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The train from Berlin arrived in Munich under the cover of darkness, pulling into the city’s eastern rail station with a whisper of steam and a grating stop. The crowded cars were emptying almost before the stock had come to a complete stop, and Halstead’s heart beat with the fear that he would lose the chase. The object’s mechanical march away from the train platform set him apart from the teeming others, however, and Halstead managed to push his way through the crowd and keep the corporal in sight as they both exited the station. The pursued man immediately headed in the direction of the infantry barracks, which were located on the other side of the city, and the pursuer’s eyes started to dart back and forth along the path, searching for a side street or alley. Across the Orleansplatz and down Orleans Strasse the pair walked, before turning onto Rosenheimer Strasse and across the Ludwig Bridge to the other side of the River Isar. Halstead kept his eyes pegged on the back of the other, slightly shorter, man’s head, even though his senses were fascinated by the sights, sounds, and smells of a city utterly transformed from its twenty-first century version, much like Copenhagen, Berlin and Pasewalk but in more numerous and dramatic fashions. Homeless soldiers, fresh from a disintegrating Imperial Army like their comrades in Berlin, lined the wide Zweibrücken Strasse as they settled in for the bitterly cold night and begged the well-dressed Halstead for a mark or two, a Halstead who pretended to not see them. The only diversion the newcomer permitted himself was the tossing of his stolen medical records, a thin folder filled with papers and two photographs, into one of the many fire-filled drums lining both sides of the street. Once he had destroyed the last vestige of his past, Halstead closed the distance between himself and his objective. Out from beneath his overcoat dropped a U.S. Army issue grenade, a grenade that was kicked towards one side of the street before it started to roll back down the cobblestones that it had already crossed in Halstead’s possession. Halstead quickened his steps further to bring himself up directly behind the man he had spent all day trailing, then rammed a syringe into the target’s right buttock at the moment of the grenade’s explosion. The syringe was emptied into the bloodstream as Halstead’s opponent started to turn around, and the victim had only a moment to stare up at the man in bandages before the poison kicked in and he collapsed to the cobblestones. An immediate chaos, in addition to the general chaos that ruled the country, had come to Zweibrücken Strasse as the result of an explosion amidst a row of homeless veterans lining a sidewalk, and those who saw the officer collapse immediately assumed that he had been wounded by flying shrapnel. |