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third showed two men in Schutzstaffel uniforms kneeling over an empty container and smiling. The fourth fragment showed a machine gun nest and the long view down a firing range.
    The fifth showed an antiaircraft gun hovering above the same range. Marsh shook his head. Too many hours on the road and not enough sleep. But when he looked again, it truly did look like the eighty-eight was floating in midair. No evidence of an explosion, either, though it was hard to tell from a few frames of heat-damaged film.
    What on God’s green Earth were you mixed up with, Krasnopolsky?
    The fragments crackled against each other when he dropped them back in the envelope. Once the envelope was secured inside his shirt once more, he stood as though he’d merely ducked behind the crates to tie his shoes.
    A gypsy woman stared at him from across the boardwalk with wide plum-dark eyes. She’d been beaten. The skin around one of her eyes looked like the rind of an aubergine; the corner of her mouth quirked up where her split lip had scabbed over.
    Marsh frowned. He sized up her companion, a man with the same olive skin as the woman. Brother? Husband? A tall fellow, but not problematically so.
Enjoy beating up women, do you?
Marsh cracked his knuckles as he started for the pair.
    Another breeze rolled off the harbor. It tugged up the kerchief tied over her hair and fluttered the braids hanging past her shoulders.
    And jostled the wires connected to her head.
    Marsh stopped. He looked again.
    Wires. In her head.
    The wind died, and the kerchief covered her hair again.
    She winked at him.
    Her companion said something. She turned away. Marsh made to follow them before they disappeared in the throng.
    The whistle on his steamer blew two short, impatient bursts. Finalcall. He looked over his shoulder. The last few stragglers dashed up the gangplank under the watchful scowl of the porter.
    When he turned back, the woman was gone.
    “Gretel, please.” Klaus tugged at his sister’s hand. “We have to go.”
    Exasperation crept into his voice, though he tried to suppress it. In addition to Rudolf, two technicians had died when the errant mortar shell hit the house. A doctor had also died in the fire during the confused scramble to evacuate. One of the Twins nearly perished, too, before Reinhardt strode through the fire and released her from the restraints on the operating table. Standartenführer Pabst made the decision then and there to terminate training operations in Spain. There was no point in risking further Reichsbehörde assets to another “accident.” They had their field results; it was time to go home.
    “Sorry, brother.” Gretel turned and smiled. The swollen skin around her eye stretched tight. “I’ll be good.”
    Pabst had belted her with a savage backhand across the jaw when he learned of Rudolf’s death. It was her duty, her purpose, to warn them of such dangers, he’d screamed. And, like the incantations of a mad al-chemist, her laughter had transmuted his rage to violence, his open hand to a fist.
    Reinhardt wasn’t punished for burning down the house.
    “What were you staring at?”
    “Daydreams. Posies and gravestones.”
    Klaus sighed. “Our pier is this way,” he said, pulling her through the crowd.

two
     

     
     
    22 February 1939
    Westminster, London, England
    B rittle scraps of acetate fluttered across Stephenson’s desk as he paged through Marsh’s report. The charred edges of the document fragments littered the wide expanse of cherrywood with black flakes and smears of carbon. Ashes skittered along the desk and drifted to the carpet at Marsh’s feet every time Stephenson exhaled. They smelled of woodsmoke and scorched leather.
    Marsh rocked on the balls of his feet. Stephenson had been at it for a good half hour.
    Somewhere down on the street the
rat-a-tat
syncopation of a two-stroke engine drifted out of the white noise of a London morning. A motorbike, probably a Villiers, zipping along Victoria