Free The Folks at Fifty-Eight by Michael Patrick Clark

to question her. He hadn’t believed a word she said.
    Fortunately, the local Saxony-Anhalt cell boasted an informer in the Leipzig headquarters. He gave them details of her interrogation, and told them of MGB plans. They told Hammond.
    The authorities in Magdeburg planned to transfer her to their counterparts in Prague, for further questioning about a similarly-gruesome murder there. After that, they intended taking her up to Moscow, where the Mingrelian Monster himself, the great and terrible Lavrenti Beria, awaited her arrival.
    By then Hammond had long since stopped smiling. In the space of five hectic days his part in an unofficial back-scratching exercise had graduated from a covert walk in the park to something bordering suicidal.
    “When can we go?”
    The girl was clearly impatient. An older and wiser Gerald Hammond was more cautious.
    “Not just yet. When I’m sure it’s safe.”
    “Where are we?”
    “On the floodplain, to the south-east of Dessau, I hope. Don’t you know? This is your country.”
    “It was my country, but not any more. Now my people have no country. Barbarians have taken it from us. Anyway, I only know Berlin, and a little of Prague, I suppose.”
    “Well, I’m betting the River Mulde is on the far side of those woods. If it is, we should be able to follow it all the way up past the town.”
    As she peered across the fields to the woods beyond, following the tip of a grubby finger, he quietly studied the girl beneath the layers of caked-on dirt. She was more than easy on the eye, she was stunning, with classically beautiful features and clear blue eyes that laughed and sparkled through the fear.
    Crouched low in the stagnant water and peeping over the rim of the ditch, she reminded him of an impish tom-boy, with her face and limbs streaked with dirt, and her long blonde hair hanging in damp and matted strands. The white cotton and lace skirt she wore was now torn, stained with grass and embedded with grime, but the body that so beautifully distorted the mud-spattered jacket was not that of an impish tomboy but a fully-formed and exquisitely-proportioned young woman.
    As he quietly watched her, he found himself inexplicably drawn and wanting to believe in her innocence. She was obviously young and beautiful, but she was also deceptively strong; agile and athletic and mentally tough.
    “Can’t we risk it? I’m getting cold.”
    She had posed the question without any hint of complaint. Hammond studied the empty road and the fields beyond. He knew they needed to make the northern outskirts of Dessau before dusk, but there was still that large expanse of open ground to cross before they could make the cover of the woods. He decided they had no choice. They had to chance it.
    “I suppose we have to. We can’t stay here forever. We’ll head for the woods over there, but if you hear anything or see anybody, you drop immediately and lay still. Got it?”
    She nodded. He clambered out of the ditch and pulled her after him.
    Then they ran; over the road, into the field and across the open farmland; eyes scanning the surrounding countryside, lungs gasping for breath, progress hindered by the cloying mud that grabbed at their feet and wearied their legs.
    Ten minutes later, they made the woods on the far side of the fields, and paused to rest exhausted limbs. He checked to see if anyone had spotted their frantic dash for cover. He saw no one.
    “I think we’re safe, for the moment anyway. Now let’s find the river.”
     

6
     
    Around four thousand miles to the west of where Hammond and the girl were making for the River Mulde, 1946 Washington D.C. saw J. Edgar Hoover and ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan continue their high-profile battle for control of the new Central Intelligence Group. The battle would continue into the following year, when the initials CIG would be changed to CIA, but while the two political heavyweights wrangled, another faction of former OSS members quietly made their