Winter Page 5

  Captain Sanderson led Ella out of the general’s office and back along Fort Jackson’s labyrinthine corridors. Being out of the general’s presence helped the captain relax: he chatted quite amiably to her as they walked. He even called her Ella. She didn’t object; the captain was good-looking if a little on the small side, but then compared to her near-six-foot height, most men came up a little short. “You’re going to be meeting two disturbing people, Ella,” he said as they strode through the building, “but don’t let either of them distract you too much. Everybody is a little upset by their first meeting with the Professor, and as for Heydrich . . .”

  They walked for about five minutes and then descended—Ella had no idea how many floors—in a high-security elevator. When the elevator’s steel doors finally opened they were met by a man who was excessively lanky and thin, his emaciated body clad in an exquisitely cut—if a tad old-fashioned—suit made from worsted wool of an uncompromising black. He looked like an undertaker, though his long, Roman nose, his dark button eyes that snarled out at Ella from behind shaded glasses and his oiled black hair made him an extremely aggressive-looking undertaker.

  Weird.

  Captain Sanderson effected the introductions. “This is Professor Septimus Bole, who developed the Demi-Monde. Professor, this is Miss Ella Thomas, our first-choice candidate for Operation Offbeat.”

  Operation Offbeat?

  Ella held out her hand. The professor looked at it warily, then with what appeared to be extreme reluctance shook it. The man’s fingers were cold and clammy and her feeling of revulsion was heightened when he squirmed them hurriedly out of her grasp. It was as though he was disgusted by her touch.

  “I am delighted to meet you, Miss Thomas. I hope what you see today will persuade you to help us.” This little announcement was made, unexpectedly, in an English accent, which had a strange mechanical cadence to it. The professor noted Ella’s surprise. “Yes, Miss Thomas, I am a Brit, though I trust you won’t hold that against me. I, for my sins, am head of ParaDigm CyberResearch’s Demi-Monde Project Team, ParaDigm being the company behind the Demi-Monde. I am here on secondment from ParaDigm to help the U.S. Army sort out its problems.”

  Problems?

  Introductions made, Captain Sanderson slotted his ID tag into a scanner set on the wall by the side of the elevator and placed his palm on the reader next to it. Immediately a door in the steel wall sighed open and Sanderson nodded Ella and the professor through to the conference room beyond. The door slid shut behind them.

  The room they entered was small, cold and impersonal, and, rather disconcertingly, reminded Ella of a hospital waiting room. The only furnishings were a line of five very uncomfortable-looking plastic chairs set in front of a low stage which had a lectern standing at its center. At a sign from the captain, Ella took the middle chair. Professor Bole sat next to her, and after taking an age to coil his long body into the seat and ensure that the immaculate creases in his trousers weren’t being compromised he turned to Ella.

  “As I think the general will have explained to you already, Miss Thomas, the Demi-Monde was designed to replicate the chaos and anarchy associated with an Asymmetric Warfare Environment. The demonstration you are about to see will, I hope, inform you of two things. The first and most obvious will be to convince you of the realism of the Dupes populating the Demi-Monde, a realism so profound that they are as close to real life as makes no difference.”

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

  Ella kept her face bland; she would believe this when she saw it. There was no way she was ever going to believe that a computer-concocted Dupe was a real person.

  “The second point,” the professor continued, “which to my mind makes the Demi-Monde such a triumph, is that it accurately conjures up the type of people who rise to leadership positions in Asymmetric Warfare Environments. For the leaders in the Demi-Monde we have selected individuals from history famous for their brutality and their barbarism, and have mimicked their aberrational personalities using state-of-the-art DNA-mapping techniques. As a consequence these PreLived Dupes look, think and act just as their real-life equivalents did. I tell you this not to frighten you, but to prepare you.”

  The professor flicked a switch on the remote control he was holding. “I’ll just dim the lights, Miss Thomas, and then I think our guest will be ready to present himself.”

  Even before the lights had fully faded a tall, slim man dressed in a perfectly fitting black uniform of an officer in the Nazi SS strode out of the right-hand wall. His jackboots shone, his leather belt and holster sparkled and the silver death’s-head badge on the brow of his tall peaked hat twinkled under the room’s fluorescent lighting. That the man was a Dupe, Ella had absolutely no doubt—no one she knew of could walk through a solid steel wall—but . . .

  But in all other respects the man who came to stand on the stage behind the lectern was a perfect representation of a living, breathing human being. Ella stared at him, awed by the way in which the man’s body—the Dupe’s body—so precisely imitated the shadows and highlights that would have been seen if it had been rendered from solid flesh and blood. In sum, it was an amazing, disturbing display of computing power; a display of verisimilitude such as Ella had never imagined could be achieved. It was impossible to distinguish the Dupe from the real thing.

  “Perhaps you would be so kind as to introduce yourself?” Captain Sanderson asked quietly.

  The Dupe turned his bleached, narrow-set eyes toward the captain and smiled the most chillingly arrogant smile Ella had ever seen. And as he smiled he seemed to suck all the heat and goodness out of the room. She shivered in cold and fear; the man standing before her was the very personification of evil.

  “As you wish.” The man gave a sharp click of his heels and a slight bow of his head. This done, he took his cap from his head, placed it precisely to the left of the lectern, and slowly and deliberately ran a hand over his short, sleek blond hair. He wasn’t a handsome man, decided Ella, but he was striking, what with his prominent nose and his long, narrow face. But what she particularly disliked was the way his cold, cold eyes didn’t seem to look at her but into her.

  “I am Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich, SS-Obergruppenführer, Chief of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, the Reich’s Main Security Office, and Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia.”

  Jesus.

  Ella sat openmouthed in amazement. The nuances of speech were so astonishingly correct that she was having trouble remembering that the man standing not six feet away from her was a piece of computer fabrication. Even the tone and resonance of his voice—a little too light and effeminate, she thought, for a man of his size—by its very wrongness added an authenticity to the masquerade.

  She turned to the professor. “Just who is this Heydrich of yours? Is he a fiction?”

  The professor tapped a button on his control pad and immediately a red sign illuminated over the Dupe: .

  The figure of Heydrich froze in mid-gesture.

  Professor Bole smiled in a disdainful, condescending way. “I had thought the teaching of history in British schools was the worst in the Western world but . . .” He shook his head sadly. “No matter. Whilst Reinhard Heydrich has, as a consequence of his assassination by Czech resistance fighters in June 1942, not generated quite the public disdain and infamy of other leading Nazis such as Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and Goering, Heydrich was, in my humble opinion, the most evil, the most callous and the most dangerous of the whole pack of them. The man so wonderfully represented here in this room is the individual whose organizational genius, superhuman capacity for hard work and total and utter disregard for human suffering made the triumph of the Third Reich possible. The man standing before you, Miss Thomas, masterminded the Holocaust. He was the man who enabled the Nazis to send six million Jews to their death.” He smiled bleakly at Ella. “Shall we continue?”

 

  “I must congratulate you, Herr Obergruppenführer,” said the professor in a rid
iculously conversational tone, “on your recent promotion to Reichsprotektor.”

  The Dupe nodded his appreciation of the compliment.

  “Perhaps,” the professor continued, “you would be so kind as to describe your career for my young friend here? She is quite an admirer of yours.”

  The dead eyes of the German settled upon Ella and a contemptuous smile flickered over his full, fleshy lips. “I am wondering why I should be obliged to discuss my career with one such as her.”

  “One such as me?” asked Ella, unable to keep the tremor out of her voice.

  “A black . . . a negro . . . a member of a more primitive race.”

  Ella was jolted back in her seat by the scorn in the Dupe’s voice. Struggling to remember that Heydrich was just digital make-believe, she did her best to hide how upset she was by what the bastard had just said. Taking a deep, calming breath she continued the conversation in as equable a manner as she was able.

  “I am student president at my high school. I have achieved an SAT score that places me in the top one percent of all students in the USA. I am intent on majoring in genetics at college. I am a skilled musician. Surely that gives the lie to your proposition that I am a member of an inferior race?”

  Heydrich slid a silver cigarette case from his jacket pocket and with infuriating slowness went through the pantomime of selecting and lighting a cigarette. He drew heavily on the cigarette then breathed out, snaking a stream of perfectly imitated virtual smoke into the room. A miasma of malevolent vapor, ashen and feathered, settled around his head like a diabolical halo. “That you are capable of rote learning merely confirms the inferiority of your race. You are the exception that proves the rule. And anyway, I have seen chimpanzees performing in the circus. Even apes can, through diligent training, be made to perform tricks surprisingly well.” He sneered. “Perhaps that is what you are: a trained ape.”

  If this guy had been for real Ella would have given him a real mouthful. But he wasn’t for real: he was just a Dupe imitating the attitudes of a racist who had died almost eighty years ago.

  Stay cool, Ella. Try to get yourself into this jerk’s mind-set. Play the psychologist.

  “I understand you are an officer, Herr Heydrich. Then surely your duty as an officer is to help those of lesser ability? If you scorn me as an African-American, perhaps you can assist me as a woman . . . as one of the weaker sex?”

  The feminist in Ella almost gagged when she uttered this last phrase.

  She felt those terrible eyes studying her, Heydrich slowly sliding his gaze over her body. She had the distinct impression that the Nazi liked what he saw . . . more than liked what he saw. In fact the way he was looking at Ella persuaded her to pull the hem of her short skirt further down her long legs. Heydrich’s crystal-cold eyes watched her as she did so, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. She shivered again; there was something infinitely unsettling about the man . . . about the Dupe, she quickly reminded herself.

  “Very well. As you are not a pure black, there being something of the Mischling—a person of mixed race—in your appearance, I am prepared to speak with you. May I be permitted to know the name of my interrogator?”

  Ella looked to Professor Bole, who merely shrugged his assent. “My name is Ella Thomas.”

  “And you are intent on becoming a geneticist?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Ah, most apt, the study of genetics is much favored by the Untermenschen, by the lesser races, by the Jews.” He paused to enjoy his cigarette, all the time watching Ella as a cat might watch a mouse.

  Eventually he deigned to continue. “Yes, the explanation must be that you wish to study genetics in order to appreciate why your race is so inferior to mine. I am told that self-knowledge can lead to improvement.” He sniggered dismissively; he obviously found the idea of blacks being capable of improving themselves risible. “Regarding my career, I have recently been elevated to the position of Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia. This I take as a signal from the Führer that he holds me and my talents in high regard.”

  “So you are well thought of by Adolf Hitler?”

  “Whilst I am loath to discuss the thought processes of the Führer with one such as you, Miss Thomas, I will say that this is an asinine question. I have served both the Führer and my immediate superior, Reichsführer Himmler, to the very limits of my abilities and would say with no little pride that these efforts have contributed mightily to the success the Vaterland has enjoyed in its struggle to bring order to the lesser nations of the world.”

  “And which of these successes has given you the most satisfaction, Herr Obergruppenführer?” asked Ella, slightly perplexed to be having such a freewheeling question-and-answer session with what was, after all, just a computer-driven Dupe.

  Another sneer from Heydrich and another arrogant puff on his cigarette. “There have been so many. In the early days of my career I would cite the snuffing out of the protests planned by enemies of the Nazi Party at the time of the Berlin Olympics of 1936 as a signal achievement. Later I took a great deal of satisfaction in organizing the forging of the documentation which persuaded that animal Josef Stalin to liquidate so many of his most able officers on the eve of war.”

  “Heydrich speaks fluent Russian,” Professor Bole added as an aside to Ella.

  “You will not speak until you are spoken to!” snarled Heydrich, and smashed his fist hard against the wooden lectern. The sound of the blow caused Ella to flinch back in alarm.

  Jesus! How the hell did they program that?

  “And I am to be addressed by my titles and rank, not simply as ‘Heydrich.’ Do you understand?” His gaze flickered around the room, touching on each of the three members of his audience in turn. “Do you all understand?” The hatred and the contempt were redolent in every word the German uttered.

  In the midst of the stunned silence an almost beatific calm drifted across Heydrich’s face. “Now, what were we discussing, young lady? Ah, yes, my achievements. Another major success was my bringing of the Czech workers back to full production and the gaining of their support for the war against the Bolsheviks.” A self-satisfied grin tugged at the corners of his mouth. “But I suppose my lasting memorial will be the freeing of Europe from the pernicious contamination of the Jews.”

  “It was you who organized the extermination of the Jews?” asked Ella incredulously, stunned by how casually Heydrich could talk about his involvement with the Holocaust.

  “No, I am organizing their transportation to the east, where they will contribute to the success of the German Reich by building roads and laying railway tracks. The work will be . . . exacting and certainly many will die, but it is not my intention to ‘exterminate’ them as you so crudely put it. It would be too expensive of bullets to shoot, what, ten million people. In my opinion, bullets would serve a greater use if they were employed to kill Russians and other enemies of the Reich rather than being squandered in the dispatching of Jewish offal.”

 

  “You should realize, Miss Thomas,” explained the professor, “that the Heydrich you are speaking with is the Heydrich of February 1942. He has no perception of what will be the future course of the war. At that moment everything in the Nazi garden was coming up roses: they had rolled back the Soviet armies and seemed to be on the brink of conquering Russia as easily as they had conquered mainland Europe. The ‘Final Solution’ to the Jewish problem as Heydrich perceives it is the shipping of every single Jew east and working them to death creating a German Garden of Eden in the lands of Belarus and the Ukraine. The mass execution of Jews in gas chambers hadn’t yet been adopted as Nazi policy, though Heydrich had already set up gas chambers in Poland and Czechoslovakia. He had already initiated the Holocaust.”

 

  “It will be an amazing logistical exercise to move ten million Yids east,” Heydrich continued, seemingly unaware that he had been interrupted, “and to accommodate and to feed them . . . well, to feed the
m after a fashion anyway. But at least in this way they will be of some economic value to the Reich rather than just an expense. This is the proposal I made and had accepted at the Wannsee Conference of just a month ago. Within two years we will be living in a Jew-free world, ten million people moved out of the Reich and resettled somewhere where they can be of benefit rather than simply being a burden.” Heydrich smiled a secret little smile. “A Jew-free world: that will be my greatest achievement.”

  Ella shook her head. “Don’t you ever have sleepless nights about conniving to destroy the lives of millions of people? Do you never stop to consider whether what you are doing is right?”

  Heydrich studied Ella carefully, as though he had difficulty understanding her question, as though perplexed by her obtuseness. Suddenly he began to laugh. It was an unnaturally high-pitched laugh, which reminded Ella of the braying of a goat. “Right? Morality is a mutable, a subjective thing. It is not whether a thing is right that matters, my dear Miss Thomas; all that matters is victory. Victory makes all that you do correct: success is the only criterion by which we judge what is right and what is wrong.”

  “But what you are doing is barbaric . . . uncivilized.”

  Heydrich shrugged nonchalantly. “As the Führer said, ‘Why should man be less barbaric than nature?’ You call me ‘uncivilized’ but the chief characteristic of civilized behavior is cruelty. So, let history judge me”—he laughed sardonically—“and as I am making history I have every confidence that I will receive excellent reviews.”

 

  “Have you seen and heard enough?” asked Professor Bole quietly.

  “More than enough. It’s terrifying.” Ella felt empty inside . . . nauseous. Oh, she had met racists and rednecks before but their hatred had been playground stuff compared to what she had just heard. This man—this monster—didn’t only hate those he considered his racial inferiors but was intent on destroying them.

 

  The image of Reinhard Heydrich flickered and faded.