D-Notice by Bill Walker (big ebook reader txt) 📗

There were powerful elements in England who were still sympathetic to Hitler.

But the seeds had been planted and he had to be content with that. And even more so, Rainer felt as if he’d made a fast and true friend. The irony of that made him smile.

The smile died when he faced the approaching staff car. It slid to a halt, its brakes squealing. As soon as it stopped moving a tall whippet-thin man dressed in the new field-grey uniform of the Waffen-SS leaped out.

The new feldgrau was meant to make the SS look more like soldiers, the old black uniform having become an object of scorn to those who felt the SS was shirking its duty by remaining home instead of fighting at the front. Now, ever since Hitler had decreed that the SS would carry arms into battle, it had taken supreme acts of will to tolerate their presence. This one made the task all the harder. He was the officer in charge of their military district.

You might have changed your spots, Müller, but you’re still scum.

Rainer plastered a conciliatory smile on his face and watched while Müller marched up to him, his polished boots gleaming. He strutted rather than walked, carrying himself with the air of the congenitally arrogant, blue eyes staring out of a face that was all sharp angles and jutting planes.

“Obersturmbannführer Müller, what a surprise,” he said. “I must confess that I did not expect you until this evening.”

One of Müller’s long-fingered hands stabbed the air in the direction of the departed Heinkel. “Who was that man, Herr Hauptmann?”

Rainer arched his brows in mock innocence. “Why that, Obersturmbannführer, was Major Wenner...from the Inspector General’s Office.”

This spurious revelation only seemed to make Müller even angrier. “You should have reported his arrival to me, at once. I was ordered to contain the situation here!”

“And I was ordered to cooperate. Perhaps Berlin has its wires crossed?”

Müller sneered at Rainer, then looked toward the sky where the Heinkel had disappeared. “We shall see whose wires are crossed, Herr Hauptmann, Berlin’s...or yours.”

Müller turned back and fixed him with a piercing glare. It made Rainer’s blood run cold. For in the man’s ice-blue eyes he saw only death, destruction, and rivers of his countrymen’s blood.

THE SON: 1984

Chapter Nine

Friedrich Rainer awoke from a restless night of vague and disturbing dreams, covered in a sheen of sweat and feeling every minute of his sixty-eight years. Muscles in his lower back spasmed painfully, and his prostate throbbed with a dull and persistent ache that radiated down through his rectum. Perhaps the most annoying of all was that it now took several minutes for his tired eyes to focus every morning, even after putting on his trademark pair of eight-hundred Mark tortoise shell-rimmed bifocals.

Getting old was shit, but that all paled in comparison with what ran through his mind this mild June morning.

Hans Kleisner was dead, killed by some Arab fanatic they said. Hans had become a controversial writer known the world over for his searing fictional portraits of real-life despots and other politicos, a man who had made many enemies and very few friends. But mere words had not motivated the nervous ascetic young man to wrap his arms around him as the semtex strapped to his youthful body had detonated, blasting them both to atoms.

Rainer knew the real truth: what had killed Hans Kleisner was not his books, but his membership in a nearly forgotten cabal of young German officers dedicated to wresting control of their country from a sputtering madman bent on world domination, a group dedicated to restoring true democracy. Hans Kleisner, like Rainer, had been a member of Der Weisse Adler: The White Eagle.

Rainer put on his glasses, squinting while he eased himself off the mattress, careful not to awaken his wife. He turned, looked down on her and smiled.

Thirty years his junior, she’d come into his life two years before during a Lufthansa shuttle flight from Bonn to Frankfurt, where he’d been traveling to close a deal on new factory space for his company. The closing had gone exceptionally well, and Ilse, one of the flight attendants on the return leg of the journey, had flashed her expensive capped teeth and her ample cleavage, leaving no room for doubt that she found the distinguished-looking industrialist to her liking.

And the truth be told, Rainer hadn’t been looking.

Managing to survive both the war and Hitler’s purging of the Wehrmacht officer corps in the wake of the assassination attempt on July 20, 1944, Rainer elected to stay and help rebuild his ravaged country after the surrender, rather than flee to the Americas as others had done. His patriotism paid off in an opportunity to join a fledgling pharmaceuticals firm, which soon became the preeminent company in West Germany. And his beloved Gerda had been there every step of the way, indispensable to both his life and his business, until breast cancer stole her beauty and her life at the age of fifty-four.

A widower now for nearly a decade, he’d grown accustomed to his solitude, preferring to satisfy the occasional urge with discreet high-priced escorts who knew how to pleasure a man and asked for nothing but their fee in return. The rest of his energies he devoted to his business. Now the “Direktor” of the firm of Horst und Freideke, he was one of the most respected businessmen in Germany, and one of the richest. Still, he hadn’t realized how lonely it all had become...until Ilse.

With her, there had been an immediate attraction, which surprised him as much as it had delighted her. They’d dated for six months, getting together whenever their hectic schedules permitted, spending most of that time in bed. Ilse turned out to be a consummate mistress in the art of lovemaking, approaching the act with