"~An important matter has come up. It is to do with mislabelled goods that have been sent to the front. Herr Podlezl must check the records to locate the error and who is responsible, as well as how to correct it.~" If a lie worked once there wasn;t a reason not to use it again, and every soldier had stories of a bureaucratic mix up being why they were undersupplied and eating poor rations. The Allgeimeine most locally had the same stories, being part of the SS.
"Mislabelled goods, you say? How did you Czechs manage to survive, when you can't run a supply line to save your life? Urgh. Gustav, please escort them to Bienert, and let them work it out."
The other guard, apparently Gustav, motions you to follow and steps inside the double oak doors leading to the Ministry of Interior. The name of Bienert most likely refers to the Minister himself, Richard Bienert.
Katherine nodded, turning to and saying in Czech, "~They are taking us to see Herr Bienert, Undersecretary.~" This was less than ideal - Katherine's magic was running unpleasantly low, and she wasn't sure she would be able to re-write the memories of a guard and the Minister. It was a choice between seeing the Minister and trying to work through, or taking control of the guard and using him to go where they wished.
Caw caw. Titus thought as he circled overhead, watching the assistants carefully. No need to keep dive-bombing them yet, but he was planning to cause trouble as needed until the others had had enough of an opportunity to act.
Tomasz nods, and tries to keep his voice level as he replies. "Is this Herr Bienert expecting us? If not, we maybe have an opening here."
"I would not imagine so," Katherine replied. "No messenger of phone call ahead, and until we found out about the situation you did not plan to be here either, Herr Podzel." It was unlikely the German troops could follow the conversation, but to be safe it was best to keep in character.
"Then perhaps it is best we meet with him only later, after we have finished our thorough investigation." Tomasz replies - if they could remove their guide, they could potentially have the run of the place for a few short minutes.
The infiltrators are walked through the Habsburg corridor, lined with a seemingly endless row of offices, and yet another security checkpoint before Gustav stops in front of twin doors marked as Richard Bienert - Minister of Interior. Your SS liaison doesn't apparently bother with formalities and just shoves one of them open, standing at the side. "You go in there and sort out your own mess." he harrumphs, his first words to you.
The moustached man sitting at the lavish oak desk in the room has grey hair, and you apparently caught him in the middle of work. He scowls in your direction. "What do you want and why wasn't I informed about this?"
The office is otherwise empty.
The Undersecretary appears to come to his senses, but doesn't rise from the ground yet. The assistant who is at his side shouts something to the other one, who gets back on his bike and hurries away, presumably to get help.
Focusing on the man, Katherine focused on dumping the information she needed him to remember into his mind. It would be easier to make him work with them rather than controlling him like a puppet. If they needed to leave him alive he wouldn't spill the beans, either.
"~Apologies for the misdirection, Sir. I am Ms Wagner, and this gentleman is Mr Meier. We are here in regards to Operation Völsung, which you should have received the documentation for recently. The password is flieg und sieg.~" Smiling cheerfully, Katherine continued, "~Now that everything is in order, if you could please escort us to the following materials..." She rattled off the plans and time tables they required.
"Now, please." Tomasz growls, trying to keep the man too pressured thinking to question them.
The mind of Bienert has been shielded with a few wards. Nothing heavy duty, just enough to keep him compliant and ignorant of the dealings of the Ahnenerbe. Katherine's infiltration ward is subtle enough to slip past that layer of protection and twist his mind. He is geassed not to show anything sensitive to anyone who is not a legitimate authority, but not against believing that someone is. From that moment onward, he is nothing but cooperative, and arranges for you to visit the Archives as you please.
For the better part of the next two hours, you are brought to the archives of the Ministry, and shown endless amounts of reports: internal troop movements (nothing to actually help the war effort, sadly), provisions, internal communications, inventories and reports on every conceivable occurrence. Two items appear to be significant to you. One is a receipt showing that Heydrich has received, a few months ago, a private ENIGMA machine, the German encrypting machine that has caused so much problems to the Allied cryptoanalists. No codes have been broadcast for this specific one.
The other one is a report on the nearby city of Terezín, filed under the German name of Theresienstadt. The report itself is chilling enough, showing how the city has been turned into a prison camp carefully studied to increase deaths from starvation and disease while still maintaining an appearance of stability and civility. But you notice that it is not what it seems. This report has been sealed with an Ahnenerbe ward. Someone with the correct credentials would read something entirely different on the paper.
It's theoretically possible to crack such a ward and reveal at least part of the message. But it's time-consuming, and it won't be possible here, not unless you want to risk setting the Castle on fire.
In the meantime, an ambulance arrived to pick up Podlezl, who seemed mostly alright, although bleeding freely from a gash in his head. The other assistant hasn't reappeared after asking for help, he might be heading to the Rudolfinum.
Nodding to himself, Tomasz folds up the Terezín report and shuffles it into his pocket. The puzzle of decrypting it could be left for later, once they were all reunited and would not burn down the records room. Although...
Tomasz lets the thought slide - better that no-one knew they were there. "You are ready to leave?" he asks Katherine.
Katherine nodded. "I think we've done what we can for now. Let's go report."
Flap flap flap flap. No signal from the others, so no need to keep assaulting things - they'd been stymied enough, it seemed. Now to see how the rest of their plan went...
Ada gags as she swallows the potion. Her mother's recipe; equal parts amphetamine and adrenaline dissolved in a vinegar solution that preserves the tiny corpses of specially bred tiny - but poisonous - spiders. Add sugar to taste - which is to say as much as you can add before it precipitates out of the mix.
While the energy courses through her body she takes a moment to call up a stored incantation that borrows mass from somewhere.
The combination was going to leave her debilitated for a while later, but the strains, sprains and tears would go beautifully with the migraine she had coming from earlier.
Instantly she was on the 'borrowed' bicycle and on her way, hopeful Titus could buy enough time she could beat the three officials to the Rudolfinium.
On your way, you notice Podlezl, sprawled on the street. He's bleeding from a scalp wound, his bicycle is a wreck, and one of his assistants appears to be in the process of administering first aid. There doesn't seem to be any trace of the other assistant.
The Rudolfinum is heavily guarded. From a safe spot on the edge of the Vltava you can count no less than twelve guards in SS uniforms stationed outside. They don't seem to be in any state of alarm, for the moment.
Ada keeps her attention to the front, and does her best to simply ride on.
She rides past the Rudolfinum to the Vlatva, then turns a corner and stows her bike.
Ada keeps her attention to the front, and does her best to simply ride on.
She rides past the Rudolfinum to the Vlatva, then turns a corner and stows her bike.
'Alright, genius. Now, how do you intercept someone heading here without putting all the guards on alert?'
Panting Ada slips off the bike, pulls her hair from her bun and throws on a pair of glasses.
'Hopefully I'll have enough time to put on a uniform...'
A peek around the corner reveals the incoming 'clerk', and she skips to the core of her preparation.
Still moving quickly she pulls a journal from her handbag, quickly flips to the page with the green silk bookmark and activates the silver sigil carefully laid down in conductive inks. As soon as the effect washes over her she is pulling out her 'brooch watch' and activating a process encoded in the crystal memory.
Another moment later and she has half a cigarette in her mouth, another moment to light it, and she strolls casually back around the corner towards the clerk's destination.
Holding her cigarette in the book's hand she shouts an accusation in German-accented Czech. "You! You're one of Podlezl's men! Aren't you?"
With her other hand she brandishes the watch "What time do you call this? I was about to leave after this cigarette!"
It's quite hard to believe, in 1942, that a woman could have a position high enough in the hierarchy of the Protectorate or the SS to order around even a clerk as lowly as the one standing in front of Ada. But between the mad rush from the castle, the sudden weird accident to the Undersecretary's bike, his second rush towards the headquarters and the arcane enhancement giving weight to Ada's words, he's in a suggestible enough state to believe that the girl ordering him around imperiously is someone to be respectful with.
He squeezes the brakes, narrowly avoiding a fall on the ground, and dismounts clumsily. There are pearls of sweat on his brow.
"Ah, M-Madam? I'm sorry, Mister Podlezl had an accident and has been taken to the hospital! I came here as soon as possible to report on that, I tried to phone ahead but I have no authentication code myself! Truth be told, I'm not even sure what that was about, the Undersecretary just bolted and told us to follow..."
"That might have been a lucky break for him." Ada confides, much more quietly, as she closes. "My boss has gone out to investigate. I'm not exactly sure what either." she does her best to forge some common bond "I'm not cleared. I gathered it was some sort of logistics screw up? He was furious about waiting - only left me on the off chance he turned up in the end - but if your boss is in hospital it gives a good reason why he wasn't in his office."
She sighs "I suppose you and I had best see if we can track them down. If we can move fast enough, we might be able to catch up before they finish at the first site. Otherwise we'll spend the whole damned day chasing them!" She starts moving, then looks back "Well, come on! I'm not waiting around any more!"
Ada leads the hapless clerk in a wild goose chase for the following two hours, ensuring that the Rudolfinum is not alerted to Podlezl being moved out of his position. This allows Katherine and Tomasz to retreat in an orderly fashion from the Castle: Bienert's authorization allows them to skip the checks at the exit from the archives, and the guards don't suspect that enemies infiltrated their ranks.
It's very likely that they will notice how Podlezl has been lured away from his place before he apparently entered the Castle again, and that this will tip off the Protectorate to the presence of enemies around. Your chances to infiltrate the Rudolfinum too have just dropped drastically. But in Tomasz's pocket is a document bearing the silver filigree of a ward, and critical information behind it.
Well, that had gone reasonably well. The information they had should be enough, and whatever was in the warded message likely useful to themselves or the war effort as a whole.
Still, although she was trained for such work, tonight had been very tiring. It would be good to rest before they tried doing anything else. She was certainly ready for bed.
Tomasz nodded at the suggestion - he was still as well-rested as anyone his age could be after the day's excitement, but he anticipated a long night ahead examining the warded documents. Save behind at least one, possibly several, layers of his own wards of course.
The fine silver filigree in the paper creates a mesh running on the paper like an electric circuit. A tiny flicker of power will induce an inductive current in the mesh, and power a diagram to reveal what is hidden, provided that one has the proper key. Which you don't, but there are ways to crack these encryptions, given time and dedication. The first thing to examine is the failsafe mechanism, to make sure that it won't set the surroundings on fire if triggered.
Judging that all was in order, Titus wheeled away from his original targets and flew to rejoin the others, hoping their plans hadn't been so horribly derailed he couldn't find them right away. He was fairly confident that he could eventually - after all, investigating missing things like people was his main job - but that was a skill better left unused for the moment.
Working by the light of an oil-lamp, Tomasz ruffled the papers between his fingers and listened to the sound of their movement. All around him an opaque dome shivered, buffering the rest of the building against any mishaps and muting the bustle of the city - even in the midst of war, it still lived and breathed.
More delicately than you'd expect with his sausage fingers, Tomasz spread a fine magnetic dust over the sheet before applying just the barest flicker of power. Entranced, he watched the dust jump and settle in three, no, four dimensions. This key, whatever it was, moved with time.
Nodding to himself, he reaches into his pocket seeking some spare gears.
Richard found that he had something of an instinctive understanding of the device. Working with Tomasz, he was able to point out any mistakes the man had made.
Ada's return is subdued. 'He seemed like a nice enough guy. Hope he doesn't get in too much trouble for getting fooled.'
"So" she asks the group "How did it go? Have you got the information we need to do this properly?" Noting the attention on the page she moves to help Tomasz "What did you find?"
The effects of the ward, should it be triggered, is twofold: a simple short-circuit will incinerate the paper, but the most dangerous part is a deep mental control trap, placing you under the authority of whoever designed the ward. An unshielded target would then become a puppet of the Ahnenerbe, but you would face a messier fate, given your Laundry wards of office. You are fairly certain that the ward would melt your brain, rather than risk you spilling critical information to the other side. Despite the intrinsic brutality, that is rather an elegant trick.
How to counteract that is rather harder. By prodding at the edges of the ward, you can get three sensations. First is a heartfelt pledge of allegiance to the Nazi regime. Then you perceive words: "This sentence is false". The third, and more confusing one, is a piece of violin music.
The piece of music is from Beethoven's Violin Concerto in D Major.
"Music from beyond, meant to break the mind, and a paradox so simple it is unbreakable. Most exciting, wouldn't you agree? Perhaps to break this ward we must introduce another paradox, one it cannot fathom."
The pledge was simple, even if the 'heartfelt' part was more annoying. More worrying, though, was the music. "Has anyone the knowledge of what this piece is? Since the War, I have been not so good with hearing." Tomasz asked.
Yawning sleepily, Katherine considered. "Are the two separate statements, or are they clues? Is it false that a heartfelt pledge will unlock it? Perhaps if we knew more about the third part..."
"Beethoven's..." Ada trails off, finger conducting an imaginary orchestra, before dropping in frustration. "I can't place it. Possibly if we transcribed it, something might trigger."
"There are plenty of music teachers and shops, even during a war," Katherine said, blinking. "We should be able to find out more about the music in the morning, and maybe some hint as to why it's part of the ward."
"Hmph. The Germans and their Beethoven." Tomasz muttered. "Agreed, we can ask around in the morning. But this does not reveal the matter of the other two - perhaps sleep will help, but to doubt I profess."
Nodding to the others, Tomasz took his leave to sleep for the night.
Richard, in a quiet moment, picks up the paper and begins to feel for any mystic weakness. Incongruous angles, non-euclidian edges, walls held in place by the simple and firm belief that they must stay in place. And then he beholds the Stone, and summons forth the half-known and half-remembered cosmic truths he once saw, the sublime and terrible and infinite madness seen in a brief moment of nigh-omniscience. And all that, he channels into a statement, ”The Cycle ends with it’s own beginning, and begins with it’s own ending. What was, will be and what will be, was”
"I think..." Katherine considered for a moment. "I think that we disarm each one separately, if we're fast enough, and one person can break each ward."
"Indeed, I believe I have found a paradox I can set into motion. When it is ready, it's truth shall be let loose."
"Potentially the music's key could be the music itself - or perhaps the act of playing it." Ada pauses "I should add that this is a guess, and I'm not volunteering - my musical training finished when I broke my recorder."
She considers "I might have a way to alter my mental state enough to give the pledge - but that has risks of its own."
"At a pinch I can change someone's mind to do so, then change it back." Probably. Hopefully.
"We may have need of a violinist." Tomasz harrumphs. "Heydrich himself plays, were this meant for him it would make it awkward at best for anyone else to read it."
These Germans, and their over-engineering. When an underling needs to be reading this, do they require Heydrich playing to them in the corner?
"Regardless, someone with knowledge of this song I think we still need. I do not have the ability to re-create it with any accuracy. Perhaps even a record player, if such a thing could be found."
It had taken him some time to track them down but, finally, Titus had managed to rejoin the others. Flying was still faster than walking, at least, and he could appreciate that. "Not much of a musician myself, I'm afraid." he said as math modified his reality back to a humanoid form. "Given enough time, I might be able to brew something that could improve someone's voice, but that'd take longer than I think we want to spend."
"Money will resolve the problem, I should imagine. There are plenty of stage musicians who need to eat, even in the middle of this blasted war." If none of them had a talent for it, then it would have to do. The message might be important, to the Allies or to there own mission.
Light rain falls on Prague on the morning of the 13th of May. You are sharing a hotel room with a deadly trapped piece of paper and in the outskirts of the city is a stolen truck carrying an active golem.
Quite an average Wednesday.
Waking, Tomasz cracked first his jaw and then his neck. Thinking about their problem was pointless before breakfast - and a shower if he could scrounge the water in the present conditions - so he set about his morning ablations for an hour before returning to the Ahnenerbe's notes.
"In this city, where do we find a musician? Perhaps the resistance has someone who can play?"
Sitting up from her slumber, Katherine put her feet on the floor with a stretch and a yawn. She glared at the suns sad attempts to peek out behind the clouds with obvious irritation. It was quite clear that she was not fond of working mornings, which wa not typically an issue for her - most of her missions took place late at night, during fine parties. She only had to get up early if she made a mistake.
Usually.
"I would imagine so, if we can provide an instrument and the sheet music. I suspect the instrument will be the harder to find, and most likely come with an accent." Perhaps it was the tiredness, or perhaps she didn't think it mattered, but more of an accent came through on the toussled haired woman than had been there the previous day.
Titus considered what had happened the last time he was at a place that hosted lots of musicians and hesitated on bringing that up. Probably better to not admit to the wider public his involvement with that...