The Mark of the Assassin

window of a smoky cafe a short distance from his hotel. The
    bookstore was there, across a busy square. It had developed a
    well-deserved reputation for snobbery, for it specialized in literature
    and philosophy and refused to stock commercial fiction or thrillers. The
    hotel clerk said the manager once physically removed a woman who dared
    to ask for the new book by a famous American romance writer. It was a
    perfect place for Astrid. Twice, he caught a glimpse of her--stacking
    books in the front window, giving advice to a male customer who was
    clearly more interested in her than in any book she might be
    recommending. Astrid had that effect on men, always did. It was why
    Delaroche came to Amsterdam in the first place.
    SHE WAS BORN ASTRID MEYER in the town of Kassel near the East German
    border. When her father walked out on the family in 1967, her mother
    abandoned his name and reclaimed her own, which was Lizbet Vogel. After
    the divorce, Lizbet settled in a lakeside cottage in the mountains of
    Switzerland, outside Bern. It was familiar territory. Late in the war,
    in July 1944, her family fled Germany and sought refuge in a nearby
    village. It was there, alone in the mountains with her mother, that
    Astrid Meyer began her lifelong fascination with her grandfather, Kurt
    Vogel. A heavy smoker his entire life, Vogel died of lung cancer in
    1949, ten years before Astrid was born. In the end his wife, Gertrude,
    had tried to bring him down from the mountains, but Vogel believed the
    alpine air held his salvation, and he died at home gasping for breath.
    Trude Vogel knew next to nothing of her husband's wartime work, but what
    she did know she told to Lizbet and Lizbet told to Astrid. He had given
    up a promising legal career in 1935 to join the Abwehr, the German
    secret service. He had been a close associate of the chief of the
    Abwehr, Wilhelm Canaris, who was executed for treason by the Nazis in
    April 1945. He had deceived Trude for years, telling her that he was
    Canaris's legal counsel. But late in the war he admitted the truth--he
    had recruited agents and sent them to England to spy on the British.
    Lizbet remembered the night. Her father had moved the family to Bavaria,
    because Berlin was no longer safe. She remembered her father arriving at
    the house, very late, remembered his presence in her bedroom, framed
    against the faint light of the open doorway. Later, she remembered the
    sound of her mother and father talking softly in the kitchen, and the
    smell of her father's supper. And then she heard the sound of dishes
    shattering, the sound of her mother gasping. She and her twin sister,
    Nicole, crawled to the top of the stairs and looked down. Below, in the
    kitchen, they saw their parents and two men wearing the black uniforms
    of the SS. One man they did not recognize; the other was Hein-rich
    Himmler, the most powerful man in Germany after Adolf Hitler. For years
    Lizbet Vogel believed her father had been a Nazi, an ally of Himmler and
    the SS, a war criminal who had chosen to die in the mountains of
    Switzerland rather than face justice in his homeland. Her mother, she
    concluded, secretly believed the same. When her mother was dead, Lizbet
    told the story to Astrid, and Astrid grew up believing her grandfather
    was a Nazi.
    Then, on an afternoon in October 1970, a man telephoned the cottage and
    asked if he could visit. His name was Werner Ulbricht, and he had worked
    with Kurt Vogel at the Abwehr during the war. He said he knew the truth
    about Vogel's work. Lizbet told him to come. He arrived an hour
    later--gaunt, pale as baker's flour, leaning heavily on a cane, a neat
    black patch over one eye. They walked for a time Werner Ulbricht,
    Lizbet, and Astrid--and then sat on the grassy bank of the lake and
    drank coffee from a thermos bottle. Despite the snap of autumn in the
    air, Ulbricht's face was bathed in sweat from the exertion. He rested
    for a time, sipping his coffee, and then told them the story. Kurt Vogel
    was no Nazi; he hated them with a passion. He came to the Abwehr on
    condition he not be forced to join the Party, and Canaris had been more
    than happy to grant him his wish. He was not an in-house legal counsel
    to Canaris. He was an agent runner and a damned good one at that:
    meticulous, brilliant, ruthless in his own way. One of his agents in
    Britain was a woman. Together, they learned the most important secret of
    the war--the time and place of the invasion. They also