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The Munich Affair

Page 127

by James Patterson

“Ja natuurlijk. Ik gaf het haar in de kerk.”

I replay those words over and over again.

“Ah, een landgenote!”

I look up to see a woman in a puffy blue jacket and white ski cap. She smiles and says, “Kom je uit Nederland? Spreek je Nederlands.”

She gestures to my phone when she sees the confusion on my face. “I’m sorry, I thought you were Dutch, like me,” she says.

“Could you—please.” I put my hand on my heart. “If I replay the recording, could you translate?”

“Uh, sure?” She seems amused, but listens carefully, leaning in. “The man is saying—he is asking, did you give the teacher—or professor?”

“Yes, professor.”

“He is asking, ‘Did you give the professor the film?’”

“Yes, yes, that’s right. And what does the woman say?”

I play Jenny’s response again. The woman listens, eyes closed, and nods. “She says, ‘Yes, of course, I gave it to her… at the church.’”

My mouth drops open. Jenny gave me the film at the church?

I thank the young woman and start pacing, remembering. The only church she could mean is St. Stephen’s Cathedral, that huge Gothic church in Vienna where I went to meet Franklin. He didn’t show, and Stranger Danger gave me a dire warning instead.

That was when I saw the young Asian woman with the face piercings and the lime-green hair. When Jenny bumped into me, I thought she might be an assassin, might stab me or inject me with—

She bumped into me.

Could that be it? Did she hand off something?

I remember what I was wearing, because my clothing instructions were specific: brown jacket, orange hat, so I would stand out. And I was wearing jeans, the same ones I’m wearing right now.

I pat my pockets, but there’s no way she could’ve slipped it in them without me knowing it.

My heart racing, I open my carry-on roller bag. There it is, folded—more like crammed—inside. The beige corduroy jacket, the one my darling daughter Annabelle gave me as a present a year before she died.

I pull it out and examine the pockets. There, in an interior pocket I have never used, I feel a bulge. There’s something in there.

She slipped it into my pocket days ago in the church, and all this time, I had no idea.

“Eleanor,” I whisper, “you are the worst spy in the history of spies.”

I carefully reach in and pull it out. Light as a feather, which is why I didn’t feel it. A flat metal canister, not much bigger than a stack of coasters.

A reel of film.

113

March 19, 1945

Reich chancellery, Führerbunker

Berlin

A SMALL PLANE LANDED on an airstrip in the Tiergarten, a five-hundred-acre park roughly two hundred yards northwest of the chancellery grounds.

Adolf Hitler had once planned for the park to be a centerpiece in recasting Berlin as Germania, the world capital. As the Soviet army closed in on Berlin, however, the Nazis converted it into a landing strip for small planes. On this day, the Fieseler Fi 156 Storch plane carried one passenger—Albert Speer, Hitler’s Minister of Armaments and War Production.