the Inter-Continental hotel, with official French identification, of course, to interrogate the surviving clerks. They all speak English, and they said they distinctly heard two of the guards on the balcony shouting that the 'maniac' had been shot in the legs, but was still alive. They took him away and put him into an ambulance. I repeat, still alive."
"My God!"
"Next, I had our people examine the so-called witnesses to the assault on the American Embassy, where the ambassador was severely wounded and his wife supposedly survived. These witnesses could not understand the subsequent reports on television and in the newspapers. They told our people that the woman's upper chest and face were flowing with blood......... How could she have lived?" they asked."
"So our people did their work. She's gone."
"Then why are they keeping it quiet? Why?"
"That godforsaken Latham, that's why!" cried [email protected], the hatred returning to his ice-cold eyes.
"He's trying to fool us, to pull us into a trap."
"You know him?"
"Of course not. I know men like him. All corrupted by whores."
"Do you know her?"
"Good God, no. But since the legions of the pharaohs, the whores have always corrupted armies. They follow in their covered caravans, sapping the soldiers of their strength for a few minutes of unholy pleasure! Whores!"
"As accurate as that judgment may be, Gunter, and I do not dispute it, it's not particularly relevant to what I'm saying."
"Then what are you saying, Hans? Youtell me that things are not as they've been reported and I reply that you may be correct, that our enemies are attempting to entrap us as we lay traps for them.
There's nothing new in this except that we're winning. Assess the circumstances, my friend. The Americans, the French, and the British are finding us everywhere and nowhere. In Washington, senators and congressmen are suspect; in Paris we have twenty seven members of the Chamber of Deputies shaping laws to our benefit, and the head of the I5euxieme in our pocket. London is ludicrous; they find an ineffectual adviser in the Foreign Office and overlook the first associate to the foreign secretary, who's so furious over the black immigration that he could have written Mein Kampf!" [email protected] stopped briefly as he rose from his chair and stood on the flagstone patio, looking over a flowered hedgerow at the calming waters of the Rhine.
"Yet for all of that, our work in the lesser areas is even more impressive. An American politician once said "All politics is local," and he was right. Adolf Hitler understood that; it's what gave him the Reichstag. You pit one race against another, one ethnic group against another, one economic class against another seemingly drained by it, you provoke chaos, wherein lies a vacuum. He did it from one city to another-Munich, Stuttgart, Nuremberg, Mannheim; troopers everywhere spreading rumors, sowing discontent. Finally, he rushed into and took the political Berlin; he could not have done that without the erratic but consuming support of the outlying areas."
"Bravo, Ginter," cried Traupman, applauding.
"You see the landscape so clearly, so perceptively."
"Then what bothers you so?"
"Things you may not know-"
"Such as?"
"Two Blitzkrieger were taken alive in Paris and flown to Washington."
"I was not told of this," said jAger, his words frozen in ice.
"It's true, but it's of no significance now. They were shot in a safe house in Virginia by our Penetrator Three at the Central Intelligence Agency."
"He's a moron, a clerk! We give him twenty thousand American dollars a year to tell us what the other departments are researching."
"He now wants two hundred thousand for carrying out an order he believes would have been issued to him if he were higher on the ladder."
"Kill him!"
"That's not a good idea, gUnter. Not until we learn whom he may have spoken to about us. As you pointed out, he's a moron; he's also a braggart."
"That swine!" roared jdger, turning from the glare t)f the lantern, his face in shadows.
"A swine who did us a considerable service," added the doctor.
"We'll live with him for a while, even elevate him. The time will come when we can deal him other cards and he'll become a grateful slave."
"Acb, my dear Hans, you are so good for me. Your mind is like your steady surgical hand. If my predecessor had had more men like you around him, he would still be giving orders to the British Parliament."
"In that spirit, I hope you will listen to me now, Gunter."
Traupinan took several steps across the patio; the two men were face-to-face in the