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isolation. It is not uncommon for agents in such a situation to feel strange, self-destructive tendencies. Our business is based on deception, and the human mind does not take kindly to that. There is nothing wrong with feeling the urge to confess everything to the nearest friendly ear. But there is something very much wrong, of course, with acting on that impulse.
    Was that the urge he felt now—to find some innocent German in some bar and confess everything? He supposed it was. He had committed a murder, after all. He had taken a man’s life. He had crossed a line. The need to confess was strong.
    Or perhaps he only wanted a drink.
    You think too much, he thought.
    Stop thinking. Keep moving.
    He kept moving.
    The people around him were loud, boisterous, drunk. During the days, they walked on eggshells, these Germans. Would the war come, as it seemed it must? Or would the English, at the last possible instant, sue for peace? At night, their tension was released; they drank, danced, brawled, and celebrated as if the world itself was ending. The beer halls and cafés were doing a thriving business behind their new blackout shades.
    Litter crackled under his feet as he walked—discarded newspaper, windswept trash, an occasional crumpled leaflet. The British confetti campaign had begun on the very day that war had been declared. Thirteen tons of propaganda had landed in Germany on that first night alone. Hobbs and Borg had watched later deluges together from the apartment window. At one point, Borg had brought a leaflet up to the flat, and they’d shared a laugh over it. The rhetoric was simple and to the point. Your rulers have condemned you to the massacres, miseries, and privations of a war they cannot ever hope to win.
    A taxi was drifting toward him. He raised a hand and it immediately pulled over to the curb. He slid into the backseat and opened his mouth to state his destination—
    â€”and then paused.
    An idea had just occurred to him.
    He would go to Eva’s flat right now, at this very moment. He knew her address. He would go to her and make his plea, demanding that she give him another chance. He had been rehearsing the words over and over in his mind, during his time locked in the apartment with Borg. It would be a relief to finally say them.
    But it would be better, no doubt, to stick to the plan. To visit his contact family in Wilmersdorf, get set up with false papers, and arrange the extraction. In the long run, it would improve his chances—both his and Eva’s.
    Best to stick with the plan, he thought again. He was far enough behind schedule that another twenty-four hours wouldn’t make much of a difference. He would go to Wilmersdorf tonight, and visit Eva tomorrow.
    The words he wanted to say to her would still be there tomorrow.
    â€œHohenzollerndamm,” he told the driver blithely. “Wilmersdorf.”
    LAKE WANNSEE
    The staff car drifted to a stop in front of the villa; a single passenger emerged from the backseat.
    He was a slender man, lithe and compact, with a widow’s peak just beginning to gray around the temples. His hooded, restless eyes promptly scanned the entire area—lake, trees, porch, bristly frost-speckled lawn—in one long, smooth sweep.
    The man’s name was Frick, and his eyes had not been so restless a few months before. But since then he had spent time in Poland as commander of an Einsatzgruppen squad, following behind the regular army and rounding up Jews for deportation to the ghetto, and now his eyes never stopped moving.
    He was not in the field anymore, however, and there was nothing here at the villa that seemed to merit such extreme caution. After a moment, he made himself relax. The transition from the field to the bureaucracy was not an easy one to make. But he was back in Germany now, and so his role as Einsatzgruppen leader needed to be put aside. It was time to don again the mantle he had worn for so many years