Bitter Seeds

thirteen

11 May 1941

Kensington, London, England

Will decided, while packing up the Kensington flat, that his brother W Aubrey might have been on to something with his ceaseless harping about the necessity of hired help. It rankled, the thought of taking on a valet. Will had always rejected the notion. I can clothe myself, thank you kindly.

But now half-empty boxes sprouted from every corner of the flat like corn poppies blooming on the grave of Will's old life. A knowledgeable hand to help prune the disarray wouldn't have been unwelcome. Perhaps what he truly needed was an undertaker.

He opted to leave the bone china. The notion of packing and shipping it back to Bestwood presented a headache he didn't care to indulge. Instead, he'd leave it for whomever succeeded him. A gesture of goodwill. And who knew? The next residents might be related to one of the many people he'd killed to satisfy the Eidolons' prices.

It occurred to him that his closet contained a ridiculous number of suits. He took a few shirts, some trousers, a pair of ties, and abandoned the rest. He left the paisley carpetbag sitting on the floor of the closet. Let the next residents make what they would of its bloodstained contents. He didn't give a damn.

The bell rang while he was emptying the bookshelves of Rudyard Kipling and Dashiell Hammett. Will peeked through the curtains. Marsh stood outside, his boxer's face hung low.

“One moment,” Will called. He rolled down his sleeves to hide the bruises and puncture wounds on his forearms. He buttoned the shirt and his cuffs, checking himself in the mirror above the umbrella stand. There was no hiding the bags beneath his eyes, but they could be attributed to a sleepless night. Or ten. The hollows beneath his cheekbones and the pale, papery skin were another matter.

He opened the door. “Pip.”

Marsh removed his fedora, ran a hand through his hair. “Hi, Will. Can I come in for a moment?”

Will stepped back, beckoning him into the foyer. Marsh stopped short when he saw the boxes. His nostrils twitched, and his hand started to move toward his face before he caught himself.

“Packing?” he asked, breathing through his mouth.

What—oh. The kitchen. I'd forgotten about that. It hasn't been that long, has it?

“I'm going away for a while,” said Will, leading him toward the den, where he hoped the smell wasn't so offensive. “I've decided it's time for a change.” He tucked the eviction notice under a half-finished Sunday Times crossword puzzle, while Marsh perused the boxes. Then he tucked the crossword between two books, suddenly self-conscious of his shaky handwriting.

“In that case,” said Marsh, “you know why I'm here.”

“I'm to be cut loose, am I?”

“Yes.”

“And then what happens?” Will asked.

“Nothing. You've served the country well. Go back to your life, Will.” Marsh paused. “But please don't tell anyone about Milkweed.”

Will asked, “If I do?” Marsh looked uncomfortable. Will waved his discomfort aside. “No, no. I haven't forgotten poor little Lieutenant Cattermole, you know.”

“I know you won't reveal anything,” said Marsh. “It had to be said. For the record.”

“Of course it did. Even so, don't let Stephenson make you his hatchet man, Pip. It doesn't become you.” Will perched on the edge of a chaise longue upholstered in long satin stripes of royal blue and sunflower yellow. He stretched his legs before him, exhaling heavily as he did so, and waved Marsh toward the matching chair.

Marsh sat. The chair creaked as he shifted back and forth, trying to find a comfortable position. He reached down into the gap between the cushion and the armrest and pulled out a saucer crusted with something black. It clinked against the glasses clustered on the coffee table when he set it there. His gaze drifted from the glasses to the empty decanter on the sideboard.

“I'd offer you something to drink,” said Will, “but I'm fresh out.”

Marsh sighed. “What happened to you, Will?”

“The war happened, Pip. I'm weary of it.”

“So are we all. But I meant ...” Marsh stopped. He sighed again, and encompassed the flat with a sweep of his arm. “Will. This place is squalid. And pardon me for saying it, but you look like three-day-old shit.”

“As would you, had you done the things I have.”

To his credit, Marsh ignored the barb. He changed the subject. Looking around the room, he said, “Where are you headed? A change of scenery would do you good. You've earned a rest.”

“Here and there. Home, eventually. Bestwood.”

“I'd offer you a place here in the city,” said Marsh.

“I wouldn't hear of it, Pip.”

“It's just, right now ... Liv and I. Things are improving.”

Somewhere deep inside Will, a slender asp, green like emeralds, twined through his gut. Even after all this, after all we've done, she still wants you, doesn't she.

He forced a smile. “That's good. I'm glad,” he lied.

Marsh fell quiet, looking at the wine-stained carpet. Finally, he said, “You were right, Will. I should have listened.”

Will rocked back in his seat. “Now this is rather surprising. What's happened to you?”

The other man shook his head. There was an air about Marsh, something new that Will hadn't seen. It wasn't exactly tranquillity, but rather an absence of anger.

No, not an absence. It was there, hidden deep in the caramel-colored eyes, if one knew where to look. But it wasn't bubbling away just a hairsbreadth beneath the surface, as it had for so many months. And in that Will recognized Liv's influence at work.

Aubrey might have thought Will needed a batman. But what man could want for anything with Liv at his side?

“We should have dinner, the three of us,” Marsh said. “Like we used to.”

At this, Will brightened. “I'd like that.” Any chance to pretend the past year hadn't happened... .

“Though I don't know when. I might be away, traveling, for a while.”

“'Traveling,' he says. Would this be related to the old man's grand plan?” Milkweed's bid to end the war.

“Yes.”

“Have you stopped to consider what we'll do if it works? It's trading one basket of concerns for another.”

“I have,” said Marsh, nodding. “And I'd be lying if I said it didn't worry me. But I don't see that we have any choice. We'll deal with it when the time comes.”

“Do you know you can handle it? What if you can't?”

“We'll find a way. We have no choice.”

Will jumped to his feet. “That's exactly the sort of cocksure attitude that got twenty-six men killed.” He paused, alarmed by his own intensity. He'd thought that by now any passions had long since drowned. “Yes, you're very clever, but there are still some problems too great even for you to fix.” He sat again. “Don't think you have it all sussed out, Pip. You don't.”

Marsh's puckered, knobby knuckles turned pale as he squeezed the armrests of his chair. But again, to his credit, the man held his temper. Ah, Liv.

“I've said you were right about the raid,” Marsh said in a quiet monotone. “I'm well aware of the men we lost.”

Equally quiet, Will said, “I notified the next of kin. All of them.” It was a statement of fact, a commiseration more than an accusation.

“You're a better man than I am, Will.” Marsh peered out the window, his gaze momentarily distant. He changed the subject again. “Have you heard anything about some work going on downstairs? At the Admiralty.”

“I'm sure I'd be the last person to know anything.”

“Ah.” Marsh slapped his knees with the palms of his hands, and stood. “Well. Need any help?” he asked, gesturing around the flat.

Will said, “Thank you, but no. I'll send somebody for my things once I've returned to Bestwood.”

He showed Marsh to the door. As his friend descended the stairs to the street, Will called after him.

“Pip? I've—” He paused. I've what? I've consigned a child's soul to the Eidolons? I've lost track of the men I've killed? I've forgotten who I am?

It was all true, but none of it was right. He didn't know what he was looking for, what he was struggling to say.

“What, Will?”

“Never mind,” he faltered. “See you soon, I'm sure.”

Will abandoned the Kensington flat. He called a taxi to Fairclough Street in Whitechapel. He took two suitcases; the one he'd packed, and another, smaller, empty case.

He had learned about Fairclough Street by following one of Stephenson's men. Stephenson couldn't come down here himself, of course, but the man did adore his American tobacco. And the only place to get it was on the black market. Almost anything could be found on the black market, if one had the money: Food. Extra ration books. Petrol. Cigarettes. Clothing. Even medicine.

Will traded almost the entirety of his month's allowance from his brother Aubrey, to fill the smaller case with syrettes of medical morphine. With the leftover cash he purchased a rail ticket to Swansea, and from there hired another taxi. The driver followed Will's directions through the Welsh countryside, and frowned with silent disapproval when they pulled up to a boarding hotel surrounded by landscaped acreage.

The working class took a dim view of funk holes. As well they should have.

Will, being not of the working class, knew of several such places. Places where those with enough money—more money than conscience, certainly—could wait out the war in comfort. The residents typically pooled their rationing books together, enabling the proprietor or proprietress to prepare more suitable meals. And in return for a not-inconsiderable fee, the residents spent their war time years painting, punting, playing bridge, or listening to the wireless with a glass of sherry on hand while complaining about how Mr. Churchill had done everything so very wrong.

The driver sped off—grumbling about the well-to-do, his son in the Royal Navy, and his daughter in the Women's Land Army—as soon as Will had his suitcases out. From Will's vantage point there before the main house, he could see a tennis court, a fishpond, a whitewashed pergola, and a horse stable. A breeze carried the perfume of bluebells and hollyhocks blooming down in the garden.

It was, Will decided, a perfectly fine place to die.

22 May 1941

Bielefeld, Germany

The weather turned on them yet again. But it was different this time: a relentless, eyeball-cracking cold, equal parts ice and malice. And although this seemed impossible, or perhaps too disturbing to contemplate, Klaus felt as if the deepest freeze, the very worst of it, was following them. Dogging them. It seemed drawn to their uniforms, their regalia.

Klaus had never before in his life seen Reinhardt shiver. Now they all did it, constantly.

At night, when the temperature plunged and every snowflake became a crystalline flechette, patterns emerged within the interplay of moonlight and shadow. Wind sculpted the snowdrifts into unknowable shapes. Phantom scents lingered like half-remembered dreams on a wind that murmured in a language too alien to discern.

But most disturbing of all were the rumors. Klaus had heard in each of the last two towns they'd visited that the local children had begun to act strangely. They babbled endlessly, and they babbled in unison, as though chanting to some unseen presence that lived inside the weather.

Klaus had heard reports from Channel weather spotters the previous year, during the run-up to the invasion of Britain. Those men had reported strange shapes, sounds, even scents in the fog. More than a few of those men had gone mad. Gretel had told him so. He believed her; her voice had carried an undertone of wry amusement, as though it were an inside joke to which he wasn't privy.

She'd also told him about the British warlocks, and the beings they commanded. This was their work.

Turnout for the Gotterelektrongruppe's demonstrations had declined steadily as they performed their pointless road show in Heidelberg, in Frankfurt, and in the shadow of Cologne Cathedral. It was too cold for people to venture outside their homes, no matter the promised entertainments.

Their tour was forced to linger in Bielefeld—the birthplace of poor, martyred Horst Wessel—for an extra day when thigh-deep snowdrifts closed the road to Hannover. The mighty Gotterelektrongruppe could have pushed through, had its members been so inclined. But after more than a month on the road, they couldn't stand each other's company long enough to discuss the issue. And besides which, they had only so many batteries.

Klaus took his dinner, alone, at an inn down the road from where he and the others stayed. A late-spring sunset washed incongruously against frost-etched windowpanes, bleaching the room in diffuse white light. The decor was a thoroughly unconvincing re-creation of a beer hall. The stag heads, enameled tankards, and filigreed woodwork around the doorways would have been more natural farther south, in Bavaria. A true hall (Klaus had seen several; populous Munich had yielded many volunteers) required dark walnut paneling, stout ceiling beams, and casks of beer stacked behind the bar for fueling the gemutlichkeit. This place had none of these things.

It was the kind of place that didn't know itself, didn't know what it was meant to be. Klaus liked it. Though it was chilly, he felt more at ease here than anywhere else they'd visited.

The fireplace was empty and dark. Klaus inquired about a fire. He was told the flue had frozen shut soon after being closed to keep out vicious downdrafts.

He ate in a bubble of silence. All the other patrons stepped widely around Klaus's table. The wires unnerved people, but he was too weary of the issue to hide them any longer. People were polite when forced to interact with him, but jittery, too.

His meal was as slapdash as the decor. Gristle marbled the corned beef so thickly that Klaus was hard-put to carve out each mouthful. Brine squeezed out of the too-pink meat each time he sawed his knife through it. The water sloshed over the lip of his plate and made a ring around his glass of lukewarm cider.

But the beets weren't so terrible, and the venison sausage was edible if slightly gamey. Best of all was the black bread, which was warm enough to melt butter. It must have been made in-house; carrying it just across the street would have leeched away the heat, rendering the bread as cold and hard as a hearthstone in an abandoned house.

“Where are your companions?”

Klaus looked up. A short ruddy man stood across the table. He stood with elbows resting on the back of an empty chair, forearms extended over the table and fingers interlaced. He fixed a wide grin on Klaus.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your companions,” said the stranger in a reedy voice. “Especially the thin fellow.” He wiggled his fingers, raising his arms as he did so to mimic a blazing fire. “Whoooosh! I'd be inclined to stick close to him, on a chilly evening like this.”

“You wouldn't, if you knew him.”

The stranger looked surprised. “Oh. That's a shame.” He gestured at the empty chair. “May I?”

Klaus's fork tinked against his dish when he set it on the table. “Do I know you?”

“Nein. But I know you.” The other man untied the oyster blue muffler about his neck, unbuttoned his coat, and hung them on the hooks on the wall behind him. Under the coat he wore work boots, denim coveralls, and a flannel shirt over a thick white turtleneck sweater. “I saw you in Augsburg several weeks ago. And your impressive friends.”

It was possible. That had been over a month ago, when the weather had still carried the potential for spring. They had drawn large crowds, large enough that Klaus wouldn't have remembered individual faces, even if they hadn't been on the road for so damnably long.

The man sat. “Ernst Witt,” he said, hand extended.

Klaus took it. “Klaus.”

“A rare honor, Obersturmfuhrer Klaus.”

Klaus cocked his head in surprise. This man was dressed as a civilian laborer, yet he'd identified the insignia on Klaus's collar. Few civilians knew the Waffen-SS well enough to correctly address an officer by his rank.

“How—?”

“I work for IG Farben. We do a lot of business with the Wehrmacht... . It's my job to know the military.” Witt's lips peeled back to reveal a gap-toothed smile.

That's one explanation, thought Klaus. But there are others.

“So you saw us in Augsburg, and followed us here?”

Witt laughed. “No. Like you, my work sends me on the road. I saw flyers advertising a visit from the elite Gotterelektrongruppe when I arrived yesterday. I hoped I'd get to see you and your companions in action again. Perhaps even meet you. One doesn't often meet such greatness.”

Klaus nodded at the fawning man. “And why are you on the road?”

“What we sell to the Wehrmacht, we also fix for the Wehrmacht. That is to say, I fix. And with weather like this, many things need fixing.”

No, you're following us, Klaus decided. “Is that so.”

“Oh, yes. You'd be surprised how brittle certain alloys can become, under the right conditions.”

“Really.” Are you keeping an eye on us for the Sicherheitshauptamt? If morale and discipline had declined at the Reichsbehorde after Doctor von Westarp's death, the SD Hauptamt, the SS Security Department, would want to know.

“Most people don't realize that a well-cast metal is actually composed of tiny crystals,” said Witt, warming to his subject. He spoke of atoms and dislocations and still other things Klaus neither knew about nor cared for. His eyes never lingered on Klaus's face, flicking instead to Klaus's collar and scalp whenever Klaus turned his head.

Witt trailed off. “I've bored you. I apologize.”

“I lack your passion for science,” said Klaus.

“But German science made you the man you are today,” said Witt.

“I'm a soldier,” said Klaus, because it sounded true and needed no elaboration.

“And quite a soldier at that. You must be, to have been among the first recruits for such an elite project,” said Witt. His inflection might have breathed a subtle implication into the words, or perhaps not.

Klaus chose to let a heavy silence suffocate any implied questions. Witt didn't offer up anything else to fill the growing pause in the conversation.

“Things were different in the early days,” Klaus said, and left it at that.

“Yes, I suppose they were. You'll have raised an entire army soon! An army of men like you.”

“Perhaps.”

“I'm sure you've inspired many eager recruits.” Again, it might have been a question, and it might not.

“It varies from town to town. And with the weather.”

Witt nodded. “I imagine so. You've been traveling for many weeks, it seems. Will you be returning home soon?”

“Soon enough.” Klaus drained the last of his cider, which had gone cold. “And speaking of travel, I may be in for a long day tomorrow.” Witt again looked surprised. “If you'll excuse me, I think I'll turn in early.” Klaus rose, shook Witt's hand again, and donned his wool overcoat.

As he buttoned it, he said, “A question, Herr Witt?”

“Of course, my friend.”

“You said you entered Bielefeld yesterday. Yet the roads have been closed for the past two days.”

“I did? Well, then, I'm sure I meant Monday.”

“That explains it.”

“Yes. With weather like this, who can keep track of the days?”

“Safe travels,” said Klaus.

“Heil Hitler,” said Witt with a wave and another flash of his gap-toothed smile.

The cobbled walkway along the street had been reduced to an iced footpath trampled into thigh-deep snow. Wind sliced through the buttonholes of Klaus's coat and the seams of his shirt. It raked his skin, stippled him with gooseflesh. He hadn't gone twenty meters before his chest muscles ached with the effort it took not to shiver. A gust eddied around the side of the inn. Klaus slipped, landing painfully on the ice.

“To hell with this.” He stood, shook himself off, and embraced his Willenskrafte. The copper taste of the Gotterelektron erased the last remnants of his drink, which was regrettable because he had enjoyed the hints of cinnamon in the cider. Armored in willpower, Klaus became a wraith untouched by the demon wind.

The change in his surroundings, in his personal microclimate, was immediate. The twin bulbs of a glass streetlamp shattered. Window shutters wrenched free of their hinges and exploded into matchsticks on the frozen street. The boles of the gingko trees along the boulevard cracked open.

The weather had been ferociously cold, but now it was nothing short of furious. By expressing his supreme volition, Klaus had enraged the elements.

He stood at the center of a maelstrom that tried in vain to assail him. Nor could the ice underfoot make him slip if such contradicted his Willenskrafte. He ran through snowdrifts and crashing icicles, impervious to one and all.

He ran because his invulnerability would last only so long as he could hold his breath. When he did rematerialize, just long enough to exhale and gulp down air, the arctic fury zeroed in on him. It savaged his throat, reached into his chest and attempted to freeze his lungs. He raced past the trucks parked outside, ghosted through the front windows of his inn, and released the Gotterelektron before an ashen-faced desk clerk.

Klaus ascended the narrow stairs to his room on the second floor. Static and the high-pitched warble of a radio came through the wall; their LSSAH radio operator had the adjacent room. This arrangement suited Klaus. Anything was better than sharing a wall with Reinhardt.

When Klaus turned on the light over the washbasin, he discovered that his mouth and chin were caked with frozen blood. Inhaling the smoke from a British phosphorus grenade back in December had done minor but permanent damage to his sinuses. It left him susceptible to nosebleeds. Drawing a single breath from the blizzard outside had been more than enough to provoke one.

The blood had begun to thaw, but he was too numb to feel it trickling down his neck. The image in the mirror was that of a ravenous beast, an insatiable carnivore. Not a man.

He fell asleep in a chair, still in his uniform, holding a damp towel to his face.

He woke some time later to a commotion outside his window. Familiar voices, shouting, down on the street below. Klaus's hip twinged as he stumbled to the window; sleeping upright in a chair, with his battery harness still attached, had made for hours of awkward posture.

Though the sun rose early this time of year, most of the light on the street came from the few streetlamps that hadn't been destroyed during Klaus's sprint home. The wind had receded for the time being, allowing fresh snow to fall placidly from a charcoal sky.

It might have been a serene picture, if not for the echo of Spalcke's nasal voice as he yelled, “Who are you? Who are you?” The hauptsturmfuhrer stood behind the third truck of their convoy, hand on his sidearm. He was addressing somebody inside the cargo bed.

Klaus suspected he knew who Spalcke had caught rummaging through the truck. He donned his coat in the corridor as he once again passed the hiss and warble of the radio operator's room on his way back outside. Apparently Spalcke's tirade had awakened most of the inn.

Reinhardt had made it down first. When Klaus approached, he did a double take. “What happened to you?”

Klaus checked himself in the driver's side mirror. His skin was red and creased where he'd had the cloth pressed to it. Little black flecks of dried blood peppered his upper lip and part of his chin.

“Forget it,” said Klaus. He jerked his chin at Spalcke. “Let's take care of this so I can sleep.”

By then, Spalcke had sent one of the LSSAH troops into the truck. The soldier emerged a moment later with the barrel of his rifle nudging the ribs of Ernst Witt. Witt climbed out of the truck and stood shivering on the street with his hands resting on his head.

“Please,” he said. “This isn't what you think.”

“Oh? Because I think you're a spy and a saboteur.” Spalcke unbuttoned the flap covering his Walther.

“No, no!” Witt shook his head wildly. “I'm, I'm an admirer. I want to join you!”

Reinhardt said, “By hiding away like a rat in our truck?”

Witt turned. His eyes opened wider when he saw Reinhardt, and his face lost a little more color. But then he saw Klaus, and his features softened. “Klaus! Please, tell them! You know me.”

Spalcke turned. “Is this true?”

“I met him last night. At dinner. I don't think he's a saboteur. He told me he works for IG Farben. I think he's—”

“Hauptsturmfuhrer! Hauptsturmfuhrer!” More shouting cut short Klaus's response. The radio operator, a twenty-year-old boy with jet-black hair and an ugly, crooked nose, came running from the inn.

Witt took advantage of the distraction and tried to run. The soldier who had flushed him from the truck reacted calmly. He leveled his rifle and shot the fleeing man in the back. Witt landed facefirst on the street.

“Are you out of your goddamned mind?” said Klaus. “You've just killed an SD officer.”

The radio operator continued his clamoring. “Hauptsturmfuhrer Spalcke!”

Spalcke turned to him. “Quiet.” Then he turned to Klaus. “What did you say?”

“I tried to warn you. I think he was from the Sicherheitshauptamt. Keeping an eye on us.”

Spalcke turned pale. “Why do you say that?”

“He kept asking about our work, the recruitment. Our training. My feelings about the program.”

“Oh.” Spalcke slumped against the truck. “What do we do?”

“We?” Reinhardt laughed. “This isn't my problem. That poor defenseless man was shot on your orders. You're the one who'll hang.”

Spalcke put his hands to his forehead. “Oh, Gott,” he moaned. “I knew this traveling circus was a bad idea... .”

Klaus watched the steam rising from Witt's blood as it seeped through his coat onto the snow. His muffler was a brilliant blue. Klaus felt a pang of sympathy for the artless, tragically overenthusiastic man.

The radio operator tried again. “Please, Herr Hauptsturmfuhrer, it's urgent.”

“Oh, for Christ's sake,” said Reinhardt. “What?”

“I've been trying to tell you. The Soviets are moving west.”

“What?” Klaus and Spalcke said it simultaneously.

“They have armored columns pushing through Poland. They've already engaged our remaining forces there.”

Remaining? In the confusion of the moment, Klaus forgot about the weather. And then it sank in: Oh.

Reinhardt sneered at Klaus as he stalked over to Witt's body. “He wasn't from the SD, you idiot.” He kicked the dead man in the ribs. “He was Red Orchestra.”

22 May 1941

Berlin, Germany

Marsh was in the air before the advanced forces of the Red Army approached the Oder River, which, according to reports, was capped with four feet of ice. The warlocks moved the inclement weather as the Soviets advanced, opening a corridor straight to Berlin for Stalin's troops. And, Marsh hoped, maintaining a bulwark to keep them the hell away from von Westarp's farm.

His second trip to Germany proceeded via slower and more mundane avenues than the first. Marsh flew from Scotland to Sweden in an RAF Mosquito; rode two hundred bumpy miles in the cargo bed of a fisherman's truck, hidden under tubs of ripe cod; crossed the Baltic Sea to Denmark in a fishing boat cloaked by extremely heavy fog, courtesy of Milkweed; and finally entered Germany at Flensburg in the middle of the night. The Danish Underground had smuggled hundreds of Jews out of the country via much the same route in reverse.

All told, the journey took twenty-one hours. Far too long. The Soviets were moving faster than anybody had thought possible. The supernatural winter had proved more destructive to the embedded German troops than even the warlocks had predicted. But now the plan was in motion, and the time for fine adjustments had passed.

An avalanche goes where it will.

Eidolons are not tactical weapons.

In Flensburg, wearing the captain's uniform of an SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer, Marsh commandeered a car from the sleepy local Wehrmacht garrison. Officially, of course, his uniform didn't give him that authority. But the Wehrmacht lieutenants knew better than to contradict an officer of the Waffen-SS. Particularly one with direct orders from Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler's command staff.

Marsh knew his best bet was to avoid dealing directly with the SS command structure for as long as he could. The experts in MI6 had done their best, but his papers wouldn't fool the most experienced officers. God knew he had a slim chance of fooling Himmler's staff, if anybody bothered to trace Marsh's cover story back up the chain of command.

Which was likely to become a problem. Himmler's interest in von Westarp's work extended from its earliest days, not long after his stint in the Thule Society twenty years ago. And Himmler, seeing the REGP as his own pet project, kept its records close at hand. Meaning the files Marsh sought to destroy were housed at 9 Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse: headquarters of the SS.

Thus, in addition to the counterfeit uniform, Marsh also wore Gretel's battery on his belt. When the time came, he'd attach the wires to the minute pieces of adhesive tape hidden on his scalp. The hopes were twofold: first, that most people in the SS still hadn't met a member of the Gotterelektrongruppe in the flesh; second, that members of the Gotterelektrongruppe received special consideration.

At the Flensburg garrison, he also commandeered an extra coat, hat, and gloves. But the deeper he drove into Germany, the less effective they became. The warlocks had summoned a cold unlike anything Marsh had ever experienced. They had infused this weather with the Eidolons' arcane hatred of man, creating a cunning and malicious entity. It slipped through every seam in his clothing. The rubber door moldings of his Mercedes lost their pliability, leaving gaps around the door through which entered the wind. His breath turned to frost where it touched the cold windshield glass.

Each passing mile found it harder to keep the heavy staff car on the road. His journey might have been altogether impossible had the warlocks not opened a corridor for him as they were also doing for the Red Army. But it also helped that the impending invasion had sent the Reich into chaos and panic. Every available soldier was converging on Berlin to aid in the defense of the capital. Convoys of heavy transports packed down the snow, leaving the roads slick but navigable by the Mercedes. Yet in places the roads were impossible even for the transports; Wehr -macht engineering detachments labored to clear downed trees from the roads with bulldozers and, in some cases, flamethrowers.

He made better time after falling in behind a panzer unit. The tanks' treads crushed the snow flat enough that his Mercedes could clear it.

Sunrise found Marsh entering Hamburg. He arrived not far behind two convoys awkwardly funneling themselves onto the city streets. The troop transports brimmed with soldiers trembling in their heaviest winter gear—those lucky enough to have such gear—as well as blankets and anything else they could find to ward off the chill. The convoys would pick up still more soldiers from the local garrisons before continuing to Berlin.

The high concentrations of military personnel made Marsh nervous. His hands trembled on the steering wheel. Exhaustion, cold, and nerves took their toll on him.

But, after thinking about it, Marsh decided to view the convoys as an opportunity. Protective camouflage. None of these men could peer through the fogged-up windows of his automobile and discern the spy within. No. His best course of action was to attach himself to one of the convoys as brazenly as possible. Which he did, sliding the Mercedes in a safe distance behind the final truck.

It took longer to traverse the city, following the convoy, but it vaulted him above suspicion.

Marsh was feeling a glimmer of optimism—This might work. I could make it to Berlin.— when two uniformed figures on the side of the road flagged him down. One kept to the shoulder, bundled in a heavy coat. The other stepped in front of Marsh's car, waving his arms. He couldn't discern any details of the two men without lowering the window, but he knew immediately from their coats and hats that they were SS.

Shit. Shit, shit, shit.

Stuck inching along behind the convoy, he had no choice but to stop. He pulled the parking brake with one hand as he loosened the holster of his Walther pistol with the other. Sweat trickled beneath his undershirt, defying the chill as it ran under his arms and down his ribs.

Marsh rolled down the window. The man in the road approached the driver-side door and saluted. “Heil Hitler.”

It took a moment for Marsh's brain, running on a cocktail of fear and adrenaline, to process the rank insignia on his coat: SS-Obersturmfuhrer. A lieutenant. Marsh outranked him. He returned the salute, relaxing.

The lieutenant said, “Guten Morgen, Herr Hauptsturmfuhrer.” A cloud of his breath hovered between them in the still air. Black blemishes marred the man's face and nose. Frostbite.

“Be quick. I'm in a hurry,” said Marsh.

“Apologies, sir. But the standartenfuhrer”—the frostbitten lieutenant indicated his companion—”requires your vehicle.”

Standartenfuhrer. Colonel.

Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Marsh fought to keep his voice steady. “I've been ordered to return to Berlin at once.”

“Berlin? Excellent! So has the standartenfuhrer.”

“But—I must—”

The lieutenant called to his senior officer. Their senior officer. “Sir, the hauptsturmfuhrer has been ordered to Berlin as well.” He jogged around to the car's passenger side and opened the rear door.

Marsh was trapped. It was too late to don the wires and attempt to talk his way out of this. There was nothing he could do except wait for the officer to climb inside, and then drive the man to Berlin.

Or, actually, no. He didn't have to drive.

Marsh stepped out of the car and saluted the approaching officer. “Heil Hitler!” He played the moment for everything he was worth. “Guten Morgen, Herr Standartenfuhrer.”

The colonel returned his salute with a halfhearted wave. “Devil take these backstabbing Communists,” he muttered. “Straight to hell. Every one of them.” His breath smelled of a stomach made sour by too much strong coffee and not enough food.

“Trust it to them to find their spine just now,” said Marsh. The col o -nel ignored him.

Marsh turned to the lieutenant once the colonel had settled inside. “Take us to Berlin, Obersturmfuhrer.”

“Jawohl.”

By the time the lieutenant had settled into the driver's seat and Marsh had settled into the front passenger seat, the convoy was on the move again. Loud snoring emanated from the backseat soon after the lieutenant had the car in gear.

They followed the convoy through the outskirts of the city. The streets were clear of all but military traffic and those vehicles, like his own, on Reich business. It was impossible to tell how much of this was by virtue of people opting to stay home, and how much by virtue of the fact that many of the civilians had frozen to death.

The flow of traffic slowed to little better than a brisk walk in several places; burst water mains transformed entire intersections, even major traffic circles, into skating rinks. They passed a house gutted by fire. A fire probably set by the residents themselves in a bid to stay alive. A truck from the local fire brigade blocked part of the road. The hoses had ruptured. The resulting geyser had coated the road and the truck itself in the instants before the water froze. One side of the truck was coated in inches of ice. So were the bodies of the fire brigade men, frozen in midscream.

My God, thought Marsh. What kind of blood prices bought this? What is this costing us back home?

They picked up the Elbe outside Hamburg, and followed the valley southeast toward Berlin. The river had become a glacier. It was frozen solid, from the surface all the way down to the riverbed. And the water had expanded as it froze, rising above its banks and ripping down bridges. The only way to cross the river was on the few temporary bridges the engineering detachments had erected.

Marsh closed his eyes. “Wake me when we enter Berlin,” he told the lieutenant.

Liv's light touch, a fingertip on his lips.

“What?”

Quiet laughter, warmth in the dark. “You were talking in your sleep again, love.”

“I'm sorry, Liv.”

Her breath tickles his earlobe. “Don't be. I've missed it more than you know.” She laces her fingers through his.

“I'm glad I came back. I'm sorry it took so long.”

“So are we.”

Agnes fills the hollow between their bodies, nestled in the blankets. Marsh presses his lips to the fine, thin hair of her scalp.

Her skin is icy cold. She smells like baby and rot.

Marsh jerked awake.

The glare of sunlight on snow stabbed at his eyes; he squeezed them shut and then opened them slowly. They were still moving, though they no longer followed a convoy. They were driving through a large city.

“Hauptsturmfuhrer?” The lieutenant took his eyes off the road for a moment. “We've entered Berlin.”

Marsh's gut impression was of a venerable lady, a grande dame, never beautiful but handsome in a stern way, now ruined by illness and racked with tumors. If a city could contract cancer, this place was terminal. In some places the wounds were relatively small, embodied in the swastikas and Prussian eagles adorning everything. And in other places the Reich's philosophical malignancy had engendered severe art deco monstrosities like the Olympic Stadium. There were reminders of a healthier, more aesthetic time, and hints of old Europe, such as on the Potsdamer Platz, but even that was scarred with ea gles and broken crosses.

The weather had changed while Marsh was napping. The ice caked to the edges of the windshield had begun to melt. And the roads were slushy. Compared with the rest of the countryside Marsh had witnessed, the capital of the Third Reich was balmy. Perhaps as warm as ten degrees Celsius. He could breathe without his nose freezing shut.

It meant the warlocks had completed their corridor to Berlin. Now the question was, where were the Soviets?

The lieutenant woke the napping colonel as they entered the central administrative district of the Reich. They passed the air ministry, which was a hulking square gray building with square black windows. Profoundly utilitarian.

The colonel's errand took him to the Reich Chancellery building, which occupied an entire city block on the Voss Strasse. It connected to the Foreign Office building, which stood around the corner on Kaiser Wilhelm Strasse, across from the Propaganda Ministry. The nerve center of the Third Reich had been shaped from countless tons of granite and yellow marble to create a monster of neoclassical and art deco construction topped with massive bronze eagles and bas-relief scenes of Aryan greatness. It was all designed with an eye toward creating awe-inspiring ruins in some distant century, like those the vaunted Romans had left behind. Albert Speer's theory of ruin value at work.

Marsh began to sweat again. If the colonel gave the order to accompany him inside, his options would be severely limited. But the colonel stepped out of the car as soon as the driver brought it to a stop. He bounded up the stairs between the massive square pillars and disappeared into the Chancellery without another word for Marsh or their driver. He hadn't even closed the door.

Marsh released the breath he'd been holding. He moved to the backseat and told the lieutenant, who had apparently been left in his command, to drive to Schutzstaffel Headquarters. Then he took the opportunity while the driver was distracted to finish his disguise, pulling the wires from his collar and fastening them to the strips of adhesive under his hair.

The drive to the SS Haus was brief. The street directly in front of the headquarters building was clogged with trucks and other vehicles. The lieutenant parked next door, at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8, formerly a school of industrial arts and crafts and now the headquarters of the Gestapo. Marsh imagined he could hear the special prisoners screaming themselves hoarse, confessing to anything and everything, in the basement cells.

Standing there in the nerve center of the police state, surrounded by thousands of the Third Reich's most dedicated servants, Marsh resigned himself to his fate.

I'm so sorry, Liv. I was a bloody fool. I should have gone back to you sooner. Why did I stay apart from you for so long?

What I do now, I do with a light heart, because I know you understand. You understand that I've loved you so fiercely that at times I've been unable to think rationally. You understand that everything I've done has been for you, and Agnes. Marsh touched the breast pocket of his uniform, felt the reassuring bump of the cyanide capsule hidden there. Stephenson will look after you.

In recent years, the trajectory of Marsh's life had orbited scenes of mass panic, of crowds bubbling with that barely contained animal instinct to flee, to lash out, to find cathartic release in the disorder of uninhibited emotion. He'd listened to its murmurings in Spanish, in French, in English. He'd walked amongst it in Spain, at the port of Barcelona; then again in France, where he heard it in the catch of people's voices and watched it in the way they moved too quickly; he'd smelled the sweat and fear again during the Blitz, in the shelters, and had seen the worry lines creasing every face in London. He had immersed himself in the panic, perhaps even indulged in it, at Paddington when he and Liv evacuated Agnes.

Thus, the scene outside Schutzstaffel headquarters held a surreal familiarity. The building itself, formerly the Prince Albert Hotel before Himmler commandeered it, was a four-story edifice that occupied most of the block. Here and there, hints of the building's old life could be seen in the reversed shadow of the old hotel sign on the weather-darkened granite, and in the clock atop the undulating cornices that overlooked the street. Marsh had seen the hotel only in photographs.

But the tension in people's voices as they barked out orders, the herky-jerky motions of their arms and legs as they hurried in and out of the building, the electric tingle of nervous energy: Marsh knew it well. Only the details differed. A constant stream of men flowed between the headquarters building and the line of trucks parked in front. Each man exited the building with an armload or hand truck of boxes, which he relinquished to other men loading the trucks. Everybody moved at a clip just below a dead run, just on the orderly side of chaos.

They're moving the files, Marsh realized. In case the Soviets take the city. Jerry doesn't want his operational records falling to the Communists any more than we do.

He watched the men hurrying into the building and rushing back out again with more crates. It all proceeded under the supervision of two officers who, with their steaming breath, suggested twin dragons looming overhead while medieval villagers scrambled to amass tribute.

Each load of boxes went to a different truck. Some, he imagined, were slated for destruction. But the most valuable information would be saved. Moved to bunkers, perhaps, or shipped out of the city ahead of the Soviets.

Somewhere in that mess resided the files that Marsh had come to destroy. The records of the Reichsbehorde fur die Erweiterung germanischen Potenzials, and the Institut Menschlichen Vorsprung before that, and perhaps even of the orphanage before that. These were some of the Reich's most precious secrets and its vision for the future. They'd be moved to the most secure location possible, preserved until the bitter end, defended against all comers. Especially saboteurs like Marsh.

But the scene gave him an idea.

Strictly speaking, his mission wasn't to destroy the files. His mission was to ensure they didn't fall into Soviet hands. The ideal solution would have been for Milkweed to seize them, but that had never received serious consideration, since Britain lacked an occupying force with which to capture Berlin.

But as he watched the boxes loaded onto the trucks, Marsh realized they didn't need an army to seize the files. All he had to do was determine where the files were going, which truck they occupied, and steal the truck.

He breathed deeply and disregarded the chill as he opened his coat, rolled down the collar, and strode toward the hubbub. He counted over a dozen trucks, their cargo beds in various states of loading. Some were nearly full. He had to move quickly before the records he sought were moved out.

He joined the stream of men entering and leaving the SS Haus, quickening his pace to match the sense of urgency that surrounded him. The subordinate officers occupied with carrying and loading the boxes paid him no heed, except for the handful who noticed his rank and paused for salutes. These he returned with the same desultory air he'd received from the colonel. Stay focused on your task, his body language said.

They didn't question him; this was the last place anybody would expect to find a British spy.

Marsh made it as far as the entrance when one of the supervising captains lifted an arm to block his passage. Marsh stopped short, nearly bumping the clipboard in the other man's outstretched hand.

“You're late,” he said. Condensation from his breath glistened in his eyebrows and eyelashes. He held the clipboard out to Marsh again. Marsh took the board and flipped through the pages.

It contained a nine-page list, each page filled with pairs of columns of numbers. One column referred to the crates, while the other referred to the trucks. It was the list that determined which boxes went into which trucks. But it didn't specify the contents of the crates.

“You were supposed to be here half an hour ago,” said the second officer. Whiteness caked one corner of his mouth, and his runny nose had coated his upper lip.

Marsh ignored them. He also shifted his stance slightly, turning his head and neck toward the men without taking his eyes off the list. He made a show of inspecting the loading manifest, slowly perusing the pages while he waited for the men to notices his wires.

His accusers fell quiet; Marsh let the silence stretch into awkwardness. The buzz of activity swirled around them.

When he finally looked up, Marsh saw the supervisors looking at his battery harness, and then at each other. As he'd hoped, the battery spoke for him. The wire snaking up his collar and into his hair made his point more effectively than any words could have. These men knew the significance of the battery, knew that it commanded respect. Marsh hoped they didn't look so closely as to notice the sweat trickling down his forehead, along his scalp, and down his collar.

Marsh cleared his throat. “I'm not here to relieve you,” he said, emphasizing relieve. True, as far as it goes, he thought. Now for the lie, and the gamble. He made an educated guess: “I'm here to escort all Reichsbehorde records to the Fuhrer's bunker.” He held up the clipboard, pointing at it. “Where are they?”

It worked.

The men looked at each other. “We only have what you see there, the crate numbers,” said one man. He nodded his head toward the former hotel building. “We don't load the crates. You'll have to ask inside.” He paused before he added, tentatively and uncertainly, “Sir.”

Marsh shoved the clipboard back at the first man, nudging him in the chest. “Carry on,” he said. He turned his back on them and went inside.

The Prince Albert Hotel had been built long before the Nazis' rise to power. The original design of the lobby reflected that different time, but it had been subverted into the architectural bastard child of Albert Speer and Heinrich Himmler. Marsh imagined thick rugs covering the marble and parquet floor in the wings of the lobby, oak and leather furniture arranged cozily around low tables and the large hearth opposite what must have been the concierge desk at one time. A nicer space than the Hotel Alexandria in Tarragona. But now it was all gone, stripped down to bare marble polished to shining beneath the vaulted ceiling and the unblinking stares of bas-relief plaster ea gles. There was no furniture, nothing to suggest comfort or welcoming, and certainly nothing to encourage loitering. The concierge station had been ripped out and replaced with a utilitarian desk, behind which sat an SS-Unterschar -fuhrer, a sergeant. Men streamed around him as they passed through the lobby, the rubber tires of their hand trucks squeaking on the marble.

Marsh stood inside Schutzstaffel headquarters feeling like Daniel in the lions' den. Yet nobody stopped him; nobody paid him any attention at all. It was as though the battery harness had rendered him invisible, like the blond woman in the Tarragona filmstrip. He wondered, fleetingly, where she was, and if she had participated in the decimation of Milkweed's strike teams back in December.

Wherever she was, the Reich had a fearsome assassin at its call. Perhaps, if his ploy worked and he obtained the Reichsbehorde's operational records, he could learn more about her. Although she wasn't his main interest.

Marsh followed a line of men returning from the trucks outside to a bank of elevators at the edge of the lobby. He and nine others stuffed themselves into an elevator. It was paneled with rosewood and lined with a brass rail at waist height, little remainders of the building's previous life. The men spoke little as it descended to the basement, instead taking the opportunity to catch their breaths where the air wasn't so cold. Some of the men had an unpleasant rasp in their chests, probably from working in chilly weather that had lifted only within the past day. They saluted Marsh as appropriate, and more than a few eyes widened in alarm when they glimpsed his wires.

The elevator dinged, the doors opened, and they poured into the basement. In times past, it had housed the laundry and other services. Now it served as an archive for SS records, a clearing house for all information Reichsfuhrer Himmler wanted to keep at hand.

That the operational records of the Reichsbehorde qualified as such was beyond question. The only issue was whether they had already been moved to a safe location, and whether Marsh would find them before his ruse fell apart.

Shelves had been installed in the former laundry, and the corridors were dense with filing cabinets nearly identical to those back at Milkweed Headquarters. Stacks of crates, empty but otherwise like the ones Marsh had seen loaded on the trucks outside, occupied every spare inch of floor space. The shelves held boxes of files, which the men systematically loaded into the numbered crates for loading onto hand trucks.

The total amount of paperwork stored in the bowels of the former hotel was staggering. It seemed Jerry couldn't do anything without first completing a form in triplicate. And then again when the task was finished.

Marsh examined a random shelf. Some boxes were indexed with keywords and numbers, while others had dates printed neatly on their spines. But there was nothing to explain their contents.

He found the officer overseeing the packing procedure in a cavernous room carved directly from the bedrock beneath the building. Lightbulbs hung from cables affixed to the ceiling overhead, tossing harsh shadows between the vaulted brick archways and casting the deepest niches into shadow. The hotel had once boasted an extensive wine cellar, but the casks and wine bottles had been replaced with row upon row of filing cabinets and metal shelving. Approximately two-thirds of the shelves were bare; many of the cabinets stood with their drawers open and empty. Doubtless the wine had long ago disappeared into the personal collections of high-ranking SS officers.

The officer was tall, much taller than Marsh, perhaps even taller than Will. His long, thin face and large round eyeglasses made him look more like a librarian than like a soldier. Which might not have been far from the truth, Marsh realized.

He carried a clipboard upon which two high metal loops impaled a sheaf of papers. He walked among the empty crates, inspecting the shelves and cabinets that hadn't been packed yet, pausing to compare each label with something in his papers. He'd nod, make a note on his clipboard, and jot a six-digit number on the box or cabinet drawer with a grease pencil. The numbers corresponded to crates, showing the packing men which files went in which containers.

The archivist saw Marsh. He scowled. “Don't stand there,” he said. “Grab a crate”—he pointed to a stack in one of the shadowy niches—”and get to work. But be certain to label your crate with the proper catalog numbers,” he added, pointing to the numbers on the file boxes. His attention turned back to his work.

Marsh cleared his throat. He stepped closer to the other man. He tried to keep his fake battery harness in plain view, but the shelves, low ceilings, and archways cast irregular shadows in all directions. “I'm here for the Reichsbehorde files. Have they been moved yet?”

The other man shrugged, still studying his clipboard. “Everything's getting moved today.”

“I don't care about everything else,” said Marsh. He stepped closer still. “My orders are to escort the Reichsbehorde records. Where are they?”

The other man looked up, frowning. His eyebrows pulled together in puzzlement. “I wasn't informed about this.”

“Of course not.” Marsh rested his hand on the battery at his waist, silently praying it would again make his point for him. “The Reichsfuhrer and the Fuhrer themselves have a deep personal interest in our work. I'm here to escort the records. It's a special task, not something entrusted to merely anybody.”

“Still—” The archivist paused when he saw Marsh's battery. “Oh, I see.” His gaze darted from the battery to the wires snaking up Marsh's neck. When it reached the collar of Marsh's uniform, his brows came together, and his mouth formed another frown. The sweat dampening Marsh's shirt felt clammy.

He studied Marsh's face. “You're from the Gotterelektrongruppe, then?”

“Yes, and I've told you why I'm here. Now, have the records been moved or not?”

“Let me check.” The archivist flipped through several pages on his clipboard until he found the one he sought. He tapped the page with one slender finger and looked up again. He took another look at Marsh's battery, then another at the polished siegrunen on his collar. Again, the furrowed brow.

Marsh didn't like the way this fellow was studying his uniform. He appeared to be looking for something, a patch or insigne that wasn't present. “Is there a problem?”

“No,” said the archivist distantly. But then his demeanor brightened, and he tapped the clipboard again. He said, “You're in luck. They're still here.” He ushered Marsh deeper into the cellar, toward shelves that hadn't yet been packed. “That way.”

Marsh motioned the other man ahead of him. “Show me.”

The archivist hesitated for the briefest moment, then cocked his head in a halfhearted nod. Marsh reached into his pocket as soon as his guide turned his back. He pulled out the garrote a second before the man reached for his pistol. With wrists crossed and arms outstretched, Marsh leapt forward to get the wire over the taller man's head. It caught briefly on the tip of the archivist's nose as he pitched forward, giving him time to drop the clipboard and get one hand up to protect his throat as Marsh frantically flipped the wire loop under his jaw and around his neck.

Marsh yanked backwards as hard as he could, straining until his shoulders groaned. His opponent made a wheezing, gurgling sound as his head was pulled back. But air still trickled into his throat because he'd gotten a few fingers under the garrote. And shorter Marsh couldn't get the leverage he needed to close off the man's trachea.

He backed into Marsh, using his greater weight to shove him bodily against a brick archway. The wire bundle taped to Marsh's scalp came loose. Pain ripped up his side. His ribs ached, but he kept pulling until it felt he'd sever the man's fingers.

Blood trickled from the wire-thin cut on the man's neck, making the garrote slippery. The wire and the blood together mingled into a hot, metallic, salty smell.

The man pitched forward again, lifting Marsh off the ground. They brushed a lightbulb. It swung wildly, casting kaleidoscopic shadows that danced around them. The archivist launched himself backwards, landing heavily atop Marsh. Air whooshed out of Marsh's lungs, leaving his chest painfully hollow. His ribs creaked almost to the point of snapping. A dark tunnel consumed his field of vision; he struggled to force air back into his lungs, but the weight of the larger man atop him made it difficult. The tension in the garrote loosened.

The man's gurgling, Marsh's gasping, and the hammering of Marsh's heartbeat together sounded loud enough to alert the entire building. He could hear the scuffing of boots, the rattle of hand trucks, and men talking in another part of the cellar not far away.

As the man atop him thrashed, Marsh worked one knee up against the base of the taller man's leg and dug his opposite elbow into the man's lower back, near the kidney. Then he flexed his body, using those two contact points like fulcra. His opponent arched his back, scrabbling at his throat with his free hand. The gurgling trailed off. Marsh, quivering with too much adrenaline to loosen his grip on the wooden handles of the garrote, struggled to roll the archivist off him.

He kneeled over the man he'd just killed, panting as though he'd run a steeplechase. It couldn't have lasted beyond a minute, but the fight felt as though it had gone for hours. Marsh's ribs ached, and his hands shook violently. He wrinkled his nose at the melange of sweat, blood, and panic.

Different parts of his mind followed disparate threads of thought as he struggled to get his body under control. Hide the body. Watch out for blood. Something's wrong with my disguise. Find the clipboard.

First things first. Marsh reaffixed the loose wires to the tape under his hair. It took two tries because his hands trembled so badly and his scalp was damp with sweat from his exertion. But he managed to repair the gravest damage to his imperfect disguise.

Marsh heaved the dead man over his shoulder, careful not to smear blood on his uniform. The man was thin but tall, and a damn sight heavier than he looked. Marsh staggered into an abandoned wing of the cellar, where the shelves stood empty and where, he hoped, nobody would have reason to venture. He propped the body in a niche behind one of the brickwork arches, where the light didn't reach. He retrieved the garrote in case he needed it again. The wire made a wet slicing sound as Marsh pulled it out of the thin gash in the dead man's throat. After coiling the wire and putting it back in his pocket, he wiped his hands clean on the archivist's uniform. He listened for several long moments, to see if anybody in the cellar had heard the struggle. No shouts; no alarms.

The archivist had dropped the clipboard where Marsh jumped him. Marsh retrieved it. He scanned through half the pages before he found a sequence of entries marked “REGP.” The Reichsbehorde records comprised a sequence of thirteen consecutive catalog numbers. He tore the sheet from the clipboard and folded the catalog page in his pocket. It took another fifteen minutes of searching the cellar before he found the cabinets marked with the same catalog numbers. They were empty, meaning the records in question had already been loaded on one of the trucks.

He rushed back outside, but was relieved to find the trucks still queued up. Marsh again scanned the supervising officers' cargo manifest—their replacements had arrived, while Marsh was inside—and traced his quarry to the fourth truck from the end of the queue. The lieutenant behind the wheel saluted when Marsh climbed in.

Marsh said, “I'll be escorting our cargo to its new destination.”

The driver acknowledged this but otherwise said nothing. They passed the next half hour in silence broken only by shouts of the men loading the trucks. It took an effort of will not to fidget, not to inspect himself in the mirrors. The truck occasionally bobbed up and down on its suspension as more crates were loaded on the cargo bed. It rocked Marsh into half sleep; the adrenaline rush evaporated, leaving him wearier than before. But fear that the dead archivist would be discovered too soon kept him jolting back to wakefulness.

Eventually, the stream of men filing in and out of the SS Haus slowed to a trickle. One of the supervisors walked down the line of trucks, loudly pounding his fist on each. One by one the trucks belched exhaust. Marsh's driver turned the ignition, and their own truck grumbled to life.

When the driver reached for the gearshift, Marsh said, “Wait.” Marsh watched the trucks in front pull away, and checked the side mirror until the trucks in the rear had pulled around them. When they had fallen to the end of the line, he said, “Now. Proceed, slowly.”

The lieutenant obeyed him without question. He didn't object when Marsh directed him to take turns that separated them from the rest of the convoy. They wove through Berlin, heading roughly west.

Marsh waited until they were well outside the city before ordering his driver to pull to the side of the road.

“Roll down your window, Obersturmfuhrer.”

The driver hesitated. “Sir?”

“Lower your window,” said Marsh. “That's an order.”

Cold weather had left the window crank stiff and unresponsive. The driver struggled with it, but managed to lower the window glass.

Marsh pulled out his sidearm, pressed the barrel to the driver's temple, and pulled the trigger. Blood, bone, and brain matter exploded through the open window.

He dumped the driver's body under an ash tree, in a shallow grave of snow.

He parked the truck on a disused back road kilometers from the nearest town. The lingering glow of a late springtime sunset paled the sky while Marsh, working by the light of an electric torch, rearranged the cargo bed to free up the crates he sought.

His ploy had worked. Marsh had stolen the operational records of the REGP stretching back at least to the early 1930s. As he'd suspected, the project had used the Spanish Civil War as a playground for field-testing and training Doctor von Westarp's subjects.

Marsh skimmed through the files in roughly chronological order. He learned of a pair of psychic twins, rendered mute by the process that had forged them into bonded empaths, each seeing and feeling everything the other did. He learned that the ghostly man who walked through walls was named Klaus, and that Gretel was his sister. (Interesting: Klaus wasn't the first person to manifest the ability, but he was the only one to survive it longer than a few days.) Marsh also learned of a flying man named Rudolf, who had been killed in an accident weeks before the conclusion of the Spanish war. That fact was annotated with a footnote that led Marsh, after more searching, to a very thick folder: Gretel's file.

This last thing he read until the batteries in his torch died. Which was how he learned that Gretel had been roughly five years old when von Westarp had acquired her and her brother for his “orphanage.” And how Marsh learned that through years of random experimentation, the mad doctor had created a mad seer, imbuing her with a godlike prescience.

Marsh sat up. “Bugger me.”

He set the file down, absently, on the crate where he'd made his perch. He cracked his knuckles, staring into the distance while the cogs of his mind turned.

That single piece of information—the girl's a bloody oracle—was like a fingertip nudging the first in a long chain of dominoes. So many things fell into place.

That's how she knew me in Spain, though we'd never met. That's how she knew when Agnes was born. That's how she escaped so easily; they probably had the entire operation planned before I captured her. That's why they were ready for us, why our December raid never achieved the element of surprise. We never had a chance.

Click, click, click, fell the dominoes.

He remembered little things. Her tone of voice:

Try anything, anything at all, and I'll put a bullet in your gut.

No, you won't.

And the daisy: For later.

He took up the file again. As the years dragged on, the men who ran the IMV, and later the Reichsbehorde, had come to realize they could not control her. She was immune to their coercive tactics. Yet they tolerated her because her advice, when she deigned to give it, was invaluable. Marsh let out a long, slow whistle: Gretel had guided the Luftwaffe through the systematic destruction of Britain's air defenses.

But slowly, her handlers began to speculate that highly intelligent Gretel had her own agenda. Their speculations reached a crisis point after the destruction of the invasion fleet bound for Britain. Gretel's very existence should have rendered such a loss impossible.

Why would she let that happen? Marsh wondered.

And eventually they realized, however reluctantly and with no small amount of trepidation, that von Westarp had created a precognitive sociopath. The Reich's greatest weapon was a monster feared even by the Schutzstaffel.

“Jesus bloody Christ.”

But there was more. Marsh read further.

He discovered that the woman who had winked at him in Spain, who had become his willing prisoner in France, and who had first congratulated him on Agnes's birth, had also convinced the German High Command to obliterate Williton.

Gretel had looked through time and, for reasons known only to her, had orchestrated the death of his daughter.

The files offered no explanation as to why. In justifying the bombing raid, the OKW said only that their source—Gretel—had deemed the matter urgent and vital. They didn't know why she wanted Williton destroyed; the file made no mention of Marsh or Liv or Agnes.

She said we'd meet again, he remembered. At the time, during her escape from the Admiralty building, Marsh had assumed she was taunting him. But now he knew that wasn't it at all. She'd meant it as a statement of fact.

They'd meet again. He'd find her, and she'd explain herself. She'd explain herself, and then he'd kill her.

If the woman truly was what the records claimed, she already knew Marsh's intent. But he imagined a bullet would kill her dead just the same.