Chapter Two Thousand One Hundred Sixty-Four
11th August 1972
Potsdam
The guards in blue coats did their best to stay unobtrusive, but it was hard to ignore the fact that they looked like they were armed to the teeth and never more than a few paces away. Still, they didn’t bother the Secret Service more than the men in black who surrounded Kaiser Friedrich IV himself. According to the Agent-in-Charge, those were the men of the First Foot Guard Regiment who had volunteered for further training after the first eighteen-month stint in the Regiment was complete. They were the personal bodyguards of the Kaiser and reputed to be the most dangerous men in an outfit that was filled with decorated combat veterans. In a few hours, Rockefeller was set to meet the woman who had set that unit up when she had been the Operations Officer of the First Foot.
To the German’s credit, they had gone all out for this morning’s State Visit. Everywhere Rockefeller looked he saw American Flags as well as the Red, White, Black of the German Empire, the Red, Black, and Gold of the Reichstag and the Federation as well as the State flags of Berlin and Brandenburg. It seemed to call out that they were all friends here. The trouble was that relations between the two nations had been anything but cordial since SMS Moltke had mistaken the USS Des Moines for a British Cruiser off Ireland during the First World War. The Germans had stubbornly clung to their position that the findings of their own investigation into incident had been correct. The fact that the reputations of Franz von Hipper and Jacob von Schmidt, both regarded as heroes of the Reich, were bound up in that incident didn’t help matters.
Talking with Friedrich himself was just as difficult as Rockefeller figured it would be. The Kaiser was a relatively young man and frequently it felt like he was talking past Rockefeller. Things like the need for greater cooperation in International Arms Reduction or preventing future tragedies like Argentine-Chilean War from happening again. The brutal truth was that war had been a proxy fight between Germany and the United States. The idea had been to get the Germans to spend blood and treasure in a pointless expedition in what was considered a wasteland. It remained to be seen what that plan would look like in the fullness of time. As soon as Rockefeller had that thought, he saw one of the soldiers, a Staff Sergeant of the First Foot if he was reading their rank correctly. He was highly decorated though he had to still be in his early twenties. Something about the look in the eyes of that young man… This was someone who had been sent through the meatgrinder.
“I understand that you are going to be meeting with Tante Kat after this” Friedrich said with a smile, “Good luck with that.”
“You just referred to that woman as your Auntie” Rockefeller asked in disbelief.
“She always joked that it comes from how she spent a great deal of time around me and my brothers and sisters back when she was the Royal Assassin” Friedrich replied.
He had to know that was not a joke, Rockefeller thought to himself. The CIA had uncovered a lot of the details left out of her biography, the ones that involved her going places on the order of Friedrich’s father and solving a problem. If that problem had a name, then that person vanished as if they had never existed. Then there were the rumors of what she had done while fighting the Soviets, a red-haired girl coming out of the night and begging Russian soldiers for help to get them to lower their guard, then she killed them.
“Try talking to her directly” Friedrich said, “If you try to bullshit her then you are going to have a bad afternoon.”
It was odd to hear that term spoken by the Kaiser, if made Rockefeller wonder where he had picked it up from.
Silesia
Watching the forest had long been a pastime of Ilse’s. Back when she had been recovering from her bout with agoraphobia, she had found that the hunting blinds set up by her eventual father-in-law had been a means of observing nature while not allowing the fear that had gripped her to cripple her. One of the side benefits was that she had gotten to watch Nikolaus, Sabastian, Marie Alexandra, Anna, and Gretchen grow up here. She figured that Ingrid would do the same thing in time, she was still much too young to play in the forest with her older brother or cousins. So, it was wonderful that Izabella had agreed to watch Ingrid while Ilse was out here doing this today. As a Biologist, Ilse found that spending time in nature was helpful as opposed to what she had to contend with in Breslau.
What happens when a jagged little line was recognized as an upward trajectory? A world of trouble, that was what.
However, this time when Ilse came home, she discovered that Manfred the Elder had decided that a statement needed to be made about what he regarded as excessive secrecy by the Military. It was something that she had listened to him complain about dozens of times. “How are they supposed to be heroes if no one can know their damned names?” being typical of the sort of thing he said. In seemed that he had decided to take in a girl who had snuck into a military installation. The girl herself, Mathilda, was certainly an odd child.
Ilse had watched as Mathilda had run circles around Nikolaus and Sabastian. What was odd was that the two dresses she wore, one purple and one burgundy, were colors that should have stood out more. Ilse figured that Mathilda only was seen if she wanted to be seen and that Ilse desperately needed the take the girl clothes shopping.
Mathilda was wearing the burgundy dress as she drifted through Ilse’s field of view. She was singing a song about the Oak King and the Holly King as they vied for the affections their Mistress. It told the story about the Oak King was at his greatest strength during the height of summer, then came the decline in the autumn. Finally, the Oak King “died” in the winter. That was when his mistress came to him, and he was reborn in the springtime. It was a pretty song and Ilse knew that she would need to ask about the song when she got the chance.