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him to his front door, and that behind them, across the street, a third member of Hitler’s elite troops was standing beside the limousine.
    "You are Doctor von Weyrauch?" one of them asked.
    "I...yes...yes, I am. Why? W...what do you want?" he stammered.
    The man turned to Louisa. "And you are Louisa von Weyrauch, maiden name Keimes?"
    "Yes," she replied evenly, frightened but bitterly resentful of this intrusion.
    The S.S. man nodded. "You will both please pack a bag and accompany us."
    "Accompany you where?" he asked, his lip quivering. He reached back to take Louisa’s hand, ostensibly as a gesture of protection, in reality out of need for support. She snatched her hand away from him and stood glowering at the two men so intimidating in their black uniforms and jack boots.
    "Your presence is required at S.S. headquarters in Budapest ," he replied. "You have very little time, so you had better see to your packing immediately."
    " Budapest !" Louisa exclaimed. "Why? What in God’s name for? Who has ordered this?"
    "The order comes, I understand, from your cousin, Madam."
    Weyrauch rushed upstairs to pack bags for them both as Louisa, her face flushed and her hands curled into trembling fists at her sides, argued with their unwelcome escorts. Weyrauch knew as well as she did that the only cousin of Louisa’s to whom the trooper could have been referring was, when last they had heard of him, a colonel in the S.S.
    Less than an hour later they were on a military transport plane, flying through the blue Moravian sky on their way to Hungary .

CHAPTER TWO
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    Helmuth Schlacht dropped the file folders onto the large mahogany desk and shook his head. Facts do not lie; the information written in the files were facts, and the two dozen mutilated bodies stored in the freezers in the basement of the Ragoczy Palace were facts. But when facts seem to run counter to reason, documentation must be very carefully assembled before action is taken. If Weyrauch can assist me in presenting this to Himmler , he thought, I’ll see that he and Louisa are taken care of. He should be grateful, even if she isn’t . He laughed humorlessly, recalling the many conversations, arguments actually, in which he and his cousin Louisa had engaged when they were children back in the twenties, before their estrangement had become so deep and fundamental that they had stopped seeing each other altogether.
    When was the last time I saw Louisa? he mused. Was it at her wedding? No, it was after that . She had refused to allow him into the church if he insisted upon wearing his uniform...he was in the S.A. then, a storm trooper, a brownshirt, until he was recruited by the S.S....and while he had no desire to attend the wedding in the first place, having agreed to go just to placate his forever needling mother, he was nonetheless angered at Louisa’s attitude. He had consoled himself with many foolish, adolescent dreams of vengeance upon her for the affront, but he had outgrown them.
    It had not taken long for him to realize that Louisa, married to a weak-kneed, spineless clergyman, living out her life as a petite-bourgeois Hausfrau in a provincial Silesian backwater, had taken a greater vengeance upon herself than he would have taken. He was reasonably certain that she was miserable, and he derived some satisfaction from the knowledge, even though on a different level he felt sorry for her.
    S.S. Colonel Helmuth Schlacht did not think himself a vengeful man. He was, of course, a dedicated and devoted National Socialist, and did not regard the necessary execution of national and racial enemies as vengeful acts, regardless of the harm these creatures had done to the Fatherland and the Volk . It was simply as the Führer had so often said, that the lying, deceitful, thieving, traitorous, destructive, parasitic, syphilis-ridden Jews had to be done away with, along with the Gypsies and, ultimately, the Slavs and the Asiatics and the