'It's all down to the tides,' Wentworth-King said, 'and here in England they can be unpredictable. In the meantime, I suggest you collect who you want for Operation Paperclip and otherwise enjoy your time in London. Anything else?'

'Go to h.e.l.l,' Bradley said.

He stormed out of the lieutenant colonel's office with the bulky envelope under his arm, on the one hand bitterly disappointed and even outraged, on the other hand surprisingly, helplessly relieved that at least he could see more of Gladys Kinder, who had given him back the will to live.

She was a huge consolation.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX 'We must talk to them,' Wilson said as Ernst drove him from the BMW plant in the Berlin suburb of Spandau, back around the dreadful ruins caused by increasing Allied bombings, and then south toward the research complex at k.u.mmersdorf. 'As you've just seen, the new multidirectional jet propulsion system for the flying saucer works beautifully and can be installed any day now. Once we do that, we can arrange a test flight of the saucer, but we must sort this business out first.'

'It's dangerous to go behind Himmler's back,' Ernst insisted, glancing out at the bombed suburbs, the skeletal houses and mountains of rubble, and deciding that he must persuade Ingrid, who was living with her parents in the nearby suburb of Wannsee, to move out of Berlin before it was too late. 'No one can be trusted these days. If they talk, we'll be shot.'

'They won't talk,' Wilson replied, looking straight ahead, thinking, his eyes bright with that icy intelligence that seemed not to know fear. 'Like you, they're becoming wary of Himmler's state of mind and think he's becoming unpredictable. They're also worried about how he'll react when the end finally comes - and now they know it's coming.'

' No one knows that,' Ernst insisted, clinging stubbornly to a vain dream. 'The Allies haven't yet launched their invasion and might never do so.'

'They will and you know it.'

'We can use the rockets against them.'

'The rockets won't be enough to stop them. Now nothing can stop

them.'

'Don't sound so pleased,' Ernst said.

'I am pleased,' Wilson confessed. 'Not because of my countrymen,

nor because of the British, but because I want to go where I can work without feeling threatened.'

'Does nothing else matter to you?'

'No,' Wilson said flatly.

Ernst glanced to the side as they pa.s.sed some blackened ruins and saw a one-legged child hopping along on crutches, surrounded by other children, all of whom were looking for valuables in the high mounds of rubble in which broken gla.s.s and twisted metal glinted in the light of the sun. The ruins were extensive, surrounding him on all sides, and he thought of the awesome power of modern technology and then glanced at Wilson.

He was seventy-four years old but looked perhaps sixty.

Ernst knew that it was due not only to a lifetime of strict dieting and the ruthless application of mind over matter Wilson's will was unyielding and he used it to recharge his energy but also to the surgical operations that he'd recently been having in various SS hospitals. Operations on the stomach, on his varicose veins and joints, reportedly even on the heart, perhaps more than that. The experimental work had been done on humans, on the inmates of the camps, and then Wilson, when he thought the risk reasonable, had them performed on himself, so far with remarkable results. Indeed, at seventy-four years of age he was more vigorous than Ernst.

And Wilson was different from other men in more ways than one.

Exactly what was he?

Ernst thought of him as a mutant, a creature not quite human, someone who had transcended normal emotions to embrace the G.o.d of pure logic, beyond kindness or cruelty. Ernst had tried to find out why

what childhood trauma had perverted him but every record indicated that he'd had a lonely childhood, his parents strict but decent, so that the only explanation for his unique personality was his extraordinary intelligence. Such intelligence is beyond pity, feeding on logic, not emotion, and Ernst was now convinced that Wilson was an evolutionary accident, the product of pure reasoning, a human being for whom emotions were no more than unwelcome distractions. He was neither cruel or kind, good or bad, right or wrong: He was a creature impelled by the inhuman force of his mind: a mutant, without emotions, the personification of man's evolutionary drive toward mathematical absolutes.

His was the face of the future.

Ernst shivered involuntarily, gripped the steering wheel tighter, and was feeling decidedly uneasy when the ruins of Berlin gave way to open fields and eventually, as clouds covered the sun, to the barbedwire fences and heavily guarded main gate of the research complex at k.u.mmersdorf.

Waiting for them in Wilson's office in the main hangar were Hans Kammler, the blond, blue-eyed, former head of SS construction programs, now a brigadier and in charge of the Nordhausen Central Works in the Harz Mountains of Thuringia, and Artur Nebe, former commander of one of the notorious Action Groups in Russia, head of the dreaded Kriminal Polizei, or Kripo, the Prussian intelligence service, and now a full general of the SS, though his allegiances shifted with the wind and his actions were shadowy. Both men were wearing their SS uniforms and looking slightly annoyed.

'You're late,' Kammler said.

'I'm sorry, sir,' Ernst replied. 'We were observing a test at the BMW plant at Spandau and it took a little longer than expected.'

'I'm not interested in excuses,' Kammler said. 'My time is limited and I resent waiting for anyone, much less for an officer of lower rank.'

'Yes, sir, I understand, but '

'How are things at Nordhausen?' Wilson asked, deliberating changing the subject in an unusual display of tact.

'Livelier than they are here,' Kammler said.

'The rockets are still being produced?'

Kammler practically sneered. 'Of course, American,' he said. 'A total of one hundred and forty V-2s were produced in January and February alone. Another hundred and seventy were produced in March, and a further three hundred in April. With luck, we'll soon be aiming them at London, and then '

'They won't stop the invasion,' Wilson said. 'They'll just cause a nuisance.'