Here on the dais, with all the blood and horror, his mother, Frau Boden, was kissing her son. Suddenly, she turned to Lilly with loathing etched in her face. ‘You brought this on him. This is all your doing. Dirty French peasant.’ With her right arm, she thrust Lilly away. ‘Get this woman out of here,’ she shouted at those who had gathered around her.

Two women began to drag Lilly away from Julius and away from the dais. She tried to stay with him, to hold her bunched-up skirt at the wound to keep his precious blood inside him. The blood that had flowed through their lost child, Nathalie.

But she didn’t have the strength and could do nothing to prevent them tossing her aside like a bag of garbage.

*

Wilde was skirting the village, staying in the trees. In his favour, the men and women of the community were either crowded around the dais or were heading towards the woods at the far side where Heck disappeared.

He was angry beyond words. Heck had not only endangered both their lives for no good reason, but he had ruined everything. This was never supposed to be about confronting Boden, let alone shooting him. They had one mission: to find Adolf Hitler and Boden was to have been their conduit to him. Well, how did killing him help that?

Wilde had given Allen Dulles and Colonel Appache the benefit of the doubt when they selected the hot-headed young Dutchman for this operation, now he knew it had been a bad choice all along. Heck was in a blood-red world of his own, and no amount of reasoning was going to alter that. Even worse, it looked as though he was about to die for his foolhardy actions.

*

For the first time in his life, Mozes Heck realised he was not immortal. Blood was spilling from the savage wound to his arm and he was becoming weaker. Struggling in the near-darkness, he had crossed a stream in an effort to throw the barking dogs off his scent and now he was in a hollow, deep in the woods beside rocks and an icy waterfall.

Behind him, he saw the flickering lights of his pursuers and heard their shouts and speculative bursts of gunfire.

Very little snow had penetrated the canopy of branches, so his footprints could not be seen or followed and the rush of the water deadened other sounds.