Chapter 1BURTON CRANE STOOD AND stamped the early hour’s mist on a gravel road to nowhere. It had stopped raining, but the wetness and the wind persisted. The clearing was in a river valley surrounded by woodland eight miles east of the old Ducal town of Landshut in Lower Bavaria. There were nine of them waiting for police backup to arrive from the Federal Criminal Police in Munich, eight officers of the German Verfassungsschutz and he as a lone liaison officer from NATO intelligence. Strictly speaking, NATO had no intelligence assets but got the professional staff it needed from various countries, in his case the American NSA. Salary-wise, Burton Crane was on loan from SIS, the United Kingdom’s external security agency, more commonly known as MI6. They too were temporary masters as window
