“Sorry,” he said again. “What were we talking about?”

His lawyer, Ms. O’Brien, looked exasperated, as usual. He often thought that uptight was her natural state of being. Their relationship had changed some since the early days, though, when she’d acted more like his drill sergeant than his employee. O’Brien was a player in her own right now. Probably one of the richest women in America, if you didn’t count heiresses. And he didn’t. They tended to be stuck-up bitches who wouldn’t give him the time of day. But as his business got bigger and he grew more and more powerful, she came to…what? Admire him, he guessed. She was only a little more deferential than she had been, but if he didn’t know any better he’d say she almost respected him for the way he’d handled the last few years.

“We were discussing your testimony in the Rockefeller suit, Mr. Davidson,” she said. “It’s important. You can’t slide through this one on a boyish grin and southern charm. These guys are out to snap you like a twig.”

He shrugged. “Assholes like this been beating on me since-”

“Oh please. Let’s not do your E! channel bio today. Let’s work through the brief I zapped over. You did read it, didn’t you? They’re not going to let you wear your Oakleys in court, so I can’t send you notes up on the stand.”

“Yeah, yeah, I read it,” he grumbled. Most of what he did nowadays seemed to be reading and signing big piles of paper. Most of it he didn’t understand. He preferred sitting down with a couple of guys over a beer and talking shit through like men. He was a good listener. You had to be when you’d made your living as a grifter.

Ms. O’Brien started in on him like a prosecutor going after an ax murderer. It’d been a little scary the first time she’d done it, but she explained it was just like in the navy when he’d trained for war. The courtroom was no different. He had an enemy that was coming after him, trying to destroy him. He had to be ready. She kept firing questions at him. Real curly ones, too, and he practiced saying as little as possible that’d get him in trouble. The only real joy of it was contemplating what a bloody pulp Ms. O’Brien was going to reduce those Rockefeller assholes to when they got onto the stand. She had a well-earned reputation for brutality in the courtroom. It was partly why he expected this bullshit case to settle, and why only part of his mind was really on it. Another part, the old Slim Jim, was thinking about the party he was gonna throw in his penthouse over the weekend. He had half of Hollywood coming over to rip it up in his rooftop pool and artificial beach. They were the only original features he’d kept when he bought the Oviatt Building. Everything else-the Lalique chandeliers, the art deco bar, the exotic woods in the floors and walls-he’d had torn out and replaced with the closest facsimiles of twenty-first materials his personal designers could find. Ms. O’Brien had been aghast and argued vehemently against the “vandalism,” as she called it, but Slim Jim wasn’t having a bar of it. The next century had been very kind to him, whereas this one had done nothin’ but kick his ass from the moment he’d crawled out of the cradle.

And anyway, 21C was the hottest style in modern architecture. Nobody built old anymore.

“Are you concentrating, Mr. Davidson?”

“Nope,” he admitted.

“Are you thinking about your party this weekend?” she asked, putting down the flexipad she’d been holding.

“Uh-huh.”

“You thinking about copping a blow job from Hedy Lamarr again?”

He grinned. “No, but now that you mention it-”

“Well, knock it off!” she barked. “Because if you can’t, the only blow jobs you’re gonna be getting will be from the jailhouse cat in a federal pen.”

Chastened, he apologized and tried to focus on the questions. But before long he was daydreaming about Hedy Lamarr again. And splitting beers with Ernest Hemingway. And sailing with Errol Flynn. And playing poker with Artie Snider, the war hero he’d met at a Kennedy fund-raiser. They were all great fucking guys. And unlike those society snobs, they didn’t look down on him for what he’d once been.

It was no longer safe at the Wolfschanze.

Indeed, there was no Wolfschanze to speak of-not now. Allied bombers had struck there in a massive raid just three months ago. Had the fьhrer not been delayed in Berlin, he might even have been killed. More than a thousand men of the SS had died on that day.

Himmler rubbed the hot, grainy feeling from his eyes. This bunker offered none of the comforts of Rastenburg, but it had one major advantage. The British and Americans did not know of its existence. Or at least he thought they didn’t. One could never be sure these days…

The Reichsfьhrer-SS grunted. It was pointless trying to second-guess one’s opponent, especially in wartime. The enemy rarely did what you wanted. You could study them, and plan for contingencies based on their capabilities, but once you began fantasizing that you actually knew their intentions…well, that was a folly for decadent novelists, not for statesmen.

The rough concrete walls of the underground bunker oozed with condensation. Here in the map room, it wasn’t so bad. Fans turned constantly to suck the stale atmosphere away and drag fresh air down from the surface. But there were places in this complex-as in all the subterranean hideouts in which they had been forced to take sanctuary-where he found himself close to passing out, so vile were the stench and the heat. Every breath tasted as though it had already been inhaled a hundred times over. Fastidious in his personal habits, Heinrich Himmler found the press of unwashed humanity one of the hardest burdens he had been forced to bear in this conflict.

Thirty or more people were crammed into the map room, an area not much bigger than a sizable parlor. The overcrowding was made worse by the huge map table, which dominated at least half the floor. A large, flat televiewing screen hung from the wall, displaying much the same information as the little wooden blocks that were being pushed around the table, but it wasn’t updated nearly as frequently. Even with the bounty they had taken off the Dessaix and the “Indonesian” ships, the Reich simply did not have the Allies’ ability to monitor the “battlespace,” as they called it.

Gцbbels had come up with a suitably Teutonic alternative to the Anglo-Saxon phrase-Kriegsgebiet, the realm of battle. And standing by Hitler’s side as the fьhrer marshaled his response to this violation of the Reich, Himmler could appreciate the correctness of the phrase. Battle was not joined across a simple field, as it had been in the days of Bismarck. No, it was being fought on land, in the air, on and under the sea, where millions contested the future of the world, in blood and iron.

The mood in the room was tense. They had known this was coming, since their own lunge across the channel was foiled. The memory still gave him shudders. The fьhrer’s screaming. Gцring getting drunk and becoming more dangerous as his vaunted jet fighters were scythed out of the sky. Gцbbels saying nothing, his eyes sinking back into those darkened pools. The military high command making one excuse after another. One fool of an admiral had even dared to question the wisdom of launching the operation in the first place. He, of course, was no longer numbered among the living. Indeed, a great many of the men who had been in the war room at Rastenburg had received their final rewards: a firing squad and an unmarked grave.

This would be different, however. He breathed slowly through his mouth, lest a sudden gulp give away how nervous he was. The fьhrer ordered the Second SS Panzer Corps moved up out of Le Mans. A moment later he countermanded the order. No one said anything.