The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) Read Online Free

stairs. He had put the report in the briefcase as usual, and he followed his ordinary routine for delivering reports, even if tomorrow—no, today actually—was Christmas Eve. On the bottom floor he approached the junior officer on duty at the guard station. The young officer was reading a magazine, and he didn’t seem particularly busy doing anything useful.
    “I have a parcel for the minister of war,” Fritz said, holding up the briefcase containing the sealed folder. “Would you get me a courier?”
    “This late?” the officer muttered frowning with annoying impudence as if Fritz had said something preposterous.
    Although most of the staff were civilians, Fritz wore his uniform with the insignia identifying him as a captain, so it was hardly a great mystery to the second lieutenant that he was an officer who outranked him. Ever since he first became an officer, he rarely went out without a uniform, and civilian clothes made him feel a bit naked. Yet this lout didn’t seem to notice the insignia at all.
    “It is quite urgent,” Fritz said, not letting his annoyance show, since he had no reason to seed resentment from this disrespectful young man. “The minister must have it first thing in the morning.”
    The officer glanced over at the clock, still looking skeptical. Lazy bum . The man made Fritz feel like an old man bitterly noticing the degenerate youths around him. Was this the modern Prussian man? Reading a men’s magazine and looking like he couldn’t care a damn about his job.
    “Why don’t you leave it here, and it can go out at six? The minister won’t be in his office before it arrives anyway.”
    What was the point of rushing in the middle of the night to get something to a senile goat who would probably not even be around to receive it until sometime in the morning? It just didn’t make sense to him.
    “It is quite sensitive,” Fritz mumbled. “I would very much like to have it delivered by a courier straight away.”
    The second lieutenant sighed as if he had been told to do something that would need work, not just call someone.
    “All right, sir, but you’ll probably have to wait.”
    “That is fine,” Fritz said. “Just get the courier, if you please.”
    After the officer called for a courier with his phone, Fritz went to sit down at a hard wooden bench across from the officer’s desk to wait while the officer returned to his magazine. If he was still annoyed about having to call for a courier, he didn’t show it and instead seemed to enjoy reading whatever he was reading in his magazine.
    The War Ministry was in the heart of Berlin while the Office of Wartime Statistics was housed only about three miles away in a building that had originally belonged to a different department but had been vacated during the significant reorganization when the central government abolished the Prussian, Saxon, Frisian, Bavarian, and Württembergian armies to integrate them completely into a central Reichswehr back in April. Fritz’s uniform still had the insignia of the Prussian Army on his uniform, although he was now supposedly a German captain after the separate armies had been merged together and the Prussian Army had become the centerpiece of the unified Reichswehr —the first modern German army.
    Although the Office of Wartime Statistics provided a wide range of data as a general department of the central German government, Fritz’s department had been put there perhaps by accident or by some cunning reasoning by the higher ups—Fritz did not actually know about the genesis of the Fourth Floor since the organization had been started before he was appointed as the military assistant to its administrator Colonel Doctor Professor Kretschke. The people working on the Fourth Floor dealt with the Wiesbaden Group, the Hesse Metallurgical Works, and the Kongo Project, and Colonel Kretschke spent much time with several subdivisions within the Group and the Works on location, recently that had taken