Thomas Greanias - The 34th Degree

“Now, let me frame your 34th Degree mission for you in 1943 terms,” Prestwick said as the anesthesiologist put a mask over Deker’s mouth. “Think of these glass slides of brain slices as a slide show. We are going to load them up one at a time. First the slide from my own grandfather, then Baron Ludwig von Berg, then Chris Andros. You must ultimately identify with him.”

“Why?” Deker asked.

“Because he’s looking for the text, too,” Prestwick said. “If you become dominated by a strong presence like the Baron and identify too much with him, you will do everything you can to keep the contents and location of the Maranatha text from us. But you need him, because he can take you places nobody else has been.”

“Okay,” Deker said. “So I’ll experience all these episodes in your slide show until they’re loaded and running together.”

“Then the 34th Degree program, together with your brain, will fill in any empty spaces,” Prestwick said. “You asked me what the 34th Degree was, Deker. It’s total omniscience. You will know more than we do. You will know everything. You know what that means, don’t you?”

Deker nodded soberly. It meant that if this crazy experiment actually worked, then his trip through time to the ancient battle of Jericho in 1400 B.C. had been just a torture-induced psychosis. This lab, this chair, these people, were real. Everything else was illusion. He could finally sleep easy. If it failed, then perhaps reality was back in 1400 B.C. or 1943 A.D. or whenever, and this life was the illusion.

Except the intel.

The intel, as he had learned the hard way long ago, was always real.

Packard nodded enthusiastically. “I can’t think of a Mason who wouldn’t die for this kind of opportunity,” he said. “Consider this your 34th Degree.”

“Sure,” Deker said slowly.

“No worries,” Prestwick said as he quickly made some adjustments. “The next burst will send you back. You will see, feel, and experience everything that these people did at this significant moment for them in 1943, starting with my grandfather. Are you ready?”

Deker nodded. In spite of himself, the terror from his previous torture seized him, and he gripped the arms of the chair tightly.

“Okay, then,” Prestwick said, and pushed the button. “Here we go.”

Deker felt a surge of energy coming into his head, then a blinding light, and finally, a black tunnel engulfed him.

J ason Prestwick hurried along Fifth Avenue with a teddy bear from FAO Schwarz tucked under his arm. A phone call in the middle of the night had instructed him to pick up the cub at the famous toy shop and “carry it to a certain floor of a building in Manhattan,” the New York headquarters of the Office of Strategic Services.

Now, as he neared Rockefeller Center on this sunny afternoon of May 11, 1943, Prestwick slowed down and ran a quick check on a possible tale. At sixty-two, the Yale University professor knew he was hardly the sort one would associate with the spy trade, what with his tall, awkward frame, ill-fitting Harris tweed sport coat, shaggy gray hair, and round spectacles. Still, one had to be careful. No doubt some top-secret information about Operation Maranatha was stuffed inside this absurd teddy bear, and he was the courier.

The professor of classical Greek had been recruited in 1939 by the British Secret Intelligence Service as a cryptanalyst. After helping William Albright and the ULTRA team crack the Nazis’ secret Enigma codes, Prestwick had brought his formidable cipher and code-breaking skills to the Research and Analysis branch of the OSS, America’s fledgling spy agency. He later transferred to the agency’s Secret Intelligence section in order to serve as an OSS liaison with Britain’s Special Operations Executive, or SOE, created by Churchill “to coordinate all action by way of subversion and sabotage against the enemy.” That meant helping resistance movements in Nazi-occupied Europe and engaging in all sorts of splendid intrigues designed to “set Europe ablaze.” For a frustrated academic like Prestwick, itching for cloak-and-dagger action, it was the perfect sort of work, even if he was a deskbound case officer and not a field agent behind enemy lines.

Prestwick passed under the statue of Atlas in front of the 630 Fifth Avenue entrance, crossed the lobby, and stepped into the nearest elevator. Already he fantasized about the good news on Maranatha. It was his greatest “caper,” as he liked to call his operations, and he looked forward to celebrating that evening at the Stork Club. Maybe he’d win back some money at gin rummy from a certain air force colonel and then share highballs in the Cub Room with a certain lovely starlet. The band would strike up “That Old Black Magic,” and they’d dance the night away…

The offices of British Passport Control were on the thirty-sixth floor at the end of a deserted hallway. A New York police officer sat outside on a wooden chair, dozing off under the Times as Prestwick walked by. The front-page headlines reported that Axis forces in North Africa were on the eve of official surrender.

Inside the reception area, a young blonde in a short skirt smiled at the teddy bear and pushed a button beneath her desk. The buzzer unlocked the door to the office of Bill Stephenson, code name INTREPID, the agent who coordinated joint American OSS-British SOE operations from New York.

As soon as Prestwick stepped into Stephenson’s office, he could sense something was off. Somebody else was seated behind the spymaster’s desk with his back toward the door. A cloud of cigar smoke hovered over his bald head. When the chair turned, Prestwick found himself face-to-face with Winston Churchill. Prestwick’s jaw dropped.

“Don’t just stand there gaping, man,” said the British prime minister. “Come in and close the door.”

P restwick sat on the edge of his stiff chair. Across the desk, the great round face seemed to hover over the dark bow tie with white polka dots, disembodied from the prime minister’s navy blazer. Holding that blazer together over the expansive stomach was a single brass button. With each puff the great man took of his cigar, the button came alarmingly close to popping off. Prestwick wondered if it would be poor etiquette for him to duck should it fly toward his face.

“In less than eight weeks, the largest invasion force ever assembled in human history will land on the shores of Sicily,” Churchill began. “We are talking about more than five hundred thousand American and British troops.”

Churchill unrolled a large map of the Mediterranean across the top of the desk, placing the teddy bear as a weight on one corner. Over Nazi-occupied Europe, the prime minister had drawn the outline of a huge crocodile stretching from Spain in the west to Greece in the east.

“This is our first assault on Fortress Europe and the first big seaborne landing on a coast held by the enemy.”

Churchill thrust his Havana up the soft underbelly of the crocodile to make his point. His fingers were long and thin, almost delicate. This always surprised Prestwick, perhaps because his memories of their previous chats were invariably dominated by the prime minister’s gruffness.

“As this is precisely what the Germans are expecting, the Combined Chiefs of Staff asked the British SOE and the American OSS to come up with several deception operations designed to convince the Germans that Sicily is only a cover, that the bulk of the Allied invasion force will land in Greece. The idea is to force Hitler to spread his coastal defenses thinly rather than concentrate them on Sicily, our intended point of entry.”

None of this was news to Prestwick, and he wondered where the prime minister was going. “I believe I understand the fundamental concept, sir.”