"Subversive activities, inciting to riot, crimes against the state, all the usual legal garbage our forebears refined in a far more conducive environment."
"But bow?"
"Apparently your Harry Latham-Lassiter was not the only infiltrator in our valley."
"Inconceivable! Each and every one of our followers was put through the most rigorous examinations, even to the point of electronic brain scans that would reveal lying, doubts, the smallest hesitation. I myself devised the procedures; they're foolproof."
"Perhaps one of them had a change of heart after he or she left the valley. Regardless, von Schnabe was picked up by the police and identified in a lineup where the accuser could not be seen.
According to what little we've learned, it may have been a woman, as there apparently were references to sexual abuse. A middle-level police officer was heard laughing about it with his colleagues in the Munich station."
"I told the general constantly, warned him repeatedly, about his liaisons with female personnel. He always answered, "With all your learning, Kroeger, you don't understand. A general connotes power, and power is the essence of sex. They want me."
"And he wasn't even. a general," said Traupman over the phone.
"Much less a von."
"Really? I thought-"
"Youthought what you were meant to think, Gerhardt," interrupted the doctor from Nureniberg.
"Schnabe is a brilliant student of military operations, a devoted partisan of our cause-few among us could have found, created, and managed our valley-those were his enormous strengths. Actually, in medical terms, he was, is, a sociopath of the highest intelligence, the sort of person such movements as ours demand, especially in the initial stages. Afterward, of course, they are replaced. That was the error of the Third Reich; they believed their false titles, lived them out, and overrode the real generals, the Junkers who might have won the war with a properly timed invasion of England. We will not make those mistakes."
"What do we do now, Herr Doktor?"
"We've arranged for Schnabe to be shot in his cell tonight. The assassin will use a silenced pistol. It's not difficult; unemployment is high even among the criminal classes. It must be done before his interrogation begins, specifically the Amytals."
"And Vaclabruck?"
"It's yours to run for now. What concerns us, what concerns our leader in Bonn, is your computerized robot in Paris. When will he die, for God's sake?"
"One day, three days at the outside, he can't last more than that."
"Good."
"Excuse me, Herr Traupman, but it is all too possible that he will experience a virtual explosion in his occipital lobe."
"Where your implant resides?"
"Yes.
"We must find him before that happens. If they discover one robot, they'll believe there are a thousand others! "
"I said as much to my wife."
"Greta, of course. What does she suggest?"
"She agrees with me," replied Kroeger as his wife stood up and shook her head violently.
"I must fly to Paris and meet with our people. First with the Blitzkrieger; they're missing something. Then with our plant at the American Embassy; we must refine what he knows about the Antinayous. Finally, our man at the [email protected] Bureau. He vacillates."
"Be careful with Moreau. He's one of us in his stomach, but he's a Frenchman. We really don't know which side he's on."
Andrew Latham, now his brother Harry, waited in the shadows of the Trocadero, behind the statue of DKing Henry the Innocent, his eyes peering through night-vision binoculars. Nearly a hundred yards across the vast concrete pavement were the equally dark spaces between the statues of Louis the Fourteenth and Napoleon the First.
It was the rendezvous point of his last request to Karin de Vries that day. The delivery of selected confidential papers he needed from his "dead brother's" office. It was almost eleven o'clock, the Paris night illuminated by a summer moon, a professional white hunter's moon in the African veldt, and Drew Latham found comfort in that fact.
"Two men emerged from a black sedan parked in the long, curbed entrance to the great facade of monuments. They wore dark business suits and walked toward the rendezvous, each carrying a briefcase ostensibly holding the papers he had "urgently requested" from his "brother's" desk. They were ncos, for that last request, as coded, had not been transmitted by Karin de Vries. It was proof that her telephone was tapped within the embassy.
Drew ambled into the scattered groups of strollers, many Parisians, the majority foreign tourists holding cameras. Erratic flashes popped everywhere. The lapels of Drew's jacket were turned up, and a black visored cap partially covered his face as he made his way