Frederick Forsyth - The Odessa File

On the way over, Miller noticed a coffee machine and took a steaming cup into the phone booth with him. He flicked through the phone book for OsnabrUck. There were several Winzers, but only one Klaus. The name was repeated twice. Against the first entry was the word "Printer." The second Klaus Winzer had the abbreviation "res." for residence against it.It was nine-twenty. Working hours. He rang the printing plant.The man who answered was evidently the foreman. "I'm sorry, he's not in yet," said the voice. "Usually he's here at nine sharp. He'll no doubt be along soon. Call back in half an hour." Miller thanked him and considered dialing the house. Better not. If Winzer was at home, Miller wanted him personally. He noted the address and left the booth."Where's Westerberg?" he asked the pump attendant as he paid for the gas, noting that he had only 500 marks left of his savings. The boy nodded across to the north side of the road."That's it. The posh suburb. %ere all the rich people live.Miller bought a town plan as well and traced the street he wanted. It was barely ten minutes away.The house was obviously prosperous, and the whole area spoke of well-to-do professional people living in comfortable surroundings. He left the Jaguar at the end of the drive and walked to the front door.The maid who answered it was in her late teens and very pretty. She smiled brightly at him."Good morning. I've come to see Herr Winzer," he told her."Oooh, he's left, Sir. You just missed him by about twenty minutes." Miller recovered. Doubtless Winzer was on his way to the printing plant and had been held up."Oh, what a pity. I'd hoped to catch him before he went to work," he said."He hasn't gone to work, Sir. Not this morning. He's gone off on vacation," replied the girl helpfully.Miller fought down a rising feeling of panic. "Vacation? That's odd at this time of year. Besides"---he invented quickly----~'we had an appointment this morning. He asked me to come here especially." "Oh, what a shame," said the girl, evidently distressed. "He went off very suddenly. He got this phone call in the library; then he went upstairs.'Barbara,' he said -that's my name-'Barbara, I'm going on a vacation in Austria. I ust for a week,' he said. Well, I hadn't heard any plans for a vacation. He told me to call the plant and say he's not coming in for a week. Then off he went. That's not like Herr Winzer at all. He's usually so quiet." Inside Miller, the hope began to die. "Did he say where he was going?" he asked."No. Nothing. Just said he was going to the Austrian Alps."No forwarding address? No way of getting in touch with him?" "No, that's what's so strange. I mean, what about the printing plant? I just called them before you came. They were very surprised, with all the orders they had to be completed." Miller calculated fast. Winzer had a half-hour's start on him. Driving at eighty miles an hour, he would have covered forty miles. Miller could keep up a hundred, overtaking at twenty miles an hour. That would mean two hours before he saw the tail of Winzer's car. Too long. Winzer could be anywhere in two hours. Besides, there was no proof he was heading south to Austria."Then could I speak to Frau Winzer, please?" he asked.Barbara giggled and looked at him archly. "There isn't any Frau Winzer," she said. "Don~t you know Herr Winzer at all?" "No, I never met him." "Well, he's not the marrying kind, really. I mean very nice, but not really interested in women, if you know what I mean." "So he lives here alone, then?" "Well, except for me, I mean, I live in. It's quite safe. From that point of view." She giggled."I see. Thank you," said Miller and turned to go."You're welcome," said the girl, and watched him go down the drive and climb into the Jaguar, which had already caught her attention. What with Herr Winzer being away, she wondered if she might be able to ask a nice young man home for the night before her employer got back. She watched the Jaguar drive away with a roar of exhaust, sighed for what might have been, and closed the door.Miller felt the weariness creeping over him, accentuated by the last and, so far as he was concerned, final disappointment. He surmised Bayer had wriggled free from his bonds and used the hotel telephone in Stuttgart to call Winzer and warn. him. He had got so close, fifteen minutes from his target, and almost made it. Now he felt only the need for sleep.He drove past the medieval wall of the old city, followed the map to the Theodor Heuss Platz, parked the Jaguar in front of the station, and checked into the Hohenzollern Hotel across the square.He was lucky; they had a room available at once, so he went upstairs, undressed, and lay on the bed. There was something nagging in the back of his mind, some point he had not covered, some tiny detail of a question he had left unasked. It was still unsolved when he fell asleep at half past ten.Mackensen made it to the center of OsnabrUck at half past one. On the way into town he had checked the house in Westerberg, but there was no sign of a Jaguar. He wanted to call the Werwolf before he went there, in case there was more news.By chance the post office in OsnabrUck flanks one side of the Theodor Heuss Platz. A whole comer and one side of the square is taken up by the main railway station, and a third side is occupied by the Hohenzollern Hotel. As Mackensen parked by the post office, his face split in a grin.The Jaguar he sought was in front of the station.Ile Werwolf was in a better mood. "It's all right. Panic over for the moment," he told the killer. "I reached the forger in time, and he got out of town. I just phoned his house again. It must have been the maid who answered. She told me her employer had left barely twenty minutes before a young man with a black sports car came inquiring after him." "I've got some news too," said Mackensen. "The Jaguar is parked right here on the square in front of me. Chances are he's sleeping it off in the hotel. I can take him right here III the hotel room. I'll use the silencer." "Hold it, don't be in too much of a hurry," warned the Werwolf. "I've been thinking. For one thing, he must not get it inside Osnabriick town. The maid has seen him and his car.She would probably report to the police. That would bring attention to our forger, and he's the panicking kind. I can't have him involved. The maid's testimony would cast a lot of suspicion on him. First he gets a phone call, then he dashes out and vanishes, then a young man calls to see him, then the man is shot in a hotel room. It's too much." Mackensen's brow was furrowed. "You're right," he said at length. "I'll have to take him when he leaves." "He'll probably stick around for a few hours, checking for a lead on the forger. He won't get one. There's one other thing. Does Miller carry a document case?" "Yes," said Mackensen. "He had it with him as he left the cabaret last night. And took it with him when he went back to his hotel room." "So why not leave it locked in the trunk of his car? Why not in his hotel room? Because iVs important to him. You follow me?" "Yes," said Mackensen."The point is," said the Werwolf, "he has now seen me and knows my name and address. He knows of the connection with Bayer and the forger. And reporters write things down. That document case is now vital. Even if Miller dies, the case must not fall into the hands of the police." "I've got you. You want the case as well?" "Either get it or destroy it," said the voice from Nuremberg.Mackensen thought for a moment. "The best way to do both would be for me to plant a bomb in the car. Linked to the suspension, so it will detonate when he hits a bump at high speed on the autobahn." "Excellent," said the Werwolf. "Will the case be destroyed?" "With the bomb I have in mind, the car, Miller, and the case will go up in flames and be completely gutted. Moreover, at high speed it looks like an accident. The gas tank exploded, the witnesses will say. What a pity.""Can you do it?" asked the Werwolf.Mackensen grinned. The killing kit in the trunk of his car was an assassin's dream. It included nearly a pound of plastic explosive and two electric detonators."Sure," he growled, "no problem. But to get at the car I'll have to wait until dark." He stopped talking, gazed out of the window of the post office, and barked into the phone, "Call you back." He called back in five minutes. "Sorry about that. I just saw Miller, attach6 case in hand, climbing into his car. He drove off. I checked the hotel, and he's registered there all right. He's left his traveling bags, so he'll be back. No panic, I'll get on with the bomb and plant it tonight."Miller had waked up just before one, feeling refreshed and somewhat elated. In sleeping he had remembered what was troubling him. He drove back to Winzer's house.The maid was plainly pleased to see him. "Hello. You again?" She beamed."I was just passing on my way back home," said Miller, "and I wondered, how long have you been in service here?" "Oh, about ten months. Why?" "Well, with Herr Winzer not being the marrying kind, and you being so young, who looked after him before you came?" "Oh, I see what you mean. His housekeeper, Frliulein Wendel." "Where is she now?" "Oh, in the hospital. I'm afraid she's dying. Cancer of the breast, you know, Terrible thing. That's what makes it so funny that Herr Winzer dashed off like that. He goes to visit her every day. He's devoted to her. Not that they ever-well, you know-did anything, but she was with him for a long time, since nineteen fifty, I think, and he thinks the world of her. He's always saying to me, 'FrAulein Wendel did it this way,' and so on." "What hospital is she in?" asked Miller."I forget now. No, wait a minute. It's on the telephone notepad. I'll get it." She was back in two minutes and gave him the name of the clinic, an exclusive private sanatorium just beyond the outskirts of the town.Finding his way by the map, Miller presented himself at the clinic just after three in the afternoon.Mackensen spent the early afternoon buying the ingredients for his bomb."The secret of sabotage," his instructor had once told him, "is to keep the requirements simple. The sort of thing you can buy in any shop." From a hardware store he bought a soldering iron and a small stick of solder; a roll of black insulating tape; a yard of thin wire and a pair of cutters; a onefoot hacksaw blade and a tube of instant glue. In an electrician's he acquired a nine-volt transistor battery; a smaU bulb, one inch in diameter; and two lengths of fine single-strand, five-amp plastic-coated wire, each three yards long, one colored red and the other blue. He was a neat man and liked to keep positive and negative terminals distinct. A stationer's supplied him with five erasers of the large land, one inch wide, two inches long, and a quarter of an inch thick. In a drugstore he bought two p of condoms, each containing three rubber sheaths, and from a high-class grocer he got a canister of fine tea. It was a 250-gram can with a tight-fitting lid. As a good workman, he hated the idea of his explosive getting wet, and the tea can's lid would keep out the air, let alone the moisture- with his purchases made, he took a room in the Hohenzollern Hotel overlooking the square, so that he could keep an eye on the parking area, to which he was certain Miller would return, while he worked.Before entering the hotel, he took from his trunk half a pound of the plastic explosive, squashy stuff like children's plasticene, and one of the electric detonatOM Seated at the table in front of the window. keeping half an eye on the square, with a pot of strong black coffee to stave off his tiredness, he went to work.It was a simple bomb he made. First he emptied the tea down the toilet and kept the can only. In the fid he jabbed a hole with the handle of the wire clippers. He took the nine-foot length of red wire and cut a ten-inch length off it.One end of this short length of red-coated wire he spot-soldered to the positive terminal of the battery. To the negative terminal he soldered one end of the long, blue-colored wire. To ensure that these wires never touched each other, he drew one down each side of the battery and whipped both wires and battery together with insulating tape.The other end of the short red wire was twirled around the contact point on the detonator. To the same contact point was fixed one end of the other, eight-foot piece of red wire.He deposited the battery and its wires in the base of the square tea can, embedded the detonator deep into the plastic explosive, and smoothed the explosive into the can on top of the battery until the can was full.A near-circuit had now been set up. A wire went from the battery to the detonator Another went from the detonator to nowhere, its bare end in space. From the battery, another wire went to nowhere, its bare end in space But when these two exposed ends, one of the cight-foot-long red wire, the other of the blue wire, touched each other, the circuit would be complete. IMe charge from the battery would fire the detonator, which would explode with a sharp cracL But the crack would be lost in the roar as the plastic went off, enough to demofish two or three of the hoters bedrooms.The remaining device was the trigger mechanism For this he wrapped his hands in handkerchiefs and bent the hacksaw blade until it snapped in the middle, leaving lum with two six-mch lengths, each one perforat-d at one end by the small hoic dint usually fixes a hacimaw blade to its frame.He piled the five erasers one on top of another so that together they made a block of rubber. Using this to separate the halves of the blade, he bound them along the upper and lower side of the block of rubber, so that the six-inch lengths of steel stuck out, parallel to each other and one and a quarter inches apart. In outline they looked rather like the jaws of a crocodile. The rubber block was at one end of the lengths of steel, so four inches of the blades were separated only by air. To make sure there was a little more resistance than air to prevent their touching, Mackensen lodged the light bulb between the open jaws, fixing it in place with a generous blob of glue. Glass does not conduct electricity.He was almost ready. He threaded the two lengths of wire, one red and one blue, which protruded from the can of explosive through the hole in the lid and replaced the lid on the can, pushing it firmly back into place.Of the two pieces of wire, be soldered the end of 6ne to the upper hacksaw blade, the other to the lower blade. The bomb was now live.Should the trigger ever be trodden on, or subjected to sudden pressure, the bulb would shatter, the two lengths of sprung steel would close together, and the electric circuit from the battery would be complete.There was one last precaution. To prevent the exposed hacksaw blades from ever touching the same piece of metal at the same time, which would also complete the circuit, he smoothed all six condoms over the trigger, one on top of another, until the device was protected from outside detonation by six layers of thin but insulating rubber. That at least would prevent accidental detonation.His bomb complete, he stowed it in the bottom of the wardrobe, along with the binding wire, the clippers and the rest of the sticky tape, which he would need to ft it to Miller's car. Jrhen he ordered more coftee to stay aw3k,, and settled down at the window to wait for Mile; a return to the parking lot in the center of the square. fie did not know where Miller had gone, nor did he care. The Werwolf had assured him there were no leads he could pick up to give him the whereabouts of the forger, and that was that. As a good technician, Mackensen was prepared to do his job and leave the rest to those in charge. He was prepared to be patient. He knew Miller would return sooner or later.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 Frliulein 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." Ile doctor paused for a moment, irresolute, and then added, "Would you excuse mer 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?... Ob, no, thank you, FrIalein, I just w2nted to confirm that he will not be visitinS this afternoon." The doctor bung up and came back to the balL "Strange," he murmured. "Herr Winzer has been here, as regular as clockwork, since Frdulein 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, "Frdulein 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." rhen there was anotner jumble of words that meant nothing.Miller leaned closer. "Frdulein 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, Frdulein 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 cbest-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 theArmistice 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 rabble-rouser 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 Ravensbriick.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 0snabdick 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." 17bat 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 FiIii, 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. III 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 Osnabriick, 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 skillfuli 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 everanything 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 Osnabrijck." 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 Miinster," 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 near-side 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 Mer- cedes, 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 caf6 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 caf6. 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 super- intendent 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 ~rove 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 southbotind 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 Miinster, Dortmund, Wetzlar, and Bad Homburg to Frankfurt in just under three hours, then turned off the ring road toward K6nigstein and the wild, snow-thick forests of the Taunus Mountains.IT WAs already dark when the 16Jaguar slid into the small spa town in the eastern foothills of the mountain range. A glance at his map told Miller he was less than twenty miles from the private estate he sought. He de cided to go no farther that night, but to seek a hotel and wait till morning.To the north lay the mountains, straddled by the road to Limburg, lying quiet and white under the thick carpet of snow that muffled the rocks and shrouded the miles and miles of pine forest. There were lights twinkling down the main street of the small town, and the glow of them picked out the skeletal frame of the ruined castle brooding on its hill, once the fortress home of the Lords of Falkenstein. The sky was clear, but an icy wind gave promise of more snow to come during the night.At the corner of Hauptstrasse and Frankfurtstrasse he found a hotel, the Park, and asked for a room. In a spa town in February the cold-water cure has hardly the same charm as in the summer months. There was plenty of room.The porter directed him to put his car in the small lot at the back of the hotel, fringed by trees and bushes. He had a bath and went out for supper, picking the Grilne Baum hostelry in the Hauptstrasse, one of the dozen old, beamed eating houses the town bad to offer.It was over his meal that the nervousness set in. He noticed his hands were shaking as he raised his wineglass. Part of the condition was exhaustion, the lack of sleep in the past four days, the catnapping for one and two hours at a time.Part was delayed reaction from the tension of the break-in with Koppel, and part the sense of astonishment at the luck that had rewarded his instinct to go back to Winzer's house after the first visit and ask the maid who had looked after the bachelor forger all these years.But most, he knew, was the sense of the impending end of the chase, the confrontation with the man he hated and had sought through so many unknown byways of inquiry, coupled with the fear that something might still go wrong.He thought back to the anonymous doctor in the hotel in Bad Godesberg who had warned him to stay away from the men of the Comradeship; and the Jewish Nazi-hunter of Vienna who had told him, "Be careful; these men can be dangerous." Thinking back, he wondered why they had not struck at him yet. They knew his name as Miller-the Dreesen Hotel visit proved that; and as Kolb-the beating of Bayer in Stuttgart would have blown that cover. Yet he had seen no one. One thing they could not know, he was sure, was that he had got as far as he bad. Perhaps they had lost him, or decided to leave him alone, convinced, with the forger in hiding, he would end up by going in circles.And yet he had the file, Winzer's secret and explosive evidence, and with it the greatest news story of the decade in West Germany. He grinned to himself, and the passing waitress thought it was for her. She swung her bottom as she passed his table next time, and he thought of Sigi. He had not called her since Vienna, and the letter he wrote in early January was the last she had had, six weeks back. He felt now that he needed her as he never had before.Funny, he thought, how men always need women more when they are afraid.He had to admit he was frightened, partly of what he had done, partly of the mass-murderer who waited, unknowing, for him in the mountains.He shook his head to shake off the mood and ordered another half-bottle of wine. This was no time for melan- choly; he had pulled off the greatest journalistic coup he had ever heard of and was about to settle a score as well.He ran over his plan as he drank the second portion of wine. A simple confrontation, a telephone call to the lawyer at Ludwigsburg, the arrival thirty minutes later of a police van to take the man away for imprison- ment, trial, and a life sentence. If Miller had been a harder man, he would have wanted to kill the SS captain himself.He thought it over and realized he was unarmed. Supposing Roschmann bad a bodyguard? Would he really be alone, confident his new name would protect him from discovery? Or would there be a strong-arm retainer in case of trouble?During Miller's military service, one of his friends, spending a night in the guardroom for being late back into camp, had stolen a pair of handcuffs from the Military Police. Later be had become worried by the thought they might be found in his kitbag and had given them to Miller.The reporter bad kept them, simply as a trophy of a wild night in the Army. They were at the bottom of a trunk in his Hamburg flat.He also had a gun, a small Sauer automatic, bought quite legally when he had been covering an expose of Hamburg's vice rackets in 1960 and had been threatened by Little Pauli's mobsters. That was locked in a desk drawer, also in Hamburg.Feeling slightly dizzy from the effects of his wine, a double brandy, and tiredness, he rose, paid his bill, and went back to the hotel. He was just about to enter to make his phone call, when he saw two public booths almost at the hotel door. Safer to use these.It was nearly ten o'clock, and he found Sigi at the club where she worked. Above the clamor of the band in the background, be had to shout to make her bear him.Miller cut short her stream of questions about where he had been, why be had not got in touch, where he was now, and told her what he wanted. She protested she couldn't get away, but something in his voice stopped ter."Are you all right?" she shouted over the line."Yes, I'm fine. But I need your help. Please, darling, don't let me down.Not now, not tonight." There was a pause; then she said simply, "I'll come. IT tell them it's an emergency. Close family or something."Do you have enough to rent a car?" "I think so. I can borrow something off one of the girls." He told her the address of an all-night car-rental firm he had used before, and stressed she should mention his name, as he knew the proprietor."How far is it?" she asked."From Hamburg, five hundred kilometers. You can make it in five hours.Say six hours from now. You'll arrive about five in the morning. And don't forget to bring the things." "All right, you can expect me then." There was a pause, then: "Peter darling "What?" "Are you afraid of something?" The time signal started, and he had no more one-mark pieces."Yes," he said and put down the receiver as they were cut off.In the foyer of the hotel he asked the night porter if be could have a large envelope, and after some hunting beneath the counter the man obligingly produced a stiff brown one large enough to take a quarto-sized sheet of paper. Miller also bought enough stamps to cover the cost of sending the envelopes by first-class mail with a lot of contents, emptying the porter's stock of stamps, which were usually needed only when a guest wished to send a postcard.Back in his room he took his document case, which he had carried throughout the evening, laid it on the bed, and took out Salomon Tauber's diary, the sheaf of papers from Winzer's safe, and two photographs. He read again the two pages in the diary that bad originally sent him on this hunt for a man he had never beard of, and studied the two photographs side by side.Finally be took a sheet of plain paper from his case and wrote on it a brief but clear message, explaining to any reader what the sheaf of documents enclosed really was. The note, along with the file from Winzer's safe and one of the photographs, he placed inside the envelope, addressed it, and stuck on all the stamps he had bought.The other photograph he put into the breast pocket of his jacket. The sealed envelope and the diary went back into his attach6 case, which he slid under the bed.He carried a small flask of brandy in his suitcase, and he poured a measure into the glass above the washbasin. He noticed his hands were trembling, but the fiery liquid relaxed him. He lay down on the bed, his head spinning slightly, and dozed off.In the underground room in Munich, Josef paced the floor, angry and impatient. At the table, Leon and Motti gazed at their hands. It was forty-eight hours since the cable had come from Tel Aviv.Their own attempts to trace Miller had brought no result. At their request by telephone, Alfred Oster had been to the parking lot in Bayreuth and later called back to tell them the car was gone."If they spot that car, they'll know he can't be a bakery worker from Bremen," growled Josef when he heard the news, "even if they don't know the carowner is Peter Miller." Later a friend in Stuttgart had informed Leon the local police were looking for a young man in connection with the murder in a hotel room of a citizen called Bayer. The description fitted Miller in his disguise as Kolb too well for it to be any other man, but fortunately the name from the hotel register was neither Kolb nor Miller, and there was no mention of a black sports car."At least he had the sense to register in a false name," said Leon."That would be in character with Kolb," Motti pointed out. "Kolb was supposed to be on the run from the Bremen police for war crimes." But it was scant comfort. If the Stuttgart police could not find Miller, neither could the Leon group, and the latter could only fear the Odessa would by now be closer than either."He must have known, after killing Bayer, that he had blown his cover, and therefore reverted to the name of Miller," reasoned Leon. "So he has to abandon the search for Roschmann, unless he got something out of Bayer that took him to Roschmann." "Then why the hell doesn't he check in?" snapped Josef. "Does the fool think he can take Roschmann on his own?" Motti coughed quietly. "He doesn't know Roschmann has any real importance to the Odessa," he pointed out."Well, if he gets close enough, he'll find out," said Leon."And by then he'll be a dead man, and we'll all be back to square one," snapped Josef. "Why doesn't the idiot call in?"But the phone lines were busy elsewhere that night, for Klaus Winzer had called the Werwolf from a small mountain chalet in the Regensburg region.The news he got was reassuring."Yes, I think it's safe for you to return home," the Odessa chief had answered in reply to the forger's question. "The man who was trying to interview you has by now certainly been taken care of." The forger had thanked him, settled his overnight bill, and set off through the darkness for the north and the familiar comfort of his large bed at home in Westerberg, Osnabrdck. He expected to arrive in time for a hearty breakfast, a bath, and a long sleep. By Monday morning he would be back in his printing plant, supervising the handling of the business.Miller was waked by a knock at the bedroom door. He blinked, realizing the light was still on, and opened. The night porter stood there, Sigi behind him.Miller quieted his fears by explaining the lady was his wife, who had brought him some important papers from home for a business meeting the following morning. The porter, a simple country lad with an indecipherable Hessian accent, took his tip and left.Sigi threw her arms around him as he kicked the door shut. "Where have you been? What are you doing here?" He shut off the questions in the simplest way, and by the time they parted Sigi's cold cheeks were flushed and burning and Miller was feeling like a fighting rooster.He took her coat and hung it on the hook behind the door. She started to ask more questions."First things first," he said and pulled her down onto the bed, stUl warm under the thick feather cushion, where he had lain dozing.She giggled. "You haven't changed." She was still wearing her hostess dress from the cabaret, low-cut at the front, with a skimpy sling-bra beneath it. He unzipped the dress down the back and eased the thin shoulder-straps off."Have you?" he asked quietly.She took a deep breath and lay back as he bent over her, pushing herself toward his face. She smiled. "No," she murmured, "not at all. You know what I like." "And you know what I like," muttered Miller indistinctly.She squealed. "Me first. I've missed you more than you've missed me." There was no reply, only silence disturbed by Sigi's rising sighs and groans.It was an hour before they paused, panting and happy, and Miller filled the glass with brandy and water.Sigi sipped a little, for she was not a heavy drinker, despite her job, and Miller took the rest."So," said Sigi teasingly, "first things having been dealt with-" "For a wbile," interjected Miller.She giggled. "For a while. Would you mind telling me why the mysterious letter, why the six-week absence, why that awful skin-head haircut, and why this small room in an obscure hotel in Hesse?" Miller grew serious. At length be rose, still naked, crossed the room, and came back with his document case. He seated himself on the edge of the bed."You're going to learn pretty soon what I've been up to," he said. "So I may as well tell you now." He talked for nearly an hour, starting with the discovery of the diary, which he showed her, and ending with the break into the forger's house.As he talked, she grew more and more horrified."You're mad," she said when he had finished. "You're stark, staring, raving mad. You could have got yourself killed or imprisoned or a hundred things." "I had to do it," he said, bereft of an explanation for things that now seemed to him to have been crazy."All this for a rotten old Nazi? You're nuts. It's over, Peter, all that is over. What do you want to waste your time on them for?" She was staring at him in bewilderment."Well, I have," he said defiantly.She sighed heavily and shook her bead to indicate her failure to understand. "All right," she said, "so now it's done. You know who he is and where be is. You just come back to Hamburg, pick up the phone, and call the police. They'll do the rest. That's what they're paid for." Miller did not know how to answer her. "It's not that simple," he said at last. "I'm going up there later this morning." "Going up where?" He jerked his thumb toward the window and the stilldark range of mountains beyond it. "To his house.""To his house? What for?" Her eyes widened in horror. "You're not going in to see him?" "Yes. Don't ask me why, because I can't tell you. It's just something I have to do." Her reaction startled him. She sat up with a jerk, turned onto her knees, and glared down at where he lay smoking, his head propped up by a pillow."That's what you wanted the gun for," she threw at him, her breasts rising and falling in her growing anger. "You're going to kill him-" "I'm not going to kill him-2' "Well, then, he'll kill you. And you're going up there alone with a gun against him and his mob. You bastard, you rotten, stinking, horrible-" Miller was staring at her in amazement. "What have you got so het up for?Over Roschmann?" "I'm not het up about that horrid old Nazi. I'm talking about me. About me and you, you stupid dumb oaf. You're going to risk getting yourself killed up there, all to prove some silly point and make a story for your idiotic magazine readers. You don't even think for a minute about me!' She had started crying as she talked, the tears making tracks of mascara down each cheek like black railway lines."Look at me-just damn well look at me. What do you think F am, just another good screw? You really think I want to give myself every night to some randy reporter so he can feel pleased with himself when he goes off to chase some idiot story that could get him killed? You really think that?Listen, you moron, I want to get married. I want to be Frau Miller. I want to have babies. And you're going to get yourself killed. Oh, God..." She jumped off the bed, ran into the bathroom, slammed the door behind her, and locked it.Miller lay on the bed, open-mouthed, the cigarette burning down to his fingers. He had never seen her so angry, and it had shocked him. He thought over what she had said as he listened to the tap running in the bathroom.Stubbing out the cigarette, he crossed the room to the bathroom door."Sigi." There was no answer."Sigi." The tap was turned off. "Go away." "Sigi, please open the door. I want to talk to you." There was a pause; then the door was unlocked. She stood there, naked and looking sulky. She had washed the mascara streaks off her face."What do you want?" she asked."Come over to the bed. I want to talk to you. Well freeze standing here." "No, you just want to start making love again." "I won't. Honestly. I promise you I won't. I just want to talk." He took her hand and led her back to the bed and the warmth it offered.Her face looked up warily from the pillow. "What do you want to talk about?" she asked suspiciously.He climbed in beside her and put his face close to her ear. "Sigrid Rahn, will you marry me?" She turned to face him. "Do you mean it?" she asked."Yes, I do. I never really thought of it before. But then, you never got angry before." "Gosh." She sounded as if she couldn't believe her ears. "I'll have to get angry more often." "Do I get an answer?" he asked."Oh yes, Peter, I will. We'll be so good together." He began caressing her again, becoming aroused as he did so."You said you weren't going to start that again," she accused him."Well, just this once. After that I promise I'll leave you strictly alone for the rest of time." She swung her thigh across him and slid her hips on top of his lower belly. Looking down at him, she said, "Peter Miller, don't you dare." Miller reached up and pulled the toggle that extinguished the light, as she started to make love to him....Outside in the snow there was a dim light breaking over the eastern horizon. Had Miller glanced at his watch, it would have told him the time was ten minutes before seven on the morning of Sunday, February 23. But he was already asleep.Half an hour later Maus Winzer rolled up the drive of his house, stopped before the closed garage door, and climbed out. He was stiff and tired, but glad to be home.Barbara was not yet up, taking advantage of her employer's absence to sleep longer than usual. When she did appear, after Winzer had let himself in and called from the hallway, it was in a nightgown that would have set another man's pulses bounding. Instead, Winzer required fried eggs, toast and jam, a pot of coffee, and a bath. He got none of them.She told him, instead, of her discovery on Saturday morning, on entering the study to dust, of the broken window and the missing silverware. She had called the police, and they had been positive the neat circular hole was the work of a professional burglar. She had had to tell them the house-owner was away, and they said they wanted to know when he returned, just for routine questions about the missing items.Winzer listened in absolute quiet to the girl's chatter, his face paling, a single vein throbbing steadily in his temple. He dismissed her to the kitchen to prepare coffee, went into his study, and locked the door. It took him thirty seconds and frantic scratching inside the empty safe to convince himself that the file of forty Odessa criminals was gone.As he turned away from the safe, the phone rang. It was the doctor from the clinic to inform him Frdulein Wendel had died during the night.For two hours Winzer sat in his chair before the unfit fire, oblivious of the cold seeping in through the newspaper-stuffed hole in the window, aware only of the cold fingers worming around inside himself as he tried to think what to do. Barbara's repeated calls from outside the locked door that breakfast was ready went unheeded. Through the keyhole she could hear him muttering occasionally, "Not my fault, not my fault at all."Miller had forgotten to cancel the morning call he had ordered the previous evening. The bedside phone shrilled at nine. Bleary-eyed, be answered it, grunted his thanks, and climbed out of bed. He knew if he did not, he would fall asleep again. Sigi was still fast asleep, exhausted by her drive from Hamburg, their lovemaking, and the con- tentment of being engaged at last.Miller showered, finishing off with several minutes under the ice-cold spray, rubbed himself briskly with the towel he had left over the radiator all night, and felt like a million dollars. The depression and anxiety of the night before had vanished. He felt fit and confident.He dressed in ankle boots and slacks, a thick roll-neck pullover, and his double-breasted blue duffel overjacket, a German winter garment called a Joppe, halfway between a jacket and a coat. It had deep slit pockets at each side, capable of taking the gun and the handcuffs, and an inside breast pocket for the photograph. He took the handcuffs from Sigi's bag and examined them. There was no key, and the manacles were self-locking, which made them useless for anything other than locking a man up until he was released by the police or a hacksaw blade.The gun be opened and examined. He had never fired it, and it still had the maker's grease on the interior. The magazine was full; he kept it that way. To familiarize himself with it once again, he worked the breech several times, made sure he knew which positions of the safety catch were the "On" and "Fire," smacked the magazine into the grip, pushed a round into the chamber, and set the safety catch to "On." He stuffed the telephone number of the lawyer in Ludwigsburg into his trouser pocket.He took his attach6 case out from under the bed, and on a plain sheet from it wrote a message for Sigi to read when she awoke. It said: "My darling. I am going now to see the man I have been hunting. I have a reason for wanting to look into his face and be present when the police take him away in handcuffs. It is a good one, and by this afternoon I wiU be able to teU you. But just in case, here is what I want you to do...." The instructions were precise and to the point, He wrote down the telephone number in Munich she was to call, and the message she was to give the man at the other end. He ended: "Do not under any circumstances follow me up the mountain. You could only make matters worse, whatever the situation. So if I am not back by noon, or have not called you in this room by then, call that number, give that message, check out of the hotel, mail the envelope at any box in Frankfurt, then drive back to Hamburg. Don't get engaged to anyone else in the meantime. All my love, Peter." He propped the note on the bedside table by the telephone, along with the large envelope containing the Odessa file, and three 50-mark bills.Tucking Salomon Tauber's diary under his arm, he slipped out of the bed- room and headed downstairs. Passing the reception desk, he ordered the porter to give his room another morning call at eleven-thirty.He came out of the hotel doorway at nine-tbirty and was surprised at the amount of snow that had fallen during the night.Miller walked around to the back, climbed into the Jaguar, gave full choke, and pressed the starter. It took several minutes before the engine caught. While it was warming up he took a hand-brush from the trunk and brushed the thick carpet of snow off the hood, roof, and windshield.Back behind the wheel, be slipped into gear and drove out onto the main road. Ile thick layer of snow over everything acted as a sort of cushion, and be could hear it crunching under the wheels. After a glance at the ordnance survey map he had bought the previous evening just before closing time, he set off down the road toward Limburg.THE MORNiNc had turned out gray 17and overcast after a brief and bril liant dawn which he had not seen.Beneath the clouds the snow glit tered under the trees and a wind keened off the mountains.The road led upward, winding out of town and immediately becoming lost in the sea of trees that make up the Romberg Forest. After he had cleared town, the carpet of snow along the road was almost virgin, only one set of tracks running parallel through it, where an early-morning visitor to Kbnigstein for church service had headed an hour before.Miller took the branch-off toward GlashUtten, skirted the flanks of the towering Feldberg mountain, and took a road signposted as leading to the village of Schmitten. On the flanks of the mountain the wind howled through the pines, its pitch rising to a near-scream among the snow-clogged boughs.Although Miller had never bothered to think about it, it was once out of these and other oceans of pine and beech that the old Germanic tribes had swarmed to be checked by Caesar at the Rhine. Later, converted to Christianity, they had paid lip service by day to the Prince of Peace, dreaming only in the dark hours of the ancient gods of strength and lust and power. It was this ancient atavism, the worship in the dark of the private gods of screaming endless trees, that Hitler had ignited with a magic touch.After another twenty minutes of careful driving, Miller checked his map again and began to look for a gateway off the road onto a private estate.When he found it, it was a barred gate held in place by a steel catch, with a notice board to one side saying: PRIVATE PROPERTY, KEEP OUT.Leaving the engine running, he climbed out and swung the gate inward.Miller entered the estate and headed up the driveway. The snow was untouched, and he kept in low gear, for there was only frozen sand beneath the snow.Two hundred yards up the track, a branch from a massive oak tree had come down in the night, overladen with half a ton of snow. The branch had crashed into the undergrowth to the right, and some of its twigs lay on the track. It had also brought down a thin black pole that had stood beneath it, and this lay square across the drive.Rather than get out and move it, he drove carefully forward, feeling the bump as the pole passed under the front and then the rear wheels.Clear of the obstruction, be moved on toward the house and emerged into a clearing, which contained the villa and its gardens, fronted by a circular area of gravel. He halted the car in front of the main door, climbed out, and rang the bell.While Miller was climbing out of his car, Klaus Winzer made his decision and called the Werwolf. The Odessa chief was brusque and irritable, for it was long past the time he should have heard on the news of a sports car being blown to pieces, apparently by an exploding gas tank, on the autobahn south of OsnabrUck. But as he listened to the man on the other end of the telephone, his mouth tightened in a thin, hard line."You did what? You fool, you unbelievable, stupid little cretin. Do you know what's going to happen to you if that file is not recovered?..." Alone in his study in Osnabrijck, Klaus Winzer replaced the receiver after the last sentences from the Werwolf came over the wire, and went back to his desk. He was quite calm. Twice already life had played him the worst of tricks: first the destruction of his war work in the lakes; then the ruin of his paper fortune in 1948. And now this. 'Faking an old but serviceable Luger from the bottom drawer, he placed the end in his mouth and shot himself. The lead slug that tore his head apart was not a forgery.The Werwolf sat and gazed in something close to horror at the silent telephone. He thought of the men for whom it had been necessary to obtain passports through Maus Winzer, and the fact that each of them was a wanted man on the list of those destined for arrest and trial if caught. The exposure of the dossier would lead to a welter of prosecutions that could only jerk the population out of its growing apathy toward the que9tion of continuing pursuit of wanted SS men, regalvanize the hunting agencies.... The prospect was appalling.But his first priority was the protection of Roschmann, one of those be knew to be on the list taken from Winzer. Three times he dialed the Frankfurt area code, followed by the private number of the house on the hill, and three times he got a busy signal. Finally he tried through the operator, who told him the line must be out of order.Instead, he rang the Hohenzollern Hotel in Osnabrilck and caught Mackensen about to leave. In a few sentences he told the killer of the latest disaster, and where Roscbmann lived."It looks as if your bomb hasn't worked," he told him. "Get down there faster than you've ever driven," he said. "Hide your car and stick close to Roschmann. There's a bodyguard called Oskar as well. If Miller goes straight to the police with what he's got, we've all had it. But if he comes to Roschmann, take him alive and make him talk. We must know what he's done with those papers before he dies." Mackensen glanced at his road map inside the phone booth and estimated the distance."I'll be there at one o'clock," he said.The door opened at the second ring, and a gust of warm air flowed out of the haR. The man who stood in front of Miller had evidently come from his study, the door of which Miller could see standing open and leading off the hallway.Years of good living had put weight on the once lanky SS officer. His face had a flush, either from drinking or from the country air, and his hair was gray at the sides. He looked the picture of middle-aged, upper-middleclass, prosperous good health. But although different in detail, the face was the same Tauber had seen and described.The man surveyed Miller without enthusiasm. "Yes?" he said.It took Miller another ten seconds before he could speak. What he had rehearsed just went out of his head."My name is Miller," he said, "and yours is Eduard Roschmann." At the mention of both names, something flickered through the eyes of the man in front of him, but iron control kept his face muscles straight."This is preposterous," he said at length. "I've never heard of the man you are talking about." Behind the fagade of calm, the former SS officer's mind was racing.Several times in his life since 1945 he had survived through sharp thinking in a crisis. He recognized the name of Miller well enough and recalled his conversation with the Werwolf weeks before. His first instinct was to shut the door in Miller's face, but he overcame it."Are you alone in the house?" asked Miller."Yes," said Roschmann truthfully."Well go into your study," said Miller flatly.Roschmann made no objection, for he realized he was now forced to keep Miller on the premises and stall for time, until...He turned on his heel and strode back across the hallway. Miller slammed the front door after him and was at Roschmann's heels as they entered the study. It was a comfortable room, with a thick, padded door, which Miller closed behind him, and a log fire burning in the grate.Roschmann stopped in the center of the room and turned to face Miller."Is your wife here?" asked Miller.Roschmann shook his head. "She has gone away for the weekend to visit relatives," he said. This much -was true. She had been called away the previous evening at a moment's notice and had taken the second car. The first car owned by the pair was, by ill luck, in the garage for repairs.She was due back that evening.What Roschmann did not mention, but what occupied his racing mind, was that his bulky, shaven-headed chauffeur-bodyguard, Oskar, had bicycled down to the village half an hour earlier to report that the telephone was out of order. He knew he had to keep Miller talking until the man returned.When he turned to face Miller, the young reporter's right hand held an automatic pointed straight at his belly.Roschmann was frightened but covered it with bluster. "You threaten me with a gun in my own house?" "Then call the police," said Miller, nodding at the telephone on the writing desk. Roschmann made no move toward it."I see you still limp a little," remarked Miller. "The orthopedic shoe almost disguises it, but not quite. The missing toes, lost in an operation in Rimini camp. The frostbite you got wandering through the fields of Austria caused that, didn't it?" Roschmann's eyes narrowed slightly, but he said nothing."You see, if the police come, they'll identify you, Herr Direktor. The face is still the same, the bullet wound in the chest, the scar under the left armpit where you tried to remove the Waffen SS blood-group tattoo, no doubt. Do you really want to call the police?" Roschmann let out the air in his lungs in a long sigh. "What do you want, Miller?" "Sit down," said the reporter. "Not at the desk, there in the armchair, where I can see you. And keep your hands on the armrests. Don't give me an excuse to shoot, because, believe me, I'd dearly love to." Roschmann sat in the armchair, his eyes on the gun.Miller perched on the edge of the desk, facing him. "So now we talk," he said."About what?" "About Riga. About eighty thousand people, men, women, and children, whom you had slaughtered up there." Seeing he did not intend to use the gun, Roschmann began to regain his confidence. Some of the color returned to his face. He switched his gaze to the face of the younger man in front of him."That's a lie. There were never eighty thousand disposed of in Riga." "Seventy thousand? Sixty?" asked Miller. "Do you really think it matters precisely how many thousand you killed." "That's the point," said Roschmann eagerly. "It doesn't matter-not now, not then. Look, young man, I don't know why you've come after me. But I can guess. Someone's been filling your head with a lot of sentimental claptrap about so-called war crimes and suchlike. It's all nonsense.Absolute nonsense. How old are you?" "Twenty-nine." "Then you were in the Army for military service?" "Yes. One of the first national servicemen of the postwar army. Two years in uniform." "Well, then, you know what the Army is like. A man's given orders; he obeys those orders. He doesn't ask whether they are right or wrong. You know that as well as I do. All I did was to obey my orders." "Firstly, you weren't a soldier," said Miller quietly. "You were an executioner. Put more bluntly, a murderer, and a mass-murderer. So don't compare yourself with a Soldier.' : "Nonsense,' said Roscbmann earnestly. "It's all nonsense. We were soldiers just like the rest. We obeyed our orders just like the rest. You young Germans are all the same. You don't want to understand what it was like then." "So tell me, what was it like?" Roschmann, who had leaned forward to make his point, leaned back in the chair, almost at ease, the immediate danger past."What was it like? It was like ruling the world. Because we did rule the world, the Germans. We had beaten every army they could throw at us. For years they had looked down on us, we poor Germans, and we had shown them, yes, all of them, that we were a great people. You youngsters today don't realize what it is to be proud of being a German."It lights a fire inside you. When the drums beat and the bands played, when the flags were waving and the whole nation was united behind one man, we could have marched to the ends of the world. That is greatness, young Miller, greatness your generation has never known and never will know. And we of the SS were the elite, still are the elite. Of course they hunt us down now, first the Allies and thon the wishy-washy old women of Bonn. Of course they want to crush us. Because they want to crush the greatness of Germany, which we represented and still do."They say a lot of stupid things about what happened then in a few camps a sensible world would long since have forgotten about. They make a big fuss because we had to clean up Europe from the pollution of this Jewish filth that impregnated every facet of German life and kept us down in the mud with them. We had to do it, I tell you. It was a mere sideshow in the great design of a Germany and a German people, pure in blood and ideals, ruling the world as is their right, our right, Miller, our right and our destiny, if those hell-damned Britishers and the eternally stupid Americans had not stuck their prissy noses in. For make no bones about it, you may point that thing at me, but we are on the same side, young man, a generation between us, but still on the same side. For we are Germans, the greatest people in the world. And you would let your judgment of all this, of the greatness that once was Germany's-and will be again one day-of the essential unity of us, all of us, the German people, you will let your judgment of all this be affected by what happened to a few miserable Jews?Can't you see, you poor misled young fool, that we are on the same side, you and me, the same side, the same people, the same destiny?" Despite the gun, he rose from his chair and paced the carpet between the desk and the window."You want proof of our greatness? Look at Germany today. Smashed to rubble in nineteen forty-five, utterly destroyed and prey to the barbarians from the east and the fools in the west. And now? Germany is rising again, slowly and surely, still lacking the essential discipline that we were able to give her, but increasing each year in her industrial and economic power. Yes, and military power. One day, when the last vestiges of the influence of the Allies of nineteen forty-five have been shaken off, we will be as mighty again as we ever were. It will take time, and a new leader, but the ideals will be the same, and the glory-yes, that will be the same too."And you know what brings this about? I will tell you, yes, I will tell you, young man. It's discipline and management. Harsh discipline, the harsher the better, and management, our management, the most brilliant quality after courage that we possess. For we can manage things; we have shown that. Look at all this-you see all this? This house, this estate, the factory down in the Ruhr, mine and thousands like it, tens, hundreds of thousands, churning out power and strength each day, with each turn of the wheel another ounce of might to make Germany mighty once again."And who do you think did all this? You think people prepared to spend time mouthing platitudes over a few miserable Yids did all this? You think cowards and traitors trying to persecute good honest, patriotic German soldiers did all this? We did this, we brought this prosperity back to Germany, the same men as we had twenty, thirty years ago." He turned from the window and faced MWer, his eyes alight. But he also measured the distance from the farthest point of his pacing along the carpet to the heavy iron poker by the fire. Miller had noticed the glances."Now, you come here, a representative of the young generation, full of your idealism and your concern, and point a gun at me. Why not be idealistic for Germany, your own country, your own people? You think you represent the people, coming to hunt me down? You think that's what they want, the people of Germany?" Miller shook his head. "No, I don't," he said shortly."Well, there you are, then. If you call the police and turn me in to them, they might make a trial out of itI say only 'might' because even that is not certain, so long afterward, with all the witnesses scattered or dead. So put your gun away and go home. Go home and read the true history of those days, learn that Germany's greatness then and her prosperity today stem from patriotic Germans like me." Miller had sat through the tirade mute, observing with bewilderment and rising disgust the man who paced the carpet in front of him, seeking to convert him to the old ideology. He had wanted to say a hundred, a thou- sand things about the people he knew and the millions beyond them who did not want or see the necessity of purchasing glory at the price of slaughtering millions of other human beings. But the words did not come.They never do when one needs them. So he just sat and stared until Roschmann had finished.After some seconds of silence Miller asked, "Have you ever heard of a man called Tauber?" "Who?" "Salomon Tauber. He was a German too. Jewish. He was in Riga from the beginning to the end." Roschmann shrugged. "I can't remember him. It was a long time ago. Who was he?" "Sit down," said Miller. "And this time stay seated." Roschmann shrugged impatiently and went back to the armchair. With his rising conviction that Miller would not shoot, his mind was concerned with the prob- lem of trapping him before be could get away, rather than with an obscure and long-dead Jew."Tauber died in Hamburg on November twenty-secOnd last year. He gassed himself. Are you listening?" "Yes. If I must." "He left behind a diary. It was an account of his story, what happened to him, what you and others did to him, in Riga and elsewhere. But mainly in Riga. But he survived, be came back to Hamburg, and he lived for eighteen years, because he was convinced you were alive and would never stand trial.I got hold of his diary. It was my starting point in finding you today, here, under your new name." "The diary of a dead man's not evidence," growled Roschmann."Not for a court, but enough for me." "And you really came here to confront me over the diary of a dead Jew?" "No, not at all. There's a page of that diary I want you to read." Miller opened the diary at a certain page and pushed it into Roschmann's lap. "Pick it up," he ordered, "and read it-aloud." Roschmann unfolded the sheet and began to read it. It was the passage in which Tauber described the murder by Roscbmann of an unnamed German Army officer wearing the Knight's Cross with Oak Leaf Cluster.Roschmann reached the end of the passage and looked up. "So what?" he said, puzzled. "The man struck me. He disobeyed orders. I had the right to commandeer that ship to bring the prisoners back." Miller tossed a photograph onto Roschmann's lap. "Is that the man you killed?" Roschmann looked at it and shrugged. "How should I know? It was twenty years ago." There was a slow ker-lick as Miller thumbed the hammer back and pointed the gun at Roschmann's face. "Was that the man?" Roschmann looked at the photograph again. "All right. So that was the man.So what?""That was my father," said Miller.The color drained out of Roschmann's face as if a plug had been pulled.His mouth dropped open; his gaze dropped to the gun barrel two feet from his face, and the steady hand behind it."Oh, ilear God," he whispered, "you didn't come about the Jews at all." "No. I'm sorry for them, but not that sorry." "But how could you know, how could you possibly know from that diary that the man was your father? I never knew his name. This Jew who wrote the diary never knew. How did you know?" "My father was killed on October eleventh, nineteen forty-four, in Ostland," said Miller. "For twenty years that was all I knew. Then I read the diary. It was the same day, the same area, the two men had the same rank. Above all, both men wore the Knight's Cross with Oak Leaf Cluster, the highest award for bravery in the field. There weren't all that many of those awarded, and very few to mere Army captains. It would have been millions to one against two similar officers dying in the same area on the same day." Roschmann knew he was up against a man whom no argument could influence.He stared, as if mesmerized, at the gun. "You're going to kill me. You mustn't do that, not in cold blood. You wouldn't do that. Please, Miller, I don't want to die." Miller leaned forward and began to talk. "Listen to me, you repulsive piece of dogshit. I've listened to you and your twisted mouthings till I'm sick to my guts. Now you're going to listen to me while I make up my mind whether you die here or rot in some jail for the rest of your days."You had the nerve, the damned crass nerve, to tell me that you, you of all people, were a patriotic German. I'll tell you what you are. You and your kind were and are the filthiest crap that was ever elevated from the gutters of this country to positions of power. And in twelve years you smeared my country with your dirt in a way that has never happened throughout our history."What you did sickened and revolted the whole of civilized mankind and left my generation a heritage of shame to live down that's going to take us all the rest of our lives. You spat on Germany throughout your lives.You bastards used Germany and the German people until they could not be used any more, and then you quit while the going was good. You brought us so low it would have been inconceivable before your crew came along-and I don't mean in terms of bomb damage."You weren't even brave. You were the most sickening cowards ever produced in Germany or Austria. You murdered millions for your own profit and in the name of your maniac power-lust, and then you got out and left the rest of us in the shit. You ran away from the Russians, hanged and shot Army men to keep them fighting, and then disappeared and left me to carry the can back."Even if there could be any-oblivion about what you did to the Jews and the others, there can never be any forgetting that your bunch ran and hid like the dogs you are. You talk of patriotism; you don't even know the meaning of the word. And as for daring to call Army soldiers and others who fought, really fought, for Germany, Kamerad, it's a damned obscenity."I'll tell you one other thing, as a young German of the generation you so plainly despise. This prosperity we have today-it's got nothing to do with you. It's got a lot to do with millions who do a hard day's work and never murdered anyone in their lives. And as for murderers like you who may still be among us, as far as I and my generation are concerned, we would put up with a little less prosperity if we could be sure scum like you were not still around. Which, incidentally, you are not going to be for very long." "You're going to kill me," mumbled Roschmann."As a matter of fact, I'm not." Miller reached behind him and pulled the telephone over toward where he sat on the desk. He kept his eyes on Roschmann and the gun pointed. He took the receiver off the cradle, slid it onto the desk, and dialed. When he had finished, he picked up the receiver."There's a man in Ludwigsburg who wants to have a chat with you," he said and put the telephone to his ear. It was dead.He laid it back in the cradle, took it off again, and listened for the dial tone. There was none."Have you cut this off?" he asked.Roschmann shook his bead."Listen, if you've pulled the connection out, I'll drill you here and now." "I haven't. I haven't touched the phone this morning. Honestly." Miller remembered the fallen branch of the oak tree and the pole lying across the track to the house. He swore softly.Roschmann gave a small smile. "The fines must be down," he said. "You'll have to go into the village. What are you going to do now?" "I'm going to put a bullet through you unless you do as you're told," Miller snapped back. He dragged the handcuffs he had thought to use on a bodyguard out of his pocket.He tossed the bracelets over to Roschmann. "Walk over to the fireplace," he ordered and followed the man across the room."What are you going to do?" "I'm going to handcuff you to the fireplace, then go and phone from the village," said Miller.He was scanning the wrought-iron scrollwork that composed the surround of the fireplace when Roschmann dropped the handcuffs at his feet. The SS man bent to pick them up, and Miller was almost caught unawares when Roschmann instead gripped a heavy poker and swung it viciously at Miller's kneecaps.The reporter stepped back in time, the poker swished past, and Roschmann was off balance.Miller stepped in, whipped the barrel of the pistol across the bent head, and stepped back. "Try that again, and I'll kill you," he said.Roschmann straightened up, wincing from the blow to the bead."Clip one of the bracelets around your right wrist," Miller commanded, and Roschmann did as he was told. "You see that vine-leaf ornament in front of you? At head height? There's a branch next to it that comes out of the metalwork and rejoins it again. Lock the other bracelet onto that." When Roschmann had snapped the second link home, Miller walked over and kicked the fire-tongs and poker out of reach. Keeping his gun against Roschmann's jacket, he frisked him and cleared the area around the chained man of all objects which he could throw to break the window.Outside in the driveway, the man called Oskar pedaled toward the door, his errand to report the broken phone line accomplished. He paused in surprise on seeing the Jaguar, for his employer had assured him before he went that no one was expected.He leaned the bicycle against the side of the house and quietly let himself in by the front door. In the hallway he stood irresolute, bearing nothing through the padded door to the study and not being heard himself by those inside.Miller took a last look around and was satisfied. "Incidentally," be told the glaring Roschmann, "it wouldn't have done you any good if you bad managed to hit me. It's eleven o'clock now, and I left the complete dossier of evidence on you in the bands of my accomplice, to drop into the mailbox, addressed to the right authorities, if I have not returned or phoned by noon. As it is, I'm going to phone from the village. I'll be back in twenty minutes. You won't be out of there in twenty minutes, even with a hacksaw.When I get back, the police will be thirty minutes behind me." As he talked, Roschmann's hopes began to flicker. He knew he had only one chance left-for the returning Oskar to take Miller alive so that he could be forced to make the phone call from a phone in the village at their demand and keep the documents from reaching the mailbox.Miller swung open the door at the other side of the room and walked through it. He found himself staring at the roll-neck pullover worn by a man a full head taller than he was. From his place by the fire Roschmann recognized Oskar and screamed, "Hold him." Miller stepped back into the room and jerked up the gun he had been replacing in his pocket. He was too slow. A swinging left backhander from Oskar's paw swept the automatic out of his grasp, and it flew across the room. At the same time Oskar thought his employer cried, "Hit him." He crashed a right hand into Miller's jaw. The reporter weighed 170 pounds, but the blow lifted him off his feet and threw him backward. His feet caught in a low newspaper rack, and as he went over, his head slammed into the comer of a mahogany bookcase. Crumpling like a rag doll, his body slid to the carpet and rolled onto one side.For several seconds there was silence as Oskar took in the spectacle of his employer manacled to the fireplace, and Roschmann stared at the inert figure of Miller, from the back of whose head a trickle of blood flowed onto the floor."You fool," yelled Roschmann when he had taken in what had happened. Oskar looked baffled. "Get over here." The giant lumbered across the room and stood waiting for orders.Roschmann thought fast. "Try and get me out of these handcuffs," he commanded. "Use the fire-irons." But the fire-irons had been made in an age when craftsmen intended their handiwork to last for a long time. The result of Oskar's efforts was a curly poker and a pair of wriggly tongs."Bring him over here," he told Oskar at last. While Oskar held Miller up, Roschmann looked under the reporter's eyelids and felt his pulse. "He's still alive, but out cold," he said. "He'll need a doctor to come around in less than an hour. Bring me a pencil and paper." Writing with his left hand, he scribbled two phone numbers on the paper while Oskar brought a hacksaw blade from the tool chest under the stairs. When he returned, Roschmann gave him the sheet of paper."Get down to the village as fast as you can," he told Oskar. "Ring this Nuremberg ' number and tell the man who answers it what has happened.Ring this local number and get the doctor up here immediately. You understand? Tell him it's an emergency. Now hurry." As Oskar ran from the room, Roschmann glanced at the clock again.Ten-fifty. If Oskar could make the village by eleven, and he and the doctor could be back by eleven-fifteen, they might bring Miller around in time to get to a phone and delay the accomplice, even if the doctor would only work at gunpoint. Urgently, Roschmann began to saw at his handcuffs.In front of the door Oskar grabbed his bicycle, then paused and glanced at the parked Jaguar. He peered through the driver's window and saw the key in the ignition. His master had told him to burry, so he dropped the bicycle, climbed behind the wheel of the car, gunned it into life, and spurted gravel in a wide arc as he slid the sports car out of the forecourt into the driveway.He had got up into third gear and was boring down the slippery track as fast as he could take it when be hit the snow-covered telegraph pole lying across the road.Roschmann was still sawing at the chain linking the two bracelets when the shattering roar in the pine forest stopped him. Straining to one side, he could peer through the French windows, and although the car and the driveway were out of sight, the plume of smoke drifting across the sky told him at least that the car had been destroyed by an explosion.He recalled the assurance he had been given that Miller would be taken care of. But Miller was on the carpet a few feet away from him, his bodyguard was certainly dead, and time was running out without hope of reprieve. He leaned his head against the chill metal of the fire-surround and closed his eyes."Then it's over," he murmured quietly. After several minutes be continued sawing. It was over an hour before the specially hardened steel of the military handcuffs parted to the now blunt hacksaw.As he stepped free, with only a bracelet around his right wrist, the clock chimed twelve.If he had bad time, be might have paused to kick the body on the carpet, but he was a man in a hurry. From the wall safe he took a passport and several fat bundles of new, high-denomination banknotes. Twenty minutes later, with these and a few clothes in a bag, he was bicycling down the track, around the shattered hulk of the Jaguar and the still-smoldering body lying face down in the snow, past the scorched and broken pines, toward the village.From there he called a taxi and ordered it to take him to Frankfurt international airport. He walked to the flight-information desk and inquired. "What time is the next flight out of here for Argentina-preferably within an hour? Failing that, for Madrid." IT WAS ten past one when Mac- 18kensen's Mercedes turned off the country road into the gate of the estate. Halfway up the drive to the house he found the way blocked.The Jaguar bad evidently been blown apart from inside, but its wheels had not left the road. It was still upright, slewed slantwise across the drive. The forward and rear sections were recognizable as those of a car, still held together by the tough steel girders that formed the chassis.But the center section, including the cockpit, was missing from floor to roof. Bits of this section were scattered in an area around the wreckage.Mackensen surveyed the skeleton with a grim smile and walked over to the bundle of scorched clothes and their contents on the ground twenty feet away. Something about the size of the corpse caught his attention, and he stooped over it for several minutes. Then he straightened and ran at an easy lope up the rest of the drive toward the house.He avoided ringing the front doorbell but tried the handle. The door opened, and he went into the hallway. For several seconds he listened, poised like a carnivorous animal by a water hole, sensing the atmosphere for danger. There was no sound. He reached under his left armpit and brought out a long-barreled Luger automatic, flicked off the safety catch, and started to open the doors leading off the hall.The first was to the dining room, the second to the study. Although he saw the body on the hearthrug at once, he did not move from the half-open door before he had covered the rest of the room. He had known two men to fall for that trick-the obvious bait and the hidden ambush. Before entering, he glanced through the crack between the door's hinges to make sure no one waited behind it, then entered.Miller was lying on his back with his head turned to one side. For several seconds Mackensen stared down into the chalky white face, then bent to listen to the shallow breathing. The matted blood on the back of the head told him roughly what had happened.He spent ten minutes scouring the house, noting the open drawers in the master bedroom, the missing shaving gear from the bathroom. Back in the study, he glanced into the yawning and empty wall safe, then sat himself at the desk and picked up the telephone.He sat listening for several seconds, swore under his breath, and replaced the receiver. There was no difficulty in finding the tool chest under the stairs, for the cupboard door was still open. He took what he needed and went back down the drive, passing through the study to check on Miller and leaving by the French windows.It took him almost an hour to find the parted strands of the telephone line, sort them out from the entangling undergrowth, and splice them back together. When he was satisfied with his handiwork he walked back to the house, sat at the desk, and tried the phone. He got the dial tone and called his chief in Nuremberg.He had expected the Werwolf to be eager to hear from him, but the man's voice coming down the wire sounded tired and only half-interested. Like a good sergeant, lie reported what he had found: the car, the corpse of the bodyguard, the half-handcuff still linked to the scrollwork by the fire, the blunt hacksaw blade on the carpet, Miller unconscious on the floor. He finished with the absent owner."He hasn't taken much, Chief. Overnight things, probably money from the open safe. I can clear up here; he can come back if he wants to." "No, he won't come back," the Werwolf told him. "Just before you called, I put the phone down. He called me from Frankfurt airport. He's got a reservation on a flight to Madrid, leaving in ten minutes. Connection this evening to Buenos Aires-" "But there's no need," protested Mackensen. "IT make Miller talk, we can find where he left his papers. There was no document case in the wreckage of the car, and nothing on him, except a sort of diary lying on the study floor. But the rest of his stuff must be somewhere not far away." "Far enough," replied the Werwolf. "In a mailbox." Wearily he told Mackensen what MiNer had stolen from the forger, and what Roschmann had just told him on the phone from Frankfurt. "Those papers wiU be in the hands of the authorities in the morning, or Tuesday at the latest. After that everyone on that list is on borrowed time. That includes Roschmann, the owner of the house you're in, and me. I've spent the whole morning trying to warn everyone concerned to get out of the country inside twenty-four hours." "So where do we go from here?" asked Mackensen."You get lost," replied his chief. "You're not on that list. I am, so I have to get out. Go back to your flat and wait until my successor contacts you. For the rest, it's over. Vulkan has fled and won't come back. With his departure his whole operation is going to fall apart unless someone new can come in and take over the project." "What Vulkan? What project?" "Since it's over, you might as well know. Vulkan was the name of Roschmann, the man you were supposed to protect from Miller...... In a few sentences the Werwolf told the executioner why Roschmann had been so important, why his place in the project and the project itself were irreplaceable.When he had finished, Mackensen uttered a low whistle and stared across the room at the form of Peter Miller. "That little boy sure fucked things up for everyone," he said.The Werwolf seemed to pull himself together, and some of his old authority returned to his voice. "Ka- merad, you must clear up the mess over there. You remember that disposal squad you used once before?" "Yes, I know where to get them. They're not far from here." "Call them up, bring them over. Have them leave the place without a trace of what happened. The man's wife must be coming back late tonight; she must never know what happened. Understand?" "It'll be done," said Mackensen."Then make yourself scarce. One last thing. Before you go, finish that bastard Miller. Once and for all." Mackensen looked across at the unconscious reporter with narrowed eyes."It'll be a pleasure," he grated."Then good-by and good luck." The phone went dead. Mackensen replaced it, took out an address book, thumbed through it, and dialed a number. He introduced himself to the man who answered and reminded him of the previous favor the man had done for the Comradeship. He told him where to come and what he would find."The car and the body beside it have to go into a deep gorge off a mountain road. Plenty of gasoline over it, a real big blaze. Nothing identifiable about the mango through his pockets and take everything, including his watch." "Got it," said the voice on the phone. "I'll bring a trailer and winch." "There's one last thing. In the study of the house you'll find another stiff on the floor and a bloodstained hearthrug. Get rid of them. Not in the car-a long, cold drop to the bottom of a long, cold lake. Well weighted. No traces. Okay?" "No problem. We'll be there by five and gone by seven. I don't like to move that kind of cargo in daylight." "Fine," said Mackensen. "I'll be gone before you get here. But you'll find things like I said." He hung up, slid off the desk, and walked over toMiller. He pulled out his Luger and automatically checked the breech, although he knew it was loaded."You little shit," he told the body and held the gun at arm's length pointing downward, lined up on the forehead.Years of living like a predatory animal and surviving where others, victims and colleagues, had ended on a pathologist's slab had given Mackensen the senses of a leopard. He didn't see the shadow that fell onto the carpet from the open French window; be felt it and spun around, ready to fire. But the man was unarmed."Who the hell are you?" growled Mackensen, keeping him covered.The man stood in the French window, dressed in the black leather leggings and jacket of a motorcyclist. In his left hand he carried his crash helmet, gripped by the short peak and held across his stomach. The man flicked a glance at the body at Mackensen's feet and the gun in his hand."I was sent for," he said innocently."Who by?" said Mackensen."Vulkan," replied the man. "My Kamerad, Roschmann." Mackensen grunted and lowered the gun. "Well, he's gone." "Gone?" "Fucked off. Heading for South America. The whole project's off. And all thanks to this little bastard reporter." He jerked the gun barrel toward Miller."You going to finish him?" asked the man."Sure. He screwed up the project. Identified Roschmann and mailed the information to the police, along with a pile of other stuff. If you're in that file, you'd better get out too." "What file?" "The Odessa file." "I'm not in it," said the man."Neither am I," growled Mackensen. "But the Werwolf is, and his orders are to finish this one off before we quit." "The Werwolf?" Something began to sound a small alarm inside Mackensen. He had just been told that in Germany no one apart from the Werwolf and himself knew about the Vulkan project. The others were in South America, from where he assumed the new arrival had come. But such a man would know about the Werwolf. His eyes narrowed slightly."You're from Buenos Aires?" he asked."No." "Where from, then?" "Jerusalem." It took half a second before the meaning of the name made sense to Mackensen. Then he swung up his Luger to fire. Half a second is a long time, long enough to die.The foam rubber inside the crash helmet was scorched when the Walther went off. But the nine-millimeter parabellum slug came through the fiberglass without a pause and took Mackensen high in the breastbone with the force of a kicking mule. The helmet dropped to the ground to reveal the agent's right hand, and from inside the cloud of blue smoke the PPK fired again.Mackensen was a big man and a strong one. Despite the bullet in the chest he would have fired, but the second slug, entering his head two finger-widths above the right eyebrow, spoiled his aim. It also killed him.Miller awoke on Monday afternoon in a private ward in Frankfurt General Hospital. He lay for half an hour, becoming slowly aware that his head was swathed in bandages and contained a pair of energetic artillery units. He found a buzzer and pressed it, but the nurse who came told him to lie quietly because he had severe concussion.So he lay and, piece by piece, recollected the events of the previous day until the middle of the morning. After that there was nothing. He dozed off and when he woke it was dark outside and a man was sitting by his bed. The man smiled.Miller stared at him. "I don't know you," he said."Well, I know you," said the visitor.Miller thought. "I've seen you," he said at length. "You were in Oster's house. With Leon and Motti." "That's right. What else do you remember?" "Almost everything. It's coming back." "Roscbmann?" "Yes. I talked with him. I was going for the police." "Roschmann's gone. Fled back to South America. The whole affair's over.Complete. Finished. Do you understand?" Miller slowly shook his head. "Not quite. I've got one hell of a story.And I'm going to write it." The visitor's smile faded. He leaned forward. "Listen, Miller. You're a lousy amateur, and you're lucky to be alive. You're going to write nothing. For one thing, you've got nothing to write. I've got Tauber's diary, and it's going back home with me, where it belongs. I read it last night. There was a photograph of an Army captain in your jacket pocket.Your father?" Miller nodded."So that was what it was really all about?" asked the agent."Yes." "Well, in a way I'm sorry. About your father, I mean. I never thought I'd say that to a German. Now about the file. What was it?" Miller told him."Then why the bell couldn't you let us have it? You're an ungrateful man.We took a lot of trouble getting you in there, and when you get something you hand it over to your own people. We could have used that information to best advantage." "I had to send it to someone, through Sigi. That meant by mad. You're so clever, you never let me have Leon's address." Josef nodded. "All right. But either way, you have no story to tell. You have no evidence. The diary's gone, the file is gone. All that remains is your personal word. If you insist on talking, nobody will believe you except the Odessa, and they'll come for you. Or rather, they'll probably hit Sigi or your mother. They play rough, remember?" Miller thought for a while. "What about my car?" "You don't know about that. I forgot." Josef told Miller about the bomb in it, and the way it went off. "I told you they play rough. The car has been found gutted by fire in a ravine.The body in it is unidentified, but not yours. Your story is that you were flagged down by a hitchhiker, he hit you with an iron bar and went off in it. The hospital will confirm you were brought in by a passing motorcyclist who called an ambulance when he saw you by the roadside.They won't recognize me again; I was in a helmet and goggles at the time.That's the official version, and it will stay. To make sure, I rang the German press agency two hours ago, claiming to be the hospital, and gave them the same story. You were the victim of a hitchhiker who later crashed and killed himself." Josef stood up and prepared to leave. He looked down at Miller. "You're a lucky bastard, though you don't seem to realize it. I got the message your girl friend passed me, presumably on your instructions, at noon yesterday, and by riding like a maniac I made it from Munich to the house on the hill in two and a half hours dead. Which was what you almost were--dead. They bad a guy who was going to kill you. I managed to interrupt him in time." He turned, hand on the doorknob. "Take a word of advice. Claim the insurance on your car, get a Volkswagen, go back to Hamburg, marry Sigi, have kids, and stick to reporting. Don't tangle with professionals again." Half an hour after he had gone, the nurse came back. "There's a phone call for you," she said.It was Sigi, crying and laughing on the line. She had received an anonymous call telling her Peter was in Frankfurt General."I'm on my way down right this minute," she said and hung up.The phone rang again. "Miller? This is Hoffmann. I just saw a piece on the agency tapes. You got a bang on the head. Are you all right?" "I'm fine, Herr Hoffmann," said Miller."Great. When are you going to be fit?" "In a few days. Why?" "I've got a story that's right up your alley. A lot of daughters of wealthy papas in Germany are going down to the ski slopes and getting screwed by these handsome young ski-instructors. There's a clinic in Bavaria that gets them back out of trouble-for a fat fee and no word to Daddy about it. Seems some of the young studs take a rake-off from the clinic. A great little story. Sex amid the Snow, Orgies in Oberland. When can you start?" Miller thought. "Next week." "Excellent. By the way, that thing you were on. Nazihunting. Did you get the man? Is there a story at all?" "No, Herr Hoffmann," said Miller slowly. "No story." "Didn't think so. Hurry up and get well. See you in Hamburg."Josef's plane from Frankfurt via London came into Lod Airport, Tel Aviv, as dusk was setting on Tuesday evening. He was met by two men in a car and taken to headquarters for debriefing by the colonel who had signed the cable from Cormorant. They talked until almost two in the morning, a stenographer noting it all down. When it was over, the colonel leaned back, smiled, and offered his agent a cigarette."Well done," he said simply. "We've checked on the factory and tipped off the authorities-anonymously, of course. The research section will be dismantled. We'll see to that, even if the German authorities don't. But they will. The scientists apparently didn't know whom they were working for. We'll approach them all pri- vately, and most will agree to destroy their records. They know, if the story broke, the weight of opinion in Germany today is pro-Israeli. They'll get other jobs in industry and keep their mouths shut. So will Bonn, and so will we. What about Miller?" "He'll do the same. What about those rockets?" The colonel blew a column of smoke and gazed at the stars in the night sky outside. "I have a feeling they'll never fly now. Nasser has to be ready by the summer of sixty-seven at the latest, and if the research work in that Vulkan factory is destroyed, they'll never mount another operation in time to fit the guidance systems to the rockets before the summer of 'sixty-seven." "Then the danger's over," said the agent.The colonel smiled. "The danger's never over. It just changes shape. This particular danger may be over. The big one goes on. We're going to have to fight again, and maybe after that, before it's over. Anyway, you must be tired. You can go home now." He reached into a drawer and produced a polyethylene bag of personal effects, while the agent deposited on the desk his false German passport, money, wallet, and keys. In a side room he changed clothes, leaving the German clothes with his superior.At the door the colonel looked the figure up and down with approval and shook hands. "Welcome home, Major Uri Ben-Shaul." The agent felt better back in his own identity, the one he had taken in 1947 when he first came to Israel and enlisted in the Palmach. He took a taxi back home to his flat in the suburbs and let himself in with the key that had just been returned to him with his other effects.In the darkened bedroom he could make out the sleeping form of Rivka, his wife, the light blanket rising and falling with her breathing. He peeked into the children's room and looked down at their two boys: Shlomo, who was six, and the two-year-old baby, Dov.He wanted badly to climb into bed beside his wife and sleep for several days, but there was one more job to be done. He set down his case and quietly undressed, taking off even the underclothes and socks. He dressed in fresh ones taken from the clothes chest, and Rivka slept on, undisturbed.From the closet he took his uniform trousers, cleaned and pressed as they always were when he came home, and laced up the gleaming black calf-boots over them. His khaki shirts and ties were where they always were, with razor-sharp creases down the shirt where the hot iron had pressed. Over them he slipped his battle jacket, adorned only with the glinting steel wings of a paratroop officer and the five campaign ribbons he bad earned in Sinai and in raids across the borders.The final article was his red beret. When he bad dressed he took several articles and stuffed them into a small bag. There was already a dim glint in the east when he got back outside and found his small car still parked where he had left it a month before in front of the apartment house.Although it was only February 26, three days before the end of the last month of winter, the air was mild again and gave promise of a brilliant spring.He drove eastward out of Tel Aviv and took the road to Jerusalem. There was a stillness about the dawn that he loved, a peace and a cleanness that never ceased to cause him wonder. He had seen it a thousand times on patrol in the desert, the phenomenon of a sunrise, cool and beautiful, before the onset of a day of blistering heat and sometimes of combat and death. It was the best time of the day.The road led across the flat, fertile countryside of the littoral plain toward the ocher hills of Judea, through the waking village of Ramleh.After Ramleh there was in those days a detour around the Latroun Salient, five miles to skirt the front positions of the Jordanian forces. To his left he could see the morning breakfast fires of the Arab Legion sending up thin plumes of blue smoke.There were a few Arabs awake in the village of AbuGosh, and when he had climbed up the last hills to Jerusalem the sun had cleared the eastern horizon and glinted off the Dome of the Rock in the Arab section of the divided city.He parked his car a quarter of a mile from his destination, the mausoleum of Yad Vashem, and walked the rest, down the avenue flanked by trees planted in memory of the gentiles who had tried to help, and to the great bronze doors that guard the shrine to six million of his fellow Jews who had died in the holocaust.The old gatekeeper told him it was not open so early in the morning, but he explained what he wanted, and the man let him in. He passed through into the Hall of Remembrance and glanced about him. He had been there before to pray for his own family, and still the massive gray granite blocks of which the hall was built overawed him.He walked forward to the rail and gazed at the names written in black on the gray stone floor, in Hebrew and Roman letters. There was no light in the sepulcher but that from the Eternal Flame, flickering above the shallow black bowl from which it sprang.By its light he could see the names across the floor, score upon score: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belsen, Ravensbriick, Buchenwald.... There were too many to count, but he found the one he sought. Riga.He did not need a yarmulka to cover himself, for he still wore his red beret, which would suffice. From his bag he took a fringed silk shawl, the tallith, the same kind of shawl Miller had found among the effects of the old man in Altona and had not understood. This he draped around his shoulders.He took a prayer book from his bag and opened it at the right page. He advanced to the brass rail that separates the hall into two parts, gripped it with one hand, and gazed across it at the flame in front of him. Because he was not a religious man, he had to consult his prayer book frequently, as he recited the prayer already five thousand years old."Yitgaddal, Veyitkaddash, Shemay rabbahAnd so it was that, twenty-one years after it had died in Riga, a major of paratroops of the Army of Israel, standing on a hill in the Promised Land, finally said Kaddish for the soul of Salomon Tauber.It would be agreeable if things in this world always finished with all the ends neatly tied up. That is very seldom the case. People go on, to live and die in their own appointed time and place. So far as it has been possible to establish, this is what happened to the main characters.Peter Miller went home, married, and stuck to reporting the sort of things that people want to read over breakfast and in the hairdresser's.By the summer of 1970 Sigi was carrying their third child.The men of the Odessa scattered. Eduard Roschmann's wife returned home and later received a cable from her husband telling her he was in Argentina. She refused to follow him. In the summer of 1965 she wrote to him at their old address, the Villa Jerbal, to ask him for a divorce before the Argentinian courts.The letter was forwarded to his new address, and she got a reply consenting to her request, but stipulating the German courts, and enclosing a legal document agreeing to a divorce. She was awarded this in 1966. She still lives in Germany but has retaken her maiden name of Willer, of which there are tens of thousands in Germany. The man's first wife, Hella, still lives in Austria.The Werwolf finally made his peace with his furious superiors in Argentina and settled on a small estate he bought with the money realized from the sale of his effects, on the Spanish island of Formenteria.The radio factory went into liquidation. The scientists working on the guidance systems for the rockets of Helwan all found jobs in industry or the academic world. The project on which they had unwittingly been working for Roschmann, however, collapsed.The rockets at Helwan never flew. The fuselages were ready, along with the rocket fuel. The warheads were under production. Those who may doubt the authenticity of those warheads should examine the evidence of Professor Otto Yoklek, given at the trial of Yossef ben Gal, June 10 to June 26, 1963, Basel Provincial Court, Switzerland. The forty preproduction rockets, helpless for want of the electronic systems necessary to guide them to their targets in Israel, were still standing in the deserted factory at Helwan when they were destroyed by bombers during the Six-day War. Before that the German scientists had disconsolately returned to Germany.The exposure to the authorities of Klaus Winzer's file upset a lot of Odessa applecarts. The year which began so well ended for them disastrously. So much so that years later a lawyer and investigator of the Z Commission in Ludwigsburg was able to say, "Nineteen sixtyfour was a good year for us, yes, a very good year." At the end of 1964 Chancellor Erhard, shaken by the exposures, issued a nationwide and international appeal for all those having knowledge of the whereabouts of wanted SS criminals to come forward and tell the author- ities. The response was considerable, and the work of the men of Ludwigsburg received an enormous boost which continued for several more years.Of the politicans behind the arms deal between Germany and Israel, Chancellor Adenauer of Germany lived in his villa at Rh6ndorf, above his beloved Rhine and close to Bonn, and died there on April 19, 1967. The Israeli Premier David Ben-Gurion stayed on as a member of the Knesset (Parliament) until 1970, then finally retired to his home on the kibbutz of Sede Boker, in the heart of the brown hills of the Negev, on the road from Beersheba to Eilat. He likes to receive visitors and talks with animation about many things, but not about the rockets of Helwan and the reprisal campaign against the German scientists who worked on them.Of the secret-service men in the story, General Amit remained Controller until September 1968, and on his shoulders fell the massive responsibility of ensuring that his country was provided with pinpoint information in time for the Six-Day War. As history records, he succeeded brilliantly.On his retirement he became chairman and managing director of the labor-owned Koor Industries of Israel. He still lives very modestly, and his charming wife, Yona, refuses, as ever, to employ a maid, preferring to do all her own housework.His successor, who still holds the post, is General Zvi Zamir.Major Uri Ben-Shaul was killed on Wednesday, June 7, 1967, at the head of a company of paratroops fighting their way into Old Jerusalem. He took a bullet in the head from an Arab Legionary and went down four hundred yards east of the Mandelbaum Gate.Simon Wiesenthal still lives and works in Vienna, gathering a fact here, a tip there, slowly tracking down the whereabouts of wanted SS murderers, and each month and year brings him a crop of successes.Leon died in Munich in 1968, and after his death the group of men he had led on his personal crusade of vengeance lost heart and split up.And last, Top Sergeant Ulrich Frank, the tank commander who crossed Miller's path on the road to Vienna. He was wrong about the fate of his tank, the Dragon Rock. It did not go to the scrap heap. It was taken away on a low-loader, and he never saw it again. Forty months later he would not have recognized it anyway.The steel-gray of its body had been painted out and covered with paint the color of dust-brown to merge with the landscape of the desert. The black cross of the German Army was gone from the turret and replaced by the pale blue six-pointed Star of David. The name he had given it was gone too, and it had been renamed The Spirit of Masada.It was still commanded by a top sergeant, a hawknosed, black-bearded man called Nathan Levy. On June 5, 1967, the M-48 began its first and only week of combat since it had rolled from the workshops of Detroit, Michigan, ten years before. It was one of those tanks that General Israel Tat hurled into the.battle for the Mitla Pass two days later, and at noon on Saturday, June 10, caked with dust and oil, scored by bullets, its tracks wom to wafers by the rocks of Sinai, the old Patton rolled to a stop on the eastern bank of the Suez Canal.ABOUT THE AUTHORWritten in hotels in Austria and Germany during the fall of 1971, THE ODESSA FILE-like the phenomenally successful The Day of the Jackal before it-is based on FREDERICK FORSYTH'S life experiences as a Reuters man reporting from London, Paris and East Berlin in the early 1960's. Mr. Forsyth is currently at work on a third novel, The Dogs of War, which he has set among mercenaries in Africa and in which he has included details of gun-running from Europe he uncovered while researching his nonfiction book, The Biafra Story, and while serving as the BBC's television correspondent in Biafra during the Nigerian civil war.AUTHOR'S NOTEIT IS CUSTOMARY for authors to thank those who have helped them to compile a book, particularly on a difficult subject, and in doing so to name them.All those who helped me, in however small a way, by assisting me to get the information I needed to write The Odessa File are entitled to my heartfelt thanks, and if I do not name them it is for three reasons.Some, being former members of the SS, were not aware at the time either whom they were talking to, or that what they said would end up in a book.Others have specifically asked that their names never be mentioned as sources of information about the SS. In the case of others still, the decision not to mention their names is mine alone, and taken, I hope, for their sakes rather than for mine.Throughout the book there occur the names of places and organizations and the titles and ranks of various people, most of which in the original language would be in German. To assist those who do not read German and find the longer words unpronounceable, I have taken the liberty of translating the majority into English. Those with a knowledge of German, who will no doubt recognize the original form, are asked to forgive the translations.F. F.The End