“He’s a Gauleiter,” Kurt whispered, carefully leaving the shower on to make it harder for anyone to spy on them. “Can he be trusted?”
“He’s sane,” Horst said. “But he has his own agenda.”
He took a deep breath as they were shown directly into his uncle’s study, remembering the times he’d been marched into the study to explain himself. His uncle had been strict, but fair; he’d never hated Horst — or any of the other children — purely for being children. And while he never relaxed enough to play with them, he’d never been distant from them either.
“Please, take a seat,” Forster said. “I’ll have some food sent in for the three of us.”
Kurt sat, gingerly. “How did you find us?”
“I had a theory that the Berlin government would send someone into Germany East,” Forster said, after a moment. “When your papers — perfect and yet unrecorded — appeared, I knew I was looking at potential allies. And so I arranged for your transport to be ambushed.”
“You took a hell of a risk,” Horst said. He rubbed his wrists meditatively. “What if you’d been wrong?”
“I could have covered myself,” Forster assured him. “It being you was a stroke of luck, of course. I had hoped you’d make contact, but…”
“Contacting you would be a gamble,” Horst said. He felt the question welling up inside him, even though asking would reveal a potential weakness. “Where is my wife?”
“Alive, for the moment,” Forster said. He smiled, lightly. “Although I should question the legality of a marriage that took place without your guardian’s consent.”
Horst barely heard him. Gudrun was alive! He’d hoped — desperately — that Holliston would keep her alive, but he’d feared that she might simply have been shot out of hand. Gudrun was useless to him. It was possible, all too possible, that Holliston would simply have ordered her death. And he’d vowed that, if his wife was killed, he would make damn certain that Holliston died too.
And if it cost me my life, he thought, I would be reunited with her at the end.
“We are married,” he said, finally. “You can’t separate us.”
“I wouldn’t dare to try,” his uncle said. He sounded amused. “She is a very formidable young lady.”
Kurt blinked. “You’ve met her?”
“We’ll discuss that later,” Forster said. “There are other matters to discuss.”
“True,” Horst agreed. He leaned forward. “Are you switching sides, uncle?”
Forster looked pained. “Direct as ever, my boy?”
“Yes,” Horst said.
The door opened before Forster could answer, revealing three maids carrying trays of food and steaming mugs of hot coffee. Horst and Kurt tucked in gratefully; Forster, seated behind his desk, nibbled at his platter. Horst would have liked to concentrate on the food, but he knew — deep inside — that they didn’t have time. He needed to know what was going on.
“Uncle,” he said, once the first hunger pangs had been quelled. “Are you switching sides?”
Forster looked back at him, evenly. “There are… some… of us who believe that prolonging this war will only result in mutual destruction.”
“They are correct,” Horst said. “If nukes are being used…”
“Three nukes,” Forster said. “The training base at Kursk — I believe you know it — was destroyed a few days ago.”
Horst and Kurt exchanged glances. They’d heard nothing about it, neither on the radio nor at any of the settlements they’d passed through. The radio had chattered endlessly about how horrible the rebels were to use nuclear weapons, but it had seemed focused on the explosions near Warsaw. A third nuclear detonation?
“To be precise, Holliston deployed two nuclear weapons near Warsaw,” Forster clarified, carefully. “Your government retaliated by destroying the training centre with a nuclear warhead.”
“I see,” Horst said. “And you plan to switch sides?”
“Let’s just say that… we… would like a negotiated solution,” Forster said. “We cannot bring you to heel and you cannot bring us to heel. Further conflict will merely weaken the Reich to the point that whoever wins will actually lose. We believe that a parting of the ways may be the best possible solution to the problem.”
Kurt snorted. “And Holliston?”
“Is insane,” Forster said. “He needs to be removed.”
“Good,” Horst said.
Forster held up a hand. “Is your government prepared to talk?”
Horst hesitated. “We do have some authority to make promises,” he said. “But it would depend on what you were prepared to offer.”
“And it would be contingent on Berlin’s approval,” Kurt added.
“I do understand,” Forster assured him. “And seeing that I’m not a diplomat either, I shall be blunt.”
He cleared his throat. “Germany East formally separates from Germany Prime,” he said, firmly. “There is a formal amnesty for anyone within Germany Prime — or the Reich as a whole — who served the Reich Council in any role. Anyone you find unbearable — or merely wants to stay with the Reich — gets to emigrate to Germany East, no questions asked. The same goes for the other parts of the Reich.”
Horst lifted an eyebrow. “You don’t want to keep control of Germany Arabia? Or Germany South?”
“I suspect the former will stay with you,” his uncle said. “And the latter is too far away to be ruled effectively.”
“Yeah,” Horst agreed. “Plenty of people living there with impure pedigrees.”
His uncle ignored the remark. “You will not interfere in the internal affairs of Germany East; we will not interfere in the affairs of Germany Prime. You can reshape the west to suit yourselves — who knows? You might come up with a new way to live.”
“It would be more accurate to say that your way of life is killing us,” Kurt said, stiffly.
“Your sister said much the same,” Forster said. “Although she did seem to put her former boyfriend on a pedestal.”
Horst felt his cheeks heat. “She was engaged to him for months, uncle,” he said. “Even after she knew they would never be together, it still hurt her to leave.”
His uncle lifted his eyebrows. “And that doesn’t bother you?”
“I grew up here, Uncle,” Horst said, sharply. “Women remarrying — or several women marrying the same man — is not uncommon here. I choose not to worry about it.”
“Nor should you,” Forster said. “Do you find our terms acceptable?”
“We would want to put the nukes under tight control,” Horst said. He doubted his uncle would agree to simply surrender the weapons. If nothing else, their mere presence would keep Berlin from resuming the war at a later date. “Can that be done?”
His uncle frowned. “Holliston is the only person who has access to the launch codes,” he said. “Whatever we do will have to make sure he doesn’t have a chance to send a command to the launchers.”
Horst nodded. Whatever the state of the ICBMs, the SS would have no trouble shooting tactical nuclear warheads from long-range guns. The entire front line could be bathed in nuclear fire. Hell, smuggling nukes west into Berlin — and the other cities — would be relatively straightforward. If Holliston decided he wanted to take everyone else down with him, he had the tools at his disposal. Keeping the warheads from being detonated would be the first priority, superseding everything else.