The Furies

PISTOLS AT A COLD DAWN

I stuck the Karkhov boots in the back of a cupboard, folded away my SS uniform, and changed into a sports jacket and trousers bought in prewar London, in Jermyn Street, on a holiday with Papa and Bruv. The jacket was tweed and cut in a style that was unmistakably English, not the Bavarian Tracht that was the favorite of patriotic Nazis. I tried the outrageous yellow tie with elephants, but didn't have the nerve for it, and I took it off and kept my shirt open-necked. The outfit had been with me from Poland, stuffed in a duffel bag, and it was badly creased. It had crossed Russia with me almost to the Urals, returned to Berlin, and come with me down to this mysterious place. I'd worn it twice in three years. The civilian in the long mirror looked at me; he marveled at the transformation of the external man, and wondered about the inner one. Could I get back to the way things were? Or was brutalization for life? I didn't know. But I was determined to let my hair grow, get rid of the bullet head.

It occurred to me that I hadn't eaten for almost a day. I wandered along the corridors in the direction of the refectory. Wandered! I smiled at the memory of my training sergeant. What are you, Krafft, a girlie? Don't mince, march!

The refectory had a lingering smell of bratwurst sausage, and the sound of clattering dishes was coming from the direction of the kitchen. Two women, a man, and what looked like a schoolboy, all in civilian clothes, were still there at one of the tables. The older man was thirtyish, nearly bald with round spectacles and a small, round face. He reminded me of my old music teacher. He stood up and extended his hand. "Max Krafft? I'm Bartholomew Bosch, a name that is easily remembered. This is your first day here, I gather."

"That's right." I've seen you somewhere.

"I'd like to introduce the ladies first, Edith Zimmerman and Daniela Bauer."

"I'm a chemist," said Edith Zimmerman. She had a slightly pointed nose, a small, prim mouth, and short, almost boyish black hair.

"I'm a mathematician, for my sins. And we've met." Daniela Bauer smiled. It was a mischievous smile, broad-mouthed and exposing perfect teeth. I didn't know what to make of it.

"And this is Willi Webber. Your factotum."

The schoolboy blushed, half stood, sat down, stood up, and sat down again.

A middle-aged, stooped woman, thin as a rake, approached and stood deferentially next to me, just over my shoulder.

"They don't know much German," Edith said. "There's bratwurst and dumplings, or you can have steak. I think there's trout on the menu."

"I'll have the steak." The thin woman understood, half bowed, and headed for the kitchen. I said, "Presumably I'm dreaming."

Edith Zimmerman swirled sugar at the bottom of her coffee cup. "The staff here are Slavs and Poles. They're here to serve us. We're not expected to fraternize with them in any way."

"Have you seen where they sleep?" Daniela said. "They'll freeze to death in that laundry."

"So far as I can see there will be just six or seven of us." Edith spoke in a precise, clipped voice, like a spinstery school-teacher. "We're all overhead, on the first floor. There's a second floor above that, which will belong to the technicians when they arrive. The kitchen staff sleep in the laundry and the guards, when they arrive, will have a novitiates' dormitory. We're protected by a full brigade, would you believe?"

"They're arriving now. What's the chain of command? What exactly is expected of us, and what's the time scale?"

Bosch said, "I think we're someone's bright idea."

"Goering's?" I wondered.

"This has the hallmark of Heinrich Himmler." Crazy science. Everyone knew what Daniela meant but nobody was about to spell it out. Not until we knew one another a lot better.

"I think it's up to us to do whatever we're going to do in the biochemical line," Edith said. "So long as we produce a superweapon that will finish the war."

"Is that all?" Webber was risking a flippant remark. Edith gave him an icy stare, and his cheeks flushed a deep crimson.

I said, "Willi, I want to talk to you about that. Do you care if we skip lunch?"

"No, no, not at all."

Bosch said, "Get the kitchen to bring you sandwiches. So far as I can see we'll be living like Eastern potentates here for the duration."

"You're our procurements officer, right? What was your army rank?"

"Major. In civilian life I was a professor of literature at Leipzig."

"A very young professor. That's where I've seen you. I was a student there. You outrank me on all counts, Professor."

"But now I fetch things for you."

"I'd like some airguns and plasticine, please."

The air pistols and rifles arrived at dawn the next day, and I had to admire the little professor's entrepreneurial skills. Presumably some Munich sports shop had been opened up for the occasion. The plasticine arrived at lunchtime, delivered by a motorcycle courier. Now all I needed was a place to fire them.

I scouted the convent once more. I remembered the stone steps; they led down to a warren of cellars barred by several heavy locked doors. It was damp, dismal, and cold. I'd had enough of damp, dismal, and cold. I took wooden spiral stairs up to the minaret and walked around the little parapet, disturbing pigeons. There was ice in the air, and the mountains were now hidden by heavy cloud, a reminder that Alpine weather could be treacherous. At ground level, chatter was coming from the library. A life-like statue stood in a dark corner. As my eyes adapted I almost jumped. It was wearing the uniform of an SS major. I gave him a smart salute and got an icy stare in return. The hell with you.

The kitchen. It was brightly lit, warm, and had lots of space. Half a dozen Slavs of both sexes were scrubbing and clearing. I chased them out. They seemed exhausted and glad to go.

I collected an armful of air pistols, rifles, and slabs of brightly colored plasticine from the refectory and carried them through to a kitchen bench. I summoned Willi Webber from the library. Now I pummeled a slab of pink plasticine, turning it into a slab about three centimeters on a side and two deep. It stuck easily on the whitewashed wall. I was ready to win the war.

I started with the lowest-power air pistol, resting my elbows on a table and pointing the gun at the little slab of plasticine. The pellet smacked into it with a satisfying plop. Willi Webber stuck a matchstick into the tunnel so created. "Six millimeters, Herr Krafft," he said, making the very first penciled entry in a hard-backed notebook.

"What's the pellet speed, do you think?"

"I've no idea, Herr Krafft."

"If you call me Herr Krafft again I'll shoot you. The name is Max. Would you say a hundred meters a second?"

"Shoot the gun horizontally, Herr Krafft. See how far the pellets fall over a fixed distance and work out the speed from that."

"Good idea. If I aim between your eyes and hit you in the balls, it's a slow mover."

Willi risked a grin. It was a big step for him.

By three o'clock that morning, with a variety of air pistols and rifles, and by freezing plasticine to various degrees of hardness, we were able to draw up a simple table. Cold plasticine was best; the pellets neither bounced back out nor penetrated too deeply, giving them too leisurely a stop. Four degrees Celsius, it turned out, was about right. For that temperature, drooping with tiredness, we were able to summarize the night's work:

Now all we needed were some bugs to put in the cavities of the pellets, and some way to count the proportion that survived being slammed into the cold plasticine. For that, I would have to collaborate with Edith Zimmerman, a maiden as icy as the plasticine we'd been handling.

The pellet speeds were far too low. They were slamming into the plasticine at a few hundred meters a second, whereas the blast from dynamite would hit bacteria at four thousand meters a second. And what was it that would kill the bugs, anyway? Not velocity, but maybe the acceleration? So far we had attained twenty-five thousand g, enough to turn a human being into fine mince, but what would it to do a microorganism? Or maybe the killing factor was the rate of change of acceleration, like the jerk you got when a car smashed into a wall? It was all unexplored territory! Still, we'd made a start. And there was the thrill of doing something new, of going where nobody else had been, an addictive drug you won't understand if you haven't sampled it.

At the end of my first working day in the convent, with a glorious pink-and-yellow dawn breaking over the pinnacles, I decided to give my nun a name: Sister Lucy. I slid between Sister Lucy's sheets and wished her good night with a feeling of contentment. In my mind, she was beginning to resemble the enigmatic Daniela Bauer.

I drifted off, listening to the wonderful silence of the mountains. Maybe I was going to win the greatest conflict in history with a few air pistols, maybe not. Either way, it was a lot better than the Eastern Front.

WARTIME CHOCOLATE

"Sheep's blood. Horse's blood. Also some fungi with obscure names — I'll write them down for you. And chocolate. And that's it."

Bosch skimmed over his scribbled notes. "Blood and fungus I can get you, Edith, but I may have to justify the chocolate. Belgian or what?"

"Ground-up cocoa beans, you idiot." She decided to laugh, to show that she had recognized a joke.

More scribbling. "What do you want with this stuff?"

Edith, Daniela, Bosch, and I were in the north wing parlor. Hess had been true to his word — wartime austerity stopped outside the convent. Comfortable leather armchairs were scattered around. There were art deco lamps on antique tables; paintings with a Slavic look about them lined the walls, and there were even a few "degenerate" paintings from twentieth-century artists. The floor was covered by rugs from India and Persia, some of them with burn marks as if they had lain in front of domestic fires. Either the nuns had lived a life of remarkable opulence, or it had all been plundered from the occupied territories by the Fat One. Or maybe by Rosenberg, the party philosopher and Goering's rival in pillage.

Sheets of smoke hovered over us, the product of an early-morning cigarette dangling elegantly between Edith's fingers and drooping ash. She explained, "I mix them with various compounds to create nutrients for different bacteria. We end up with stuff that looks like jelly. These jellies get spread thinly in petri dishes on a tray. The tray is kept sterile and warm. The bugs, being cozy and well fed, multiply to the point where we can see them under a microscope. If a lot have survived, the colony will grow quickly. If there are just a few, we'll see little colored spots, tiny colonies that will take time to grow and merge into a single big colony on the dish. Is that clear?"

"It will no doubt become so, in time," said Bosch, adding real sugar to his coffee. "Have you decided on a laboratory?"

"I'll take the carpentry workshops upstairs."

"Very well. I'll have them cleared out and your benches set up there." Bosch checked the list. "You said two incubation chambers and four microscopes."

"Especially the new fluorescence microscope developed by Dr. Auguste Hirt at Strasbourg. It's state-of-the-art."

"Thy will be done."

"And I'll need at least three lab assistants. People who know how to light a Bunsen burner, basically."

Bosch frowned. "That could be a problem. National Socialist ideology doesn't allow a woman to give orders to men."

"I have a brilliant solution, Professor. Make them women."

"What about you, Max?" Bosch attached a fresh sheet of paper to his clipboard.

I said, "Say we bake clay until it's sterile. I take a little of it, soak it with a measured droplet of water infested by bugs or spores, and stuff it into the back of an air pellet. If we know how many bugs there are in a cubic millimeter, then we know how many we're shooting out of the gun. Then the pellet hits plasticine and the jolt kills some of the bugs — maybe all of them, maybe none. Edith finds out how many have survived the ride."

Edith took in a lungful of smoke and blew it down her nose. "I scoop the clay from the back of Max's slug and put it in a petri dish. I use the number and size of the colonies that grow to work out the survival rate."

I said, "I then increase the speed of the shots and plot their survival rate against force of impact. It's basic data needed for whatever weapon we create."

"Sounds plausible," said Bosch doubtfully. He scribbled some more. "But what I meant was, do you have a shopping list?"

"A few lathes, welding equipment and a couple of welders, a strong compression pump, some high-pressure steel pipes whose spec I still have to work on, and half a dozen cylinders of compressed hydrogen. And a sphere the size of a beach ball made of armament steel four centimeters thick. To be going on with."

"I don't want you to feel constrained by the fact that there's a war on and you can hardly requisition a paper clip. No, don't feel inhibited at all, Max. But couldn't you stick to air pistols?"

"They lack muzzle velocity, my dear Professor Bosch, as do rifles. I want to fire Edith's bugs out of a gas gun at four kilometers a second and smash them into a steel plate. Anyway, I still think her chocolate is your biggest challenge."

"Where do you want this set up?"

"In the laundry."

Edith adopted a you can't be serious expression, and Bosch pursed his lips. "You can't be serious, Max. That's where the Poles and Slavs live."

"I'll be conducting experiments at extreme pressures, far higher than anyone else has gone. If anything goes wrong, it would be nice to leave the convent standing. The slave labor can go into the novitiates' dormitory in the north wing. It's unused."

"I'll have to speak to Hess." Bosch sounded doubtful.

"Do that. I'll design the gun over the next few days and give you precise specifications. I'll need Daniela's mathematics."

Bosch looked at Daniela, who had been following the conversation with languid interest. She said, "A big blackboard and lots of chalk. And I like this room. Just get rid of the portraits — all these people staring at me while I work. I don't suppose you can get me a piano?"

Bosch stood up. "Not a problem. When would you people like your apparatus?"

Edith flicked ash onto an expensive rug. "How soon do you want us to win the war?"

"Out of the question."

"Look, I need an outbuilding." I was facing Hess and another man over a huge desk in the bishop's procuratory, which had apparently been commandeered as Hess's office. "You've told me you don't want to draw attention to this place with external construction work. Fine. But I can't carry out this high-pressure stuff inside the convent, it's far too dangerous. The laundry's the only logical possibility."

"Krafft, we're talking about Slavs here. Slavs and Poles. We can't forget the atrocities they committed against us."

"Herr Director, I've just come from Hausser's Waffen-SS …"

"Enough. Such people are expected to sleep in barns, stables, huts, outbuildings. And you want them in dormitories? Can you possibly be serious? Maybe you'd like to tuck them in at night?"

"I'm not talking about their welfare. I appreciate they're allowed to exist only insofar as they are useful to us and that they should be grateful they aren't digging their own graves in Poland and Russia. But I need the laundry for dangerous experimental work."

The statue I had seen earlier was standing next to Hess. He was tall, blond, and thin-faced, in his late twenties. He would have been handsome except that his light blue eyes were too close together in his head, and his nose was a little too pointed. He reminded me of a greyhound. His voice was soft, almost sibilant. "You must understand that the labor force does not come within your jurisdiction, Herr Krafft. Security is my responsibility, and that includes the workers from the occupied territories."

"I understand that, Sturmbannführer Oberlin."

Hess said, "Good. No more discussion. We'll build you a steel chamber in the chapel. Put your high-pressure stuff in there. Bosch will see to it."

I had one last shot but I knew it wouldn't work. "These people will freeze to death out there come the winter. Surely they're more useful to us alive."

Oberlin looked at me thoughtfully through narrowed eyes. Hess was looking puzzled. "But that's not a problem, Krafft. We'll just requisition more."

THE FIRING ROOM

I had to hand it to Bosch. The man seemed to rustle up equipment out of thin air. Within days a small team of welders appeared and began to put together steel plates, to make a firing room in the form of a small steel cabinet at the far end of the chapel. A small flask of anthrax spores from Spandau turned up a week later, on the same day that an army truck disgorged a baby grand — a Blüthner, what else? The steel sphere and tubes I asked for took a little longer, but considering that they'd had to be ordered and built in one of the Krupps armament factories in the Ruhr, their delivery within three weeks of demand was amazing. Willi Webber and I had a gas gun built and operational within a month.

Now a routine began. We started cautiously, using gas pressures not much more than those inside a volcano. The anthrax stayed firmly in its flask, and instead we targeted a harmless soil bacterium supplied by Edith. As our confidence grew, we began to tweak up pressures. It took about three hours to set up a shot, and we managed five or six shots a day. And each day, we tweaked the pressure up a little more than the day before, and felt a little more edgy than the day before.

There seemed to be about a dozen security staff and the same number of workshop people. Edith acquired half a dozen lab technicians and machinists. By Hess's instructions, the scientists ate at a separate table in the refectory. In the event, our hours were so erratic that we often did not meet as a group at mealtime for days, and it was quite common for one or other of us to eat alone, an island of solitude in a sea of chatter.

A curious custom evolved, unplanned. At eleven o'clock each morning we would drift into the former classroom, which had now been converted into Daniela's office. A blackboard took up almost an entire wall, coffee seemed to be permanently ready on a little stove, and a dozen armchairs, tables, and desks were scattered around haphazardly. It was an eclectic collection, and I wondered where they'd been confiscated from. Daniela didn't seem to have a fixed desk, flitting between them from day to day. And over coffee, we would talk about our progress.

Always in a group. Somehow, I never seemed to find myself alone with Daniela: There was always someone around, whether a couple of dozen people in the refectory or three or four scientists in her office. Once I passed her in a cloister. Snow was drifting down onto the quadrangle and she had a suit collar turned up against the cold. She smiled at me, that damned Mona Lisa thing I couldn't decipher. "Heil Hitler, Max."

Hello, Daniela. Why don't you and I get away for a weekend in Vienna? You could introduce me to this famous Meissel and Schadn restaurant.

I'd love that, Max. What a wonderful idea.

Let's take in a concert, Mozart or Mahler. Or visit the fairground. Or what about the pictures? By the way do you ski? Do you have a boyfriend?

"Heil Hitler, Daniela." We passed by, my fantasies dissolving and my stomach in knots.

I sensed trouble from the way Hess strode in. The outer door let in a brief flood of light as the director entered the darkened chapel. Bosch, Willi, and I were in the firing room; I was seated at a bank of dials and switches. A cable stretched across the floor like a thick black snake and disappeared into a hole in a wall. Hess spotted it just in time.

"I want to see for myself. Just ignore me," said Hess with uncharacteristic modesty.

A metal flask was sitting on its own on the communion table, under a spotlight. It seemed somehow to be the focus of the room. "What's that? A poisoned chalice?"

"Actually, yes," Bosch said. "It holds anthrax spores, which is why it has its very own spotlight. Knock it over and you die."

"Horribly," I added for fun. "Didn't you read ZUTRITT VERBOTEN? We're about to fire the gun."

"So what's the game?"

"It's like I said. We're almost ready to fire."

Hess strode over to the steel chamber and peered through a small rectangle of bulletproof glass. "What am I seeing?"

I joined him at an adjacent rectangle. "That weight on the end of a wire…"

"It reminds me of a pendulum from a grandfather clock."

"It is. Just before firing we'll enter the firing chamber, pull it back at forty-five degrees to the vertical, and switch on an electromagnet to hold it there. Then we'll clear out. We'll throw a switch from here and the pendulum will swing and hit the firing pin — that brass thing at the end of the horizontal tube."

"Which looks remarkably like a shotgun barrel." The barrel led into a steel sphere half a meter across.

"Yes, Herr Director, it is, with a standard twenty-millimeter cartridge. Inside the shotgun tube there's a nylon piston with a very tight fit, gas-tight. When the gun fires, it drives the piston into the sphere, which is made of Krupps armament steel, very high tensile strength."

"So, you fire a shotgun into this sphere of high-pressure gas."

"Right. Very high-pressure gas."

"It's pumped up now?"

"Yes. And I don't trust entirely the firing chamber, Kurt. You wouldn't want to be here if the gas gun blows."

"Thank you for that reassurance, Krafft. So what happens when you fire the shotgun?"

"Look at the other tube, the one coming out of the far end of the sphere. It has a hard vacuum inside it, and between the vacuum and the high-pressure gas in the sphere lies a metal disk, close to bursting. When we fire the gun, it tips the balance and the disk breaks. The gas in the sphere throws the projectile at a huge acceleration along the second tube into the target chamber, that big cylinder at the end."

"Why does it need to be a meter long?"

"It holds high-speed cameras and other instruments to measure the speed of the projectile. That's why the chapel is nearly dark. We need to protect the photographic plates."

"What sort of projectiles?"

"Hollow steel marbles holding the bugs. Any tough sphere will do. We've even used a ruby."

"How fast can the marbles move?"

"We're pushing half a kilometer a second. A dynamite shock wave travels at four. We need to get to that speed before we can start on the spore survival rates."

"You need to octuple your projectile speed?"

"Yes."

"How will you do that?"

"We could build a bigger gun."

"But?"

"It would take time, and probably create a fresh set of problems."

The door opened and Edith slithered in, wearing a white lab coat and gloves. "Does nobody read notices around here?" I asked.

Hess started on a cigar. "You were saying?"

Webber had joined us from a dark corner of the chapel. "Instead, we're trying to increase the pressure of the compressed gas, and also making the bursting disk thicker and stronger. Either way, by the time the compressed gas bursts through, it's going faster. We get closer to simulating an explosion."

"But it also gets more dangerous because we're approaching the bursting strength of steel. We're dealing with massive pressures, Kurt."

Hess said, "You engineers. You're always full of caution. You have a built-in margin of error, right?"

"If we exceed it…," I started.

The director shook his head impatiently. "How long will it take you to get the figures we need? To get up to four kilometers a second?"

"We're firing six shots a day, tweaking the pressure up each time. We should get to three kilometers a second in the next three months, four a second in the next four. If the gun doesn't explode."

"Four months? Four months?" Hess raised his voice. "In four months Ivan could be pissing on the tulips in the Tiergarten."

Edith said, "That's just for the anthrax spores, isn't that so, Max?"

"Right."

"If we're going to do sarin, to see how the chemical survives a four-kilometers-a-second shock wave, you'll have to start the experiments all over again, this time with sarin. Right?"

"Maybe, maybe not."

Webber said, "Sarin will be harder to handle, sir. It frightens me."

Hess said, angrily, "You people are talking about eight months to get the answers we need. Maybe a year."

"Looks like it."

"Before we even build the weapon?"

"We need the basic data before we know what to build."

Hess took a lungful of cigar smoke. "Indeed. And you will supply it within six weeks. Not eight months, Krafft. Six weeks."

I made a cardinal mistake: I laughed. "Don't be stupid. It can't be done. We're nearly at the limit now. If we jump straight to the highest pressures…"

"Six weeks. And you're at the limit with your insubordination. If you call me stupid again, I'll have you put up against a wall and shot." Hess turned sharply away. Edith flashed me a malicious smile and followed Herr Director out the door.

BOMBER!

Slot the disks. Pump the hydrogen. Set the pendulum. Fire! Give the agar plates, or the smashed fragments of pellet, to Edith to incubate the bugs and count the colonies. Then slot the disks. Pump the hydrogen. Set the pendulum. Fire! Count the colonies.

Slot. Pump. Set. Fire! Count.

In the morning Edith comes in, hardly recognizable under lab coat, gloves, face mask, and hair net, carrying sterile agar plates. At the end of the day — or night — she comes to collect. Daniela comes at random intervals to collect numbers. Let her do the slide rule stuff: mean, standard deviation, regression, least squares fit. All of it elementary, far below her talents. She'll come into her own later.

Now slot in a stronger disk. Pump more hydrogen. Watch the pressure gauge, licking lips. Set the pendulum. Fire! Count. We pass the safety margin, our dials routinely go into the red; God knows what that's doing to the steel sphere.

Break for Christmas? Nobody on the front is breaking for Christmas. The Russian tide is coming in, a steady, inexorable flow toward the Fatherland. Nobody says so, but the triumphalism of the early days has gradually been replaced by a sense of impending catastrophe. In the convent we have a growing suspicion that we may be the only people standing between the Tiergarten tulips and the Magyar hordes.

I love Daniela's visits, anticipate them eagerly. They are a break from slot, pump, set, fire… Sometimes she collects the data and leaves without a word, sometimes she says something romantic like "We need another fifty percent pellet speed." Always she has a smile. Always the need to crank up the pressure. It's never enough. When she leaves, there is a faint trace of perfume in the chapel. Sometimes I imagine I also sense a bodily smell, something female, primitive, maybe even animal.

Don't get obsessed, Max.

She's taken to playing the baby grand at nights, sometimes for ten minutes, sometimes for an hour. The music lightens the dark creepy halls, defies the silent tombs, drifts along the cloisters. Sometimes it's Mozart, sometimes it's a beer hall ditty, sometimes it's a few snatches of theme tune from a film. Often too faint to be heard, depending on the wind. Sometime she sings. But on a still night, it's as if she's playing at my open window. Then I hear her footsteps light on the corridor outside as she heads for her room, and I drift off to sleep.

The crash hammered its way into my head, shaking my bed like a jelly. I leaped up, heart pounding. A rain of plaster flakes was falling from the ceiling, and my books had been shaken off the shelves. I grabbed a dressing gown and rushed to the door, barefoot.

The bomb had gone straight through the ceiling and floor at the end of the corridor, making jagged holes about two meters across. Already black smoke was pouring up from below and spreading along the ceiling. It was an acrid, choking, rubbery smell.

Doors were being flung open. Hess appeared at his door in underpants and hairy legs, hair tousled and mouth open in astonishment. He started to cough violently. Daniela emerged from the room next to him, apparently wearing nothing more than a fur coat. She caught my eye; she seemed to be trying to convey something with her expression, but I didn't know what. Other scientists were streaming into the corridor, and I turned back to my room and pulled on clothes frantically.

And now I saw that my window had been blown out of its frame. The shock wave must have bounced around the courtyard. Shards of glass were embedded in the books. It was still dark, and the tips of the highest peaks were catching pink light from rising sun. Back into the corridor, where the smoke was already black. The sound of retching came from all around. Trying not to breathe, I sprinted along to the stairs, colliding with cold, half-naked bodies.

The enemy had recently broken the Gustav line in Italy, putting the whole of southern Germany in reach of their bombers. They'd already plastered Munich. But a bomb didn't make sense. A bomb would have destroyed the convent. Unless it hadn't exploded. With a dry mouth I realized that the explosion must have come upward from the firing room.

Willi! He often worked late.

"Is it safe?" Hess grabbed me by the sleeve. His eyes were wide with fear, and he was speaking through a handkerchief held over his mouth and nose. "What about the spores?"

We were clustered at the far end of the courtyard along with a couple of dozen bewildered soldiers, some in uniform, some shivering in underclothes. Black smoke was still billowing out of a hole in the side of the chapel and one in the roof, which had lost half its slates. There was a stench of burning rubber, and splinters of door and window and roof slates were scattered across the courtyard.

"We were targeting harmless soil bacteria. The spores are in a cellar."

Relief transformed Hess's face. He became Herr Director immediately. "Your gas gun? How could it have gone off by itself?"

"It couldn't explode by itself. Someone was working with it."

Hess gaped for a second, and then shouted, "Has anyone seen Webber?"

Daniela said, "Oh God." She had managed to dress but was still wearing the fur coat.

I thought, if Willi was in the chamber when the gun exploded, he would now be seventy kilos of mince smeared over the chapel walls. Orange and yellow flames were almost hidden by the black, billowing smoke.

Oberlin had somehow managed to emerge from the chaos in full SS uniform. I wondered if he slept in it. He started to shout orders in a clipped, nasal tone. Half a dozen soldiers scurried away, and we watched uselessly as the men ran back from the direction of the stables, gasping with exertion and dragging a hose, which they struggled to connect to a water main in the courtyard.

"What's burning?" Bosch asked anxiously. "Is there anything dangerous?"

"Just rubber," I said. "That and a couple of chairs were the only flammable things in the chapel. So long as the fire doesn't spread." I was lying. If the anthrax flask had blown open, we were already dead.

The fire was out within ten minutes. A few meters of thick insulating rubber had generated an amazing volume of smoke. The hole in the side of the chapel was man-sized. Hess and I ran in through it, holding our breaths. My eyes were stinging but I could make out that the steel chamber had buckled outward from the internal explosion. A hole in the ceiling overhead showed where the steel roof had split open. I glimpsed gray sky overhead through the rising plume of smoke. But in the semi-dark I couldn't see much more, and in any case could only linger for a few seconds; eyes streaming, we ran back out coughing. Hess ran over to the fountain and started to vomit.

"Is Willi there?"

"I don't know, Daniela. We didn't get inside the chamber."

"This is your fault, Krafft." Hess was wiping his face with a sodden handkerchief. He stared at me malevolently through red, streaming eyes. "You built an unsafe gun. What happens to the project now? Everything we've done here is for nothing. What happens to the war now?"

"Herr Director." Oberlin's voice had a warning tone, and he was nodding toward the soldiers. Security.

"Well, get them out of here!" Hess shouted angrily. "Clear the courtyard."

"What went wrong, Max?" Edith was shivering in the cold morning air, a dressing gown pulled around her shoulders.

Bosch's tone was a mixture of fear and accusation. "Ask our director here. He's been pushing Max and Willi to take shortcuts, isn't that right, Kurt? You've been trying to get them on to high bullet speeds in one jump?"

"Since when did I have to justify myself to you, Bosch? But I do have to justify myself to Hermann Goering. What am I going to tell him? That we can't help the war effort? That the Reich is finished? Is that a message you would like to deliver?"

"Poor Willi," said Daniela.

"What was the state of play with your experiments?" Edith asked.

"Sometimes we got a hundred percent spore survival, sometimes fifty percent in identical conditions. I don't understand that, not yet. When you pushed the speed up, the survival rate dropped. But this was all at very low energies, not enough to simulate dispersal from an explosion. I can't make a secure extrapolation, not yet."

"We still don't have the basic data?"

"That's it, Edith."

"He'll have to be scraped off the walls." Something like dread was beginning to tinge Bosch's voice; his face was gray.

"Did he have a family?"

"How long will it take you to build another gas gun?" Hess asked, ignoring Daniela's question.

"You know the first one took four months. Maybe I could do it again in two."

"Two months before we get another gun? Do you know what that means? How many Germans will die in two months because of your incompetence? What extra territory will we have to claw back from Ivan? In two months the war could slide into an irreversible situation."

"I'll see what I can do."

"Listen to the genius. He'll see what he can do." Hess was both shouting and shivering, whether from cold or anger wasn't clear. "What am I going to tell the Reichsmarschall? That you'll see what you can do?"

It took two soldiers with crowbars to prise open the steel door of the firing room. Willi's greatcoat was stuck against a wall, and in the dull light it took me a few seconds to see that Willi was the glue. Both the soldiers ran out, and I heard vomiting. I insisted they come back in with flashlights.

The pressure dial was smashed, but its reading at the moment of explosion could just be made out. It had gone far into the red. Shards of metal were recognizable as remnants of the high-pressure sphere, which had clearly exploded. The hydrogen cylinders had been blown off their mountings but were otherwise almost untouched.

I now checked the gauges on the cylinders, but I already knew the answer. One gauge had been blown off, but the other two registered empty. Someone had emptied the lot into the sphere, a cylinder at a time. I found the anthrax flask in a corner, under rubble. It was still intact. Momentarily, I felt my knees go weak.

The stench of the lingering smoke was getting to me and I had to take a few minutes in the courtyard. My head was whirling. Back inside the steel box, I started to kick aside metal fragments with the toe of my boot. I found what I was looking for after some minutes: the gun barrel, still more or less intact. I squinted along it, holding it against the morning light now coming in. Two disks, buckled and jammed some centimeters into the barrel. Two disks, one of them rammed well up the barrel, out of sight. When Willi inserted the second disk and fired the gun, the pressure went far beyond anything the steel sphere could stand.

Either Willi had committed suicide in spectacular fashion, or it was sabotage.