moment came! The column marched to the right in the snow-swept night, and Harry ducked away, crouching, and scurried to his left during a particularly brief, heavy snowfall. An observant guard saw him and raised his pistol.
"Nein!" said the Reichsfzihrer of the detail, gripping the soldier's arm and lowering it.
"Verboten. Ist sc bon gut!"
The man known in covert-operations as Sting trudged through the knee- ep snow un tramp e prece feet, breathlessly hoping he would see the first of the marks he had made weeks before-years ago in his mind -when he was first escorted to the hidden valley. There it was! Two broken limbs of a sapling that would not rejuvenate until spring. The small tree had been on the left, the next marking was on the right, a descending, diagonal right.. .. Three hundred yards later, his face hot and flushed, his' legs freezing, he saw it! The branch of an alpine spruce he had snapped; it was still angled downward, its remnant dried, devoid of sap. The mountain road between the two alpine villages was less than five miles away, most of it downhill. He would make it. He had to!
Finally, his feet in ice-cold agony, his body bent over in pain, he did. He sat down and massaged his legs, his hands scraped by his half-frozen trousers, when a truck appeared on the left. He propelled himself to his feet, staggered into the road, and violently waved his arms in the beams of the headlights. The truck stopped.
"Hilfe!". he yelled in German.
"My car went off the road!"
"No explanations, please," said the bearded driver in accented English.
"I've been waiting for you. I've driven up and down this road for the past three days, hour after hour."
"Who are you?" asked Harry, climbing into the seat.
"Your deliverance, as the British say," replied the driver, chuckling.
"You knew I was coming out?"
"We have a spy in the hidden valley, although we have no idea where it is. She, like everyone else, was taken there blindfolded."
"How did she know?"
"She's a nurse in the hospital down there, a nurse when she isn't ordered to copulate with another Aryan Brader so to produce a new Sonnenkind. She watched you, saw you folding pieces of paper and sewing them into your clothes-"
"But how?" interrupted Latham/Lassiter.
"Your rooms have hidden cameras."
"How did she get word to you?"
"All the Sonnenkinder are permitted, even ordered, to reach parents or relatives to explain their absences with pleasant fictitious stories. Without those explanations, the Oberfrihrer fear exposure, as with your American cults, who barricade themselves in other mountains and valleys. She reached her 'parents," and with precise codes told us the American would be leaving, the precise day or time she couldn't know, but you were definitely going to escape imminently."
"The evacuation-and it is just that-was my way out."
"Whatever, you're here and on your way to Burghausen. From our humble headquarters there you may reach whomever you like.
You see, we are the Antinayous."
"The who?"
"The opposite of the one who, under the nom de plume of CaracARA, slaughtered twenty thousand Romans who opposed his despotic rule, according to the historian Dio
Cassius." I
"I've heard of Caracalla, Dio Cassius as well, but I'm afraid I don't understand you."
"Then you are not a serious student of Roman history. " "No, I'm not."
"So we'll bring it up-to-date, in another context, in another reversal, ja?"
"Whatever you say."
"Anglicized, we are anti-Nyoss, ja?"
"Okay."
"Substitute 'ncos' for 'nyoss," h'okay?"
"Sure."
"Then what have you got? Anti-ncos, night wabr? Antineo-Nazis.
That's who we are!"
"Why do you have to hide under an obscure name?"
"Why do they hide under the secret name of the Broderschaft?"
"What has one got to do with the other?"
"Secrecy must match secrecy!"
"Why? You're legitimate."
"We battle our enemy both above the ground and underneath the dirt."
"I've been there," said Harry Latham, falling back into the seat.
"And I still don't understand you."
"Why did you leave?" asked Drew, having gotten Karin de Vries's telephone number from security.
"There wasn't anything more to say," replied the D and R researcher.
"There was a hell of a lot more to say, and you know it."
"Please check my clearance files, and if anything upsets you, report it."
"Forget that crap! Harry's alive! After three years under cover, he escaped and [email protected] on his way back!"
"Mon Dieu. I cannot tell you how happy, how relieved I am!
"You knew all 'along what my brother was doing, didn't you?"
"Not on the telephone, Drew Latham. Come to my flat on the rue Madeleine. It is twenty-six, apartment five."
Drew gave the number to Durbane in Communications, grabbed