wish me to—” Her voice broke. “Du meine Güte, I’m sorry—”
She rushed out of the room, shoulders hunched as though expecting a blow. The first sob came just before the sound of the bedroom door closing.
Jordan looked at her father numbly. He stood with his hands hanging at his sides, wearing the good shirt he’d donned for Thanksgiving dinner. The table’s bright silver and holiday pumpkins looked like festive flags decorating a shipwreck. Jordan dragged a breath into her frozen lungs and realized she was smelling smoke from the kitchen. Their Thanksgiving dinner was burning.
Her father was staring at her. She took a step forward, eyes blurring. Not knowing what to say. Not knowing what to think, except that this had all gone horribly wrong. “Dad . . .”
Dad, I still don’t know if I believe her or not. Dad, I was just trying to protect you . . .
But she couldn’t get past that first word. Her throat stopped, choked up with tears and the smell of burned turkey and ruined Thanksgiving. Feebly, she gestured to the two photographs. “Pictures don’t lie,” she forced out. “I believed what I saw.”
But the thought reverberated through her head like a tolling bell now:
You saw wrong.
Chapter 17
Ian
April 1950
Salzburg
It should have been a night to sleep happy and triumphant, a night to dream of die Jägerin in handcuffs, but the nightmare didn’t care. Vaulted out of sleep by the familiar dream, Ian tried to be amused at the utter predictability of night terrors but he was shaking too much. “Why the parachute?” he asked aloud of his dark hotel room, needing to hear a voice even if only his own. “Why the bloody parachute?”
Fruitless question. A nightmare was a needle plunging through the net of human memory; it slipped past one strand and caught up another on its point, stitching up dark dreams out of the unlikeliest recollections. The parachute wasn’t the worst thing he’d seen in his career by any means, so why dream of it? Why not Spain, that day in Teruel when he’d carried his notepad up shell-pocked stairs into the Republican-attacked Civil Governor’s building, listening to the terrible single shots of men killing themselves? Why not that schoolhouse in Naples after the German retreat, the coffins heaped with flowers that didn’t cover the dirty bare feet of the children in them? Why not dream about Omaha Beach, for God’s sake? “That would be the obvious nightmare to have,” Ian muttered, leaning on the open window to drag in a shaky breath of geranium-scented air. Clinging to wet sand, watching blood swirl past through shallow waves, deafened by German fire but feeling the impact through his bones as the shells hit all around him . . . he’d seen the first gray in his dark hair within a week of Omaha Beach. Surely that should have been the worst dream in his nighttime arsenal.
No. It was the parachute under the emerald-green trees, peacefully swaying, and the endless drop below.
Stop. Ian gave the fear a brutal kick. There is no parachute, no fall. No bloody nightmare either, because you have no right to it. You were just a journalist. A goddamn writer, not a soldier. They carried guns; you carried pens. They fought, you didn’t. They bled and died, you wrote and lived. You haven’t earned the nightmares.
He went back to bed, closed his eyes, pounded the pillow. Rolled on his back and stared at the ceiling. “Bloody hell,” he muttered, rising again to pull a shirt over chilly sweat-slicked skin, and went downstairs to the hotel desk. After a protracted wrangle with the sleepy night clerk, Ian was finally put through to the only other man he could count on to be awake at this hour. “Bauer, what do you know about extradition law in America?”
“Guten Morgen to you too,” Fritz Bauer rasped. “Don’t tell me you’re following a chase overseas.”
Ian turned his back on the night clerk. “Perhaps.” The staggering complications of that had only begun to register this evening, as he sat over the remains of a scrounged supper listening to Nina and Tony wrangle about how best to track die Jägerin now that they had a name, a photograph, and a destination. “What would we be in for?” He only knew in the most general terms; Bauer could be counted on for specifics.
“It would be hell,” his friend said succinctly. Ian could imagine the flash of light off his glasses as he leaned back in his leather