Standing beside him, wearing a fur-collared overcoat and heavy leather combat boots, was a man I had seen only in history textbooks: General George S. Patton.
Advertisement
"Your father wasn't carrying routine division dispatches through the mortar fire at Bastogne, Harold," Vance whispered, his eyes locking onto mine with an intensity that burned through forty years of suburban quiet.
"On the night of December twenty-third, the Third Army intercepted an SS special recovery detachment retreating from the salt mines at Merkers. In their possession was a lead-shielded, titanium-reinforced courier cylinder containing the Nuremberg Restitution Cipher: the complete, un-redacted cryptographic banking registries, gold-bullion deposit receipts, and industrial patent deeds for seventy-two German industrial conglomerates that funded the Reich."
Advertisement
Vance pulled an antique, cylindrical brass tube—no larger than an architectural scroll case, fitted with a three-wheel mechanical combination dial—from his pocket, setting it gently onto the oak table between us.
