Ten

The road unfolded before Gerd Breitner, an endless pool of lighted asphalt slipping under the camper’s wheels. It was the first time in many weeks that he’d felt alone, the first time since that afternoon he’d spent mourning — yes, that was the word — mourning Johanna on that fence outside Beresino. And for some reason he felt strangely at peace with the world. Happy just to be alive, perhaps, but he thought it was more than that. The boy’s face, the death grin. It had ended in that moment, he realized. The war was over for him.

He was thirty-five years old, and he’d seen a lot of men die younger. He’d loved and been loved, always had friends. He’d seen four continents. And here he was, driving down a foreign highway on a moonlit night, a lovely woman asleep beside him, two wounded comrades in the back. Who could ask for more?

He grinned and lit another cigarette. Paul would ask for more. They were so alike in some ways, yet deep down they were so different. Yin and yang, the Buddhists called it. Paul would always look back, regretting, or at least reexamining his choices, imagining that things could have been different. It might be illusion, but it gave him his strength, that crazy refusal to bow down before what others considered inevitable. Paul didn’t believe in fate, it was as simple as that. For Paul there would always be choice, and so there could never be total satisfaction — the future would always be open, uncertain.

Gerd had no regrets. Sadnesses, yes, but the good had gone with the bad. Johanna and little Paul were dead, and so were those Russians in the little village outside Vitebsk. It was funny how the two always went together in his mind, as if the one had been a punishment for the other. Perhaps it had. They’d gone mad that day with blood lust — three years ago now, though sometimes it seemed like a century, sometimes like yesterday. The war had done away with coherent time, broken it up and thrown it together. It was all part of the same madness.

He remembered the conversation with the Arab in that room in Tobruk. A sufi, that’s what the man had said he was, some kind of holy man. They’d talked for hours in broken English, but all he could remember was the one proverb: People fall in love with each other because of what time has made of them both; tribes fall in madness with a moment, because of what time has made of them. He and Johanna. Germany and the twentieth century.

Gerd thought about what the woman had told him. They should have expected the deception, or something like it. It made perfect sense, provided you didn’t mind sacrificing a U-boat full of boys and a couple of soldiers. And who would? The Russians, the British, all of them would have accepted the same logic without batting an eye. If you were prepared to kill thirty million people, what difference did a few more make?

The camper rolled on, climbing and descending ridge after ridge, swooping across fast-running streams that glittered in the moonlight, tunneling through pine forests, rumbling through one-street towns where no lights shone. It was in one of these that the front tire went flat, jerking Gerd from his reverie and slewing the vehicle across the street.

Amy woke with a start and gingerly climbed down from the cab. Gerd was already unbolting the spare tire from the chassis, letting out a long and imaginative string of German profanities. She looked up and down the street, lit only by the now-sinking moon, which threw shadows across the silver-gray surface. No lights had gone on in the houses.

“How long?” she asked.

“About twenty minutes.”

As he answered they both heard footsteps, way down the street but coming in their direction. Two people, she thought. He put a finger to his lips and gestured her back into the camper, but before she had moved more than a few paces, the footsteps stopped. They heard a door close, distant voices, saw a faint glow that indicated a light had been turned on.

“Is there any way I can help speed it up?” she asked.

“No.”

She leaned against the hood, listening for any further activity while he finished taking off the punctured tire. The glow down the street seemed to be brightening as the moon shadows lengthened, then suddenly it blazed and a door slammed and there was laughter. More doors, car doors this time, and then two headlights were shining straight at them, illuminating the whole street. The car, a convertible, rolled toward them and stopped alongside the camper, its headlights now pointing away, down the street.

“Trouble, folks?” the man sitting next to the driver asked.

“Just a flat,” Gerd replied.

“You folks from up North?”

“Yep. Just tourin’. Saved up our coupons a year for this trip.”

At that moment a flashlight beam stabbed out of the convertible’s rear seat, flooding Gerd and the camper cab with light.

“Turn that off, Jesse,” the man said. “Sorry…” he started to say, but the driver was whispering something to him, and suddenly he was out of the car, a rifle in his hand, the glint of a badge on his shirt.

“Put your hands in the air, mister,” he told Gerd. “And you, too, ma’am.”

The one called Jesse and the driver were both out of the car now, and they both had rifles too. “Cover them, Jake,” the man with the badge said, reaching into the cab and unslinging the tommy gun from its place on the back of the driver’s seat.

“Duane, the woman’s bleeding,” Jake said, excitement in his voice.

“Make sure you don’t get any on you,” the sheriff said, moving around to the camper’s rear. They heard him open the doors. “There’s a dead man in here. No, he’s breathing. Sonovabitch.”

Amy and Gerd exchanged glances. Where was the other man?

The sheriff came back. “Jesse, bring that guy in the back down to the jail. Be careful with him.” Jesse giggled, and went to do it. “Okay, you two,” the sheriff said, “walk.”

They walked, a hundreds yards or so, down to where they’d first seen the glow of light. “Blount County Sheriff’s Office, Locust Forks” it said above the door. The man called Jake opened the door, took off the “Gone Fishing” sign, and preceded them in. The sheriff brought up the rear and, still holding his gun on them, took two pairs of handcuffs from his desk drawer. He threw them to Jake.

“Behind the back,” he said, watching while the cuffs were snapped on. He lit a cigarette and sat down behind his desk. “So what have we got here?” he asked dryly. “Bonnie and Clyde?”

Amy examined the two men; it was the first chance she’d had to see their faces. The sheriff was a man in his forties, thickset with a round head and cropped blond hair. Jake was his opposite, wiry and dark with a lugubrious face.

“What’s your name, lady?” the sheriff asked her.

“Bonnie,” she said.

He didn’t smile. “Bonnie,” he repeated softly. “Yeah.”

The one called Jesse dragged Kuznetsky across the threshold and let him down, with surprising gentleness, on the wooden floor. “Duane, there’s two more machine guns in the back and some big crates with weird markings on them.”

“Is there now? Take him through to the cells and then go get the guns.”

Jesse turned to obey like an obedient dog. His face, Amy noticed, was too young for his body, much too young. There was something wrong with him.

“Maybe I’d better look at those crates,” the sheriff mused. “Watch ’em, Jake.”

“I wouldn’t open them,” Amy said as he headed for the door.

He turned. “And why’s that, lady?”

“It’s dangerous stuff.”

“What is?”

“It’s… a new type of explosive.”

He walked back to his desk. “From where?”

“Paradise,” Gerd said.

“Shut up, Clyde.” He looked at them both, then ground out his cigarette in the brass ashtray and picked up the telephone. “C’mon, c’mon,” he muttered. “Mary Beth,” he said at last, “yeah I know what time it is. Business. Get me the state police in Huntsville.”

He waited, staring at Amy. She stared back.

The operator was talking. “It’s dead? Then try Birmingham,” he said. Cradling the receiver in his shoulder, he lit another cigarette. “It’s ringing,” he told Jake. “What the… there’s no lines out? Hey, Mary Beth, what’s going on?”

He put the phone down, walked across to Amy. “There’s someone out there messin’ with us, Bonnie. Ain’t there?”

She looked at the floor.

He grabbed the front of her blouse and yanked her to her feet in one violent jerk. She felt a moment of nerve-tearing pain, then the warm wetness of blood flowing out of the reopened wound.

“How many?” he was asking.

Gerd leaped to his feet, but Jake prodded him hard in the stomach with a rifle barrel and sent him sprawling back across the bench.

“Two,” she said.

“You lying bitch,” he said, shoving her back onto the bench. “Jake, take him into the cells and stay with him. Jesse, take her upstairs.”

“She’s bleeding, Jake.”

“So what?”

“Shall I clean her up?”

“You behave yourself. Just make sure she doesn’t go anywhere.”

“Where’ll you be, Duane?” Jake asked.

“Right here, with a rifle pointed at the door. It’ll be light in a couple of hours, and then we’ll go out and get whoever it is.”

Paul dropped from the telephone pole the last few feet to the grass, then sat on his haunches for a few moments, a shadow among shadows, trying to ignore the splitting pain in the back of his head. On the other side of the road the breeze rustled the pines, but the night was empty of any other sound.

He’d had two pieces of luck: return to consciousness and the wirecutters still being in his pocket. And perhaps the location too. Locust Forks — population 896, according to the town sign — was only about half a mile from end to end and considerably less wide than it was long. He’d found no road entering the town from the east, and the hill he was now skirting seemed to rule out access from the west. But he had to make sure.

He clambered down a bank, waded across a stagnant ditch and up the other side, walking into a barbed-wire fence at the top. He cut himself a hole to get through and removed a four-foot length just in case.

The moon had almost set now, turning orange and bathing the buildings to his right in a ghostly luminescence. He trotted across the field, slipped, and fell headlong, catching the barbed wire against his thigh and burying his face in something that smelled like rotting cabbage. He lay there for a moment, silently laughing at himself. “Two eagles” Schellenberg had called them, and here was one of them tripping over vegetables in the dark.

He moved on, crossing two more fields and cutting his way through two more fences before he reached his starting point at the town’s northern end. Just the one road, then. And they’d be doing no talking on the telephone. But there wasn’t that much of the night left, there were at least three of them, and they had the guns.

He squatted down and cut the barbs off the last foot of each end of the wire, then twisted those ends into loops. It wasn’t very flexible, but it would have to do. He began edging his way down the street, keeping to the darker shadows of the western sidewalk.

Jesse laid Amy out on the sheriff’s bed and disappeared. She heard running water through the adjoining door; presumably it was the sheriff’s kitchen. It was extremely hot, or had the wound made her feverish? She could feel the sweat pouring down her face.

He came back with a bowl of hot water and what looked like a piece of bed sheeting, gently opened up her blouse, and carefully wiped away the blood from around the bullet gash. Then he just sat there, the bloodied sheet in his hand, staring at the space of bare flesh between her belt and her brassiere.

“Thank you,” she said, trying to lift herself up, trying not to let fear creep into her voice.

He helped her forward, and for a second she thought she’d misjudged him, but his hands wrestled with the hook on her brassiere. Successful, he pushed her back down, and like a little boy peeking under a stone, he eased the cups off her breasts with the palms of his hands. Looking into his eyes, she found an innocent evil that terrified her far more than any sign of lust.

He didn’t touch her for a long time, just stared as if transfixed by her naked breasts, the droplets of sweat rolling down between them. Then he reached out a hand and stroked a nipple with the edge of a thumb. Not once did he look at her face. Leaning forward, he put his mouth around the other nipple, sucking gently, his eyes closed.

She squirmed violently, felt the blood flow again.

He let go, looking horrified, and held the sheeting to staunch the renewed flow and made a clucking sound in his throat.

Paul stood on the side of the street opposite the jail, examining the lighted sheriff’s office. The lights seemed to be on in every room, up and down, but in ten minutes he’d seen only one hint of movement, someone upstairs carrying a bowl. It didn’t look very inviting. Someone must have picked up the phone and put two and two together. They were waiting for him.

He crossed the street in a wide semicircle, avoiding the patch of light thrown from the windows and open door, and worked his way around to the back of the building. The lights were on there, too, throwing the shadows of the window bars across the remains of an old tractor. The back door was locked.

He made his way back down the side, but stopped when he heard Gerd whistling the first notes of “Lili Marlene,” which seemed to come from a point only feet away through the clapboard wall. The whistling was swiftly followed by a grunted “Shut up” and the sound of footsteps.

“Keep the bastard quiet, Jake,” another voice said, this time from the right, toward the street.

Which meant the third guy was probably upstairs, and probably with Amy. Stupid, Paul thought. They shouldn’t have separated themselves. He looked up, then remembered the rain barrel and pipe at the rear.

Amy had never felt so much like screaming. If he’d said anything, just one word, it might have been bearable, but the silence, the look of schoolboy curiosity on the middle-aged face, even his concern over her wound…

He unbuckled her belt, breathing with little gasps, a small trace of spittle forming at the corner of his mouth.

“If you take off the handcuffs, I could help,” she said, fighting to keep her voice steady.

He didn’t even seem to hear. She felt him tugging at her skirt, pulling it below her knees, felt a drop of moisture fall on her bare thigh. He was dribbling uncontrollably, a glistening of tears in his eyes.

She closed hers, heard an inhuman gurgle, and almost fainted. But suddenly the hands disappeared, his head jerked back violently, blood spurting as Paul wrenched the barbed wire tight across his throat. It seemed to go on silently forever, then he let the body down onto the bed and lifted her up, and she sobbed into his shoulder. “Paul, Paul…”

“Ssshhh,” he murmured in her ear, and they sat for a moment in silence, her body quivering as the tension dissolved. Then he stood her up, pulled up her skirt and fastened the belt, replaced her brassiere and buttoned her blouse with a doctor’s detachment. He went through the dead man’s pockets, but there were no keys for her handcuffs.

He gestured for her to stay where she was and went through into the sheriff’s kitchen. There was a sharp hunting knife hanging on the wall, but it wasn’t a weapon for throwing.

He went back past her to the top of the stairs, crawling forward to extend his view of the office below, but all he could see was the corner of a desk, the bottom of the open street door, and floorboards. He lay there thinking. He could go down with the dead man’s rifle, probably get the sheriff, and if Gerd was still conscious they’d manage the other man between them. But the whole town would be awake, the camper’s tire still wasn’t fixed, and the crates were still in the camper. He couldn’t fire the gun.

The sheriff didn’t know that, though.

He felt a tug at his ankle, turned, and found Amy sitting behind him. She indicated with her head for him to follow her back into the room, then whispered in his ear. “The sheriff told this one to behave himself. If I make noises as if he isn’t, maybe he’ll come up.”

“Maybe he’ll call his man down,” Paul whispered back.

She shrugged. “And when he doesn’t come?”

“Okay.”

She got back on the bed. “Please, no,” she said in a trembling voice. “Please don’t” — this time louder.

“Jesse, whatever you’re doing, don’t,” the man downstairs shouted up.

Amy groaned, a long shuddering groan that seemed to go on and on.

“Jesse!”

“Aw, let him have some fun,” Jake shouted.

“Yeah, and you’ll explain it all to the Feds, I suppose. Jesse, answer me!”

“Come and get the pig off me,” she sobbed.

“Jake,” they heard the sheriff say, “go up and bring ’em down here.”

Paul took up position behind the door, the hunting knife held in his hand like a brush, as if he were about to cut a line on a wall. They could hear Jake tramping up the stairs, and Amy began to groan again as he opened the door. “Jesse…” he began, then the knife slit his throat from ear to ear, splashing blood down his bare chest.

Paul lowered him silently to the floor, picked up his rifle, and signaled Amy to walk in front of him. As they began their descent the sheriff glanced up at her, still handcuffed, then resumed his watch on the door.

“Put the rifle down, Sheriff,” Paul said softly, and the man’s head jerked around, his mouth dropping in disbelief. He laid the rifle down on the desk in front of him.

“Throw the keys for the handcuffs onto the floor over there.”

“You…”

“Shut up. I don’t want to use this gun — it’ll wake up the whole town — but if you’re going to do that anyway, then it won’t make much difference… The keys.”

He reached into his shirt pocket, threw them where he’d been told. Paul unlocked Amy’s handcuffs with one hand, holding the rifle aimed at the sheriff with the other.

“Let’s go and get our friend,” he said, pointing the sheriff toward the door that led through to the cells.

Gerd was waiting for them. “You took your time,” he said.

Paul unlocked the cell, and pushed the sheriff in. “I thought you’d have started a tunnel by this time.”

“Where’s my brothers?” the sheriff asked.

“They’re dead.”

The sheriff sat down on the bunk, his head between his hands.

“We have to talk,” said Amy from the next cell. She’d been examining Kuznetsky, who was still unconscious but seemed to be breathing regularly. “But not in front of him,” she said, reappearing and nodding in the sheriff’s direction. “And we’d better get the lights out.”

Without waiting for an answer, she walked through to the office and up the stairs. Her feet faltered at the top, but she went on in, ignoring the two corpses. When she came back down Gerd was fixing the “Gone Fishing” sign back in the door window. Paul came through from the cells, switching off the office lights.

“There’s something you don’t know, Paul,” Amy said, grateful that she couldn’t see his face in the dark. She told him what she’d told Gerd back on the road.

“And this was Berlin’s plan from the beginning?” he asked bitterly.

“Yes.”

“And the sixty men on the U-boat?”

She said nothing.

“The bastards.”

“We never thought they were saints,” Gerd said. “Or even normal people, come to think of it. Anyway, we’re stuck with the plan. And no matter what we think of the bastards, we’ve still got to get out of this country.”

“How long to change the tyre?” Amy asked Gerd.

“Ten more minutes. I’ll get on with it.” He opened the door, looked right and left, then came back in. “We’ve forgotten their car.”

“When we leave I’ll drive it,” Paul said. “We can dump it a few miles down the road… No, why don’t we take it, use it as a recon vehicle? I can keep half a mile ahead and look out for trouble.”

“Right.” Gerd disappeared.

Amy and Paul sat in silence, each absorbed with the other. He wondered where the woman who’d sobbed on his shoulder not ten minutes before had gone; she remembered the look on his face as he’d tightened the barbed wire around Jesse’s neck. It was for the best, she thought; at least she knew now that neither of them were the same people who’d fallen in love all those years before. Or did she just want them to be different? Stop it, she told herself. Gerd was right: all that mattered for now was getting out of America, or all four of them would be dangling from nooses, or whatever it was that happened to murderers in this state.

And then she remembered the sheriff, opened her mouth to say something, but closed it again. It was up to her this time. She didn’t know why, but it was.

The camper pulled up outside the door. “You and Gerd bring out Smith,” she told Paul, and went out to find her bag in the front seat. After screwing together the revolver and a silencer, she waited for them to come out, and as they were maneuvering Kuznetsky into the back, she walked again through the office, trying to conjure up anger against this man who’d let his idiot brother slobber all over her. It didn’t work. The moment she saw his petrified expression the anger dissolved, leaving her with nothing but logic. Quickly, Amy told herself. She aimed and fired before he had time to speak or shout, one bullet through the chest, then another through the head.

The dull pops seemed to echo through the cells, and she turned to find Paul staring at her as if he’d never seen her before.

“We can’t leave any witnesses,” she said, almost succeeding in keeping the tremor out of her voice.

“Makes sense,” he said automatically.

She walked straight past him and out to the camper. Gerd was already behind the wheel. She got in beside him, heard Paul gun the motor of the convertible, and they were on their way again. As they left the shelter of the buildings she could see the first hint of dawn in the eastern sky.

Eleven

Lieutenant Jeremiah Allman examined his watch by the light of his car’s headlamps. It was 4 A.M., another two hours till dawn, perhaps an hour and a half. Not that he particularly wanted to see the scene in the cold light of day. Seven corpses, one of them just a kid. And they still hadn’t found the fireman. Of course he might have been one of the gang. If it was a gang.

It didn’t look like an ordinary holdup: two of the victims bore the signs of execution rather than simple murder. It would help if he knew what the train had been carrying; maybe Walsh would enlighten him when he arrived from Bridgeport.

“There’s nothing in the car,” one of his subordinates called out.

“Just get the plate number down — we’ll check it when we get back. No, you might as well go back now.” When was he going to get radios in his cars? “No, wait,” he said. Christ, he hated being called out in the middle of the night. His brain refused to function. “Let me think. Check the plate, that’s the first thing. Then check the area for strangers — the hotels, realtors, everything. Huntsville and Scottsboro first, then spread out.”

Was there anything else? No. Whoever they were, they’d done a first-class job of covering their tracks. No witnesses left alive, telephone wires out, just like a military operation. But why had they left the car? Tried to turn it and overshot, he supposed. And they hadn’t stripped off the license plates. Clumsy. It didn’t fit in with the rest.

He realized the sergeant was still waiting. “Okay, that’s it… Oh, hold on.” Another car was coming up the valley. “The cavalry,” he murmured to himself. How in the hell was the sergeant going to get his car out? What a goddamn mess. He rubbed his eyes and waited.

It was George Walsh, who was quite human for a Fed. They’d worked together against the moonshiners, with a little hindrance from the Treasury men, a few years back.

The two exchanged greetings and Allman showed Walsh around the exhibits. The FBI man whistled under his breath, chomped his gum, and scratched his ear. “Well,” Allman said at last, “what was in the goddamn train?”

Walsh looked, if possible, even less willing to talk. “Crates,” he finally said, making the most of the word’s consonants.

“Crates containing what?”

“Army people wouldn’t tell me. I pointed out that it sometimes helps to know what you’re looking for, and they gave me this.” He showed Allman a diagram. “That’s the marking on them. It must be some military secret — probably supplies of krypton. They’re flying two men down from Washington now. I’m just here to keep you company until they get here.”

“Thanks. How many crates? How big?”

“Ten. Three foot by two foot by two.”

“A truck for certain, then.”

“Has to be. No tracks I suppose?”

“Ground’s too dry. We might find something when it’s light, but I wouldn’t bet my pension on it. This was a real peach of a professional job.”

The streets of Birmingham were bathed in the light of half-dawn and virtually empty. A few trucks making deliveries, the occasional paperboy on his bicycle, and one police car parked near City Hall. Its occupants, as Gerd drove the camper past, were deeply involved in a conversation with Paul, all three men being bent over a map spread out on the vehicle’s hood. Ten minutes later Paul overtook them again and resumed his position a quarter of a mile ahead.

They drove southwestward now, through the heart of an industrial area that seemed to Gerd more like a stretch of the Ruhr than Alabama. There were more people on the streets, most of them in blue overalls. The road passed under a series of railway bridges, then rose sharply to display a line of huge blast furnaces silhouetted against the rising sun.

“I never realized it was a place,” Gerd said to himself.

“Where?” Amy asked through a yawn.

“Bessemer. We just passed the sign. It’s a steelmaking process, but I never knew it was a place where they made steel.”

“Oh.”

He laughed. “I was a teacher once.”

“Teaching what?”

“Science.”

She pulled herself upright in the seat and gazed out at more factories, their tall brick chimneys standing out against the blue line of distant hills. “Did you like teaching?” she asked.

“Some of the time.” He lit another cigarette. “But in the end there’s only one thing science teaches you — that all truths are relative.”

She glanced sideways at him. “And isn’t that a useful thing to learn?”

“Not in a world run by believers.”

In Huntsville, Jeremiah Allman put the phone down when Walsh got back from the airport with the two men from Washington.

“Sam Benton,” the taller one introduced himself. “And this is Don Mitchell. Any developments?”

“Would you like to fill me in first?” Allman asked.

It was Mitchell who answered. “There’s a distinct possibility that foreign nationals are involved. In other words, enemy action, Japs or Germans.”

“Japs would be rather noticeable around here.”

“Yeah, probably Germans.”

“And are we going to be told what’s in the crates?” Allman asked.

“I’m sorry, but no. Not without Roosevelt’s say-so, anyhow. But it would be hard to exaggerate how important it is we get them back.”

“Fair enough,” Allman said. “Here’s where we’re up to. The hunting lodge on McCoy Mountain — that’s about ten miles from where the train was stopped — was hired out last Saturday to a guy named Joe Markham. The realtor in Scottsboro said he had a woman with him when he picked up the key, and she was also there earlier when they first looked it over. Some business associates were going to join them later. Markham had a Tennessee accent, about five foot nine, a hundred and fifty pounds, dark hair, brown eyes — do you want all this now?”

“No, just get it out,” Benton said. “The woman?”

“He didn’t see her clearly either time; she stayed in the car. Black Buick, by the way. She had dark hair, sunglasses — that’s all he saw. Could have been just a hooker for Markham’s friends.”

“They’re checking the lodge now?”

“Yeah, and we’re still waiting for Washington to come through on the car plates.”

A sergeant arrived with coffee and a sheet of paper. “The lodge is empty,” Allman read out. “Clean as a whistle.”

The telephone rang. Walsh listened, made notes, and put the receiver down with a grim expression. “You’d better get a forensic team up to the lodge,” he told Allman. “They’ve traced the car,” he explained to the others. “It was hired by a man in Washington two weeks ago. He doesn’t fit Markham’s description — he was a big man with a Midwest accent. But he did give a German name — Doesburg. Address in New York.”

“Give that here,” Mitchell said. He was already asking the operator for the FBI’s New York Central office.

Walsh and Allman looked at each other. “Now if you were a German commando team humping a truckload of crates containing krypton, where would you be heading?” Walsh asked.

“Germany.”

“Right. The quickest way home would be through Georgia or South Carolina.”

“How long would it take?” Benton asked, standing up to examine the map behind Allman’s desk.

“Twelve hours minimum.”

“So they haven’t got there yet, and they’re not going to risk a pickup in daylight—”

“They could be going south to the Gulf,” Mitchell said, joining him.

“Why would they do that? It would add about a thousand miles to the sea journey.”

“Yeah, but they’d know that we’d know—”

“Yeah, yeah, there’s no end to that.”

“I don’t think we’re dealing with people who are relying on luck to get away,” Mitchell insisted.

“Jesus, German commandos in Jackson County,” Allman muttered to himself.

“That’s not for publication, Lieutenant,” Benton told him. “Okay, Don, they could have gone south. Walsh, work out how far they could have gotten by midday in any seaward direction and then start phoning around. Get Birmingham, Atlanta, and Columbia to put blocks on all the major roads. Tell them what we’re looking for, not what’s in the crates.”

“I don’t know what’s in the crates.”

“Right, right.” He looked up at the map again, then at his watch. “We’ve got about twelve hours to catch these bastards.”

Wim Doesburg was in the bath when they hammered on his front door. He heard Elke shout that that she was coming, stepped out, and wrapped his bathrobe around him. It was impossible. Even if things had gone wrong, they couldn’t be here this soon.

He stepped into the hall and was almost knocked over by a tall young man in plainclothes. At the door there were two uniformed police with drawn guns. “What is…?”

“Wim Doesburg?” the man said, flashing a card at him.

“Yes, but…”

“FBI. We have a warrant to search this house.”

Doesburg controlled himself. Let them search! It would take them forever to find anything incriminating.

The FBI man looked into each room. “Come in here,” he said, entering the kitchen. “We have some questions.”

Doesburg followed him. “There must be some mistake,” he said, conscious that he was parodying a thousand Hollywood villains. “What’s your name?” he asked belligerently.

“Kowalski. It says on the card. Okay, you can start,” he told the other plainclothesmen who had just appeared in the hall. Doesburg heard one of them ascending the stairs. Oh God, he thought suddenly. The money.

“Mr. Doesburg, have you rented a car in the last month?”

“No.”

“In Washington. A black Buick.”

“I said no. I don’t drive. I’ve never driven a car in my life.” What was happening? Was this something else entirely? “Ask anyone around here if they’ve ever seen me drive a car,” he added hopefully.

“Do you know” — Kowalski consulted his notebook — “an Aaron Matson of 221 Mountain Boulevard, Knoxville?”

Knoxville. Could it be Sigmund? “No,” he said calmly. “Who is he?”

“Was. He was shot dead in Knoxville this morning.”

“That can hardly concern me. Or are you suggesting I can be in two places at once?”

“Do you know a Joe Markham?”

“No.”

Someone was coming down the stairs. “Found this, Charlie,” he said, putting the pile of notes on the table. “About four thousand dollars, I’d say.”

Kowalski looked at Doesburg, raised his eyebrows.

“My savings,” he said indignantly.

“Get dressed,” Kowalski said, “we’re going downtown.”

“But…”

“Now.”

In the back of the car Doesburg held his wife’s hand, trying to communicate the need for silence. There were tears in her eyes and he realized, with something of a shock, that he had no idea how she’d react under pressure. She didn’t know everything, but she knew enough.

They were separated the moment they arrived, and Doesburg was led to a small windowless interview room. He was left on his own for several minutes, then Kowalski came in with an older, gray-haired man who didn’t bother to introduce himself.

“I’d like to see my lawyer,” Doesburg said immediately.

“Bullshit,” the man said, in a quiet voice that somehow seemed full of menace. “I’m not going to play games with you, Herr Doesburg. You know what this is about and I know what this is about. You’re thinking that we have no proof, and you’re quite right. But we’ll find some, starting with a trace on that money and finishing by taking your house apart brick by brick. We may find it too late, but not as far as you’re concerned. For you, there’s a straightforward choice. You talk now and you get fifteen years. You don’t talk now and you go to the chair. Which is it to be?”

Could they trace the money? Perhaps. He wouldn’t want to stake his life on it. And if they had Markham, he was done anyway. But that, he realized with a flash of insight, was all irrelevant. The only one who knew his address was Kroeger, and if Kroeger had talked, then he must too. He sighed, looked across into the man’s blue eyes.

“What do you want to know?” he asked.

For a few seconds Amy was conscious of bumping up and down, but it was the cessation of motion that finally woke her. They seemed to be in the middle of a forest, and the sun shining down through the yellow-green foliage invested everything with amber light.

“We’ve been driving through this for about ten miles,” Gerd said, “so I thought it was time to get off the road.” He yawned, stretching out his arms above his head. “And I was having trouble keeping my eyes open,” he added.

“Where’s Paul?” she asked, noticing the empty convertible in her side-view mirror.

“Call of nature, I expect,” he murmured, his eyes already closed. “Wake me when the war’s over.”

She was extremely hungry. In the back of the camper Kuznetsky seemed much the same, though perhaps there was more color in his face. She took a can opener and a tin of peaches from the supply box and opened it on the camper’s hood.

Paul reappeared, his face and hair glistening with water. “Stream over there,” he explained, leaning across her and digging a hand into the tin.

The consciousness of his body forced her to move away. “You can get some sleep too,” she said.

“Someone’ll have to stay awake.”

“I’m not driving,” she said levelly.

But there must have been something else in her voice. “Are you okay?” he asked, touching her lightly on the shoulder.

“Fine,” she said. “I’m fine.” She walked off toward the stream.

Benton and Mitchell arrived in Savannah early in the afternoon. There was no fresh news from Huntsville or New York. Benton called New York and was told that they were bringing Doesburg in now. “Half an hour,” the voice promised.

It was an hour before the call came through. Benton listened, moved his finger down the coastline on the map in front of him. “Got it,” he said into the phone. “Anything more precise?”

“Where the road hits the sea,” New York told him. “There’s only one, according to our German friend here.”

“We’re on our way.” He put down the phone, showed Mitchell Ossabaw Island on the map. “Everything set?” he asked.

“The troops are lined up for inspection outside.”

The phone rang again, Washington this time. “Benton? Charleston just called us. They’ve had a reported sighting of a U-boat. Someone called in from Folly Beach — place just outside the city — said it was heading south about a half mile out.”

“Anything else?”

“No, the caller got hysterical after that, started screaming about a German invasion, and then hung up.”

“I take it the Navy’s on the way.”

“And how.”

“Right.” He hung up, clapped Mitchell on the shoulder. “Let’s go get ’em.”

Ten minutes later they were sitting in the cab of an army troop transport, the first in a column of ten rumbling south along the Jacksonville road.

Kuznetsky emerged into consciousness, seemed to be looking through a large glassless window at angular beams of sunlight shining down through strange tall trees. Was it the forest, a dream of the forest… heaven perhaps, old Father McIlroy’s paradise situated somewhere high in the sky above St. Cloud…?

A figure blocked the window. Could it be hanging in midair?

“Jack… Yakov,” it whispered. Yes, they were him. How could he have two names? “Don’t be greedy, Jack.” “But…” The trees were so beautiful — why was this person blocking them out, coming closer, feeling his forehead, a cool hand, the smell of clean hair. Nadezhda? No, it was someone else, he knew that. Nadezhda was far away. Who was it then? It was important he know, but his head hurt, felt like cold fire.

“Try to sleep. Everything’s fine.” He obediently closed his eyes. The story must be finished, he thought. Good night, Mama.

Amy pulled the blanket up to his chin and walked back to the others, feeling the wound in her side. Paul was sitting against a tree, trying to flick a cigarette into his mouth. Like a little boy again, she thought. A little boy who cut throats.

“How do you think Smith is?” she asked Gerd. “Will he come through?”

“There’s no way of knowing. He’s a strong man, but head wounds…” He shrugged. “I’d better look at you,” he said, getting to his feet. She held the blouse up across her breasts as he carefully inspected the wound. The blood had clotted in the gash, a brown groove in a patch of blue flesh. “How’s it feel?” he asked.

“Stiff. And it itches.”

“Good signs.” He went to the camper, got a roll of bandage, and replaced the dressing she’d lost in Locust Forks. “You’ll be okay in a few days.” He smiled at her.

“Thanks,” she said. His kindness was almost unbearable. “I’m going to wash my face.”

She walked off toward the stream, feeling close to despair. If Kuznetsky died, what could she do? Even with him they’d never have gotten this far without the two Germans. And what would she do with them? With Paul? They might reach the coast, they might reach Cuba, they might even reach Sweden. And then? At some point Paul and Gerd had to be silenced, had to be, or it was all for nothing. And she didn’t know if she could kill them.

“Where exactly are we headed?” Paul asked when she returned, his gaze fixed on the map that he’d spread out on the convertible’s hood. “Mon Louis,” she said, pointing it out and moving away. “It’s a small fishing port. French-speaking. There’s a shrimp boat waiting to take us to Cuba.”

“Hired?”

“Yes. No questions asked, a nice big fee.”

“When?”

“We’re supposed to sail at midnight.” She looked at her watch. “We should be leaving soon.”

“The U-boat’s been sighted by now, hasn’t it?” Paul asked.

“Yes,” she said coldly. “I expect it has.”

Sam Benton stood at the top of the path that led down to the rocky beach. It was a damn shame in some ways, a damn shame. They’d come for a battle and found nothing but one empty and broken crate and a dead man in a car. The Navy had gotten all the glory. Well, almost all of it — the Bureau had nabbed the big wheel in New York.

“It’s Markham all right,” Mitchell said, joining him. “Found a book under the front seat — Civil War battlefields, something like that — got his name inside the front.”

“That’s that then.”

“Well…”

Benton looked at his partner. “Well what?” he asked irritably.

“I don’t get it,” Mitchell said. “It doesn’t add up.”

“It doesn’t add up,” Benton repeated sarcastically. “We’ve got this empty crate, we’ve got Markham’s body, we’ve matched the car left by the train with the one those kids saw here on Wednesday night. Markham hired the lodge. The German in New York, the guy who arranged the whole goddamn spree — he told us this was the pickup point…”

“He said the pickup was supposed to be at ten p.m.”

“So they got here early.”

“Why was it traveling on the surface? That doesn’t make sense. They’d be dead ducks.”

“How d’you know it was?”

“The sighting.”

“Hell, I don’t know.”

“And why was it moving south when they got it?” Mitchell went on doggedly.

“Oh Christ, that doesn’t mean anything. It had seen our boats, and was making a run for it.”

Mitchell sighed. “Yeah, you’re probably right. But why did they shoot Markham?”

The “probably” irritated Benton still further. “How should I know? They must have fallen out among themselves…”

“The moment they arrived?”

“Orders from Berlin, then. He knew too much. Christ, what does it matter now?”

“Yeah. Okay.” There must have been a reason. “We’d better unblock the highways,” he said. “And I’m hungry.”

Paul had seen the roadblock when he was still half a mile away, but there’d been no way to avoid it. In the mirror he could see the camper pulling up two cars behind him.

The state troopers finished with the truck in front and one of them waved him forward, a bored expression on his face. As the truck picked up speed Paul accelerated the convertible through the space between it and the troopers’ car. A burst of gunfire would have been nice, but he had only two hands and he wanted to stay on the road.

Looking back, he could see that gunfire hadn’t been necessary; the troopers were already pulling their car around and giving chase, the siren beginning to wail. He rammed his foot down, feeling an exhilaration as the wind swept past him.

The first thing was to get off the highway and clear it for the others, but at the moment he had a river on one side, railroad tracks and a forest on the other. And the troopers were slowly reducing the distance between them.

He was at the turnoff almost before he realized it, and the wheels screeched and squealed as he swung into the side road, bouncing across the inlaid tracks and climbing sharply upward through the trees. For a few seconds the pursuit vanished, then reappeared in his mirror about a hundred yards behind as the road straightened out. He could see the officer in the passenger seat talking into a radio. That was bad news.

For a mile ahead the road was straight and empty. Paul unfastened the door beside him so only the car’s motion kept it closed, checked the position of the tommy gun on the seat, then skidded the car to a halt with his door broadside on to the pursuit. Kicking the door open with his foot as he picked up the gun, he raked the oncoming car before the dust thrown up by his skid had begun to settle. Through it he saw the windshield explode into fragments, two heads thrown back, the car careening sideways off the road to glance off one tree and into another.

He walked across to the wreck, tommy gun at the ready, and stood there listening to the voice shouting, “Hal, what the fuck’s happening, come in…” Both men were dead. “Hal died in the war,” Paul murmured to himself and the trees.

He got back behind the wheel, leaned over and examined the map Amy had given him. The road he was on wasn’t marked, but with any luck it should join up with one that was.

After about ten minutes he reached an east — west highway and turned west. Almost immediately he passed a truck stop, a long one-story café with a dozen or so vehicles parked in the lot. He drove on until he was well out of sight, then pulled the convertible off the highway and drove it deep into the trees. There he examined the map again, measuring distances against the scale with the barrel of the Walther. He was about 120 miles from Mon Louis, which didn’t seem far. But then they’d been only ten miles from the Kremlin.

It was almost seven o’clock, and the sun was sinking fast. It would be worth waiting for dark, he decided. Paul sat there for half an hour and let his mind rest.

When the last glint of orange had gone from the sky, he put the map inside his shirt, the Walther in his jacket pocket, and with the tommy gun slung over his shoulder walked back to the highway. It was lighter outside the trees and he waited another ten minutes before making his way to the truck stop.

There were about twenty people inside, and the smell of frying meat made his mouth water. All those years ago the one thing he’d loved about America was the hamburgers. He flattened himself against the side wall and, reaching up on tiptoe, cut through the telephone line where it entered the café, then walked stealthily around the back to the parking lot on the far side. The car closest to the highway was another convertible, so he decided on the one parked next to it, a black Pontiac. The door wasn’t locked. He took off the brake and pushed it into motion with his shoulder, finding it easier as the slope took over. He jumped in, letting in the clutch a hundred yards or so down the highway.

He traveled east, toward Selma, and a few miles farther on he saw a police car coming toward him, its siren wailing. The tommy gun was ready, but the cruiser just sailed past, ignoring him. So far so good. But in fifteen minutes they’d be at the truck stop, and the car’s disappearance might have been noticed. The troopers would radio Selma and… at this rate he’d have to change cars every ten miles to Mon Louis, and leave a trail that any fool could follow in the process. He needed a car whose theft wouldn’t be noticed for several hours.

He put his foot down harder on the gas, and within ten minutes he entered a town alongside a railroad track. He was running parallel with a train. Now if it was going south… He stopped to look at the map, and found that it must have come from the south. A pity, but the station would be a good place to dump the car he was in. The police didn’t know in what direction he was headed.

He followed the train into town, keeping the orange glare of the locomotive in sight between the buildings, and reached the station only a minute or so behind it. After parking the car away from the single streetlight, he sat there wondering what to do. He’d have to leave the tommy gun, that seemed certain. He pushed it under the front seat and was opening the door to get out when another car almost hurtled into the yard. A man leaped out and raced to the train platform just as it was pulling out.

Paul smiled beatifically. A third piece of luck in twenty-four hours; someone somewhere liked them. He watched the train clank out of the station, waited to check that there were no arriving passengers, then recovered the tommy gun from its hiding place and strolled calmly across to the man’s car. The key was still in the ignition.

They drove south through the cotton fields, through ramshackle settlements full of black children and small towns that all looked the same, through Megargel, Uriah, Bay Minette, strange names for a strange land of bright colors and fading endeavor. As the sun went down it seemed to Amy as if the golden light transformed each vista into a sepia photograph, pushing time backward a century and more. And then, with darkness having fallen, the movie screens, set high in the fields, their flickering images reflecting from the roofs of their wheeled congregations, seemed only to emphasize the point, to offer a present that was too unreal to hold back the past.

It was past ten when they crossed the bay bridges and drove into Mobile, a larger version of the same picket and neon mélange. Amy bought a newspaper while they were stopped at a city intersection. There was no mention of train holdups, no mention of U-boats. “Nothing,” she told Gerd. “But I wouldn’t expect anything, not with our cargo.”

“Perhaps we imagined it all,” he said, swerving to avoid a cab that had cut across him. “Christ, don’t they teach Americans to drive?”

“You’re in the wrong lane,” she told him sweetly.

“And what happens when we get there?”

“The boat should be waiting. The Lafayette. Captain’s name is Warren. He lives on the boat.”

“I thought you said it was French-speaking.”

“Not completely.”

“What’s he know?”

“Nothing. As far as he’s concerned, we just want a ride to Cuba — one that doesn’t involve customs inspection. But he’s expecting only two people.”

“Hmm. People who haven’t been shot up, presumably.”

“I thought we’d imagined all that.”

Mon Louis looked French. It was a small fishing community built on a narrow peninsula between the bay and an inlet, with wooden houses and a long, sheltered anchorage crammed with shrimp boats. The first two people they stopped spoke a French that neither could understand, the third, on hearing the name Lafayette, spat a long stream of tobacco juice between his feet and gestured them toward the end of the dock. There they found the boat, one of the least prepossessing in sight, faded paint from the deck down, rust from the deck up. But it was floating.

There was no one aboard. “I’ll start loading,” Gerd said. “The invalid first.” He glanced up and down the waterfront, but there was no one in sight; all the noise seemed to be coming from a bar about two hundred yards away.

Gerd had lifted Kuznetsky down onto the dock when the car arrived. It was Paul. His eyes had lost the bitter expression she’d seen in the forest, but he avoided looking at Amy. “A frog among princes,” he murmured, looking at the Lafayette. “Nothing’s too good for us eagles, eh?”

He and Gerd carried Kuznetsky along to the boat, then lifted him across and onto the deck. Gerd noticed that the tide was in — either good planning or luck. Probably the former, he thought. But for the kid everything would have gone like clockwork.

“You’d better sit down,” he told Amy, noticing how unsteady she looked. “I said you’d be better in a couple of days, not hours.”

She watched as they hauled the ten crates out of the camper, onto the dock, and across to the boat. “You were always complaining about the lack of exercise on the U-boat,” Paul said as Gerd, the job finished, sat down and wiped his brow.

“You can unload them all at the other end,” Gerd said. “We’d better find the owner of this pleasure cruiser before the tide turns. No, you stay where you are,” he told the other two. “I need to practice my French.”

“I’ll take a look at Smith,” she said, not wanting to be left alone with Paul.

Gerd found Warren, a short, wiry man with a shock of black hair above a crowded face, playing dominoes in the bar. He was about fifty, and judging from the skin on his face, he’d spent a lifetime in the sun. Gerd introduced himself as Jack Smith.

“You’re early,” Warren said curtly, concentrating on the game.

“What about the tide?”

“An authority on the sea, eh? What about the tide?”

“It’s turning.”

“Plenty of time. Have a drink.” He passed over the bottle of bourbon, called over his shoulder for another glass.

It was delicious, but not, Gerd decided reluctantly, the ideal lining for an empty stomach. The game went on, and he fought to restrain his impatience. At last Warren got up, called over a young man who turned out to be his son and crew, and accompanied Gerd back to the boat. Both fishermen were mildly drunk.

Paul came out of the cabin, and leaned against its side. “Okay?” he asked Gerd.

“What happened to him?” Warren asked, looking past Paul at the inert Kuznetsky. “Hey, I was told two, not three passengers…”

“Be more company for you,” Paul said lightly.

“And it’s four,” Amy said, emerging from the shadows in the bow, her hands behind her back. “You were paid for the journey, not by numbers.”

“Who the hell are you people?” Warren’s son exclaimed, backing toward the side.

“Tourists,” Paul said succinctly, bracing himself for a lunge. Why the hell hadn’t he thought to have a gun on him?

“Hold on,” Warren said calmly. “I’m sure we can agree on something here.”

“We’ll throw the camper in as extra payment,” Amy said coolly.

“Okay, I’ll have to move it off the dock.”

“No.” Her voice was harsher than Paul had ever heard before.

“Look, lady…”

She stepped into the light, bringing the Walther out from behind her back as she did so. “Cast off,” she said to Gerd.

Warren laughed nervously, pushed his son. “Take the wheel. Madame here wants to leave.”

They were under way in a few minutes, chugging down the bay toward the open sea. “We didn’t stay long,” Paul muttered as he and Gerd watched the last lights of the shoreline slipping past.

“Long enough. We’ll have to watch them day and night now,” he added, indicating the cabin where the two Warrens were talking softly to each other.

“How long’s this trip going to take?”

“Two days,” Amy said, joining them. “It’s over six hundred miles. I don’t think they’ll give us any trouble, but it might be a good idea to throw the tommy guns overboard rather than have to carry them around.”

“Good idea,” Gerd said. “Let’s do it now.” He disappeared into the crew quarters, took a quick look at Kuznetsky, and returned with the three guns. The men in the wheelhouse had stopped talking, were watching with open mouths as he and Paul sent them arcing over the side.

“I’ll take first watch,” Paul said. “I’ll wake someone if I feel like collapsing.”

The others laid out blankets on either side of the foredeck, and Paul sat down with his back against the bow railing, his service revolver in his lap. Amy heard him and Gerd talking about someone called Burdenski, fell asleep wondering when they’d first met each other.

Twelve

Paul rearranged his legs to make himself more comfortable, tried to remember which of the stars was which. The sky must be very different this far south, he thought, because he couldn’t make head nor tail of it. Warren stood in the wheel-house a few yards away, both hands on the wheel, a pipe in his mouth. His son had bedded down somewhere in the stern.

He looked at Amy’s upturned, sleeping face, watched her hand brush something from her cheek, felt a lump form in his throat.

He forced his gaze back to the sky, made out the veil of the Milky Way draped across the heavens. What the hell had happened by the train? Gerd still hadn’t told him the full story. The image of Smith shooting the injured man in the back of the head kept flashing into his mind, and the feeling of revulsion that had accompanied it. Why? he wondered. Why was it worse to kill people in cold blood than to kill like an animal? The man had known nothing; it had been almost merciful. Because we are animals, he answered himself, and we fear machines.

He found himself staring at Amy again, remembering kissing those gray eyes, feeling those legs that now shifted under the blanket shifting then against his own… Damnit, that had been someone else, not this woman with a gun and a voice that could turn you to stone. But sleeping, she seemed…

He’d read the paper while Gerd had been looking for Warren back in Mon Louis. Russians outside Warsaw, Americans all over Normandy. It wouldn’t be long now. He might yet outlive the war. And then what? The farm? It would be like Russia again, a life dictated by the seasons. He never wanted to see snow again; he still had the snow dream, as Gerd did, and probably thousands of others: the beautiful white blanket, white velvet sewn with silver sequins, so lovely… suddenly thawing into mud and flesh, as if a face had been pulled away to reveal the pulsing muscles and pumping blood…

Stop it, he told himself, you’re not asleep now. He wouldn’t go back to the farm, the country. A city then, full of new buildings, living people, endless activity.

“Life in the country is just like life in the city — a hundred years earlier.” He could still hear Uncle Berndt say it, the droll inflection, the malicious twinkle in his eye. Well, his uncle had died in his beloved Bremen, had stubbornly sat in his fourth-floor office, probably with cigar in hand, as everyone else crouched in the shelters and the RAF opened their bomb-bay doors.

He wouldn’t mind losing the last hundred years. What had been happening in 1844? They’d been building railways, exploring Africa, looking at steel mills as if they were magic creations. People had been optimistic then, one way or another. Hadn’t Marx written the Communist Manifesto that year? Now there was optimism for you. And Germany hadn’t even existed then, not as a unified state. Perhaps it would be that way after the war: a hundred small states within a civilization, just getting on with existence, making watches and toys like the Swiss.

It was one in the morning, time for something to eat. He raised himself gingerly to his feet and walked back to the cabin.

The first thing Kuznetsky noticed was the movement of the floor, the easy rocking motion of a buoy on water. Either he was being rowed across the Hesperus or they’d made it to the Gulf. The latter, he guessed, wincing as the muscle movement of a smile shot up the side of his face. He carefully felt for the wound, found his head swathed in bandages.

Someone came in, a man to judge from the footfall. He closed his eyes and played unconscious as the visitor rummaged around at the far end of the cabin, then observed the man’s back through slitted eyes. It was the younger German, Paul. He closed his eyes again as the man walked back past him.

Alone again, he tried to remember what had happened. The train, the rush of feet in the darkness, the blow on the side of the head. How long ago had it been? At least twenty-four hours if they were now at sea, which they were — he could smell the salt.

So what was the German doing here? She must have brought them — no one else knew. But why? It couldn’t be betrayal or he wouldn’t still be alive. And if it wasn’t betrayal, then what had she told them? Christ, his head hurt. She’d have to do the thinking for a bit longer yet. He drifted back into sleep, the throbbing in his skull keeping time with the throbbing of the engines.

When Amy woke it was light, the first flash of the sun glinting on the eastern horizon. The boat was chugging through an empty sea, deep blue and calm, beneath an empty sky that seemed to lighten as she watched. She stood up and stretched, forgetting for a moment the wound in her side. The sharp pain pulled her up short, but the scab tissue stayed closed.

Gerd was huddled in the wheelhouse with Warren, who appeared to be explaining the controls. She joined them. Warren seemed almost asleep on his feet, but at least daylight gave his face a basic friendliness that she hadn’t suspected the night before. Perhaps she’d overreacted by pulling a gun on him, perhaps he really had only wanted to move the camper. He looked at her now with something approaching awe. He finished with Gerd and went to lie down in the stern next to his snoring son.

Gerd didn’t look much livelier. She made herself some coffee and asked him to go through what Warren had shown him. There was nothing to it.

“Go to sleep,” she said, “I’ll be fine.”

“Smith’s better,” he told her, “he’s sleeping now.”

“Good,” she said automatically, and watched him slump wearily down onto the foredeck beside the sleeping Paul. She supposed she was glad, but she’d never really doubted that he’d pull through. His sort always did.

She knew what they had to do with Paul and Gerd. It was obvious — they’d leave them in Cuba. There was no reason for them to go back to Europe, and after what she’d made up about their being Berlin’s sacrificial lambs, surely they wouldn’t feel duty-bound to carry on fighting the Führer’s war. It was simple. No need for Kuznetsky to kill them. No need for her to worry. Paul would soon be gone again, pushed safely back into the past.

She gripped the wheel, checked the compass heading, pushed her hair back from her eyes. Another thirty-six hours. She didn’t want to think about anything else, just to get it over, come through to the other side. There must be other things she could occupy her mind with… But there weren’t — everything in her life seemed to return to the same place, the same feelings, the same knot of experiences she couldn’t untie…

The rasp of a match being struck on the wheelhouse door spun her head round. It was Paul.

“Sorry,” he said, lighting the cigarette. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

She turned her face back to the sea. “It’s just weariness,” she said. There was no hostility in his face, which somehow made it worse. Go away, the voice in her head screamed.

“Amy,” he said quietly, almost gently, “I’ve something to tell you. It doesn’t make any difference now, but I want to tell you anyway.”

“Yes?” she said in a small voice, but her eyes still would not meet his.

“I never got your letters. I would have answered them, the way I felt then.”

“Then how—”

“They came to my family’s farm. My mother read them and destroyed them. She was afraid I’d leave, go back to America. I would have. But… my father had just died, and I don’t think she’d yet come out of shock. Anyway, I never saw them. She told me about your letters years later, in 1939. Thought she was dying, wanted to confess her sins. She didn’t die, of course. She’s still alive now as far as I know.” He stopped, and she could feel his gaze on her face. “I just wanted you to know,” he said.

“As you said, it doesn’t make any difference now.” Her voice felt like it belonged to someone else. “But thank you for telling me.”

“Well, life is full of might-have-beens.” His cheerfulness sounded forced. She turned to face him and saw, for the first time, the strain behind his eyes, the toll the last eleven years had taken. She wondered if he saw the same in her.

“You’ve hardly changed at all,” he replied to the unspoken question.

“Perhaps not on the outside.” She wanted this conversation to end, to have never been. “Smith’s better,” she said desperately.

“Wonderful,” he said with all the old irony. “He’ll be up and executing people before we know it.”

“It was necessary,” she said fiercely, “you know it was.”

“It always is,” he replied coldly.

“Anyway, you’ll have his company for only another thirty-six hours.”

“Why?”

“There’s no need for you and Gerd to go home, back to the war. Especially after the way Berlin’s treated you. And they’re expecting only two passengers on the freighter.”

He digested this information for a minute or more, lighting another cigarette. “Are you and Smith… more than partners?” he asked.

“No.” The question hurt. She wondered if it was meant to.

“And what are we supposed to do in Cuba — beg?”

She felt like screaming. “There’s more than fifteen hundred dollars left from the expenses,” she said with a calmness that seemed to tax every nerve in her body. “The war will be over in six months.”

Silence.

“Amy…”

“What?” she asked sharply.

He sighed, ground out the cigarette. “Nothing. I’ll talk it over with Gerd. Give me a turn at the wheel.” He almost pushed her aside, took the wheel, and stared straight ahead.

“South southeast,” she said, moving away toward the stern.

“Yes, Paul,” he muttered to himself after she’d gone, “it pays to know which way you’re going.”

She leaned against the stern rail for several minutes, the two snoring Warrens behind her, then ducked inside the cabin. Kuznetsky was awake, half out of the bunk. She pushed him back and sat down beside him. “Everything’s under control,” she told him in a whisper. “The Germans still think we’re all on the same side, and we’re leaving them in Cuba.”

“Well done,” he murmured. “Now tell me how.”

She explained what had happened, what she’d told them, then got him something to drink. “They’re good soldiers,” he said, apparently to himself. But before she could ask him what he meant, he’d drifted back into sleep.

The rest of the day dragged by, each of them taking turns at the wheel as the Lafayette carved its passage through the blue-green sea. By noon the heat was becoming unbearable, and with Warren’s help Paul and Gerd rigged up a makeshift awning on the foredeck. Amy spent the hours either sitting with the sleeping Kuznetsky or talking with Warren in the wheelhouse; even his inexhaustible stream of tall stories was preferable to another conversation with Paul.

He and Gerd had found a pack of cards and were playing under the awning, though neither of them looked as if he had his heart in the game. She studied Paul’s profile, remembering the very first time she’d seen him, playing chess in the lounge on the Bremen. She loved him — there was no harm in admitting it to herself. It didn’t make any difference now. There were more important things than love.

The sun went down in a golden burst, the twilight seemed over as soon as it came, the stars grew sharp in the sky. Amy went back to see Kuznetsky, found him sitting in the stern, the Walther beside him, staring into space. He smiled at her, a distant smile, said nothing. She had the fleeting impression that he was absorbing energy from the sea, like some mythical monster, somehow both benign and terrible, and in that moment felt almost resentful at how easy it seemed for him, how hard it was for mere mortals like herself.

The next day seemed to pass more quickly. The Lafayette, growing lighter as its engines consumed the drums of fuel, seemed to pick up speed, almost to skim across the water. Amy seemed more relaxed after their announcement, and Paul wondered if their reunion had caused as much turmoil in her heart as it had in his. He would soon know.

By noon the Cuban shore was visible on the horizon, and two hours later they were passing beneath the sullen remains of Morro Castle and threading their way into Havana harbour. The MV Balboa, flying the Swedish flag, was anchored in the reach, a squat freighter with three masts and an incongruously small funnel. Gerd hailed the lookout, who disappeared to find the captain. They tied up against the ship’s side.

“Well, this is good-bye,” Amy said to Gerd.

He looked over his shoulder at Paul, who was standing with his hands in his pockets in the stern, and received a nod. Kuznetsky was sitting on the wheelhouse steps staring into space.

“We’re coming with you,” Gerd said, loud enough for everyone to hear.

He saw what looked like panic flash across her face. “Why?” she asked, a hint of supplication in her voice. He looked at her, failed to catch her eyes. Was she that desperate to leave Paul behind? It seemed ridiculous.

“We’re going home,” he said gruffly, watching Kuznetsky, who was now fully alert, glancing first at him and then at Paul. “There’s plenty of room,” he continued, nodding at the bulk of the freighter towering above them.

Kuznetsky relaxed, leaned back on his elbows. “It’s up to you,” he said offhandedly. Life or death, he thought to himself. He felt sorry for Amy.

“Ahoy there,” a voice shouted from above. “I’ll throw down a ladder.”

“I’ll go,” Kuznetsky said as the rope ladder snaked down out of the sky. “Get the crates untied,” he said over his shoulder as he began to climb.

Amy watched the sling descend, watched Gerd maneuver the first crate into it and wave it back up. Why, why, why? The word kept echoing in her brain.

“You might as well give Warren the fifteen hundred dollars,” Paul said, suddenly appearing at her side.

“Yes, I might as well,” she said, and went to do so, feeling utterly numb.

The Balboa sailed on the evening tide, and it was hardly out of the harbour before Kuznetsky, sitting alone in the bow, was approached by one of the Swedish crew.

“Bjorn Sjoberg, Comrade,” the man said in a low voice. “Do you have any instructions for me?”

“None for now.”

“Who are the other two men?”

Kuznetsky grinned. “Two serving German officers.”

Sjoberg showed his astonishment. “How—”

“Don’t worry, I’ll deal with them when the time comes.” He looked out across the sea. “How will your captain react if they are suddenly missing, do you think?”

“Difficult to say.” Sjoberg had recovered his poise quickly, which encouraged Kuznetsky. “He won’t turn the ship around and search the Atlantic for them, but he might ask awkward questions. And he might arrange a police welcome in Gothenburg.”

“That won’t matter. You contacted Rodrigues?”

“Yes, he’ll have watched the loading.”

“Good. Moscow will take all the necessary steps.”

Thirteen

“You haven’t told Zhdanov, I suppose,” Fyedorova said with a malicious grin. “I seem to remember you told him there was no chance of a German atomic bomb.”

“There still isn’t,” Sheslakov snapped. “And no, I haven’t told him,” he added more thoughtfully.

“Intriguing though, isn’t it?” she said in a similar tone. “It’s hard to find any reasonable explanation for the presence of the two Germans.”

“There must be one. The question is, what will we do about it?”

“Nothing.”

“We do have a U-boat, you know. It was grounded in the Gulf of Finland in 1942. It’s been repaired and it’s ready for service.”

“What service?” she asked.

“Well… I’m considering sending the Swedish boat an escort, even perhaps transferring the uranium to the U-boat at sea.”

She swung her legs to the floor in the familiar move. “No,” she said earnestly. He waited for the explanation as she went through the usual process of putting her thoughts in order. “For one thing,” she said, “it’s too elaborate. You’re seducing yourself with your own trickery again. For another, and much more important, imagine Kuznetsky’s reaction to the sudden appearance of a U-boat. He’ll throw the stuff over the side.”

Sheslakov looked at her appreciatively. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

“Because you’re itching to interfere. Look, the Germans must still think it’s a German operation, so there’s no reason for them to do anything before the ship reaches Gothenburg. And even if they do discover something before that, what can they do? They can’t hijack a Swedish ship with the crew and our people against them. It’s much more likely that Kuznetsky will dispose of them before the ship reaches Sweden.”

“Nothing then,” he muttered.

“Just make sure Gothenburg is swarming with our people when the ship comes in, including a few German-speakers in case the need arises.”

“Right. And if necessary we can dispose of them when we dispose of the other two.”

“What?”

“I forgot to tell you.” He passed across a sheet of paper bearing the General Secretary’s signature.

“For reasons of state security,” she said impassively. “And us?” she asked him.

He shrugged. “A good question. I doubt whether we’ll be sent advance notification.”

The days passed, blue seas giving way to green, calm waters to the rolling ocean swell. On clear days the thin line of the American coast was visible on the western horizon, emphasizing the distance still to be traveled.

Of the four of them, only Paul showed any inclination to mix with the Swedish crew, and this, it seemed to Gerd, had more to do with avoiding the three of them than with any genuine desire to play nonstop poker in the galley. He understood his friend’s need, but felt unable to share his means of assuaging it.

For many days he was haunted by the expression on Amy’s face that afternoon in Havana harbour. It had seemed out of all proportion when measured against what he knew of her and Paul. He sensed that she was hiding something, but he had no idea what it might be.

As the Balboa plowed northward this absorption faded, giving way to another. Sitting in Schellenberg’s office all those weeks before the whole business — America, atomic bombs, trains, and U-boats — it had all seemed quite fantastic, a crazy game that the mad masters of his country had decided to play.

Now, with the crates sitting out there on the deck, a few weeks at most from Germany, he was experiencing a growing feeling of revulsion at the thought of delivering them. Did he want to be one of the men who’d brought Hitler a weapon like that? “Defeat will have its compensations,” he’d told the U-boat captain, and that had been an understatement. Leaving the U-boat that night had been like stepping out of the war, giving him his first chance in years to look at the whole ghastly mess from the outside. And he knew now, as clearly as he’d ever known anything, that a German defeat would be the best possible outcome for everyone, the German people included. A swift defeat moreover, while the country was still in one piece.

And here he was helping to prolong the war, perhaps even to change its outcome. He didn’t want that. Aboard the U-boat they’d heard Hitler’s account of the bomb plot against him, the chilling voice announcing the revenge to come. And though a part of him still, almost reflexively, condemned the conspirators for breaking their soldier’s oath, the rest of him, most of him, had never felt prouder to be a Wehrmacht officer.

God knows, they should have acted sooner. They’d been blind, completely blind, and once the war had begun their eyes had been looking outward, their minds full of that shameful intoxication with victory, with sheer motion really, right up to that dreadful month outside Moscow.

But that was the East, not the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Was it too late for treason? If he and Paul heaved the crates overboard, it wouldn’t make him very popular with Smith or Amy or the reception party that would be waiting in Sweden — in fact it might well prove to be their last meaningful act on earth. But as the days passed the vision of those crates sinking through the Atlantic swell seemed more and more like the only appropriate swan song for his war.

Kuznetsky spent his days sitting in the bow, hardly moving for hours save to light his cigarettes, staring ahead at the ocean still to be crossed. He had decided to kill the Germans on the penultimate night of the voyage. By then, he reasoned, he would be fit again, and there would only be around thirty-six hours for Torstensson to discover that two of his passengers had gone over the side. Twelve hours would have been better, but he didn’t completely trust Amy, and had told her it would be the final night. If by some chance her feelings got the better of her it would be too late.

Not that she’d shown any such inclinations when he’d told her. “You know they have to die,” he’d said on the occasion of their only conversation since leaving Havana.

“There’s no other way, is there?” she’d said simply, not even avoiding his eyes.

“There never has been. From the moment Sheslakov drew up the plan those two were dead, one way or another.”

She’d picked up on the name quick enough. “I’m slipping,” Kuznetsky had said, “no one should have known that name.”

“Do I have to die too now?” she’d asked with the same, almost unreal detachment.

“There’s a good chance that both of us will be considered unnecessary risks. You knew that, didn’t you?” And she had — he could tell by the expression in her eyes.

“It’s insane,” she’d said quietly, “but it makes perfect sense.”

Back in her cabin, its walls seeming to mock the dreadful openness of her mind, Amy sat on the floor, her back against the bunk, her legs splayed and straight like a little girl’s.

It did make sense: that was what seemed so terrifying. It made sense that Paul should die, should be killed, if not by her then at least with her active connivance. It made perfect sense. Richard had died for the same reason, and Joe, and the guards, and the boy who had appeared from nowhere. And Paul would die. To make it all work. If he didn’t, it wouldn’t work. Her feelings had no power to change the logic of it.

She wanted Paul, but only for herself. She wanted it all to work, for herself perhaps, but for others, too, and that was the difference. At times during the days at sea the distinction had escaped her, her motivation had been impossible to pin down in words, and she’d wondered whether she’d spent ten years trapped in an illusion. But she hadn’t.

The distinction was real, the struggle was real, existing outside as well as inside herself. She couldn’t release herself from it even if she wanted to. If Paul’s death was the price demanded, then she would pay. It wasn’t what you felt that counted, it was what you did.

She could remember the very day Aunt Rosa had said that to her mother. The two women had been arguing, as they often did, but this time with more anger than usual, and at the end of the argument they’d hugged each other. She had watched from the stairs, had rushed to join the hugging, not knowing what it was for but knowing that it was important.

Aunt Rosa. She had a picture of herself and Effi sitting in that same kitchen listening to one of Aunt Rosa’s “history lessons” as they prepared the evening meal. The man in the factory working all day and getting next to no money, the owner in his big house sitting around doing nothing, getting richer and richer. And how they should even feel sorry for the rich man, because all his riches were things, cold and empty things.

It must have been in the month following Aunt Rosa’s release from prison; she’d been weak, thinner than before, but her face at that time had seemed almost luminescent, like the pictures of the Virgin Mary in stained-glass windows. And she and Effi had sat there, sometimes not understanding what this wonderful woman was saying, but captivated by the face and the kindness and the simple intensity of belief. The world could be better, fairer, more human.

Fables for children perhaps. But they’d carried a truth she’d never been able to deny, because all the people she’d ever loved — all except Paul — had lived it, had worked and struggled and died for something beyond themselves. And their deaths had not been an illusion.

The Soviet Union might be; she didn’t know. But the alternative was not: an American world in which no one cared for anything but themselves and Aunt Rosa’s cold and empty things. If the material in the crates could prevent that, they were worth any cost.

Only a few more days. Kuznetsky would kill Paul and then he and she would die. It was fair and just.

There was no other way.

Kuznetsky looked at his watch as he inhaled the cigarette. It was almost two in the morning. He checked the Walther once more and sat for another ten minutes adjusting his eyes to the darkness.

“Thy kingdom come, the Party’s will be done,” he murmured to himself as he stood up. “On earth as it is at sea.”

The two Germans had taken separate cabins. Perhaps Paul had hoped to resume his affair with Amy, perhaps they were fed up with each other’s snoring. Either way, it simplified matters.

He stepped out onto the deck, found the light brighter than he’d anticipated. The sky was overcast, but every now and then the moon would find a thinner layer of cloud to shine through, bathing the freighter and the sea in a silvery glow. A few miles to the south, the dark bumpy line of the Shetland Islands divided the ocean from the sky.

The sea was choppy rather than rough, and not as noisy as he’d hoped. Still, Sjoberg had arranged for the helmsman that night to be a Party sympathizer, and he himself took the stern watch. No one would hear anything. He took the strangling cord from his pocket, stood outside Gerd’s door, and listened. Nothing. He eased the door open and slipped noiselessly inside, closing it behind him. There was no one in the bunk.

He went to the cabin next door, but it was empty too. A white square shone in the gloom, a note pinned to the mirror. He struck a match and read it: “Amy, Bremerhaven Bahnhof, 14 July.” For an instant Kuznetsky saw the expression of surprise on his own face in the mirror, an expression he’d forgotten he had.

He went back on deck, walked purposefully back toward the stern. Above the sound of the ship’s passage he heard a scraping noise, recognized it from the loading in Havana. They were moving the crates. He peered out around the corner of the ship’s superstructure, saw the silhouettes of the two Germans pushing a crate toward the starboard rail, and as the sky momentarily lightened, he caught a glimpse of a body, Sjoberg’s, lying motionless on the stern deck.

Somehow they’d found him out, and had decided to take the uranium to Germany on their own. He felt almost proud of them.

He worked his way nearer, dodging silently through the crates of general merchandise stacked amidships until he was no more than ten yards away. Raising the Walther with both arms extended, his feet splayed to compensate for the ship’s motion, he took aim at the back of Gerd’s head.

He couldn’t do it. Didn’t want to do it. They deserved to see his face as he pulled the trigger. Private executions were bad enough, and even then the victim could see his executioner.

As he stepped forward the moonlight suddenly brightened, giving his entrance an almost theatrical quality. The two Germans stiffened, then relaxed as they saw the gun, relaxed in the way he had once seen a Siberian tiger relax, with a casualness that obscured the alertness of their poise. They didn’t expect a chance, but were ready for one if it came.

“Where are you planning to go, gentlemen?” he asked softly.

“We’re sleepwalking,” Paul said, edging away from Gerd. Kuznetsky stopped him with a flick of his wrist.

“We decided the Führer’s genius didn’t require any assistance,” Gerd said sarcastically.

Kuznetsky smiled at his own misjudgment and admired them even more. “They’re not intended for your Führer,” he said. “Or Nazi Germany.”

A tiny voice inside him said, “Let them go,” but was instantly silenced by the familiar voice of duty.

“Somehow,” Gerd said, “that doesn’t seem as surprising as it should.”

Amy lay awake on the bunk watching the play of light on her cabin walls. Another twenty-four hours. What could be wrong in spending the last night with Paul? It would change nothing. In the dark there would be no deception, in the dark their love would be real. And the thought of it, of one more meeting, one last immersion in that other world, had held her together through the weeks at sea.

She climbed out of the bunk, wrapped a blanket around her shoulders, and left her cabin. The iron plate felt cold beneath her feet. She went to tap on Paul’s door but it was ajar, the cabin empty, the note shining on the mirror.

“Why?” Gerd asked, almost disinterestedly. His gun lay on the crate, hidden from Kuznetsky by a bag of food they’d brought for the journey. If only it wasn’t lying with the butt farthest away from him.

“Why?” Kuznetsky seemed to find the question ridiculous. “I serve a cause I believe in. Could you say the same?”

“No.”

“You’re not an American,” Paul said flatly.

“I was. I chose another country.” He still couldn’t pull the trigger. It wasn’t finished. “I was at Khimki,” he said. “And Povorovo and Lyalovo.”

They looked at him. Did they understand? Did he?

“My comrades, and my sense of duty, they died together in the snow,” Gerd recited slowly. “But they didn’t, did they? They should have, but they didn’t. Only the comrades died. And,” he said, looking straight at Kuznetsky, “the duty remains.”

“I’m sorry,” he heard himself say.

“Does Amy know?” Paul asked abruptly.

“No,” Kuznetsky lied.

Gerd lunged for the gun, but succeeded only in knocking it across the crate and onto the deck. The Walther coughed, pumping a bullet through the side of his head, and whirled in search of its other target. Paul scrambled for the fallen gun, realized he wouldn’t reach it, and looked up in time to see Kuznetsky topple forward as Amy’s bullet smashed through the back of his right knee.

Paul started forward, was stopped in his tracks by the gun aimed at his heart. “No,” she said, “no.”

He looked up at her, a woman with bare feet in a night-dress, a blanket hanging from one shoulder, a gun held rocksteady in both hands, tears pouring down her cheeks.

“What now?” Paul asked.

She tore herself away from his face, from the question, picked up Kuznetsky’s gun, then Gerd’s, and threw them over the side. Below her she saw the lifeboat bobbing on the waves.

She turned back to Paul, wiping the tears from her eyes. She had to know. “Do you love me?” she asked with a terrible simplicity.

He studied her face, thought for a moment she’d gone mad, but her eyes were shining with some other fire. Joy it looked like, and maybe that was madness. He smiled up at her, the old self-mocking smile. “Do you always point guns at men when you ask them that?”

“I’ve never asked another man that, Paul.”

He leaned over and closed his dead friend’s eyes, looked down at the deck. “Yes,” he said.

“Get in the lifeboat,” she said softly, lowering the gun.

“Am I going alone?”

“You know you’re not.” She turned to Kuznetsky, who was smiling, a smile she couldn’t begin to understand. “You don’t need me anymore,” she said.

“They will hunt you to the ends of the earth,” he said without malice. “But you know that.”

Amy had a momentary impulse to hug him, to wish him well, but she turned her back and followed Paul over the side.