Final impact

Even so, you couldn’t trust the waiters, or the prostitutes, or even the fascist leaders of the French Popular Party. Any of them might be secretly working for the Resistance. Dozens of collaborators and their German overlords had been killed in the last few weeks. Brasch himself was a target of great value, because of his role in the Ministry of Advanced Armaments Research, so the SS had assigned Neumann to protect him out of a genuine fear that he might be lost to such an attack.

Yet none of this meant anything to Brasch-he had numbered himself among the dead back when he served on the Eastern Front. In truth, his secret life, and the knowledge of his family’s escape, made each day a gift from above.

“Actually, Herr General,” he said, pumping Oberg’s arm in a firm two-handed grip, “you are entirely correct. You should consider a career in counterintelligence. Clearly you can see right through me.”

“Of course, of course!” the SS commander replied. “So we must talk our way around such things, over dinner.

“I understand you are leaving for Berlin tomorrow,” he continued. “I just wanted to thank you for all of the help you have given my staff while you were here and, if I might impose upon you, to pass along a personal note to the Reichsfuhrer.”

Brasch clicked his heels. “Of course, Herr General. I shall be seeing Reichsfuhrer Himmler almost as soon as I return. I shall make certain he gets your letter.”

He pocketed the slim envelope in his jacket, next to the flexipad that still waited for the signal from Muller.

He had less than an hour to live. The blood leaking into his shoes made a squelching noise as he dragged himself up the street.

There was no pain, thanks to an analgesic flush from his spinal syrettes, but Muller knew that the knives had struck deeply. As much blood as had flowed out of him to soak his clothes, he was losing even more to the internal bleeding that would surely end his life.

A lamppost loomed, the glow of its light a soft sphere in the summer night, tempting him to stop for just a little while. But he pressed on. If he gave up now, even for a short rest, there was no guarantee he’d be able to get moving again.

The three Frenchmen who had set upon him earlier had meant business. Whether they were Resistance fighters or simply street toughs did not matter. It had been a short, brutal encounter. He hadn’t hesitated to defend himself when they came at him out of the dark alleyway. Many people would have paused, and died on the spot, but when the oldest, most primitive parts of his brain began screaming at him that he was in danger, Muller acted. His fighting knife had appeared in his hand instantaneously, and without conscious thought he had decided which of the three was to die first, even before they had closed the short distance between them.

If they were Resistance, there was no point trying to explain that they were all working toward the same end. He’d dispatched two of them with his knife and killed the third with an open-handed strike to the throat that had crushed the man’s larynx. However, he wasn’t fast enough. At least two of the stab wounds he’d suffered felt as if they had cut something deep and vital. As he fled the scene, gray space bloomed at the edge of his vision, and cold chills racked his upper body with increasing violence despite the warmth of the evening.

Muller could not be certain that he would get far enough to establish a point-to-point link with Brasch’s flexipad. He stopped in the doorway of a boarded-up tailor shop, a Jewish business, and automated the contact routines, just in case. He might not make it all the way to the dispatch point, but as long as the engineer passed within seven hundred meters the link would set itself up.

Drawing breath felt like hauling a great weight up into himself at the end of a long rope. His feet dragged, and more than once they threatened to become tangled up with each other.

People were beginning to stare.

He tried to calculate the distance he had left to travel. Maybe another four hundred meters. Supercoagulants gathered at the site of his wounds, to slow the loss of blood. Another flush of stim coursed into his veins, pushing him on and clearing some of the gray from his vision.

But blood was beginning to show through the coat he had taken from the body of the man he’d killed with the blow to the throat. As the stain spread, and his discomfort became obvious, the reactions of those passing by became more pronounced. In short, they avoided him. There were many Parisians about, but none approached him to help, for which he was grateful. The last thing he needed right now was some Gallic busybody complicating matters further.

Actually, the last thing he needed was for another German to do so, but as he staggered down the way, that was exactly what occurred.

Someone hurried across the street toward him. “Hey! Wait there. I’ll help you.”

The figure swam in and out of focus, but the black uniform of an SS officer was unmistakable.

Fuck it.