Robert Butler - The Empire of Night

“Most of the German high command is critical of the Kaiser.”

“Willie’s soft on the Brits.”

Jeremy nodded. “Notwithstanding, he’s duly tough after the fact. He never dreamed his U-boats would catch a target like the Lusitania . No one really did. But he was keenly vigorous in defense of its sinking.”

“So Bauer and Stockman figure they can safely act on their own, as long as they pull it off.”

“If you listen to Germans argue with each other,” Jeremy said, “no one is ever wrong about anything. Collectively too. If the poison gas bomb goes off and England effectively suffers, then the High Command certainly was right all along. Every one of them, from the Kaiser on down.”

“This makes sense of the tower at Stockman House,” I said. “The wind studies. They were thinking about poison gas in British streets.”

“My other bit fits as well,” Jeremy said. “I decided FVFB had to be comparable to Krupp. I just couldn’t sort things out in my head from the companies I knew. So I consulted the Berlin Stock Exchange. Farbenfabriken Vormals Friedrich Bayer. Pharmaceuticals. Dyes. Chemicals.”

“I think we know what they make in Kalk,” I said.

“Did Madam Cobb persuade Stockman to let her go along?”

“I persuaded him on her behalf, I think.”

“And you?”

“Not invited.”

“We need to invite ourselves,” Jeremy said.

At this, we smoked for a few moments.

Across the street was the hotel where another identity awaited me behind the baseboards of a wardrobe. Colonel Klaus von Wolfinger. I’d already shaved for him.

“Time to bluff,” I said.

“This is good advice.”

“It was yours.”

“I am never wrong,” he said.

“Since you’re so German, can your people fit you out as an officer? We’re talking about getting very close to an army base.”

“Yes.”

“Trask has me set up as a colonel attached to the Foreign Office,” I said. “Secret service.”

“Your uniform complete?”

“The only officer headgear I could pack was a crusher,” I said. “Can you get me a peaked field cap?”

“Size, if I have a choice?”

“Seven, British,” I said.

“When does Stockman leave?”

“In about thirty-six hours.”

“With that box, they have to be driving.”

“As much as I’d relish the irony,” I said, “I don’t think your Ford will pass for a German staff car.”

“I can arrange a car. But the people I draw on for support are all of them around Berlin. In Spich we’ll be on our own. Any special needs you can anticipate?”

“In other words, what’s our plan,” I said.

“In other words.”

I thought of what we knew about Albert and about Spich and about his wooden crate. What the likelihoods were.

Jeremy said, “I suppose the argument could be made that we simply need a bullet. For Stockman.”

I shook my head no . “We let the boxes go in order to keep us in the game. And because those presumed prototypes are replaceable. The plans are somewhere. Several somewheres, I’m sure. But Albert’s replaceable too, at this point. His work is done. The Zepps and the gas and the shell design already exist. What you learned about Bauer is the thing. We need to interfere in a striking enough way to prevent the maverick attack and also openly discredit the attempt. We need to get the half-British Kaiser’s attention. The only cruelty he’ll disavow is failed cruelty.”

Jeremy nodded. “So what do you need?”

I was improvising now. Without a real plan. But from the realities I’d just voiced, there was a basic act that seemed to be called for. Indeed, I could think of no other.

I said, “I don’t know exactly how to employ it, without our knowing Spich, but I think we need a bomb of our own. A portable one.”

He thought a moment. About either what I had in mind or how to get one.

In case it was the former, I said, “If we can blow up the Zepp with Stockman’s untested shell armed, either on the ground or very shortly into the flight, we can spectacularly poison an air base inside the Fatherland. The whole maverick plan will come out and look bad.”

“I can arrange this,” Jeremy said.

“And a dispatch case to fit the thing,” I said. “I’d need to carry it close.”

He dropped half his cigarette at his feet and stubbed it out. “I’ll pick you up tomorrow at six. Here at the Baden. Dress like you are now and bring what you need for the south.”

Jeremy pulled his pack of Murads from his coat pocket. He handed them to me. “In case you can’t find Turkish tobacco in the hotel.”

I took them. “Thanks.”

Maybe it was the moment of leave-taking after a serious talk that suddenly brought this to mind, but I thought of Stockman in the Adlon bar.

I said, “That drink I had with Albert the first night in Berlin. He criticized the Zeppelins for bringing only isolated disruptions. That’s what I was focusing on. But it was his other criticism that really mattered. Commonplace .”

“This is anything but that,” Jeremy said.

“Stockman is a terrorist,” I said.

And I was letting him sleep with my mother.

When I got back to the Adlon, there was a note waiting for me, in a sealed hotel envelope slipped under the door. My mother had simply written Hotel Alten-Forst. Spich. Its brevity, its mode of delivery, the risks and suspicions of yesterday early morning, her place now, near the center of Stockman’s plans, my exclusion from those plans: all this meant I should not— dared not — see her again before the time of my rendezvous with Jeremy.

Would I have tried to talk her out of all this? I wished I’d told her about the poison gas. But maybe it was better she didn’t know. She was committed to her role. The most dangerous thing for her now would be to try to withdraw from him. Still. As a woman, would she continue to love a known terrorist? As a son, how could there be even a match-spark of doubt about the answer to that? But there was.

Spich.

I’d brought my Gladstone to the Adlon. I gathered the things I needed for travel and packed them. I stepped off the elevator and paused at the mezzanine balustrade and looked for Herr Wagner.

He’d kept his distance since I’d confronted him in this very spot, but I didn’t want the Gladstone to set off any alarms in his head. He was standing just beyond the reception lounge, in front of the Palm Court. He was watching someone cross the lobby. I followed his gaze to a small man, dressed in a dark, three-piece suit. A Far East Asian. Wagner openly observed the man as he marched with clear and oblivious purpose into the Palm Court. Wagner turned as if to follow.

I beat it quick down the stairway but emerged cautiously from behind the reception desk. Wagner was indeed following the Asian man, out the doors to the Goethe Garden. I strode away in the other direction, across the lobby and the vestibule platform, and then I was spinning through the revolving door onto Unter den Linden, feeling happier with each step to be leaving the Adlon behind.

I returned to the Hotel Baden and stopped inside the front door and asked the Hausmeister where Spich was. He touched the tip of his nose in thought and then led me to the front desk and a book of maps.

Kalk was just across the Rhine from Cologne; Spich was just nine miles farther south.

When I stepped into Jeremy’s Ford in front of the hotel the next evening, Spich was still nagging at me in vague familiarity.

As soon as I’d closed the door, Jeremy throttled up the T and we drove off, and he said, “I didn’t mean to be mysterious last night. I’m taking you to my mother’s house in Spandau.”