LITMIR.BIZ

       Prologue

       DECEMBER 10, 1948

       Ann Arbor, Michigan

      In the shadows of a small white building near the center of the University of Michigan campus, a young man stood motionless as he watched and waited. He was tall and wiry with harshly chiseled features, as if he’d been carved rather than born.

      From his concealed vantage point near the eastern end of the L-shaped Economics Building, the man-made canyon formed by the four-story masonry bulk of the Randall Physics Laboratory and the equally massive West Engineering building lay open before him. The two buildings defined one corner of a large campus quadrangle. A pair of diagonal walkways crisscrossed the formal lawn from opposite corners of the square, intersecting at a large concrete plaza in front of the Graduate Library. The plaza and campus green surrounding it were known as the Diag.

      A wide flat hole surrounded by mounds of earth and debris lay to his right, just beyond the concrete walkway that extended out from an alley toward the center of the campus. A few days earlier a demolition crew had brought the aging boiler house and its attendant smokestack to the ground. The scene around him vaguely resembled many towns and villages of Europe he’d prowled as the Allied forces fought their way into Germany.

      He put aside those thoughts and, instead, focused on the two men who stood in the illumination of a street-lamp not one hundred feet away. From this distance, he struggled to hear the men speak as a steady wind out of the north swallowed the sound of their conversation. Snow swirled into vortices around them as they shuffled and stamped their feet, trying to stay warm.

      A few minutes later the older of the pair, a woodworker who built large model ships in a shop in West Engineering, shook his friend’s hand and walked off at a brisk pace. The snow barked under his boots, echoing off the surrounding buildings. The woodworker quickly rounded the far side of the Economics Building and disappeared from view as the other man then climbed up the stone steps that led to the rear entrance of the Physics Lab.

      A light flickered and then illuminated a small third-floor office, and from the shadows the hunter watched as Johann Wolff hung up his hat and coat and sat down at his desk.

      Might as well settle in, the hunter thought as he crouched down atop his duffel, behind the thick evergreen shrub.

      He shrugged off the cold and discomfort – conditions he’d been hardened against long ago – and instead focused on his mission. If Wolff followed his usual routine, like a typical German, then he could expect the young physicist to work late into the night before returning to his rented room a few blocks away.

      Johann Wolff pulled six notebooks out of his battered

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