Felix couldn’t keep down any of the water that Bulbous Nose had brought him, so he poured it over his fingers instead. It was a shoddy cleaning. His left hand, still cuffed to the bed, slopped the liquid over his injuries in uneven jolts. Felix had nothing but the hem of his Hitler Youth uniform to pad the mess dry. He wasn’t even sure why he bothered.
The SS-Standartenführer was gone much longer than the average phone call. When the officer finally did return, Felix braced himself against the bed frame, crippled hand clutched close to his uniform. But Baasch didn’t seem set on breaking any more fingers. Nor did he order Bulbous Nose’s jackboots back into position. Instead he started pacing, treading through the bloody water on the floor.
“I’ve been encouraged by your recent cooperation, Herr Wolfe. Your information regarding the girl’s markings has already proved useful.”
“You—you caught her.” Felix’s stomach turned. He couldn’t tell if it was from this realization or the constant pain relaying through his tendons or the smoke stink rolling off the SS-Standartenführer’s uniform. (All three of these things made him want to retch.) “How?”
“The girl possesses more sentimentality than the average assassin. It does not work to her advantage.”
But… if they had the girl, they had no need for Felix’s answers anymore. What was Baasch doing here?
Felix’s spine felt crooked against the bedpost, as if Bulbous Nose had kicked that out of alignment, too. He watched Baasch’s jackboots closer than he would a fanned-out cobra as they splashed back and forth across the room. Wafting that awful ill-wind, burning smell…
“The girl isn’t the only one we caught.” Baasch halted at the bedside table. His hand went for the rotary phone—picking up the receiver, sliding through a series of numbers.
What was the SS-Standartenführer talking about? Felix’s gut wrenched tighter as the officer murmured into the phone, “You’ve connected with Frankfurt? Good. Put them on the line.”
Frankfurt. Home. Oh God…
Baasch carried the phone as far as its cable would allow, pressing the receiver—hard—against Felix’s ear. There was a crackling quiet, and then: “Felix? Is that you?”
“Papa?” It was his father’s voice. A raspy baritone lined with age and arthritic pain, made faint by tens of thousands of kilometers of distance. “Papa, where are you? Where’s Mama?”
The sound of tears, high and frail, answered Felix’s last question.
“Some men came to the house. Gestapo. They took us.… I don’t know where we are. Are you hurt? Where’s your sister? What’s happening over—”
Baasch’s finger punched into the switch hook. Silence sliced through his father’s voice.
Gestapo. Felix’s parents were being held by the Gestapo. It was among his worst fears. One he’d voiced in this very room just hours earlier, to the girl who was not his sister: If you succeed, what do you think the Gestapo will do to Mama and Papa? You’ll destroy them.
But the girl didn’t give a Scheisse about the Wolfes, did she?
“You’re quite a remarkable person, Herr Wolfe. Not many brothers would travel the lengths you’ve gone to for your sister’s sake. Twenty thousand kilometers, ruined fingers…” The SS-Standartenführer’s eyes flickered over Felix’s stained uniform. “Family is clearly important to you. Tell me, how much further would you go to keep your parents from harm?”
Felix’s heart jump-started, rattling electric against Martin’s pocket watch.
“I’ll do anything,” he said, and meant it.
“I thought as much,” Baasch said. “The situation has changed. The girl posing as your sister was only a single piece in a much larger plan. The Fatherland is in peril. As we speak, there is a putsch taking place back in Germania.”
A revolution? In Germania? It didn’t seem possible, not with the hold the National Socialist government had on the population. Every few years, there were small rebellions in the outer territories—uprisings in the mining camps and oil fields—but news of them hardly reached the Reichssender screens before they were squashed. Cleaned out with the ruthlessness of a root canal: quick, brutal, painful.
To have a movement deep enough to launch an assault against the very heart of the Reich? That wasn’t just a cavity. That was years of hidden rot.
“Some generals have used the Führer’s apparent demise to trick their Wehrmacht units into seizing the capital. They’ve started arresting key National Socialist officials. This attempt to overthrow the government appears to be highly organized. They might have gotten away with it if not for a crucial flaw in their plan.” Baasch paused, letting his eyes pick Felix to pieces: toned arms, hair paler than pale, crooked bridge of a nose. “How old are you, Herr Wolfe?”
“Seventeen.”
“So young.” The SS officer tutted. “Too young to remember… There was a situation like this years ago, during the war. The Führer was betrayed by those in his closest confidence, men who planned to assassinate him and take over the government. They smuggled a bomb into Hitler’s Wolfsschanze headquarters. When it went off, these traitors attempted to use the Führer’s death as an excuse to overtake Berlin. But Hitler survived the explosion. The resistance was quickly squelched, its conspirators arrested and tortured. They spilled the names of more conspirators, which led to more arrests, more torture sessions.… Can you guess, Herr Wolfe, how many were executed in the wake of that incident?”
Felix had no idea. “Three hundred?”
“Five thousand. Five thousand traitors were eliminated. And yet here we are, nearly twelve years later, facing another putsch. Clearly the roots we tried to pull up survived. Regrew…” Baasch drifted off. Shook his head. “We must take a different approach this time. The resistance should be crushed beyond regrowth, all who are involved exterminated. You—Herr Wolfe—are going to help us.”
“But I know nothing. Even when I thought she was Adele… the girl gave me no information. I didn’t even know Ade—I mean, the girl—was involved in the resistance until halfway through the race.” It hurt to think of those conversations, now that Felix knew the truth behind them: lies, lies, all lies. The girl’s manipulation—flesh and feelings, right and wrong—was nothing short of masterful.
“Oh, I’m not going to torture the information out of you.” The SS commander glanced back down at the marbled pink puddle. “We’ve both had quite enough of that, I think.”
“Then… how…”
“If you let a rat out of the trap, where does it go?” Baasch didn’t wait for an answer. “It scurries straight back to its nest. It’s true that we’ve managed to capture the girl with the help of your tattoo information. We could continue torturing her in the hope that she’ll give us a name or two, but she seems to be even more adept than yourself at resisting pain. It’s far easier to let her lead us straight to their headquarters. Of course, I can’t have any of my men tail her. She’s too well trained. She’d get scared off.”
“You want me to do it,” Felix finished.
The SS-Standartenführer nodded. “We’ll give you the tools you need to escape. You’re to gain this girl’s trust and follow her back to the resistance’s headquarters. When you discover where they’re hiding, you’ll contact me through the channels I’ll provide you. No one will lay a finger on your parents as long as you keep to the plans of your mission.”
It was amazing, how many ways the SS-Standartenführer could make a threat without actually verbalizing it. Felix preferred the nuts-and-bolts version: Fail and we’ll kill your parents.
“What about Adele?” he asked.
“I’ve already spoken with Reichsführer Himmler about the pardon,” Baasch said. “Should you succeed, Adele’s name will be cleared.”
What the SS-Standartenführer was asking him to do was not a simple fix. No mere swapping out parts. This was more like the few times Felix watched his father rebuild an engine from scratch. Exhaust manifold bolts, valve covers, cylinder heads, rod caps… every piece of the machine had to be taken apart, sifted through, and refitted with unforgiving precision. The job took weeks to complete and could be ruined by a single misplaced part.
Faking an escape, tracking a trained killer back to Germania, infiltrating the resistance, and leading the SS to its stronghold. This was no simple fix, but it was a solution. If Felix pulled this off, his family—Mama and Papa and Adele—would be safe.
And the girl… if Felix’s veins hadn’t been so thinned out from blood loss, they would have kept boiling. But he was exhausted, and his anger was sinking into something deeper. The girl had lied to him, used him, made him care, left him for dead. The girl had tried to hurt his family.
The girl would pay for what she’d done.
Speaking of compensation… Felix jerked his chin at the television. “What about the ‘blood to pay’?”
The question had hardly left his mouth when the screen’s static vanished, giving way to a familiar scene: a National Socialist flag hanging above a chair. It was the same piece of furniture from Adolf Hitler’s weekly Chancellery Chats: high-backed, upholstered in velvet.
It was not empty.
The Führer sat as he usually did—meter-stick back, shoulders slightly turned like a portrait of some long-dead king. A pallid face and raging eyes bored into the camera.
It was a recording. It had to be. Even if the Führer had somehow managed to survive a point-blank shot to the chest, he wouldn’t be sitting up in a chair just hours afterward.
Yet when the Führer spoke, all resemblances to a ghost vanished. His words were as strong as ever, made of Krupp steel syllables. “My fellow countrymen. Our great empire of peace and purity is under attack. Earlier this evening, many of you witnessed a desperate attempt on my life—”
Felix stared at the screen, trying his best to believe.
Not a recording. Not a ghost.
Not even a scratch.
“The hand of Providence has, once again, protected me—”
“Mark my words, Herr Wolfe.” Baasch’s voice swelled over the Führer’s speech. He watched the television, a half smile breaking his face. “There will be blood. There will be more than enough. The world is about to drown in it.”