To an educated man of humanist sympathies, Berlin was a perverse caricature of the city Muller knew. A fright mask drawn over a familiar face.
Nazi Germany was every bit as bad as the history teachers had said. A wasting of the soul had taken place here, and darkness had rushed in to fill the void. The fear was tactile and oppressive. It sat on everyone's shoulders like a giant crow, ready to pluck out their eyes if they should look the wrong way.
The SS was everywhere, too. As were the Gestapo. They made no attempt to disguise themselves, and terror surrounded them wherever they went.
Muller had developed painful stomach cramps and a permanent headache within two days of arriving. He was sure the entire nation, possibly all of Europe, felt the same way. He'd used his spinal inserts to dial back the pain, so distracting had it been.
The implants dispensed stimulants, painkillers, and a cocktail of pharmaceuticals to aid concentration, to sharpen the senses, and to control the physical manifestations of fear. He was familiar with the effects and the side effects. He had never known there was a spiritual dimension to fear, however. And there was no drug capable of counteracting its corrosive effect. The hammering pulse, the sweaty palms, and shaking limbs that might give him away in a random street encounter with the Gestapo-these could all be controlled by the pharmacological wonders of implant technology.
But it was beyond the ability of science to ameliorate the psychic pain of having to confront evil cast in his own image. The Germany through which he moved was both familiar and utterly alien. Its people were Nazis, and they loved Adolf Hitler as much as they feared his agents. He had seen the same thing in the next century in what had been North Korea, a sort of national Stockholm syndrome, where the hostage nation had come to love its captor.
His equipment was buried beneath his skin, some of it standard issue from the Deutsche Marine, some of it implanted when he began his two-year secondment to the U.S. Navy, and some of it new, fitted in Scotland at Kinlochmoidart. As he sat, drinking a foul-tasting ersatz kaffee across the square from his target, a biolocater and feedback chip in his neck maintained a constant link with one of the Trident's high-orbit geostationary drones.
Muller observed the cafe without watching. He listened to the conversations without hearing. He had learned to filter out the useless residue of everyday life. He was a scanner, sweeping his immediate surrounds for mission-critical data, and not much else.
He lit another cigarette with his free hand. The other was encased in a fake plaster mold, suspended in a sling around his neck. It was part of his cover story; he was a fighter pilot, injured over England, his wrist shattered by a bullet chip, recuperating before shifting to a desk job. It induced a lot of sympathy.
Yes, he had agreed a hundred times, it was a great pity he would never get to fly the new planes they were building. Herr Gobbels says they will sweep the old tin cans of the British out of the skies.
Muller doubted that. The problems with the early German jet program were systemic and resource based. They couldn't be wished away just because you suddenly learned how to build a better ME 262.
The bell attached to the shop door jingled as a rotund man in a uniform entered, trailed by his fat son and equally stout wife. Party members. The husband had to be some minor functionary, although Muller had no idea of what ilk. The Nazis were crazy for uniforms. He'd seen dozens of different types since he'd infiltrated the city, most of them unidentifiable. This guy might have been the deputy leader of an Ortsgruppe, a small local party unit, or he might have been a Nazi strudel chef.
Possibly the latter, given his imposing frame.
The great oaf was barking like a seal about how much better this cafe was since it had been taken away from Zelig the Jew, and come to be run by Holz, the Bavarian. "It always smelled like the cream had gone off when Zelig was here."
Muller instantly killed the expression of distaste that wanted to crawl over his face. Two SD goons were sitting at the corner on the far side of the cafe, smoking cigarettes and spooning lumps of sugar into their cups. The sugar bowl on their table was full, the only one like it in the whole place.
The fat man's voluble beastliness grew louder and even more offensive as he spotted the security men. His dumpy Frau smiled at them, but her eyes were fixed and glassy, and she bustled their child away to a dark corner. Muller didn't blame her. After the Jews and the gypsies and the cripples, it would only be so long before the fat kids went into the ovens.
He folded his copy of the Volkischer Beobachter with the banner where the Nazis could see it, pushed his chair back, and left, nodding briefly to one of the SD agents who caught his eye. One Aryan patriot to another. He looked like a man at ease with the world, a warrior at rest, and they ignored him.
Then Muller put them out of his mind. He had spotted his quarry leaving the apartment across the square. His hand wanted to caress the small pistol concealed under his jacket, but he gave no sign of it as he exited the shop. He fixed his eyes on the target.
Colonel Paul Brasch.
Brasch could hardly breathe by the time he reached his office in the Armaments Ministry. He couldn't swallow, and his heart threatened to burst out of his chest.
Today was the day. The orders for Sea Dragon had arrived by safe-hand courier-as almost all high-security communications did now, with at least two of the Trident's Big Eye drones in stationary position above Europe at any given moment.
Now he had to make his choice. He told his secretary to hold his calls and shut the door behind him. There was nothing unusual about that. All over the Reich, functionaries like him were attending to their duties with increased determination. The next few days would decide the fate of Germany.
He'd noticed the diffuse energy on the streets as he walked to work. Nobody gossiped, not with the Gestapo and the SD everywhere. But he could tell that even in Berlin, hundreds of kilometers from the action, tens of thousands of men and women were to be involved in the attack on Britain. They walked a bit more briskly, kept their backs a little bit straighter, and that fanatic glint of the eye was just a touch madder.
Brasch looked just like them, but for a different reason.
He had been planning and preparing for this specific action for weeks, but in fact, the seeds of betrayal had been planted back in June, in his cramped, steamy cabin on the Sutanto, when he'd first read about the Holocaust. His fingers had felt cold and numb as he held the flexipad then, and a similar deadness affected them now. Indeed, whole patches of his body felt that way, as though he was already lingering in a Gestapo cell somewhere.
He hadn't felt so alive since the Eastern Front.
Outside of the marbled glass door that led to his office, he could hear phones ringing and messengers scuffing up and down the corridor. The building, always a hive of industry, was electric with excitement this morning. He had a dozen separate tasks to attend to, but most of them he'd done at home on his flexipad the previous evening. His eyes were hollow with sleeplessness and, he had to admit, with anxiety. Not so much for himself but for his family. Himmler had plowed unknowable numbers of new victims into the earth since the Emergence. A distant relationship with anyone who might be implicated in future acts of betrayal was enough to condemn whole branches of some families to the extermination camps.
Brasch let go a shuddering breath at the insanity.
He powered up the flexipad and brought an encrypted compressed file to the front of the little desktop screen. It had taken him a long time to work out how to do this, and even longer to work up the courage to go through with it.
He opened the software that he was certain would provide a link into Fleetnet, if a valid connection could be made. He keyed in the code Moertopo had given him back in Hashirajima, when they'd had made their pact by the light of the burning Japanese ships.
The result was unimpressive, but momentous. The pad chimed, making him jump. He had forgotten to mute the sound, but that was all right. He worked with the device every day.
The file disappeared from the out-tray, and security software wiped every trace of it from the lattice memory.
He couldn't help but glance out of his window, taped to protect against bomb blasts. The sky was completely blocked by low, dark gray clouds. If he had done this correctly, somewhere up there on the edge of space, a surveillance drone was already decoding his microburst package and pulsing it back to the smart-skin arrays of the Trident.