A mental note: keyword 'whale.' Tell Control to turn the heat off the big fish so that they relaxed their vigilance while I got within range.

It was only the smaller fish I'd netted so far. They'd sent KLJ after the big ones and now he was dead. The big ones were people like the Hitler deputy Bormann, and Mueller, and General von Rittmeister. They'd got out of Berlin under fire from the Russian batteries in ' 45, a whole gang of them running for Obersalzberg and beyond, while their Fuhrer's short round-shouldered carcass was smothered in petrol-soaked rag and set alight. Some of them had taken off in Himmler's four-motor plane from the Flughafen a mile from here through a dawn sky dark with smoke. I could see the runway lights from this window now.

I went across to it. Outside the night was still and the city frozen in sleep. The present and the past lay buried under the snow. What made us rake like this among the ashes of that distant hell after twenty years? They said it was to help a nation to its feet. The new young Germany had heard too many tales of the war that had raged above its unborn head, and wanted to know the truth, and face it and then forget. That was the reason.

It wasn't mine.

'Have we a minute,' they said, 'to chant a prayer?' He shook his head.

My breath made a bloom on the window's glass. The room was too hot and I turned the radiators off, working for another hour. With half the memorandum shuffled, linked and recorded in my mind I left the hotel and walked on the snow to clear my lungs for sleep. The street was empty.