Then we saw the elephant. Bright, blue, glossily varnished, its trunk raised high in the air as if it was trumpeting. It had a big, wide body you had to straddle. And when Erin knocked on it, it was hollow.

“Look,” said JD, tracing the wood with his finger. “There’s a line. They must have sawed it in half and stuck it back together.”

“They probably did it at night,” I said. “The fair would have been closed, no one around.” I looked around at the carousel. “And this thing had probably been there for twenty, thirty years even in 1981. It was a permanent attraction, they had no reason to think it would ever move. They never dreamed the Berlin Wall might come down.”

We looked at each other, excited. We made a good team, JD, Erin and me. God, why do I have to choose?!

Yuri ran back to the car and returned with a crowbar. He was grinning, caught up in the excitement of the hunt. As I took the crowbar, I wondered why he’d be carrying it around in the trunk of his car. Then I remembered who he worked for. Oh.

I raised the crowbar, aiming at the spot on the elephant’s head. I saw Erin wincing and I knew how she felt: it seemed wrong, to destroy something so beautiful. But we had no choice.

I brought the crowbar down and the wood cracked. Another blow and there was a hole big enough to look through. Erin put her eye to the hole and shone her flashlight inside. We held our breath while she searched. Then:

“There’s a case, brown leather, down at the bottom!”

We’d found it.

58. Becker

58

BECKER

I stalked around the dig site, furious. “Why aren’t you digging?” I snapped at one of the construction crew.

He started to say something about being on a break. I glared at him and he reluctantly fired up his pneumatic drill and began work again. But I knew it wouldn’t make any difference.

The night I’d obtained the file, as soon as I’d had the American spirited away to Siberia, I’d come here with a few trusted men. I’d dug the first hole myself, breaking the frozen soil with a pickaxe. But there’d been nothing. I’d had my men dig more holes, spreading out from the first, but there was no sign of the bomb. Eventually, I’d had to make up a story about a cache of weapons hidden by criminals and bring in a city construction crew to speed up the digging. But still, we hadn’t found it.

I had to face facts: the bomb wasn’t here. And I was meeting the buyer later that day.