General Paul Brasch.

Stangl wrote that the Gestapo had been covertly observing Brasch for six months, on suspicion that he had made contact with some enemy agents. One man in particular had been of interest to them, but had evaded capture on a number of occasions. He had been killed in Paris on May 8, just a few streets away from where Brasch had been dining with Oberstgruppenfьhrer Oberg. General Brasch had been observed loitering in the area afterward, and approached a number of Wehrmacht personnel who survived a blast they presumed had been triggered by the unnamed spy. He showed great interest in the details of the incident in which the man and many others had perished.

Thus it was decided to pick him up for routine questioning, but when he was approached by two Gestapo men, Brasch had killed one and crippled the other. He was now on the run, somewhere in Paris.

Brasch! Of all people. Could this day get any worse? Brasch had been intimately involved in some of the most critical research-and-development programs that had grown out of the Emergence. Indeed, he was there from the very first moments, having been sent to Japan on what was first assumed to be a wild goose chase. He had been vetted and vetted again by the SS. His family had been killed in a British bombing raid. The fьhrer had personally decorated him!

It could not be.

As he held the sheaf of paper with a bloodless, shaking hand, however, the Reichsfьhrer-SS began to see the outlines of a conspiracy. Brasch’s dead son had been T4, a deformed child who would have been put down were it not for his father’s prominence. Brasch had enjoyed unrestricted access to the Sutanto’s files in Hashirajima and presumably could have learned of the T4 program. But then again, these suspicions had all been voiced early on, and Brasch had been attended for weeks by both covert and overt SS minders. They had never seen any evidence to suggest that he was anything but a patriot.

Himmler pulled out a pad of paper. He began to jot down notes furiously, instructing Stangl to continue the search for Brasch, even if it meant leaving agents behind in Paris to look for him after the city fell to the Allies. Then he scratched out “after” and wrote “should the city fall to the Allies.” It would not do to be seen as a defeatist.

He further instructed the Gestapo chief to cross-reference with Brasch’s work history all major incidents of unexplained sabotage, equipment failure, or even apparent Allied intelligence successes-such as the counterambush of the Luftwaffe raid on Patton’s Third Army. His writing grew spiky as his heart beat faster. In a way he hoped this was a misunderstanding. A coincidence. Because if Brasch had sold them out, they were in even worse trouble than he’d thought. The Allies would know details of some of the most sensitive weapons programs in the Third Reich.

They would even have inside information on the broad outlines of the German atomic program.

Oh, this was very, very bad.

The crackle and pop of gunfire was a constant across the city, like traffic noise or birdsong in happier times. As the sporadic clashes grew into one long battle, Brasch began to think the French might do themselves more harm in the Liberation than the Germans had done during the Occupation.

He twitched aside the stiff, sun-faded curtain and risked a peek outside. He was hiding, for the moment, in a hotel off the Rue Houdon, although to call it a hotel invested the establishment with more dignity than it really deserved. It was the sort of flophouse where tight-fisted Austrian noncoms or petit bureaucrat collaborators might have rented a room by the hour, paying a few francs for a sagging, crusty mattress and an even saggier, crustier companion. The whores were still here, but the trade had dried up, so to speak. The Wehrmacht and the SS seemed to be in general retreat; all that remained were a few thousand of the hardier, dumber Frenchmen who had thrown in their lot with the fascists.

He watched a couple of them who were hiding at the end of the pinched, cobblestone alley that ran between Rue Houdon and the Villa de Guelma, beneath his window. A man and woman, both wearing German helmets but otherwise dressed in civilian clothes. Some sort of fascist militia, he supposed. They nervously checked their weapons and ammunition at a small sandbag barricade. They had just one rifle between them, an 1898 vintage Mauser, but had somehow managed to find a whole box of Stielhandgranate, long-handled grenades. The man was sitting on a chair he’d obviously stolen from a nearby cafй or strip club, his head resting in his hands, his body completely still. The woman, clothed incongruously in a thin cotton dress, odd socks, tennis shoes, and a black bucket helmet, seemed animated by all the energy that had left his body. She held the rifle, checking the load every few minutes, poking her head around the corner into the main street, whipping it back like a frightened deer, and spinning around nervously as though someone had just snuck up behind her. She would start to crouch, then stand bolt upright, back away from the sandbags, then shuffle toward them again. The only sign that her companion was still alive was an occasional shake of the head.

Brasch was sure they would both be dead by the end of the week, if not the day.

The cease-fire among the Resistance, the few functioning elements of the French state, and the German rear guard had frayed as the Allies pushed toward the city. Some fighting had flared as individual units of SS engineers had tried to set off demolition charges at selected sites around the city. The Louvre was a smoking ruin, its artworks looted before the building had been destroyed. Gone, too, the Arc de Triomphe. But attempts to bring down the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame had failed when the engineers were attacked by an odd alliance of Communist guerrillas and paramilitary gendarmes. Most of the city’s police force was on strike, probably working on their excuses for having cooperated so closely with the Germans, and the Communists were in a frenzy of excitement at word of the return of the Soviet Union to the fray. As Brasch had slipped through city, just ahead of his pursuers, he had seen dozens of posters calling for a workers’ uprising in solidarity with the approaching Red Army.

As far as he could tell, most Parisians were only too glad that the Americans and their own Free French forces would arrive long before the Reds.

The whores in the sitting room downstairs swapped rumors concerning the advance, some of them insisting that the Americans were already at the edge of the suburbs. But Brasch knew far more than they did. He could hear the percussion of artillery and heavy bombing in the distance. Probably around Chartres, an hour away. And he’d been able to access Fleetnet via his flexipad for most of the past twenty-four hours. Drones had taken up station above the city, probably in support of Special Forces already inside, some of whom were coming to extract him. He could follow the battle quite closely, and he knew for certain that the Free French First Armored under Leclerc was punching through the last line of defense, and should enter Paris within hours.

His problem was that he might not have hours left. Even though the occupying German troops were almost gone, he’d been chased across half the city by at least six separate squads of Gestapo. They must be desperate to capture him, he reasoned, because the tipping point was fast approaching when the Parisians’ fear would give way to a savage hunger for revenge. It would be made all the worse by self-loathing as the French came to terms with the last two years. Time could not be reversed like a vid file. Many had not just served the interests of Nazi Germany but done so with great zeal, especially in the prosecution of the Reich’s genocidal Final Solution. There would come a heavy reckoning for that.