“Thanks,” I said, heading back to my car. “Oh, and by the way. I’m from Berlin originally. Thanks for what you did there. The airlift? As a matter of fact, that’s half the reason I bothered to drive all the way here tonight. Because of Berlin.”

Schwarz grinned back at me. “No problem,” he said.

I got back into the car and drove into the airbase, hoping that this small show of sentiment would forestall any suspicions the Ami might possibly entertain about me after I had gone. It was something I had learned as an intelligence officer during the war: The essence of deception is not the lie that’s told but the truths that are told to support it. I meant what I’d said about the airlift.

The Rhein-Main airport building was a white, Bauhaus-style edifice of the kind the Nazis hated, which was probably the only reason to like it. To me it was just big windows, blank walls, and a lot of egalitarian hot air. Looking at it you sort of imagined that Walter Gropius would have an apartment on the top floor with a lavatory wall expertly doodled on by Paul Klee. I parked my car and my cultural Philistinism and maneuvered one of the packages out of the backseat. Then I saw it. Jacobs’s green Buick Roadmaster, with the white-wall tires, parked just a few places away from where I’d left the Mercury. I was in the right place all right. I tucked the package under my arm and walked toward the building. Behind me, on the edge of the fog, stood several C-47 airplanes and a Lockheed Constellation. All of them looked bedded down for the night.

I went through a side door and found myself in a cargo area that was the size of a large factory. A roller conveyer ran the length of its sixty or seventy yards and there were multiple sets of folding doors that gave onto the runways. Several forklift trucks were parked where they had stopped, and dozens of luggage carts and cargo cages containing kitbags and suitcases, army backpacks, duffel bags and footlockers, parcels and packages, stood around like an airlift that was waiting to happen. There were consignments for almost everywhere in the United States—from Bolling AFB in Washington to Vandenberg in California. A radio was playing quietly somewhere. In the doorway of a small office an American serviceman with a Clark Gable mustache, a set of greasy overalls, and a hat like a tea cozy sat on a box marked “Fragile” smoking a cigarette. He looked tired and bored. “Can I help you?” he said.

“I have some late cargo for the Langley flight,” I said.