Astronomy(9)

Schoenberg was back the next day with more cigarettes. Hope and Crosby opened her cell door and stood back while he arranged his paperwork for the day’s interview. They gave her a sorrowful look and then left her on her own. As guardian angels, these guys were washouts.

A rocket volley hit the tunnel about fifty yards from her cell. The sound was ear-shattering. The dust from the collapsed section nearly choked them. As it subsided, the darkness was filled with a lowing sound to make her skin crawl.

Susan tried out a new word she had heard during the night. She nodded toward the dark. “Is Malmagden going to unleash the Totenstürm?” she asked.

He looked at her sharply. “Where did you hear that word?”

Hope and Crosby had donated it to her. They had been hauling out her latrine bucket when a looping cry came up from some distant darkness. Their faces got so white they glowed in the dim light.

“Totenstürm,” Hope had said (or maybe it was Crosby). Crosby (or Hope) gave him a bad look and nodded toward Susan, as if to remind his compatriot they were still in the presence of the enemy.

She remembered all those dead soldiers being collected off the streets of Berlin.

She gave the two of them an even stare. “Totenstürm,” she said. “Army of the Dead?”

Each blamed the other for saying too much. They got into a shoving match, which escalated till it involved the contents of her latrine bucket. People were edgy down here, no question.

Herr Schoenberg sighed a sigh of futility. “The Totenstürm will not be unleashed,” he told her. “They are uncontrollable by anyone but Sturmbannführer Malmagden. And Herr Malmagden . . .” Schoenberg stared at the ceiling as another impact made the lights dance about. He looked terribly young and terribly frightened. “Herr Malmagden is beyond the reach of the Russian army now.”

“What happened to Malmagden?” she asked.

“An accident happened last night,” he said. “I know only a little. There was a research station at Faulkenberg Reservoir. Herr Malmagden was visiting—that’s where he has been the past three days. Apparently the entire lake is gone, hurrah! Stürmbannführer Kriene, the project director at Faulkenberg Reservoir, was found on the shore of the Saare River. I am told he is all but unrecognizable. Herr Malmagden . . .” Schoenberg seemed unsure how to finish.

“That was the big ace up your sleeves,” Susan realized. “That research station to the south.” Schoenberg was her kind of Gestapo agent. She’d learned more about the Nazis’ occult war effort from him than Walter Foley had learned from three years of covert operations.

But Schoenberg had one more secret. As far as Susan was concerned, this may have been the most terrible of all.

“I tracked Malmagden’s financial crimes as far as I could. They lead nowhere. He is paying himself with worthless Reichsmarks. He would not be doing such a thing even were he remaining in Berlin. Yet you claim he is trying to defect. That makes his financial crimes even more senseless.”

This awful feeling had been forming in the pit of her stomach since last night. When she was a teenager, Susan had done stuff like this to mean old ladies on her block. You sign them up to get junk mail that they don’t want. It’s amazing the things people will send you on the slightest pretext—life insurance, snow tires, the odd American agent. . . .

“Are you saying we were both conned into coming to Berlin?” She hoped she didn’t sound hysterical. “Just on a goof? On the off chance we might get this Malmagden killed?”

“Such things have happened before, for one officer to try and get another shot as a criminal or a traitor.”

I’m going to die down here, Susan said to herself, and it’s all for nothing.

Schoenberg had one of those faces made for misery. “I don’t deny that mistakes have been made.”

“But the joke’s on us, isn’t it.” She wanted to kick something. “What, are you all bored? Is this your idea of laughs? Do you people just do things like this?”

Schoenberg laughed bitterly. “Herr Malmagden is hardly blameless. Who do you think it was destroyed the Faulkenberg Reservoir research facility?” He had evidence for this too—a blueprint for the ceremonial tower beside the lake. Little X’s were drawn here and there. Susan had blown up enough buildings that she knew what she was looking at—pressure points.

Christ, she thought. We wasted our time invading this place. Leave them alone long enough, they take care of each other.

“It is my assumption that Stürmbannführer Kriene, the head of the Faulkenberg Reservoir project, brought us here to implicate Malmagden. These were the two most powerful men in Zentralbund der Geheimlehre’s Advanced Research Division. They hate each other—did hate each other,” he corrected himself.