Free B004U2USMY EBOK by Michael Wallace

believe me. I just found it, that’s all.
     Please, for god’s sake, please. You have to believe me.”
    Hoekman pulled the coin back a few inches as
     the lieutenant translated this. “You found it. Where?”
    “I was in the major’s car, looking for
     cigarettes. I suppose it had fallen out of someone’s pocket. I
     didn’t think it would be missed.”
    “The major? Major Ostermann, you mean.”
    “Yes.”
    Now this was interesting. Colonel Hoekman
     didn’t trust Alfonse Ostermann. There was something underhanded
     about the man. At the least, he was a corrupt element within the
     Wehrmacht requisitioning department. But this business with the
     coin cast new suspicions on the major, assuming the boy was
     telling the truth.
    Hoekman took the forceps and put the coin
     back into the fire. How long would gold hold its heat? He would
     have to ask the lieutenant later.
    Could this have anything to do with the
     American spy they were trying to catch in Provence? There was
     something there about gold roosters, too. They’d raided a house
     near Marseille reputed to hold the spy. No American, but one of
     the items recovered was a small box filled with a few dozen gold
     rooster coins. It might just be a coincidence; there were a lot of
     these old coins in vaults and banks across the country. Even more
     had found their way to Germany, and not always by official routes.
    In fact, one of Hoekman’s earliest successes
     as a Gestapo investigator had been catching a Wehrmacht captain
     who had robbed a bank vault during the invasion of France,
     smuggled its contents back to Germany in sacks of feed. A number
     of French roosters and British sovereigns and even American eagles
     had turned up mysteriously in and around Stuttgart. The captain’s
     house, when raided, had been filled with real coffee, chocolate,
     lemons, oranges, and other extremely expensive black market items.
     His wife had been wearing nylon stockings, like a cabaret girl.
    After Hoekman had finished arresting and
     interrogating the captain and his co-conspirators, he’d received a
     curt telegram through official channels, ordering him to report to
     a castle in the Silesian highlands, near the old frontier with
     Poland.
    This had been March 1941, before the war with
     the Russians on the Eastern Front, when Germany and the Soviet
     Union were, to all intents and purposes, allies. Suspicious,
     semi-hostile allies, of course, like two packs of wolves came
     together to bring down a wounded animal—Poland, in this case—and
     now circled each other warily with blood from the last battle
     still dripping from their jaws. Still, Hoekman had assumed war
     with the Soviets would be unthinkable so long as Britain remained
     unbroken and jeering on the other side of the English Channel.
    But as he drove into Silesia, Hoekman
     couldn’t help but notice the trains, the military convoys, the
     massive movement of material. And endless lines of men, thousands
     and thousands of them, all moving east, in excess even of what
     he’d see along the former border with Poland two years earlier.
     Hoekman had recognized at once the signs of a pending war.
    So all the talk of peace and friendship with
     the Bolsheviks was a lie. And why not? Germany was surrounded by
     enemies. Germans had their superior organization and their brains,
     and if they needed to add a measure of cunning, so be it. He just
     hoped his counterparts in Department E were up to the challenge of
     rooting out and destroying the NKVD spies that no doubt infested
     Poland and would be watching and reporting to Moscow.
    The guards didn’t lead Hoekman into the
     castle, as he’d expected, but onto a path into the wooded part of
     the estate. The sound of an animal came from the underbrush,
     grunting, primitive sounds. A wild boar, from the sound of it.
     Hoekman found himself wishing the guards hadn’t relieved him of
     his Mauser.
    “Heil Hitler,” a voice said.
    Hoekman turned,