The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) (2 page)

“
This is the coat you got for your birthday, is it not
?” Heinrich said as he pulled out a tailcoat. “Where’s Collins?” he asked over his shoulder at the door where Karoline was standing, reverting to Karoline’s preferred language.

“I think he is out on some errand,” she replied in her native tongue.

Collins was the chief servant of the household, and Heinrich relied on him for dealing with things that he felt beyond the competency of the nanny. He was a dependable man, and during Heinrich’s posting in British Malaya he had relied on him to be the man who could offer the boy some manly stewardship. Karoline and the nanny Elizabeth Mandel White were not exactly beacons of masculinity. Collins was a gentleman educated at a good independent school and his father had a minor title he had received as a distinguished civil servant, so he was exactly the kind of man Heinrich could trust when it came to the young boy.

“
Very well
,
get your trousers boy
,” Heinrich said, deciding that the boy should keep it simple and innocuous; morning dress would not be too informal for the occasion.

“
Why can’t I wear this
?” James muttered, having looked forward to wear his lieutenant’s uniform outside.

He liked it a great deal, and it wasn’t fair that Dad refused to tell Uncle Bobby to get him a Blues and Royals uniform like he wanted. With a cuirass, of course! It wouldn’t be a real horse guard uniform without the breastplate—and the helmet too! By comparison, this German getup would look ever so tame and silly, but it was the only real military uniform he had in his wardrobe.

“
Because your father doesn’t want you to
,” Karoline said admonishingly, not too self-conscious about her overwhelming accent to expose it when nobody but Heinrich and Philipp was around. “
That’s reason enough
.”

She sometimes whipped out her English to highlight that she meant business, and she hoped that his father would convince Philipp to stop acting so childishly about his uniform. While her son didn’t listen to her or Elizabeth, he had plenty of respect for his father, and he had to understand by now that he did not want him to wear that uniform. Little boys shouldn’t wear military uniforms! She could see just how full of himself he became from wearing it, and if anything Philipp had to practice a bit of humility.

The offices were slowly emptying as people were leaving to catch the subway or tram home for the evening, but Fritz was still painstakingly examining the draft of the report he needed to type up for the minister of war. The report from one of the working groups indicated some great progress, and there was all the need to keep the minister of war up to date about the technical aspects of the program even though he was unlikely to understand much of the details, so it had to be kept simple. Fritz hated typing, but the sensitivity of the matter left him with no choice but to type the report personally since not even Miss Lind was supposed to know about the existence of the Wiesbaden Group, the Hesse Metallurgical Works, or the Kongo Project. He penciled some notes on the draft as he read through it, making his usual markings where he was not content with the formulations or where he felt he needed to put things a bit differently to make the report more pleasant on the minister’s eyes. The report was solely intended for the minister, and the end report would have to be properly sealed and classified to his sole perusal, as Fritz had been instructed by Colonel Kretschke.

It was almost midnight before at long last after many cigarettes and two whole redrafts he was content enough to burn all his notes and previous drafts, and properly sign the report and stamp it with the warning of the report being top, top secret with a reference to the national criminal statute. The building had been deserted when he walked out of his personal office, and he kept the small briefcase with the folder to his chest as he walked through the hallway towards the stairs. He had put the report in the briefcase as usual, and he followed his ordinary routine for delivering reports, even if tomorrow—no, today actually—was Christmas Eve. On the bottom floor he approached the junior officer on duty at the guard station. The young officer was reading a magazine, and he didn’t seem particularly busy doing anything useful.

“I have a parcel for the minister of war,” Fritz said, holding up the briefcase containing the sealed folder. “Would you get me a courier?”

“This late?” the officer muttered frowning with annoying impudence as if Fritz had said something preposterous.

Although most of the staff were civilians, Fritz wore his uniform with the insignia identifying him as a captain, so it was hardly a great mystery to the second lieutenant that he was an officer who outranked him. Ever since he first became an officer, he rarely went out without a uniform, and civilian clothes made him feel a bit naked. Yet this lout didn’t seem to notice the insignia at all.

“It is quite urgent,” Fritz said, not letting his annoyance show, since he had no reason to seed resentment from this disrespectful young man. “The minister must have it first thing in the morning.”

The officer glanced over at the clock, still looking skeptical.
Lazy bum
. The man made Fritz feel like an old man bitterly noticing the degenerate youths around him. Was this the modern Prussian man? Reading a men’s magazine and looking like he couldn’t care a damn about his job.

“Why don’t you leave it here, and it can go out at six? The minister won’t be in his office before it arrives anyway.”

What was the point of rushing in the middle of the night to get something to a senile goat who would probably not even be around to receive it until sometime in the morning? It just didn’t make sense to him.

“It is quite sensitive,” Fritz mumbled. “I would very much like to have it delivered by a courier straight away.”

The second lieutenant sighed as if he had been told to do something that would need work, not just call someone.

“All right, sir, but you’ll probably have to wait.”

“That is fine,” Fritz said. “Just get the courier, if you please.”

After the officer called for a courier with his phone, Fritz went to sit down at a hard wooden bench across from the officer’s desk to wait while the officer returned to his magazine. If he was still annoyed about having to call for a courier, he didn’t show it and instead seemed to enjoy reading whatever he was reading in his magazine.

The War Ministry was in the heart of Berlin while the Office of Wartime Statistics was housed only about three miles away in a building that had originally belonged to a different department but had been vacated during the significant reorganization when the central government abolished the Prussian, Saxon, Frisian, Bavarian, and Württembergian armies to integrate them completely into a central
Reichswehr
back in April. Fritz’s uniform still had the insignia of the Prussian Army on his uniform, although he was now supposedly a
German
captain after the separate armies had been merged together and the Prussian Army had become the centerpiece of the unified
Reichswehr
—the first modern
German
army.

Although the Office of Wartime Statistics provided a wide range of data as a general department of the central German government, Fritz’s department had been put there perhaps by accident or by some cunning reasoning by the higher ups—Fritz did not actually know about the genesis of the Fourth Floor since the organization had been started before he was appointed as the military assistant to its administrator Colonel Doctor Professor Kretschke. The people working on the Fourth Floor dealt with the Wiesbaden Group, the Hesse Metallurgical Works, and the Kongo Project, and Colonel Kretschke spent much time with several subdivisions within the Group and the Works on location, recently that had taken him to the site outside Posen and the other locations where the Wiesbaden Group had significant facilities—none of the sites were actually in the city of Wiesbaden which had only lent its name to the Group. Similarly, the Hesse Metallurgical Works had very little to do with either the Kingdom of Hesse or the Grand Duchy of Hesse. It was a name that had originated in an institute based in Mainz in the Grand Duchy of Hesse run by the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, the director of which was the head of the organization working under the codename the Hesse Metallurgical Works, but other than the location of the original institute, in Mainz, the Metallurgical Works was primarily based in the Duchy of Karlsbad and Prussian Silesia.

The secrecy surrounding the Office of Wartime Statistics was high since even the relatively overt activities of liaising between the Ministry of War, the Ministry of Armaments and War Materials, and other ministries directly involved in the war effort were surely of interest to enemy agents. The Fourth Floor, however, only reported in full to the Minister of War, the Palace, and—since very recently—the Chancellor’s Office. Apart from Fritz, Colonel Kretschke, and a handful of others, the Fourth Floor’s purpose was not known even to the majority of the military leadership, let alone the apes populating the Reichstag. Even most people in the Wiesbaden Group and the Hesse Metallurgical Works—and obviously every single Hottentot and their handlers in the Kongo Project based in the German Kongo—didn’t know the broad idea behind it. Lieutenant General König had instructed every single person from the humblest menial worker and up to the top that if secrecy was breached, it would amount to espionage or even high treason, punishable by a very long prison stay or even death.

Fritz waited impatiently for the courier, and it took almost an hour before the motorcyclist turned up to lead Fritz outside to his motorbike. He didn’t particularly enjoy riding cramped up in the small sidecar, but be couldn’t let the briefcase out of sight, and protecting it was a matter of duty, and he wouldn’t, couldn’t, leave it with a courier and entrust him with delivering the report. The language he used was vague enough so that it would not be immediately recognizable as an important document, but even a man with a moderate intellect would presumably decipher it to be a military document of some value.

The War Ministry was a large complex in Tiergarten, and had it not been for the briefcase and its sensitive contents, going over there on foot would have been a refreshing walk through a nice part of the city—quite an appealing sight in the dark. This late—or early—there was not much to see in the city, and few people were outside. It was rare to see the streets this empty, and there was something very attractive about the big city being asleep. The city administration had prevented central Berlin from being perverted with experimental architecture, and the heart of the city was still not a world apart from the city you could find painted in old postcards from the Wilhelm I Era in which Berlin had continued to grow to become the modern metropolitan center of Germany with a heart still dressed in pre-industrialization architecture. To an old-fashioned romantic, Berlin was perhaps Germany’s most picturesque city—in the center at least—if you took its enormous population into account since most picturesque towns and villages weren’t home to millions…

The motorcycle courier passed the sentries standing guard at the gates and drove into the courtyard right outside the part of the building where Fritz was headed, and the captain was pleasantly surprised when he found out from the duty officer that one of the minister’s assistants was in the private offices of the minister. He could always deliver documents in the delivery safe he was supposed to use, but he preferred to have one of the minister’s aides to take care of it.

“Working late, huh?” Fritz smirked while the captain unlocked the safe in the office just outside the private study of the minister.

The official offices of the war minister were quite palatial, and Fritz was no stranger to delivering secret correspondence on Colonel Kretschke’s behalf. The minister presumably received much classified information directly to his office, and the young officer didn’t seem at all surprised by Fritz’s appearance or the “
Classified
” seal on the report which had to be broken to read the document.

“It’s just one of those days,” von Weiszer said over his shoulder as he opened the thick safe hatch.

The handsome officer was quite young, but he came from a good family of
Junkers
from West Prussia, and his uncle was apparently a division commander in Russia. The young man had several cousins and a brother who had senior positions in the army as well, so he was exactly the kind of man who had the blood of the old Prussian warrior class flowing through his veins. He had a very beautiful smile, manly, yet not rough. It seemed somehow like the kind of face that would have inspired ancient sculptors as the embodiment of the youthful, erotic young man, and Fritz felt a little dirty from admiring his undeniable Grecian beauty.

After he had opened the safe he came over to Fritz to take the sealed folder, and Fritz worried that the young man might notice his peculiar interest in him, surely looking like a small enamored girl rather than a man who was almost old enough to be von Weiszer’s father. His sentiments were quite disturbing, and they usually did not strike as badly as they did now. Perhaps it was his tiredness after a long day that was bringing out his inner pervert from its hiding place in the bestial part of his brain.

“The minister should read it as soon as possible,” Fritz said when the folder changed hands, hoping to mask his awkward, unseemly interest in the young officer.

“I am sure that the minister will look read it as soon as he comes in,” the assistant said, not showing any curiosity at all about the folder before he walked over to lock it inside the safe until the minister would arrive to read it.

Jakob had no idea whether this was another one of the kind of reports the minister would just go through in a minute or two before destroying it. He was a difficult man to sort out, but Jakob didn’t want to dash anybody’s illusions about the minister actually combing through a report. Most of the important data came through Army High Command rather than directly to the War Ministry anyway—the minister was just in charge of the Ministry of War, he wasn’t the Chief of Staff of Army High Command.

Fritz wouldn’t expect that a fine man like von Weiszer would inquire about things that were solely for the minister—he probably didn’t even really know what Fritz was doing. A true Prussian’s highest virtue was his loyalty, his fidelity to his duty to the country, the king, and God. Perhaps a lesser human being—like a Bavarian…—might be tempted to look into things he was not supposed to see, but not a man born and bred to be a soldier. If a soldier was told to not read something, then he would not read it. As much as a good officer should have a nose for taking initiative and being proactive, Fritz was certain that all good officers had a sense of duty to obey important orders ingrained in their bloodstream, and a man like von Weiszer surely had that in him just like Fritz.

“Was there anything else?” the beautiful officer asked.

Fritz was a little startled as he realized that the man was looking at him, his eyes so youthfully inquisitive.

“No, no, I’m just tired,” he mumbled.

He had enough decency to lie.

“Merry Christmas, then, if you don’t come again before that,” the officer said.

“Yes, indeed,” he mumbled absentmindedly. “Merry Christmas.”

Fritz saluted the officer before he left. He really preferred when someone else was there. Von Weiszer made him much too uneasy, and he was far more at ease when von Goltz, Leopold, or one of the other aides was there since neither of them caused nearly as much disturbances in his mind. Hardly anybody anywhere compared to von Weiszer.