The Swiss Courier: A Novel by Tricia Goyer, Mike Yorkey Page B

victory . . . in Jesus.”
    “No, there isn’t!” Kassler’s heart pounded harder. “Death is the end. It’s over when you die!”
    Kassler removed his pistol from the sinus cavity and planted the tip between the man’s eyebrows. The prisoner strained against the ropes, but then—as if taken over by another force— he suddenly calmed.
    “I am prepared,” he said. “It is finished.”
    “Okay, we’ll do it your way,” Kassler bellowed. “At the count of three—unless you tell me who is helping you—you will find out if your Jesus is waiting.”
    “Eins . . .” Kassler toggled the Luger.
    “Knees?” the prisoner begged. “I want to kneel to meet Jesus.”
    Kassler relaxed his grip and waved the gun toward the floor. The bound prisoner crumpled to the ground in a heap. Buchalter seized the man’s arm, pulling him to his knees and adding a kick in the man’s side.
    Kassler lowered the gun to the prisoner’s forehead. “Where were we? Ja, I remember.”
    He held the pistol steady. “Zwei!”
    The prisoner raised his head. His eyes looked above Kassler, as if he were fixated on something far beyond the clammy walls.
    “You have five seconds to say more than ‘church.’ I want names!”
    The prisoner shook his head, but now his piercing eyes locked onto Kassler.
    A brave one , Kassler thought. “ Auf Wiedersehen , Herr Vinzent.”
    The single shot to the forehead dropped the prisoner like a burlap sack of Alsace potatoes.
    Kassler returned the pistol to his holster and turned on his heels with a twinge of regret. Not for killing the swine, but because the prisoner died without telling everything he knew.
    University of Heidelberg
     
    6:02 p.m.
    Joseph Engel heard the heavy footsteps and knew who would be rapping on his office door.
    “The door’s open, Hannes.”
    “Ach—put the Bible away.” Hannes Jäger sneered. “Or is that silly book more important than reading the papers Heisenberg sent over?”
    They’d been through this dance how many times before? Joseph’s roommate had a habit of barging into his office after five o’clock—just as he relaxed by reading the Bible. This often prompted a cagey comment or a pointed question from Jäger, and tonight appeared to be one of those occasions. Joseph had been careful not to read his Bible back at the apartment or get dragged into discussions about religion, but he wasn’t going to hide his light under a bushel, as he had read the previous day in Matthew 5:15.
    “Listen, Hannes.” Joseph beckoned his roommate to take a seat in the sparely furnished office. “You study papers by Fermi, Weizäcker, and Hahn, hoping to learn something more about the half-life of natural uranium after it’s been bombarded with neutrons. I scrutinize those papers as well, but sometimes my brain needs a break, so I pick up my Bible. So much that is written here makes sense.”
    A stunned silence filled the office. “You must be joking, Engel. There are only superstitions in that book—medieval ones at that.”
    Joseph felt his face flush from embarrassment and hoped it didn’t show. “You can blame my father.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “He read the Bible to me every night as a young boy. Father said if I read the Good Book for fifteen minutes a day—plus one chapter of Proverbs—I would become a wise young man.”
    “A wise young man,” Jäger repeated in a slightly mocking voice. “You’re a Lutheran, right?”
    “That’s correct.” Joseph considered himself a Lutheran— and a conflicted one at that. His parents complained that the Lutheran Church in the 1940s wasn’t the Lutheran Church of their youth. After Hitler came to power, the Führer attempted to establish a German Reich Church, calling on all German Protestants to unite in the hour of national need. Although his effort was rebuffed, many Lutheran pastors—as well as Roman Catholic priests—remained silent or cooperative when Hitler enacted the Nuremberg Laws in 1935