by Kay Kenyon
“High enough. High enough to know—”
Franz interrupted, “—that her purification works fiendishly well.” He turned back to Hannah. Hurry up.
“So then,” Hannah said, “this is Monarch. A person who can augment the Talent of any person she embraces. The catalysis Talent.”
A new Talent. Kim tried to work it out. “People she embraces . . .”
“Anyone she makes contact with for long enough. It is not a Talent one can turn on or off. It is always in her touch.”
Kim tried to imagine what it would be like to live with a Talent like this. The ability was not volitional; it must be a harsh sentence to live under. But surely such an ability would be well documented by now. “If there is such a Talent, we would have heard of it, or guessed at it. Over time, high ratings wouldn’t be rare.”
Franz snapped, “Let her finish.” A noise from the courtyard, a shout. He checked again. They were like hares in the woods, ears primed, distrustful, always moving.
Hannah went on. “It isn’t known because catalysis Talents die young. It is the most damning ability in the list. You give your strength to others, and over time it takes your own. As well, the uplift is temporary. One must be augmented again for it to last. So if such a Talent dies young, and the effect on other Talents is temporary . . .” She shrugged. “No one takes note. Or if they do, they do not ascribe it to the right reason.”
“How do you come to have all these details about catalysis if the Talents die off so fast?”
Hannah lit a cigarette and blew a stream of smoke out the side of her mouth. “I have told you. Tannhäuser. He has been part of Monarch from the start.”
Kim chewed on this. “But can the Nazis be certain they die young? They have only this one person . . . and she is still alive.”
“Look,” Hannah said as though Kim were not quite getting it. “Ever since Annakova came to them, they have been combing for information: old records, medical references that might point to case studies of catalysts. They found a rare few, maybe not always confirmed, but suggesting patterns in the progression of a potential catalyst ’s condition. Even my father, who was a Talent researcher at the University of Cologne, tracked down at least one other case. He heard a rumor of the ability and followed up with a colleague. Knowledge exists here and there, but the Nazis know the most about the Progeny.”
“Progeny?”
“Nachkommenschaft. The official name. For those Nachkommen in the military, you will see the insignia. The vulture on the collar.”
She had indeed seen it. On Rikard Nagel, he of the hypercognition Talent. So, if he was purified to a high-enough level . . . perhaps he did know, did intuit, that she was a spy. It could mean she was under surveillance. Nerves flared on her skin.
“Monarch’s purpose,” Hannah said, “is to send the Nachkommenschaft into Europe. To infiltrate, control. Terrorize. Individual Nachkomme who can mesmerize leaders, cabinets; who can attract and compel newspaper editors, religious leaders. Receive spills from military general staff. Where persuasion fails, they slay and torture. And Nachkommin, women, as well.”
The infiltration of Europe, Kim thought with dismay. Oh yes, London would be interested.
“Already in Germany,” Hannah went on, “there is a reign of physical and spiritual terror, beyond the Gestapo and the usual tyranny.”
“Spiritual terror?”
Hannah leaned forward, flicking the ash of her cigarette on the floor. “You have read Mein Kampf ? If people are steeped in fear, they will not act. As you see all around you. Hitler knows this very well. So the Nachkommenschaft enforce loyalty and obedience among the people by torture and murder.
Kim’s mind was racing. “So then, after the Nachkommenschaft are all in place . . .”
“The Wehrmacht has information, collaborators, correct propaganda. The Party has control of political leaders and to some extent, the people themselves.”
Monarch. It was about the control of Europe. Monarch, she thought with amazement, was the operation that she had been sent to uncover.
“Where is this operation based?”
“That’s what we have to trade.” Franz shot Hannah an angry look. “You have told her enough.”
Hannah frowned at him. “Just a little more.”
“No, Hannah. She has promised nothing.”
Kim jumped in. “You wanted to interest me in Monarch. All right, I’m interested.” But a number of objections began to arise. “If you’re kidnapping people that the SS expects to meet, they must know there’s a security lapse. A mole.”
“They do not suspect. They have contempt for non-Germans, however useful. They believe the recruits have lost courage. So our man next to Annakova says.”
“He could be luring you into a trap.”
Franz rolled his eyes. “If he was, we would have been dead months ago. Besides. I know the man. He will not betray us.”
“This Irina Annakova,” Kim said. “What is her Talent rating? Is it strong enough for Monarch’s purpose?”
“The Nazis must think so. But there is no rating system established for catalysts. No one has seen enough cases to determine a sequence.”
Kim thought about the Russian woman, and her ability that might be profound indeed. Perhaps enough for a head start on the master race that Hitler dreamed of.
“One thing to know,” Hannah resumed, “is that the optimized ones deteriorate. Very noticeably.”
“Madness?” Kim guessed.
“Each embrace comes at a price. More side effects for the one touched if the augmentations happen more often than every three months. But no matter what, eventually, after repeated uplifts, there is a taste for blood. Then the drinking of it.”
“They go mad.”
“Of course. But in this particular way. So the loved ones find their father, or daughter, drained of blood. The slayer with blood on his lips.”
The women at the picnic table in Bad Schandau. This is what they had been talking about.
“You see what they fear?”
The old myth, Kim guessed. “That they will not stay buried.”
“So death is not the end of the terror. You fear your lovely dead child will never find peace. It is the worst dread, worse than death.”
“Why,” Kim asked, “is their madness associated with a taste for blood?”
Hannah shrugged. “Little mix-ups in the brain’s wiring. Who knows?”
Kim could imagine Duncan’s reaction to this part of the story. “So the Nazis encourage the blood-drinking idea.”
“They do. And in fact, with previous catalysts, it is how the vampire myth began.”
“Hannah. You don’t know this!” Franz snapped.
She stabbed a look at him. “Think about it. Hundreds of years ago, a few people were raised up, augmented. Some of them repeatedly. They began to indulge their appetites on the local population. They faded in time, but the damage was done, the stories were told and told.” She ground out her cigarette under her shoe.
Kim weighed the story, its cohesion. It could be.
“Also they become unnaturally strong.”
Kim thought of how Captain Nagel had smashed and broken the seat in the car.
“This strength also feeds the story. Especially for Christians. For you people, death is all mixed up.”
The door opened. Their young watchman. “Zeit zu gehen. Schnell!” Time to go, quickly.
Hannah sprang from her chair, grabbing her jacket.
Franz hissed at Kim. “Der Schal!” She grabbed the scarf as he took her by the arm and urged her toward the door.
As they rushed down the hall, Kim tied the scarf under her chin. They came to a staircase leading up to the next level and ran down another hall, dimly lit by a window at the far end. Someone waited for them at the window. Franz peeled off from the group and, now with Hannah and the new man, Kim exited onto a wooden fire escape.
“You will go into the street.” Hannah pointed. “Turn
right and walk away slowly. The car will come for you. His name will be Alvin.” She paused, watchful, but took a moment. “So. Is it enough?”
“It’s a beginning.” She wanted to know where the catalyst was. Where Monarch was. To get Duncan to listen.
Hannah sliced a look at her. “I need your side of it now. You promise?”
She couldn’t, not yet. “I’ve seen things in Germany that square with what you’re saying about these Nachkommenschaft. But the claims are still extraordinary. I need something more.”
Hannah and her companion scanned the backside of the tenement. Dogs rummaged in bins of refuse. A wooden cart lay collapsed in the mud, slumped to one side. Farther back, masked by fog, a plump woman pulled tubers from a garden black with rot.
Hannah looked keenly into Kim’s eyes. “Are you brave, Frau Reed, or just playing the game?”
“I’m afraid all the time. I do it anyway.”
“Then, if that is true, I will take you to a place. The fourth floor.”
Her companion groaned. She cut a glance at him. “Mind your own business, Micha.” Turning back to Kim, she said, “Will you come with me?”
“What place is it?” Kim asked.
“Where the SS Nachkommen end their days. You will see what they become.”
“Their infirmity? Their madness?”
“Yes. But to see these things. It is something more, as you say.”
Kim hesitated.
Hannah snapped, “If you need proof, then it will not be enough. I am sure, though, what you will see will corroborate everything I have said. The SS guard this place; it is a place they wish no one to discover. But if you have no interest . . .”
“I am interested, yes. But I can’t risk capture.”
“You will accomplish nothing without risk. My people have been to the fourth floor. We have penetrated it, and I will show you how.” She waited as Micha watched the area, nervous, watching for pursuit.
“Elaine Reed. Are you coming or not?” Hannah had a way of challenging that seemed to ask one to do their best. Kim liked her, or at least sensed her integrity. She would make no snap judgments, but you did learn to take people’s measure in this business.
Kim had to earn the Oberman Group’s trust. They were the only source on Monarch. “Yes,” she finally said.
“Good. Then at least you will know that the Germans are creating monsters.” Hannah locked a gaze on her. “We will go on Tuesday.”
In two days. Kim nodded.
She memorized her instructions. Then, as Hannah and Micha raced up the stairs, perhaps to the roof, she hurried down to the overgrown lot and made her way to the street alone, except for the riot of her thoughts.
16
GÖRING’S HUNTING LODGE, SCHORFHEIDE FOREST
MONDAY, DECEMBER 7. Outside the library, Sonja Nagel, full of confusion and alarm, heart thudding in her chest, backed into the hall table. A rattle and clink as the Etruscan statuary swayed but remained upright. God in heaven, if she had broken it.
A reprieve.
But then Hermann Göring’s bulk filled the doorway to the library. Panic flared across Sonja’s chest. She had no good reason to be in this part of the lodge. And what she had heard at the library door, she should not have.
“My darling.” Göring’s eyes squinted in confusion. “I thought you had gone.”
“Yes. But you see, the car is late. The snowstorm . . .” She cast about for an excuse to be here, outside the room where he had been meeting with SS Colonel von Gottberg. She had not meant to overhear, but she had been curious and, fatefully, had stepped closer to the door.
Göring’s eyes still held her. “Did you speak to Major Scheel about the car?”
“Oh, I did, of course. He says the roads have become treacherous.” She looked at the row of priceless statuary. “I was very clumsy.”
He opened his hands and smiled. No harm done. I cannot be angry with you. “Well. What will you do? Stay until the storm passes?”
An idea sorted itself out. “I was going to ask if perhaps Colonel von Gottberg might consider giving me a lift.” Yes, this was something she might have done, a perfect excuse. She tried to summon a calm aspect but, to her chagrin, she felt a twitch at her mouth. “Unless he is staying?”
“No, as it happens he is not staying. But I am not sure he returns to Berlin.”
Major Scheel entered the hall. He gave a Nazi salute. “Reichsluftfhartminister. Madam’s car has arrived.”
Göring spread wide his hands again. “So then.” He nodded at Major Scheel, then turned back to her. “Are you nervous to try the roads?”
“Oh, I’m sure it will be fine. It is just snow, after all.”
The air minister took her hand and bowed his head, pressing her hand in his great ones. “Goodbye then, Sonja. We shall see you soon if you are not tired of me.”
She called up a smile at this gallantry. He knew that her husband could not be a man to her and he thought that she savored his vitality. He believed this, a man who could afford to believe all manner of grotesque things.
“I could never tire of your company, Hermann.”
Major Scheel led her down the hall, more a gallery than a corridor, with paintings clinging to their perches above and below one another, covering the five-and-a-half-meter-high walls. Her bags awaited her in the atrium. As a guard held open the door, the smell of snow and motorcar exhaust met her. Though the snow had stopped, the landscape bore a caustic white drape.
As she crossed the broad porch to the waiting car, she saw Göring watching her from a window of his stone mansion, a baron in his keep, no matter how he called it a hunting lodge. And she, his concubine, no matter how he styled her his darling.
They drove off into the snow-laden forest.
She stared out the window, dismayed by the conversation she had overheard. The Nachkommenschaft were, as she had suspected, being experimented upon to heighten their Talents to serve as feared enforcers of Hitler’s programs. But for these men, the treatments ended in madness and restraint in an asylum, an outcome she had just heard Göring call an “inconvenience.”
Things were clear to her now, blindingly clear. They had a plan for Rikard and his cohorts. Of course they did. Her adopted countrymen did nothing spontaneously, but followed their plans, the Führer’s demented dreams. How simple she had been to worry about Rikard and what would become of their marriage! Their lives belonged to the Reich. And if the experiments they conducted upon him made him into something she could not care for, nor even understand, it was all according to plan.
She shivered in the back seat, drawing her fur coat more tightly around her throat.
Her marriage. How strange that she had thought she still had one.
Rikard could not love her anymore, could not share her life. He had become a creature who lived for the night. Insomnia, he called it, but she saw how he shied from the light, how he could eat nothing, his body wasting away. And his mind. His extraordinary mind, now decayed into an engine of calculation. It grew worse. Or he would say, better, for he recognized no limits to what he could know, the value he could be to his wretched master, her absurd lover. A lover whom Rikard allowed. Or rather, required.
The memory came of the Nachkommenschaft creatures at the lodge, standing in a circle—this she had once seen from one end of the Great Hall as she entered—Rikard and his cohorts raising their crystal glasses for a toast, the flames from the roaring fireplace setting the red wine aglow.
If it was wine.
Oh, Rikard. You have given up your very soul.
Was it not his soul? Or was this science, the planned future of the race, and it had nothing to do with God?
An elk bounded across the road, just missing the car, his rack of antlers a heavy crown he carried with ease. He disappeared into the bleak landscape, a glimpse of normal, exquisite life. They drove on.
THE LAKE DISTRICT, NORTH OF BERLIN
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 8. Kim and Hannah were on a deeply ru
tted road an hour north of Berlin, Hannah at the wheel. Every time the tires hit a dip, the sound of glass clinked at them from the back seat.
Kim turned around to look. “What’s in the box?”
“Radiophosphorous. Eight vials. Special delivery to Treptow Sanatorium.”
A TB facility, with three stories of treatment rooms and dormitories, and on the fourth floor, a secret critical care unit. For Nachkommen. SS in the final stages of their lives. Not proof of Monarch’s purpose. But something more than a story from the Oberman Group. Something that Kim could say she had seen with her own eyes.
“Radiophosphorous,” Kim repeated. “Radioactive?”
“Of course. An experimental TB therapy.”
Kim hadn’t been told about that part. “The vials have enough packing?”
“Don’t worry. They are in a wooden rack. Nothing will spill.”
They would gain access to the sanatorium by delivering the drugs and using the name of a doctor who was gone this week. For the fourth floor, however, they would need stealth and diversion. A middle-of-the-night delivery would put the staff off guard. And besides, Hannah had said, All you need to say is “radioactive” and you have them under your thumb.
Catalyst: the unnerving new Talent that the Oberman Group claimed existed. If meta-abilities could be augmented, it would alter the balance of psi gifts in the world. Could it be true that, deep within, each person of Talent held a full measure of power, a ten on the scale? And that a touch from a catalyst could remove the dross to bring it out in full? The reason we do not know of such a power: it is temporary. The catalyst dies young. Those uplifted die as madmen.
It might be true. If so, it was a stunning claim. She put Hannah’s story together with what she had already seen in Germany: the rumors of fiends; the symptoms displayed by Rikard Nagel; his fervent declaration about being in the service of the monarch. Kim couldn’t know with certainty, couldn’t solve the calculus of lies, if that’s what they were. But she knew she couldn’t walk away from discovering more.
They passed through a woodland with skirts of white on the north side of boulders, snow left over from an early-winter storm. They sped on, meeting few other cars, crossing into a region of meadows cradling small lakes.
