Stephen Edmond was at Dulles to receive his own executive jet when it touched down on the evening of the 16th after a refuelling stop at Shannon. An ornate hearse took the casket to a funeral parlour for two days while final arrangements for interment were completed.

On the 18th, the ceremony took place at the very exclusive Oak Hill Cemetery on R Street in Georgetown. It was small and private, in the Roman Catholic rite. The boy's mother, Mrs. Annie Colenso, nŽe, Edmond, stood with her husband's arm around her, weeping quietly. Professor Colenso dabbed at his eyes and occasionally glanced over at his father-in-law as if he did not know what to do and sought some guidance.

Across the grave the eighty-one-year-old Canadian stood in his dark suit like a pillar of his own pentlandite ore and looked unblinkingly down at the coffin of his grandson. He had not shown the report from the Tracker to his daughter or son-in-law and certainly not the testimony of Milan Rajak.

They knew only that a belated eyewitness had come forward who recalled seeing the black Landcruiser in a valley, and as a result, the two bodies had been found. But he had to concede that they had been murdered and buried. There was no other way of explaining the sixyear gap.

The service ended, the mourners moved away to let the sextons work. Mrs. Colenso ran to her father and hugged him, pressing her face against the fabric of his shirt. He looked down and gently stroked the top of her head, as he had when she was a small girl and something frightened her.

"Daddy, whoever did this to my baby, I want him caught. Not killed quickly and cleanly. I want him to wake up in jail every morning for the rest of his life and know that he is there and will never come out again, and I want him to think back and know that it is all because he cold-bloodedly murdered my child."

The old man had already made up his mind. "I may have to move heaven," he rumbled, "and I may have to move hell. And if I must, I will."

He let her go, nodded to the professor, and strode away to his limousine. As the driver eased up the slope to the R Street gateway, Stephen Edmond took his phone from the console and dialled a number. Somewhere on Capitol Hill a secretary answered.

"Put me through to Sen. Peter Lucas," he said.

The face of the senior senator for New Hampshire lit up when he got the message. Friendships born in the heat of war may last an hour or a lifetime. With Stephen Edmond and Peter Lucas, it had been fifty-five years since they had sat on an English lawn on a spring morning and wept for the young men of both their countries who would never come home. But the friendship had endured, as though they were brothers. Each knew that, if asked, he would go to the wire for his friend. The Canadian was about to ask.

One of the aspects of the genius of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was that although a convinced Democrat he was quite prepared to use talent wherever he found it. It was just after Pearl Harbour that he summoned a conservative Republican, who happened to be at a football game, and asked him to form the Office of Strategic Services.

The man he summoned was Gen. William "Wild Bill" Donovan, the son of Irish immigrants, who had commanded the Fighting Sixty-ninth Regiment on the western front in World War I. After that, as a trained lawyer, he had become deputy attorney general under Herbert Hoover, then spent years as a Wall Street legal eagle. It was not his law skills that Roosevelt wanted; it was his sheer combativeness, the quality he needed to create the United States ' first foreign intelligence and special forces unit.

Without much hesitation, the old warrior gathered around himself a corps of brilliant and well-connected young men as his gofers They included Arthur Schlesinger, David Bruce, and Henry Hyde, who would all go on to high office.

At that time Peter Lucas, raised to New England wealth and privilege, was a sophomore at Princeton, and he decided on the day of Pearl Harbour that he, too, wanted to go to war. His father forbade any such thing.

In February 1942, the young man disobeyed and dropped out of college, all taste for study gone. He raced around trying to find something he really wanted to do; toyed with the idea of fighter pilot and took private flying lessons until he learned that he was constantly airsick.

In June 1942, the OSS was established. Peter Lucas offered himself at once and was accepted. He saw himself with blackened face, dropping by night far behind German lines. He attended a lot of cocktail parties instead. General Donovan wanted a first-class aide-de-camp, efficient and polished.

He saw at short range the preparations for the landings in Sicily and Salerno in which OSS agents were wholly involved and begged for action. Be patient, he was told. It was like taking a boy to a sweet shop but leaving him inside a glass box. He could see, but he couldn't touch.

Finally he went to the general with a flat ultimatum. "Either I fight under you, or I quit and join the Airborne."

No one gave "Wild Bill" Donovan ultimatums, but he stared at the young man and maybe saw something of himself a quarter of a century earlier. "Do both," he said, "in reverse order."

With Donovan's backing, all doors opened. Peter Lucas shrugged off the hated civilian suit and went to Fort Benning to become a "ninety-day wonder," a fast-track commission to emerge as a second lieutenant in the Airborne.

He missed the D day Normandy landings, being still in parachute school. When he graduated, he returned to General Donovan. "You promised," he said.

Peter Lucas got his black-faced parachute drop one cold autumn night into the mountains behind the German lines in northern Italy. There he came across the Italian partisans who were dedicated Communists, and the British special forces who seemed too laid back to be dedicated to anything.

Within a couple of weeks he learned the "laid back" bit was an act. The Jedburgh group he had joined contained some of the war's most skilled and vicious killers.

He survived the bitter winter of 1944 in the mountains and almost made it to the end of the war intact. It was March 1945 when he and five others ran into a staybehind squad of no-surrender SS men they did not know were still in the region. There was a firefight, and Lucas took two slugs from a Schmeisser submachine gun in the left arm and shoulder.

They were miles from anywhere, out of morphine, and it took a week of marching in agony to find a British forward unit. There was a patchup operation on the spot, a morphine-dazed flight in a Liberator, and a much better reconstruction in a London hospital.

When he was fit enough to leave, he was sent to a convalescent home on the coast of Sussex. He shared a room with a Canadian fighter pilot nursing two broken legs. They played chess to while away the days.

Returning home, the world was his oyster. He joined his father's firm on Wall Street, took it over eventually, became a giant in the financial community, and ran for public office. In April 2001, he was in his fourth and last term as a Republican senator for New Hampshire, and he had just seen a Republican president elected.

When he heard who was on the line, he told his secretary to hold all calls.

"Steve. Good to hear you again. Where are you?"

"Right here in Washington. Peter, I need to see you. It's serious."

Catching his mood, the senator dropped the bonhomie. "Sure, pal. Wanna tell me?"

"Over lunch. Can you make it?"

"I'll clear the calendar. The Hay-Adams. Ask for my usual corner table. It's quiet. One o'clock."

They met when the senator strode into the lobby. The Canadian was waiting there.

"I just came from an interment up in Georgetown. I just buried my only grandson."

The senator stared and his face creased with shared pain. "Jesus, old friend, I am so sorry."