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“I thought I was getting to him,” McKenna said to Cronley five minutes later. “I was wrong.”

“You want to try Müller?”

“I will if you insist, but,

frankly, my ego isn’t up to it.”

“Well, then, I think what we should do is send ol’ Willi back to his cell at the Tribunal, after another tour of the city, and then when the Horch finally comes back, we head back to Castle Wewelsburg.”

[FOUR]

Wewelsburg Castle

Near Paderborn, American Zone of Occupation, Germany

1830 26 April 1946

Cronley found Lieutenant Colonel David P. Dickinson and Major Donald G. Lomax in what he thought of as King Arthur Hall, but designated as his Court Room, with twelve doors and an enormous, circular wooden table large enough for King Arthur and his twelve Knights of the Round Table.

They went over a stack of huge sheets of parchmentlike paper, making notations on them, after consulting their notebooks.

“What did you find out about our humble home?” Cronley asked.

“It’s riddled with secret rooms, passageways, et cetera,” Dickinson replied. “What Lomax and I are trying to decide is, when were they added to the castle? In the old days or when the modifications were made ten, twenty years ago?”

“Revealing my ignorance, why does that matter?”

“We don’t want a ceiling to fall because we took out a wall. The rule of thumb is, when knocking something down, reverse the steps taken to build the building to take it down.”

“How do you know what steps somebody else followed, and in what order, building something ten years—or a hundred years—ago?”

“That’s the fun part, Captain Cronley,” Colonel Dickinson said. “But not to worry, Lomax and Dickinson, engineers extraordinary, are working on it.”

“And when do you think you’ll be finished?”

“Some time in this century, if we’re lucky,” Lomax said, and then saw the look on Cronley’s face and felt sorry for him.

“I think we can start to go through a small wall in the big round room tomorrow. One of the possibilities is different from the other eleven. It looks like that might be the place where the project was finished—ergo sum, the place to start our reverse construction.”

“What time tomorrow?”

“How does oh-nine-hundred grab you?”

“Not as tightly as oh-eight-hundred.”

“Oh-eight-hundred it is.”

[FIVE]

King Arthur’s Court

Wewelsburg Castle

Near Paderborn, American Zone of Occupation, Germany

0750 27 April 1946

When Cronley arrived, he had expected to find the “destruction” crew setting up in the big round room, with Colonel Dickinson standing at King Arthur’s huge round table, perhaps marking up with a pencil parchment sheets showing hidden rooms and passageways in the castle.