The theater restaurant in Zagreb had the nervous energy of a place that took a stolen gloss seriously. Velvet-draped booths ringed the parquet floor; a small orchestra hammered an American tune into something angular and European. Lights pooled on the stage, where dancers in sequins moved with the practiced suggestion of something glamorous and empty. The crowd ate and drank and watched as if spectacle could hold them together.
At a lonely table by the center aisle sat Wilhelm Drexler. He was immense in a way that made the table look fragile beside him: bald, heavy-jawed, wearing a black suit cut to make him look narrower than he was. A thick cigar sat in his fingers like an instrument; he rolled smoke into the air and watched the dancers as if measuring their rhythm for a campaign. He didn't laugh. He didn't applaud. He just breathed in the cigar smoke and watched, an indifferent god among men who sought his attention.
A crew of young Wehrmacht officers clustered at a corner table, their tunics still too neat, their shoulders squared in the way of men newly given uniform and status. They drank loud, joked loud, bored as any officers who had been posted to backwater provinces in the long arc of empire. Their energy bounced like loose coins into the room.
Drexler called for the waitress he favored the brunette who moved like a shadow between tables ordered more of the expensive French wine, and returned to his cigar. She took the order with a practiced smile. On her way past the rowdy table, one of the soldiers, drunk on the heat of being seen in uniform, reached out and slapped her backside. The gesture was loud, obscene in the small room.
The waitress's hands flew. The bottle she carried wobbled; the wine clattered and shattered across the officers' table, red spreading like a small injury. A dancer on the stage paused mid-turn; the music stuttered. One of the officers, hot and theatrical, spat obscenities. Before anyone could de-escalate, he struck the young woman with the back of his hand. She crumpled, the bottle's shards glittering at her knees.
A manager burst out from the kitchen, face white with shock and calculations about damage and reputation. He ordered the soldiers to stop; they shrugged in unembarrassed confidence. The manager turned, awkward, and came to where Drexler sat.
"Sir," he hissed, voice hurried and apologetic. "Forgive her clumsiness she is new. We will… we will replace the bottle, and make it right."
Drexler lifted his cigar and watched the tableau like a man watching a rehearsal. He exhaled a slow plume of smoke and said, almost lazily, "Bring another bottle for me. Put it on their tab." His voice had no heat in it; it was a measurement. "And see she is attended."
The young officers looked toward Drexler, wondering who he was. The bartender shrugged. "He's been coming every night," the man said. "Pays cash. Keeps to himself." The soldiers, emboldened by curiosity, rose and wandered over. One of them, the leader by posture if not by any visible insignia, demanded to see papers. The man's tone had the brittle audacity of those who had been given small power and imagined it vast.
Drexler did not move. He only watched them with the slow amusement of a man whose patience had been forged in longer wars than their lives. "When the Reich marched east," he said softly, the cigar smoke curling between his words, "no private soldier addressed me in such a tone." It was not only admonition. It was history, a quiet weapon.
The young officer opened his mouth to retort, but the door burst open and a skinny man in a black suit, drenched from the rain, hurried in. He scanned the room quickly and then stepped to Drexler's table. He snapped into a neat salute and whispered something in Drexler's ear—urgent, short. Drexler listened without expression. Then a slow laugh left him, mirthless and ragged.
"This will be interesting," he said under his breath. He crushed out the cigar, smoothing the ash with his thumb as if pressing the last sound from it. He told the man in black to fetch the car. The messenger vanished into the rain.
Before he rose Drexler turned to the young officers. His eyes were calm as a blade. "You boys will be dealt with," he said softly, and there was no warmth in the promise. He took his hat and coat, nodded once to the manager, and stepped out into the storm. The soldiers watched him go part relief, part unsettled curiosity.
In the corner an SS lieutenant had been watching. He took a slow drag of his cigarette and smiled thinly. "That is Wilhelm Drexler," he told the officers when they glanced toward him. "He's the Wehrmacht liaison to the Eastern American Reich. He keeps a long tab in his memory. Insult him, and you will learn why that matters." The soldiers swallowed, faces paling a shade that the kitchen light couldn't warm.
The car slid through Zagreb's rain-slicked streets, tires whispering on wet cobblestone. Drexler's driver drove with slow, careful competence. He moved through the city's quieter veins toward the fenced, barred area where the Jewish Ghetto lay under curfew and guard. The Ghetto was a place made small by control rows of shuttered windows and the glint of sentries' bayonets under sodium lamps. People moved like slow ghosts. Some gathered near pits where refuse burned, trying to pull food or heat from the ash.
Drexler watched through the glass, eyes stone. "These Jews are a problem," he said to his aide, voice thin. "When a society is weak, problems spread like weeds." His words were careful but his meaning was clear: discipline, order, removal of what he called problems. His aide nodded, taking notes on a pad.
"We Wehrmacht lost Paris to something messy. The SS moved quick and silent. They have eyes in corners the Wehrmacht does not. We cannot let the capital be swallowed by their reach." Drexler's fingers tightened around the armrest. "Berlin must decide which arm will shepherd order. I will press on this when we reach the capital. They will not hold the city without consequence."
He watched the Ghetto slide past faces, children pulled in under shawls, a woman clutching a rusted pot, a man beaten half dead by Wehrmacht soldiers. There was a disgust in Drexler's expression, not merely moral but political an impatience that folded hunger and hopelessness into an argument for sterner measures. He did not voice genocidal intent. He spoke in the vocabulary of policy and discipline curfews, clearances, relocations and stronger guardianship. The words were clinical; the implications were not. He would write reports and meet men in Berlin who wore uniforms and had the power to turn policy into action and eventually extermination.
San Francisco — Iron and Quiet Obsession
Jack bent over the bench like a man in prayer, his face a study of concentration and fatigue. The basement smelled of oil and hot metal, the thin light above him throwing hard shadows. He moved metal with hands that remembered blueprints in ways his head refused: cut, file, fit. The small frame on the table was still only an outline, a skeleton of intent. He could not bring himself to stare too long at the finished edges; the frame's meaning had already grown teeth in his mind.
At the shop Sam had left an empty tin of stew where Jack normally ate. The note Sarah had left—Enjoy your first day back to work. Love, Sarah—still sat on the counter. He folded it and tucked it into his pocket before he left the basement; it was a small talisman against the abyss.
He worked through the day at the machine shop in a mode thick with ritual. The presses and lathes hummed, and there was a certain comfort in the order of their motions. Sam checked in on him from time to time with a beer and a cautious companionable grin that tried and sometimes succeeded in claiming a fraction of Jack's attention back from the dark horizon he walked toward.
By night, he returned to the basement. He did not seek schematics from strangers; he improvised with the scraps of engineering he knew from work. He did not look up instructions; he would not put the world in words that could be used by others. His hands shaped every piece with the fury of a man who wanted the world to feel the difference he had felt when his family was taken.
He knew what he could not do: he would not become a teacher of methods. He only pressed forward with the battered, private drive of grief, and if it turned him somewhere he could not return from, he accepted that as the price of staying human in a place that had emptied meaning.
The Neutral Zone — Leo & Kenzie
Leo and Kenzie hunched over a canvas map in a dim safehouse a day's drive from the coast. They marked troop movements with small pins and used smudged charcoal to draw the lines where Japanese patrols moved like a net. The pending Imperial visit had tightened everything: checkpoints were more numerous, patrols less predictable. Chief Inspector Sugiyama had rolled out orders from Admiral Yamamoto with the precision of a surgeon's knife—curfews at 10 p.m., documentation to be carried at all times, house logs required, guests to be recorded. The Kempeitai presence was no longer a nation's polite demonstration of power; it was a living, crowding wall.
"We need to move the shipment nights earlier," Leo said, tracing a route with his finger. "Sugiyama's men are watching the normal corridors now."
Kenzie rubbed her jaw. "There are fewer gaps. I don't like this. If they start checking manifests the way they check faces, it becomes near-impossible."
Leo thought of Sarah, of the way she had slipped through borders and bureaucracy to send radios and parts to keep "The Voice"alive. He thought of their plan and the small compromises they'd made to keep people alive. "We adapt," he said. "We do smaller drops, more often. We use distractions from the city—ceremonies, visits, the imperial train schedule. We'll need a runner in the JPS who can get a cooking permit or a floral delivery license. Paperwork is thin at the top when ceremonies come through. People are too concerned with parades."
Kenzie's laugh was brief, dark. "When the Crown prince and princess goes by, people forget the small things. But Chief inspector Sugiyama is no fool. He has orders to stop everyone. We are not sure how he treats Nazi operatives; he will treat them by law if his orders say so. That helps us, oddly. If he's thorough, even their operatives get slowed."
They marked a potential route through a less-guarded coastal strip and made a list of contacts who could act as temporary handlers. Kenzie scrawled a name: Hawk's drop, 2400 hours, small freighter off Marin. It was tentative, dangerous, and required luck. In a world tightening like a fist, luck would have to do.
Paris — Muller's Unraveling, Eichmann's Watch
In the ash-gray morning at the former palace site, Heinrich Müller worked with the quiet obsession of a man with a ledger. The forensic teams moved like slow, precise animals—testing metal fragments, mapping the blast radius, looking for any signature that would betray the device and the hands that placed it. The more Müller's team uncovered, the less the story fit a simplistic external assault. Wiring had been routed along maintenance corridors. A support beam had been undermined at a vital spot. Someone had exploited institutional knowledge of the palace's backstage.
Müller's notebook filled with names and times: which maintenance crew had keys, who signed off on the chandeliers that morning, which delivery agents had been issued passes. A pattern emerged: access lists that had been adjusted in the days leading up to the banquet to reflect the arrival of the crown of guests; a few names appeared as having been logged twice, as if someone had manufactured redundancy to legitimize presence.
Reinhard Heydrich watched the inquiry with a folded-lip smile. He did not move openly, but he sent Adolf Eichmann to shadow Müller's team. Eichmann's remit was simple: observe, report, and nudge the investigation toward avenues that Heydrich cared to be explored—or away from those he did not. Eichmann loitered at the edge of the forensic teams, crisp in a uniform that looked as if it had been carved from a single sheet, and took careful notes.
Müller, suspicious by nature, grew wary of the neat lines that Eichmann took in the reports he filed as Eichmann was Müller's agent long before he sent him to spy on Heydrich. Someone else was watching the watchers, and the world is always more dangerous when the watchers start counting one another. Müller's instincts told him a hand with access had been involved; the tenor of the evidence suggested an insider. But whether that insider answered to the Wehrmacht, the SS, or to some darker, private interest was the question that kept him awake at a command desk that smelled of ash.
Lucy's Empty Room
Lucy returned to her hotel with the kind of hollow a person gets when the soft scaffolding of their life collapses overnight. Bandages ringed her face and arm—minor things that opened into larger wounds in the mirror's reflection. She went to the front desk; the maid who took her bags talked around her and offered a low, careful voice. "Miss Riefenstahl flew back to Berlin this morning. There were orders. The situation demanded her presence."
For Lucy that word—orders—felt like a sentence. She tried again to reach Imel at the SS headquarters. Each time the same answer: He is indisposed. He is busy. The men at Imel's office were polite but distant, their smiles clipped and their allegiance folded into an endless ledger of priorities that did not include her.
She sat on the edge of the bed and unwrapped the bandage to wash with a cheap bar of soap against the bruise on her cheek. Tears came before shame could catch them. The city thrummed with SS soldiers and curfews, and Lucy felt the old ties snap into silence. Face's she had hoped would shelter her had been swept into orders and urgency. A supposed friend had taken flight. The woman who had been her guide in a room now gone as if Riefenstahl was only there to use her and leave.
Someone had left at the door a small paper bag with a bottle of water and some crackers—an anonymous kindness. Lucy took them with shaking hands and pressed them to her chest. She swallowed the rising panic and put her face into the mirror, smoothing the bandages back into place. She had to keep moving. She had to find the contacts still on the ground, the people who moved in the seams of orders.
The city's sirens rose and fell like tidal warnings. Lucy cleaned her face as best she could, then stepped out into the rain to look for someone who still remembered her name.