Chapter 8

Wanda had an innate sense about her homeland. Many times she suggested an alternate route, or alternate approach to a suspected meeting place, and it worked out each time. Her willingness to offer sound advice overcame any reluctance to trust an outsider. Over time I noticed that she seemed to always sit near one of our team, and he often had a smile on his face in the mornings.

Good for him.

My days and nights were full of danger and suspense. Several times I just escaped death when suspects discovered that they had been caught. These spies had no hope of anything but execution, so responding to certain failure with dramatic violence was a choice that had no down side. Wanda nursed me several times when I’d been roughly handled or slightly injured. We avoided any report of injury to keep those who came in contact with our reports from deducing our mission. With Wanda’s skillful hand at stitching up minor wounds and bandaging ankles and wrists, we continued to avoid serious injury or deaths on our team.

We had tried for months to get a line on one particular enemy agent that we called, ‘Mr. X.’

X liked to use pretty girls as a cover. He would appear in public with a woman that he’d only known a short time and since we were not looking for a couple, our investigators never got near him. Once his mission – whatever it was – came to a satisfactory conclusion, he would leave the woman raped, tortured, and beaten to death, as a warning to those who wished to capture him. Locals often made the sign of the cross whenever he came up. It was that scary to them.

This particular wartime spy seemed to move around a lot. Whatever nation was running him seemed to be content to keep him on the move, so as to avoid an embarrassing capture and interrogation. As the dead piled up behind him, my bosses began to press us to try and put him down.

Wanda wanted us to dangle her out as bait. That was emphatically not happening. My staff heard my intentions loud and clear. We were not using our help to catch a torturing, psychotic, spy. As the search unfolded and more dead girls turned up, I began to imagine ways to pay him back for the way he brutalized those who helped him.

One day Wanda did not turn up for work. When an aide was sent to rouse her from her bed, she discovered a note informing us that she went to lure Mr. X out of hiding.

I was furious.

And terrified...

My team began to methodically turn the hamlet upside down, where we suspected he had his latest hide out. In the course of one day we captured five black market operations, four underground whore houses, two gambling dens, and arrested three suspected spies. When all that failed to turn up Wanda we intensified the search, terrorizing the town into helping. Before nightfall we received a tip that led us to a pub, where a stranger had recently checked in. It took some coordination, but we surrounded that pub, emptied the first floor of staff and customers, cleared the basement and carefully defused a makeshift bomb left to kill whoever came after him. Once we had the place completely secure my men stormed the upper room ready to kill our quarry to save Wanda.

We could have taken our time.

Wanda’s body had been neatly skinned. Her outer skin was drying from nails driven into the ceiling by her tormenter. The sight of what was left of our pretty, sweet, young assistant caused several of our hardened soldiers to vomit.

The patrons and staff were separated and questioned for hours. Their stories were checked out and compared against every other story. Those whose facts didn’t hold up were deliberately interrogated by seasoned investigators until they were either cleared, or arrested and held for further inquiry.

Mr. X made very little impression on anyone that claimed to have seen the occupant of the upper floor. He was universally described as bland, average in every way and quiet to a fault. No one claimed to have actually heard his voice, other than the clerk who checked him in and he could give us nothing to go on.

Alone in my lodging, I went deep inside myself to focus on ways to flush out the mad man. He was a thumbtack in my shoe, a thorn in my side, and a sliver under my skin. Somehow he was going to die by my hand. Some way he was going to beg for death before I gave it to him. Wanda would not die without revenge against her killer.

In the morning I had a plan.

It took several weeks to track the ghostly Mr. X. to another German city. As the Allies took more and more ground, the Axis withdrew towards Berlin, giving up territory that they held from the start of the war. Our target was deliberately moving behind German lines, feeding troop movements, aircraft operational status and other critical intelligence that might hinder the Allied march.

After the murder of Wanda, we stepped up the pressure on locals to volunteer information about strangers in their midst. Now that the Nazis were being soundly beaten they were far more willing to betray the Fatherland. The real problem was separating tips into groups of useful information and useless prattle of locals using the opportunity to inform on family and friends that had offended them at one time, or another.

We faithfully worked each lad that wasn’t transparently stupid and accidentally stumbled on our quarry. Mr. X. was with his current paramour and apparently engaged in the more stimulating activities that go on between a woman and a man when we busted down the door and took him into custody. The young woman was furious, naked, unsatisfied and apparently expecting the soon to be prisoner to pay her for her time, when we interrupted and ruined her expectation of monetary reward.

The spy truly was unremarkable. Standing in front of him I was unable to positively describe his features. Since he would soon be a corpse, I wasn’t particularly worried about his face, so I made no attempt. His girlfriend hurled insults at us that had my team members laughing and making her even madder at the same time. Rather than create even more of scene, we wrapped our prize in leg irons, handcuffs and tied his arms to his sides to inhibit any movement while we transported him. We drove over forty miles on brutally ruined roadways, to a safe house where we could interrogate Mr. X. in private,

It took all night and both of his testicles to break his will. The quiet spy cried as he spewed the contents of his memory about those he betrayed, killed, tortured and tricked. Our interrogation team efficiently recorded his every word for posterity, until he ran out of words, just before he ran out of oxygen. When they tossed his wrecked corpse into a shallow grave I felt nothing but bored.

“I am so sorry, Wanda,,, “ was my prayer behind closed doors, later that night.

The war in the Pacific ended far earlier than in my timeline, Assets that would have been lost out in the west were repurposed towards Hitler’s destruction and the difference was obvious. France was freed from the Nazi’s over a year earlier and the cost to the Third Reich was felt throughout the warring world. Nothing the Generals did seemed to turn the tide back in Germany’s favor and our little spy operation played no small part in Allied success.

Rumors of a ‘super weapon’ seemed to stay just that, rumors. As far as I could deduce, the heavy water project was not as desperately needed and might not ever be, since the Nazi Army suffered defeats on multiple fronts during the my mission.