In The Presence Of My Enemies

"Can't do it." Walther pointed to his desk. It was as neat as usual, but did have more stacks of paper on it than people were used to seeing there. "This changeover to the new operating system is tougher than we ever thought it would be. I don't know if we can meet the schedule they've set us."

Gustav Priepke grimaced. "Lord help us if we don't. We've already had three false starts. If we botch it this time, they're liable to throw us out on our ear and hire a bunch of programmers from Japan."

Priepke was kidding on the square, and Walther knew it. The Reich had pioneered in electronic computers-and the core operating system still showed as much, for it lacked protected memory and preemptive multitasking. The Japanese had got off to a later start, and had had the advantage of seeing the mistakes German programmers made. Japanese systems were more robust and often more reliable, even if they weren't so elegant.

"I think we can make it happen, but it's going to take a lot of work," Walther said. "And so…" He apologetically spread his hands.

His boss nodded. "If you're on the trail of something, keep after it. I'll have an extra hot dog for you." Off he went-and, knowing him, he'd probably have two.

Walther waited till more people went off to lunch, whether at the American place-it was called, for no reason he could see, the Greasy Spoon-or somewhere else. When the big room that held his cubicle had quieted down, he used one of those access codes he wasn't supposed to have. This one took him to an archive of the Fuhrer 's speeches. He wanted to-and he was convinced he needed to-find out just what Heinz Buckliger had said at Nuremberg, because it had so many people hopping.

The Nuremberg speech was there in the menu, sure enough. When he tried to call it up, though, it demanded another authorization code from him, one with a much higher security level. He blinked. He'd never seen anything like that before, not for a speech. He knew the second code, but hadn't imagined he would have to use it. Whathad Buckliger been talking about? Nuclear bombs and missile design?

Even after he entered the authorization code, the system hesitated before it coughed up the text of the Fuhrer 's speech. He got ready to bail out in a hurry and cover his tracks. But then the speech did come up. If someone-or something electronic-was making special note of his presence, none of his own tools for detecting such things sensed it.

He quickly scrolled through the speech to see how long it was. When he did, he got another surprise. It seemed to go on forever. the Fuhrer had the privilege of length, of course. Had any ruler of the Third Reich ever used it so extravagantly as Heinz Buckliger had here, though? Maybe the Volkischer Beobachter hadn't published it because it would have filled two days' editions.

Walther started to read. He couldn't go through the whole speech in detail, as he'd intended. It was just too damned long; he wouldn't have been halfway through by the time his boss got back from the Greasy Spoon. So he skimmed-and even skimming was plenty to make him sit up and take notice.

Buckliger came right out and said things that everybody knew but that nobody-certainly not the Fuhrer -ever talked about. What had Lothar Prutzmann and the rest of the leaders of the SS thought when he declared, "For far too long, this state has been founded on one thing and one thing only: terror"? If that didn't infuriate them…

If that didn't infuriate them, the speech had plenty of other things to do the job. The new Fuhrer said that all his predecessors, from Hitler on, had received reverence as if they were gods, "but they are only men, with all the failings to which men are heir." Walther found himself nodding. That seemed obvious when you came out and said it-but who in the nearly eighty years of the Reich 's historyhad come out and said it? Nobody-and a ruling Fuhrer least of all.

And Heinz Buckliger had also said, "Force can win victories, but force alone cannot maintain them forever without more expense than Germany can readily afford." If that didn't fly in the face of everything the Reich had stood for since the early days, what did?

With each new bombshell, Walther wanted to slow down and read more carefully. He knew he couldn't, not with his boss and his colleagues coming back soon, not if he wanted to see as much of what was there as possible. But he wanted to.

If he had slowed down, he wouldn't have come to the question the new Fuhrer asked near the end of the speech: "If everything we say about Aryan descent is true, how do we explain the recent rapid progress of the Japanese, who have not mingled their blood with Aryan stock any time recently?"