Free The Empire of Time by David Wingrove Page A

better than I thought, if you want the truth.’
    Hecht smiles. ‘He’s very capable.’
    ‘Yes …’
    There’s a moment’s silence, then Hecht nods. ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘You can go now.’
    I stand.
    ‘But Otto …’
    ‘Yes, Meister?’
    ‘Keep an eye. I’ll send you the summaries.’
21
    Seydlitz had gone back further to hatch his scheme, back beyond the beginning of that century. Officials had been bribed with freshly minted gold, and perfectly forged documents were entered into the records of the US government: nationalisation papers; certificates of marriage and birth. All this to establish his team’s credentials – the ‘reality’ of their existence. In the Twenties they obtained passports, travelled, met those who, later, they would need to meet again. And so on through the Thirties, stretching their group existence thin – sufficient to create the fiction; enough to satisfy the prying eyes of Himmler’s agents when, eventually, they came to look.
    And so Seydlitz was twice-born in the records of this world; once in the Indiana of 1896, and again in the Berlin of 2963. What vast gulfs separated those times. Otto, studying the files, knew how it felt. When Seydlitz walked the streets of Columbus, Indiana, back in those distant days of his first birth, he no doubt found it exhilarating simply to stroll beneath an open sky on a spring day, the sun on his bare arms. Like heaven.
    He entered Germany through neutral Sweden in the autumn of 1940. France had fallen by then. Hitler was in the ascendant. Russia and the United States had yet to enter the arena. Great Britain was alone in holding out against the Führer. In such circumstances his mission seemed possessed of little attraction. Why should Hitler listen? What could Seydlitz offer that destiny – in Hitler’s mind – had not already granted him?
    Nothing that Hitler did, it seemed, could go wrong. Each step he took raised him higher. Destiny, surely, meant to raise him higher still – maybe to the very pinnacle itself? So he thought. And soon, Seydlitz knew, he would lose touch with the reality of Germany’s situation. His sense of destiny would, piece by piece, destroy what he had built. The Fatherland, the
Volk
itself, would be sacrificed to Hitler’s sense of his own greatness.
    Unless they could stop him. Unless they could undermine his confidence
before
he ceased listening to conflicting views.
    Seydlitz had studied him long, watched him on film and read of him until he could sense the thought behind each look, the feeling behind every gesture. Hitler was a consummate actor, a master of the art of self-delusion. In his speeches he would work himself into a state of total belief – as credulous, as much a victim to his creative manipulation of the truth as the least of them who watched and listened, their eyes agleam, their lips shaping echoes of his words. But he was also cunning, paranoid, utterly ruthless.
    In the summer of 1941 the fantasist and the realist were delicately balanced in his nature, but after the snows nothing would be the same again – that balance would shift ineradicably. Hitler would become a recluse, hidden away in the Wolfensschanze, Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair, his military command post in the heart of the Mazurian forest; refusing to acknowledge the fact of his defeats; talking endlessly, repetitively of the victories of the past and dreaming of the miracle to come.
    He did not know it, but Seydlitz was that miracle: the future come to greet him. He was Hitler’s fate, his destiny, the
deus ex machina
that would change the very shape of history and bring about the Dream.
    Stettin, where Seydlitz landed, was a cold, suspicious place. As an American national he was at first treated politely if not warmly by the local SS. What was he doing there? What did he want? Who was he going to meet? This was expected.
    ‘I have a meeting with Herr Funk,’ he said.
    Things changed at once. Walther Funk was President of the