by James Lepore
“Are we in urgent mode?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so. Our man believes he is being watched, that he will be arrested quite soon, that his formula will be discovered or tortured out of him.”
“How did you come by all this?”
“In March I asked one of our people—your old friend Rex Dowling—to make contact. He did. Our scientist contacted Dowling last night. I should say early this morning. He’s in panic mode.”
“I’ll run it by the old man.”
Donovan remained silent. Sunlight, filtering through the old tree’s thick branches, cast dappled shadows on the small table’s snowy-white cloth covering.
They sipped their tea and the silence stretched out.
“I’ll be discrete,” the Englishman said, finally.
“Thank you.”
“Did I hear it from you?”
“Yes, but I made no request.”
“You mentioned it in passing.”
“Something like that.”
“What’s the man’s name?”
“Friedeman. Walter Friedeman.”
The two men stared at each other over their teacups, their faces masks of politeness. Then Fleming put his cup down, extracted a Morland’s Special from its packet, tamped it on the table, placed it snugly into its holder, and lit it.
“What’s your interest?” he asked after taking a long drag and exhaling it with obvious pleasure.
“Personally?”
“Yes.”
“Einstein.”
“What about him?”
“He said Friedeman had found a way to make the bomb in three months.”
“Three months. Bloody hell. And you believed him?”
“Yes. He’s Einstein for God’s sake.”
“I thought he was a pacifist.”
“That’s just it. That’s what sold me. He sees disaster coming and has been forced to change his principles. To bend them actually. He thinks the a-bomb would be better off in our hands than in Hitler’s.”
“If we get this bomb…”
“We’re a long way from that.”
“Yes, but if we do.”
“You’ll use it.”
“We’re a small island. Hitler’s a mad man. I daresay we will.”
“As I said, Albert is obviously willing to bend.”
“It’s an old story, Colonel. More tea? A bit of a bracer?” The Englishman had his hand on a bottle of St. George’s.
Donovan looked at his watch.
“Do us good,” said Fleming. “What with war coming and not being ready. Turn to the bottle.”
Wild Bill Donovan smiled and slid his teacup toward his host. “Let me know what Godfrey says,” he said. “I’ll do what I can to help.”
Chapter 3
Berlin, August 30, 1939, 7:00 p.m.
“Conrad.”
“Yes, Papa.”
“We will be celebrating Opa Josef’s birthday early this year.”
“Early? Why?”
“I have a conference next week in Munich. You will leave tomorrow. I will join you the next day.”
“I have Hitler Youth tomorrow.”
“You will have to miss this week.”
Father and son were sitting in worn leather chairs by the fire in their apartment in the Dahlem section of Berlin, near the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, where Friedeman worked. They sat and read almost every evening after dinner. Conrad frowned. “Shall I travel alone?” he said.
“Karl Brauer will accompany you.”
“Karl Brauer? The butcher’s boy?”
“He has cousins outside Strasbourg. His father is thinking of sending him to school there.”
“School? He seems so dull.”
It was Walter Friedeman’s turn to frown. His son was brilliant, his memory photographic. But he was arrogant and condescending to those he deemed beneath him, and worse, much worse, a true believer in Hitler and his insane political and cultural ideology. He said nothing though. The last time he and Conrad had argued, the boy had had an epileptic seizure, his first in many years. That argument had been over Conrad’s insistence on joining Hitler Youth at the ripe age of ten.
“I will not let you travel alone,” Friedeman said. “You will only be with Karl for a short train ride. I have already spoken to Opa. He is quite happy and excited.”
“Of course, Father.” Conrad nodded and turned back to his book.
“You can give Opa his gift,” Friedeman said.
“Of course. What is it?”
“It’s a poem I wrote for him. I think it will be fun if you memorized it and recited it when I arrived.”
Friedeman did not expect his son to be surprised at his choice of gifts for his grandfather’s eightieth birthday, and he was not. Conrad had been memorizing things verbatim, at a glance, since the age of seven, right after his first epileptic seizure. Traumatically induced eidetic memory, his physician had called it.
“Shall we do it now?” the boy asked.
Friedeman took several sheets of lined paper from his book and looked at them. Then he looked around the room where his small family had spent so much of their lives together. The fireplace, the sideboard where he made drinks for himself and Hilda every evening after Conrad was put to bed when he was a child. The cushioned chair where Hilda knitted. The radio from Rosenhain’s that she talked back to and sometimes sobbed in front of. The bookshelves with their section for Conrad’s science fiction and fantasy novels. The book in his hand was The Hobbit, a gift from Opa Josef, which Conrad loved when he first read it two years ago, and loved more now that it was said to be pro-Aryan and Conrad had become a little Nazi.
“Father,” Conrad said, interrupting these thoughts.
“Yes. Connie. Here.” He handed the boy the papers. “It’s in Elvish.”
“Elvish?”
“From The Hobbit.”
Conrad smiled. “What does it say?”
“A stanza for each of Opa’s decades. His life. It will make him smile.”
Conrad stared carefully at each sheet for a moment or two, then handed the papers back to his father.
“I don’t remember so much Elvish in the book, Papa.”
“Oh yes,” Friedeman replied. “I have been studying. I will translate, but first we’ll see if Opa can decipher it. It will be fun to tease him as he tries.”
“The elves in The Hobbit represent our Italian allies,” said Conrad, “silly looking, speaking gibberish, but useful to the cause.” His eyes were bright. “Don’t you agree, Father?”
On the wall behind his son was a framed photograph of Conrad and two of his Hitler Youth friends in their absurd uniforms, the single sig rune symbol prominent on their sleeves. Blond like his mother, Conrad looked every bit the Aryan superman the HJ was touted to be producing. The boys in the picture, all smiling confidently, each had his right hand on the haft of the standard issue Hitlerjugend knife in leather sheathes on their belts. Three Jew-haters and future killers for the Reich. Could there actually be five million of these boys—and girls, alas—throughout Germany?
“Don’t you, Father?” Conrad said.
“They’re just elves, Conrad,” Friedeman replied, “conjured up by Professor Tolkien to bring joy to children, to stir their imaginations.”
“I disagree,” the boy said. “But you have not been thinking straight since Mama died.”
You mean I had an excuse all these years for being nonpolitical, Friedeman said to himself. And for ignoring the drums of war these past months. The frothing at the collective German mouth. He said nothing.
“I will have to do something to make up for missing tomorrow’s meeting,” Conrad said.
“Yes, of course,” Friedeman said. “I will call your troop leader to explain.”
“Thank you, Father.”
“Of course, you are making great progress. I understand your concern.”
Conrad nodded and smiled.
Thank God he loves his grandfather, Friedeman said to him
self. At least I had no childish Nazi tantrum to deal with. “Your train leaves at seven a.m.,” he said. “Karl will meet you at the platform. He has your ticket. You should pack and get to bed soon. I will be gone before you. I have a meeting at the institute at six tomorrow morning.”
Walter Friedeman, horrified though he was, did not blame his son for his embrace of Nazism.He would have been ostracized by his peers if he hadn’t. Of course, in Berlin society in the late 1930’s, ostracized meant spit on, pissed on, pummeled, and sometimes much worse, like disappearing into the black vortex on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. And that was for Germans, those few brave souls who refused to bear the yoke of Gleichschaltung, the doctrinal conformity demanded by the Nazis and enforced by violence if necessary. The Jews were simply robbed of all their belongings and then either sent to camps or killed. Thank God his Jewish friends, Einstein and many others, had fled before it was too late.
Lately, Hitlerjugend “troops” had taken to throwing bricks through church windows. This was what earned them their merit badges. Traditional Christianity, with its treasonous love thy neighbor message, was naturally an enemy of the Nazis. Was Conrad among the brick throwers? The German scientist looked at his son, who had turned back to his book. Perhaps your journey tomorrow, Connie, will be the start of a new life, a life where Hitler is a monster and Hitler Youth a group of robotic young cowards. I pray it will be.
As for me, he said to himself, who has done nothing in the face of all this evil—nothing, for example, to even protest, let alone stop the massive effort at my once beloved KWI to produce chemical weapons—well, I will try. Now that I know that I am being spied on, I will do my best to make up for my cowardice all these years.
When Walter Friedeman was certain that his son was asleep, he retrieved his briefcase from his study, drew out the several hundred pages that contained all of his extracurricular research notes compiled over the last fifteen years, and deposited them in the fireplace. Very thick, they were slow at first to burn, but once they ignited, they were gone quickly. For good measure, he threw in Papa Friedeman’s birthday poem. It’s up to you now, Albert, he said to himself when these were consumed, you and your friends in America. I have placed the fate of the world in your hands, and in my son’s fragile mind.
Chapter 4
Berlin, August 31, 1939, 7:00 a.m.
Walter Friedeman had no trouble passing through the guarded gates of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute’s Building A, which contained the laboratory where the Institute’s director, Peter Debye, made liquid hydrogen for his experiments in superfluidity. He and Debye were good friends and visited each other’s work quarters regularly. The guard simply nodded him in. If the bright-eyed young soldier, in his Wermacht gray, had searched him, as he certainly did with all other visitors, he would have found the matches in the physicist’s lab coat pocket, and, smiling at Herr Professor’s absentmindedness, confiscated them. Inside the empty lab, Friedeman looked at his watch and was certain that, German efficiency being what it was, Conrad’s train was underway.
Building A stood isolated some one hundred feet from the institute’s main complex. Friedeman knew the properties of liquid hydrogen. Building A should have been at least a thousand feet from the main building, where the institute’s chemical warfare research was conducted under the man who discovered nerve gas, Gerhard Schrader. Once ignited, the steel rack holding a dozen two hundred gallon tanks of highly flammable liquid hydrogen on the lab’s far wall would explode so fiercely that the shower of fire and heat produced would easily reach, and completely destroy, the main building and all of its contents, including the Nazi’s stores of the deadly tabun and sarin gases.
Friedeman searched along the grid of piping that fed the tanks and found the ingress and egress ports at eye level and their backup levers along the floor. Clear-eyed, his face grim, he opened both ingress valves fully and waited a moment for the air from the room to flow into the tanks. Then he opened both egress valves by a quarter turn, to promote a certain amount of circulation. He had chosen a matchbook with a bright crimson swastika on it’s cover, one of Conrad’s, part of his official Hitlerjugend camping gear. He took this out of the pocket of his white lab coat and started counting. Thirty seconds should do it, or so he had been told. At three there was a sharp rapping on the lab’s reinforced steel door. At ten, angry voices, followed by loud banging of hard metal against hard metal. A gun butt, Friedeman thought. At twenty, a burst of machine gun fire and the door came crashing in. As it did, Walter Friedeman lit a match and placed it next to the ingress port. His last thoughts were of Conrad and of Albert Einstein, to whom he had sent a cryptic telegram at six a.m.: The Dance of Surtr Begins: CO=2200xBSP√.
Chapter 5
Berlin, August 31, 1939, 7:15 a.m.
“Professor Diebner, what are we looking at?” asked Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Schutzstaffel, the much feared SS, an organization that had grown under his command from three hundred men in 1929 to over a million in ten years, including a military wing, the Waffen SS, whose three hundred and fifty thousand soldiers answered only to him.
“It looks like a chemical formula to produce enriched uranium,” Professor Kurt Diebner replied. “A portion of such a formula. There would be more than the three pages we just looked at.”
They sat in the dark at one end of Himmler’s spacious office at SS/Gestapo Headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, looking up at a slide screen on which was projected a page of pencil notes on lined paper, the last of three they had looked at. The room’s floor-to-ceiling plush drapes were closed tight against the early morning light.
“What does that mean?”
“We have determined that by separating the two isotopes found in uranium, we can produce a fissionable material, which is known as U-235, or enriched uranium.”
“Fissionable?”
“It means splittable. Splitting U-235 will cause a chain reaction and the release of immense amounts of energy. Normally, the separation process would take years. Thousands of centrifuges would have to be built, they would have to spin at immense speeds, probably over one hundred thousand revolutions per minute. The rotors and bearings would have to be built to withstand these forces. No one knows exactly how much enriched uranium would be needed to make one bomb. Perhaps one hundred kilograms. Enough for one bomb might be made, working around the clock, in four or five years at best.”
“Get to the point, Herr Professor, please.”
“If these notes are correct, it means an atomic bomb—several, actually—could be made in a few months.”
“Can that be possible?”
“I would not have thought so.”
“Until you saw this.”
“Yes.”
“Why? What makes you think so?”
“These notes contemplate a chemical solution to promote enrichment. There would be no need for centrifuges, for elaborate, highly precise equip.m.ent, for huge physical plants. I see where the author is going and it is quite intriguing.”
“If we were to obtain the entire formula, could you make this solution?”
“That depends. I don’t know what the other components are. If they were readily available, then yes, I could do it.”
“Are you familiar with Army Ordnance’s Uranium Club? Geiger, Bothe, that group?”
“I know of its existence.”
“I want you to start a second Uranium Club. You will report to me. Pick your own people.”
“Yes, of course, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”
“I believe I can get you the rest of this formula. Your task will be to use it to build Germany’s atomic arsenal.”
“Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer, it will be done.” Diebner was beaming. “May I ask,” he said, “who’s notes these are?”
“No, you may not.”
Now Diebner cringed.
“I am going to make you an officer in the SS.”
“I—”
“You know we have several special purpose corps? Do
ctors doing experiments, historical research. Camp security.”
“Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”
“You will be a captain in charge of our atomic energy program.”
“Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”
“And one more thing, Herr Professor.” Himmler switched on the lamp on the end table nearest to him. He looked the nuclear physicist directly in the face.
“Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer?”
“You will not be allowed to fail. Success will bring great glory. Failure will bring your career to an unpleasant end. A very unpleasant end. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer. I understand.”
“Good, talk to my aide, Major Hoffman. He will assist you with uniforms, office space, staffing, budgeting, and the like. You will take an oath. Here.” Himmler retrieved a sheet of paper from an inside tunic pocket and handed it to Diebner. “The questions and answers are quite simple,” he said. “I wrote them myself. Study them. I will personally administer it tomorrow.”
“I am honored, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”
“You should be. You are excused.”
Himmler’s mole, the beautiful Marlene Jaeger, had told him that, though she could not be certain, she believed that Walter Friedeman had seen the camera in her hand when he surprised her in his office two nights ago. The SS Chief had decided to proceed with caution. Friedeman was German, that is to say, not a Jew. He had served honorably in the first war and was now a brilliant scientist, a nuclear physicist, who would be useful to the next war effort. Popular among his colleagues, he could not be arrested without good cause. A random, mistaken arrest would frighten them, perhaps stir up dissent, which Germany could not afford among its top scientists. Not now. He had ordered the Berlin Chief of Police, Hans Becker, an old Prussian who had succumbed meekly when Himmler and his SS took over all law enforcement departments throughout Germany in 1936, to have his men ready.