Mr Einstein's Secretary

Mr Einstein's Secretary
Released	17 October 2023
Published	Pan Macmillan
Page no.	464
ISBN	9781761260766

Mr Einstein's Secretary is the nineteenth novel written by Matthew Reilly. The story follows protagonist Hanna Fischer over the course of 40 years as she navigates the world of science and espionage.

Synopsis

A SECRETARY LIKE NO OTHER IN AN EPIC SPANNING 40 YEARS

All Hanna Fischer ever wanted to do was to study physics under the great Albert Einstein.

But when, as a teenager in 1919, her life is suddenly turned upside-down, she is catapulted into a new and extraordinary life - as a scientist, a secretary, a sister and a spy.

From racist gangs in Berlin to gangsters in New York City, Nazis in the 1930s and Hitler's inner circle during the Second World War, Hanna will encounter some of history's greatest minds and most terrible moments, all while desperately trying to stay alive.

She is a most unique secretary and she will work for many bosses - from shrewd businessmen to vile Nazis, to the greatest boss of them all, Mr Albert Einstein...

Spanning forty years, this is the thrilling tale of a young woman propelled through history's most dangerous times. But read it carefully, because all may not be as it seems...

Summary

January 20, 1948: At the Princeton Public Cemetery, the funeral of Hanna Fischer is underway... with the decedent watching the affair as only four people turn up, including the renowned theoretical physicist Albert Einstein. As Einstein begins the eulogy, Hanna thinks to herself that, despite his having known her since she was a child, he doesn't know everything that she went through in life, particularly in her role as a spy...

1912: At her home in Berlin, the 10-year-old Hanna receives birthday gifts from both her father Manfred and her neighbour, Einstein himself, grants Hanna a mobile of the solar system, which the young girl is enamored by. Hanna and her father converse with Einstein about how women such as Marie Curie prove that women are just as smart as men, and on the physicists recent theory of relativity. Since Hanna's understanding and questioning of the complex theory proves her to be quite intelligent, Einstein suggests that her father enroll her in a science Gymnasium as soon as possible. By comparison, her twin sister Norma - or Ooma - was institutionalised a few years earlier for abrupt mood swings and violent behaviour, including vivisecting a live rat. Meanwhile her mother, Sandra Rose Martin, an American lecturer in physics, was murdered a couple of year previously alongside some of her Jewish students by an anti-seminist.

November 1919: By the time Hanna turned 17, the recent loss in the War has left Germany destitute and wrongly pointing the blame at both the Jewish community and those who penned the armistice. However, while Manfred was at times becoming distant, Hanna had begun attending the Gymnasium and began courting with Lukas Hofstedter, and Ooma had been released back into their father's care for nearly a year. When Einstein's theory of relativity was proven by a solar eclipse, making him recognised as the greatest physicist in the world, he took a moment to converse with Hanna, encouraging her with her quest for knowledge while also imploring Hanna to maintain her joy. A few days after this conversation, Ooma's behaviour takes a dark turn as she sneers at Hanna's happiness upon reading her diary before later cutting her own wrist, resulting in her being institutionalised once more.

The following day, Hanna and Manfred visit the latter's distasteful sister Olga and her family, but quickly leave when Olga and her eldest daughter ignorantly blame Germany's recent troubles on the Jews, and Manfred for helping pen the treaty. As they head home, Manfred explains the misconceptions for which the Jews are persecuted and his reasoning to avoid an invasion of Germany, which he believes was the right choice. Hanna takes a detour to buy some food, but upon turning into her street, she is aghast to see her apartment building burning and her father hung by a furious crowd. Einstein brings her into his home before the thugs spot her, and reveals that Manfred had confided that he had been receiving death threats, and has made arrangements to ensure Hanna's safety. Einstein escorts the distraught Hanna to Hamburg, whereupon she boards a ship heading to America, where she is to meet her maternal aunt, Penny Carlson, in Brooklyn.

December 1919 to April 1920: Upon her arrival in New York, Hanna's aunt and uncle decide to send her to the Graham-Coulson Secretarial School for Ladies so that she can take out a loan and begin learning secretarial work for future employment. Once there, she quickly befriends her roommate, Fanny O'Toole, and begins learning etiquette and secretarial skills needed for future work, as the headmistress, Katherine Graham-Coulson, strives to ensure her graduates will be the best secretaries in the nation. After initially accompanying some of her fellow students, led by the ambitious Stella Lang, to bars and nightclubs, Hanna later continues to do so at speakeasies once Prohibition comes into play. It is in one such place - Pearl's - that she comes into the periphery of the preeminent gangster Douglas "Baby Face" Mancino, who runs the bootlegging track, Clay Bentley Jr, who runs a trucking and shipping company with his father Clay Bentley Sr, and also meets Dan Kessler, an undercover agent from the U.S. Treasury Department.

Towards the end of the course a couple of months later, Clay Jr lets slip to Stella and Hanna that Mancino is planning to kill several other bootleggers at a meeting to take over their businesses. Knowing that Kessler is going to be at the warehouse, and having taken a liking to him, Hanna hurries there and warns the agent of the plot, narrowly saving him from being caught in the ensuing execution. A few days later, during the final exam, Hanna and Stella are the top contenders for the first-place spot that will get them a job as Clay Sr's secretary, and a single mistake on the latter's part results in Hanna earning the position.

April 1921: Though Bentley Sr's full work schedule forced Hanna has to match his pace, she has earned his respect with both her intellect and work ethic. Meanwhile his son - having taken Stella on as his secretary - has divorced his wife and married her, and plays the options on the stock market. Hanna soon learns that Einstein is coming to America to do a speaking tour, and soon after his arrival, Bentley Sr takes Hanna along with him to a dinner at the White House where Einstein is to speak. During the event, Hanna and Einstein reunite, with the physicist requesting Bentley's permission to allow Hanna to accompany him as an extra assistant throughout his tour, which Bentley agrees to. Though the work ends up being harder, Hanna enjoys it, and soon bids Einstein farewell as he returns to Germany.

December 1923: When Hanna accompanies Bentley Sr to a pre-Christmas Church event, she spots Kessler observing Mancino nearby and reconnects with him, agreeing to have dinner with the Special Agent on Christmas Eve. During their meal, however, Mancino and his thugs approach them, revealing that his sources in the NYPD have outed Kessler's plans to take him down later in the week. Though he plans to kill them both, his lieutenant, "Lucky" Luciano, launches a hostile takeover to try to claim Mancino's operation, affording the pair the chance to flee. Hanna turns back when she sees Lucky's men trying to abduct Mancino's son and helps the boy escape with her and Kessler. They return Doug to him the next morning, and the gangster decides to forget about killing them as repayment; since his planned raid is blown and both Mancino and Lucky are closing down operations for a while, Kessler leaves for Washington, D.C. for a new assignment.

April 1924: Having saved enough money, Hanna takes leave to return to Berlin, hoping to reconnect with Lukas. Upon meeting him, however, Hanna finds that Lukas is already married, claiming to be married to Hanna, leading her to realise that Ooma has been impersonating her. Thinking the real Hanna to be Ooma, Lukas has security forcibly take her to the sanitarium, where she is quickly visited by Ooma herself. Released shortly after their father's murder, Ooma quickly assumed her twin's identity, using Hanna's intact diary to successfully impersonate her and seduce Lukas. Having also intercepted the letters Hanna wrote to Lukas from America, Ooma sneers at her twin's mundane life and leaves her to take her place at the sanitarium.

Hanna is quickly able to escape, however, using a hidden door in the church that Ooma had once told her about. Now only possessing her return ticket to America and being penniless due to the sanitarium staff taking her money, Hanna goes to Einstein for help. Einstein successfully verifies Hanna's identity by pointing out the scars from when Ooma cut her wrist. Ooma flees before she can be taken back to the sanitarium, and Lukas, left in debt due to her various loans, cannot bear to even look at Hanna and orders her to leave him alone. Heartbroken, Hanna takes Einstein's advice and returns to New York, where she has better prospects than in the increasingly tense Germany.

October 1927: A few years later, Einstein again requests that Hanna accompany him as a secretary to the Solvay Conference in Belgium to discuss atomic sciences. There, Einstein and several other brilliant minds undertake several debates before a secret meeting on the concerns of the application of atom-splitting technology in weapons. Once this meeting ends, leaving Einstein, Paul Dirac, Arthur Compton, Niels Bohr and their respective assistants, the group discuss aiding Bohr's assistant, the brilliant young Jewish Russian Alexei Zilberman, in fleeing to America to avoid him being used by the brutish Soviet regime. Kessler enters the room, having been recruited into the Office of Strategic Services, and reveals his agency's plan to aid Alexei's escape, which involves having Hanna accompany him to a ship bound for America. Before they leave, Marie Curie suggests to Hanna that she obtain her doctorate. En-route to Antwerp, however, following a brief moment away from Alexei, Hanna returns to find the young man dead, assassinated by "Brigitte Weber", a Russian assassin who had posed as one of Werner Heisenberg's assistants. Kessler is relieved Hanna is safe though, and sends her on her way.

Late 1927 to October 1929: Upon her return to New York, Hanna learned that Clay Jr had outed his father from Bentley & Sons with a boardroom takeover, and was thus now Jr's assistant. While Jr's use of economics theories and naked options in the stock market has made the company more profitable, his carefree lifestyle makes Hanna's work more chaotic than it was under Bentley Sr. Still, by August of 1929, she has finally graduated from night school and achieved her high school diploma, with plans to follow Curie's advice to qualify for a doctorate. A couple of months later, however, the stock market crashes, beginning the Great Depression.

Hanna goes in search of Clay Jr when he doesn't appear one morning, and upon arriving at his mansion finds him, Stella and their son at the mercy of Mancino and his men, the gangster having followed Clay Jr's advice on investment and now lost most of his money. Before the family are drowned, Hanna steps in and requests to use her outstanding debt for saving Mancino's son to have him spare their lives. Mancino only agrees to spare Stella and Charlie in exchange for their silence, having Clay Jr dropped off the pier with concrete shoes. Hanna helps Stella find work for Fanny's new investment company (Fanny having sold all of her holdings before the market crash), but with the Shipping and Trucking company being liquidated to cover Clay Jr's debts, Hanna is out of work. Since he had sold his stock upon being kicked out of the company, Bentley Sr is fine, and uses his connections to help Hanna find a new job, as Einstein's secretary.

1933: A few years after coming on as one of Einstein's secretaries, during which she often travels with the physicist to other nations for his talks, Hanna successfully prevents two German assassins from killing Einstein in New Jersey. However, she is captured by the police alongside the assassins, and despite her attempts to tell them to call Einstein or Kessler to have them confirm her story, the officers believe Hanna to be the assassin. Army Major Gil Willis proceeds to question her over the next day-and-a-half, until Einstein and Kessler show up verifying her story and get Hanna released.

Soon after, Hanna is sent ahead of Einstein to Germany to prepare for his return home, only for the Nazi Party to take power, and as Einstein had spoken out against the regime, he is now a target for assassination and thus unable to return to his home nation.

While tending to his office at the University of Berlin, Hanna overhears Reinhard Heydrich, the Head of the Gestapo, ordering Heisenberg and some men to gather Einstein's notes, and so rushes to his second home in Caputh to retrieve Einstein's most important documents from their hiding place before they arrive. Hanna meets with Kessler at an American safehouse in Berlin, the U.S. agent having been ordered there to observe the Nazis. Since she has no other prospects now, Kessler suggests she work as a spy for the U.S., as he can use his undercover connections to get her a position as a secretary to Albert Speers, a prospective architect in the Nazi Party and a potential close aide to Adolf Hitler. Hearing his argument, Hanna agrees.

September 1934: For over a year, Hanna has successfully infiltrated the Nazis' operations and been passing information garnered from Speer and Hitler on to Kessler. Hanna eventually learns that her sister has passed away in prison, but when she goes to collect Ooma's personal effects, she sees that the body in the morgue isn't her twin's. While horrified to realise Ooma must have escaped during the sanitarium's conversion into a prison, she elects not to warn the prison director.

1936: Shortly after reporting to Kessler on Speers' plans for the upcoming Olympic Games, Hanna is present at a meeting where several high-ranking Nazis listen to new weapons proposals. The first, given by Heisenberg, is the atomic weapon, but since Heisenberg himself dismisses its possibility, Hitler orders him away. The next proposal, from Wernher von Braun, proposes a rocket that can be launched from Germany to strike at other nations, which gets Hitler's attention. To ensure the Soviets won't be able to build their own missiles, Heydrich suggests assassinating the Russian rocket scientists Igor and Anatoly Kurtzov at the end of the Games, which the brothers will be participating in.

Since she is aware Kessler wants to help them defect to the U.S., Hanna proposes an idea to the agent to grab the brothers at the end of the Olympics before disguised German agents can kill them. But when the Games wind down and the floodlights are put out, Hanna sees that the Germans are in fact using the very same plan they had intended to use to spirit the Russian scientists away before Kessler can reach them. But as she watches the Germans take the brothers into the maintenance passageway, Hanna witnesses the lot of them being cut down by a third party, the Russian assassin known to Hanna as Brigette. When Hanna meets with Dan later, he identifies the assassin as Svetlana Sarkovsky, and surmises that the Soviets knew of the brothers' desire to defect and the Germans' plans by way of an inside agent in the Nazi Party.

1938: After visiting Mauthausen concentration camp - where Speer orders the construction of a weapons-and-aircraft-building facility - Speer and Hanna return to Berlin, where Speer is to debrief a captured Russian spy being held at Spandau, who attempted to steal plans for von Braun's rockets; upon seeing her, Hanna recognises the spy as Svetlana. While Speer and the Gestapo interrogate Svetlana, Hanna wanders around and sees that a restrained Ooma is a prisoner. Speer emerges from the interrogation room and informs Hanna that Svetlana is to be exchanged for two German spies being held in Stalingrad. Before the assassin leaves, she calls out that she recognised the scent of Hanna's perfume - as she had at the Games - and will be keeping an eye out for her in the future. Hanna later visits Ooma, who shows no remorse for any of her actions yet pleads for Hanna to help her look pretty again (her hair having been shaved off), though Hanna simply leaves.

January 1942: A couple of years after war has broken out across Europe, Hanna is abruptly taken into custody and brought to the Reich Main Security Office alongside Gertrude Schneider, the secretary and mistress of Martin Bormann, under suspicion of being spies. A secret police interrogator soon arrives alongside Heydrich, who feigns charm as he informs the two women that he needs to question them... Eventually though, Heydrich releases Hanna, as Gertrude has confessed to being the spy they were looking for, as she was seduced by a female Russian agent and subsequently blackmailed into revealing secrets from Bormann's office.

1944: Still serving as Speer's secretary, Hanna often accompanies him to various prison camps, rocket-building facilities, and Heisenberg's atomic reactor. During one of their meetings, Kessler informs Hanna that the Allies have concluded that they will ultimately emerge victorious in the War, and his department wants to capture Germany's best scientists before the Soviets. However, Hanna is surprised one morning when Bormann uses his superior rank to have her become his new secretary.

January to April, 1945: Hanna finds Bormann boorish and soon discerns his plans to desert. Kessler tells Hanna that they are being ordered to leave Berlin, due to the risk of bombings before the Allies arrive, but first has some final tasks to see to before they leave. Hanna thus accompanies Bormann to Spandau as he oversees its preparation for evacuation. Ooma sees Hanna and pleads for her to do something to save her before she is transferred to Mauthausen to work as slave labour. Hanna decides to falsify transfer papers in order to provide Ooma the chance to escape. But as she heads to meet Kessler, their meeting point is hit by a bomb, which injures Kessler and Svetlana, whom he was meeting. Kessler's left leg is badly broken, leaving him unable to escape the city. Unwilling to leave him behind, Hanna drives Kessler and Svetlana to a field hospital for treatment, deciding to try to find another way for them to escape. But when she goes for Ooma the next morning, her twin betrays her, drugging Hanna and shaving her head while donning a wig to take her place once more, leaving Hanna to take Ooma's place in the transfer to Mauthausen.

Upon arrival, Hanna gets herself placed on the work plant constructing the parts for German fighters, as her previous visits to the facility with Speer means she knows there are tunnels that reach the other side of the mountain. A couple of days later, when 500 Russian prisoners make their escape, drawing the guards' attention away, Hanna takes her chance to flee into the tunnels, emerging free on the other side of the mountain. Knowing that Kessler, possessing a fake Gestapo uniform, will be executed by the Russians when they reach Berlin, Hanna makes her way to the mobile command post for the American 6th Army, who soon verify her story and send her to ALSOS headquarters in Paris. After being debriefed by Colonel Boris Pash, Hanna requests to be allowed to return to Berlin to rescue Kessler, but even he doesn't have the authority alone to authorise this. Several weeks pass before Pash is able to call in some favours to get Hanna on a seat in a stolen Luftwaffe aircraft for a final reconnaissance operation before the Allies move in on Berlin.

Meanwhile, Ooma has easily assumed Hanna's undercover identity since Bormann never paid enough attention to Hanna to notice any differences in behaviour. Quickly figuring out Bormann's planned escape, Ooma seduces him so that he will take her with him when he deserts, which they begin doing once the Russians enter Berlin and Hitler has killed himself.

Once the stolen plane lands in Berlin, Hanna rushes to the field hospital, finding Kessler alive despite it being abandoned. As they flee towards the plane, they happen across the fleeing Ooma and Bormann, with their identical appearances throwing Kessler since he knows of Ooma's existence. Ooma claims to be the real Hanna and tells Kessler to shoot "Ooma", and Kessler points his gun at Hanna since she has shaven hair, plus similar scars on her wrist which Ooma gave to Hanna when she betrayed her. Fortunately, he chooses to ask a question only Hanna knows the answer to (the travel duration of travelling at the speed of light), which she had mentioned to Kessler back when they had dinner in New York. Hanna answers correctly, and so Kessler shoots Ooma dead. As the stolen plane leaves without them, they decide to follow Bormann to his escape plane, only to be captured by squads of Russian paratroopers.

May 4, 1945: After being held for a few days, eventually a pair of Russian colonels arrive before Hanna and Kessler, one of whom is Svetlana (who had escaped from the field hospital one morning). Having heard of Hanna's exploits from Kessler during their time in the field hospital, and grateful to her for saving her life, Svetlana informs the pair that she will be turning them over to the Americans in exchange for two Russian agents.

1945 to 1947: Over the next couple of years as the War winds down, Hanna spends much of her time in Paris with Kessler and Pash, helping the Allies in identifying the various secret installations she had visited. At one point she goes to visit Speer, who has not been executed, but instead sentenced to imprisonment at Spandau, who is flummoxed by the idea that his own secretary had duped him for years. By October of 1947, Pash grants Hanna and Kessler permission to return home to America. On the ship heading across the Atlantic, Hanna happens to meet Mancino's son, Doug Jr, who had been serving in the war since 1941, and he is astounded to be reunited with the woman who both saved his life and stood up to his father (who has since died in prison). Later, Hanna muses to Kessler that she once again has no prospects once she gets back to New York, and Kessler suggests he can get her a new identity, which she decides to think about.

When the ship docks, Hanna sees Einstein, Fanny and her husband waving to her. Einstein apologises for sending her to Germany without him back in 1933, and Fanny shocks Hanna by revealing that the money Hanna had invested with her years earlier has accumulated interest and left her nearly $2 million in a trust fund.

January 20, 1948: A couple of months later, Hanna has decided to take Kessler's suggestion and faked her death, and thus watches her own funeral from a nearby belltower. As Einstein begins the eulogy, Hanna is surprised when numerous people suddenly show up for the funeral, including some of Einstein's students, whom he told Hanna's exploits to; Katherine and some students from the Graham-Coulson Secretarial School; Bentley Sr and his new wife; and Stella, her new husband and Charlie. Einstein restarts his eulogy, in which he commends Hanna for her actions during the War, and for what she has done for many people with her greatest talent: enabling others to live out their potential. As the funeral ends, Fanny nods to Hanna; she, Raymond and Einstein in fact know that she faked her death.

Hanna soon marries Kessler as they begin a new life together, with Hanna working under her mother's name in the physics department at Princeton University as she works with Einstein, finally the physicist that she had always wanted to be.

Characters

Main Characters

• Hanna Fischer
• Dr Albert Einstein
• Special Agent Daniel "Dan" Kessler
• Norma "Ooma" Fischer
• Franny Wozniak, née O'Toole
• Stella Clayton, née Lang

Pre-War Berlin

• Manfred Fischer
• Dr Sandra Fischer, née Rose Martin
• Olga Fischer
• Gretel Fischer
• Gunther Groethe
• Lukas Hofstedter
• Elsa Einstein

New York

• Douglas "Baby Face" Mancino
• Clay Bentley Jr
• Clay Bentley Sr
• Charles "Lucky" Luciano
• Rajmund "Raymond" Wozniak
• Henrietta Henderson
• Clayton "Charlie" Bentley III
• Carol Mancino
• Douglas Mancino Jr

Solvay Conference Attendees

• Dr Arthur Compton
• Marie Curie
• Paul Dirac
• Niels Bohr
• Alexei Zilberman
• Werner Heisenberg
• Kurt

Nazi Regime

• Adolf Hitler
• Albert Speers
• Martin Bormann
• Reinhard Heydrich
• Wernher von Braun
• Gertrude Schneider
• Dr Ernst Rennicker

Others

• Helen Dukas
• Major Gil Willis
• Penny Carlson
• Michael Carlson
• Katherine Graham-Coulson
• Bomback
• Carling
• Thelma
• Lorna
• Beatrice
• John Pierpont "J.P." Morgan
• Art Dunkley
• Svetlana Sarkovsky / "Brigitte Weber"
• Igor Kurtzov
• Anatoly Kurtzov
• Colonel Boris Pash
• Dorothy Summers
• Levi Hoffman

Locations

• United States of America
  • New York State
    • New York City
      • Graham-Coulson Secretarial School for Ladies
      • "Pearl's"
      • Bentley & Sons Trucking and Shipping
    • Washington, D.C.
      • The White House
• Germany
  • Berlin
• France
  • Paris

Gallery

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Trivia

• This is the fifth of Reilly's novels to feature a main female protagonist, following Bess in The Tournament, CJ Cameron in The Great Zoo of China, Skye Rogers in The Secret Runners of New York, and Cassie Cassowitz in Cobalt Blue.

External Links

• https://www.panmacmillan.com.au/9781761260766/mr-einsteins-secretary/?fbclid=IwAR2aIM37WiBvQLo2xcWxWSF0NmBuZ25v25l6EguDg2akjBcQbdkPJrTs1A4
• 1. https://fb.watch/kHK5s7cxgN/