He had died a few hours later and Ingrid had dedicated the last five years of her life to tracking down that message. She had recruited like-minded associates and they had confirmed the Weiss family story that Ingrid’s uncle had been found shot in the head in the woods just outside Dachau. They had traced the names of every American soldier at Dachau that day, including soldiers never prosecuted for the war crimes they committed at the camp—lining up the few remaining German officers and executing them without trial.

Most of those Americans had died by the time Ingrid went looking for the message, and she feared she might be too late, but then, posing as a researcher working on an oral history project, Ingrid heard a story about a soldier named Jasper Fleming who had disappeared into the woods outside the camp and returned a few minutes later looking pale and sick. “A lot of us got sick that day,” said the man she was interviewing. But not a lot of them went off into the woods toward the very spot where her uncle Albert was murdered, Ingrid thought.

Jasper Fleming had proven hard to track down, but they finally found him through his subscription to a newsletter for veterans of the Forty-Fifth Infantry Division. When Columbia House placed an advertisement in the newsletter for plans to build your own Enigma machine, Jasper Fleming had been the only person to place an order. Ingrid knew she had her man. It took months to lay the plan and to raise the money to hire a professional hit man who would leave a clean path to Fleming’s house for Karl and Erich. They had left nothing to chance. And then everything had gone wrong and now they were hunting their own contract killer and some woman across the English countryside.

“OK,” said Nemo, “Ruthie and Alex will stay here while Patton and I take care of business in Munich.”

“Sounds good to me,” said Alex.

“I’m going with you,” said Ruthie, looking at Patton with the same pleading eyes she had used at the bar on Harvard Square when Ruthie didn’t want Patton to go home early and, more important, didn’t want her to go home alone.