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claim he had received a garbled signal, then simply proceeded with his mission as ordered. No one could lay the failure of Hess’s mission at his door. The pilot closedhis eyes in relief.
Sippenhaft
be damned! No one would kill his family without giving him a chance to explain.
    By taking this gamble—the only chance he could see of survival—the desperate captain unknowingly precipitated the most bizarre conspiracy of the Second World War. And a hundred miles to the east, alive or dead, the real Rudolf Hess—a man with enough secrets in his head to unleash catastrophic civil war in England—disappeared from the face of the earth.
    The Duke of Hamilton maintained his attitude of skepticism throughout the brief interview, but before he left the hospital, he issued orders that the prisoner be moved to a secret location and held under double guard.

BOOK ONE
WEST BERLIN, 1987
    A talebearer revealeth secrets: but he that is of a faithful spirit concealeth the matter.
    P ROVERBS 11.13

CHAPTER ONE
    The wrecking ball arced slowly across the snow-carpeted courtyard and smashed into the last building left on the prison grounds, launching bricks through the air like mosscovered mortar rounds. Spandau Prison, the brooding red-brick fortress that had stood for over a century and housed the most notorious Nazi war criminals for the past forty years, was being leveled in a single day.
    The last inmate of Spandau, Rudolf Hess, was dead. He had committed suicide just four weeks ago, relieving the West German government of the burden of one million pounds sterling it paid each year to maintain the aged Nazi’s isolated captivity. In a rare display of solidarity, France, Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union—the former Allies who guarded Spandau by monthly turns—had agreed that the prison should be destroyed as quickly as possible, to prevent its becoming a shrine to neo-Nazi fanatics.
    Throughout the day, crowds had gathered in the cold to watch the demolition. Because Spandau stood in the British sector of Berlin, it fell to the Royal Engineers to carry out this formidable job. At first light an explosives team brought down the main structure like a collapsing house of cards. Then, after the dust settled into the snow, bulldozers and wrecking cranes moved in. They pulverized the prison’s masonry, dismembered its iron skeleton, and piled the remains into huge mounds that looked all too familiar to Berliners of a certain age.
    This year Berlin was 750 years old. All across the city massive construction and restoration projects had been proceeding apace in celebration of the historic anniversary. Yet this grim fortress, the Berliners knew, would never rise again. For years they had passed this way as they went abouttheir business, rarely giving a thought to this last stubborn symbol of what, in the glow of
glasnost
, seemed ancient history. But now that Spandau’s forbidding battlements no longer darkened the Wilhelmstrasse skyline, they stopped to ponder its ghosts.
    By dusk, only the prison heating plant still stood, its smokestack painted in stark relief against the gunmetal clouds. A wrecking-crane drew back its mammoth concrete ball. The stack trembled, as if waiting for the final blow. The ball swung slowly through its arc, then struck like a bomb. The smokestack exploded into a cloud of brick and dust, showering what had been the prison kitchen only minutes before.
    A sharp cheer cut through the din of heavy diesel motors. It came from beyond the cordoned perimeter. The cheer was not for the eradication of Spandau particularly, but rather a spontaneous human expression of awe at the sight of large-scale destruction. Irritated by the spectators, a French corporal gestured for some German policemen to help him disperse the crowd. Excellent hand signals quickly bridged the language barrier, and with trademark efficiency the Berlin Polizei went to work.
    “Achtung!”
they bellowed. “Go home!
Haue ab!
This