Most and Louis disposed of the Phantom surveillance drone by dousing it in gasoline and setting it alight in a dumpster. Most then drove Louis to a guesthouse on the outskirts of Lidice, just a short distance northwest of Václav Havel Airport. In June 1942, in reprisal for the assassination of the Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, the Germans had razed Lidice and sown the ground with salt. They had also executed every male over the age of fifteen and sent the women and children to Chelmno to be gassed, apart from a handful adjudged physically acceptable enough to be Aryanized. The current village overlooked the site of the original settlement. A line of trees concealed it from the view of those staying at the guesthouse.

No one at the desk asked Louis for identification or payment. An elderly woman showed him to a tiny, spotlessly clean room, and left without offering a word. The earliest direct flight from Prague to Vienna left at 8:15 a.m., and Most had decided that Louis should not spend the intervening hours waiting in an airport lounge. Most thought it unlikely that any connection would be made between the explosion at the casino and the departing American, but in the event of such a misfortune befalling them, it would be best if Louis were somewhere other than a terminal building filled with cameras and armed police.

Louis did not sleep, or even remove his shoes, although in deference to his hosts he placed a towel at the foot of the bed so as not to mark the comforter. The TV in the room did not have a cable or satellite connection and was limited to terrestrial Czech channels. He turned on his iPad and tried using the guesthouse’s internet to check local news reports, but most were in Czech and none mentioned anything about an explosion at a casino. After an hour he heard a knock at his door, and Most’s voice called his name. Louis admitted the big man, who just about managed to fit into the room’s single chair. Most had arranged for the motorcycle to be collected by one of his nephews, and all traces of their presence at the factory to be erased, right down to the tire tracks of the BMW.