Final impact

Himmler bit down on the sense of despair that was threatening to engulf him. He put the Bothe paper aside and picked up a briefing note from Gruppenfuhrer Stangl on the renewed effort to root out fifth columnists, saboteurs, and traitors within the highest offices of the Reich. Normally he skimmed Stangl’s briefings. There was rarely anything of note; an admiral here, a general there. But today his eyes bulged as he read the first name on the list.

General Paul Brasch.

Stangl wrote that the Gestapo had been covertly observing Brasch for six months, on suspicion that he had made contact with some enemy agents. One man in particular had been of interest to them, but had evaded capture on a number of occasions. He had been killed in Paris on May 8, just a few streets away from where Brasch had been dining with Oberstgruppenfuhrer Oberg. General Brasch had been observed loitering in the area afterward, and approached a number of Wehrmacht personnel who survived a blast they presumed had been triggered by the unnamed spy. He showed great interest in the details of the incident in which the man and many others had perished.

Thus it was decided to pick him up for routine questioning, but when he was approached by two Gestapo men, Brasch had killed one and crippled the other. He was now on the run, somewhere in Paris.

Brasch! Of all people. Could this day get any worse? Brasch had been intimately involved in some of the most critical research-and-development programs that had grown out of the Emergence. Indeed, he was there from the very first moments, having been sent to Japan on what was first assumed to be a wild goose chase. He had been vetted and vetted again by the SS. His family had been killed in a British bombing raid. The fuhrer had personally decorated him!

It could not be.

As he held the sheaf of paper with a bloodless, shaking hand, however, the Reichsfuhrer-SS began to see the outlines of a conspiracy. Brasch’s dead son had been T4, a deformed child who would have been put down were it not for his father’s prominence. Brasch had enjoyed unrestricted access to the Sutanto’s files in Hashirajima and presumably could have learned of the T4 program. But then again, these suspicions had all been voiced early on, and Brasch had been attended for weeks by both covert and overt SS minders. They had never seen any evidence to suggest that he was anything but a patriot.

Himmler pulled out a pad of paper. He began to jot down notes furiously, instructing Stangl to continue the search for Brasch, even if it meant leaving agents behind in Paris to look for him after the city fell to the Allies. Then he scratched out “after” and wrote “should the city fall to the Allies.” It would not do to be seen as a defeatist.

He further instructed the Gestapo chief to cross-reference with Brasch’s work history all major incidents of unexplained sabotage, equipment failure, or even apparent Allied intelligence successes-such as the counterambush of the Luftwaffe raid on Patton’s Third Army. His writing grew spiky as his heart beat faster. In a way he hoped this was a misunderstanding. A coincidence. Because if Brasch had sold them out, they were in even worse trouble than he’d thought. The Allies would know details of some of the most sensitive weapons programs in the Third Reich.

They would even have inside information on the broad outlines of the German atomic program.

Oh, this was very, very bad.

18

D-DAY + 33. 5 JUNE 1944. 1324 HOURS.

PLACE PIGALLE, PARIS.

The crackle and pop of gunfire was a constant across the city, like traffic noise or birdsong in happier times. As the sporadic clashes grew into one long battle, Brasch began to think the French might do themselves more harm in the Liberation than the Germans had done during the Occupation.

He twitched aside the stiff, sun-faded curtain and risked a peek outside. He was hiding, for the moment, in a hotel off the Rue Houdon, although to call it a hotel invested the establishment with more dignity than it really deserved. It was the sort of flophouse where tight-fisted Austrian noncoms or petit bureaucrat collaborators might have rented a room by the hour, paying a few francs for a sagging, crusty mattress and an even saggier, crustier companion. The whores were still here, but the trade had dried up, so to speak. The Wehrmacht and the SS seemed to be in general retreat; all that remained were a few thousand of the hardier, dumber Frenchmen who had thrown in their lot with the fascists.