E y e of the A r c h a n g e l A Mallory and Morse Novel of Espionage Forrest DeVoe Jr. Contents Book I: Monaco 1 PROLOGUE: Three Serpents 3 1 Your Lucky Day 19 2 Billion with a B 26 3 Just Because I Always Wear a Smile 39 4 Three-Sixty 53 5 Ballerinas 66 6 A Few Marks Between Friends 81 7 Up on the Wall 103 8 Walking the Track 116 9 Gone 139 10 Kendrick Insists 158 11 The Winner’s Circle 164 Book II: Mont Saint-Sévérin 185 1 Where the Angel Lives 187 2 Understood 207 3 Hullabaloo 220 4 The Bowl of the Sage 234 5 Zero Hour 244 6 Queen of the Mountain 263 7 A Long Time Coming 277 8 A Man Like That 284 EPILOGUE All You Can Ever Do 291 About the Author Other Books by Forrest Devoe Jr. Credits Cover Copyright About the Publisher BOOK I Monaco PROLOGUE Three Serpents This is no place for an old man, thought the old man. It was the dead black hours before a Finnish winter dawn, but Kost had been crawling through the dark for a very long time, and for him the blackness had become as varied and informative as midday sunlight. There was the weak, ghostly black of the snow beneath his belly and legs, which crested against his chin like waves against the prow of a ship. There was the complexly woven black of the surround- ing trees and, behind them, the rich blue-black of the horizon. Toward the base of the trees ahead, the glittering black of the narrow asphalt road leading into Virtaniemi. A two-kilometer walk to the middle of town, if the crude, smeary map had been accurate. Two or two hun- dred; if he made it across the border, the rest was trivial. About ninety meters down the slope, the guardhouse at the Soviet-Finnish frontier was two bright windows hanging in air; between and around them, a nimbus of bleached-out, substanceless black—just the absence of 4 Forrest DeVoe Jr. light upon a stunned eye. Right before his chilled nose was the base of a cyclone fence, a ghostly black lattice, against which his old leather work gloves were a furry, animal black. The wire snips in his hand, freshly oiled, were a black as brilliant as chrome. He tightened them and a link of wire fencing parted with a sharp clack that was almost like a spark of light. It seemed to Kost that the sound must be audible for miles, but as a scientist he knew this was unlikely. The man in the snow was tall and thin. He wore a workman’s can- vas trousers and short leather jacket, and had pulled a coarse woolen watch cap over a scholarly forehead and flowing white locks. Even so, Walther Kost had an aristocratic air. He looked more like a concert violinist than a rocket scientist—at any rate, that was what Der Führer had once told him, under the impression that he was paying a compli- ment. Kost was sixty-one years old, just ten months older than this wretched ruin of a century. He was far too old to be wriggling on his numbed belly through the snow. Still, as he’d done so often in his life, he was shooing away his dignity like an unwanted cat and making the best of a bad bargain. Dr. Kost had been forty-six when the Russians rolled into Berlin. This had seemed quite old at the time, and he’d sat in his laboratory drinking tree-bark tea and waiting for death with a kind of sour equa- nimity. Von Braun had long since cleared out, no doubt to somewhere advantageous. Von Braun could always be relied upon to take care of von Braun. And the Russians would want him alive, or the Ameri- cans—Wernher was a valuable commodity, the man who’d built the V-2. In contrast, Kost would strike the invaders as a minor researcher, a tinkerer, of little account. Unless, of course, they knew about Arch- angel. And no one knew about Archangel but Hitler, Goebbels, and two of Goebbels’s most senior aides; even Göring hadn’t been trusted with the dossier. But apparently the Russians knew. The soldiers who’d taken him had been courteous and apologetic—handpicked men, even the least of them speaking passable German. They’d packed up his workshop with un-Russian efficiency, handcuffed him tenderly, and bundled him off to a brand-new laboratory compound ringed by snowy mountains and smelling of still-damp concrete and fresh paint. Some village in