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Awad’s bombs go off, our little group will be the least of the world’s worries.”
    “If we’re found out by the wrong people, they’ll roll us up.”
    “Not in this time frame they won’t,” I said. “Our advantage is that we can move fast because nobody can say no to us.”
    Jack said, “We’ll see about that. You have no actual objection to our following the rules of tradecraft?”
    “No.”
    “That’s good,” Harley said, “because we jes’ can’t help it.”
    I told them the plan. Because of my physique I didn’t think it wise to stop off in Rome and call on Zarah’s ex-monk. Looking up from his deathbed at a six-foot-five American who speaks Italian like a Visigoth wouldn’t put a man in the mood to share confidences. On the other hand, Jack had a soothing personality and he spoke fluent Italian. I told him what we knew about Paul’s old friend and how we knew it, and handed him Zarah’s slip of paper with the man’s name on it.
    “If he has anything to tell us,” Jack said, “what do I do then?”
    “Tell everybody everything you know over the satellite phone,” I said. “Then follow up.”
    “Bydoing what?”
    “Go wherever you think you should go, see whoever you need to see,” I replied. “but feed every scrap of information to every single one of us by satellite phone as soon as it happens. Don’t wait. Call the minute you know something.”
    They all knew the reason for this: if every one of us knew everything, only one of us had to survive to carry out the last stage of the op.
    Ben Childress, our Arabist, knew Ibn Awad’s German live-in doctor. This particular alumnus of the Schutzstaffel (SS) called himself Claus Bücher. If Bücher was still alive and still doctoring Ibn Awad, his whereabouts obviously would be unknown. We needed to know if he had dropped out of sight at the same time as his employer and, more important, if he had been sighted since. If he came into town every now and then, or flew somewhere for R & R, we might be able to get our hands on him, and if we did, miracles do happen. Who knows? If the incentive was right, he might take us to his patient.
    Harley Waters had a wide circle of friends among the used-tobe’s of the former Soviet bloc. He would find out whatever he could in Moscow, then go to Prague and Budapest and sniff around for recent traces of Paul and old folklore about Lori Christopher. Harley’s prime target was the nobility of the old Austro-Hungarian empire. These people still existed, and in Lori’s day they had been a nationality of their own, living in a world of their own, and so much intermarried over the centuries that they were nearly all cousins.
    The old aristocracy had despised the Nazis, who came out of the gutters. By 1942, these people were an undergroundin-waiting, and Lori was one of them. Had she gone to anyone for help in Prague, she would have gone to them. Unless they had come to her first and asked her help in liquidating Reinhard Heydrich.
    Charley Hornblower, our scholar, would remain in Washington and work the files. He had an attic full of them and a Rolodex full of fellow pack rats.
    I would go to Paris and sell the Hicks to finance the operation.

10

    In my penury I continued to possess some of the accoutrements of the man of means: wardrobe, credentials, connections, manners, even a valid credit card. But I had almost no pocket money. I booked the cheapest available ticket to Paris and took a bus into town from the airport. At 8-bis, avenue Wagram, I presented one of my last calling cards to the burly servant who answered the door of Kalash al Khatar’s apartment. He took it from my hand and shut the door in my face. A long time passed. Had I not been dealing with a descendant of the Prophet I might have feared that I had been refused entry. However, I had in the past been kept waiting by this haughty breed on many occasions in many parts of Islam, so I loitered patiently in the corridor. The windows looked