Christian Semmler surveyed the recording studio with a knowledgeable eye. It was antiquated—even though the equipment was the latest available—because words and music were recorded here as feebly as they had been when Edison and his competitors first tinkered with phonographs and gramophones thirty years ago. Grim proof of how antiquated was the makeup of the band of trumpets, clarinets, and saxophones playing into an acoustical horn. Where were the violins? Where was the double bass? Where was the piano? Where was the tympani? Nowhere! None of those instruments could be recorded faithfully. The saxophone played for the string bass. The clarinet was supposed to fill in for the violins. Banjos attempted to keep the beat. The untutored listener of the recorded wax disc would assume that the piano had never been invented.

General Major Semmler climbed back up to the eighth floor for another look at the one man who could change that. He watched through the spy hole as Clyde Lynds’s eager assistants scurried. He saw that Lynds had had a cot moved in so he could work long nights. Semmler grunted approval at the sight. The scientist who was key to surmounting the shortcomings on the fourth floor was what Fritz Wunderlich’s drummer friends applauded as a “live wire.” Lynds was working, Semmler thought with a cold smile, just as hard as if he were locked in a Prussian dungeon with a gun to his head.

Semmler glided up the stairs to his lair on the ninth floor, confident that he had Clyde Lynds exactly where he needed him to save Germany from the fatal flaw of Der Tag. And, despite Isaac Bell’s repeated interference, the grand scheme of the Donar Plan was unfolding as it was destined to.

General Major Christian Semmler had soldiered abroad. Fighting in China and Africa, he had seen firsthand foreigners’ weaknesses and their strengths, and he knew better than any other officer in the kaiser’s army that Germany could never survive a war against all the world at once.

The Donar Plan—Semmler’s strategy to save Germany—had sprung to life in a rainstorm at Katrinahall, the hunting lodge on the Rominter Heath that was the jewel of his wife’s dowry. Kaiser Wilhelm II had come to shoot wild boar. A royal visit was a singular honor that aristocrats vied for at court. Semmler had stocked the estate with that in mind, but in fact the kaiser had always cast a warm eye on his youngest general major. He called Semmler a man’s man and a soldier’s soldier, and he chortled over rumors of deadly duels at school and reports of savage battles in Peking and with the Boers behind the English lines.