The Milkweed Triptych 01 - Bitter Seeds Read Online Free PDF Page A

off-time.
    The road back to their farmhouse wended through a vast olive plantation. Rows of trees marched all the way from the edge of the hills overlooking the town to within a dozen yards of the house. The hills themselves had turned brown in spots, owing to a dry winter. Overhead, a fingernail moon hung in a powder-blue sky. A cool, damp breeze gusted up from the river valley.
    The north and east sides of the plantation had been shattered by misaimed artillery. The ongoing siege slowly chewed up more of the plantation each time another shell went off course.
A shame
, thought Klaus.
I like olives
.
    They pulled up in front of a wide two-story farmhouse built in the style of a Roman villa. The family that had owned it must have been rather prosperous. When he had first arrived here, Klaus wondered if the family had also owned the almond groves that blanketed the surrounding hillsides. Not that it mattered. The Reichsbehörde had needed a base of operations from which to field-test Doctor von Westarp’s work, and so the family had disappeared.
    The others climbed out of the truck and filed into the house. Klaus paused a moment to scan the wide windows on the second floor, hoping to catch a glimpse of his sister. He worried about her when he was gone all day.
    He doffed the straw hat he wore and rubbed at his scalp with the stumps of his two missing fingers as he entered the house. He reached inside his shirt, undid the clasp, and disconnected the pencil-thick bundle of wires that extended from several points on his skull to the battery harness at his waist. The braided wires dangled over his shoulder like a Chinaman’s queue.
    They had left their crisp Schutzstaffel uniforms back at the Reichsbehörde when they came to Spain, opting instead for the locals’ more inconspicuous overalls, kerchiefs, and floppy wide-brimmed hats. If nothing else, their disguises conveniently hid the wires. But the coarse peasant apparel tended to snag the wires’ cloth insulation, sometimes catching painfully when Klaus moved quickly or unwisely.
    Klaus followed Rudolf past the makeshift darkroom—once a child’sbedroom—where the cameramen stacked the film canisters from the day’s work. One canister was larger and bulkier than the others; the technicians always dispensed with it first. Heike’s ability necessitated a special camera and special film to record her activities.
    The cameramen looked down as he approached. They unloaded an Agfa eight-millimeter reel with conspicuous silence and diligence. The defector had put them all on edge. Doctor Von Westarp was half-inclined to use the remaining cameramen for target practice, and they knew it.
    Klaus pushed through the crowded farmhouse, toward the laboratory and debriefing room, eager to remove his battery harness. Over the previous decade, the engineers had made great strides with the batteries, and they had outdone themselves with the lithium-ion design. But after a long day in the field, it still felt like he’d hung a lead brick on his belt. The sooner he handed over his harness, the sooner he could try to quell the spasms in his back.
    The technicians would gauge charge depletion in the batteries and reference that against the activity documented by the cameramen. Klaus would detail his exploits slipping through Republican fortifications and pushing land mines into the earth. Any information of military value he’d gleaned would be passed—after appropriate sanitization to obscure the nature of its source—to the Reich’s allies converging on Girona. The arrangement was a quid pro quo in return for Franco’s permission to operate in Spain.
    The door to the debriefing room swung open as Klaus lay his hand on the knob. He confronted a pair of eyes so pale and unfeeling, they might have been chiseled from ice. Reinhardt stepped into the corridor.
    Von Westarp was there, too. He wore a dark lab coat with a dusting of dandruff on the shoulders from his graying tonsure.