In The Presence Of My Enemies

Alicia almost asked for more details. But the front door opened then. Her sisters ran into her mother's arms. "Mommy!" she shouted, and broke into a run herself.

Mommy had a hug for her, too, and kisses. "I know you were all brave girls," she said. Alicia's little sisters nodded eagerly. So did she, with a secret smile on her face. She'd had to be brave in a way Francesca and Roxane hadn't, because she'd known the truth and had to hide it, and they hadn't.

Their mother tousled her hair. She had a secret smile on her face, too. Yes, she'd meant that especially for Alicia. It went right over Francesca and Roxane's heads. Alicia's smile got wider. She liked secrets…well, most secrets, anyway. The big one she carried? She still wasn't so sure about that. One thing she was sure of, though, and all the more so after this ordeal: like it or not, it was hers.

Daddy came up the steps. "Did you tell them about the surprise yet?"

"Of course not," Mommy answered. "If I told them, it wouldn't be a surprise any more, would it?" Naturally, that set all three Gimpel girls clamoring. Their mother looked innocent till she'd almost driven them crazy. Then she said, "If people look in the kitchen, they may find…something."

They ran in. Roxane's gleeful squeal rang out a split second ahead of her sisters'. The cake was enormous, and covered with gooey white icing. Big blue letters spelled out WELCOME HOME! When Mommy cut the cake, it proved to be dark, dark chocolate, with cherries and blueberries between the layers. She gave them huge slices, and when Francesca asked, "Can we have some more?" she didn't say anything about ruining their appetites. She just handed out seconds as big as the firsts.

Everything was so wonderful, it was almost worth getting grabbed by the Security Police. Almost.

Walther Stutzman muttered to himself. Threading his way past the electronic traps on the virtual road that led to Lothar Prutzmann's domain wasn't his worry. He had their measure now. Sooner or later, an SS programmer would come up with some new ones, and Walther would need to spot them before they closed on him. Today, though, getting in had been easy enough. So was looking around once he'd got inside.

No, what made him mutter was not finding what he was looking for. Heinrich had given him a good description of the man who'd released him from prison: tall, blond, a major in the Security Police. By what the man had said, he was a Jew.

But Walther had been pretty sure he knew about all the handful of Jews in the SS. None of them, from what he recalled, matched this fellow. Looking through the records only confirmed that.

So who was the major, then? More to the point,what was he? Someone who'd tried a last trick to get a suspected Jew to reveal himself? That would have been Walther's guess, but it didn't fit the way Heinrich had described the scene a couple of days earlier. A joker? Or a real Jew, unknown to Walther and his circle of friends?

That would be good-the more who survived, the better. But it also raised doubts, frightening ones. Now somebody outside the circle, somebody no one in the circle knew, knew something about somebody in it. The last thing a Jew in the Third Reich wanted was for anybody to have a handle on him.

What can I do?Walther wondered. One thing that occurred to him was tracking down everybody on duty at the prison the day Heinrich was released. Not many majors would have been there. One of them should have been the man who turned his friend loose.

Before he could do that, though, his boss came back from lunch and bellowed, "Walther! You here, Walther?"

Three quick keystrokes, and everything incriminating vanished from his monitor. Three more made his electronic trail vanish. "I'm here," he called. "What's up?"

Gustav Priepke stuck his beefy face into Walther's cubicle. "You smart son of a bitch," he said fondly. "You goddamn know-it-all bastard."

"I love you, too," Walther said in his usual mild tones. His boss roared laughter. Still mildly, he asked, "Could you at least tell me why you're swearing at me today?"

"Delighted, by God," Priepke answered. "You're not only a smart son of a bitch, you're a thieving son of a bitch, too. You know that?"

Excitement tingled through Walther. Now he had a pretty good idea of what his foul-mouthed boss was talking about. "The code ran, did it?"

"Bet your sweet ass it did," Gustav Priepke said. "And backward compatibility looks as good as you said it would. We've got a real live modern operating system, or we will once we root out the usual forty jillion bugs. And we won't lose data, on account of it'll be able to read all our old files."

"That's-terrific," Walther said. Computer experts in the Reich had talked about modernizing the standard operating system for years. They'd talked about it, but they hadn't done it-till now. He was proud he'd had a part, and not such a small one, in turning talk into the beginning of reality.