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

him to the site outside Posen and the other locations where the Wiesbaden Group had significant facilities—none of the sites were actually in the city of Wiesbaden which had only lent its name to the Group. Similarly, the Hesse Metallurgical Works had very little to do with either the Kingdom of Hesse or the Grand Duchy of Hesse. It was a name that had originated in an institute based in Mainz in the Grand Duchy of Hesse run by the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, the director of which was the head of the organization working under the codename the Hesse Metallurgical Works, but other than the location of the original institute, in Mainz, the Metallurgical Works was primarily based in the Duchy of Karlsbad and Prussian Silesia.
    The secrecy surrounding the Office of Wartime Statistics was high since even the relatively overt activities of liaising between the Ministry of War, the Ministry of Armaments and War Materials, and other ministries directly involved in the war effort were surely of interest to enemy agents. The Fourth Floor, however, only reported in full to the Minister of War, the Palace, and—since very recently—the Chancellor’s Office. Apart from Fritz, Colonel Kretschke, and a handful of others, the Fourth Floor’s purpose was not known even to the majority of the military leadership, let alone the apes populating the Reichstag. Even most people in the Wiesbaden Group and the Hesse Metallurgical Works—and obviously every single Hottentot and their handlers in the Kongo Project based in the German Kongo—didn’t know the broad idea behind it. Lieutenant General König had instructed every single person from the humblest menial worker and up to the top that if secrecy was breached, it would amount to espionage or even high treason, punishable by a very long prison stay or even death.
    Fritz waited impatiently for the courier, and it took almost an hour before the motorcyclist turned up to lead Fritz outside to his motorbike. He didn’t particularly enjoy riding cramped up in the small sidecar, but be couldn’t let the briefcase out of sight, and protecting it was a matter of duty, and he wouldn’t, couldn’t, leave it with a courier and entrust him with delivering the report. The language he used was vague enough so that it would not be immediately recognizable as an important document, but even a man with a moderate intellect would presumably decipher it to be a military document of some value.
    The War Ministry was a large complex in Tiergarten, and had it not been for the briefcase and its sensitive contents, going over there on foot would have been a refreshing walk through a nice part of the city—quite an appealing sight in the dark. This late—or early—there was not much to see in the city, and few people were outside. It was rare to see the streets this empty, and there was something very attractive about the big city being asleep. The city administration had prevented central Berlin from being perverted with experimental architecture, and the heart of the city was still not a world apart from the city you could find painted in old postcards from the Wilhelm I Era in which Berlin had continued to grow to become the modern metropolitan center of Germany with a heart still dressed in pre-industrialization architecture. To an old-fashioned romantic, Berlin was perhaps Germany’s most picturesque city—in the center at least—if you took its enormous population into account since most picturesque towns and villages weren’t home to millions…
    The motorcycle courier passed the sentries standing guard at the gates and drove into the courtyard right outside the part of the building where Fritz was headed, and the captain was pleasantly surprised when he found out from the duty officer that one of the minister’s assistants was in the private offices of the minister. He could always deliver documents in the delivery safe he was supposed to use, but he preferred to have one of the minister’s