"Including Jews, Gypsies, the disabled and mentally impaired, along with homosexuals of either gender?"
"Those are political decisions, beyond the realm of the medical profession."
"Doctor, you are one son of a bitch. But I'll tell you something.
I may just bring you to the Latham you're after, if only to watch him listen to you, then spit in your face......... Political decisions?" You make me sick." '
Wesley Sorenson stared out his corner office window in Washington, absently noting the morning traffic congestion in the street below. The scene resembled a fish tank maze filled with insects, all trying to reach the next horizontal tube, only to find themselves in yet another tube, leading to still another, none with a finish line. It was a visual metaphor for his thoughts, concluded the director of Consular Operations, swinging his chair around, facing the separate plies of notes on his desk, notes that would be shredded and burned before he left the office at the end of the day.
The strands of information were coming in too fast, clogging the alleyways of his mind, each revelation seemingly no less explosive than the one preceding it. The two Germans in custody in Fairfax had implicated the Vice President of the United States and the Speaker of the House in the spreading hunt for neo-Nazis, with the promise of additional names to follow; the CIA was compromised in its upper levels (how many more agencies were so infected?); a Defense Department communications laboratory had had an entire year's research deleted from its computers by a neo who had disappeared on a Lufthansa flight to Munich; senators, congressmen, powerful businessmen, even newscasters, had been tainted with the Nazi brush with no substantive evidence whatsoever, the allegations dismissed until an influential member of Britain's Foreign Office had been caught, apparently giving the names of other influential figures in the U.K."s government hierarchy. Finally, Claude Moreau was clean,-but the U.S. Embassy in Paris was not-good God, it was far from it if the latest information was accurate! Ambassador Courtland's wife?
It was a maelstrom of charges and counter charges of insidious implications furiously denied, a battleground where blood would be spilled, the innocent mortally wounded, the guilty vanishing from the scene. It was as if the insanity of the crazed McCarthy period had been fused with the Nazi madness of the late thirties, the marching Bunds everywhere, all in lockstep with demonic leaders whose screaming exhortations brought the intellectually unwashed to their feet, their fears and their hatreds-frequently one and the same finding volcanic outlets for their own inadequacies. The sickness of fanaticism was again spreading across the world; where would it end, if ever?
What concerned Sorenson at the moment, however concerned hell, shocked him-was the information, followed by a faxed background check, on Courtland's second wife, Janine Clunes. On the surface it would ap- 3 pear inconceivable; he had said as much to Drew Latham over their secure phones only minutes before.
"I can't believe it!"
"That's what Witkowski said until he read the check from Chicago. Then he said something else, only he kind of whispered it. You could barely hear him but the words were clear.
"She's a Sonnenkind."
"Do you know what that means, Drew?"
"Karin filled me in. It's wild, Wcs, and it could never fly. Infants, kids, sent all over the place-"
"You left out a couple of items," interrupted Sorenson.
"Selected kids, pure Aryan blood, parents with combined IQ's over two hundred seventy, none less."
"You know about it?"
"They were called the products of the Lebensborn. SS officers impregnating blond-haired, blue-eyed northern European women, those closest to or across the Scandinavian borders whenever possible."
"That's nuts!"
"That was Heinrich Himmler. It was his concept."
"It happened?"
"Not according to every intelligence investigation after the war.
The conclusion was that the Lebensborn scheme was abandoned, due to the difficulty of transport and the time it took for medical evaluations."
"Witkowski doesn't believe it was abandoned."
Silence. Then Sorenson spoke.
"I was convinced it was," he said.
"Now I'm not so sure."
"What do you want us to do-me to do?"
"Keep cold and keep silent. If the ncos know Kroeger's alive, they'll break everyone's balls to find him. If you've lucked out, nobody on our side will be killed."
"That's pretty icicle like Wcs."
"Remembrance of things past," if you'll forgive the literary bastardization," said Sorenson.
"Send a signal out to the Antinayous. Tell them you've got the prize."
"For Christ's sake, w y?"
"Because at this point I don't trust anybody, and I'm covering all our flanks. Do as