Would a delay of a minute or two cause the man to kill his wife and child?
Behind of all this lay the bigger question: Who was their captor? Which master had sent him?
The more he thought about it, Brasch didn't think the man was an SD agent. The state had no need to play games like this. If they had wanted him, they would have marched a squad of goons into the office and simply taken him. So, too, with his family.
He realized with a flutter of his already churning stomach that he still wore his Luger. The instructions had been quite explicit. He was to come alone-and unarmed.
Thus as he jumped from the trolley at the stop nearest his home, and half walked, half jogged the rest of the way, Brasch unbuttoned the clasp on his holster. His soldier's training tried to assert itself, pushing him toward action. But his rational mind checked the warrior spirit.
This bastard wanted him, for whatever reason. If he had been an assassin, he wouldn't have bothered with Willie and Manfred. No, the prize was Brasch, not his corpse.
He fumbled with his keys at the building entrance, and again at the door to their rooms. "It's me," he called out, closing the door behind him. The kitchen was at the end of a long corridor. He unloaded the Luger and slid it along the carpeted floor with an underarm throw.
"There," he called out, "it is as you wished. And I am alone."
A German voice replied. "I know. I can see. Come into the kitchen, slowly."
When he was halfway down the hall, the voice spoke again. "Turn around, place your hands on your head, and walk the rest of the way backwards."
Brasch did as he was told.
Muller watched the engineer as he felt his way into the small kitchen. When Brasch was a few feet from the table, Muller told him to stop and turn around.
"Bind your hands to the table leg with those plasteel cuffs," he ordered, pointing to the objects on the table. "I'm sure you know what I mean, so don't fuck around or I will put a bullet into your son. This pistol is silenced. Nobody will hear."
He spoke in English, to spare the boy any more distress than was necessary. Even so, he fought to keep the disgust off his face and out of his voice. This wasn't how he had imagined himself when he had enlisted, twelve years earlier. No, this was the moral equivalent of the evil he had volunteered to fight, although he had no real intention of murdering the boy or the woman.
Brasch however, could well be spending his last day on earth. When the engineer had cuffed himself to the table, Muller moved around to a spot where he could see the man's hands.
"You have brought your flexipad, I see. Good, Herr Oberst. I will remove it now and place it on the table. My gun will be at your head the entire time. I doubt you will want your son to watch as his papa's brains are blown out."
Brasch was shaking with coiled tension as Muller removed the device, powered it up, and laid it next to his own on the table. He keyed in the command set that would effect a laser link transfer of all the data.
"What are you doing?" asked Brasch. "You're not Gestapo, are you? You're one of them. From the future?"
"Yes," Muller admitted. "And I'm saving Germany from herself."
"You idiot!" Brasch spat. "Why did you have to do this to my family? Look at little Manny-he is shaking with terror. You have tortured him, and all for nothing. I sent you everything I know. Everything! And this is my reward? What sort of a barbarian are you?"
Muller had no idea what the man was talking about. His mission brief had been simple. Brasch was one of the critical players in the Nazi's accelerated weapons program. So Muller had been sent in to determine how much they had accomplished, and to liquidate Brasch once he had the information. The engineer's outburst made no sense.
"Where do you think the data burst came from, on the Demidenko Center, the fast-fission project, the SS special-weapons directorate," Brasch hissed, glancing around as if afraid they might be overheard.
"Just shut up, and slow down," Muller barked when he finally recovered his wits. "What are you talking about? What burst?"
"It was yesterday! I sent a compressed, encrypted burst to the British ship, the Trident. It took me months to work out how to do so, without being caught. I sent everything I had on the special projects, and on Sea Dragon. Have they told you nothing?"
"Did you identify yourself?" asked Muller as he tried to understand what was happening. It was like wrestling with blocks of smoke.
"Of course not. Do you think I'm insane? I took enough of a risk, just sending the information as I did."
Muller glanced at the wife. She must speak English, too, he guessed. He'd spoken to her only in German before. Her eyes registered a renewed shock-something beyond the trauma of being taken hostage.
He tried to think it through as quickly as possible. If Brasch had sent such a burst, but hadn't identified himself, there would be no immediate reason for the special ops executive to contact Muller. Particularly if there was any risk of compromising the source of such valuable new information.
"Shit," he muttered as he scooped up his own flexipad. He dropped the file transfer into the background and brought up the communicator, scribbling out a quick message.
He needed to check out Brasch's story.
HMS TRIDENT, THE ENGLISH CHANNEL
The Trident's defensive stocks had dropped to 13 percent of capacity. The previous day's attack by ME 262s had sliced through the destroyer screen and pressed in on the ship, requiring her Close-In Weapons Systems to respond.
The Metal Storm pods had chewed up the incoming fighters in less than four seconds, but all the defensive sysops in the ship's Combat Information Center had red warning lights displayed on their screens. Ammunition for the pods had dropped past the critical line. Back home, the Trident would have been assigned protected status, and would have been shielded by other ships connected via the Cooperative Battle Link. Or she would have withdrawn from hostilities altogether.
Neither of those options was available to Halabi now.
She caught herself chewing at her bottom lip as she reviewed the situation. It wouldn't do to look as though circumstance had the better of her. But she was growing concerned that that was exactly the case. News of the missile strike on Hawaii had jolted the ship's complement, but not as much as the message from Kolhammer that arrived shortly afterwards, warning her that the Trident might come under attack from weapons stripped off the French cruiser. It was unlikely, but it forced her to revise down their chances of survival. How difficult could it be to remove a cruise missile from the Dessaix and rig it up for a land-based launch against her command? Very difficult, she supposed, but not impossible if a few key crew members had helped out.
And the chances of that?
She had no idea.
She could feel the increased tension in her CIC. Nerves had been stretched to the breaking point. The first blows of Sea Dragon had already been struck. The two attempts by the Luftwaffe could no longer be seen as probes. They were hammering at Britain's shield. The Wehrmacht was moving into position for an assault across the Channel.
Thousands of men dueled and died in the skies above them as the RAF and the Luftwaffe clawed at each other for supremacy. Neither side had unleashed any additional jet fighters, since the ME 262s had been destroyed attacking her ship, but there had been some nasty surprises for everyone, nonetheless.