As Carter struggled to piece together what a hiker could be doing this far from the path, he heard a twig crack behind him. Spinning around, he found himself face to face with a man who was holding a gun.
Carter recognised him, but he seemed so out of place that it took him a moment to grasp that this was the same man he had met at the American airbase in Dornheim, when Wilby first made him the offer, who had neither smiled nor said a word and whom Wilby had refused to identify, calling him a figment of Carter’s imagination. He was even wearing the same tweed jacket, which barely contained the bulk of his muscular shoulders.
Carter knew that if the man had intended to kill him, he would already be dead. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t change his mind.
‘I guess I didn’t dream you up, after all,’ said Carter, slowly raising his hands.
And then, to Carter’s surprise, the man laughed. ‘It’s your lucky day,’ he said, and put away the gun.
‘Who are you?’ asked Carter.
‘My name is Babcock.’
‘Colonel Babcock? The station chief at Bonn?’
‘That’s right.’
‘I thought you were dead.’
‘To paraphrase Mark Twain, that would be a slight exaggeration.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Well, first of all, keeping you alive,’ replied Babcock, nodding at the body. He set his boot upon the man and rolled him over, revealing a face half masked with old pine needles that had stuck to his skin as he lay there on the ground.
Carter gasped. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said. ‘That’s Eckberg!’
The dead man’s eyes were half open, his teeth outlined in blood. A bullet had gone through his right cheekbone and blown out the back of his head. A piece of his skull, with a shred of skin and blond hair still attached, lay beside his outstretched arm, as if he had tried to catch that fragment of bone in the final moment of his life.
‘He tried to dress himself up like a local,’ said Babcock, ‘but this guy never could figure out how to stop looking like an American. Now, as it turns out, he might not even be one, after all.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘You spoke to him, didn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ admitted Carter. ‘He tracked me down. He told me you had concerns about Wilby, about how he might be falling apart. He said you had authorised me to tell him about the operation.’
Babcock sighed. ‘Unfortunately, I never did that.’
Carter stared at the body. ‘You mean he was the leak?’
‘Yes,’ said Babcock, ‘and I wish I could say that we had our suspicions about him, but the truth is we had assumed it was one of the secretaries.’
‘You mean the one who turned up dead?’
‘That’s right,’ said Babcock. ‘We thought she had committed suicide after realising that we were closing in on her. It now seems more likely that Eckberg killed her to throw us off the trace, and I’m ashamed to say that it worked. At least until today.’
‘So he put the bomb in the safe house?’
‘It might have been him. It might have been someone he works with. Either way, he’s the reason Wilby is dead. It must have been on a timer, or else they would have waited for us to arrive.’
‘But why did he do it at all?’
‘Because as soon as he learned about that planeload of counterfeit money, he knew he had to stop you from getting to it first. That’s why he tried to have you kidnapped in the alley behind the train station. If Wilby hadn’t shown up, they’d be finding you in the reeds right about now, with a bullet in your skull. But you got away. Then, when Wilby informed us that he had set up a meeting at the safe house, he decided to get rid of all three of us at once. But that didn’t go the way he had planned either and, by then, his cover was blown. As soon as that bomb went off, we knew who must have set it. The only choice he had left was to set out on his own and get here before you. And for once, he actually succeeded. He just didn’t count on the fact that I would be here waiting for him when he arrived.’
‘You knew he’d come?’
‘I knew he had to try,’ said Babcock.
‘But why was it so important that he stop me from coming here? Surely the Russians would have wanted it destroyed.’
‘This was their best chance of tracing the money back to the people who made it. They already knew that someone was producing high-grade counterfeit roubles. This wasn’t the first load that had found its way into Russia. It was showing up all over the place, and they had a hunch that it was coming from somewhere in Europe. Of course, they assumed we were behind it. They just didn’t have any proof. The fact is, we had nothing to do with it and, until you came across this man Garlinsky, we were no wiser than the Russians as to who it might be.’
‘What about now?’ Carter gestured at the tail section and the splintered mass of crates and broken bottles, from which the sour smell of whisky drifted through the air. ‘Did you find anything that might help?’
‘I’m afraid not,’ sighed Babcock. ‘We’ll get them eventually, whoever made this stuff, but not today. Until this plane went down with half a million roubles stashed inside it, I had been inclined to let these counterfeiters carry on as they’d been doing. One day, the Russians would realise we weren’t behind it, but between now and then, this whole thing was giving them a heart attack. And that made me very happy. But this crash, and the fact that the Russians know about it, thanks to Eckberg, has changed the whole equation.’
‘What happens now?’
‘To you?’
‘That will do for a start,’ said Carter.
‘As far as I’m concerned, you are not here. An imaginary friend, if you will.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Your contract with us as an Agent of Opportunity has been terminated. We no longer require your services. I’ll leave the timing up to you, but all you have to do is put a call in to my office at Bonn station, give me the go-ahead and, as per our original agreement, an announcement will be made that you have been working undercover in western Europe, for which your dishonourable discharge was only a part of your cover. You will receive a public apology from the mayor of Elizabeth, New Jersey, as well as the governor. You will be reinstated into your old job, if you want it, and I seem to remember something about a parade.’
‘You can skip that part.’
‘As you wish.’
‘What about Dasch?’
‘I have nothing personal against the man. He was never anything more than a symptom of human desire, without which crimes like his would not exist. Nor did I care about the goods themselves. Fine wine and liver pâté will not be the start of World War Three. But men who can get their hands on such luxuries, and who can move them so skilfully from one country to the next, will soon develop an appetite for more dangerous cargo. It was only a matter of time before Dasch started running guns, or even worse. That’s why we were much more interested in his links to the criminal organisations in other European countries, and the government officials who helped him circumvent the borders.’