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“Who sent him?”

“HR. It’s a new program they just started for engineers. No cellphones, no technology of any kind. It’s supposed to prevent burnout.”

“How long will he be gone?”

“No idea.”

Kate glanced toward his desk. It seemed odd that he’d leave food out if he was leaving for an extended period of time, though there were probably enough preservatives in that junk to last a millennium. “I just saw him last week. Weird he didn’t mention he was leaving.”

“I didn’t know, either. Nobody did. Like I said, it’s a brand-new program.”

“Is Patrick the first?”

“Yep. Patrick’s the guinea pig. Hopefully, he’ll get bitten by a snake or something and they’ll nix the whole program before I have to go. Life without tech. What’s the point? Know what I mean?”

“Not yet,” she said, glancing one more time at the empty desk chair. “But I’m learning.”

Chapter 14

On Saturday morning, Kate received a text message from Bass’s assistant.Meet me for tea, it read.

Kate texted back:Where?

Moments later, Sean’s response:At the Reichstag.

Kate knew what was coming next, and she laughed as the bubble popped up on her screen:With Adolf Hitler.

Ordinarily, there was nothing funny about Hitler, unless you were a producer named Mel Brooks and it happened to be springtime in Germany. But Sean’s text warmed her heart.

Kate had delivered more than the first ten pages by the Friday deadline. She’d fleshed out the entire first act with new material on the life and career of IBM’s founder and CEO, Thomas J. Watson, Sr. In June 1937, Watson became president of the International Chamber of Commerce, urging “world peace through world trade.” His inauguration was at the annual ICC banquet, held at Friedrich Wilhelm III’s romantic eighteenth-century castle outside Berlin, organized by chief Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels in what would go down as the most elaborate party in the history of the Third Reich. That same evening, Watson became the first American to receive the Merit Cross of the German Eagle with Star, the highest honor the Reich had, up until that point, ever bestowed on a non-German, surpassed only by Hitler’s subsequent decoration of Henry Ford, a known anti-Semite. At a separate, more intimate meeting, Watson took tea with Hitler at the Reichstag. No one knows for sure what they said to one another. They may have talked about the weather. Or, Watson might have mentioned his plan to double the output of his German subsidiary, increasingHollerith card production to 74 million per month by the end of 1937, enough to accommodate the Führer’s need to process an emerging mountain of census data and other personal information that would soon expand to include the populations of Austria, the Sudetenland, and Memelland.

Kate had worried how her dramatization of tea at the Reichstag might be received. Sean’s text was the reaction she’d hoped for.

Coffee at 11?she texted back, adding a link to her favorite spot. Sean quickly accepted.

When John Adams, second president of the United States and first resident of the White House, denounced tea as “impatriotic,” it may not have been his intention, but he nonetheless established the nation’s capital as a city of coffee lovers. Kate’s go-to coffee bar was just a few blocks from the White House, Swing’s Coffee Roasters, which had been serving Washingtonians for over a century. The mosaic-tiled floors were so beautiful that, on her first visit, Kate had almost felt guilty stepping on them. Her usual seat at the black quartz counter offered prime people watching, as the aroma of freshly ground coffee wafted from a pair of shiny, dependable espresso machines on the other side. That morning, however, Kate didn’t go inside. The unexpected sight of the silver-haired gentleman seated at an outside table stopped her in her tracks.

“Irving? I thought I was meeting Sean here.”

“He’s doing what he does best. Fetching coffee.”

Kate settled into the empty chair, not wanting to sound impertinent, but she had to ask. “Aren’t you supposed to be in rehab?”

“Eh. Rehab, schmeehab.”

Sean joined them with three coffees and put one in front of Kate. “Mesco Blend, one Splenda, a little cream,” he said.

“How’d you know?”

“The barista told me. Apparently, you’re quite the creature of habit.”

Bass pulled a hard copy of Kate’s script from his leather satchel. “Sean sent me your pages. I was up all night with them.”

She glanced at Sean, who had promised not to show them to anyone, unless...

“You passed the first-ten-pages test,” Sean explained.

“You work fast,” said Bass. “I like that.”

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