I heard Jacobs moving around upstairs for a while and then everything went quiet. I stood up and kicked at the door, which helped get some of the anger and frustration out of me but did nothing to aid my escape. The cellar door was made of oak. I could have kicked it all day and not even scratched it. I looked around for some sort of tool.

The cellar had no windows and no other doors. There was a central-heating radiator the size of a coiled anaconda and as hot as a lightbulb. The floor was concrete, with walls to match. Some old kitchen appliances were heaped in one corner, and I supposed that part of the laboratory upstairs had once been the villa’s kitchen. There were several pairs of skis, boots, and poles; an old toboggan; some ice skates; and a bicycle with no tires. I practiced using one of the skis as a sort of pikestaff and decided that it might serve as a useful weapon if the Israelis coming to see were armed only with the strength of the Lord. If they had guns, I was in trouble. I abandoned a similar plan to use the blade of an ice skate for the same reason.

As well as an assortment of junk there was a small wine rack containing some dusty-looking bottles of Riesling. I smashed the neck off one and drank the contents without much pleasure. There’s nothing worse than warm Riesling. By now I was feeling warm myself. I removed my coat and my jacket, smoked a cigarette and turned my attention to several largish packages that were ranged on either side of the radiator. All of them were addressed to Major Jacobs and labeled “U.S. Government. Urgent Laboratory Specimens.” Another label read: “Extreme caution advised. Handle with care. Store in a warm place only. Danger of infectious disease. Contains live insectary. Should only be opened by trained entomologist.”

I had my doubts that an Israeli avenger squad would be deterred from killing me by a couple of squadrons of mosquitoes, but I tore the packaging off the first box and removed the lid all the same. Inside the box was a lot of straw and, in the middle of the straw, a handy little travel habitat for the friends of Henkell and Gruen. A couple of sheets of paper described an inventory of what was inside the box. It had been prepared by someone from the Committee on Medical Sciences in the Department of Defense at the Pentagon, in Washington, D.C. It read as follows: “Insectary contains live and preserved anopheles and culex eggs, larvae, pupae, and adult specimens, both male and female. Adults and live eggs are in mosquito cages. Insectary also contains sucking tubes, to pick up mosquitoes from the cage and several blood meals to sustain insect life for up to thirty days.”