Chapter One Thousand Seven Hundred Eighty-Four
2nd February 1967
Dublin, Ireland
While it seemed like the whole world was focused on events in Outer Space, Jack found himself with far more earthly concerns. Like what deviltry his clients were up too. Many of them were like children, when things got quiet, that was when you started to worry. Right now, things were quiet out of Continental Europe. That meant that about a dozen of Jack’s clients, many of them high-profile were keeping incredibly quiet.
“Did it occur to you to check the date before you called?” Jack asked his assistant, an Associate who was less than a year out of University. The Associate had just explained that while he had managed to get ahold of Fürstin Katherine von Mischner zu Berlin, her response had been very rude, and she had hung up before he could get a word in edgewise. Today was the anniversary of the Reichstag Bombing and Kat being worse than usual, even for her, should have been expected.
Jack knew he should have been the one to call his pricklier clients and Kat was the prickliest of the lot, but the other Partners in the firm were leaning on him to delegate responsibilities out of fear that his health was declining and if something happened to Jack, his clients would go elsewhere. They had told him that no one was irreplaceable but replacing him would take time and money that they felt was better used elsewhere. Whatever might be said about the other Senior Partners, they knew what their priorities were, money. They said personally calling clients over billing as beneath a man of Jack’s stature.
The Senior Partners didn’t really understand that despite her title and close proximity to the Kaiser, Kat was possibly the most successful career criminal that Jack had ever known and that was saying something. It wasn’t as if he could call her up and ask if she had been doing anything illegal lately. By the time that she called him it was usually far too late, and he would be reading about what had happened in the papers. Sure, she was good at keeping her name out of the papers but there were disturbing things that happened from time to time that had her fingerprints all over them. Unlike nearly everyone else, Jack understood what she was capable of. He had been there when Kat had coldly explained to Guy Burgess how she would start his interrogation by cutting off one of his testicles with Ian Fleming standing there watching it happen. Burgess had spilled his guts before she had started, but Jack was certain that she would have done it just to get even with the people who had hurt Jehane Thomas. It still haunted his dreams.
“Anything else?” Jack asked, hoping that was the end of it.
“Your brother called” The Associate said.
“Yes” Jack replied, “Which one?”
“I forgot to ask.”
“Is that a joke?” Jack asked, wondering why such a thing would not have occurred to the Associate. Though it was something that was changing in a hurry now that women had resorted to civil disobedience to force the matter, it seemed everyone in this Ireland had more than one brother. The Associate should have known that.
“No” The Associate said, aware that Jack was giving him the evil eye. “He asked if he could count on your presence at an event for Fianna Fáil tonight.”
That meant Edward had called. Unlike his older brothers and sisters, Ted had still been a child when the family had fled Boston after their father had gotten himself up to his eyeballs in the Spanish Civil War. Even if the US Government had been unable to nail Joe Senior to the wall, they had made certain that he was shunned by the American Public. Decades later, Ted was coming up in Fianna Fáil, one of the two establishment political parties of Ireland and running for a seat in the Dáil. Unlike Jack, he stood a good chance of winning.
Peenemünde
There were times when Nora Berg had her doubts about her professional life. She heard that she wasn’t well liked and her tendency towards being blunt seldom helped matters. The fact that she was regarded as the foremost expert in her particular field meant that she was tolerated, not that she asked or needed more than that. When she had been invited to Peenemünde to join the Raumfahrer Program, specifically the team that monitored the health of those aboard the capsule, was an opportunity to change all that.
Berg doubted that it would though.
The reason the Space Program had come to her was because one of the crew of Taxidiotis IV was a twenty-nine-year-old woman. Over the previous weeks Berg had flown to Vietnam to oversee the medical examination that had been conducted on Sigi. Berg concluding that Sigi was in excellent health and that the Doctors employed by the ESA had made a complete hash of it when trying to determine what her baseline was. It shouldn’t have been a surprise because most of these Doctors dealt with Luftwaffe Pilots, more than ninety percent of whom were male.
Today, Berg found herself pointing that out again because the equipment that was monitoring Sigi had picked up a few anomalies.
“Until we have further information, we can assume that this is normal” Berg said as one of her colleagues pointed out that Sigi’s body temperature had suddenly changed as well as slight changes in her heart rate and respiration.
“How can you just assume that?” The colleague asked, “A sick member of this crew is a serious matter, what if this is contagious?”
Berg did her best to hide her annoyance, these men really did need to get out more.
“The personal cycles of women are not contagious” Berg replied, “Though I think it would be rather entertaining if they were.”
The men around the table just stared at her. They all had wives and girlfriends. How was it possible that they wouldn’t know these things? The information was all there in Sigi’s file.