Berg looked forward to a double gin, some leisurely reading, and maybe a nap. It had been a challenging week, with few opportunities for sleep.
—
“Not you again,” Sergeant Thomas Weiner exclaimed as the train lurched forward, beginning its return journey from Stralsund to Berlin.
Manfred smiled at the SS guard. “Sergeant, my sincerest apologies for last week. That bout of food poisoning was horrid. I trust the nurse I brought to you and Herr Wolf proved helpful, did she not?”
Erhard Wolf shot an icy look at his guard.
“Verzeihung,” Weiner said immediately, backing off. He had worried the entire week on Rügen that the scientist he’d been assigned to watch over might squeal on him, letting Kammler or even Himmler—Kammler’s boss and the head of the SS—know that he’d been asleep at his post for most of the trip to Rügen. It wasn’t as if he and Wolf were friends, and he knew that his constant presence irritated the scientist, so he felt that he had to proceed carefully, at least until the memory of his uncharacteristic lapse had faded.
“Apology unnecessary, Sergeant,” Manfred said, setting down a tray of warm snacks for the two men as the train accelerated. “And to make sure there are no hard feelings, I’m offering you both any drink of your choosing—at our expense, of course.”
A smile crept across the guard’s face. “Very well, then,” he said smugly. “I’ll have a Bavarian beer, same kind as last time.”
“And I’ll have a vodka on ice,” Wolf added with a knowing smile. “Thank you.”
“The pleasure is mine,” Manfred responded.
—
“I think I know who she is,” Berg said suddenly, looking up from his book, his head swiveling toward Criminal Assistant Horst Grandt, who, as predicted, had appeared just minutes before the train left the station.
“Who?” the lanky twenty-five-year-old asked, tearing his eyes from a popular celebrity magazine he’d managed to get his hands on.
Berg had been sitting quietly, sipping his gin as he tried to get into an old Agatha Christie novel, but his mind kept going back to the pretty woman he’d seen on the platform.
“Her first name is Emma, not sure about her last name. She’s blond, blue-eyed—high cheekbones, big lips, shapely, between twenty-five and thirty years of age, a little over five and a half feet tall. Come to think of it, do you happen to know that actress from Sweden . . . Ingrid . . . oh, what’s her name?”
“Bergman!” Grandt said. Ingrid Bergman was a favorite of his; he’d always paid to watch her at his hometown movie theater, where he’d spent a good part of his youth.
“That’s it,” Berg confirmed. “Well, this girl looks like her, but with lighter blond hair.”
“And what about her, sir?” Grandt inquired, his interest now piqued.
“I believe she’s on this train but can’t be certain,” Berg said. “If she is, she’ll be sitting with a good-looking chap, probably in his forties. I want you to look for her. I’d suggest you start with coach twelve and work your way down from there.”
“Will I be arresting this woman for being too pretty, sir?” Grandt asked with a snicker, combing back his brown hair sleekly as he prepared for an encounter with the Bergman look-alike. “Or did she actually do something wrong?”
“I’d forgotten the Third Reich has an award for best comedic performance by a young officer in his first significant role,” Berg countered, peering over his glasses. “And no, Criminal Assistant Grandt, I don’t know if she’s done anything wrong. But if she is indeed on this train I would find it strange that she just happened to be visiting this remote area of the country during a particularly sensitive week. Should you locate her, whether in general seating or in a compartment, I want this woman brought to me. Alone. Without the man.”
“Yes, sir,” Grandt responded, rising to his feet and carefully placing his coveted magazine on the empty seat. Tracking down someone who looked like Ingrid Bergman was his kind of assignment. He’d always yearned to be an actor, and, in truth, often felt as if he were simply playing a role with the Gestapo. The fact that his last name roughly matched that of Cary Grant, the debonair English actor who’d once starred opposite Germany’s Marlene Dietrich, only gave Grandt further assurance of his ultimate destiny following the war’s successful conclusion.
“There’s no need to raise a fuss,” Berg said. “Just tell her I want to talk with her as a follow-up to our first meeting. We came across each other ever so briefly outside Berlin as she and her friends drove in from Leer.”
“With respect, Criminal Director Berg, are you certain she’ll remember you?”
“Oh, yes,” Berg said, chortling into his drink. “I have a keepsake from that encounter, which she was kind enough to give me.”
—
The black-and-white photographs lay strewn across the low table.
Wolf’s head was in his hands.
Manfred and Emma sat across from him, looking at each other and then back at the scientist. Sergeant Weiner was asleep just a yard away; the guard had once again fallen victim to a dose of Emma’s chloral hydrate. Weiner had chosen to down his free beer in one go, hoping that he could then order another one on the house. That strategy hadn’t worked out so well for him.
Wolf knew that the photographs were real, and he felt like a fool. The aggression against the Jews had been obvious to him for years, but he never dreamed the Nazis would break their own laws by killing innocent Germans.
Had he looked the other way, he wondered, because he was so obsessed with fulfilling his lifelong ambition? Or had the Nazis played him perfectly? Or both?
Wolf knew the murders depicted in the photos couldn’t have been fabricated. Each photo was stamped with the date and time as well as the name of a camp or a remote location, with the timeline spanning several years. In just these two dozen images alone, he guessed there were ten thousand bodies—most piled in mass graves, with others lying riddled with bullets, huddled together in stillness, or being fed into huge furnaces. Some images focused on individuals, including starving women and children who were alive but no longer looked human. In many of the scenes, there were uniformed Nazi soldiers present, often posing proudly by their victims.
The scientist had now finally, painfully, fully accepted that his mother, her friend Thelma, and his best childhood friend, Mark Katz, were no longer alive. They hadn’t appeared in any of the photographs, but the capacity to kill indiscriminately and the machinery for doing so were in full view. Nor did he have any doubt that the monsters committing these murders inside Germany would easily use his bomb outside their country’s borders to inflict similar suffering on foreign nations.
“How did you get these pictures?” Wolf asked. “Surely your colleague who photographed my family couldn’t also have gained access to these killing camps?”
“No, Peter didn’t take these,” Emma said. “I don’t know who did. But I can tell you that they were given to me by a reliable source at the highest level.”
Her request for proof of the death camps and the extermination of Jews had been placed in writing at the lion statue. Within forty-eight hours, Kurt received a note from Paula, telling him where the photos were hidden nearby and that they were to be returned as soon as possible.
“You have to believe that I had no idea of any of this,” Wolf said, shaking his head.
“We know that,” Emma said. “But, now that you have this proof, will you support our efforts to at least delay your bomb?”
The scientist looked out the window at the trees whipping by and sighed. He sat in silence, and Emma knew from Nash’s teachings not to push; ideally, Wolf would internalize the commitment to himself first, making it more likely that he’d then keep his commitment to her.
“It’s not easy for me. This weapon represents my life’s work. Others here and abroad will claim they were the first.�
� He wiped his brow and breathed deeply, his eyes returning to the photographs. “And if anyone discovers that I’ve revealed state secrets, my family and I will join these skeletons. I’ll need assurances of my anonymity and the protection of my wife and children. Fleeing would be too risky. Besides, I’m proud of the Germany my ancestors built and want to stay here to help rebuild—after the peace.”
Emma nodded. “No one will know of your role. I’ll also protect your family—once you’ve come through for me,” she said. “Just so you know, all of us behind this resistance effort are German, including the person who gave me these photos. Each of us has made the same difficult decision to do what we think is right, and right for our country—as your mother did—instead of what’s right for the führer and his supporters.”
—
Criminal Assistant Horst Grandt knocked on the compartment’s curtained glass window. When no one answered, he tried pulling the door sideways. It was locked.
“Gestapo. I’d just like a quick word with you, please,” he said.
He heard voices exchanging terse, inaudible words. He felt for his weapon.
The door opened slightly. A shirtless young man peeked out. Grandt angled himself so that he could see past him. On the bench, a brunette, twenty years old at most, sat smoothing her skirt and buttoning her blouse. Opposite her on the bench was a gray officer’s uniform.
“We heard some high-pitched squeals and wanted to make sure everything was all right,” Grandt said with an earnest expression, delivering his line flawlessly. The lovers blushed. “If you should hear these same sounds, it could be a serious problem with the train’s brakes. I’d appreciate your coming to coach fifteen to alert me, all right?”
The disheveled travelers stared at him. The girl couldn’t contain herself.
“Sir,” she said, her body rigid, her eyes on the floor, “did you hear these . . . sounds . . . all the way from coach fifteen?”
“No,” he answered. She smiled with relief. “It was actually someone from coach twenty who first alerted me. My apologies if I’ve caused you any inconvenience,” he said, bowing out of the room. The girl’s face was now beet-red.
Grandt moved down the hallway toward coach nine, a smirk plastered to his lips.
—
Once Wolf had agreed to support the resisters’ efforts, Emma and Manfred were surprised at how much he was willing to share.
It was obviously a relief for him to talk about the development of his weapon; Emma suspected that his ego benefited as well. She would carry the conversation as Manfred listened from the door, standing guard, as he had at their previous meeting.
Wolf told them that after he joined Kammler’s team in 1942, the Allies somehow got wind of Germany’s renewed focus on a disintegration weapon. To undermine these efforts, in early 1943, the Allies attacked the Nazis’ heavy water facilities in occupied Norway.
Furious, the führer publicly denounced those who’d failed to protect such a critical Nazi asset. Privately, though, Hitler reveled in the fact that he had a backup plan: Wolf’s unique method didn’t require heavy water as a catalyst. His Vodka Project would ensure that his uranium was enriched with enough uranium-235 that he could use regular water in his newly constructed Uranmaschine to convert U-238 into element 94—the core ingredient for an atomic bomb.
To protect Wolf’s work against any new attacks by the Allies, Kammler sent the scientist farther and deeper into the fortress of the Ore Mountains in the Sudetenland region, which Germany had taken from Czechoslovakia in 1938.
“I assume that’s also where you get all your uranium?” Emma clarified.
“No,” Wolf said, “not all of it. We’ve been mining and refining there for a few years now. But the Belgians have also proved helpful.”
“How so?” she asked.
“When we invaded their country in 1940, our troops uncovered a rare gift: thousands of tons of highly refined uranium ore from the Belgian Congo—which got us off to a tremendous start. Kammler later quietly claimed much of this for my work because most of the führer’s other scientists were so inept. Getting the uranium was not the hard part. We had other challenges.”
“What was hard, then?” Emma said, looking for some kind of vulnerability.
He paused. “Getting a bomb to do what it’s supposed to do. Theory is one thing, reality another. Take the test in Rügen this past week—a failure.”
“Pardon? You must be joking. How in God’s name wasn’t that blast a success?”
“Sicke ignored my advice. He underestimated the number of triggers that needed to be attached to the core material—which I’ve managed to make the size of a wine bottle. The implosion didn’t really work. You witnessed a bomb that was mainly conventional, since almost all of the atomic material ended up dispersing rather than igniting.”
Emma looked at him in amazement. “So your final product would be stronger?”
“Definitely,” Wolf said. “Sicke and I spent time after the test making changes consistent with what I’d already suggested. His device was too big, too complex, and poorly wired. It was always supposed to be small and compact—our tactical advantage. But we’re almost there.”
“How small?” she asked.
“Small enough to fit into a reconfigured warhead on one of von Braun’s V-2 rockets and be delivered from a portable launcher on a rail car,” he said. “Larger bombs could cause more damage, but we didn’t want to fly a lumbering plane over our targets. We wanted a weapon that could credibly threaten to cross the Channel quickly, striking fear into our enemies.”
Emma looked at Wolf across the table. She’d be watching carefully to see which way his eyes moved when he answered her next question.
To my left is lying, to my right is right, she reminded herself.
“So when will one of these superbombs be ready to launch for real?”
Wolf’s eyes turned to her right as he searched for a reasonable answer. “I am confident now that a disintegration bomb could be launched as soon as January, with several more bombs ready for delivery by March at the latest.”
“Damn it!” she swore, slamming her hand down. “I suppose you didn’t consider holding off on your suggested improvements until we’d spoken again?”
His hands fanned out in front of him. “I didn’t know you’d come back with so much proof, and so fast. And, frankly, I was focused on solving the problems with our bomb, nothing else. You have to understand, this is all I’ve worked on for years.”
Emma shook her head, reminding herself to stay focused on what she could influence, not on what had already happened. “Okay, then, we need to figure out how you’re going to help us undermine your own work—without anyone knowing.”
Wolf fell silent. Emma and Manfred watched him and waited.
“I may have a simple answer,” he finally offered.
“What is it, then?”
“You’re sitting on it.”
Emma looked at the red leather bench under her. Manfred shot Wolf a puzzled look from the doorway.
“Sitting on what?” she asked. She noticed that it had warmed up in the cabin, either that or she was feeling anxious. She removed her cape, instinctively running her hands over her nursing dress to straighten it out. Her cap remained in her pocket.
“To be more precise, perhaps you’re sitting over the answer,” Wolf said.
“A railway line?”
“Exactly. There’s one that runs in and out of our mountain hideaways, transporting materials to other hidden mountain locations. Most of the rail is underground, but a small, vital part of it can’t be hidden because it goes over a trestle bridge nestled between two mountains. Without this single piece of rail,” Wolf said, “Sicke can’t get the finished material he needs as it comes off my production line. I’ve always been concerned about the trestle’s vulnerability because of Allied bomb
s. But, of course, they’d have to know where the wooden bridge is to destroy its fortified structure. It blends in with the trees and the terrain rather well.”
He stopped, turning the idea over in his head.
“I’ll tell you where it is,” he said. “You can work out the details on your own.”
—
Grandt felt a growing sense of disappointment as he approached the first compartment in coach No. 2, almost losing his balance as the fast-moving train swayed. Berg’s criminal assistant was nearing the front of the train after half an hour of thorough searching and knocking on doors.
He’d had to take a second look at a number of couples, but none of the women from close up looked anything like Ingrid Bergman. He was beginning to assume that Berg’s sighting of his blond acquaintance had indeed been a mirage.
He knocked on the compartment door numbered 2A. There were sounds inside, people talking in low, urgent voices. This would be the fourth or fifth time that had happened.
“Gestapo! Could you please open your door?”
“Yes, of course,” came the muffled reply from a female voice inside.
Grandt heard the latch slip.
The door slid open. An attractive nurse with big blue eyes stood before him. She motioned for Grandt to enter quickly. “Thank God you’re here. Sergeant Weiner needs your help,” she said, gesturing toward the SS guard; he lay flat on his back across the bench. “It seems he ate something that disagreed with him.”
The criminal assistant scanned the room, slowly moving into the compartment. He observed that one of the train’s servers was in the room, and that in the corner behind the server there was a thin, balding man wearing sunglasses.
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