THE GENERAL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH. December 9, 1945. Three weeks before going home, General George S. Patton is paralyzed in a low-speed car accident on a rural German road. His passenger walks away uninjured. Patton cannot move. He had a leather ledger pressed against his chest. He had documented where the gold went.

He had four allegations and a congressional hearing date. He never made it to Washington. What he knew-about the twelve tons of gold that vanished from Merkers Mine, about the fuel that was diverted when his tanks could have taken Berlin, about the apparatus being built in the shadows of the victory-died with him in a hospital bed in Heidelberg, twelve days later, of a pulmonary embolism that no one investigated. In 1979, a former OSS operative named Douglas Bazata came forward. He named a figure. He named a method. He named a target. The records are still sealed.