The figure swam in and out of focus, but the black uniform of an SS officer was unmistakable.

Fuck it.

Mьller cursed his bad luck. He was wearing a civilian jacket over his gore-stained Luftwaffe captain’s uniform. In his breast pocket was a British flexipad, and he was heading toward the most valuable spy the Allies had in Nazi Germany. This was not going to end well.

“Resistance,” he coughed as the SS man ran up and grabbed his arms to steady him. He had been very close to toppling over.

“What happened?” the man demanded. Mьller recognized him as a Hauptsturmfьhrer. A captain. A definite buffer existed around them now, a circle about twenty meters in diameter into which none of the locals would dare step. They all found some reason to cross to the other side of the street.

“Resistance,” Mьller repeated. “Three of them. Back at the Rue la Bruyere. I killed them.”

“I don’t doubt it,” his would-be savior said, supporting most of his weight. “We must get you to an aid station. Quickly, come this way.”

The man began to force Mьller back the way he had just come. There was an aid station two blocks down. He attempted to resist, but his helper was too strong.

“No, this way, Herr Kapitдn,” he insisted. “You are in shock. You need to come with me-let me carry you.”

Finally Mьller allowed himself to fall over the other’s shoulder, his arm around the man’s neck. He let his body go limp, allowing his full weight to burden the SS officer, who grunted a little with the effort. Mьller let himself be carried away from his objective, acting in character, cursing the Resistance, vowing revenge, demanding that that SS hunt down those who were responsible.

“But you said you killed them,” his rescuer grunted.

A wet, wounded chuckle bubbled up out of Mьller’s throat. “So I did.”

Then he drove his fighting knife deep into the man’s sternum, twisting and ripping up and out. The screech of pain became confused with the cries of onlookers, who could not believe what they were seeing as Mьller suddenly locked up his victim’s head, using the arm he had draped over the shoulders, before slitting his throat from ear to ear. The man’s screams were cut off as Mьller severed the windpipe. The body dropped with a sick thud as the head hit the pavement.

Mьller’s world tilted then, and threatened to fall out from under him. He let his momentum carry him into the road, where he stopped a velo-taxi, one of the faintly ridiculous three-wheeled, pedal-powered cabs that had taken over the city during the Occupation. The driver attempted to swerve around him, but a shot from Mьller’s pistol pulled him up.

A shrill whistle sounded in the distance, and he thought he could hear hobnailed boots hammering toward him. He half lunged, half fell into the passenger’s seat.

“Just get me up the road,” he croaked in his passable French.

“B-but…” The driver tried to stammer out some excuse, but a wave of the pistol set him to his job. They lurched away just as rifle fire cracked past them.

“They will kill me,” the driver protested.

“No, I will kill you if you don’t hurry up. Just to the next corner, and then you can get out. I’ll shoot you in the ass if you like, to prove that you were hijacked.”

“To prove I was what?”

“Just fucking pedal.”

More bullets whistled past, some of them sparking off the cobblestones and shattering shop windows, sending the native Parisians scurrying for cover. More bullets chewed great chunks out of the little wooden passenger’s cabin. Mьller painfully forced himself to twist around in the seat.

About two hundred meters back a detachment of German soldiers had outrun a couple of gendarmes and were taking aim.

They weren’t going to make it.

Crack!

The top of the velo-taxi driver’s head flew off in a fantail of blood and gray matter. Immediately they decelerated, and Mьller allowed himself to roll out of the cab onto the hard stone roadway. A bullet struck him a glancing blow on the shoulder, knocking him forward. He managed to scramble a few more meters as he hauled out the flexipad.

No signal lock.

Crack!

An enormous iron fist slammed into him, bringing darkness.

He came to, expecting to find himself in a Gestapo cell.

But he was still in Paris, on the street. The pedicab driver’s body was just a few feet away, gushing blood like a ruptured pipeline. A squad of German infantry had surrounded him, their guns leveled at his head.

He blinked slowly and his head swam.

“What have we here. A spy? A Resistance pig playing dress-up. A traitor?”

An officer was speaking, advancing on him. Mьller realized he was still holding the precious flexipad in his outstretched hand. He tried to get to his knees, but the Wehrmacht officer, a lieutenant, sailed in and launched a vicious snap kick at his ribs. His inserts protected him from the worst of the pain, but he felt at least three ribs break as he flew over onto his back and rolled another half a meter away, ending facedown in a puddle of mud.

The pad began to beep.

It had locked on to Brasch’s device and initiated a linkup. The file transfer began.

It was complete within half a second.

“What the hell is that?” the lieutenant demanded.

Mьller coughed up a thick blood clot.

“That is the end of the world,” he said, rolling on top of the flexipad with the last of his energy and triggering the explosive weave vest he routinely wore under whatever disguise his mission required.

Everyone within thirty meters was atomized by the blast.

“What the hell was that?” Oberg asked as the rumble shook the crystalware on their table at Maxim’s.

Brasch had no idea, but he instantly assumed something had gone wrong with Mьller. There was no reason to think so, really. Bombs were constantly going off in Paris. The Resistance had been tutored by instructors familiar with insurgencies from the far future that had paralyzed much more formidable opponents than the Nazis. It might be a truck bomb twenty-five kilometers away, or a suitcase bomb in a cafй or bistro favored by the Germans. It might even be one of the Existentialists, seeking vengeance for the murder of Sartre and de Beauvoir by blowing himself up in a brothel favored by the occupying forces. Everybody feared being caught up in one of their mad attacks. It was said that the last thing you ever heard was the crazed existentialist screaming “To do is to be!” before he triggered his suicide device.

Brasch stood up and pushed aside the drapes that covered the window nearest their table. He had to press his face right up to the glass, but in doing so he could make out the telltale signs of a detonation a few blocks away.

His stomach turned over.

“An existentialist,” he sighed, not believing it for a second.

Something had gone wrong. He could sense it down in his core.

“Madmen,” Oberg hissed. “Cowards, all of them. If only there were some way to stop them. To detect them before they set themselves off,” he complained.

“As I understand it, no foolproof solution was ever found in the future,” Brasch commented. “When a man is willing to die to harm his enemies, there is always a good chance of taking some of them with him.”

“Pah!” spat the SS commandant. “When will these bastards accept that they are beaten? You know the most frustrating thing about this, Brasch. It’s that we cannot identify the bombers postmortem. Believe me, if that were possible we’d thin out the ranks of their recruits. Execute every last one of their friends and relatives. Then they mightn’t be so enthusiastic about blowing themselves up.”

Brasch returned to his seat, itching with the desire to take out his flexipad and see whether his data burst had come through. He pushed at an unfinished plate of boeuf bourguignon with his heavy gilded fork. “A lot of money is going into DNA research.” He shrugged. “Eventually it will help, and then we will have the ability to trace back to the culprits and take the appropriate measures.”