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thinking,' Nash said. 'If someone had told me
this same story a week ago, I'd have thought about it the same way
you do. But then, up until a couple of weeks ago, nobody even knew
where the Santiago Manu script was.'

'But now you have it,' Race said.

'No,' Nash said sharply. 'We have a copy of it. Somebody else has
the original.'

'Who?“

Nash nodded at the folder in Race's lap. 'Did you see the newspaper
article in the folder I gave you before? The one about the Jesuit
monks who were killed in their monastery

in the Pyrenees?”

'Yeah…'

'Eighteen monks killed. All of them shot at close range with
high-powered weapons. At first glance, it looks like the work of
your garden variety Algerian terrorists. They've been known to
attack isolated monasteries and their favoured m.o. is to shoot
their victims at very close range.

Sure enough, the French press reported it that way.

'But'—Nash held up a finger—'what the press don't know is that
during the carnage, one monk managed to escape. An American Jesuit
on sabbatical in France. He man aged to hide upstairs in an attic
during the whole thing.

After the French police debriefed him, he was passed on to our
embassy in Paris. At the embassy, he was debriefed

again, only this time by our CIA Chief of Station.'

'And?'

Nash looked Race squarely in the eye.

'The men who stormed that monastery weren't Algerian terrorists,
Professor Race. They were commandos. Soldiers.

White soldiers. They all wore black ski masks and they were all
armed to the teeth with some pretty awesome weaponry.

And they spoke to each other in German.

'What's more interesting,' Nash continued, 'is what they were
after. Apparently, the commandos gathered all the monks together in
the abbey's dining room and made them get down on their knees. Then
they grabbed one of the monks and demanded to know the location of
the Santiago Manuscript. When the monk said he didn't know where it
was, they shot two monks—one on either side of him. Then they asked
him again. When he again said he didn't know, they killed the next
two monks. This would have gone on until they were all killed but
then someone stepped forward

and said he knew where the manuscript was.'

'Jesus…' Race said.

Nash pulled a photograph from his briefcase. 'We have

Bason to believe that the man responsible for this atrocity /;was
this man, Heinrich Anistaze, formerly a major in the

/

East German secret police, the Stasi.

Race looked at the photo. It was an eight-by-ten glossy of man
getting out of a car. The man was tall and broad- shouldered, with
short black hair that was brushed forward

and two narrow slits for eyes. They were hard eyes, cold eyes, eyes
that seemed to be set in a perpetual squint. He appeared to be in
his mid-forties.

'Notice the left hand,' Nash said.

Race looked at the photograph more closely. The man's

left hand rested atop the car door. Race saw it.

Heinrich Anistaze had no left ring finger.

'At one time during the Cold War, Anistaze was captured by members
of an East German crime syndicate that the Stasi was trying to shut
down. They made him cut off his own finger before they sent it off
in the mail to his superi ors. But then Anistaze escaped, and
returned—with the full force of the Stasi behind him. Needless to
say, organ[sed crime was never a problem in communist East Germany
after that.

'Of more importance to us, however, are his methods in other
circumstances. You see, it seems Anistaze had a pecu liar way of
making people talk: he was known for executing the people on either
side of the person who failed to give

him the information he wanted.'

There was a short silence.

'According to our most recent intelligence,' Nash said, 'since the
end of the Cold War, Anistaze has been working in a non-official
capacity as an assassin for the unified Ger man government.'

'So the Germans have the original manuscript,' Race

said. 'How did you get your copy then?'

Nash nodded sagely:

'The monks gave