Designated Targets

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 Göbbels says they will sweep the old tin cans of the British out of the skies.

Müller 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 Müller 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 café 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.”

Müller 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 café, 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. Müller 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 Völkischer 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 Müller 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.