Dieter held up the leatherbound book. “First edition, 1832.”
Flicka really knew how to pick out a Christmas present.
The professor’s jaw had dropped. Mauve lipstick smeared her teeth.“Can I see that?”
Dieter had always felt an affinity with Carl von Clausewitz. They had both entered the military very young and as grunts. Granted, Clausewitz had been twelve and Dieter, six months shy of eighteen. Clausewitz had started as a foot soldier and risen to be a field marshal and a master tactician.
Dieter had been a raw recruit and now wanted to form a security agency.
No one called such an organization amercenary armythese days.
Besides, there were laws that prevented Swiss citizens from serving as a mercenary, so Dieter most assuredly wasn’t one.
He was a personal protection bodyguard, which was nothing like a mercenary.
That was his story, and he was sticking to it.
The most amusing thing was that Clausewitz had fought in the Prussian-Saxon army commanded by Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick, against France during the Napoleonic wars. When the Prussian army had disintegrated during the Jena campaign, Clausewitz had been captured along with 25,000 prisoners and the duke himself.
Yes, the man that Dieter Schwarz revered as his military strategy mentor from across the centuries had servedthe Duke of Brunswick.
When Dieter and Wulfram had gotten smashed in the barracks one night, just kidding around, Dieter had pressured Wulf into reciting the whole list of his royal and noble titles a few times. Both of them had laughed harder at each recitation until they were both red-faced and their stomachs ached with laughing too hard, but despite the whiskey, Dieter had memorized it.
Wulfram von Hannover was His Serene Highness, the Hereditary Prince of Hannover and Cumberland, Prince of Great Britain and Ireland, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, and a few lesser titles.
Dieter shook his head over the last one.
The Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg.
Clausewitz had served the Duke of Brunswick.
One night, over apple and pear Obstwasser brandy—and you can get sloshed on that stufffast—Dieter had told Wulfram about Clausewitz and the Duke.
Wulf had nodded. “Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, the Hereditary Prince and Duke of Brunswick, married the British-Hannoverian princess, Princess Augusta Frederica of Great Britain, the older sister of King George the Third, who is my direct ancestor.”
“PrincessAugusta Friederike,huh?”
“The same names occur over and over in my family tree,” Wulf said. “Sometimes they’re even different people.”
“And Clausewitz was an aide-de-camp to Prince Augustus Ferdinand of Prussia.”
Wulfram had been lounging in his chair and nearly slid to the floor as he gazed at the ceiling. “Youngest child of King Frederick William the First of Prussia and his wife Sophia Dorothea of Hannover. She was the daughter of King George the Second of Britain, so she was an aunt of mine, too, somehow.”
“How do you remember all that?” Dieter had asked him.
Wulfram had shrugged. “I have a knack with names. It’s nothing. A trick.”
Dieter had suspected more, even then.
He touched the leather binding of the books, feeling like he was reaching across the centuries to von Clausewitz, a professional combat soldier who had studied at theKriegsakademie,the Prussian War College, eventually becoming a major-general and writing the predominant treatise about the philosophy of war.
Not ahow-tobook, but awhy-to.It was philosophy, not strategy.
And so here they were again, the Duke of Brunswick and the mercenary, the intellectual descendant of Clausewitz.
History was repeating itself.
But Clausewitz never betrayed Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand the way that Dieter was betraying Wulfram, by seducing his sister.
Because he could not resist her.
