Heinrich Gimpel stared down at his half-eaten lunch. He'd known this day might be coming, yes, but he hadn't thought it would come quite so soon.

Willi took a last big bite of tempura. If the wasabi bothered him this time, he didn't let it show. He got to his feet, took out his wallet, and pulled out enough money to cover his lunch and Heinrich's. "Come on," he said, suddenly all business. "We'd better get back to the office."

"You're right." Heinrich rose, too.

Half the diners in Admiral Yamamoto's were finishing up in a hurry and getting out. That surprised Heinrich not at all. Given where the restaurant was, most of the people who lunched here would work for the Wehrmacht or the SS or the Party. Haldweim had no obvious successor. Intrigue and jockeying for position had begun years earlier, when he started having "colds." Now things would come out into the open.

"Who will it be?" Willi murmured as they hurried up the street. The same thought was uppermost in

Heinrich's mind, too.

When they got back to Adolf Hitler Platz, they saw Horst Witzleben's perfect image on the huge televisor screen on the front wall of the Fuhrer 's palace. The square was filling up fast as people got the news. Already, the large swastika flag above the palace had been lowered to half-staff. Witzleben's almost operatic voice blared from powerful speakers: "Even so soon, messages of sorrow and mourning have begun pouring in from around the world. In a moving joint tribute, the King and the Duce of the Italian Empire spoke of Kurt Haldweim as a man of power and a man of peace. The Emperor of Japan has expressed his sympathy with the German people on their loss, in which the Emperor of Manchukuo joins. The Caudillo of Spain described our beloved Fuhrer as a man of world-historical proportions, while the Peron of Argentina termed him a model for all rulers aspiring to greatness." Someone's arm slid a paper onto Witzleben's desk. The news reader glanced down at it. "And this just in: the Poglavnik of Croatia has declared a day of mourning in his country, while stating that the Fuhrer 's memory will live in the hearts of men forever."

"Nice," Willi remarked. "All that sympathy and a Reichsmark will buy me a glass of beer."

"Well, what do you expect them to say?" Heinrich asked. He knew what he would say if he had the chance.One more murderer in a line of murderers. A little smoother than the last two, but a murderer all the same. Except with Lise, he wouldn't get that chance. Even thinking such things was dangerous.

"Oh, just what they are saying," Willi answered, turning his back on the televisor. "But how many of them mean it?"

"If you had to mean what you said, we'd have an awful lot of diplomats who never opened their mouths-and the world might be a better place," Heinrich said. His friend laughed, supposing he'd been joking.

He and Willi went up the broad stairway to the entrance of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht building. "Identification cards," a guard snapped. Heinrich dug out his wallet and produced the card. The guard carefully compared the photo to his face before running the card through the machine reader. Only when the light glowed green did he nod for Heinrich to proceed. Willi got the same treatment.

"They aren't usually so jumpy during the lunch break," he said once they were safely inside and out of earshot of the guards.

"Did you think they wouldn't be?" Heinrich asked. "Nobody's going to trust anybody till we have a new Fuhrer. Suppose the SS tried to sneak somebody in here to find out which way the Wehrmacht will go."

"They'd be fools if they did. They'd be bigger fools if they didn't have spies in place here years ago. And we'd be fools if we didn't have spies planted over there. And the Party's watching us and the SS both. The Air and Space Ministry's likely got fingers in a few different pies, too. Maybe even the Navy-who knows?" Willi took to intrigue like a duck to water. He eyed a secretary walking past as if he thought she was spying for the SS and the Navy and the Japanese all at once: or he might have looked at her that way because she was a cute redhead in a skirt that rose almost to her knees.

Just because he was melodramatic, that didn't mean he was wrong. The Wehrmacht, the SS, and the Party surely were all spying on one another. Air and Space and the Navy were smaller players, but they could get big in a hurry if they managed to put one of their people in the Fuhrer 's palace.

Once Heinrich got back to his desk, he checked to see what was coming over the Wehrmacht computer network. Most of it was what he'd expected. The United States sent a message of condolence. So did the British Union of Fascists-with one intriguing difference. Their spokesman added that he hoped the new Fuhrer would be chosen "according to the principles set forth in the first edition of Mein Kampf."

Heinrich scratched his head. "Why is the first edition different from all other editions?" he asked Willi Dorsch. The question eerily reminded him of the one he'd asked Lise a few days earlier.Why is this night different from all other nights? Only a few people in the Germanic Empire-a handful of hidden Jews, and another handful of scholars who studied dead things-had any idea what that question meant and how it should be answered.

Willi didn't know how Heinrich's question should be answered, either. "What are you talking about?" he said.

"See for yourself." Heinrich pointed to his monitor.

Willi came around to his desk to look. "Isn't that interesting?" he said when he'd read the British message. "I don't know what the difference between the first edition and the others is, either. I didn't think there was much difference, except for cleaning up typographical errors and such."

"Neither did I," Heinrich said. The powers that be had never forbidden any edition of Mein Kampf. That strongly argued the differences between editions weren't large. But they had to be there. Otherwise, the British Union of Fascists wouldn't have specifically cited the first edition.

Like everyone else at Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, he had a copy of Mein Kampf on his desk. His was, of course, the fourth edition, revised by Hitler after Britain and Russia went under. As always when he opened the book, he found his way to one passage near the end.If at the beginning of the War and during the War twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain. On the contrary: twelve thousand scoundrels eliminated in time might have saved the lives of millions of real Germans, valuable for the future. But that passage was plainly old, for bythe War there Hitler had to mean World War I.Damn him, Heinrich thought wearily. He'd known what he wanted to do, what he intended to do, long before he got the chance to do it.

But what did he say about choosing a new Fuhrer? Finding out took some poking through the index. In this edition, it was exactly what anyone would have expected.The young movement is in its nature and inner organization anti-parliamentarian; that is, it rejects in general and in its own inner structure a principle of majority rule in which the leader is degraded to the level of a mere executant of other people's will and opinion. In little as well as big things, the movement advocates the principle of unconditional authority of the leader, coupled with the highest responsibility.

That was the way things had worked in the Reich for as long as Heinrich could remember, and for years before. How was the first edition of Mein Kampf different? Willi Dorsch had his copy open, too. He read aloud the passage Heinrich had just found.

"It can't be the same in the first edition," Heinrich said. "If it were-"