from America, a woman who met the Fuhrer in Wannsee.”
“So the plan is for him to see you,” Danforth said.
Anna nodded.
“To see you and remember you as the woman who made that strange remark in Wannsee.”
“That’s right,” Anna said. “So if I come over to his table, he won’t be suspicious.”
“And the pistol?” Danforth asked. He looked at Bannion. “You don’t expect her to be searched?”
“Probably not,” Bannion said. “According to the British agent, the restaurant reservation list is screened, but the real fear is bombs, and so whole crews go through the place before the first customers arrive.”
There was a moment of silence, as each of them looked at the others and waited.
“What about you?” Danforth asked. “Where will you be?”
“In the crowd outside the restaurant,” Bannion answered. “If Anna fails, they’ll rush him out the front door where his car is always waiting. Things will be pretty confused, I’m sure. They’ll be dashing around, and I could get an opening between the front door and the car.”
“And if you don’t?” Danforth asked.
“I’ll make one,” Bannion said. “I’ll fire into his entourage. There’ll be more confusion. Another chance for an opening, and even a wild shot will be better than no shot at all.” He shrugged with an indifference Danforth found shocking and in which he saw the fearful courage of the truly committed. “One way or the other, we’re going to die, Anna and I,” he said. “We’ll both have cyanide in case we’re captured.” Then he looked at her like a suitor at last betrothed. “Maybe this was always the plan for us,” he said.
A silence fell over them, until Anna said quite softly, “Done.”
~ * ~
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
“And so we approached the last days,” Danforth said. “We would all go to Munich. Bannion would keep an eye on Braunes Haus at Briennerstrasse forty-five, near the Konigsplatz, the Nazi headquarters where Hitler was likely to spend a good deal of his time while he was in Munich. I would station myself in a hotel room within view of the Osteria Bavaria. Anna would remain in a nearby hotel until it was time for her to go to the restaurant. The idea was that she would go there every day for lunch and dinner. If the target showed up, and she could get in range, she would shoot him.”
“With Bannion always waiting outside the restaurant if she failed,” I said.
Danforth drained the last of his drink. “Simple as that, Paul.”
“Simple, yes.” I hesitated before my next remark. “Forgive me, but it sounds very . . . haphazard.”
“Does it?”
“Well, you have no specific intelligence component,” I said. “Other than that information Bannion got from Rache and this unnamed British agent.”
“His name was Alexander Foote, as I found out later,” Danforth said. “You can look him up, if you like.”
“I don’t doubt that he existed,” I assured Danforth quickly. “But the nature of his intelligence was so general that it couldn’t have been of much use.”
“It was of no use at all really,” Danforth agreed. “Except that it was clear it was possible to get quite close to the target at the Osteria Bavaria because Foote had already done it.”
“But that is hardly actionable intelligence,” I insisted.
“Well, certainly no more ‘actionable intelligence’ than Oswald had,” Danforth said casually. “Not much more than John Wilkes Booth had. In fact, not much more than any of those boy assassins in Sarajevo who waited for Franz Ferdinand’s car to go by. Just to be at the right place at the right time.”
I looked at him quizzically. “So you don’t believe in elaborate planning?”
“What I believe in, Paul, is human incompetence,” Danforth said. “You can simply depend on incompetence within the security system to give you an opening at some point. You wait for that opening, and then you strike.” He smiled. “All the training at my country house, all Bannion’s information about Hitler’s layers of security, all my traipsing around Berlin pretending that I could find just the right place, all of that finally came down to one thing: a guy likes to eat at a certain restaurant, and if you’re in that restaurant when he eats there, you can kill him.”
Something in Danforth’s demeanor darkened, and the tone of his voice became intimate, as if he were speaking not to a think-tank freshman young enough to be his grandson but to someone who was tied to this ancient conspiracy. “Which brings me to the final act of this part of my story, Paul.” His gaze took on a troubled wonder. “The trick love plays in life.”
~ * ~
Munich, Germany, 1939
The pistol was the same model and caliber LaRoche had used at Winterset, and Bannion’s manner was quite casual when he drew it from his jacket and handed it to Danforth.
The instructions that followed were simple: Danforth was to meet Anna in the square outside the restaurant as the dinner hour approached. He was to give her the pistol. She would take it into the restaurant.
“She should never have the gun until she goes into the restaurant,” Bannion said “Since she’s the only one of us who has a reservation at the Osteria, it would be her room they’d search.”
The target was scheduled to arrive in the city that same afternoon, and Bannion had found out —either from Rache or Foote — that he was inclined to have dinner at the Osteria Bavaria on his second day in Munich, usually
