The Darkest Hour(28)

He attempts another smile. “May we discuss my passage to England?”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself, Dorner.”

“Please, you can call me Alex.”

“I’ll call you Greta Garbo if I want, and we’ll talk about England when I feel like talking about England.” I’ve had about enough of him changing the topic, and I’m sure Harken would tell me that Dorner is obviously stalling. That’s when I begin with a simple question to kick off this interrogation. “What’s your full name?”

“Alexander Maximilian Dorner.”

“Your age?”

“I’ll be twenty-one next month.”

He’s even younger than I’d guessed. Granted, as the war has dragged along, the Nazis have been sending out younger and younger soldiers to the front lines, but I don’t know how a twenty-year-old like Dorner could have jumped up the ranks so quickly that he’d know about Operation Zerfall.

“Where are you from?” I ask next.

“Innsbruck, Austria, but I was raised in Munich. I was attending university there when the war broke out.”

“What were you studying?”

“I was working toward a doctorate in pathology.”

That certainly raises my brow. “A doctorate? At your age?”

“I started two years ago,” he says. There’s the slightest edge of pride in his voice, and I figure that he must have begun his university schooling at age fourteen or fifteen. So he’s educated. Very educated. But that doesn’t mean that I can him trust him any more than I did a minute ago. If anything, I need to raise my defenses even higher.

“When did you join the military? At the outbreak of the war?” I ask.

He sits forward slightly, puzzled. “When did I join the military?”

I channel Harken and say, “Didn’t you hear me the first time?”

“I’m afraid you must be mistaken. I never joined the military. I worked for the military, yes, but I wasn’t a soldier.”

I almost call him a liar. If he isn’t a soldier, then how could he have heard about a military operation like Zerfall? An alarm bell clatters in my thoughts, but I quiet it for now. I need to get to the bottom of this.

“That’s not what I was told,” I say coolly.

“Then there must’ve been a miscommunication.”

I lurch forward in my chair. “Are you accusing me of lying?”

“No, I—”

I slap him. A burst of pink appears on Dorner’s cheek, and his mouth hangs open. That should show him not to underestimate me. Unlike Nazi women, I’m not here to keep his home and his bed warm.

“If you’re not a soldier, how did you come to work for the Nazis?” When he doesn’t answer me straightaway, I lift my hand again and I say, “Answer me.”

He flinches and says, “Yes, mademoiselle. My university adviser was a member of the Nazi party. When I told him I needed assistance with funding, he secured a placement for me at a Wunderwaffe laboratory.”

I’ve seen that word before—Wunderwaffe—in Harken’s office, stamped on one of his classified files. He never said much about it—just that it was a covert Nazi initiative to create “wonder weapons,” like missiles and superheavy tanks—although I hadn’t heard anything about a laboratory.

I ask, “What did you do at this laboratory?”

“Research. I was an analyst there. I studied diseases.” His fingers roam toward his shirt buttons, plucking at them. A nervous tic, perhaps? I have to dig deeper.

“I need details, Dorner.”

He draws in a breath. “For the most part I worked with numbers. Statistics and raw data.” Another breath. “I never worked directly with a live subject until two months ago.”

“What do you mean? Dogs? Monkeys?”

“No.” He clutches on to a single shirt button and squeezes it between his fingers. “Humans.”

The blood seeps from my face. The Germans have been experimenting on people? I know I shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve witnessed the Nazis’ cruelty with my own eyes, but that doesn’t stop the queasiness from rolling through my stomach. I can’t let Dorner see how this revelation has affected me, though, so I sit up straight and tuck away my disgust. I need to maintain the upper hand at all times, even if I don’t know a lick about pathology and diseases. Those weren’t exactly topics the nuns taught at school.

What I can do, however, is lie.

“The Resistance has heard about these experiments,” I tell him, leaning back into my chair.

“You have?” There’s surprise in his tone.

“Do you truly think we’d be that na?ve about the Nazis’ secret operations?”

“But the laboratory where I worked … it was different from the others. We weren’t merely studying diseases.”

“Then what else were you doing?”

“We were undertaking a special mission.” His fingers move absently from his button toward his collar. He pulls at it, like it’s too hot in the attic. “The scientists called it Operation Zerfall.”

I resist the urge to grab his shirt and shake the information right out of him. “I see,” I say slowly, trying to keep my cards close to me. “Go on.”