opened and a man in pure white coveralls walked into the room. He glanced around, saw Von Schnabe, and marched directly toward him, handing the general a sealed manila envelope.
"This is it," the man said in German.
"Danke," replied Von Schnabe, opening the envelope and extracting a small plastic pouch.
"You are a fine Scbauspieter-a good impersonator-Herr Lassiter, but I believe you lost something.
Our pilot just brought it to me." The general shook the contents of the plastic bag into his hand. It was the transponder Harry Latham had shoved between the rocks of a mountain road thousands of feet above the valley. The hunt was finished. Harry swiftly raised his hand to his right ear.
"Stop him!" shouted Von Schnabe as the pilot grabbed Latham's arm, yanking it. back into a hammerlock.
"There'll be no cyanide for you, Harry Latham of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A. We have other plans for you, brilliant plans."
The early sun was blinding, causing the old man crawling through the wild brush to blink repeatedly as he wiped his eyes with the back of his trembling right hand. He had reached the edge of the small promontory on top of the hill, the "high ground," as they called it years ago-years burned into his memory. The grassy point overlooked an elegant country estate in the Loire Valley. A flagstone terrace was no more than three hundred meters below, with a brick path bordered by flowers leading to it. Gripped in the old man's left hand, the shoulder strap taut, was a powerful rifle, its sight calibrated for the precise distance. The weapon was ready to fire. Soon his target-a man older than himself-would appear in the telescopic crosshairs. The monster would be taking. his morning stroll to the terrace, dressed in his flowing morning robe' his reward his morning coffee laced with the finest brandy, a reward he would never reach on this particular morning. Instead, he would die, collapsing among the flowers, an appropriate irony: the death of consummate evil among surrounding beauty.
Jean-Pierre Jodelle, seventy-eight years of age and once a fierce provisional leader of the Resistance, had waited fifty years to fulfill a promise, a commitment, he had made to himself and to his God.
He had failed with the lawyers and in the sacrosanct court chambers; no, not failed, instead, been insulted by them, scorned by all of them, and told to take his contemptible fantasies to a cell in a lunatic asylum, where he belonged! The great General Monluc was a true hero of France, a close associate of le grand Charles Andre de Gaulle, that most illustrious of all soldier, statesmen who had kept in constant touch with
Monluc throughout the war over the underground radio frequencies despite the prospect of torture and a firing squad should Monluc be exposed.
It was all merde! Monluc was a turncoat, a coward, and a traitor!
He gave lip service to the arrogant De Gaulle, fed him insignificant intelligence, and lined his own pockets with Nazi gold and art objects worth millions. And then in the aftermath, le grand Charles, in euphoric adulation, had pronounced Monluc un bel amide guerre, a man to be honored. It was no less than a command for all France.
Merde! How little De Gaulle knew! Monluc had ordered the execution of Jodelle's wife and his first son, a child of five. A second son, an infant of six months, was spared, perhaps by the warped rationality of the Wehrmacht officer who said, "He's not a Jew, maybe someone will find him."
Someone did. A fellow Resistance fighter, an actor from the Comedie Franqaise. He found the screaming baby amid the rubble of the shattered house on the outskirts of Barbizon, where he had come for a secret meeting the following morning. The actor had brought the child home to his wife, a celebrated actress whom the Germans adored their affection not returned, for her performances were dictated, not offered voluntarily. And when the war ended, Jodelle was a skeleton of his former self, physically unrecognizable and mentally beyond repair, and he knew it. Three years in a concentration camp, piling the bodies of gassed Jews, Gypsies, and "undesirables," had reduced him to near idiocy, with neck tics, erratic, blinking, spasms of throated cries, and all that went with severe psychiatric damage. He never revealed himself to his surviving son or the "parents" who had reared him. Instead, wandering through the bowels of Paris and changing his name frequently, Jodelle observed from a distance as the child grew into