pushing through it. His fingers touched a blunt metallic object. Taking hold, he worked it brusquely through the earthen shaft until it passed through the rectangular opening and sat on the floor by his feet.
The sterling silver box was the size and width of a hardbound book. Embossed on its cover were twin bolts of lightning, in fact, ancient runes that denoted the SS or Schutzstaffel, the private army organized by Heinrich Himmler and others in 1923 to act as Adolf Hitler’s personal protection squad. Beneath the runes, engraved in a neat cursive script, was Seyss’s name. Once the box had held his medals.
Commanding himself to relax, he removed its cover and sorted through the contents, cataloguing each item even as he slipped it into his pockets. One folding buck knife, SS issue, sharpened to a razor’s edge. One billfold, contents a thousand Reichsmarks. Two dog tags taken from dead GIs. And finally, wrapped in a sheet of wax paper, a sturdy white card with a black stripe running diagonally across it from top to bottom. Typeset in Cyrillic, not Western, lettering. The government-issue identification of one Colonel Ivan Truchin, late of the Russian NKVD or secret police.
Seyss ran a finger along the card’s edges, marveling at its immaculate condition. Few Russian soldiers were issued official pieces of identification. Fewer still managed to keep them in any kind of decent condition. A document issued by the Comintern itself, one bearing the signature of Lavrenti Beria, now that was a rarity, indeed, and spoke to Colonel Truchin’s importance to the revolution. Seyss gingerly slid it into his breast pocket. His ticket to Terminal. Nothing else would have brought him back to his house.
But Seyss wasn’t quite finished. A last foray into his adolescent hiding place yielded a canvas web belt, black, tattered, unremarkable except for its surprising weight. Around a kilo, if he wasn’t mistaken. Cut into the belt were ten oblong pockets. In each rested one hundred grams of gold smelted from the SS private foundry near Frankfurt. The slim ingots had been labeled “nonmonetary” gold because of their lesser purity—.95 versus the Reichsbank’s standard of .999. It was difficult and costly to purify gold extracted from candelabras, wedding rings, eyeglasses, watches, dental fillings, and the like. Each ingot bore the imprimatur of the Third Reich: an eagle holding a wreathed swastika in its talons.
Seyss cinched the belt low around his waist, tucking in his shirt over it, then patted himself down to make sure the belt wasn’t visible. Egon had provided him with two thousand American dollars, an amount well in excess of his needs. Still, Seyss preferred to be prudent. Egon Bach’s intelligence was
spitzenclasse,
but his planning was too meticulous, cut through with the fanciful ambitions and precise timetables of an armchair general.
Seyss was to lead a squad of men into the Soviet zone of occupation, travel two hundred kilometers along the main corridor to Berlin, and pierce the guarded enclave of Potsdam. Former members of Seyss’s command had been tracked down and recruited. Good men, all. Contacts had been established along the route of travel—in Heidelberg, Frankfurt, and the German capital itself. He would have access to safe houses, revised intelligence, and most important, Soviet weaponry, transport, and uniforms. Once in Potsdam, however, he would be on his own. He knew the objectives. How he chose to fulfill them was his choice. Only five days remained until the conference began and Egon had made it clear he must act soon afterward. Something about ensuring that the last wishes of a country’s leaders not be respected.
The rest, Egon had said, would take care of itself. Dominos, he’d laughed. One falling onto the back of the next.
Reviewing the carefully laid-out plan a final time, Seyss selected those elements that would be of use and discarded the rest. While impressed by Egon’s logistics,
The sterling silver box was the size and width of a hardbound book. Embossed on its cover were twin bolts of lightning, in fact, ancient runes that denoted the SS or Schutzstaffel, the private army organized by Heinrich Himmler and others in 1923 to act as Adolf Hitler’s personal protection squad. Beneath the runes, engraved in a neat cursive script, was Seyss’s name. Once the box had held his medals.
Commanding himself to relax, he removed its cover and sorted through the contents, cataloguing each item even as he slipped it into his pockets. One folding buck knife, SS issue, sharpened to a razor’s edge. One billfold, contents a thousand Reichsmarks. Two dog tags taken from dead GIs. And finally, wrapped in a sheet of wax paper, a sturdy white card with a black stripe running diagonally across it from top to bottom. Typeset in Cyrillic, not Western, lettering. The government-issue identification of one Colonel Ivan Truchin, late of the Russian NKVD or secret police.
Seyss ran a finger along the card’s edges, marveling at its immaculate condition. Few Russian soldiers were issued official pieces of identification. Fewer still managed to keep them in any kind of decent condition. A document issued by the Comintern itself, one bearing the signature of Lavrenti Beria, now that was a rarity, indeed, and spoke to Colonel Truchin’s importance to the revolution. Seyss gingerly slid it into his breast pocket. His ticket to Terminal. Nothing else would have brought him back to his house.
But Seyss wasn’t quite finished. A last foray into his adolescent hiding place yielded a canvas web belt, black, tattered, unremarkable except for its surprising weight. Around a kilo, if he wasn’t mistaken. Cut into the belt were ten oblong pockets. In each rested one hundred grams of gold smelted from the SS private foundry near Frankfurt. The slim ingots had been labeled “nonmonetary” gold because of their lesser purity—.95 versus the Reichsbank’s standard of .999. It was difficult and costly to purify gold extracted from candelabras, wedding rings, eyeglasses, watches, dental fillings, and the like. Each ingot bore the imprimatur of the Third Reich: an eagle holding a wreathed swastika in its talons.
Seyss cinched the belt low around his waist, tucking in his shirt over it, then patted himself down to make sure the belt wasn’t visible. Egon had provided him with two thousand American dollars, an amount well in excess of his needs. Still, Seyss preferred to be prudent. Egon Bach’s intelligence was
spitzenclasse,
but his planning was too meticulous, cut through with the fanciful ambitions and precise timetables of an armchair general.
Seyss was to lead a squad of men into the Soviet zone of occupation, travel two hundred kilometers along the main corridor to Berlin, and pierce the guarded enclave of Potsdam. Former members of Seyss’s command had been tracked down and recruited. Good men, all. Contacts had been established along the route of travel—in Heidelberg, Frankfurt, and the German capital itself. He would have access to safe houses, revised intelligence, and most important, Soviet weaponry, transport, and uniforms. Once in Potsdam, however, he would be on his own. He knew the objectives. How he chose to fulfill them was his choice. Only five days remained until the conference began and Egon had made it clear he must act soon afterward. Something about ensuring that the last wishes of a country’s leaders not be respected.
The rest, Egon had said, would take care of itself. Dominos, he’d laughed. One falling onto the back of the next.
Reviewing the carefully laid-out plan a final time, Seyss selected those elements that would be of use and discarded the rest. While impressed by Egon’s logistics,
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