When the recent terrorist attack on my house and the headquarters of the charitable organization Columbia House was carried out, I was lucky enough not to be at home. My associates and I are now in hiding and in fear for our lives. However, I am able to provide the authorities with some information about the attack. Several days ago I received a threatening phone call from a woman calling herself Jean Simpson of Ridgefield, North Carolina, USA, who seemed to want to interfere with the charitable work of Columbia House. It is not unusual for us to receive such calls from anti-Semitic or white supremacist groups, and I did not give the matter any thought. Like all such calls, we logged it carefully and added a photograph, taken from social media, to the record. We believe that Simpson was the bomber responsible for the attack on Columbia House. Our security system took a photograph of her on our doorstep a few hours ago. This photograph was automatically uploaded to our secure off-site server and is attached to this message. When we investigated Jean Simpson after her phone call, we discovered she had been traveling in Europe with a woman named Patton Harcourt, an American wanted for questioning in the murder of Art Handy. The attached photo of Patton Harcourt is from her military file several years ago. We will forward any more information we uncover in our own investigation through our secure email server.

“Isn’t Simpson dead?” said Eva.

“Yes,” said Ingrid, “and they’ll figure that out quickly enough. They’ll assume she was the bomber and be that much more inclined to believe the rest of the message.”

“And they’ll go off hunting for Harcourt,” said Dietrich.

“Even if she had nothing to do with Simpson,” said Eva.

“Exactly,” said Ingrid. “And with the police hunting her all across Europe, we can be free to execute Projekt Alchemie.”

“Karl’s phone has stopped moving,” said Gottfried, who was in the back seat lit by the glow of his laptop.

“Are they at the Eagle’s Nest?” said Ingrid. Hitler’s mountaintop retreat had been turned into a restaurant, but rumors about a vast network of tunnels in the mountain below had persisted for years. Surely, she thought, the decrypted message would help them find their way into the mountain and to the secrets it hid.

“No,” said Gottfried, sounding puzzled. “They’re at a place called the Hotel Edelweiss. He said the woman and the assassin checked in and he and Erich are going to get a room and grab some sleep. He says to watch the front of the hotel and meet them in the morning.”

Ingrid smiled. “How much farther to Berchtesgaden?” she said.

“About twenty miles,” said Dietrich.

“Park across the street from the hotel,” said Ingrid. “We can take turns sleeping. In a few hours Projekt Alchemie will be complete.”