"You're my witness, son. I don't approve of this." He paused, then added, "That does not mean that I don't understand it. I just don't approve of the damn thing."

"Okay," Canidy then said cheerfully, "now that that's resolved, one last thing."

He looked at John Craig.

"I'm not going to keep calling you 'John Craig,' and I'm damn sure not going to stumble over 'van der Ploeg' over and over. So, if I'm still going by Jupiter, then you can be . . . oh, what the hell . . . you can be Apollo."

"Any particular reason?" van der Ploeg said. "I don't know my Greek gods."

"Apollo was god of all kinds of things-light, sun, truth, healing, even plague."

"Okay."

"I think we're probably going to need all that-particularly the plague."

Apollo grinned.

"Stan," Canidy then said, "would you get on the horn and tell Darmstadter we're on our way out there? Just as soon as Apollo and I go downstairs and load up in the warehouse, then prepare a message for the commo room to send to the Casabianca. Tell Hank I'll borrow one of those tiny Stinsons I saw out at Maison Blanche if I have to."

Now Fine grinned. In some circles, Canidy was damn near infamous for stealing airplanes, boats, trucks, whatever-which he declared he was actually only "borrowing," arguing that he always returned whatever he took.

"You wouldn't be borrowing it, Dick. Those birds belong to us."

IV.

[ONE].

OSS Bern Station Herrengasse 23 Bern, Switzerland 2325 27 May 1943 Allen Dulles, keeping eye contact with Wolfgang Kappler, said to the agent, "Yes, please show him in."

Kappler wordlessly raised his eyebrows.

They looked toward the door as a man entered and the agent slipped back out the door and closed it.

Kappler studied the man. Because of the dimly lit room, details were difficult to make out from the distance. But the fact that Dr. Bernhard was massive was unmistakable. He stood six-foot-six and had broad shoulders.

"Come join us," Dulles called out.

As the man approached, walking somewhat hunched over, Kappler could make out that, with the rumpled tweed jacket, unkempt thin hair, and horn-rimmed eyeglasses with very thick lenses, he looked very much like a university professor of about age forty.

An enormous university professor, Kappler thought.

And a familiar-looking one . . .

Reaching Dulles, the man held out his hand and said in a deep, almost abrasive voice, "A pleasure to see you again, Allen. I hope I am not interrupting anything."

I think I know that voice, Kappler thought.

In fact, I know I do!

Then the man turned toward Kappler and seemed to be trying to focus on him through the thick lenses.

He offered Kappler his hand and said, "I am Dr. Bernhard-"

No, I don't think so . . . Kappler thought.

"I know who you are!" Kappler suddenly said, his tone cordial. "Hans, it's me, Wolfgang. We met when you worked for Hjalmar Schacht at the Reichsbank in Berlin. You were involved with providing me funds for the expansion of my coal mine operations in the Ruhr Valley, near Ruhrpott."

There was a moment's hesitation, then he replied, "Wolfgang Kappler?"

He instantly pulled back his great big hand as if he had touched a red-hot stovetop. He glared down at Dulles.

"You asked me here to meet with a messenger of the devil himself?" he said. "This man can go to hell-he is closer to Hitler than Hitler's own mistress!"

Kappler puffed out his chest and declared, "It is you who can go to hell, Hans!"

Then he looked at Dulles and added, "What is this Dr. Bernhard nonsense? And how dare he speak of me that way! I thought that we were friends, Allen."

"It is his code name," Dulles explained evenly. "I think you know for obvious reasons why."

His other code name being Tiny, which is equally obvious.

When Kappler did not respond, Dulles added: "Hans is as much an anti-Nazi as you and Franz Messner."

Gisevius grunted derisively as he looked between Kappler and Dulles.

Then, as Kappler watched with shock, Gisevius casually dropped into one of the deep-cushioned leather armchairs. He leaned forward and poured himself a snifter of cognac, spilling some on the floor as he did so.

He acts as if this is his own home! Kappler thought.

Next, he flung open the humidor, fished out a fat cigar, and slammed shut the top.

Such arrogance!

Gisevius then unwrapped the cigar and ran it along his nose as he inhaled deeply. He grunted again. After dipping the closed end of the cigar in his cognac, he bit a small hole, then spit the piece of tobacco into the fireplace.

And such rudeness!

Finally he put the cigar in his mouth and, using the Zippo with the Princeton crest, lit it, then tossed the lighter back to the table.

He exhaled a massive gray cloud of smoke, grunted again, then said, "Not bad. Would be better in other company." He glanced up at Dulles. "No offense to the host."

But that is offensive!

Kappler quickly looked at Dulles to gauge his reaction-and was surprised to see that he was grinning.

Dulles then chuckled. He turned to Kappler, motioning toward the armchairs.

"Please have a seat, Wolffy. As we say in America, Hans's bark is much worse than his bite."

Gisevius grunted again.

"Or his grunt," Dulles added with a smile.

Allen Dulles had become accustomed to the brusqueness of the forty-year-old Hans Bernd Gisevius shortly after they had first been introduced in early 1943. Gisevius then had carefully-but boldly-announced that he worked for Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the Abwehr.

Canaris, Gisevius explained, had posted him as a vice counsel of the German consulate in Zurich, with the position serving as his cover for his secret mission of reaching out to the Allies. Then Gisevius had gone on to declare that he and Canaris were part of a group plotting to kill Hitler.

To Dulles, who by profession was trained to be skeptical, it had all sounded like so much hot air braggadocio. Gisevius certainly was not the first self-important German official to present himself at the American Embassy and try cutting a deal that promised, say, to single-handedly deliver the Nazi surrender in exchange for said official to find himself the head of the new German government.

Single-handedly with of course the full support and aid of America.

Thus, Gisevius had had to work hard to be believed. He'd already failed to convince the British, who had turned him away for fear he was a double agent. In 1933, after graduating from law school, Gisevius had joined the Geheime Staatspolizei-the Secret State Police-at its start only to be more or less thrown out for declaring that the organization itself was full of criminals, and the Brits had warned Dulles of that fear based on his having been in the Gestapo.

Despite being a skeptic, Dulles decided to take a chance-a cautious one-on the unlikely secret agent.

Gisevius soon solidified his standing with Dulles by supplying an endless stream of German intelligence, beginning with the fact that a mole had been working in the office of the military attache in the American Embassy in Bern. When Dulles had questioned that, Gisevius produced a fistful of copies of Top Secret messages that the U.S. legation recently had sent-including one of Dulles's-that had been intercepted by the Nazis and passed to the Abwehr.

Dulles's OSS agents, with a little effort, were able to track the leak to a Swiss civilian who was employed as a janitor. A Nazi sympathizer, the janitor was stealing carbon copy sheets from the trash of the military attache-copies that were supposed to be put in a secure burn bag and destroyed.

And then Dulles had learned that the Gestapo not only was watching Gisevius, it had given the group plotting against Hitler-including Generaloberst Ludwig Beck, the former chief of the German General Staff, and Count Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorf, Berlin's chief of police-its own code name, Schwarze Kapelle, the Black Orchestra.

"Allen," Gisevius now announced, holding up his snifter in his right hand, "so as not to appear rude to you, I will finish your nice cognac. But I then shall leave the company of one who actively supports Nazism"-he puffed on his cigar, then took it in his left hand and poked it in Kappler's direction, the smoke filling Kappler's face-"one who in fact was one of Hitler's earliest financiers and today is on a first-name basis with Hitler's High Command ring of thugs."

Allen Dulles glanced at Wolfgang Kappler, whose face had turned red. His green eyes were narrow and clearly furious.

"Let me tell you how that happened!" Kappler suddenly snapped, his tone uncharacteristically cold.

"Please do," Gisevius replied.

"Twenty years ago, when Fritz and I first met him, Marty Bormann was a snot-nosed twenty-three-year-old district leader in the Mecklenburg Freikorps Rossbach."

He paused, locked eyes with Gisevius, then added almost bitterly, "I assume you know what that is?"

Gisevius was uncowed.

"The paramilitary organization," he replied evenly, then puffed on his cigar. "The Freikorps that was established in the Ruhr set out to cause trouble for the French, whose military occupied the Ruhr to oversee steel and coal production for Germany, having defaulted on timber and coal deliveries. They were fanatical fighters, primarily against the Communists, but also against others."

"Fanatical is precisely it," Kappler said. "And already Marty-whom I, being twelve years his senior, knew very well, which I will get into in a moment-was showing that he had a cruel streak. He managed an estate by day, and it was there that he met, and came to lead, the Freikorps Rossbach guerrillas, sabotaging anything the French considered valuable and attacking anyone thought to sympathize with the French or the Communists."

"'Attack'?" Gisevius parroted, thickly sarcastic. "I believe the proper word is assassinated."

Kappler looked at him a long moment.

"Yes," he said, "I will grant that that is what happened. And it is why Marty spent time in jail."

Gisevius nodded and smiled smugly.

Kappler continued: "Marty was found guilty of aiding Rudolf Hoss, who killed Walther Kadow for being the traitor they believed told the French about Albert Schlageter derailing the trains."

"Schlageter was found guilty and executed," Gisevius said.

"Correct. And almost immediately made a martyr for the Nazi party."

Dulles, his face showing no emotion as he took in the discussion, had watched much of what Gisevius and Kappler described, first when serving in the U.S. diplomat service in Switzerland and collecting intelligence against the Austro-Hungarian and German empires, and then between world wars when developing clients in Germany for Sullivan and Cromwell.

During his time in both the government and the private sector, Dulles had come in contact with many leaders, including an up-and-coming charismatic politician, an Austrian by the name of Adolf Hitler.

"'Wenn ich Kultur hore entsichere ich meinen Luger!'" Gisevius suddenly quoted, raising his right hand and mimicking a pistol with his thumb and trigger finger.

"Actually," Dulles put in, "the pistol in question was a Browning-Whenever I hear of culture, I release the safety on my Browning! The key dialogue in the stage play on Schlageter's life, dedicated to Hitler, trumpeting the anti-bourgeois of Hitler and Nazism."

Gisevius, poking his cigar at Kappler again, said: "And you were a major supporter of National Socialism-of Hitler and the anti-bourgeois of Nazism-and encouraged others in your industry to support the same. You and Fritz Thyssen and Doktor Emil Kirdorf-"

"Kirdorf was a blind, doddering old fool!" Kappler exploded at the mention of the ninety-year-old industrialist. "But he was immensely powerful-"

"Hitler personally awarded him the Order of the German Eagle," Gisevius interrupted, "the highest honor for a German civilian."

"-yes, and so he influenced us, particularly as we shared a national pride. We all believed that the Treaty of Versailles was belittling our great people."

With the treaty, Germany agreed to take responsibility for causing the First World War. It required that the country make steep reparations as well as to disarm-the aim to make the Germans conciliatory and to pacify them.

"As Kirdorf declared," Kappler went on, "'We will rise again!'"

Gisevius said: "And you embraced that. So much so that in Amsterdam you and Thyssen arranged, through Rudolf Hess, for a three-hundred-thousand-mark line of credit with the Dutch Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart, which Thyssen happened to quietly own. Hess spent the complete line-which you then personally covered in Dutch guilders-to purchase what would become the Nazi party's headquarters in Munich. . . ."

Kappler did not reply.

He thought: Did he get all this information from being at the Reichsbank-or from the Abwehr?

". . . All this while," Gisevius went on, puffing heavily on his cigar, "you and Thyssen were becoming buddies with Bormann and his goon squad. Bormann named his firstborn after Hitler, his second son after Hess, and his third after Heinrich Himmler. All of whom were godfathers to their namesakes. Hitler also served as witness to Bormann's wedding to the daughter of a Nazi party official. And Hermann Goring's five-year-old is Hitler's goddaughter."

He paused to let that sink in, glanced at Dulles, then looked back at Kappler and added in an unpleasant tone, "So, such is the dirty little secret of Herr Kappler being long connected with those goons who now make up Hitler's High Command."

Gisevius, turning and staring at the fireplace, took a deep sip of his cognac, the light from the flames reflecting on his snifter. He puffed his cigar, then turned to Dulles.

"Allen," he said, "I'm afraid that this was not a good idea. I do not believe Herr Kappler is the proper candidate. If that indeed was your intention . . ."

"Proper candidate?" Kappler blurted, his tone clearly indicating that he was offended. "For what?"