“No.”
“You’re not an American,” Paul said flatly.
“I was. I chose another country.” He still couldn’t pull the trigger. It wasn’t finished. “I was at Khimki,” he said. “And Povorovo and Lyalovo.”
They looked at him. Did they understand? Did he?
“My comrades, and my sense of duty, they died together in the snow,” Gerd recited slowly. “But they didn’t, did they? They should have, but they didn’t. Only the comrades died. And,” he said, looking straight at Kuznetsky, “the duty remains.”
“I’m sorry,” he heard himself say.
“Does Amy know?” Paul asked abruptly.
“No,” Kuznetsky lied.
Gerd lunged for the gun, but succeeded only in knocking it across the crate and onto the deck. The Walther coughed, pumping a bullet through the side of his head, and whirled in search of its other target. Paul scrambled for the fallen gun, realized he wouldn’t reach it, and looked up in time to see Kuznetsky topple forward as Amy’s bullet smashed through the back of his right knee.
Paul started forward, was stopped in his tracks by the gun aimed at his heart. “No,” she said, “no.”
He looked up at her, a woman with bare feet in a night-dress, a blanket hanging from one shoulder, a gun held rocksteady in both hands, tears pouring down her cheeks.
“What now?” Paul asked.
She tore herself away from his face, from the question, picked up Kuznetsky’s gun, then Gerd’s, and threw them over the side. Below her she saw the lifeboat bobbing on the waves.
She turned back to Paul, wiping the tears from her eyes. She had to know. “Do you love me?” she asked with a terrible simplicity.
He studied her face, thought for a moment she’d gone mad, but her eyes were shining with some other fire. Joy it looked like, and maybe that was madness. He smiled up at her, the old self-mocking smile. “Do you always point guns at men when you ask them that?”
“I’ve never asked another man that, Paul.”
He leaned over and closed his dead friend’s eyes, looked down at the deck. “Yes,” he said.
“Get in the lifeboat,” she said softly, lowering the gun.
“Am I going alone?”
“You know you’re not.” She turned to Kuznetsky, who was smiling, a smile she couldn’t begin to understand. “You don’t need me anymore,” she said.
“They will hunt you to the ends of the earth,” he said without malice. “But you know that.”
Amy had a momentary impulse to hug him, to wish him well, but she turned her back and followed Paul over the side.
Epilogue
Agent Don Mitchell sat in the director’s anteroom, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, twisting his hat in his hands. He’d been there for more than an hour, and even the secretaries on the other side of the room were beginning to treat him as part of the furniture.
He knew why he’d been summoned, though he hadn’t expected it to be Hoover in person, and he hadn’t expected it to be so soon. His report had gone in only the day before.
He thought back to his moment of inspiration and laughed. He’d been at the movies with Fay; he couldn’t even remember the main feature. The “B” had been a crummy two-reeler about the romantic moonshiners and the boring G-men. And right in the middle the boys had sat in a diner discussing the tactical niceties of shifting roadblocks — “Frank’ll go through and make the gap” one had said. And he had remembered the guy who’d killed those two cops near Selma that night. He’d wanted to know.
He had sent down to Selma for the police report, to Birmingham for the Locust Forks report, taken the hijack file out of its cabinet, and put them all together. It was all there, had been all the time. The car that had broken through the roadblock was the one stolen in Locust Forks; the prints found on the bars in the Locust Forks jail matched those found on the train.
He had sent down to Selma for the bullets that had killed the two policemen. They’d been fired from the same gun that had killed the guard on the train. That had convinced even Sam Benton.
But he’d still wanted something more. It was almost a year now, so there was no hurry. He took a long weekend and the train down to Birmingham, where he hired a car and drove south through the Talladega Forest to Selma. If they’d gone through the roadblock at around 7 p.m. they must have holed up someplace during the day, and this looked like an ideal spot. For one ridiculous moment he thought of stopping to look for clues.
In Selma he got the names of the witnesses to the incident, and from one of them, a middle-aged woman with the sort of Southern accent you could spread on bread, he found what he wanted. Their car had been in the line, and behind them there’d been a camper. She remembered because she’d been struck by the face of the woman sitting in the passenger seat.
Mitchell had showed her the photograph of Amy Brandon.
“Yes, sir, that’s her.”
That had been enough. He’d driven back to Birmingham and taken his train home, wondering what had happened to them, almost admiring them in spite of himself. What ruthlessness, to deliberately sacrifice one U-boat and leave the way clear for another. And it had worked.
He’d written the report the moment he’d gotten back, but Benton had dissuaded him from turning it in for a week. “What’s the percentage?” his partner had asked, and sitting there in Hoover’s anteroom, he was beginning to wonder. But duty was duty, and he didn’t find that as old-fashioned as Benton did.
He had only a few minutes more to wait. Director Hoover greeted him warmly and seated him in a plush armchair before taking one himself.
“Mitchell,” he said, “I’ve got two things to say to you, and I wanted to say them both myself, man to man.”
“Yes, sir.”
“One, you’ve done a very fine piece of detective work, and that will go on your file.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“But the substance of it will not, because of the second thing I have to tell you. The case is closed, Mitchell. And I mean closed.”
“Sir…”
“Let me finish. Mitchell, I’m sure you can see that nothing can be gained from publicizing this matter. The war with Germany is over, and whether or not those commandos or agents or whatever they were got back to Germany with the stolen material… well, obviously nothing came of it.”
“Yes, sir, but—”
“What may not be so obvious to you is the danger any publicizing of this story might do to the United States of America.” Hoover stood up and walked to the window, his hands in his vest pockets. “Japan will be beaten before Christmas, and the soldiers will come home. But the FBI, Mitchell, fights an endless war. We are America’s first line of defense. The enemy changes but we do not, and the American people have the right, the right, to have a Bureau they can respect and trust.”
“I understand, sir.” And he did. They’d made fools of the FBI, and no one was going to know.
Hoover smiled for the first time, a baring of the teeth that had nothing to do with amusement. “I’m sure you do, Mitchell. Use your talents on today’s enemies, not yesterday’s.”
Paul loaded the last fertilizer sack onto the back of the pickup, fastened the tailgate, and whistled for his dog. She came tumbling out of the freight office and leaped up obediently onto the front seat. Paul raised a hand in farewell to the clerk and pulled the pickup out of the station yard. He was driving down the town’s main street when one of the two local policemen, the new one he hadn’t met, flagged him down.
“Paul Brent, isn’t it?” the officer asked, leaning into the cab and fondling Rosie behind the ears.