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shabby office, with a worn green carpet in the entrance hall, flat white lighting, and an anemic plant in a pot on the desk of the girl who served as receptionist, switchboard operator, and copy typist. Euram Marketing gave a distinct impression of watching the pennies.
    Herr Weber, the caretaker downstairs, would tell callers who had time for a little gossip that Euram Marketing was pretty shaky financially. He believed it was a business venture started by a couple of Americans who had settled in Frankfurt with big ambitions but few resources. The company was so broke, he confided, that the staff even had to do the window cleaning.
    And if anybody asked him what Euram actually marketed, he was rather vague.
    ‘] think they’re in the import business,” he’d say. “Or is it export? Something like that. I don’t think they make a lot of money. There’s only a handful of people working up there.”
    Some shrewder characters suspected that Euram was
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    probably the offshoot of a much bigger firm, and really a cleverly manipulated tax loss.
    They were partly right. Euram Marketing Inc. was established in 1951, under a top-secret directive 10-2 of the National Security Council. It authorized the setting up of “special operations, always provided they are secret, and sufficiently diminutive in size as to be plausibly denied by the government.”
    The girl with the plant pot smiled at Unterberg as he entered.
    “Hi, Clyde,” she greeted him. “Good to see you again.”
    She came from Arizona and was the wife of an officer stationed across town in the IG Farben Building. Her security clearance was formidable.
    “You look great, Jeannie,” said Unterberg. “Is he in?”
    “Waiting for you.”
    He opened the door marked “Private” without knocking.
    The only furniture in the room were three armchairs and a round coffee table. There was another undernourished plant in a pot similar to the one outside. A TWA calendar hung on the wall.
    “Make yourself at home,” invited the man already sitting in one of the armchairs. He wore rimless glasses. He had recently returned from Switzerland.
    Unterberg, a big six-foot two-inch 240-pounder, eased himself into one of the other armchairs.
    “Boy, you must have been cramped in that sub,” the man sympathised.
    Unterberg shook his head. “Plenty of space. You’d be surprised how roomy those tin cans are.”
    “Rather you than me, friend,” said the man. “Stuck down there, it’s one hell of a way not to see the world.”
    “l sent the report to Washington,” said Unterberg. “Including the autopsy findings on the two bodies.”
    The man was interested. “Which were?”
    “The navy says they didn’t find out much. The poor bastards had burns and exposure.”
    “You think they were dead when the Russians fished them out?”
    “It looks that way.”
    “I hope so,” said the man. “I’d hate to think the Ruskis got hold of anything.”
    He might have been talking about chess pieces. It didn’t surprise Unterberg. He knew the man well, even before
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    they had joined the company. They were both alumni of Stanford University and had been in the same fraternities, Sigma XI and Phi Beta Kappa.
    Then their ways parted until they crossed one another’s paths in OPC, the covert, highly classified Office of Policy Coordination. A beautifully meaningless title. The man had reached OPC’s higher command level; Unterberg worked in the field.
    “How was Geneva?” asked Unterberg.
    “We reached an … arrangement of convenience,” said the man, “I’m sure the French have a word for it, but I can’t think what. Got you out of a hole, didn’t it?”
    “It wasn’t my idea to go fishing in their backyard.” Unterberg snorted. “The navy swore they could do it undetected.”
    The man stretched himself. “Sometimes I worry about the military. The air force thinks it can get away with flying its tucking bombers over Russia, the navy thinks it can go for pleasure