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asked sharply. "If so I have a right to know—or are you picking up a few tricks from the Gestapo?" He regretted the words almost immediately, and not just because of what came next. He knew very well the difference between even a hardnose like Grierson and a genuine secret-police thug.
    "Lieutenant Commander James Martel, under the Espionage Act of 1941 you are hereby charged with delivering classified information to a foreign power. You are under arrest. You will be escorted back to the United States where you will face a military court martial. Prior to that court martial some people in my division want to have a long, long talk with you. A plane is waiting at Templehof." Grierson went to the back door of Acres's office and, with a bit of flourish, knocked on it. The door opened and two more men in civilian garb stepped in.
    "Martel, these two men will escort us to the plane and back to the States. They have been ordered to kill you rather than let you escape, and believe me, should the occasion arise they will happily carry out that order."
    Stunned, Jim looked back at Acres.
    "Just cooperate, Jim. I'll get things moving on my end. You'll be cleared of this within a week, maybe two." In the long months to come James Martel would often recall that empty promise.

CHAPTER TWO
    November 6 Reykjavik, Iceland
    President Andrew Harrison sat in his high, straight-backed chair waiting for his undiplomatically tardy opposite number. As he stared into the fireplaces contained conflagration he unconsciously attempted to impose some sense of order on the flickering shadows capering before him, but he had no more success in that than he had ever had in imposing a pattern on the remarkable series of events that had led to this meeting and whatever would follow.
    Hardly more than a year ago he had been the Junior Senator from Nebraska. Now he was President of the United States. To this day, that title—his title, President of the United States — still evoked the image of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and no other. But when the Japanese surrendered and The Great Pacific War was won at last, FDR suddenly announced his retirement and as a last exercise of his extraordinary political power had virtually anointed his own successor. Andrew Harrison III.
    Right now the sitting President wished that Franklin still had his old job. The whole world might pay a terrible cost for any mistakes made here today.
    There were others, seemingly better qualified, that he could have picked, Harrison mused, but I was from the West and could corral our own New Isolationists, and maybe take a little wind out of the sails of the Western Republicans. Someone from Pennsylvania, Ohio, or Missouri just would not have fit the bill. And so here he was.
    Fifteen minutes past three. Forty-five minutes late. It was deliberate of course, but annoying for all that. Before long he would have to take official notice.
    To distract himself, and because it stirred a memory of another clock and another mantel, Harrison stood up and examined the clock over this one. Lincoln had his log cabin, he thought, and I my sod hut on the prairie. His campaign managers had made much of that during the '44 campaign: the farmer's son versus the slick New York City lawyer. It had played very well, and rather remarkably it was all true.
    This mantel clock reminded him of his mother's precious memento of her elegant life back East, one of the few heirlooms that had survived the journey to northwestern Nebraska. She had kept the brass frame of that clock polished to a shine that rivaled burnished gold, and it stood out like a diamond in their earth-walled hut. As a child he had stood before it, watching the hands trace their endless course, carrying with them a mystery of time and memory, and all the promise and pain that such mysteries held.
    Before he was fully grown it had held other memories as well, of its chiming the midnight hour while tuberculosis took her from them, his father holding