Ingrid awoke to the warmth of the morning sun pouring through her bedroom window. With a lull in the activities in the basement, she had come upstairs to sleep for a few hours, and now felt much refreshed. She lay in bed for a moment, though, staring at the cracks in the ceiling and remembering nursing her grandfather in this very room during his final days. Eva had called him a deluded old man, but Ingrid had never known anyone with a sharper mind and a keener memory than her grandfather Helmut. True, he did not breathe a word to her of his relationship with Himmler until his final weeks, when it was clear the cancer would soon complete its work. But then he had spoken with pride of his friendship with the Reichsführer and of their mutual pursuit of a project that could ensure the future of the Reich and its ideals even in the face of the unstoppable forces of the Allied armies. He spoke of his time with Himmler in great detail—he remembered the menus of meals they had shared, the brand of cigars they smoked, even the punch lines of Himmler’s favorite jokes. But when it came to the project that they worked on together, Grandfather Helmut had only spoken in the most general terms until a few hours before his death. Then he had sent the nurse away, summoned Ingrid into his room, and told her she must listen carefully to what he had to say.

“The future of the Reich depends on it,” said Helmut, and at first Ingrid thought what her associate Eva would think five years later—that her grandfather, in his dying hours, was no longer aware of the world around him and was back in 1944, waiting for his friend Heinrich Himmler to walk through the door. But as he spoke, Ingrid realized that, if Projekt Alchemie was real, then there truly could be a future for the Reich, or at least for its ideals of Aryan supremacy. Because Ingrid understood, as she heard her grandfather repeat the words of Heinrich Himmler, that the Reichsführer had been right—someday all it would take to change the world would be money. Looking at the world around her, she knew that day had come.

Her grandfather told her about a message encoded on an Enigma machine. “They took it,” he said in a weak voice. “The filthy Americans who came to Dachau took it from my brother, from Albert. You have to find it, Ingrid. Himmler’s final message about Projekt Alchemie, the message with the secret of vast wealth to be used for the return of the Reich. You must be the one to find it.”