Five Past Midnight Read Online Free PDF Page B

Palace to Lady-in-Waiting, and appointed new Ladies of the Palace ranking above them, the countess stormed out of the court and left Berlin for the family estate in the Mecklenburg area. She raged anew when she learned from a family friend, Ludwig Count Oppersdorff, the court marshal, that the kaiser enjoyed making jokes at the countess's expense, vulgarly approximating her bosom. The countess swore her family would never return to the city, and her iron will had prevailed for decades. Not once in her fifty-five years had the countess's daughter—Katrin's mother—visited Berlin. Only when her grandmother died—of an accumulation of bile, the family suspected— could Katrin venture to the great city.
    During her first evening there, at the Hotel Esplanade, Captain Adam von Tornitz had approached her as she was standing near a terrace fountain. Cosseted away in the Voss-Hillebrand estate most of her life, Katrin was defenseless against the gallant Wehrmacht officer. That evening he had whispered into her ear that she was das Ewig-weibliche, the eternal feminine, a phrase from Goethe. They were married ten days later.
    Their love was a gift from God, she knew then. Their years together played themselves out joyfully, even though they were together only a few days here and there when the captain received a leave. What they lost in those days apart they made up for in intensity when they were together. She was convinced then—and still fervently believed— that their love was a unique creation, unattainable by other humans. With Adam she had found her fulfillment.
    Adam von Tornitz was arrested on July 28,1944, tried before Judge Freisler in the People's Court for complicity in Colonel Stauffenberg's plot, then taken to Plotzensee Prison, where he was hung by piano wire from a meat hook. Rumors circulated in Berlin that a motion picture camera had been in the death chamber, and that Hitler watched the movies at night. She never learned what, if anything, her husband had done to assist Stauffenberg.
    Her grief had made her a traitor to the Fatherland. At Adam's funeral, one of his friends, Colonel Wilhelm Becker, expressed his sympathy, then added cryptically, "Katrin, if you would like to do something in memory ofAdam more substantial than tossing flowers onto his casket, let me know." Becker was with the Wehrmacht Administration Office in Berlin.
    She had been doing her part for the Reich for three years, working as a radio operator for OKW (the High Command of the Wehrmacht), assigned to G Tower, the thirteen-story antiaircraft complex built on the grounds of the Berlin Zoo. She had known nothing of the messages she sent or received. They were always in code, and she knew radios, not codes. She had spent her days over a Morse sender.
    She had been fired at OKW the day Adam was arrested. Had she not been so disconsolate after Adam's death, she might have feared for herself because the Gestapo often arrested the accused's family members. But she was numb to everything but grief. And then rage began to kindle.
    So she had visited Colonel Becker at his home in Dahlem. Three days later she received the pack wireless and a one-time pad, a booklet with codes printed in red for enciphering and black for deciphering, and made of cellulose nitrate, which burns quickly and leaves no latent images. Each page of the book contained a new, random key character, to be used only once for each plain text character. A one-time code is unbreakable because it never repeats.
    She was also given a route that took her from the Tiergarten to Kreuzberg south of the city center then back to the Friedrichstrasse Station, during which she checked three drops. She was to transmit whatever message she found, but there had never been any, until today. She had found in her southerly drop a message that the sender asked be transmitted immediately. Katrin did not know that a milkman had made the drop. She had transmitted his message that afternoon.
    Colonel