“There ain’t nobody around, ’cept me. Not this time of night. ’Sides, that flight ain’t going out till morning now. ’Cause of the fog. Hell, no wonder you guys didn’t win the war. Getting planes in and out of this place is a bitch.”

“I would like that explanation better if it didn’t let that useless fat bastard Hermann Göring off the hook,” I said, ingratiatingly. “Blaming it all on the weather, like that.”

“Good point,” said the man. He pointed at the package under my arm. “That it?”

“Yes.”

“You got any paperwork for it?”

I showed him the paperwork I had brought from Garmisch. And repeated the explanation I had made at the gatehouse. He looked at it for a while, scrawled a signature on it, and then jerked a thumb across his shoulder.

“About fifty yards down there is a cargo cage with ‘Langley’ chalked on the side. Just put your package in there. We’ll get to it in the morning.” Then he went back in the office and closed the door behind him.

It took me about five minutes to find the cargo bay for Langley, but longer to find their luggage. Two Vuitton steamer trunks were standing on their ends beside one of the cages, like two New York skyscrapers. Both were helpfully labeled “Dr. and Frau Braun” and “Dr. and Frau Hoffmann.” The padlocks were cheap ones that anyone with a half-decent penknife could have opened. I had a good penknife and I had both trunks opened in a couple of minutes. Some of the best thieves in the world are ex-cops. But that was the easy part.

Open, the trunks looked more like pieces of furniture than luggage. In one half was a clothes rail with a little silk curtain and matching hangers; and in the other a set of four working drawers. It was the guard at the gatehouse who had given me the idea of what to do. The idea that a bug could be snug in a rug. And not just a rug. But also the drawer in a nice, big cozy steamer trunk.