“Uh, thanks again—”
“Just get going.”
“Yeah.” Elizabeth slipped outside. She moved around the mud puddles that dotted the streets and kept to the building shadows. When she finally reached the women’s barracks, the long row of cots looked inviting. She had had enough excitement for one night, and just hoped her transfer would go through without anyone questioning it.
Breaking and entering wasn’t her style. Maybe she was better off with the United Conscience Group, passing out leaflets and doing nothing significant. The MCG debacle had shown her the worst of what could happen. Jeff had paid with his life.
Once was enough, no matter how high the stakes.
3
Berlin
June 1943
“Since the outbreak of war, interest in uranium has intensified in Germany. I have now learned that research there is being carried out in great secrecy.”
“The Germans are at present probably far ahead of us. They started their program vigorously in 1939, but ours was not undertaken with similar vigor until 1941.”
His own stationery had finally arrived from the printer. He had needed to pull the rank of his new position in the Reich just to get something this simple done on time. It didn’t bode well for the more serious things he would have to do.
He rocked back and admired the printing: dr. Abraham ESAU, PLENIPOTENTIARY FOR NUCLEAR PHYSICS.
The bold Fraktur type made his promotion, achieved at long last, seem all the more official. They couldn’t take it away from him this time. Things would start to change now. No matter what the others might say.
Esau took the top sheet, careful not to smudge the ink, then snapped the ivory paper. Crisp, decisive movements always made points with his superiors. Esau had learned such details years before when he started his rise in the party as a Brown Shirt.
He sat back in the leather-covered chair, swiveling around to look at the office he’d recently commandeered. He had come in with the appropriate bustle and appearance of authority—another thing he had learned in the National Socialist Party, that the appearance of authority carried nearly as much weight as authority itself.
He had ordered several lesser workers to move the desk and the chair into the office he selected, the one with the best view of Berlin. He had never bothered to check whose office this was; the Plenipotentiary for Nuclear Physics claimed it now.
Though the day was cold for early summer, he left the window open to clear the air of stale cigarette smoke. He heard street sounds outside, the vehicles, the people going about their business even during wartime.
He noticed dust marks on the bookshelves from where the previous occupant had kept his library. Esau’s own boxes were piled in the hall outside the door. Sooner or later he would have someone unpack them, make this look like a proper office.
He thought of his cramped dormitory room in Cambridge back when the world was different, back when the unfair Treaty of Versailles remained a festering sore for Germans but not yet cause for a renewed war. German physics held the reins of science, and universities such as Gottingen held the greatest minds of philosophy, mathematics, physics, and chemistry. Esau had pursued studies in high-frequency electronics as a guest in Great Britain, eventually gaining some fame in the early days of wireless telegraphs and television.
His English friend and companion, Graham Fox, had assisted him in his studies, and they had both gone far. Rutherford taught at Cambridge, with its meadows and tree-shaded river. Niels Bohr himself came to give guest lectures. The Cavendish Laboratory, where Chadwick had discovered the neutron in 1932, had been the best equipped in all of Europe.
Abraham Esau had engaged in innumerable discussions, not just within classes, but also in their favorite meeting place, an old cafe’ in a remarkably clean alley. Other students gathered there to argue over their own imaginary problems. Scribbled mathematical formulae covered the marble-topped tables, and the waiters had strict instructions never to wipe away the marks without special permission. Unsolved problems left on the marble were often completed by other students who came in later. Esau smiled to himself; those were heady days. The vivid memories held many distinctive colors, sounds, and odors for him—but the world had since gone flat.
He had not seen Graham Fox for many years. They had grown apart as Esau absorbed himself in party politics, working his way up in the German government. His calling had been to use his knowledge and talents to help resurrect Germany from its economic death. He had been appointed President of the Reich Bureau of Standards, and later head of the physics section of the Education Ministry’s Reich Research Council. Abraham Esau, with his cursed Jewish-sounding name, had stumbled through many pitfalls, back-stabbings, and political maneuvers to get to his position now. It had made him many enemies, and few friends.
Esau straightened the photograph on the corner of the desk. He had no wife, no children—this was a picture of himself. One party weekly described him as “a thickset man with a tough farmer’s skull” and had made fun of his peasant ancestry, his East Prussian accent. Even his competency in physics. Too many people enjoyed picking on Abraham Esau.
In the photograph, though, Esau looked impeccable, wearing a gray wool jacket, neat tie, crisp white collar. He kept his steel-colored hair trimmed well above the ears and oiled into place so that it showed the parallel lines of combs’ teeth. He had one eyebrow raised, pale irises the color of water. An intelligent-looking man, a powerful man, with an upturned sneer caused by a tangled scar on his upper lip—the mark of a boating accident when he and Graham Fox had gotten a bit drunk and gone out on the river when they shouldn’t have.
Esau laid the stationery back on the desktop. Plenipotentiary for Nuclear Physics. The title had so many trappings, held so much power.
It had not seemed surprising that a German, Otto Hahn, would announce the discovery of the fission of the atomic nucleus in 1939, the year war broke out. Hahn had been unable to believe his own results for the longest time, probably sabotaged by his Jewish assistant Lise Meitner before she fled Germany. Finally, when he could no longer refute his astonishing results, Hahn had published his discovery in a public forum for all the world to see.
Esau found it remarkable how things had changed in only four years. Now open dissemination of such important information was unheard of. All German nuclear work—and no doubt all American and British as well continued at a frantic pace, but those discoveries were carefully hidden behind the shield of secrecy.
As Plenipotentiary, he now had to reconcile all the disparate work on nuclear physics in Germany, but he did not know how to do it. Certainly, their own researchers were among the most brilliant in the world; but they were scattered, each one working on his own pet project. It reminded him of horses pulling a cart in opposite directions, getting nowhere.
Three separate German teams worked on the same problem, and each team refused to cooperate with the others, and each received funding from different ministries.
The experimentalist von Ardenne operated the smallest program under the auspices of the Ministry of Posts—a more unlikely sponsor Esau could not have imagined. But von Ardenne had done what he found necessary to implement his ideas. Esau admired that. He himself had done a similar thing, back in 1939, when the Reich Ministry of Education appointed him to look into the possibilities of developing energy from the atomic nucleus. Hahn had just announced his discovery of fission, and physicists worldwide were falling all over themselves to be first with the next breakthrough.