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"Odilo Globocnik?" His boss shook his head. "Sounds like a goddamn skin disease. And Lothar Prutzma
"Uh-huh." Walther looked at the pictures of Esther and Gottlieb and A
"They say Buckliger's ill. My ass!" his boss said. "They're sick of him, that's what. I just hope to Christ they haven't given him a noodle, eh?"
"Uh-huh," Walther said again, and then, "You know, you'd better be careful. If you keep carrying on like that, people are liable to remember."
Gustav Priepke slid off the desk like a walrus sliding off an ice floe. He said, "If you're not going to show some balls now, goddammit, when will you ever? Or maybe you haven't got any to show?" When Walther didn't answer, Priepke lumbered off, shaking his head.
Walther swore softly. He'd just lost his boss's good opinion. But now, good opinion or not, maybe he could do more than grouse about what was going on. Maybe.
If anybody came into his cubicle while he was doing it, he was dead. That meant he had to work fast. If he made a mistake, though, he was just as dead. Sweat ran down his face and streamed from his armpits. He could smell his own fear. Just making his fingers hit the right keys was an effort.
He planted what Esther had given him about Lothar Prutzma
Covering his tracks went faster than inserting the false data-or were they true data? Esther's boss seemed to think so. Walther hardly cared. Using reports of Jewish blood to try to bring down the Reichsfuhrer -SS struck him as blackly delicious. Prutzma
One last keystroke…One last check…There. He was free. His swivel chair creaked as he leaned back in it. He'd earned the sigh of relief that burst from him. He'd not only done what he could do, he could relax…
For about fifteen seconds. Then a programmer screamed, "Reactionary!" at the same time as another one yelled, "Radical!" One of them-Walther never knew which-shouted, "Asshole!" That cut across political lines. The meatythock! of fist smacking flesh followed a heartbeat later.
"Fight! Fight!" The cry and the sound of people rushing toward the brawl took Walther back to the school playground and the fifth grade. He didn't get up. He would have gone ru
Not so distant battle made the walls of Walther's cubicle shake. He stayed right where he was. He'd just taken worse chances than any of the hotheaded fools punching away at one another. If they wanted to waste time on black eyes and bloody noses, they could do that. But information packed a bigger wallop than even the hardest fist.
He hoped.
"We are the Volk!" chanted the crowd outside Rolf Stolle's residence, and, "Panzers go home!" and, "All the world is watching!" Heinrich sang with the rest. He was getting hoarse, but he kept on. He felt more real, more alive, while he was making noise. He also felt there was a better chance the SS armored vehicles wouldn't start shooting if the people in front of them stayed noisy.
A couple of hours had gone by now, and the officer in the lead panzer hadn't opened up yet. Every so often, he would raise the bullhorn to his mouth and order the crowd to disperse. No one paid any attention to him.
He'd ducked down into the panzer turret several times, probably to use the radio. What was he telling his superiors? What were they telling him? How much of what they were telling him was he heeding? Wouldn't they be yelling for him to murder everybody in sight?
"All the world is watching!" Heinrich called. "All the world is watching!" He hoped the world was watching. If it was, Prutzma
"Heinrich."
He jumped. He hadn't seen Susa
"You should go home," she told him. "You've got a family. One person here more or less won't make any difference."
She made good sense. After a moment, Heinrich shook his head anyway. "A lot of people here have families. If they all left…" He shook his head again. "Besides, now that I am here, I want to see how things play out."
"What would Lise say?" Susa
"Neither will you," Heinrich pointed out. "I don't see you going anywhere."
She shrugged. "I'm a hothead. You're not. You're supposed to be too smart to do things like this." She sounded almost a
Before he could answer, there was a stir in the crowd behind them, back toward the doorway to Rolf Stolle's residence. The panzer commander was already looking that way. When his jaw dropped, Heinrich decided he'd better turn around. He did. His view wasn't as good as the SS man's, but after a moment he froze in astonishment, too.
"What is it?" Susa
"It's…It's Stolle." Heinrich had to work to bring forth the words. "He's coming out."
"What?" Susa
More and more people spied Rolf Stolle and the squad of gray-clad Berlin policemen who surrounded him. Along with them came two photographers, one with a Leica, the other with a small televisor camera on his shoulder. Some of the people, like Susa
Beside him, Willi Dorsch was yelling Stolle's name. He paused for a moment to shout into Heinrich's ear: "He's fucking out of his mind, but Christ! he's got balls."
"You ought to take Horst's place," Heinrich yelled back. "He couldn't have said it better." Willi's smirk said he wasn't sure whether Heinrich was joking. Heinrich nodded-he'd meant it, all right.
The noise of its hydraulics lost in the tumult, the turret of the lead panzer traversed a few degrees, so that that ca
Instead, he raised the bullhorn to his lips: "Herr Stolle, you are at the center of an illegal and seditious rally, one outlawed by the State Committee for the Salvation of the Greater German Reich. Dismiss your followers and surrender to duly constituted authority at once."