their faces. So tell me: what asylum were you recently released from?”
Blok stared at him. A muscle twitched in the side of his face. “Oh, no!” He giggled, a terrible sound. “Oh, my dear Baron! Chesna! Neither of you know, do you? You think bombs are going to be dropped on this side of the Channel?” His laughter spiraled upward.
Michael and Chesna looked at each other. A horror, like a knot of snakes, began to writhe in Michael’s stomach.
“You see, we don’t know where the invasion is going to be. There are a dozen possibilities.” He laughed again, and dabbed his eyes with the handkerchief. “Oh, my! What a surprise! But you see, it doesn’t matter where the invasion is. If it happens this year, it’s going to happen within the next two to four weeks. When it begins,” Blok said, “we’re going to drop those twenty-four bombs on London.”
“My God,” Michael whispered, and he saw clearly.
No German bomber could pierce England’s aerial defenses. The Royal Air Force was too strong, too experienced since the Battle of Britain. No German bomber could get anywhere even remotely close to London.
But an American B-17 Flying Fortress could. Especially one that appeared to be a cripple, shot full of holes and returning from a bombing mission over Germany. In fact, the Royal Air Force might even give the struggling craft an escort. How would the British fighter pilots know that the bullet holes and battle damage had been painted on by a Berlin street artist?
“Those twenty-four bombs,” Blok said, “have a center of liquid carnagene within a shell of high explosives. Carnagene is the name of the gas Gustav’s created, and it’s quite an accomplishment. He’d have to show you the equations and the chemical notations; I don’t understand them. All I know is that when the gas is inhaled, it triggers the body’s own bacteria: the microbes that cause the decay of dead tissue. The microbes, in a sense, become carnivorous. Within seven to twelve minutes the flesh begins to be… shall we say… eaten from the inside out. Stomach, heart, lungs, arteries… everything.”
Michael didn’t speak. He had seen the photographs, and he believed it.
One of the prisoners had collapsed, and did not move. “Get up.” Hildebrand prodded at the man’s ribs with his sneaker. “Come on! Get up, I said!” The prisoner remained motionless. Hildebrand looked up at Blok. “He’s broken! Bring me a new one!”
“Do it,” Blok told the nearest guard, and the soldier hurried out of the gymnasium.
“The red team will have to go on with four players!” Hildebrand blew his whistle. “Keep playing!”
“That’s a fine example of the master race,” Michael said, still stunned. “He’s too dumb to know he’s an idiot.”
“In some ways he is an idiot, I’m afraid,” the colonel agreed. “But in the field of chemical warfare, Gustav Hildebrand is a genius, surpassing his father. Take carnagene, for instance; it’s fantastically concentrated. What’s contained in those twenty-four bombs is enough to kill, at a rough estimate, thirty thousand people, depending on the prevailing winds and rainfall.”
Chesna had roused herself, fighting off the same shock that had hit Michael. “Why London?” she asked. “Why don’t you just drop your bombs on the invasion fleet?”
“Because, dear Chesna, bombing ships is an unprofitable undertaking. The targets are small, the Channel winds unpredictable, and carnagene doesn’t get along well with sodium. As in salt water.” He patted her hand before she could jerk it away. “Don’t you be concerned. We know what we’re doing.”
Michael knew, as well. “You want to hit London so word can be communicated to the invasion troops. When the soldiers hear about what that gas does, they’ll be paralyzed with terror.”
“Exactly. They’ll all swim home like good little fishies, and leave us alone.”
A panic amid the landing troops would end all chances for success. There was no way the soldiers wouldn’t hear about the attack on London, if not over the BBC then over the scuttlebutt network. Michael said, “Why only twenty-four bombs? Why not fifty?”
“The B-seventeen we have can only hold that many. It’s enough for the purpose. Anyway”-he shrugged-“the next batch of carnagene isn’t refined yet. It’s a long, expensive process, and one mistake can destroy many months of labor. We’ll have some ready, though, in time to perfume your comrades from the East.”
The twenty-four bombs contained all the carnagene that was ready for use, Michael realized. But it was more than enough to destroy D-Day and strengthen Hitler’s grip on the throat of Europe.
“By the way, we do have a target in London,” Blok said. “The bombs will fall along Parliament Street to Trafalgar Square. Perhaps we can even get Churchill, as he smokes one of those disgusting cigars.”
Another prisoner fell to his knees. Hildebrand grasped the man’s white hair. “I told you to pass the ball to Matthias, didn’t I? I didn’t say for you to shoot!”
“We won’t see each other again,” Blok told his unwilling guests. “I will have other projects, after this one. You see, this is a feather in my cap.” He gave a silver smile. “Chesna, you have broken my heart.” His smile faded as he placed a long thin finger beneath her chin. She twisted away from him. “But you’re a wonderful actress,” he said, “and I’ll always love the woman in your films. Guards, will you take them back to their cell now?”
The two soldiers came forward. Lazaris stood up, dazed. Michael helped Chesna to her feet, and she gasped with pain as some weight settled on her injured ankle. “Goodbye, Baron,” Blok said as Boots stared impassively. “I trust you have a good relationship with the commandant of the next prison camp you’re in.”
As they walked along the edge of the court, Dr. Hildebrand blew his whistle to stop the game. He grinned at Chesna and followed her a few steps. “Chemistry is the future, you know,” he said. “It’s power, and essences, and the heart of creation. You’re full of it.”
“You’re full of it, too,” she told him, and with Michael’s help she limped away. She had seen the future, and it was demented.
Once that cell door shut on them, they were finished. So, too, were thirty thousand or more of London’s citizens, and possibly the prime minister himself. Finished also was the invasion of Europe. It would all be ended when the cell door shut.
This was in Michael’s mind as he supported Chesna. Lazaris walked a few paces ahead, the soldiers a few paces behind. They were going through the alley, toward the stockade. Michael could not let that door shut on him again. No matter what. He said, in English, “Stumble and fall.”
Chesna obeyed at once, moaning and grasping her ankle. Michael bent to help her as the two soldiers yammered for him to get her up. “Can you take one?” he asked, again in English. She nodded. It would be a desperation move, but they were damned desperate. He pulled Chesna up-then suddenly twisted his body and flung her at the nearest guard. Her fingernails went for his eyes.
Michael grabbed the other soldier’s rifle and uptilted it. Pain shot through his wounded hand, but he grappled for the gun. The soldier almost got it away from him, until Michael drove his knee into the man’s groin. As the soldier gasped and doubled over, Michael wrenched the rifle away and clubbed him across the back of the neck with it.
Lazaris blinked, his mind still sluggish from the gas grenades. He saw Chesna clawing at the soldier’s eyes, and the man trying to hold her off. He took an uncertain step forward. A rifle fired, and a bullet cracked off the pavement between him and Chesna. He stopped, looked up, and saw another soldier on a catwalk above.
Michael shot at the soldier, but it was a wild shot and his hand had gone dead again. The other guard bellowed and thrust Chesna aside. She cried out and fell, catching her bad ankle beneath her. “Run!” she shouted to Michael. “Go!” The half-blinded guard, his eyes bloodshot and watering, swung his rifle in Michael’s direction. A bullet whined past Michael’s head, fired from the catwalk. A Gallatinov ran.
Behind him the guard wiped his eyes and saw the fleeing man through a haze. He lifted his weapon and took aim. He squeezed the trigger.
Before the bullet could leave the barrel, a body slammed into his back. The guard staggered and went down, the rifle firing into the air. Lazaris landed on top of him and fought to get the gun away.
The soldier on the catwalk tracked his prey with his own rifle. He shot.
Something smashed against the side of Michael’s head. A fist, he thought. An iron fist. No, something hot. Something on fire. He took three more strides and fell, his momentum skidding him across the pavement on his belly and crashing him into an area of trash cans and broken crates. His head was aflame, he thought. Where was the rifle? Gone, spun out of his grasp. He pressed his hand against his right temple, feeling warm wetness. His brain felt soggy, as if the shock had liquefied it. Got to get up, he urged himself. Got to run. Got to…
As he pulled himself to his knees, a second bullet clanged against a can only a few feet away. He got up, his
