bewilderment; the congregation talked among themselves.
"How is this to be accomplished, my defrocked brother?" asked the old Catholic priest, Monsi c gunro r Heinrich Paltz.
"If your eh knew who and what you are, Father, we'd be joined at the hip."
Laughter again.
"I can substantiate our theories back to the book of Genesis!" the mon signor broke in.
"Cain was obviously a Negro, the mark of Cain was his skin and it was black! And in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, both spoke of the inferior tribes who rejected the words of the prophets! "
"Let's not get into a scholarly debate, Father, for we might both lose. The prophets, by and large, were Jews."
"Similias similibus, my friend. That was two thousand years ago, and we are here now, two thousand years later. But you asked how this operation can be accomplished. May I explain?"
"Please do, Herr Jdger," said Albert Richter, a dilettante turned politician, but with property and another way of life in Monaco.
"The reservoirs, gentlemen, the main water reserves for London, Paris, and Washington. As we convene, plans are being developed to drop tons of toxic chemicals into those central reservoirs from aircraft at night. Once they are dispersed, thousands upon thousands of people will die. Corpses will pile up in the streets, the governments of each nation will be blamed, for it is their responsibility to protect their resources. In London, Paris, and Washington, it will be nothing less than a catastrophic plague, leaving the citizenry terrified, outraged. As political figures fall, our people will take their places, claiming to have the answers, . P the solutions. Weeks, perhaps months, later, once the crises have been reduced through -specific antitoxins introduced into the water in a similar manner, we shall have made considerable inroads within governments and their militaries. When relative calm has been restored, our disciples will be given the credit, for they alone will know and will order the chemical theriacs or counter poisons
"When will this take place?" asked Maximilian von L6wenstein, son of the general and Wolfsschanze traitor executed by the SS but whose loyal mother was a mistress of Josef Goebbels's, a devoted courtesan of the Reich who loathed her husband.
"My mother constantly spoke of the extravagant promises emanating from the Chancellory without specifics. She felt they were most unfortunate and weakened the Fuhrer."
"And our history books will extol the contributions your mother made to the Third Reich; how she exposed her treacherous husband among them. However, in the current situation, tactics are being studied, including the payloads of radar-eluding, low-flying aircraft. Everything is in place within two hundred kilometers of the targets, our specialists on the scene. According to the latest projections, Operation Water Lightning will occur between three and five weeks of this date, each national catastrophe taking place at the same moment, in the darkest hours of night on both sides of the Atlantic. It is now determined that it will be at four-thirty A.M. Paris time, three-thirty London, and ten-thirty P.m. of the previous evening in Washington. They are the most accommodating hours of darkness. That is as specific as I can be at this juncture."
"It's more than sufficient, mein hibrer, our Zeus!" exclaimed Ansel Schmidt, multimillionaire electronics tycoon who had stolen the majority of his high technology from other firms.
"I see a problem," said a heavyset man whose enormously large legs dwarfed his chair, his face balloonlike, devoid of lines despite his age.
"As you know, I'm a chemical engineer by training before branching out. Our enemies are not fools; water samples are constantly analyzed. The sabotage will be revealed, and treatments prescribed. How do we handle that?"
"German inventiveness is the simplest answer," replied Gfinter [email protected], smiling.
"As several generations ago our laboratories created Zyklon B, which rid the world of millions of Jews and other undesirables, our people have developed another lethal formula employing soluble compounds of seemingly incompatible elements, made compatible by isogonic bombardment prior to mixture." Here JAger stopped and shrugged, continuing to smile.
"I am a man of the cloth, our cloth, and do not pretend to be a master of the subject, but we have the finest chemists, a number of whom were recruited from your own laboratories, Herr Waller."
"Isogonic bombardment'?" said the obese man, a thick-lipped smile slowly spreading across his large face.
"A simple variation of isometric fusion, semetrizing the hostile elements, forcing compatibility, like a coating on aspirin. It could take days, weeks, to break down the compounds, let alone isolate them for specific counteract ants