CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Paris, France

July 22

11:49 p.m.

Clutching the gold coin recovered from the dig at El-Alamein in Egypt, Galina stormed down the hall of her headquarters under the Place de la Concorde.

“Is this my fault, Markus? The failure of the attack at Vert-Galant?”

“Never doubt yourself, Miss Krause,” Wolff said. “The assault was hastily arranged. A failure, perhaps, but in the end we keep the Kaplans moving, on the run, disoriented. We will retrieve the relics. We are so close to our goal.”

She stopped, turned to him. Despite, or maybe because of, his austere appearance—the long leather coat, the short-cropped white hair—Markus Wolff was the calmest man she knew. He never spoke in haste. He always considered the minutest details while keeping his gaze firmly on the larger vision. Her heart slowed, her anger ebbed.

She studied the coin in her palm. “Strange how the thread of Aquila takes us from the desert to the streets of Paris, exactly when the Kaplans are here.”

Wolff allowed himself a thin smile. “Strange, but no coincidence. It turns out that Kurt Stangl, the general in charge of the unit in Egypt in nineteen forty-two, was assigned to Paris during the German occupation. Naturally, this is logical. Charged with finding art and artifacts for his führer, where could he be more successful than in a city of art?”

Galina mounted a set of iron stairs to an upper level. “And his fate?”

“He was reported killed during the Allied liberation on August twenty-fifth, nineteen forty-four.”

“Reported?”

Another smile. “His death was concocted by the German high command to put the Allies off the scent. He embarked to South America the next day, courtesy of a ratline.”

Galina scanned the bank of computer screens displaying live camera feeds from dozens of stations surrounding her headquarters, then activated all the auxiliary cameras.

“A ratline, yes,” she said. “As rats escaping a sinking ship.”

“Exactly,” he said. “The escape routes of highly placed officials of the Third Reich were planned early in the war. They would be smuggled to Spain and from there by ship to North or South America. Kurt Stangl, deputy head of the art procurement division, survived the invasion of France and vanished with, I should guess, uncounted stolen masterpieces. Our Ebner may shed light on which ratline Herr Stangl may have used. His great-uncle Wernher certainly knew of ratlines. There. Our colleague arrives.”

It was Galina’s turn to smile as Ebner’s face appeared on one of the cameras. He was accompanied by a hulking man in bandages.

She pressed a button on the console in front of her, and a few minutes later, the elevator door slid open. Ebner rushed across the floor to her, enfolded his thin arms in an awkward clutch of her shoulders, and backed away, his face crimson. Behind him lurked the bandaged man, Archibald Doyle.

“Ebner, I have missed your brilliant mind,” she said.

“Yes, yes, but look!” he gasped, scurrying to the computers. “You’ll not believe this.”

“Oy, you won’t,” Doyle said behind his bandages, scanning for a place to sit.

Ebner studied the monitors while figures darted and dashed across the Place, then isolated one in particular, the odd way it shuffled crabwise toward the camera.

Galina stared at the man—it appeared to be a man—approach the rear entrance to her headquarters. “Who haunts my domain? No one knows this place. Look, there are shadows trailing him. An army of ghosts attends their mad leader. . . .”

“No one but a hideous traitor to our glorious Order,” Ebner said. He adjusted the controls to produce a closer image of the man dragging his way toward them. The face resolved itself, the features clarified. “I have found Helmut Bern! He has made his way back to us and has come directly to Paris! From fifteen thirty-five!”

When Galina saw the sores, the wrinkles, the ravages of an endless journey . . . through time . . . acid dripped down her throat. “He comes to kill me.”

Wolff watched a second figure shuffle toward the camera. This other man’s visage was pocked and ashen like Bern’s and bore a look from beyond the grave, and yet in some ways it was a familiar face. Where had Wolff seen it before?

He removed his cell phone from the pocket of his leather coat and opened its image file. He swiped through hundreds of photos until he came to one dating from September 1936. It had been taken by the photographer Robert Capa in the hills of Somosierra, Spain.

And Wolff knew who the second man was.

“Miss Krause, I showed you this image once before. The boy in nineteen thirty-six and the old man here today are one and the same. It is Fernando Salta, the student lost in the mishap with the bus in Somosierra. He somehow made his way forward from eighteen hundred and eight, where Kronos Three deposited him. First he arrived in nineteen thirty-six, when this photo was taken, and now he has returned to the present with Bern’s help, undoubtedly in Kronos One. Such compassion these people have for one another.”

Galina closed her eyes. “Compassion enough to murder me? Ebner, find them, kill them. Markus, hunt the Kaplans. They are in Paris for another relic. Intercept them, and bring it to me. Go!”