Sam Bourne - The Final Reckoning

The others would explain how the robbers had taken their time, stripping the place of everything that had value. The Americans would offer consolation, shake their heads at the loss of such costly resources and, perhaps, call for a military policeman to come and investigate. But they would not be diverted from the task of the morning. They had thousands of men to feed in Stalag 13 and – yes, look over here – as luck would have it, the intruders came in after baking time. The loaves are all here, stacked and ready for loading: the bread, at least, they did not steal. Well, our sympathies, gentlemen, but we need to be on our way.

That, anyway, was the plan, dreamed up by the Frenchman and pushed and pulled, kneaded and twisted, over weeks and weeks more thoroughly than any loaf I ever made in that bakery. Aron attacked the plan from every angle, each day thinking of new objections. But once he had thought of answers for everything – Rosa for the night-watchman, Manik for his corpse – he had decided that it was the only way. We would commit one commonplace crime – common at least in the chaos that was Germany after the war – in order to commit a much greater, more noble crime. One that was not, of course, a crime at all.

The truck travelled south, where Manik found a deserted spot to hide it. We would be fine so long as no one found the truck, or connected it with the robbery in Nuremberg, until it was too late. It would be a mystery why black market thieves had simply abandoned such precious booty, but that was a mystery we could live with. Besides, that little puzzle would be a perfect decoy, a false trail that would delay anybody coming after us.

The rest of us got out a few miles from the bakery and simply waited by the roadside: the city was already waking up by then, men making their way to the morning shift and, before long, a couple of taxis came by. We got in and Aron handed the driver a wad of notes and told him to take us to the Czechoslovak border.

Only Rosa stayed behind, to do one last job. Once more she had to act, but this time she would not play a slut or a whore. Instead she simply had to wander among the quiet, residential streets that surrounded Stalag 13, homes rented by the wives of the Nazis waiting to stand trial. She would pretend to be just such a wife as she stopped to ask women whether the rumours were true, that many of the prisoners had suddenly been taken ill. Some of these loyal maidens of the Reich stood sobbing with her, as they told her she was right: the hospital was full of their brave men. The doctors couldn't cope, more men were admitted than they could treat, all of them suddenly struck down by the same terrible plague. ‘What is it?’ Rosa would ask. A complete mystery. Food poisoning, the Americans said, but who knew whether to believe them. But it was serious. ‘I don't want to worry you, dear, but some of the men seem close to death.’

Rosa reported all this back to us, together with whatever scraps of information she could pick up. She had broken off with the mess sergeant a few weeks earlier. I liked to think that was because she had extracted all the information we needed and she ran from him as soon as she could. But I think Aron had told her to do it: if they were still together, he might become suspicious.

And, eventually, there were official accounts, in the newspapers and so on. We didn't believe every word: we knew they were censored and suspected the Americans would want to cover up what had happened. If they had not managed to protect the men they were holding, it did not look so good.

But the reports, including Rosa's, left no doubt. The poisoned loaves had got through and the Nazis, in their thousands, had eaten them. How many had died? We never knew for sure. It might have been three hundred or seven hundred. It might have been a thousand or even several thousand. Aron said the exact number did not matter. What was important was that the Nazis held in Nuremberg would have understood and, eventually, the world would have understood, too, that the Jews had not accepted their fate, but had come back to claim their revenge. That the story of Stalag 13 would live on and that no one could say again that we had been sheep to the slaughter. I tried to accept what Aron said but I cannot lie. I wanted to know, and I never stopped wanting to know, even years and years later, exactly how many Nazis had tasted that bread I had helped bake, that bread I had helped poison, how many had tasted it and died from it. I wanted to know if their death was painful. Above all, I wanted to know that among the thousands or hundreds or even dozens dead, was the man who killed my Hannah, my Leah and my Rivvy, my sisters.

Jay Sherrill wanted nothing more than to sit down. The information from Agent Marcus Mack of the New York Police Department Intelligence Division was coming too fast to take in, at least too fast to take in like this, walking on a busy Manhattan street in late afternoon, jostled by shoppers and commuters and street vendors, pretending to talk into a cellphone, unable even to look his source in the eye. This was not how Detective Sherrill liked doing business.

‘So when you say, from the beginning, you mean from the beginning.’

‘Uh-huh. Reckon I was the first agent put on it. In the morning, anyway. Obviously surveillance had been monitoring him since the previous night.’

‘When he met the Russian?’

‘Right.’

‘And they put that together with his location-’

‘Near the UN.’

‘-and on that basis he became a suspect. A terror suspect.’

‘Which is why I was following him.’

‘And you say there was another man, another agent?’

‘At least one.’

‘What do you mean, “at least”?’

‘Well, I know for certain there was one other guy, because I saw him when we got to UN Plaza. We saw each other; we both had the same reaction.’

‘But?’

‘But my handler said, when I asked whether there was back-up, “There's a team”. Now, he coulda been shitting me, they're not above that, these guys.’ For a fleeting second, Mack eyed Sherrill, at his left, then looked forward again as he kept walking. ‘You know what I mean, Detective? Saying “there's a team” when really they mean, there's you and me – we're the team. So it may have just been me and this other guy, the one I saw when I got there.’

‘Did you speak to him, this other agent?’

‘Yes and no.’

‘What does that mean? Oh, excuse me, sorry.’ A woman carrying a cappuccino-to-go, and also talking into a cellphone, had banged into him and, naturally, he had been the one to apologize.

‘It means we didn't exactly have a conversation, but we spoke.’

‘To each other? To someone else? Who?’

‘No, we said something at the same time. That's when I realized. Look: back up a second. Remember, I told you that when I got to the Plaza, I could no longer tail the guy, because he had entered another jurisdiction? He was on UN turf so I just had to hang back?’

Sherrill nodded.

‘OK. So I watched what happened. I saw the suspect walk into the centre of the Plaza, kinda looking around and then I see the UN guard reach for his weapon. And exactly at that moment, the suspect turns around and faces my direction. And that's when I see it. What I hadn't been able to see the entire time I was tailing the guy.’

‘You saw his face.’

‘Exactly. I saw his face. And I realized it instantly, the mistake we had made. I mean this guy was old, really old. There was no way he was a terrorist. He was a senior. And I know what's happening here. The guard's had the warning, the description, and this old man fits it perfectly. Black hat, black coat. He fits it. And he's just got our warning, my warning, that the suspect is about to enter UN territory and so he's reaching for his weapon. He's thinking to himself, I got Muhammad Atta here, I gotta blow him away.’