The Odessa File

15

THE DOCTOR glanced with little favor at the visitor. Miller, who hated collars and ties and avoided wearing them whenever he could, had on a white nylon turtle necked sweater and over it a black pullover with a crew neck. Over the two pullovers he wore a black blazer. For hospital-visiting, the doctor’s expression clearly said, a collar and tie would be more appropriate.

“Her nephew?” he repeated with surprise. “Strange, I had no idea Fraulein Wendel had a nephew.”

“I believe I am her sole surviving relative,” said Miller. “Obviously I would have come far sooner, had I known of my aunt’s condition, but Herr Winzer only called me this morning to inform me, and asked me to visit her.”

“Herr Winzer is usually here himself about this hour,” observed the doctor.

“I understand he’s been called away,” said Miller blandly. “At least, that was what he told me on the phone this morning. He said he would not be back for some days, and asked me to visit in his stead.”

“Gone away? How extraordinary. How very odd.” The doctor paused for a moment, irresolute, and then added, “Would you excuse me Miller saw him go back from the entrance hall where they had been talking to a small office to one side. From the open door he heard snatches of conversation as the clinic doctor rang Winzer’s house.

“He has indeed gone away?… This morning?”

“Several days?… Oh, no, thank you, Fräulein, I just wanted to confirm that he will not be visiting this afternoon.” The doctor bung up and came back to the hall “Strange,” he murmured. “Herr Winzer has been here, as regular as clockwork, since Fräulein Wendel was brought in. Evidently a most devoted man. Well, he had better be quick if he wishes to see her again. She is very far gone, you know.” Miller looked sad. “So he told me on the phone,” he lied. “Poor Auntie.”

“As her relative, of course you may spend a short time with her. But I must warn you, she is hardly coherent, so I must ask you to be as brief as you can. Come this way-”

The doctor led Miller down several passages of what had evidently once been a large private house, now converted into a clinic, and stopped at a bedroom door.

“She’s in here,” he said and showed Miller in, closing the door after him. Miller heard his footsteps retreating down the passage.

The room was in semi-darkness and until his eyes had become accustomed to the dull light from the wintry afternoon that came through the gap in the slightly parted curtains, he failed to distinguish the shriveled form of the woman in the bed. She was raised on several pillows under her head and shoulders, but so pale was her nightgown and the face above it that she almost merged with the bedclothes. Her eyes were closed. Miller had few hopes of obtaining from her the likely bolt-hole of the vanished forger.

He whispered, “Fräulein Wendel,” and the eyelids Buttered and opened.

She stared at him without a trace of expression in the eyes, and Miller doubted if she could even see him. She closed her eyes again and began to mutter incoherently. He leaned closer to catch the phrases coming in a monotonous jumble from the gray lips. They meant very little. There was something about Rosenheim, which he knew to be a small village in Bavaria, perhaps the place she had been born. Something else about “all dressed in white, so pretty, so very pretty.” Then there was another jumble of words that meant nothing.

Miller leaned closer. “Fräulein Wendel, can you hear me?” The dying woman was still muttering. Miller caught the words “… each carrying a prayer book and a posy, all in white, so innocent then.” Miller frowned in thought before be understood. In delirium she was trying to recall her First Communion. Like himself, she had once been a practicing Roman Catholic.

“Can you bear me, Fräulein Wendel?” be repeated, without any hope of getting through. She opened her eyes again and stared at him, taking in the white band around his neck, the black material over his chest, and the black jacket. To his astonishment she closed her eyes again, and her flat torso heaved in spasm.

Miller was worried. He thought he had better call the doctor. Then two tears, one from each closed eye, rolled down the parchment cheeks.

On the coverlet one of her hands crawled slowly toward his wrist, where he had supported himself on the bed while leaning over her. With surprising strength, or simply desperation, her hand gripped his wrist possessively. Miller was about to detach himself and go, convinced she could tell him nothing about Klaus Winzer, when she said quite distinctly, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” For a few seconds Miller failed to understand, then a glance at his own chest-front made him realize the mistake the woman had made in the dim light. He debated for two minutes whether to leave her and go back to Hamburg, or whether to risk his soul and have one last try at locating Eduard Roschmann through the forger.

He leaned forward again. “My child, I am prepared to hear your confession.” Then she began to talk. In a tired, dull monotone, her life story came out. Once she had been a girl, born and brought up amid the fields and forests of Bavaria. Born in 1910, she remembered her father going away to the First War and returning three years later after the Armistice of 1918, angry and bitter against the men in Berlin who had capitulated.

She remembered the political turmoil of the early twenties and the attempted Putsch in nearby Munich when a crowd of men headed by a streetcorner rabblerouser called Adolf Hitler had tried to overthrow the government. Her father had later joined the man and his party, and by the time she was twenty-three the rabblerouser and his party had become the government of Germany. There were the summer outings of the Union of German Maidens, the secretarial job with the Gauleiter of Bavaria, and the dances with the handsome blond young men in their black uniforms.

But she had grown up ugly, tall, bony, and angular, with a face like a horse and hair along her upper lip.

Her mousy hair tied back in a bun, in heavy clothes and sensible shoes, she had realized in her late twenties there would be no marriage for her, as for the other girls in the village. By 1939 she had been posted, an embittered and hate-filled woman, as a wardress in a camp called Ravensbruck.

She told of the people she had beaten and clubbed, the days of power and cruelty in the camp in Brandenburg, the tears rolling quietly down her cheeks, her fingers gripping Miller’s wrist lest he should depart in disgust before she had done.

“And after the war?” he asked softly.

There had been years of wandering-abandoned by the SS, hunted by the Allies, working in kitchens as a scullery maid, washing dishes and sleeping in Salvation Army hostels. Then in 1950 she met Winzer staying in a hotel in Osnabdick while he looked for a house to buy. She had been a waitress. He bought his house, the little neuter man, and suggested she come and keep house for him.

“Is that all?” asked Miller when she stopped.

“Yes, Father.”

“My child, you know I cannot give you absolution if you have not confessed all your sins.”

“That is all, Father.”

Miller drew a deep breath. “And what about the forged passports? The ones he made for the SS men on the run?” She was silent for a while, and he feared she had passed into unconsciousness.

“You know about that, Father?”

“I know about it.”

“I did not make them,” she said.

“But you knew about them, about the work Klaus Winzer did.”

“Yes.” The word was a low whisper.

“He has gone now. He has gone away,” said Miller.

“No. Not gone. Not Klaus. He would not leave me. He will come back.”

“Do you know where he has gone?”

“No, Father.”

“Are you sure? Think, my child. He has been forced to run away. Where would he go?”

The emaciated head shook slowly against the pillow. “I don’t know, Father.

If they threaten him, he will use the file. He told me he would.” Miller started.

He looked down at the woman, her eyes now closed as if in sleep. “What file, my child?” They talked for another five minutes.

Then there was a soft tap on the door. Miller eased the woman’s hand off his wrist and rose to go.

“Father…” The voice was plaintive, pleading. He turned. She was staring at him, her eyes wide open.

“Bless me, Father.” The tone was imploring. Miller sighed. It was a mortal sin. He hoped somebody somewhere would understand. He raised his right hand and made the sign of the cross.

“In nomine Patris, et Fuu, et Spiritus Sancti, ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis.” The woman sighed deeply, closed her eyes, and passed into unconsciousness.

Outside in the passage, the doctor was waiting. “I really think that is long enough,” he said.

Miller nodded. “Yes, she is sleeping,” he said, and, after a glance around the door, the doctor escorted him back to the entrance hall.

“How long do you think she has?” asked Miller.

“Very difficult to say. Two days, maybe three. Not more. I’m very sorry.”

“Yes, well, thank you for letting me see her,” said Miller. The doctor held open the front door for him. “Oh, there is one last thing, Doctor. We are all Catholics in our family. She asked me for a priest. The last rites, you understand?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Will you see to it?”

“Certainly,” said the doctor. “I didn’t know. I’ll see to it this afternoon. Thank you for telling me. Good-by.”

It was late afternoon and dusk was turning into night when Miller drove back into the Theodor Heuss Platz and parked the Jaguar twenty yards from the hotel. He crossed the road and went up to his room.

Two floors above, Mackensen had watched his arrival. Taking his bomb in his suitcase, he descended to the foyer, paid his bill for the coming night, explaining that he would be leaving very early in the morning, and went out to his car. He maneuvered it into a place where he could watch the hotel entrance and the Jaguar, and settled down to another wait.

There were still too many people in the area for him to go to work on the Jaguar, and Miller might come out of the hotel any second. If he drove off before the bomb could be planted, Mackensen would take him on the open highway, several miles from Osnabruck, and steal the document case. If Miller slept in the hotel, Mackensen would plant the bomb in the small hours, when no one was about.

In his room, Miller was racking his brains for a name. He could see the man’s face, but the name still escaped him.

It had been just before Christmas 1961. He had been in the press box in the Hamburg provincial court, waiting for a case in which he was interested. He had caught the tail end of the preceding case. There was a little ferret of a man standing in the dock, and defending counsel was asking for leniency, pointing out that it was just before the Christmas period and his client had a wife and five children.

Miller remembered glancing at the well of the court, and noting the tired, harassed face of the convicted man’s wife. She had covered her face with her hands in utter despair when the judge, explaining the sentence would have been longer but for the defending counsel’s plea for leniency, sentenced the man to eighteen months in jail. The prosecution had described the prisoner as one of the most skillful safecrackers in Hamburg.

Two weeks later, Miller had been in a bar not two hundred yards from the Reeperbahn, having a Christmas drink with some of his underworld contacts.

He was flush with money, having been paid for a big picture feature that day. There was a woman scrubbing the floor at the far end. He had recognized the worried face of the wife of the cracksman who had been sentenced two weeks earlier. In a fit of generosity which he regretted the next morning, he had pushed a 100-mark note into her apron pocket and left.

In January he had got a letter from Hamburg Jail. It was hardly literate.

The woman must have asked the barman for his name and told her husband. The letter had been sent to a magazine for which he sometimes worked. They had passed it on to him.

Dear Herr Miller, My wife wrote me about what you done just before Christmas. I never met you, and I don’t know why you done it, but I want to thank you very much.

You are a real good guy. The money helped Marta and the kids have a real good time over Christmas and the New Year. If ever I can do you a good turn back, just let me know. Yours with respects…

But what was the name on the bottom of that letter? Koppel. That was it.

Viktor Koppel. Praying that he had not got himself back inside prison again, Miller took out his little book of contacts’ names and telephone numbers, dragged the hotel telephone onto his knees, and started calling friends in the underworld of Hamburg.

He found Koppel at half past seven. As it was a Friday evening, be was in a bar with a crowd of friends, and Miller could hear the jukebox in the background. It was playing the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” which had almost driven him mad that winter, so frequently had it been played.

With a little prompting, Koppel remembered him, and the present be had given to Marta two years earlier. Koppel had evidently had a few drinks.

“Very nice of you that was, Herr Miller, very nice thing to do.”

“Look, you wrote me from prison saying if there was ever anything you could do for me, you’d do it. Remember?”

Koppel’s voice was wary. “Yeah, I remember.”

“Well, I need a bit of help. Not much. Can you help me out?” said Miller.

The man in Hamburg was still wary. “I ain’t got much on me, Herr Miller.”

“I don’t want a loan,” said Miller. “I want to pay you for a job. Just a small one.”

Koppel’s voice was full of relief. “Oh, I see, yes, sure. Where are you?”

Miller gave him his instructions. “Just get down to Hamburg station and grab the first train to Osnabruck. I’ll meet you at the station. One last thing: bring your working tools with you.”

“Now look, Herr Miller, I don’t work off my turf. I don’t know about Osnabruck.” Miller dropped into the Hamburg slang. “It’s a walkover, Koppel. Empty, owner gone away, and a load of gear inside. I’ve cased it, and there’s no problem. You can be back in Hamburg for breakfast, with a bagful of loot and no questions asked. The man will be away for a week. You can unload the stuff before he’s back, and the cops down here will think it was a local job.”

“What about my train fare?” asked Koppel.

“I’ll give it to you when you get here. There’s a train at nine out of Hamburg. You’ve got an hour. So get moving.” Koppel sighed deeply. “All right, I’ll be on the train.” Miller hung up, asked the hotel switchboard operator to call him at eleven, and dozed off.

Outside, Mackensen continued his lonely vigil. He decided to start on the Jaguar at midnight if Miller had not emerged.

But Miller walked out of the hotel at quarter past eleven, crossed the square, and entered the station.

Mackensen was surprised. He climbed out of the Mercedes and went to look through the entrance hall.

Miller was on the platform, standing waiting for a train.

“What’s the next train from this platform?” Mackensen asked a porter.

“Eleven thirty-three to Munster,” said the porter.

Mackensen wondered idly why Miller should want to take a train when he had a car. Still puzzled, he returned to his Mercedes and resumed his wait.

At eleven thirty-five his problem was solved. Miller came back out of the station, accompanied by a small, shabby man carrying a black leather bag.

They were in deep conversation. Mackensen swore. The last thing he wanted was for Miller to drive off in the Jaguar with company. That would complicate the killing to come. To his relief, the pair approached a waiting taxi, climbed in, and drove off. He decided to give them twenty minutes and then start on the Jaguar, still parked twenty yards away from him.

At midnight the square was almost empty. Mackensen slipped out of his car, carrying a pencil-flashlight and three small tools, crossed to the Jaguar, cast a glance around, and slid underneath it.

Amid the mud and snow-slush of the square, his suit, he knew, would be wet and filthy within seconds.

That was the least of his worries. Using the flashlight beneath the front end of the Jaguar, he located the locking switch for the hood. It took him twenty minutes to ease it free.

The hood jumped upward an inch when the catch was released. Simple pressure from on top would relock it when he had finished. At least he had no need to break into the car to release the catch from inside.

He went back to the Mercedes and brought the bomb over to the sports car.

A man working under the hood of a car attracts little or no attention.

Passers-by assume he is tinkering with his own car.

Using the binding wire and the pliers, he lashed the explosive charge to the inside of the engine compartment, fixing it to the wall directly in front of the driving position. It would be barely three feet from Miller’s chest when it went off. The trigger mechanism, connected to the main charge by two wires eight feet long, he lowered through the engine area to the ground beneath.

Sliding back under the car, he examined the front suspension by the light of his flashlight. He found the place he needed within five minutes and tightly wired the rear end of the trigger to a handy bracing-bar.

The open jaws of the trigger, sheathed in rubber and held apart by the glass bulb, he jammed between two of the coils of the stout spring that formed the front nearside suspension.

When it was firmly in place, unable to be shaken free by normal jolting, he came back out from under.

He estimated the first time the car hit a bump or a normal pothole at speed, the retracting suspension on the front nearside wheel would force the open jaws of the trigger together, crushing the frail glass bulb that separated them and make contact between the two lengths of electrically charged hacksaw blade.

When that happened, Miller and his incriminating documents would be blown to pieces.

Finally Mackensen gathered up the slack in the wires connecting the charge and the trigger, made a neat loop of them, and taped them out of the way at the side of the engine compartment, so they would not trail on the ground and be rubbed through by abrasion against the road surface.

This done, be closed the hood and snapped it shut. Then he returned to the back seat of the Mercedes, curled up, and dozed. He had done, he thought, a good night’s work.

Miller ordered the taxi-driver to take them to the Saarplatz, paid him, and dismissed him. Koppel had had the good sense to keep his mouth shut during the ride, and it was only when the taxi was disappearing back into town that he opened it again.

“I hope you know what you’re doing, Herr Miller. I mean, it’s strange you being on a caper like this, you being a reporter.”

“Koppel, there’s no need to worry. What I’m after is a bunch of documents kept in a safe inside the house. I’ll take them. You get anything else there is on hand. Okay?”

“Well, since it’s you, all right. Let’s get it over with.”

“There’s one last thing. The place has a live-in maid,” said Miller.

“You said it was empty,” protested Koppel. “If she comes down, I’ll split. I don’t want no part of violence.”

“We’ll wait until two in the morning. She’ll be fast asleep.” They walked the mile to Winzer’s house, cast a quick look up and down the road, and darted through the gate. To avoid the gravel, both men walked up the grass edge along the driveway, then crossed the lawn to hide in the rhododendron bushes facing the windows of what looked like the study.

Koppel, moving like a furtive little animal through the undergrowth, made a tour of the house, leaving Miller to watch the bag of tools. When he came back he whispered, “The maid’s still got her light on.

Window at the back under the eaves.” Not daring to smoke, they sat for an hour, shivering beneath the fat evergreen leaves of the bushes. At one in the morning Koppel made another tour and reported the girl’s bedroom light was out.

They sat for another ninety minutes before Koppel squeezed Miller’s wrist, took his bag, and padded across the stretch of moonlight on the lawn toward the study windows. Somewhere down the road a dog barked, and farther away a car tire squealed as a motorist headed home.

Fortunately for them, the area beneath the study windows was in shadow, the moon not having come around the side of the house. Koppel flicked on a pencil-flashlight and ran it around the window frame, then along the bar dividing the upper and lower sections. There was a good burglar-proof window catch but no alarm system. He opened his bag and bent over it for a second, straightening up with a roll of sticky tape, a suction pad on a stick, a diamond-tipped glass-cutter like a fountain pen, and a rubber hammer.

With remarkable skill he cut a perfect circle on the surface of the glass just below the window catch. For double insurance he taped two lengths of sticky tape across the disk, with the ends of each tape pressed to the uncut section of window. Between the tapes be pressed the sucker, well licked, so that a small area of glass was visible on either side of it.

Using the rubber hammer, holding the stick from the sucker in his left hand, he gave the exposed area of the cut circle of window pane a sharp tap.

At the second tap there was a crack, and the disk fell inward toward the room. They both paused and waited for reaction, but no one had heard the sound. Still gripping the end of the sucker, to which the glass disk was attached inside the window, Koppel ripped away the two pieces of sticky tape. Glancing through the window, he spotted a thick rug five feet away, and with a flick of the wrist tossed the disk of glass and the sucker inward, so they fell soundlessly on the rug.

Reaching through the hole, he unscrewed the burglar catch and eased up the lower window. He was over it as nimbly as a fly, and Miller followed more cautiously. The room was pitch-black by contrast with the moonlight on the lawn, but Koppel seemed to be able to see perfectly well.

He whispered, “Keep still,” to Miller, who froze, while the burglar quietly closed the window and drew the curtains across it. He drifted through the room, avoiding the furniture by instinct, closed the door that led to the passage, and only then flicked on his flashlight.

It swept around the room, picking out a desk, a telephone, a wall of bookshelves, and a deep armchair, and finally settled on a handsome fireplace with a large surround of red brick.

He materialized at Miller’s side. “This must be the study. There can’t be two rooms like this, and two brick fireplaces, in one house. Where’s the lever that opens the brickwork?”

“I don’t know,” muttered Miller back, imitating the low murmur of the burglar, who had learned the hard way that a murmur is far more difficult to detect than a whisper. “You’ll have to find it.”

“God. It could take ages,” said Koppel.

He sat Miller in the chair, warning him to keep his string-backed driving gloves on at all times. Taking his bag, Koppel went over to the fireplace, slipped a headband around his head, and fixed the flashlight into a bracket so that it pointed forward. Inch by inch, he went over the brickwork, feeling with sensitive fingers for bumps or lugs, indentations or hollow areas. Abandoning this when he had covered it all, he started again with a palette knife probing for cracks. He found it at half past three.

The knife blade slipped into a crack between two bricks, and there was a low click. A section of bricks, two feet by two feet in size, swung an inch outward. So skillfully had the work been done that no naked eye could spot the square area among the rest of the Surround.

Koppel eased the door open; it was hinged on the left side by silent steel hinges. The four-square-foot area of brickwork was set in a steel tray that formed a door. Behind the door, the thin beam of Koppel’s headlamp picked out the front of a small wall safe.

He kept the light on but slipped a stethoscope around his neck and fitted the earpieces. After five minutes spent gazing at the four-disk combination lock, he held the listening end where he judged the tumblers would be and began to ease the first ring through its combinations.

Miller, from his seat ten feet away, gazed at the work and became increasingly nervous. Koppel, by contrast, was completely calm, absorbed in his work. Apart from this, he knew that both men were unlikely to cause anyone to investigate the study so long as they remained completely immobile. The entry, the moving about, and the exit were the danger periods.

It took him forty minutes until the last tumbler fell over. Gently he eased the safe door back and turned to Miller, the beam from his head darting over a table containing a pair of silver candlesticks and a heavy old snuffbox.

Without a word, Miller rose and went to join Koppel by the safe. He reached up, took the light from Koppel’s head bracket, and used it to probe the interior. There were several bundles of banknotes, which he pulled out and passed to the grateful burglar, who uttered a low whistle that carried no more than several feet.

The upper shelf in the safe contained only one object, a buff manila folder. Miller pulled it out, flicked it open, and riffled through the sheets inside. There were about forty of them. Each contained a photograph and several lines of type. At the eighteenth he paused and said out loud, “Good God.”

“Quiet,” muttered Koppel with urgency.

Miller closed the file, handed the flashlight back to Koppel, and said, “Close it.”

Koppel slid the door back into place and twirled the dial not merely until the door was locked, but until the figures were in the same order in which he had found them. When he was done he eased the brickwork across the area and pressed it firmly home. It gave another soft click and locked into place.

He had stuffed the banknotes in his pocket, the cash proceeds of Winzer’s last four passports, and he remained only to lay the candlesticks and snuffbox gently into his black leather bag.

After switching off his light, he led Miller by the arm to the window, slipped the curtains back to right and left, and took a good look out through the glass. The lawn was deserted, and the moon had gone behind cloud. Koppel eased up the window, hopped over it, bag and all, and waited for Miller to join him. He pulled the window down and headed for the shrubbery, followed by the reporter, who had stuffed the file inside his polo-necked sweater.

They kept to the bushes until close to the gate, then emerged onto the road. Miller had an urge to run.

“Walk slowly,” said Koppel in his normal talking voice. “Just walk and talk like we were coming home from a party.” It was three miles back to the railway station, and already it was close to five o’clock. The streets were not wholly deserted, although it was Saturday, for the German working man rises early to go about his business.

They made it to the station without being stopped and questioned.

There was no ‘ train to Hamburg before seven, but Koppel said he would be glad to wait in the cafe and warm himself with coffee and a double whisky.

“A very nice little job, Herr Miller,” he said. “I hope you got what you wanted.”

“Oh, yes, I got it all right,” said Miller.

“Well, mum’s the word. By-by, Herr Miller.” The little burglar nodded and strolled toward the station cafe. Miller turned back and crossed the square to the hotel, unaware of the red-rimmed eyes that watched him from the back of a parked Mercedes.

It was too early to make the inquiries Miller needed to make, so he allowed himself three hours of sleep and asked to be waked at nine-thirty.

The phone shrilled at the exact hour, and he ordered coffee and rolls, which arrived just as he bad finished a piping-hot shower. Over coffee he sat and studied the file of papers, recognizing about half a dozen of the faces but none of the names. The names, he had to tell himself, were meaningless.

Sheet eighteen was the one he came back to. The man was older, the hair longer, a sporting mustache covered the upper lip. But the ears were the same-the part of a face that is more individual to each owner than any other feature, yet which are always overlooked. The narrow nostrils were the same, the tilt of the head, the pale eyes.

The name was a common one; what fixed his attention was the address. From the postal district, it had to be the center of the city, and that would probably mean an apartment.

Just before ten o’clock he called the telephone Information department of the city named on the sheet of paper. He asked for the number of the superintendent for the apartment house at that address. It was a gamble, and it came off. It was an apartment house, and an expensive one.

He called the superintendent and explained that he had repeatedly called one of the tenants but could get no reply, which was odd because he had specifically been asked to call the man at that hour. Could the superintendent help him? Was the phone out of order?

The man at the other end was most helpful. The Herr Direktor would probably be at the factory, or perhaps at his weekend house in the country.

What factory was that? Why, his own, of course. The radio factory. Oh, yes, of course, how stupid of me, said Miller and rang off. Information gave him the number of the factory. The girl who answered passed him to the boss’s secretary, who told the caller the Herr Direktor was spending the weekend at his country house and would be back on Monday morning. The private house number was not to be divulged from the factory. A question of privacy.

Miller thanked her and hung up.

The man who finally gave him the private number and address of the owner of the radio factory was an old contact, the industrial and business affairs correspondent of a large newspaper in Hamburg. He had the man’s address in his private address book.

Miller sat and stared at the face of Roschmann, the new name, and the private address scribbled in his notebook. Now he remembered hearing of the man before, an industrialist from the Ruhr; he had even seen the radios in the stores.

He took out his map of Germany and located the country villa on its private estate, or at least the area of villages where it was situated.

It was past twelve o’clock when he packed his bags, descended to the hall, and settled his bill. He was famished, so he went into the hotel dining room, taking only his document case, and treated himself to a large steak.

Over his meal he decided to drive the last section of the chase that afternoon and confront his target the next morning. He still had the slip of paper with the private telephone number of the lawyer with the Z Commission in Ludwigsburg. He could have called him then, but he wanted, was determined, to face Roschmann first. He feared if he tried that evening, the lawyer might not be at home when he called him to ask for a squad of policemen within thirty minutes. Sunday morning would be fine, just fine.

It was nearly two when he finally emerged, stowed his suitcase in the trunk of the Jaguar, tossed the document case onto the passenger seat, and climbed behind the wheel.

He failed to notice the Mercedes that tailed him to the edge of Osnabruck.

The car behind him came onto the main autobahn after him, paused for a few seconds as the Jaguar accelerated fast down the southbound lane-then left the main road twenty yards farther on and drove back into town.

From a telephone booth by the roadside, Mackensen phoned the Werwolf in Nuremberg.

“He’s on his way,” he told his superior. “I just left him going down the southbound lane like a bat out of hell.”

“Is your device accompanying him?” Mackensen grinned. “Right. Fixed to the front nearside suspension. Within fifty miles he’ll be in pieces you couldn’t identify.”

“Excellent,” purred the man in Nuremberg. “You must be tired, my dear Kamerad. Go back into town and get some sleep.” Mackensen needed no second bidding. He had not slept a full night since Wednesday.

Miller made those fifty miles, and another hundred. For Mackensen had overlooked one thing. His trigger device would certainly have detonated quickly if it had been jammed into the cushion suspension system of a Continental saloon car. But the Jaguar was a British sports car, with a far harder suspension system.

As it tore down the autobahn toward Frankfurt, the bumping caused the heavy springs above the front wheels to retract slightly, crushing the small bulb between the jaws of the bomb trigger to fragments of glass. But the electrically charged lengths of steel failed to touch each other. On the hard bumps they flickered to within a millimeter of each other before springing apart.

Unaware of how close to death he was, Miller made the trip past Munster, Dortmund, Wetzlar, and Bad Homburg to Frankfurt in just under three hours, then turned off the ring road toward Kenigstein and the wild, snow-thick forests of the Taunus Mountains.