A thousand suns

Some of those here planned on leaving; others, fearful of the fighting around the Chancellery, were for staying. Most of them appeared locked into a state of indecision. Perhaps they were to just wait until someone from the outside world knocked on the door of the bunker and told them the war was finally over.

To Hauser they looked pitiful. Goebbels, Bormann, the staff officers, even Hitler’s bodyguards. They looked like a group of children left unattended, unsupervised for too long — lost, confused, and those in uniform like little boys playing at being soldiers.

Hauser shook his head with disgust. Even Hitler, ultimately, had disappointed him.

In the last few days he had begun to see how weak and frail the man was. Only last night as they celebrated, had he returned, briefly, to the powerful and charismatic figure he once was. But even then, his jokes and his stories had solicited tired, long-suffering smiles from those around him. He had become like the drunken, awkward party guest that everyone wished would leave.

The flames had engulfed Hitler’s head, and now, amidst the popping and hissing, he imagined he could hear the man’s mewling cry, like Schenkelmann’s. Pathetic.

The Jew’s research notes and Hauser’s project data for the bomb were in a box in the bunker. That was a box of incredibly valuable information. And, he reflected, he too was going to be valuable.

His work could go on. His knowledge and his skills would be of extreme interest to the Russians, of that he was sure.

When they arrived, all of these people standing with him out in the courtyard and watching the flames would be unimportant, superfluous. He could well imagine the first Russians to arrive being trigger-happy, hungry to exact a little vengeance upon the first faces they stumbled across.

It would be important, he decided, to lie low, to remain unfound until their intelligence officers arrived at the scene later on, and then… then, he could make himself known, and humbly offer his services.

While every other face in the courtyard remained impassive, emotionless and still, there was a smile spreading across his.

Hauser could see in the time ahead, after this war was brought to a conclusion, that there were going to be great opportunities for a man like him. He turned away from the flames and headed back inside the bunker to collect his box of notes. Those papers were going to be his passport out of here when the Russians came.

Chapter 60

Decision

He studied their motel rooms from across the parking lot. There had been a light on in one of them until just now. He looked at his watch — it was approaching four in the morning. He would love to be tucked up in bed like them, but there was some thinking to do and perhaps a final job to be done.

It was decision time.

As he stood silently in the darkness, lit only faintly by the flickering neon light outside the diner, he allowed his mind to wander, to start gathering up all the loose ends into a manageable knot; loose ends that spanned over sixty years, all of his professional life, in fact.

His mind drifted back to the end of that last meeting with Truman. There had been an almost tangible sense of relief in the conference room as Hitler’s implied deadline came and went. Hours had passed and nothing had happened. Then Truman drafted a second, cautiously worded telegram to Hitler, calling for his surrender once more. It was over.

Then the work, his work, began.

The worst of it had all been a long time ago, the killings. Some of them were still fresh in his mind. He sometimes thought he saw their faces in a crowd, or on the evening news, or at least faces that reminded him of them; the faces of those innocent witnesses whose deaths he had calmly ordered.

The whole thing had been a nasty, unpleasant business, but a necessary job that had been passed his way to organise. In the weeks that had followed that meeting at the White House in the last days of the war, in fact for several months afterwards, he had been put in sole charge of the hastily assembled little department as it went about cleaning up many of the scattered breadcrumbs.

It had needed to be done quickly with the minimum of fuss, and certainly without the unnecessary involvement of any other departments. The President had decided that a small, ring-fenced mini-agency with a lean head-count of dependable, well-remunerated and experienced agents was the perfect tool for the job. The breadcrumbs had needed tidying up, therefore it was he, and his little task force, who’d had to ensure that all seventeen of the civilian witnesses simply vanished, with no one left to make a noise.