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wheel on the right. In British movies, the hero vaulted into cars like this but DeHaan took the traditional approach, snaking his way inside and settling into the leather seat.
    “Yes,” Wilhelm said. “Mostly.” The shepherd stared thoughtfully as Wilhelm tried the ignition, which coughed and died. “Now, now,” she said. On the fourth try there was an ill-tempered snort, then, on the fifth, a string of explosions—full power. The shepherd broke into a huge smile, and Wilhelm laughed and waved to him as they went bumping off down the street.
    “What is it?” DeHaan said.
    “What?”
    “What is it?”
    “Oh, it’s a Morgan. There’s more to it, I think, letters or numbers, something.”
    They were out of town and on a dirt road almost immediately. Past a field of green shoots and a blindfolded ox, harnessed to a wooden bar and walking in a circle around the stone rim of a well.
    “It used to belong to a friend of mine,” Wilhelm said. “An American. He liked to say that back in the States he’d had all the Morgans—the horse, the car, and the girl.”
    The dirt track began to narrow and it was almost dark. Then, suddenly, they climbed to the crest of a hill and the ocean appeared on the left. Wilhelm braked to a stop. “There you are,” she said.
    Down below, the
Noordendam
at anchor, lights shimmering in the haze, a thin stream of smoke from the funnel as one boiler was kept running to serve the electrical system.
    “Did you see that old truck? In the square?” Wilhelm said.
    “Yes.”
    “That’s your paint,” she said. “In metal drums.”
    “Is somebody watching it?”
    “The guard, of course, as you saw. And the driver isn’t far away.”
    “How much do you have?”
    “Two hundred gallons. They said at the ship chandler you need gamboge and indigo, and burnt sienna—they wrote the proportions on the drums—to make dark green. And white, for the striping. Of course it needs to be thinned, thinned way down, so there’s white spirit.”
    Wilhelm handed him a sheet of paper with a description printed out in pencil, DeHaan could just barely read it in the failing light. “
Funnel:
black with green band.
Hull:
Black with broad green band between narrow white bands.”
    “Is that correct?” Wilhelm said.
    “That’s the description in
Lloyd’s Register
. No boot-topping, thank God.” Merchant-company colors were often used for the latter—the space that showed when the ship was high in the water, without cargo.
    “Then
Santa Rosa,
on the side,” Wilhelm said.
    “On the bow, yes. And at the stern.”
    The
Noordendam
was to become the
Santa Rosa,
of the Compaa Naviera Cardenas Sociedad Annima, with offices on the Gran Via in Valencia. As a ship steaming under a Spanish, a neutral, flag, she could go anywhere. In theory. According to Leiden, the real
Santa Rosa
was in drydock, with a serious engine problem that would require a new casting, in the Mexican port of Campeche.
    Leiden, and Section IIIA, presumed that with the wartime suspension of the “Movements and Casualties” page of the maritime journal
Lloyd’s List
—daily intelligence on the world of six thousand merchant ships—hostile personnel, at sea or in port, would have at hand only the annual
Lloyd’s Register,
and the false
Santa Rosa
would conform to the description found in the section on Spain. That is, if they even bothered to look. It was further presumed that the newly
confidential
—limited-distribution—version of the shipping pages would not be available to enemy observers. On these presumptions, Section IIIA was betting forty-two lives and a ship.
    Still, not such a wild bet. The
Noordendam
and the
Santa Rosa
were, if not twins, at least sisters. They were typical tramp freighters, picking up cargo anywhere and taking it to designated ports, as opposed to liners, which made scheduled trips between two cities. They’d both been built around 1920, five thousand gross tons, some four hundred feet long and