BY THE TIME they reached the Refugee Documentation Center it was midafternoon, the shakes were gone from Ian’s hands, and the humiliation at his loss of control was subsiding. “Right,” he said as they came into the stale-smelling office. “I have a call to make. Nina, if you’d be good enough to sort post; Tony, catalog and file anything new. We have a dozen other files open besides Lorelei Vogt’s, after all.” The office filled with the crackle of paper and the hiss of the kettle, and Ian picked up the telephone. “What do you have, Bauer?” Let it be good news.
“The United States naturally has no jurisdiction over crimes committed overseas, so if you found your huntress—proved who she was and what she’d done—she’d have to be extradited for trial.” Ian heard the rustle of paper on Bauer’s end. “To Austria, possibly, as her birth nation, or to Poland as that’s where her crimes were largely committed.”
Ian could well imagine a courtroom of vengeful Poles eager to levy justice against the woman who had hunted their citizens on the banks of Lake Rusalka. “What else?”
“Before you could even think of getting her a trial in Europe, she’d probably have to be tried in the United States in a civil court, and you’d need clear proof of her crimes.”
“We have it. Witnesses.” Nina, eyewitness to Sebastian’s murder, and the clerk who had provided the statement at Nuremberg about die Jägerin’s execution of the Jewish children.
“It would still be heavy lifting,” Bauer warned, and he launched into a flurry of legal technicalities that lost Ian on the third turn. So many things this team needed, he thought—photographers, drivers, pathologists—but surely what they could have used most of all was more legal experts. Ian heard his friend sigh on the other end, aware he’d lost his audience. “The United States hasn’t extradited a single Nazi for war crimes,” Bauer finished bluntly. “Not one. Are they even aware they have any? Or perhaps the question is, do they care?”
The leaden feeling returned to Ian’s stomach as he rang off. Tony’s voice was quiet. “What’s the bad news?”
“I am pondering the realities of American extradition law,” Ian replied. Die Jägerin. Learning her real name hadn’t brought her down to human size, after all. She remained the huntress, remote and uncatchable. Ian forced the words out. “It’s time we faced facts. We aren’t going to Boston.”
Two sets of eyes regarded him, dismayed. Russian blue and Polish-American black.
“It’s over.” Ian looked back and forth between them. “She got away.”
“No, she got to Boston,” Tony said. “Who knows where from there?”
“It doesn’t matter. She might as well have gone to the moon.” Ian gestured at the four walls of the center, biting his words off. “We are three people in a one-room office with two desks and four filing cabinets. Even if we found her in America, we could not possibly get her extradited for trial. We lack the man power, the money, the influence, and the resources to mount an overseas search. It is impossible. I was hoping otherwise, but Bauer convinced me. We’re finished.”
“Bauer hasn’t convinced me,” Tony said. “We’re not finished until we fail, and we haven’t failed yet.”
“We will, if we pursue this.”
“I’ll admit, it’s a long shot. But we might pull it off if—”
“This is not a debate.” Ian cut him off in a wintry voice. “I started this documentation center, Tony. I say how and where we choose our targets.”
“And we both know you wouldn’t get half your arrests if not for me. So let’s not pretend my mingy salary makes you my boss.” Tony folded his arms across his chest, and Ian realized he was angry too. “We can catch Lorelei Vogt.”
“Drop your everlasting Yank optimism!” Ian’s temper flared to match Tony’s, sweeping disappointment away. Anger hurt, but at least it was a satisfying pain. “This tin-pot office stapled together with sweat and ink does not have the resources to—”
“So you’re willing to give up?” Tony’s eyes bored into him. “When she killed your brother?”
“A lot of brothers have been lost in this war,” Ian clipped. “My loss is no more worthy of special consideration than anyone else’s. And I’m not willing to burn up everything in my life for vengeance.”
“You’ve already burned up everything in your life, Ian. You just didn’t do it for vengeance; that’s for commoners who never went to Harrow.” Tony gave a thin, edged smile. “You burned up everything in your life for this office,