His work gave him opportunity to reacquaint himself with the queers, Schenk and Oster, who worked in a related section, exchanging information with Japan on Allied weapons systems and codes. He intended to gain their trust, then lure them to a small bar a few miles from the embassy. They’d met there once before, retiring after too much rice wine to a nearby bathhouse, where the diplomats had openly incriminated themselves. But the Sutanto had arrived before Steckel was able to personally organize their arrest and, quite frankly, he’d let the matter slip after that. It seemed less important than accompanying Brasch to Hashirajima.

This time, however, Steckel had alerted the mission’s security chief, who would be waiting for the right moment to seize the perverts in flagrante. They could be executed on the spot. Nonetheless he intended to keep them alive for a while. Their interrogation would give him an excuse to stay away from the Sutanto while this ugly business over the Jewish question and the Reich’s ultimate failure worked itself out. It surely wouldn’t take long.

As the SD man picked his way through a narrow alley that stank of fish guts and human waste, he couldn’t throw off his nagging concerns. A world without the Reich? Without the führer! It didn’t seem possible. And a Jewish state? That was an abomination. He huddled deeper inside his black trench coat as a light rain fell. The evidence he’d seen and touched with his own hands was undeniable. But what to do? Reichsführer Himmler was surprisingly open to the mystical and otherworldly. The fact of the ships’ emergence may have stunned and troubled him, but he hadn’t rejected the idea out of hand, as Steckel had expected him to. Indeed, he had leapt on the first reports, demanding more information and asking for clarification on dozens of points.

The Indonesians, for instance. Where did they fit on the human evolutionary scale? From Steckel’s preliminary notes, Himmler thought they seemed almost subhuman. What did the Nipponese think? Were they an Asian subrace? And if that were so, how did they acquire their technological sophistication? Himmler had pressed him for evidence of the triumphs of the Aryan race, as well.

Steckel had replied that it seemed as if some vast Jewish conspiracy may have thwarted the inevitable march of the German people to their destiny. He’d placed a flexipad, containing some very carefully chosen files, in a diplomatic pouch, and sent it back via a Spanish airplane.

An ominous silence had been his only answer from Berlin, until another flurry of demands and questions had suddenly come back, along with news that Himmler was sending even more men out to help with the investigation.