Five Past Midnight - James Thayer [141]
Hitler's hand on his arm brought him up. "Tell me, Inspector. Are the Bolsheviks in mortar distance of Berlin?"
Dietrich again was startled. How could the Führer not know this? "Soviet shells are landing on the city, all day and night."
Hitler nodded.
Again, Dietrich found reserves of courage he did not know he possessed. "Don't your generals tell you?"
"Some do and some don't," the Führer replied tonelessly. "It's a matter of who to believe. That's how I've come this far, Inspector. Knowing who to believe."
Dietrich sensed he was witnessing the tide turn, the waning of reason and the waxing of something more dangerous. He had heard rumors of these sea changes. He hastily turned to go, Eberhardt at his heels.
"And amid all the traitors, I can trust you, Inspector." Hitler's voice gained half an octave, and inklings of hysteria were at the edges of his words. A flood was coming.
"They have never told me the truth. They lie to me. And worse, they conspire with each other to lie to me." Hitler's face was turning red in splotches. Spittle formed at the corner of his mouth. His voice rose like a stormy wind. "That's all I hear down here. Lies and more lies."
The Führer caught himself. He shuddered with the effort to control his passion. He breathed quickly, air rattling in his throat. He turned to the blue sofa like a jerking marionette, his ruined body not cooperating in even this small motion.
He said over his shoulder, "Send another one of them in as you leave, Inspector Dietrich. Any one of them, outside the door there, waiting for an audience, sniveling in fear, hoping I haven't discovered their treachery, but of course I have."
OTTO DIETRICH held two corners of the map laid over the car's hood, and Eugen Eberhardt pinned down the other two corners. They were near the Food and Agriculture Ministry's building on Wilhelmstrasse. A company of Eberhardt's RSD troops were cordoning off the intersection and two hundred meters of Behrenstrasse, setting up wooden traffic barricades and giving gruff responses to the few passersby who asked anything. Most pedestrians on the sidewalks hurried along without even a glance at the operation. Camouflage nets hung from lamp poles made Wilhelmstrasse seem like a tunnel.
"It's all a matter of angles, really." General Eberhardt raised a hand to ward off the sunlight, made white and blinding by the high smoke. He stared down Behrenstrasse toward the church. "We'll give Jack Cray a few, and we'll take away a few."
"And you're sure the Führer would exit the bunker only by these routes?" Dietrich was bent over the hood, studying the map.
Also on the car hood, pressed under his left palm, was an aerial photo of the middle of Berlin, from Gestapo headquarters on Prinz Albrecht Strasse north ten blocks to the Brandenburg Gate, showing the neighborhood that was the Reich's administrative heart.
"He has told us he is not leaving the bunker. I take him at his word. I have overseen his departure from the Chancellery hundreds of times, and these would be his routes were he to leave. He usually gets into the limousine in the Honor Courtyard, and the limousine then exits the complex east through the automobile gate onto Wilhelmstrasse. But occasionally the limousine pulls up in front of the building, where he leaves from the Great Marble Gallery, nearer his office."
"And that exit is on Vossstrasse, to the south of the Chancellery?"
"You aren't familiar with the New Chancellery? Have you ever been inside it?"
"Never been invited." Dietrich smiled ruefully. "And I avoid the government quarter when I can."
"The Marble Gallery is a hundred fifty meters long, twice as long as the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the Führer told me. Boasting a bit, you see."
"General, are you certain you know of all the secondary bunkers, those places the Führer would go if the Chancellery bunker were rendered uninhabitable? Himmler or Goring wouldn't have a bunker you don't know about, would they? A bunker Hitler could flee to in an emergency?"
Eberhardt stiffened,