George Washington's Ghost

It had taken some minutes for the German Foreign Minister to read the full text of the hurriedly prepared Königliches Kommando – Royal Command – and when he finished, shamefaced, for his listeners to take in its dreadful ramifications.

It had been the King who summed up the mood in the basement, while outside, the capital of the Reich was burning.

‘Presumably,’ he had inquired, stiffly, ‘somebody will have the courtesy to let my ministers have this in writing at some stage before we depart Berlin, Count Bismarck?’

Everybody was carefully keeping their distance from the King and Queen as the train began to drag slowly out of the Berlin-Spandau terminus.

The windows of the carriage rattled with the concussion of a series of heavy explosions, mercifully at least a mile from the line.

The King looked to his wife.

“Gott im Himmel,” he murmured distractedly. “I never thought I’d think it, let alone say it,” he remarked, ‘but thank God for Project Poseidon!”

Chapter 23

Thursday 4th May

El Palacio de Los Pinos de Oro, México City

In the weeks since Rodrigo de Monroy y Pizarro Altamirano’s last visit to the Presidential Residence, set among the pines of the Chapultepec Woods which was once the site of a pre-Columbian Aztec Palace, the Army of the Republic had placed a ring of steel about it.

Armoured personnel carriers blocked both the roads into the forest surrounding the palace and combat troopers of the elite Assault Corps patrolled the grounds. Every visitor’s pass was checked at the outer and inner gates, and even senior politicians and uniformed officers were required to submit to body searches before they were permitted to proceed further into the compound. Moreover, nobody was admitted at all unless their visit had been pre-authorised by the Office of Presidential Security.

Fortunately, a female member of President Hernando de Soto’s secretariat was waiting at the door of the Residence to usher Rodrigo and his University of Cuernavaca faculty colleague, Arturo Gutiérrez Ortiz Mena, past the final security checks.

“Hello, Don Rodrigo,” the girl, she was barely twenty and the spitting image of her mother at her age, smiled shyly.

Margarita Medina-Mora Icaza, President de Soto’s niece, had been permitted to take a sabbatical half-way through her second year at Cuernavaca, where she had been studying Modern Languages – English and German – to serve as an intern on the Presidential Staff for the duration of the current emergency. The majority of such student applications were rejected, nothing was so important to the Republic than the education of its children and young people but Hernando de Soto had made an exception for his niece, albeit on the solemn condition that the moment the emergency was passed, she would resume her studies.

The young woman’s long jet black hair was restrained in a very sensible pigtail, she wore no make-up, foregoing the bright nail paints most young women of her class carried like badges of honour, and she was respectably dressed like a matron twice her age, covered up from neck to wrists, all the way down to her mid-calves.

She and Rodrigo hugged briefly, very correctly, much as he and his own offspring did in public.

Margarita’s mother had died in childbirth when she was only seven years old and her father, a diplomat presently in Manilla in the Philippines, not really knowing what to do with her and her two elder brothers, had never re-married. The two boys had been packed off to military colleges, Margarita had been handed from family to family until, just after her tenth birthday she had been all but been adopted by the de Soto’s, who had treated her as the daughter they had never had. In no time at all she and Rodrigo’s twins, Rudolfo and Marija, who were her juniors by only a month or so, had become, and still were, inseparable.

Unfortunately, Rudolfo was still not talking to his father at the moment on account of Rodrigo’s implacable refusal to allow him to volunteer for militia service. The boy still had over a year of his degree course at Cuernavaca to complete and until he was twenty-one, he needed his permission to make a mess of his life!

Needless to say, Margarita’s ‘escape’ to Palacio de Los Pinos de Oro – the Palace of the Gold Pines – had rubbed still more salt into Rodrigo’s son’s wounded pride.

“Marija says that Rudi,” Margarita said hesitantly, speaking lowly as she led her charges deeper into the Residence, “isn’t quite as angry, anymore, Uncle.”

“Ah… That’s good to know, my dear.”

Margarita took the two men into an ante-chamber occupied by an older woman, the President’s Appointment Secretary, a formidable lady whom he had brought with him from the University two years ago.