The Hess Cross (18 page)

"How much is . . . transferred?"

"Sixty tons of ore a month."

Fermi's head jerked up. "Sixty tons? How much uranium metal from the ore are you producing a month?"

"One full ton."

This revelation punched Fermi in the stomach. The U.S. had refined its first pure metal only a month before. If the Germans were manufacturing a ton a month, and had been for several years, we're behind. We're losing the race. He gripped the table and looked frantically around the room, hoping someone was sharing the burden of his fear. Ludendorf and Kohler absently waited for Fermi's next question, their faces devoid of understanding. Thankful for the pause, Heather McMillan furtively glanced at Crown, hoping he would look up, but he stared at the tabletop, his eyes almost closed and his mind in the Pyrenees Mountains with Miguel Maura. Only Hess knew the significance of Germany's one ton of uranium metal a month, and his eyes gleamed as he savored his effect on the physicist. In the commanding voice all Germans knew, the deputy führer expounded, "Only Germany has such an output, and only Germany has the techonology to employ the metal to benefit mankind. That is, Aryan mankind." He paused to
gauge Fermi's reaction and then lost himself in a fit of giggles.

"Do you know what a cyclotron is, Mr. Hess?" Fermi asked, after Hess's laugh had dissipated.

"It's a machine which gives great speed to charged particles by repeatedly accelerating them. A strong magnetic field keeps them traveling in a circle around the inside of the cyclotron. The particles are used in nuclear-bombardment experiments to find out how much energy is released from splitting an atom. Correct? Of course I'm correct."

Hess grinned broadly again, and Crown could see why he had never seen smiling pictures of Hess. He had a bad overbite, and buck teeth.

"Where is Germany's cyclotron located?"

"Along with the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, the French kindly contributed their only cyclotron to the Fatherland. We have made good use of it, too."

This time he laughed derisively at Crown, who had been unable to damper the joke. Hess closed his mouth to choke off his laugh, but it sputtered through, and flecks of spittle showered the table.

Fermi leaned to Ludendorf, "Is he like this all the time?"

"No, only when the conversation is going his way. Put up with it, because he'll keep the information coming as long as he's enjoying himself. When Hess feels he's losing control of the conversation, he'll stop giving us anything useful. I know it's tough, but play along."

Fermi said quietly, "I didn't realize how hard your and Kohler's task was."

Kohler smiled gratefully at Fermi, but when his head turned again to Hess, the glower returned, and it quieted the deputy führer.

"Mr. Hess, what priority has the German government given to nuclear research?" A stupid question, one allowing Fermi to catch his breath.

"At first we had trouble getting money, because the Führer was not convinced of the feasibility of our research. Plus, our whole economy was geared for the production of tools for lightning war, which, as you know, we've been very successful at," Hess said, speaking as if he was standing behind a podium at a massive rally, gesturing widely so that those in the back row a quarter of a mile away could see him, and speaking slowly so that the public-address system would not garble his message.

"Hermann Göring promised his Luftwaffe would level London, but he had to keep setting the date back week after week. The British are resilient, too much so for their own good." Hess chuckled and coughed and reached again for the water, this time sipping carefully. "So when it became clear that total victory would not be coming in a few months, the Führer decided to fully back the nuclear experiments. By the way, gentlemen"—Hess lowered his voice conspiratorially—"the fact that Germany may not win the war this month is a high state secret and is not to be leaked to the German people." Hess rocked back in his chair and roared with laughter.

Fermi waited for him to collect himself, and asked, "Are any peaceful purposes foreseen as a result of your experiments?"

"Is shortening the war a peaceful purpose?" Hess asked, his face reflecting his enjoyment of the interview. "If so, then, yes. The German Ministry of War has conducted studies on the effect of a nuclear bomb on London. For some reason, the city is always London. I suggested New York or Moscow, but the Führer wants London. Anyway, we are convinced that as goes London, so go the Allies. In fact, we've plotted the exact block where our first bomb will fall. It's an amusing science you and I are involved in,
nicht wahr
, Herr Fermi?"

Fermi was acutely embarrassed, and he almost retreated to the rationalizations he had paraded before Heather and
Crown a few days before. Peter Kohler saved him the trouble. "Listen, I've had it with you, Hess." He pushed back his chair, stood, and leaned over the table, pointing his finger at Hess's face. "You're not the goddamn deputy führer anymore," he shouted. "You're a prisoner of war, and you'll start acting like one. You answer the questions. You don't ask them. Any more of this crap, and I'm going to question you by myself in a locked room. Right, Professor?"

Rather than calming Kohler as he usually did, Ludendorf sat mute. Hess paled.

Crown's gaze shot to Hess. Something was wrong. A whiff of incredulity tugged at him, insubstantial and transient. Crown tried to fan the sensation. It was more than the strangeness of the meeting between a Reichsführer and America's leading nuclear physicist. Something here was out of place, disjointed. Or maybe the interview was too smooth and too productive. No, it wasn't smooth, not with the volatile Hess ready to explode with laughter or double over in pain. Crown shifted the ephemeral impression again, and it made no sense. It passed from him.

"Who are the scientists working on the German experiments?"

Hess looked at the ceiling and stroked his recessed chin with a purposeful display of thoughtfulness. "We ran into a little difficulty there, Herr Fermi. As you yourself know, some of the Führer's policies of racial purity have caused a few of the Reich's leading nuclear physicists to leave Germany and Italy. Your wife is Jewish, is she not?"

Fermi could not suppress his surprise. Hess chortled, put his hands behind his neck to stretch, and said, "Yes, I know about you. We were counting on your assistance with our nuclear project. But you got away. I had a personal discussion with the Duce about his emigration policies when I learned you had vanished. He promised to do better. But some do leave the Reich without permission. Some great
nuclear physicists—Wigner, Teller, Szilard, Weisskopf. I would imagine some of these men are working within several meters of this conference."

Once again, Fermi's face registered what he wished it would not. All four of these scientists were in Hyde Park working with Fermi.

Hess laughed his grating laugh and said, "I thought so. Well, that's the price of a pure Germany. The price of one of the Führer's peculiarities."

The physicist choked back rage, the same rage which had dogged his last six months in Italy. He wanted to lash out at the arrogant Nazi sitting at the end of the table. This grotesque madman had helped twist the world in war and enslave entire races. And now he talked of one man's peculiarities. Hess was evil incarnate. Fermi's throat was so constricted, he could not continue.

Ludendorf said mildly, "Mr. Fermi asked you, Rudolf, what German scientists are working on your project. He didn't get an answer."

"We have two groups—one under Dr. Diebner, and the other under Dr. Esau. They work independently of each other and largely duplicate each other's work."

"Why two groups?" Ludendorf continued with the questions as Fermi poured more water and wiped his brow with a handkerchief. The interview was draining the normally indefatigable physicist.

"In the event one group makes a mistake, the other may catch it. In addition, there's nothing wrong with a little healthy competition. Each group is acutely aware of the other. We plan it this way. There's another reason, which normally is not openly discussed. But we're among friends here." He beamed widely, scanning the room for anyone enjoying his irony, saw none, and continued, "We found that some of our scientists, even Germans, if you can imagine, were not working wholeheartedly on the experiments to
produce the atom bomb. Apparently a few did not agree with the war effort. At first, we merely suspected this problem, but we had no hard proof, because obviously there was no precedent for the amount of progress that should have been made. But some of the scientists were shirking their duties, we were sure. So we set up two teams of physicists and applied pressure to the team that lagged behind. One team set the standard for the other. No one shirks now. Our pressure is enthusiastic and professional."

Fermi signaled he could continue, and in a dry, cracked voice he asked, "What company processes the uranium?''

"I.G.Farben."

"And who refines the uranium oxide?"

"Auer Company, of Berlin."

"Where are the principal German reactor experiments?"

"At Dahlem. At the Institute of Biology and Virus Research."

"Why there? Why not at the Institute of Physics?"

"People nose around. You Americans call them snoopers. No one's afraid of physics. But no one noses around a virus center. They don't know what they'll catch. Ingenious, is it not? We call the project the Virus House."

A shadow of suspicion crossed Crown again. Hess obviously loves Germany and worships Hitler. He still acts imperious and contemptuous. Yet he's divulging highly classified information, an act which makes him a traitor to the Reich. His information about German military strategy revealed during his first weeks in England proved highly accurate and very costly for Germany. His statements about the German nuclear experiments is probably just as precise. Perhaps the arrogance and cruel jokes are Hess's way of avoiding being seen as a groveling sycophant. But something doesn't fit. Or maybe Hess is just insane.

At Maindiff Court Hospital, Hess had been given batteries of tests trying to plot his freak mental processes. The
psychiatrists concluded Hess had a neurotic-schizoid personality. Of course, their conclusions told Crown nothing, and only begged the issue, that being: Was Hess so far removed from reality that he would willfully reveal top-secret information? Or was the man crazy like a fox? Crown wasn't the first to ask this question, he knew. Deserters are always suspected of being plants. But because of the invaluable and accurate facts Hess had given his interrogators during his months of confinement, the British and American officials had determined that Hess had truly crossed. Crown couldn't argue with their conclusion, because accuracy was always the test of the genuine cross.

As Fermi's questions and Hess's laughing answers flew by him, Crown sifted through his reasoning again and again and couldn't find a fault. There were two nagging loose ends, though: Miguel Maura's death and Heather McMillan's phone call. Maura's death could be related to some other assignment Crown had worked on, but this was unlikely, because they had come to Chicago secretly and hadn't been there long enough to be found. The assassination could have been a case of mistaken identity, but this was also highly improbable. There were too many people wanting Crown and Maura dead to assign Maura's death to an accident. But these people were in Europe. So Maura's death must have been connected to their present assignment of guarding Hess. But how? Here Crown's mind went blank.

Heather's surreptitious late-night phone call was also inexplicable. Was it related to Maura's death? She was in England when it happened. Whom did she call? Certainly not anyone under Richard Sackville-West's command, because he had assured Crown that all operatives working on the Hess cross in the Chicago area were identified to Crown and there would be no teams working against each other. Ludendorf or Kohler? These men's backgrounds had been
scrupulously searched. They had been invaluable to the Allies in years past, so invaluable that thoughts of current deception had to be ruled out. No one produces information that costs the Axis thousands of men if he isn't loyal to the Allies.

Who she called was an unknown, but her purpose was not—at least, the short-range purpose. Someone wanted to know where Crown was at all times, and was using Heather to find out. Of course she is excited about seeing him tonight, because when she is with Crown, she and her mysterious boss know where he is. And in light of the prior assassination attempt, during which the murderers were gunning for both Maura and Crown, Crown's only conclusion was that there would be another try at his life and that Heather would supply his location to the murderer.

He looked up from his folded hands and saw Heather gazing at him and transcribing one of Hess's long answers at the same time. She lowered her head slightly and looked at him with a playful, sensuous pout to tell him he had been ignoring her. He smiled warmly at her and regretted he would have to kill her.

"What do you mean you don't remember?" yelled Kohler, yanking Crown's thoughts back to the interview. "You've pulled that on us before, and I don't go for it, Hess. It's too convenient."

Fermi tried again. "What proportion of heavy water to uranium oxide is used to make the heavy-water paste?"

Hess's eyes were wide, and darted from person to person, seeking understanding. "I don't remember. I can't remember anything. Please believe me."

"Let's try it this way, Mr. Hess," said Fermi patiently. "Do you know what heavy-water paste is?"

"No. I mean, maybe I should, but I don't know.
Ich weiss nicht
." Hess's face crinkled, and Crown thought he was about to sob. The German looked at Ludendorf and pleaded,
"You know this happens to me. You read Dr. Rees's report. Please, Professor Ludendorf. I can't recall anything."

Ludendorf put his hands on Fermi's arm and in a confidential voice said, "Hess has these amnesia spells occasionally. He'll pull out of it in a day or two. It's useless to continue now."