Ian Tregillis - Bitter Seeds

In recent years, the trajectory of Marsh's life had orbited scenes of mass panic, of crowds bubbling with that barely contained animal instinct to flee, to lash out, to find cathartic release in the disorder of uninhibited emotion. He'd listened to its murmurings in Spanish, in French, in English. He'd walked amongst it in Spain, at the port of Barcelona; then again in France, where he heard it in the catch of people's voices and watched it in the way they moved too quickly; he'd smelled the sweat and fear again during the Blitz, in the shelters, and had seen the worry lines creasing every face in London. He had immersed himself in the panic, perhaps even indulged in it, at Paddington when he and Liv evacuated Agnes.

Thus, the scene outside Schutzstaffel headquarters held a surreal familiarity. The building itself, formerly the Prince Albert Hotel before Himmler commandeered it, was a four-story edifice that occupied most of the block. Here and there, hints of the building's old life could be seen in the reversed shadow of the old hotel sign on the weather-darkened granite, and in the clock atop the undulating cornices that overlooked the street. Marsh had seen the hotel only in photographs.

But the tension in people's voices as they barked out orders, the herky-jerky motions of their arms and legs as they hurried in and out of the building, the electric tingle of nervous energy: Marsh knew it well. Only the details differed. A constant stream of men flowed between the headquarters building and the line of trucks parked in front. Each man exited the building with an armload or hand truck of boxes, which he relinquished to other men loading the trucks. Everybody moved at a clip just below a dead run, just on the orderly side of chaos.

They're moving the files, Marsh realized. In case the Soviets take the city. Jerry doesn't want his operational records falling to the Communists any more than we do.

He watched the men hurrying into the building and rushing back out again with more crates. It all proceeded under the supervision of two officers who, with their steaming breath, suggested twin dragons looming overhead while medieval villagers scrambled to amass tribute.

Each load of boxes went to a different truck. Some, he imagined, were slated for destruction. But the most valuable information would be saved. Moved to bunkers, perhaps, or shipped out of the city ahead of the Soviets.

Somewhere in that mess resided the files that Marsh had come to destroy. The records of the Reichsbehorde fur die Erweiterung germanischen Potenzials, and the Institut Menschlichen Vorsprung before that, and perhaps even of the orphanage before that. These were some of the Reich's most precious secrets and its vision for the future. They'd be moved to the most secure location possible, preserved until the bitter end, defended against all comers. Especially saboteurs like Marsh.

But the scene gave him an idea.

Strictly speaking, his mission wasn't to destroy the files. His mission was to ensure they didn't fall into Soviet hands. The ideal solution would have been for Milkweed to seize them, but that had never received serious consideration, since Britain lacked an occupying force with which to capture Berlin.

But as he watched the boxes loaded onto the trucks, Marsh realized they didn't need an army to seize the files. All he had to do was determine where the files were going, which truck they occupied, and steal the truck.

He breathed deeply and disregarded the chill as he opened his coat, rolled down the collar, and strode toward the hubbub. He counted over a dozen trucks, their cargo beds in various states of loading. Some were nearly full. He had to move quickly before the records he sought were moved out.

He joined the stream of men entering and leaving the SS Haus, quickening his pace to match the sense of urgency that surrounded him. The subordinate officers occupied with carrying and loading the boxes paid him no heed, except for the handful who noticed his rank and paused for salutes. These he returned with the same desultory air he'd received from the colonel. Stay focused on your task, his body language said.

They didn't question him; this was the last place anybody would expect to find a British spy.

Marsh made it as far as the entrance when one of the supervising captains lifted an arm to block his passage. Marsh stopped short, nearly bumping the clipboard in the other man's outstretched hand.

“You're late,” he said. Condensation from his breath glistened in his eyebrows and eyelashes. He held the clipboard out to Marsh again. Marsh took the board and flipped through the pages.

It contained a nine-page list, each page filled with pairs of columns of numbers. One column referred to the crates, while the other referred to the trucks. It was the list that determined which boxes went into which trucks. But it didn't specify the contents of the crates.

“You were supposed to be here half an hour ago,” said the second officer. Whiteness caked one corner of his mouth, and his runny nose had coated his upper lip.

Marsh ignored them. He also shifted his stance slightly, turning his head and neck toward the men without taking his eyes off the list. He made a show of inspecting the loading manifest, slowly perusing the pages while he waited for the men to notices his wires.

His accusers fell quiet; Marsh let the silence stretch into awkwardness. The buzz of activity swirled around them.

When he finally looked up, Marsh saw the supervisors looking at his battery harness, and then at each other. As he'd hoped, the battery spoke for him. The wire snaking up his collar and into his hair made his point more effectively than any words could have. These men knew the significance of the battery, knew that it commanded respect. Marsh hoped they didn't look so closely as to notice the sweat trickling down his forehead, along his scalp, and down his collar.

Marsh cleared his throat. “I'm not here to relieve you,” he said, emphasizing relieve. True, as far as it goes, he thought. Now for the lie, and the gamble. He made an educated guess: “I'm here to escort all Reichsbehorde records to the Fuhrer's bunker.” He held up the clipboard, pointing at it. “Where are they?”

It worked.

The men looked at each other. “We only have what you see there, the crate numbers,” said one man. He nodded his head toward the former hotel building. “We don't load the crates. You'll have to ask inside.” He paused before he added, tentatively and uncertainly, “Sir.”

Marsh shoved the clipboard back at the first man, nudging him in the chest. “Carry on,” he said. He turned his back on them and went inside.

The Prince Albert Hotel had been built long before the Nazis' rise to power. The original design of the lobby reflected that different time, but it had been subverted into the architectural bastard child of Albert Speer and Heinrich Himmler. Marsh imagined thick rugs covering the marble and parquet floor in the wings of the lobby, oak and leather furniture arranged cozily around low tables and the large hearth opposite what must have been the concierge desk at one time. A nicer space than the Hotel Alexandria in Tarragona. But now it was all gone, stripped down to bare marble polished to shining beneath the vaulted ceiling and the unblinking stares of bas-relief plaster ea gles. There was no furniture, nothing to suggest comfort or welcoming, and certainly nothing to encourage loitering. The concierge station had been ripped out and replaced with a utilitarian desk, behind which sat an SS-Unterschar -fuhrer, a sergeant. Men streamed around him as they passed through the lobby, the rubber tires of their hand trucks squeaking on the marble.

Marsh stood inside Schutzstaffel headquarters feeling like Daniel in the lions' den. Yet nobody stopped him; nobody paid him any attention at all. It was as though the battery harness had rendered him invisible, like the blond woman in the Tarragona filmstrip. He wondered, fleetingly, where she was, and if she had participated in the decimation of Milkweed's strike teams back in December.