The door of a large black saloon swung open ahead of me. A man wearing a leather jacket and a matching cap was standing behind it. Another man, walking a few steps ahead of me, stopped at the car door and turned to face me. I was being kidnapped, and by people who knew exactly what they were doing.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“Surely you’ve been expecting us,” said the man beside me. “After your note.” He grinned. “You can’t imagine the excitement your information has caused. Not just here in Germany, but at headquarters, too.”

I bent forward to get into the car and felt someone’s hand on the top of my head, just in case at the last moment I tried to resist and bumped my head on the door frame. Cops and spies all over the world were always thoughtful like that. Two men outside the car stayed on the alert, looking around nervously until everyone who was supposed to be in the car was in the car, and then the doors were closed and we were moving and it was all over, with no more fuss than if we were all going on an unexpected shopping trip to the next town.

After a few minutes, I saw that we were driving west and breathed a sigh of relief. At least now I knew who was kidnapping me and why.

“Just sit back and enjoy the journey, my friend. From here on in, you’re five-star all the way. Those are my orders, Gunther, old buddy. I’m to treat you like a very important person.”

“That will make a pleasant change from when I was last a guest of you Americans,” I said. “Frankly, there was something about it I didn’t like.”

“And what was that?”

“My cell.”

36

GERMANY, 1954

Two and a half hours later, we were in Frankfurt and heading across the Main into the north of the city. Our destination was an enormous curving, honey-colored marble office building with six square wings that lent the place a quasi-military aspect, as if any minute the clerks and secretaries inside might abandon their typewriters and comptometers and man some antiaircraft guns on the flat roofs. I hadn’t ever been there, but I recognized it from old newsreels and picture magazines. Completed in 1930, the Poelzig Ensemble, or Poelzig Complex, had been the largest office building in Europe and the corporate headquarters of the I. G. Farben conglomerate. This former model of German business and modernity had been the center for Nazi wartime research projects relating to the creation of synthetic oil and rubber, not to mention Zyklon B, the lethal gas used in concentration camps. It was now the headquarters of the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany (the HICOG) and, it now seemed, of the Central Intelligence Agency.