The spring 1945 was the season of ending, of beginning. The Third Reich's powerful grinding war machine, that engine of war that had for so long lorded the continent, was self-destructing in upon itself. The American cinema's newsreels showed triumphant footage of GIs bridging the Rhine, but the ticker tapes faltered with the indefatigable advance of the Red Army from the east, the scarlet tide that was consuming whole sections of Germany.
For everyone else, the race was to Berlin, symbolic prize for a war already won. But for Ezra Prentice, the capital of Germany didn't matter. The prize, the ultimate spoils of this war, was not a city, but the human capital in the city. He was not watching the race for Berlin, but the race for Germany's scientific brain trust.
Thanks to the message from Wilhelm Fassbender, he became aware that Werner Heisenberg, the Nobel laureate responsible for the German atomic project, and Otto Hahn and other prominent nuclear physicists, were not in Berlin. They crouched in a makeshift laboratory hiding in a cave beneath a church in the small Swabian town of Haigerloch. These were the ultimate, most cherished belongings of a dying regime.
"There is no way we let the Russians reach them," stated Ezra frankly in a tense meeting with General Groves and a selected group of members of the military intelligence. "Heisenberg himself failed in the production of the bomb, but the theoretical background he has is irreplaceable. In the Russians' custody, that would accelerate their own work for ten years."
Ezra recognized that in the history he remembered, the U.S. government would in the end conduct the sprawling, often chaotic effort to evacuate German scientists out of Europe, "Operation Paperclip." Once more, he determined that history was too slow, too inefficient, and too fallible. He would place the process in the hands of private enterprise, taking control effective at once.
"Tighten up, General," he said, turning to Groves. "The ordinary Army intelligence branches are not trained for the job. We are going to need an elite, small, fast-moving group. A scientific team with military muscle."
He requested the establishment of a new, ultra-secret, intelligence unit, the precursor of the famous Alsos Mission, to be funded directly out of a secret allocation of his own philanthropic organization. His request was sanctioned immediately. Groves, now considering Ezra a man able to solve the apparently unsolvable, left him a free hand.
Ezra chose the team himself, with the deliberateness of a skilled watchmaker selecting his tools. He chose the hard, experienced Army intelligence man, Colonel Boris Pash, the man he himself knew to be ruthless and effective. For the scientific talent, he summoned Samuel Goudsmit, his own Dutch-American physicist, well-versed in German and knowledgeable about the German scientists personally. To provide the muscle, he summoned a small group of hard-hardened OSS commandos, America's new spy service.
Their true task, as given to them by General Groves, was tracing the on-the-move Allied army and seizing all and every document, material, and apparatus that had anything to do with the German atomic project.
Their task, given them in confidence by Ezra himself alone in a closed room before they departed, was more specific. "Your number-one target is not paper," he made clear to Colonel Pash. "It is people. Specifically, Heisenberg and his team in Haigerloch. Get to them before anybody else—the French, the British, and certainly the Russians. You are authorized to offer them the following terms: safe conduct for them and their families, immunity from prosecution for their war crimes, and high-salaried, well-endowed appointments in American research institutes."
"And where will they be working, Mr. Prentice?" Pash asked.
"They'll work for me," he stated calmly.
As his own intelligence corps rushed through dying Germany, the eyes of Ezra fell upon another ghost from his own past. His own spy agency, Sullivan's, gave him another piece of news. Baron Friedrich von Hauser, his longtime adversary, the man that had threatened his own wife and tried to insinuate himself inside his kingdom, now was a man without a homeland.
A practical but dedicated German nationalist, von Hauser had lost faith in the Götterdämmerung passion of Hitler's final days. Suspected in the failed 20th of July plot against the life of the Führer, he was now hunted by the Gestapo as a traitor but also, in effect, on the Allied charts as a high-profile Nazi industrialist to be arrested for the atrocities of the war. A man pinned between two colliding walls.
Ezra felt a desolate sense of satisfaction. He had the means for a final, terrible vengeance. He could reveal von Hauser's location to the SS or the approaching Allied army and leave them to rid him of his enemy.
But then, in desperation, a back-channel message came, through a shell-shocked Swiss banker. It was from von Hauser. The message was robbed of all of its prior arrogance. It was the supplication of a drowning man. The Baron would provide anything for Ezra. The whole records of Germany's America industrial-espionage setup. The names of all the corporate collaborators. The locations of secret caches of Nazi loot and plundered paintings. A Pandora's box of secrets of the inner life of the Reich's war machine. In exchange, he would ask for only two things: safe passage to the United States for himself and family, and complete immunity from prosecution.
Ezra was given a dilemma. He could satisfy his personal desire for vengeance against the man who had sent him a dead orchid, or he could gain a priceless and rare piece of intelligence for the new war he was already planning against the Soviet Union.
The choice was not difficult. In a move of ultimate cold-blooded practicality, Ezra typed out a one-word answer to the Swiss banker: "Agreed."
He would bring his greatest enemy to America. He would not pardon nor trust him, but he would use him. He would make the Baron a caged weapon, a living encyclopedia of his former masters' secrets, to be used in the forthcoming Cold War.
The European campaign culminated in a flurry of cables. The first was from Colonel Pash.
"HAVE FOUND HEISENBERG AND GROUP AT HAIGERLOCH. TARGETS CONFIRMED. WAITING ORDERS FOR EXTRACTION."
The second was from Sullivan's man in Switzerland.
"THE PROPERTY IN OUR POSSESSION. WAITING FOR EVACUATION."
Ezra settled back in his chair. While the rest of the world was celebrating the end of the most recent war, he had just bought the two most costly commodities for the forthcoming one: the best atomic physicists in Germany and the best industrial spy. He would offer the scientists high-profile, lucrative positions in his recently bought industrial conglomerations, directing their minds toward the research of his own empire for peaceful, post-war applications. He had won. His triumph was silent, complete, and utterly imperceptible to the rest of the world.