Astronomy(6)

Sure enough. Lower left coat pocket, she found a slip of paper, a napkin actually. A little cocktail napkin. On the front was a cartoon of a cloud, puffing out its cheeks to blow a set of five-pointed stars around the sky. The logo tickled Susan’s memory; she’d just seen it this very night. It took her a moment before she remembered where.

It was the logo of that burned-out biergarten at the corner, the Four Winds Bar.

“What do you make of that?” Shrieve asked.

“Maybe he left something for us? Who knows?” Susan’s interest lay with the script on the back of the napkin. “If he did leave something for us, maybe this is where he left it.”

She noticed the circle left by someone’s sweaty glass. She touched it—the circle was still damp.

“Not bad for a place that’s been closed since forever,” Charley said.

Major Foley was blowing blue smoke into the dull light from the door. “I tell you what,” he offered. “We’ll track this business down, we’ll send a little note to—where was it?—Stony Brook, New York?”

She looked back at Shrieve, You’d better do something about this guy. Shrieve smiled and stepped between them. He whispered something in Walter Foley’s ear. He might have been reminding him that Susan, after all, was a civilian, and could deck his ass with impunity.

Just like that, she was in.

Susan didn’t even realize it at first. But Walter Foley knew. He smiled at her, the way he always did when he’d talked her into something really stupid and dangerous.

She entertained the idea of leaving him with that silly grin on his face. She could be just as happy getting his postcard in Stony Brook, New York, sure.

But that thing in the doorway, that had been the angel of her better nature. She had made promises to people who mattered a lot more than Walter Foley. The worst thing was, those people weren’t even around to know if she kept them or not.

Walter Foley must have seen this conversation going on in her head; his smile just got bigger and more evil. Susan thought back a moment, when was the last time she’d seen that heart-sinking leer? Oh, yes. She remembered.

He’d smiled that way at her the night she agreed to go to Berlin.





Chapter Two

IT HAD BEEN WALTER FOLEY WHO TOLD HER Berlin would be the best career move an ambitious young OSS agent could make.

He had received a request for extraction. Some SS major who called himself “Galileo” wanted to buy his way out of Berlin with information on a new weapons program.

Galileo had sent along photographic collateral—truckloads of German dead were being collected off the streets and hauled down into the sewers. Something was being done with them. They were being reused somehow, but for what? Fuel? Food? How desperate could people be?

Whatever it was, Galileo was supposed to be in charge of the program. He wouldn’t say what they were doing with hundreds of dead German soldiers. He wouldn’t say why he wanted out of the program he was supposed to be running. The message said he wanted passage to the American lines. General Eisenhower could ask him the rest in person.

Susan had just brought back Carl Leder, the head of Zentralbund’s Sparrow Group. A couple of people had brought in the low-level stuff—research assistants and grave robbers, folks like that. But the Sparrow Group had been translating certain ancient texts into modern German. Rumors of dark treaties between the Nazis and demons swirled through Leder’s head. Carl Leder had made Susan a superstar.

When it came time to send someone into Berlin to meet this Galileo, she was the only real nominee. There was some talk because she was a woman and the Russians were just outside of town. But Susan had the closest thing to a track record that Operation Watermark could point to.

Just to make all of her male handlers feel better, Watermark teamed her up with a U.S. Army Ranger—a sniper with fifteen kills, a snake-eater from the Rangers’ School at Fort Benning, Georgia. People spoke in hushed tones about this guy. His name was Roger Valholmen, but he had a nickname that he liked to pass around—Maxwell House.

Susan liked that—a sniper with a sense of humor. Maybe, she thought, this was a good omen.

Walter Foley dropped them just outside Berlin, along the banks of the Havel River. A rubber boat got them past the Russians. That part of the plan worked fine. It was after they got into the city that things started to go wrong.

Galileo, wherever the hell he was, had promised to be waiting with guards and an armored personnel carrier. Susan searched their landing area and came up blank: no guards, no personnel carrier, no Galileo.

The drop zone had been quiet when the operation was planned. In the twenty-two hours since, it had turned into the front line. They were taking mortar fire even before they rolled up their parachutes.