March 5, 1940

In Davy Byrne’s

The Luftwaffe was apparently dead serious about promising to level Dublin, so they’d sent the dive bombers over on a daylight raid.

Moe Berg, he of the Ivy League pedigree but the baseball career, he of the nine spoken languages, he who was, until a week ago, at spring training as the catcher for the Chicago White Sox; now sat on an upended barrel in the basement of Davy Byrne’s public house on Duke Street in Dublin, clenching a brief case and flinching as another bomb went off close enough to shake the dust from the ceiling. Across from him was the woman he’d worked for before. She was calling herself Charlotte this time. Charlotte Lynch. He wondered if she even had a real name. Moe’s passport said Paul Lynch, and she was posing as his wife. When the dust settled, he looked at her and smiled. She shrugged.

It was going to get worse in Dublin, and soon. The Luftwaffe dropped flyers yesterday. White sheets of paper with the big swastika at the top and then, in English below, saying “Irish people! The day is approaching when we will free you from English oppression. Be prepared! Your English masters have chosen to remain in Dublin, leaving us no choice but to bomb them and come to your aid. Rise up with us when we come to free you!”

And below it was a cartoonishly fat Winston Churchill running away from bombs that were raining down on his head. To the side was an Irish mother, kneeling and weeping over her dead child.

Sure, it was childish propaganda. But Dubliners had been seeing those kinds of flyers for weeks, and then hiding every night from the bombings, and it was Moe’s best guess that they just might, in fact, rise up against the English army and its government-in-exile when the moment came.

There was another earth-shaking bomb, even closer, dust and brick falling to mix with the damp air in the basement to coat everyone and everything. That meant the Stukas were getting through the thin defenses of the remnant RAF, with its too few jets and Spitfires. The Nazi’s ME 262s, flying cover for the Stukas, had an easy time of it with the Spitfires, and so outnumbered the RAF’s Gloster Meteors that all the merits of the English jets were nullified. It was a field day for the dive bombers.

When would the invasion come? And where? These were just two of the things Moe needed to know and as soon as this bombing came to an end for the day, he might be able to find out. If the Shelbourne was still standing, and if Michael Collins would show up in the Horseshoe Bar as promised.

Another explosion, too damn close, rocked the building. There went another row of shops, or maybe Bewley’s Oriental Café, or maybe the American consulate, just around the corner on Nassau Street. The shop girl next to him on the right, still wearing her blue frock from whatever store where she’d been working, reached out to hold his hand. The look on her face was determination: she was absolutely not going to cry.

Moe felt sorry for her. Hell, he felt sorry for himself. This was not what he’d had in mind when he’d said yes to Wild Bill Donovan, head of the OSS.

There was the nasty scream of a Stuka, really close this time, and then you could tell from the sound that the dive bomber had finished its run and dropped its bombs. And then, a few seconds later, there was no noise at all but a sudden flash of light and then darkness.

February 28, 1940

In Cairo, Illinois

Baseball was a game of constant disappointment. You swing, and you mostly miss. You think it’s an easy grounder and it bad hops you. You’re called out at third trying to advance on a single. The pop foul to end the game drifts away from your glove as you reach over the rail. One thing after another, one game after another, one season after another; all of this in an endless progression of mediocrity and disenchantment.

No wonder he was depressed. Surely there were better things to do with one’s life than catch and throw and swing a stick at baseballs.

Moe Berg, M.S., M.A, Ph.D., LL.D., was a well-educated man, a scholar, a man of great promise. Yet here he sat, a baseball player, in the dugout at rickety old Egyptian Field in Cairo, Illinois, in the fourth inning of the first game of war-time spring training, watching the rain fall and gather into puddles atop the tarp that covered the infield.

With a losing war being waged in the Pacific and a shaky armistice with Germany in the Atlantic, times were difficult on the home front. The president thought baseball was good for the morale of the nation, sure, but appearances mattered, so Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the commissioner, had decreed that no team could travel farther west than the Mississippi or farther south then the Ohio river for spring training. Cairo was at the spot in deep Southern Illinois where those two great rivers met, so the Chicago White Sox had gone as far south as they could. It just wasn’t far enough, that was all.

At least here it was rain coming down, Moe thought. It was probably snowing hard in Chicago right now. And here, in the South y’all, with Kentucky just the other side of the Ohio, tomorrow was supposed to be better, sunshine and fifty degrees. One could hope.

Moe was thinking about the war. In Japanese-held San Diego, U.S. Marines were dying every day as they laid siege to the city and tried to muscle their way back in. The Japs had the airbase and the port, though, and the U.S. Pacific Fleet was a shadowy remnant of itself after the losses at Pearl, so it was slow going. Everyone was worried, in fact, that San Francisco might be the next city to unhappily join the Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere. The Empire had its big carrier fleet out there somewhere, and that made everyone nervous.

In the Atlantic, the Germans swore they were happy with their united Europe and had no ambitions in North America, but if you believed that then Moe had a bridge he’d like to sell you.

America was arming up, drafting every able body it could find, turning the car factories into tank producers and building a war machine that would be able to hold both coasts against the Axis.

And here Moe Berg sat, with flat feet and a heart murmur, still playing baseball, a kid’s game. It was shameful.

The puddles rippled in the wind, tiny oceans getting wider by the second. It had been raining steadily for a half-hour and then moments ago there’d been a bright bolt of lightning and an immediate and massive crack of thunder. And now it was really pouring. Surely the game would be called in the next few minutes. Moe stood up from the dugout bench and walked up the well-chewed wooden steps that led to the field. He held out his hand to feel the rain, then poked his head out to look at the stands. Nearly empty except for one man under an umbrella in the box seats to the right of the dugout. Moe knew him, he realized. Donovan. William Donovan. “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the new OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, the spy service for the U.S. military machine.

And a lot of memories came tumbling back. Moe remembered Zurich and Werner Heisenberg, Mount Palomar and that big mirror, the mystery woman who ran the whole thing somehow as she and Moe jumped around from one reality to another. She was the one who really taught Moe how to play the spy game as well as the ball game. That damn zeppelin in Switzerland. A whole different life. A spy.

The game was called, sure enough, and they all trudged down the tunnel from the dugout to the clubhouse and there they started to strip off their uniforms, banging the spikes together to get out the muddy clumps that came with a wet field, unbuttoning their wool jerseys, unrolling the sanitaries and the pants legs: the whole ritual of a ballplayer after a worthless afternoon playing a kid’s game that was just for practice anyway. All he could think was that it wasn’t practice right now in San Diego, and it wouldn’t be on the East Coast, either, whenever Hitler decided to make that play.

Moe kept his eye on the clubhouse door as he got down to his underwear and the supporter with the cup. Sure enough, just as soon as he stood up to pull that off, the door opened and in walked Wild Bill Donovan. Moe, naked, stood there as Donovan walked over and reached out to shake his hand. Moe took it, shook, and then gestured at the wooden-slatted folding chair and Donovan smiled and sat down.

“Mr. Donovan,” Moe said. “Nice to see you again.”

“And you, Moe. You remember me?”

Moe wrapped a thin, white towel around his waist, sat down on the other chair, said, “Yeah, it all came back to me when I saw you out there. The whole thing, the training, the missions, the woman.” He paused, “Where is she? The woman.”

“Still working with us, Moe. Or maybe we’re working for her. In fact, she must be why I’m here. I’m not sure, otherwise.”

Moe smiled. “I know, I know. It’s complicated.”

Donovan took out a cigarette. Didn’t bother to ask if it was okay, but lit it, took a long drag, blew out the smoke, “You know. I’d forgotten it all, Moe. The whole thing was wiped out. I had all these other problems on my mind. But I happened to be in St. Louis to meet with an aircraft design team and when I finished that and got to Union Station for the train down to New Orleans, I read that you were having spring training here in Cairo. So, I got off and thought I’d come see you. Save me a trip later.”

“A trip later?”

“That’s what I was thinking, Moe, before it all came back to me. I know all about you, all those languages you speak, that Ivy League education and all that. And I know about that heart murmur, too. I thought what the hell, it’s right on my way, and we’ve had our eye on this guy, you know?”

Moe nodded. He did know.

“And then when I sat down here it started coming back to me, Moe, the whole thing.”

“And then you had it all, right? The memories?”

Donovan took another long pull on the cigarette, turned his head to blow out the smoke so it wasn’t right in Moe’s face, said, “Yes. All of it, and more, Moe. I have a job for you. Another important one. Think you might be interested? It means going east, not west.”

“Hitler? I suppose you don’t believe the peace will hold, right?”

“You know, Moe, people love the guy. People right here in America, they love the guy. Lindbergh. Henry Ford. Lots more. Big money, the little guy, women, kids. Millions of them. They think he’s just what we need.”

“You don’t?”

“I think he’s a gasbag with big tanks and fast planes and a lot of bombs.”

“Yeah,” said Moe. “That’s sort of how I see it, too, Mr. Donovan.”

“And there’s rumors, Moe; bad rumors. You know he hates the Jews. Your people. He blames all his troubles on them. Now he won’t let them work and blames them for that. My sources say he’s started rounding them up, Moe. He’s going to put them in some kind of camps, and god knows what hell those camps will be.

“Well, we think there might be a way to slow him down, Moe, but it’s risky.”

“I’m not surprised” Moe said, “it’s always risky. Listen, Mr. Donovan, you don’t need to convince me. Just tell me what you need, and I’ll do it, all right.”

Donovan smiled. “It’ll be a little tricky, Moe, but it will change everything. There are a lot at of lives at stake. You in?”

“Yeah,” Moe said to Wild Bill Donovan, “I suppose I am.”

March 1, 1940

In the Algonquin

Orders in hand, Moe took the night train alone from Chicago to New York, riding first class in a sleeper. Moe liked trains the way he liked hotel rooms. He’d spent his whole adult life living in one or the other, a baseball vagabond. He felt comfortable, and there was the odd feeling in the Pullman that he was relaxing but getting work done at the same time. He had time to think. You don’t get that in baseball, where your mind is filled with nothing but the game, especially when you’re a catcher. You go through the memories of the last game and your plans for the next one, and this goes on and on for months. And you do it for years, with that time off in the winter to do the banquet circuit, or tour Japan, or play winter ball in Cuba. He loved the game, and until Will Bill Donovan had come along, he’d never found anything half so interesting to him as playing baseball. But now, this. This was worth missing a week or two of spring training for, that was for sure.

Moe sat on the plush seat, pulled down the writing table, turned on the reading lamp, and got to work reading through everything and committing it to memory. As the train came into Grand Central at noon the next day, everything important had been read, learned and burned, the ashes scattered out the open window between cars. So, all Moe had with him other than his Beretta and his clothes was the formal agreement that had to be signed by Michael Collins. That was the first thing he had to get done on this little expedition. There was more to do after that, too. A lot more.

Moe had a few hours to kill in Manhattan before taking a taxi up to Port Washington on Long Island, where he’d meet up with the woman and they’d board the Yankee Clipper to head to Ireland. He decided to enjoy himself, since he was on the government’s tab and the assignment was a dangerous one. Eat, drink, and be merry. The Round Table at the Algonquin would work for a long lunch, and he could sit in that nice lobby afterward until it was time to go. He knew the people at the Algonquin and liked them, and they liked him.

He carried his valise with him in one hand and the briefcase with the documents for Collins in the other and walked to the hotel from Grand Central. It was a sunny, warm day for March, little remnants of packed snow slowly melting in the shaded corners of the alleys and the streets wet with dark slush that would be gone by the afternoon. It had to be sixty degrees or so. Hell, a lot nicer than the weather in Cairo, Illinois.

He took the long way, down Forty-Second Street to Sixth Avenue. It’s a short walk. but he planned to make it take twenty minutes. He was in no hurry; the valise was light and the briefcase weighed next to nothing, and he was going to be cooped up in that plane for nearly twenty hours.

It turned out he got a little more exercise than he bargained for. Crossing Fifth Avenue by the library, he got that little tickle that someone was tailing him. When he got back on the sidewalk he stopped to buy a magazine, so he could look around. There was a guy, wearing a leather jacket and gabardine pants, walking nonchalantly across the street, dodging the cars. Moe had seen him a couple of blocks away, too. He stood out with that fly-boy jacket.

Could be anyone, an OSS tail sent by Donovan to keep an eye on him. Some German, maybe Gestapo, who somehow had wind of things. England’s MI-2? There wasn’t much left of them, but their New York staff was still in business. Maybe even the Kempeitai, if they’d finally figured out how important Moe had been to U.S. intelligence about Tokyo and Nagasaki.

Well, he had a few hours to shake the guy, so that shouldn’t be too hard. Moe left the magazine stand and walked right into the Howard Building behind him. Went over to the elevators and got in one. “Fifth floor,” he told the operator, who nodded, said, “Yes, sir,” and closed the door and the grate and got them moving upward.

Moe got out there and it was a long corridor with office doors all along it. He walked down that hallway, found the stairs at the far end, went back down the stairs to the ground floor, and got out the building that way.

He did this three more times in other buildings, always slowly working his way toward the Algonquin, and by the time he got there, a good half-hour later, he was convinced he’d shaken the tail.

He walked in, headed to the Round Table, and was greeted cheerily by the maître d’, who called him by name and took him to a nice table for two over in a corner, where Moe could keep an eye on who might come into the restaurant.

The leather jacket never showed, and Moe had a nice steak, rare, with a baked potato and a cup of coffee, black and strong. He dawdled, spending as much time as he could at the lunch, and then paid up and walked back into the lobby. Still no leather jacket, so he set the valise down next to a comfortable chair, picked up the Times off the rack of papers, and came back to sit down and relax for a couple of more hours, reading and doing the crosswords.

Later, he walked out the rear entrance to the Algonquin, down an alley to Forty-Fifth Street, turned left and walked to Sixth Avenue and hailed a taxi. Forty-five minutes later he was at the dock, where the big Boeing 314 Yankee Clipper flying boat was being fueled and the passengers were in the small, comfortable terminal, drinking coffee or something stronger, and anxious to get going. The woman was there, and he sat down next to her and said hello. He’d seen her before and remembered it all; but would it work that way again? Would she know him? It had all gone differently this time, the woman hadn’t been at the game and Moe had traveled here on his own.

The woman knew him. After he sat down she leaned over, put a hand on his knee, and said, “We have a lot to talk about, Moe.”

“We do,” he agreed. “And plenty of time for it, too.” He was thinking about a long train ride he’d had with this woman, and how they’d made love winding their way through the Rocky Mountains. The way she acted now, it was like that hadn’t happened. Hell, maybe that was the truth of it, maybe it hadn’t. Memories weren’t all that reliable in this damn business.

Then she smiled at him, and just like that everything was fine. It was hard to figure out their relationship exactly, but then, for Moe, all relationships were hard to figure out, so this was nothing new.

The important thing was he could feel all the cogs fitting together here just like they should. They worked well together, the two of them. When he was with her, Moe knew his place in the scheme of things, knew he could get the job done, and knew she would, too. He was good with that.

March 2, 1940

In the Yankee Clipper

It had been a long, but comfortable night and now, as the sun rose ahead and to port on the flying boat, the steward had folded up the bed and they were having breakfast, served by that same steward, now wearing a sparkling white coat. Eggs, bacon, sausage, toast, potatoes, and coffee. The food was excellent.

They were traveling as a couple and had the passports to prove it: Mr. and Mrs. Paul Lynch from Chicago. Newlyweds, not that anyone would believe they were honeymooners in such perilous times. They had wide, comfortable seats that converted into beds for the long stretch over the Atlantic.

The air was smooth except for a bumpy patch about halfway across that woke up Moe but not the woman. Moe didn’t like flying all that much. The steward, keeping an eye on things, saw that Moe was awake and brought him a whiskey, and that helped. It wasn’t long until he was back asleep.

Five hours later they came in for a dramatic landing on the Shannon, water spraying up all along the sides of the aircraft, and then there was a little sinking feeling and some swaying back and forth as the big plane – now a boat – settled in. Then they came into the pier and tied her off, all this while Moe was watching out the side window.

A few minutes later Moe and the woman, rested and fed, stepped out onto the pier and then into the Irish Free State passport and customs office to get their passports stamped. There was just one customs officer checking bags and he smiled, said “Céad míle fáilte,” with typical Celtic extravagance, and waved them through, just like they’d been promised he would. Those documents in the briefcase might have caused a stir if the guy had wanted to look at them; but he didn’t, and so they didn’t. Same way with the guns that both Moe and the woman carried, packed away in their bags.

Moe was thinking that the documents in there were going to please the Taoiseach, the prime minister of the Free State, Michael Collins. He was prime minister for the third time now. The Irish loved the guy, a real war hero from the Rebellion, and the guy who’d bargained their way to a kind of independence from the hated English.

The whole passport and the friendly-wave customs took maybe ten minutes, and then Moe stopped at the bureau de change to change a few hundred dollars into Irish pounds – punts, they called them – and they were ready to go. A porter took care of their bags as they started the two-block walk to the train station, where they would board the train and head to the Pale, that part of Ireland that was controlled by England. Essentially Dublin and its surrounding county, the Pale’s border with the Free State had been an open one for decades. But now, with the English government-in-exile occupying the city, the Pale had taken on life as an enclave of England and the crown, and the Germans were, literally, taking aim at it. It was a dangerous place to be, but Moe and the woman had a job to do.

They walked down a promenade along the river, the Shannon so wide and calm here that it looked more like a lake than a river.

“County Clare across the way,” said the woman, holding Moe’s hand like a newlywed with her left and pointing toward the low hills in the distance with her right. “And we’re in County Limerick here.”

“You’ve been here before? I should’ve asked that,” Moe said.

“An assignment,” she said, and turned to smile at him. He got the message, she wasn’t going to talk about that. No problem.

Then she squeezed his hand in hers and bumped shoulders with him, looking all girlish and happy as she said quietly, “There’s a guy across the street who’s tailing us. I’d like to get a better look at him.”

So, they stopped walking and turned to look out over the river. “Kiss me, Moe,” she said. And he did, pulling her into him and swinging her feet off the ground until he was looking toward the river and she, kissing him, had her eyes open to look across the street.

The kiss might have gone on longer than needed, but eventually she pulled away, laughed loudly, said, “Oh, Paul, not in public!”

And Moe laughed loudly right back as they started walking again, hand in hand, toward the rail station, a couple of happy newlyweds.

She laughed, with a kind of high giggle that Moe hadn’t heard from her before, and then said, quietly, “I don’t know him, but he’s certainly tailing us.”

“Leather jacket?” Moe asked

“No, a sport coat. He’s carrying a valise. Gabardine pants, black, a white shirt under the sport coat. Very country club. An American, I’m sure.”

“That guy who tailed me in New York? He wore black gabardine pants.”

“I know,” she said. “We’ll take care of this on the train, right?”

“Right,” said Moe.

They reached the station and boarded the train that was waiting for its passengers from the flying boat. The gabardine pants boarded, too.

About thirty minutes later, Moe had his chance. They were leaving Askeaton station when the guy went back to use the toilet, a small room that sat on the metal platform between cars.

Moe got up, too, put his arm on the woman’s shoulder, gave it a squeeze and walked back there himself. He’d take care of this.

He stood there, as if in a queue, until the guy came out. There was no pretense. The guy said, “Hi, Moe. I guess this is it, then. You and me. Right now.” And the guy threw a haymaker aimed at Moe’s head.

Moe ducked it, stepped to the side and gave a quick jab to the face. Got it, and blood burst out of the guy’s broken nose. Moe jabbed again, but even with one hand rising to feel what his broken nose looked like, the guy slipped it, moving left. Then he jabbed back and caught Moe on the cheek. It should have hurt but didn’t, at least not yet.

Moe started to move left, and the train jolted as they started to speed up on a stretch of straight track. The guy had his back against the toilet door and was steady. He took advantage of that to drive a fist into Moe’s ribs. Now, that hurt.

Moe backed up, gasping for air. The guy moved in to finish him, and then the cavalry arrived in the form of the woman, who came in hard, shoved the guy back against that door again, then kicked him in the groin. He yelled in pain and bent over and the woman brought her knee up into his face. The guy slumped down.

The woman walked over to the door that led off the train, dropped the sliding window down, reached outside to grab the handle and opened the door. It swung wide. She went over to the gabardine pants and grabbed him by the shoulders, half-stood him up – how could she be that strong? Moe wondered, watching – and pushed him out that door. He went flying out onto the tracks.

Moe saw she’d brought his valise with her. He could breathe again, so he took a couple of steps, opened the valise and rifled through it. Found a gun, a small Beretta, and took that out to add to his collection. Moe liked Berettas. Then he picked up the valise by the handles, walked over to the door, and threw it out.

“We wouldn’t want him to not have a change of clothes,” the woman said, straightening her blouse.

Moe looked at her and smiled. “Thanks,” he said. He’d always figured her for the type who could handle herself in a fight and now she’d done exactly that.

But maybe they weren’t done with that guy. “If he lived through that, we’ll see him again, I suppose,” Moe said.

“I suppose so. But one thing at a time, Moe. Let’s just get to the Pale.”

Then they walked together back into their seats and sat down for the long ride to Dublin, the train stopping at every little village along the way.

March 3, 1940

In the Pale

The Pale was damn hard to get into. The English were watching all the rail stations and had all the roads into Dublin blocked, with nervous Tommies and their Sten guns standing at station platforms and each roadblock checking everyone’s credentials and then letting them through one by one.

Their train stopped for good at Kildare, a good thirty miles outside of Dublin, and from there they took a double-decker bus to Naas, where they stopped at the roadblock and waited for an hour to finally get through and head into the city center. It took them all day to get to their hotel, the Olympia on Dame Street, not far from Trinity College.

The bus ride from Naas to Dame Street had been surreal. In the space of a few miles they’d gone from the rural serenity of the Irish Free State to the chaos of war-time Dublin. It was a different world, an English world. Soldiers everywhere, military vehicles clogging the road, Spitfires and those new Gloster Meteor jets roaring by overhead on their way to tangle with the Luftwaffe over the Irish Sea to try and slow down the bombings. Three times they went by sites where bombs had fallen, broken buildings, hollowed out by a direct hit in one case, and the right half of a three-story building blown away in another case.

But people walked the busy streets, and there were plenty of small trucks and cars and bicycles everywhere once they got into the city. The bus took them along the River Liffey, past the ruin of the Custom House and then across the only bridge still standing in that part of town to get to the other side, where they circled back up to Dame Street and their hotel. It was Moe’s first visit to Ireland, but he knew the song and was singing it in his head: “In Dublin’s fair city where the girls are so pretty, I once met a girl named sweet Molly Malone.” Well, it wasn’t so fair anymore, and the girls and the boys both looked worried more than pretty. But Moe whistled it anyway and the woman, sitting next to him, smiled.

They checked in, and as the bellboy took their bags to their room, the front desk explained where the bomb shelter was and that they might need to go there at any time. Most of the bombings took place at night, but the Luftwaffe came in the daylight sometimes, too, she said. Best to be ready.

They settled in, took a walk around the city, ate a late dinner in the hotel restaurant, and climbed into bed. It was going to be a busy day tomorrow.

In the middle of the night, in total darkness with the blackout drapes closed, too, Moe woke to the sound of sirens and the deep throb of airplane engines, bombers. In a few minutes there was the whoomph of explosions; but none of them close. They were bombing the north side of the Liffey, sounded like.

The woman was awake, too, and they both chose to stay in bed instead of heading to the basement shelter. The woman turned on her side to face Moe and he turned too, to face her. They kissed, and then with the distant explosions and the sirens as background music, they made love. It was slow at first and then more energetic, and it was about the best lovemaking Moe had ever had. When it ended, the woman kissed him on the nose, said “Thank you, Moe. You were very good,” and then turned away to get some sleep. Moe did the same.

March 5, 1940

In the Horseshoe Bar

It was dark, with little sweeps of light coming into the room. “Who’s down there?” someone yelled.

“A lot of us,” Moe tried to yell back, but it came out a croak, his throat filled with dust, his eyes blinded by the dust and the darkness. He couldn’t see a thing, or hear much, or say much. A little bit of water might fix him right up, but that didn’t seem likely at the moment.

He swallowed, dry and awful; then he tried it again. Better, maybe. He gave the yell another try, “Help,” he said, and it came out well enough. So, “Help. Over here,” he said a little louder, and tried to move his right arm to wave it, but it was trapped under something.

Someone heard him, and the light from the flashlight – they called it a torch here – came his way. He tried to wave the left arm and it was covered in something, a plank, and he was able to pull the arm free. He waved it. The light from the torch caught it and stayed, and that was how Moe got free from the rubble of the bombed-out pub.

He was okay. The garda – what the Irish called their cops – yelled something in Irish back toward some others and in a minute or two a young kid, skinny and all arms and legs, a boy who couldn’t have been more than ten, was scrambling over the debris to get to Moe with a canteen full of water. The kid had a miner’s cap on, with a candle in front of a small mirror on the front of it; dim but it got the job done.

The kid splashed a little water on Moe’s face and wiped off the wet dust with his hand and then helped Moe drink and rinse and then spit the water out. That first sip was the best drink of any kind that Moe had ever had.

Then the kid slipped the canteen’s strap over his shoulder and set to work to free Moe, which turned out to be easier than you’d think. His right arm was trapped by some debris, but it moved aside if you pushed from behind, so the kid did that. And then Moe’s legs were under some paneling that had come down from the bar above them. Funny how the paneling was here but not the floor. The explosion must have sent stuff flying everywhere.

The paneling moved easily, too, when you had the right grip on it. Moe was lucky. In a minute or two he was standing up. Nothing broken, and the kid said something to him. “Tá tú ceart go.”

Moe brushed his sleeves for a few seconds. He was fine. Then he answered the kid with, “Beidh tú ag iarraidh ar mo cabhair a fháil ar na daoine eile,” telling the kid that he wanted to stay and help find the others.

The kid smiled at that, and then, together, talking in Irish when they needed to talk, Moe and the kid pulled out two more people, including the girl who’d been right next to Moe, holding his hand. She was in bad shape, but still alive. By then, more people were there, including a pair of nurses, and they found three more after that.

Moe was relieved to find his briefcase in the rubble, that was the whole reason for being here in Dublin. But the woman was nowhere to be seen. Moe went right to the spot where she’d been sitting and there were no bodies there, no nothing. She’d found her own way out, that had to be it.

He looked some more, but there was no one left, the basement hadn’t been that big to start with. Moe, exhausted, finally worked his way out and was startled to see bright sunlight. It was raining when he’d first gone into the pub. Now it was a very nice day and didn’t that beat all to hell.

Moe looked at his watch. Still ticking. Two-forty-five on a pleasant afternoon in Dublin. It wasn’t much of a walk to the Shelbourne, but Moe wanted to be there a little early. This was important, this meeting. He needed to get a signature on a piece of paper.

Moe headed up Duke Street, took a right on Dawson Street, and headed up to Stephen’s Green. There he took a left and walked one block and there was the Shelbourne.

He stayed outside on the sidewalk for a minute, taking the time to pat himself down, getting rid of as much of the dust as he could. As he was at it, the doorman from the Shelbourne walked over with a hand broom, said good afternoon as if it was just another day, and took over the brushing.

Two minutes left, so Moe tipped the doorman, walked into the lobby, found the gents – the door said “Fir” on it, Irish for “Men” – and he walked in, set the briefcase on the counter next to him, and washed his face and hands to make himself presentable. Then he came out, walked across the lobby and into the Horseshoe Bar.

This was a famous place, this Horseshoe Bar in the Shelbourne. The martyred Éamon de Valera and Patrick Pearse and Countess Markievicz and James Connolly and Michael Collins and all the rest of the gang that had pushed so hard for full independence and failed at it had all sat in this bar to talk about their dreams for Ireland.

Most of those dreams hadn’t come true, but they’d plotted here, and now that’s what Moe Berg was doing. He walked up to the bar, ordered himself a pint of Guinness, and then, while it settled, he walked over to a small table in the corner and took a seat, setting the brief case down behind his chair. At the next table, his back to Moe, was Michael Collins, prime minister of the Irish Free State. He was here, in the Pale, to try and hang onto what dignity the Free State had left in its capital, what with the English government-in-exile taking over since England’s surrender to the Germans.

Moe had glanced at him as he walked by to make sure it was him. It was. There were only six other people in the place, all of them English from their accents, and they didn’t seem to recognize Moe or Collins. Good.

The Guinness had settled. Moe walked back to the bar to get the pint, and the bartender winked when he handed Moe the beer, so he was in on it. That made sense.

Moe walked by Collins and sat back down. Collins was drinking a whiskey and a Guinness, which maybe said something about the difficulties he was having right now with Mr. Churchill, who’d lost none of his bluster though he’d lost the Battle of Britain. From the safety of Dublin Castle, he was telling everyone back in England to “practice patience, and perseverance, and we will return.” Sure. Moe didn’t know if the English really believed in him anymore. He had a speckled history, after all, and now was as big a loser as old Harold II, who’d died with an arrow in his eye in 1066.

Collins, on the other hand, was still popular in Ireland. He’d kept them out of that losing battle and kept them neutral, and that had been a tricky dance to execute. So far, he’d been up to it, on the dance floor with three different partners.

He was every bit as big as they’d said, though he looked thin and pale. His hair was gray, his face lined. Leadership in these troubled times had worn him down since the picture Moe had seen that was a year or two old. He was dressed in a nice business suit with a green tie over a white shirt.

Moe picked up the pint and took a careful sip. “Better than the stuff at home,” he said to no-one-in-particular. He wasn’t about to mention the name.

No-one-in-particular said back, “You’re a little dusty, there, Mr. Lynch, but I’m glad you’re alive. I heard you’ve just had a close call.”

It was kind of a chuckle being named Lynch for this assignment. That was a good Irish name and Moe knew he didn’t look Irish and wondered why Wild Bill Donovan had chosen it. But, hell, the alias was the least of his worries now.

“Thanks,” Moe said. “I was lucky. Most of the others in that basement didn’t get off so easy. The Germans are beating up on your town pretty hard these days.”

Collins ignored that. It was a touchy subject, the Germans and their Luftwaffe. The Irish Free State was neutral in this war and liked it that way. But the Irish Free State wasn’t free at all. Not only were the ports run by the English as part of the original treaty; Dublin and its surrounding county – called the Pale by the Irish and the English both – had been shared territory with dual administrations, Irish and English. It was clumsy, but it had worked. Now, though, the English ruled. Dublin was held by the English government-in-exile and the crown. Not far from here, up Dame Street in Dublin Castle, was Churchill and his gang, and somewhere else, probably just outside the city somewhere, was King Edward VIII and his American wife and their two children, nice and safe.

This part of Ireland was a regular Little England, still free from German occupation, but only just. Back in England, across the Irish Sea, the whole country was under Germany’s thumb, and Wales and Scotland would be, too, as soon as the Germans bothered.

So, the truth was, Collins and most of the rest of the Irish were prone to sympathizing with the Germans, at least when it came to England. After a few hundred years under English rule, a lot of the Irish were probably looking up at those slow but deadly Stukas and the hordes of those fast jet planes, the ME 262s, and hoping one of their bombs landed smack on top of Winston Churchill and his gang. The Germans had promised not to invade if the Irish turned over Churchill and the rest, but the Irish couldn’t get them to budge, so the Germans were ratcheting up the pressure. Hitler said the King could stay, which said something about the King’s political inclinations. He’d been a Hitler apologist for years.

“Mr. Lynch,” Collins said. “Have your friends back home considered our offer?”

“First, why are we here in this pub?” Moe asked. “It’s a little public, isn’t it?”

“Yes and no, Mr. Lynch. Everyone in here is one of us, so it’s safe enough that we are here now.”

“All right,” said Moe. “But we’ll need proof that you can do what you say you will. If you really have him, we’ll take him off your hands.”

“And the down payment? You understand I need to be certain of this.”

“What’s in my briefcase, there, will make it a certainty,” Moe said. It was good to know he could speak a little more freely. “You sign it, and, in a few days, there’ll be two of our new submarine freighters rising up in Galway Bay, filled with what you need.”

Which was weapons, a lot of them, from Garand rifles to bazookas to light and heavy machine guns and mortars and, according to the paperwork Moe had brought with him, two Sherman tanks. The Irish planned to take care of Churchill on their own if he fled the Pale.

“And recognition of our new Irish Republic, Mr. Lynch?”

“That is my understanding,” said Moe. It wasn’t a hard call for the U.S. The armistice with the Germans meant the U.S. could focus its energy on holding back the Japanese. The invasion of Hawaii and the loss of those battleships and aircraft carriers at Pearl had scared the hell out of the military brass, so much so they’d abandoned San Diego when the Japanese arrived. Sure, they’d saved a lot of lives that way, and the remnants of the Pacific Fleet. But it meant building up the forces in the rest of California and the West to try and take San Diego back. There wasn’t much to spare for any trouble in the Atlantic.

Moe had tried to warn them about Japan. He’d been on a winter baseball tour of Japan in 1934, just six damn years ago, and he’d seen how things looked there. Hell, he’d even taken pictures: battleships and aircraft carriers in Tokyo Bay, more ships at Sasebo and aircraft there, too, hundreds of them.

The Japanese loved baseball, and loved Moe Berg, since he spoke the language and openly liked the culture, so they gave him free rein, with nothing but one or two Kempeitai following him around. It was easy to ditch them when he needed to and take the pictures he wanted. The Major Leaguers had spent a month there, touring around in busses and trains, playing ball in front of big crowds who seemed to love the Americans.

Moe was still wrestling with the moral equation of how enthusiastic and friendly the Japanese had been with the American ballplayers then, and how vicious and cruel they’d been to the civilians in Honolulu just a few years later. Another reason, for sure, to abandon San Diego.

If nothing else, his month in Japan had convinced Moe that he was a better spy than he was a ballplayer, and for the first time he’d found something he liked to do even more than play baseball. On the diamond, he was a big-leaguer, sure; but a mediocre one and he knew it. A decent catcher, some first base, with a .220 lifetime batting average. Weak bat, good glove, weak arm. That was the book on Moe Berg. But in the spy trade it turned out that he was very good, indeed; maybe even an all-star. It was a very different book, and he liked it. He just had to wait a few years to get his chance.

No-one-in-particular said, “Mr. Lynch. A week ago, we were contacted by someone in the German embassy here, a man I know and trust. He tells us that there is turmoil at the top levels of the German military. There is a new weapon, a superbomb.”

“I’ve heard about that,” Moe said. “I thought they didn’t have it ready yet.”

“This man says they do. And they plan to use it, even though the English are defeated. The plan is to show America what this bomb can do, and force America to surrender.”

“And then go after Russia at last, I suppose,” said Moe.

“I suppose,” said no-one-in-particular. “But the head of the German super bomb program has defected, with his family, and with the plans for that bomb. Powerful people on the German side have arranged for this.”

Werner Heisenberg was the man, Moe was certain, but didn’t say the name.

No-one-in-particular said, “You should be at Banna Beach in Kerry at midnight on the seventh. You’ll meet the package there. You’ll need something big enough to carry four people plus yourself.”

“We’ll be there,” Moe said.

“Good,” said no-one-in-particular.

And, “OK,” said Moe, as he took a sip of his Guinness. It was, in fact, a lot better than the pint or two he’d had in Chicago.

He sat back and listened as the man behind him picked up the briefcase, unclicked and opened it, pulled out some papers, glanced at them – too trusting, really; but it was exactly the wording everyone had agreed on – and then scribbled his name on them both.

There was some more rustling of paper as he put one copy of the signed document in his jacket and the other copy of the signed document back into the briefcase, and then a click as he shut it.

Moe reached down with his left hand, found the handle of the briefcase and grabbed it, then rose, keeping his back to no-one-in-particular, said “Go raibh maith agat as an comhrá beag,” and started to walk away.

No-one-in-particular laughed at that and said, “Your Irish is better than mine, Mr. Lynch. And one last thing.”

Moe stopped, turned around.

“Don’t be anywhere near Dublin on the eighth. The Irish? We’ll all be gone. You understand?”

The invasion? Of that damn superbomb? Either way, thought Moe, it was something he had to let Donovan know about. “Thanks,” he said to Michael Collins, in English, and then he gave Collins a wave and headed out the door of the Horseshoe Bar, then through the lobby of the Shelbourne and out onto the street and from there, past the bombed-out pub and back in the direction of the hotel.

On the way there, Moe stopped at a telegraph office and sent the news – coded, of course – to Donovan. Then he looked around. The street was busy, Dublin keeping up appearances. But it was mostly the displaced English he was seeing. The Irish who’d lived here were gone or getting out. He wondered how much time the English had left here before the Germans came, and how that might change things around. Might be, he thought, something he’d find out soon.

March 6, 1940

In Tralee

It was a lot easier leaving the Pale than it had been to getting in. The English, waiting for an invasion that seemed certain to come any day, were on their guard for who might try to infiltrate their little corner of the island; but they didn’t really care who left.

They’d come across the Irish Sea in big boats, small ones, slow planes and fast ones, all heading to the Pale, all hoping that the Irish Sea was wide enough to slow Hitler down and give them time to reorganize. A good 300,000 of them, many of them Royal Navy and RAF and Tommies; but tens of thousands of civilians, too.

Moe and the woman took the local bus outward and got it all done in decent time. The roads were crowded, with cars and horse carts and buses and bicycles and people on foot: all Irish, all leaving the Pale. Moe wondered how busy these roads would be if and when the Germans invaded. All those English men, women and children trying to escape the Germans again, having done it once already. The whole island would be a mess, and the Germans would be tempted to seize control of the whole thing, he was sure.

Eventually they got back to the same train in Kildare, and changed trains twice to get to Tralee, a market town in County Kerry not far from Banna Strand, where they would meet Heisenberg and his family.

The train ride took the rest of the day, with the train stopping at every small village and larger town. Plus, Moe and the woman had to change trains twice to get on the small steam-engine job that finally got them to Tralee, at the end of the line.

At least the Grand Hotel was a nice place in a good location. And they’d stumbled into a local pageant, the Queen of the Rose pageant, with girls from all over the county vying to impress the judges. Moe and the woman were lucky to get a room at the hotel. And luckier even that it was a nice big one, with its own bathroom, a big bed and a nice view out over the town, bunting hanging everywhere, a big stage set up right below them on the wide boulevard of Denny Street, closed to cars for the duration of the festival.

They relaxed that evening. The sun was shining and the town busy and happy with the pageant, so the two of them had a good time pretending to be a happy couple in town to watch all the goings-on; the carnival rides, the food stands, the musicians fiddling away at jigs and reels on the big stage in front of a good crowd.

They ate dinner at Paddy Mac’s pub, just around the corner from the hotel, on Mall Street. They both ate shepherd’s pie, and then walked around some more to soak in the sights and sounds. They were keeping a wary eye out for trouble, especially trouble wearing gabardine pants. They didn’t see how the guy, if he’d survived that tumble from a moving train, could know they were here in Tralee; but it was worth it to keep the eyes peeled anyway. They didn’t see him.

They slept well and made love again, chuckling about how they had to stick with their cover story about being newlyweds. Moe was about as happy as Moe Berg could be; doing important things for his country while he was with this incredible woman. He told her that and she smiled, put her finger to his lips to shut him up, and then rolled over on top of him and that did, in fact, shut him up.

The next day they made their preparations. They needed transportation, for one thing. Some kind of Ford Transit truck or a big enough car that it could handle them all. Within the hour they saw what they needed, a Bedford HC van, built in England in better days and used for transport of people and their luggage. It seated eight if you squeezed and had room for luggage in the rear. It sat on the side of the road, in front of a hedge and behind the hedge was a stone cottage with a red door, the top half of it open to the breeze.

Moe walked up to the door with the woman and when they knocked on that door an elderly woman answered. They spoke in Irish and then switched to English, the elderly woman and Moe and the woman, who said “Call me Charlotte, please,” to the elderly woman.

The woman’s sons were all gone to America in the past three years, since the war began. Two to Boston and one to Chicago and god bless them but she missed them, so. She’d hung onto their van for all that time, but money was tight, wasn’t it, so. And sure, the boys wouldn’t be coming home to visit now, with all that was happening, and so it was time to part with it. Would 200 pounds be all right?

It would, said Moe, and then he and the elderly woman spat on their hands and shook on it. Then Charlotte gave her a hug and then paid her in cash and she handed them the cert for the Bedford and off they went.

The Bedford was fine. It was a lot of money to use a vehicle for one long night, but the transaction was clean, so there’d be no garda looking for the van through the night. They drove it back into Tralee and it ran like a charm.

March 7, 1940

In the Dunes at Banna

A half-hour before midnight they were up in the dunes at Banna Strand, the long wide beach stretching out in both directions, the bay in the front if you were looking west. Moe had the big flashlight – the torch – that they’d bought that day in Tralee. Somewhere out there was a submarine, a German U-boat, that was about to rise to the surface, use its spotlight to flash four times toward the beach and wait for Moe to flash back three, and then Werner Heisenberg and his wife and kids would be climbing into an inflatable dinghy along with a couple of Kriegsmarine submariners to do the paddling and perhaps twenty minutes after that the Heisenbergs would step onto the neutral soil of the Irish Free State and by eight o’clock tomorrow morning they would be on that Yankee Clipper heading to America. And inside Heisenberg’s brain was the knowledge to build that superbomb, the one the Germans had and America didn’t. Yet.

It wasn’t the best possible night for this kind of thing, the moon was nearly full and so bright you could read a newspaper by its light. Moe, in fact, did just that thing, to prove to himself that he could.

A half-hour later, right on time, there was a blinking light out in Tralee Bay. Four good flashes. The woman had the flashlight – the torch – at that point and pointed in the direction of the light they’d seen and flashed it carefully three times. Sign and countersign.

And then they waited. The moon was bright, sure, but the sea was dark, and Moe was sure they’d be in a rubber dinghy that was dark, too, and they’d be wearing dark clothes. Moe and the woman wouldn’t be able to see them, probably, until they got within fifty yards of the beach or so.

They didn’t know who might be watching, and they wanted this to go as quickly and smoothly as possible, so Moe and the woman walked down through the tall dunes to the hard sand of the beach to be ready to meet the dinghy when it reached shore.

Their timing was good, and they saw the rubber dinghy when it was about thirty yards out, two submariners doing the paddling while the Heisenberg family sat in the middle.

They dinghy was only another minute or two from reaching the beach when Moe heard a strange kind of high-pitched whine. He held up his hand and listened.

“Jets,” said Charlotte.

Some of those new jets of the Brits, Moe wondered? Probably.

The whine changed its tune and Moe knew two or more of those new British jets were heading for them. “Run! Let’s go!” he yelled as the two sailors pushed the Heisenbergs over the side of the dinghy and tossed a few pieces of luggage after them and then they started madly paddling back out to their ship. Probably too late, thought Moe; surely the U-boat was already diving.

Moe and Charlotte scrambled out into the water to help Heisenberg and his family make it in. They were lucky it was only four or five feet deep when they’d been pushed overboard.

Another change in that whine. Here came the jets, three of them in a row it sounded like. The first one aiming at the submarine, or at least where it had been a minute ago, dropping some kind of depth charge that splashed, sank and then the first one exploded.

Moe thought for a happy few seconds that it was the U-boat that was the target and not him and these people, but the second jet started a dive right at them, machine-gun bullets marching up the beach toward them.

It wasn’t the RAF after all, but the Luftwaffe, some of those ME 262s that had won the Battle of Britain for them.

The bullets missed them all, passing a good thirty or forty yards up the beach from where they were, still in the shallows.

As the plane pulled up at the end of its run, Heisenberg yelled about his briefcase and pointed out, away from the beach. Charlotte headed that way, stripped down in seconds to her underwear and pushed through the water until it was deep enough to swim.

A second jet made its run and that one missed too, the marching machine-gun bullets at the top of the beach, nowhere close to where they all stood.

Then the jets left, and Moe could see out in the bay when the U-boat surfaced and blinked the three flashes to say their job was done. Those two in the dinghy must have made it back after all.

Moe took care of the Heisenbergs when they reached the beach. “We have towels for you in the van,” Moe told them, and pointed toward the narrow path between the dune. The van was back in there, hidden.

“Herr Heisenberg,” Moe said in German, “I’m glad you are safe. We were very lucky, with those planes. Why didn’t they finish us off?”

“Lucky, yes,” said Werner Heisenberg, quickly shaking Moe’s hand and then turning back to look out at the water. The woman was wading in. She had the briefcase in her hands.

“Oh, thank god,” said Heisenberg and walked back into the shallow water to take it from her.

She shook his hand, too, and handed him the briefcase, then they walked in together toward Moe. She smiled when they reached him. “It was floating, so I think whatever is in there is probably okay.”

Heisenberg opened it, reached in with one hand to feel around. Pulled the hand out, closed the clasp tight on the briefcase. “I think it is all right.”

“Dr. Heisenberg,” the woman said. “How’d you arrange those jets? We should all be dead.”

Heisenberg looked at her, and then at Moe. “The Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, the Kriegsmarine. Everything is in turmoil, field marshals choosing sides, soldiers choosing sides. I’m sure they had orders to kill us and sink the U-438 that brought me here. But they have chosen their side, which is the side I am on, too, so they will say they sank the U-boat and killed us on the beach.

“What is happening now in Germany is terrible, Mr. Berg. Unthinkable, and yet it is happening. And now this bomb. He must be stopped. Many of us think this. And I have brought you the tool to stop the madman.”

March 8, 1940

In Foynes

They spoke in German, Moe Berg and Werner Heisenberg, as Moe did the driving, weaving his way through the countryside on the narrow Irish roads in the moonlit night, heading from Banna to Foynes. At first, he drove with the headlights off, thinking about those ME 262s coming back. After a half hour or so, and two close calls with the ditches that ran along both sides of the road, he decided that driving in the dark was the greater risk, so he turned on the lights and that helped.

It would take a couple of hours, at least, to get back to Foynes. But the ticketing wouldn’t open until five a.m., and it was just twelve-thirty, so they were in no hurry.

In the back, Charlotte was talking in German herself to Heisenberg’s wife, Elisabeth, and their ten-year-old and six-year-old daughters. Moe hadn’t realized she spoke the language until he heard her use it. She sounded like a native, maybe from Munich.

As soon as they’d cleared the dirt entrance road to the beach and got onto some too-narrow pavement, Heisenberg had started talking, in English now, unloading a lot of weight he’d been carrying around for a long time, Moe figured.

“There was another assassination attempt. It failed, like the others. And now they are blaming it on the Jews,” Heisenberg said. “No one believes that, of course. But now, with this bomb in the hands of that madman.” He shook his head.

Moe didn’t say anything, and Heisenberg went on: “He is insane, you know. He always has been. We laughed at him, called him a clown, a Wichtigtuer we called him. A Pompous Ass.”

An apt description, Moe thought. You give a blowhard like that unlimited power and a military machine like no other and here’s what you get.

“He was always a clown, a liar,” Heisenberg said. “Lies on top of lies. And the people didn’t care, the lies didn’t matter. The glory of the new Germany. The Fatherland First!”

Moe nodded, said, “We watched from America and some of us wondered how you Germans could fall for that. But others of us, millions of them, think right now today that he’s doing good work. They like the guy.”

Heisenberg shook his head. “We voted for him. I voted for him. Such foolishness!”

“And you went to work for him,” Moe said.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“It was funding for our science. Fission. Energy. Free energy!”

“And a bomb, too.”

“Yes, and that bomb.”

Heisenberg patted the briefcase. “Your scientists in New Mexico and Berkeley? Oppenheimer, Fermi, Teller, Lawrence, and the others. This will save them a year of work, maybe more. And I will help. I am ready to help, if they’ll have me.”

Moe needed to know something. “What changed your mind?”

“War was one thing. But this bomb. And now what he’s doing to the Jews. What’s happening there is,” Heisenberg searched for the right word in English, “Horrifying. To ruin them, such good people, such great scientists and artists and shopkeepers and Germans. Good Germans!”

“Our people don’t know about that. Will you tell them?”

“Of course! Speer tells me they are building camps for them, where they’ll be taken care of. ‘Taken care of.’ Do you know what that means?” Heisenberg shook his head. “Each step he took we thought it was the last. Now. I don’t know. Unconscionable. I had to leave. Someone has to stop him. If Oppenheimer and the others are close, then perhaps we can do that.”

“How many bombs did you make for him? And are they small enough to be on one of those rockets? Or in a bomber? I’ll need to cable that to my people as soon as I can.”

Heisenberg said, “Just one. No, it is too large right now for an airplane to carry, too big for the rockets. That one will be used soon, a demonstration. I don’t know where. There was talk of Dublin, a barge on the River Liffey and then the English are done for good. Perhaps you already knew this?”

“No,” said Moe, “but I know someone who probably does.” Could the Irish hate the English that much? Destroy their own capital to wipe out the English. Madness, but maybe. Let the Germans do the dirty work.

“But in six months, a year at the most?” Heisenberg was saying. “Even without me there. Yes. Six months. And Goring is flight-testing a bomber – a jet bomber! – that can fly one way from Ireland to New York. The crew will drop the bomb, start back and then parachute down when the fuel is gone, to be picked up by a submarine. A simple plan. Six months. A deal with the Irish for an airbase or crush them if there is no deal. And then the bomb on New York.”

“And then it’s all over,” said Moe. Well, that was terrible news but now he knew. Wild Bill Donovan wouldn’t be happy with this news, and you could bet there’d be quite a committee in New York to meet the Clipper when it landed.

“Yes,” said Werner Heisenberg. “And then it’s all over.” And he turned around in his seat to see how the children were doing, as they drove on.

 

They got lost twice on the way. The moon set and the darkness deepened, and even in the Irish Free State there were enough worries over a possible invasion that all the signage had been removed. But eventually an old upright stone marker, half-hidden in the hedgerow at the side of the road, had set them on the right path. “Limerick 10,” it said on it and so they realized they were turned around completely, got it straightened out and within five miles found the crossroad for Foynes and they made the left turn, Moe wrestling with the gearbox to get the van into second and then into third as the road leveled out and straightened some, too, as they started to glimpse the River Shannon off to the right, exactly where they needed it to be.

Fifteen minutes later they pulled into the small parking lot at the terminal building on the shore of the Shannon at Foynes. The woman and Elisabeth Heisenberg had to wake the two girls. It would be a great adventure, flying across the Atlantic to America.

The sun was rising behind them as they stood there, waiting for the porters to come out and help them with the luggage. It was a cool, wet morning and they could see their breath in the mist and light rain. It had been snowing in Germany, the older girl said. Would it be snowing in America? Maybe, said Moe in German, but spring is on the way. Then the girl said it rained too much in Germany, even in the summer. Did it rain very much in the summers in America? And Moe said, no, it didn’t rain very much. And then, thinking of that secret city in the high desert of New Mexico, he added that in some places it hardly rained at all. The Heisenbergs, wife and husband, looked at him and smiled. They were prepared for that.

Still no porters. They could see the plane, or the back half of it anyway, docked behind the terminal building. A huge, beautiful beast that would take them all home. But still no porters.

“I’ll roust them,” Moe said, and walked across the lot to the double-doored main entrance to the terminal. He got there, tugged open the door on the right, and walked into trouble.

A woman grabbed him and pulled him inside. She was dressed very nicely, all the way up to the hat with the sprig of flowers in it. But the gun in her right hand indicated that she wasn’t as nice as she looked. She shoved it into his ribs and pulled him out of the view of those outside the doors.

“Hello, Moe,” said the gabardine pants, back from the dead, the whole right side of his face red and bruised. He was in his leather jacket now, his left arm in a sling; but the right hand holding a gun, a Luger. German. He spoke with that flat Midwest American accent, so a Yank, or awfully good at languages. “We’re so glad that you’ve finally arrived.” He smiled, made a little joke that Moe knew he’d been waiting to say. “We regret to inform you that your flight is going to be delayed.”

Moe looked around. The other passengers were there: A priest; no, a bishop, those red threads at the end of his sleeves. A woman next to him, attractive, so that was interesting. A few obvious business-types in suits, a few American military in uniform, all of them officers. There weren’t many, what with wartime and the price of the flight.

Where was the crew? Moe didn’t see a pilot or any stewards or those missing porters or the radio operator or flight engineer. None of those, so that was a dozen or more missing.

And could there really be just two of them holding everyone hostage here? Might there be more outside, or in the plane?

All this in a quick glance. And then, “What’s the plan, pal?” asked Moe, who hadn’t raised his hands and had his own gun in a shoulder holster under his suitcoat: the Beretta he liked so much. He was very good with it.

“I’m afraid that we’re going to have to relieve you of your friends and their luggage, Moe. They’ve fled with property that belongs to the Reich. It’s our job to return that property to its proper owner, and to return the Heisenbergs, as well. They’ll be tried.”

“And executed,” said Moe.

“That’s likely.”

The guy’s accent sounded Chicago to Moe. He certainly recognized those stretched out “o” and “a” sounds. That explained it. The Bund, or more properly the German American Bund: Amerikadeutscher Bund. Big in Chicago, thousands of them, maybe a lot more, all great admirers of Hitler and the Nazi Party. Sure, a lot of Americans, millions, thought Hitler was just fine. A strong hand on the tiller, revitalizing a nation and all that. They were looking, these millions, for someone like that in America. Someone to clean up the mess that came from uppity Negroes who didn’t know their place and the Jews who had a stranglehold on the nation’s money, and the women, thousands of them, who were marching around for equal pay.

“You take your orders from the Bund or Berlin?” Moe asked him, trying to buy a little time. It wouldn’t take long for the woman to know something was up when Moe didn’t come right back out. And she was deadly when she wanted to be, Moe had seen her in action.

The guy smiled and shook his head. “You tell me, Moe Berg. Baseball player. Spy. Jew. You seem to know everything.” He waved his Luger. “Come with me now, Moe. Let’s go out and meet your friends so I can take a few of them off your hands. With what’s about to happen, we wouldn’t want them flying off to America.”

The guy was a bully. Probably always had been a bully, always shoving people around. If he was back home he’d be wearing black pants and a brown shirt and beating up any Jews he could find. But he wasn’t home. He was here, in the Irish Free State, and Moe wasn’t about to be bullied.

The front door’s glass top half exploded with a bullet coming through it and the gabardine pants was hit somewhere in his right side. Moe had pulled his Beretta from its holster and was firing immediately at the woman with the other gun. She was expecting it and fired at him at the same moment. Moe felt the slug hit him in the left arm, up high, and had a sudden crazy thought that this might mean he wouldn’t be able to play ball for a while. But he felt dizzy with the pain, and stood there, the Beretta suddenly feeling very heavy even in his right hand, and then it fell to the floor.

She’d been hit in the chest, it was a wonder it hadn’t killed her outright; but she walked over, slowly, and took aim at Moe’s head and put both hands on the trigger to make the pull when, instead, there was another crack of a shot and a bullet took her in the neck, going straight through and exiting on the other side, bringing a lot of blood and spray with it. Moe was watching as she staggered, dropped her gun and started to reach for her neck and then, instead, collapsed on the floor.

The woman, the one who was calling herself Charlotte this time, came over to Moe and helped him sit in a chair. The Bund guy wasn’t wounded too seriously, but sat there on the floor, stunned. The woman with the gun was dead. Charlotte – did she know he really had a thing for her? Did she know he thought she was the most wonderful woman he’d ever met? That he loved her? – came over and looked at his wound, said “Moe, it’s not too serious, it winged you.”

She set her gun down, pulled out her blouse, ripped off a strip of it, wrapped it around the wound and tied it tight, said “Press hard on that, all right?” and then picked her gun back up and said, “I’ll clean this up.”

Then she walked over to the far door, opened it and walked out toward the Yankee Clipper. There must be more trouble out there.

The pain wasn’t too bad. Moe stood up and felt all right. He couldn’t let her handle that alone, damn it, but the Bund guy was starting to rise. The front door opened, and Werner Heisenberg walked in. He, too, had a gun, a Luger. It was stupid they hadn’t checked him for that.

But it wasn’t pointing at Moe. He had it aimed at the Bund guy’s chest.

“Keep an eye on him?” Moe asked in German.

“With pleasure,” said Heisenberg, in English, and walked over to kick the guy’s gun clattering away into the far corner of the room. “Please,” he said to the Bund guy, “do something that will allow me to kill you.”

Moe smiled at that. Good. And then he headed, a little unsteadily, toward the back door and whatever needed to be done back there. He heard a gunshot and tried to move more quickly, but when he got there, it was all over. One more dead member of the Bund, and some shaken up aircrew. Otherwise they were fine. And Moe knew that they had to get going, get into the air as soon as they could.

A half-hour later The Yankee Clipper’s big twin Cyclone engines started up and the plane pulled away from the pier and headed out onto the Shannon. Moe and the woman sat on the left side of the plane, the Heisenbergs on the right side. To take off into the wind they’d have to make their run straight east up the Shannon, so they taxied out that way, then turned and the engines roared as the Clipper built up speed and, at 100-miles-per-hour lifted off the water and became an airplane again.

Moe had sent a telegram to Michael Collins and another one, longer to Wild Bill Donovan; but he didn’t think there was much anyone could do about what might happen next.

Sure enough, as they started to bank left to head out across the estuary and the Aran Islands below, there was a blinding flash of light in the distance, to the northeast, where Dublin, fair city, where the girls were so pretty, used to be.

Moe watched as Werner and Elisabeth Heisenberg saw the bright flash of the bomb and watched as the cloud of smoke rose and rose and blossomed outward.

Heisenberg stared over at Moe. “Six months,” he said, and Moe nodded.

The woman reached over to take Moe’s hand and squeeze it. “They’ll get it done, Moe, I’m sure of it.”

Moe looked at her. Nodded. “Sure,” he said, to her and Heisenberg both. And then he sat back against the headrest and closed his eyes. It was a long flight to Newfoundland and then to home in New York. Six months.