It had been truly a game-changer in Ryan Powell's training at the top-secret Quantico Annex for Paranormal Studies – that for a few moments, using an arcane method of self-hypnosis, the innovative young agent had actually transported himself back in time.

The experience had been a variation on a baseball game he'd played in college, and it was realistic enough – the feel of the bat hitting the ball, the slide into second just ahead of the tag - to convince him that he'd actually made the trip back to that New Haven ball field.

Enough so that he was able to persuade his Quantico instructors to allow him leeway in his training schedule, to work on the self-hypnosis he seemed to have a gift for, so that he could get himself more completely into other times and places.

"However," agent-in-charge Lawrence Convey told him, "there has to be value received for the program here."

Convey stipulated that Ryan was to use his newfound talent, if indeed it turned out to be that, to travel to times and places where tyranny ruled, to seek out and get into the minds of those in power.

The ruthless minds in power.

To better know the ways of tomorrow's enemy.

Ryan agreed.

And so it was that some weeks later, while he was taking notes during a lecture on a self-hypnosis technique that could convert certain unique individuals into an animal or insect, and back again, that the penny dropped. The lecturer had quoted extensively from a research paper written in the 1930s by a teacher of occult conjuring at a since-disappeared academy in Germany. There was something about that paper that Ryan saw as a catalyst for possibly fast-tracking his career – in a way that would put him in proximity to the ultimate ruthless mind.

Adolf Hitler's.

~~~~~~

Berlin, 1935. Professor-conjuror Rachel Rykoff, author of that original research paper, was packing the last of the things she wanted to take home from her desk. The country's new party in power, Hitler's anti-Semitic Nazis, had been making moves to take over this alternative-learning academy she taught at. Most of the students and staff were Jewish, herself included. And more than a few had occult powers that the Nazis would construe as threats. It was decided to close the current location and, if possible, relocate to a more clandestine setting.

When Professor Rykoff got to her apartment building a block off the Friedrichstrasse, diverting her eyes from a passing Wehrmacht staff car that had swastika flags flapping on the long front fenders, she saw a young man standing on the steps.

He smiled as she approached. "Professor Rykoff?"

"Yes?"

"My name is Ryan Powell." He spoke with an American accent. "I'm studying paranormal work in the United States, and yours on species conversion very much impressed me." He looked at the large cardboard box she was carrying. "May I help you with that?"

"What is it you want?"

He put a little more into his smile. "I'd like to ask you a professional favor."

She frowned. "What favor is that?"

"I'd like you to turn me into a Black Widow spider."

~~~~~~

It wasn't every day she got a request like that. She asked him up to her apartment and put on water to boil for tea.

"Have you been wanting to be a spider for long?" Her English was better than his German, so that's what they went with.

"Actually, Professor, it's a fairly recent impulse."

"Please, call me Rachel."

"Rachel." He could see that she wasn't much older than he was, late twenties at most. And now that she'd taken that floppy wool cap off and fluffed her hair, quite pretty.

"And your purpose?" she said. "Or are you just bored."

"No, not bored." The kettle on the stove started whistling. "Why don't you make us that tea and I'll explain what I have in mind."

And so he did. They sipped from their cups at the kitchen table as he told her what the future held for Hitler's Germany, specifically for the Jews. Fortunately he didn't have to explain how he knew, time-tripping being an aspect of the occult that she was well aware of (he'd been working on his travel technique and had improved it significantly).

"So basically, you want to bite the Fuhrer and kill him."

"Basically, that's my thinking." This was an internal conflict he'd been wrestling with, the pending mass murder of the Jews and how eliminating the murderer-in-charge, nullifying his deeds, would affect all things that took place thereafter – wars, the arts, relationships – possibly eliminating his own existence if, say, his forebears were never to meet. "Pictures of his office in the Chancellery show a skylight over the conference table. That's where I'll get in and hide until I see my chance to lower myself on him."

"That's quite brave. Never mind a bit crazy."

"I hope to make my way back here so you can turn me back into myself."

She lit a cigarette and stared out the window. It had started getting dark outside, they'd been talking for some time now. Finally she said, "There's one major flaw in your plan."

"What's that?"

"It's the female Black Widow that's got the poisonous fangs. When I do a transformation I can't change the sex."

"Oh." That hadn't occurred to him.

"That's if you want to kill him." She smoked and continued staring at the dusk.

Ryan stayed silent, new thoughts to process.

After another minute Rachel said, "I'll do it."

"What?"

"I'll transform myself and kill him. I'm Jewish. You're talking six-million of us who'd be gone."

"But..."

"No buts. I'll transform myself here and you can drop me outside the Chancellery. I'll make my way in and find him. It's no secret it's also his residence. "

She stubbed out her cigarette, got up and started to undress.

"What are you doing?"

"Clothes aren't meant for spiders."

"You're going tonight?"

"Why not?" When she was naked, she held out her hand. "Come."

She took him into the bedroom, laid down on the bed and watched him. After a few uncertain moments, he started to undress. When he'd taken his clothes off, she held out her arms. He went over to the bed and she drew him down to her.

Things happened quickly in times like this.

~~~~~~

Hitler was seated at the massive conference table under the skylight. Across from him sat the Lieutenant Colonel who would become his chief executioner. Adolf Eichmann.

"You understand what I'm telling you?" Hitler said.

Eichmann nodded. "I do, mein Fuhrer."

"You will be responsible for the seizure of property after the owners' removal."

"And where do we send them, these owners?"

"For now, to whoever will take them."

"And after that?"

"I leave it to you to come up with a solution," Hitler's expression an omen of what that solution would turn out to be.

Watching this from across the room was a tall husky man in a black uniform, twin SS lightning bolts glinting on his collar – Hitler's top bodyguard, Oberleutnant Werner Schenk.

The large man's internal radar had been picking up indications that an attempt would be made on the Fuhrer's life. And it appeared that those indications were valid.

He'd been watching for anything out of the ordinary, and that spider lowering itself from the skylight, that he recognized even from here as a Black Widow, was indeed just that. Especially since it was spinning its silk thread in a way that would land it directly on the Fuhrer's head, to bite with its poisonous fangs.

Schenk pulled on a pair of leather gloves and watched the spider come lower and lower, a descending opportunity to perform gallantly for his Fuhrer. When he saw that the spider was low enough to reach, he leapt past Hitler and grabbed it out of the air. Smashed it against the conference table with the flat of his gloved hand. Pounded it until he was sure it was dead.

Hitler and Eichmann had jumped up from their chairs and stood staring at the flattened insect.

"I'm sorry if I startled you, mein Fuhrer," Schenk said, "but that was a Black Widow. It was going to kill you."

Hitler kept staring. "How do you know it's a Black Widow?"

Schenk pointed. "There is a red hourglass on its abdomen."

Hitler took a cautious step toward the spider's corpse. "I don't see one."

"Permit me, please," Schenk said. "It is no doubt underneath." He reached to the spider and flipped it over.

The three men froze.

Hitler had been right. There was no red hourglass on the Black Widow. Something else was there instead.

On the dead creature's flattened abdomen was a six-pointed Star of David.

~~~~~~

Buenos Aires, 1960. Ryan Powell stood mostly hidden by a tree across the street from the bus stop, watched the commuter bus drive up and a man get off. The bus drove away and the man started walking toward home as he did every evening, stopped when another man came up and asked him something. The first man, Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Holocaust, looked alarmed. With good reason, Ryan knew. The second man was an agent of Israel's feared Mossad.

Eichmann had been living secretly in Argentina since certain high-placed persons had spirited him and fellow Nazi war criminals into the country.

Other Mossad agents now quickly closed in. A car drove up and Eichmann was forced into the back.

Just before he got into the car himself, the agent who'd approached Eichmann cast a look toward Ryan, exchanging nods. Ryan had developed mind-tracking techniques that had aided Mossad in finding Eichmann, via impulses and thought patterns that the young American time-traveler had picked up in 1935 Berlin.

He watched the agent get in the car, watched it drive off knowing that Eichmann would be secretly flown to Israel, to stand trial and be hanged for those six-million Jewish deaths.

Score one for your side, Rachel.