Jackdaws (12 page)

Flick shrugged. To her, the château
was the only target that mattered. Everything else was chicken feed. But what
the hell. "I'll brief him, of course."

Percy gave her a hard look. He
hesitated, then said, "How was Michel—apart from his bullet wound?"

"Fine." Flick was silent
for a moment. Percy stared at her. She could not deceive him, he knew her too
well. At last she sighed and said, "There's a girl."

"I was afraid of that."

"I don't know whether there's
anything left of my marriage," she said bitterly.

"I'm sorry."

"It would help if I could tell
myself that I'd made a sacrifice for a purpose, struck a magnificent blow for
our side, made the invasion more likely to succeed."

"You've done more than most,
over the last two years."

"But there's no second prize in
a war, is there?"

"No."

She stood up. She was grateful for
Percy's fond sympathy, but it was making her maudlin. "I'd better brief the
new radioman."

"Code name Helicopter. He's
waiting in the study. Not the sharpest knife in the box, I'm afraid, but a
brave lad."

This seemed sloppy to Flick.
"If he's not too bright, why send him? He might endanger others."

"As you said earlier—this is
our big chance. If the invasion fails, we've lost Europe. We've got to throw
everything we have at the enemy now, because we won't get another chance."

Flick nodded grimly. He had turned
her own argument against her. But he was right. The only difference was that
the lives being endangered, in this case, included Michel's. "Okay,"
she said. "I'd better get on with it."

"He's eager to see you."

She frowned. "Eager? Why?"

Percy gave a wry smile. "Go and
find out for yourself."

Flick left the drawing room of the
apartment, where Percy had his desk, and went along the corridor. His secretary
was typing in the kitchen, and she directed Flick to another room.

Flick paused outside the door. This
is how it is, she told herself: you pick yourself up and carry on working,
hoping you will eventually forget.

She entered the study, a small room
with a square table and a few mismatched chairs. Helicopter was a fair-skinned
boy of about twenty-two, wearing a tweed suit in a checked pattern of mustard,
orange, and green. You could tell he was English from a distance of a mile.
Fortunately, before he got on the plane he would be kitted out in clothing that
would look inconspicuous in a French town. SOE employed French tailors and dressmakers
who sewed Continental-style clothes for agents (then spent hours making the
clothes look worn and shabby so that they would not attract attention by their
newness). There was nothing they could do about Helicopter's pink complexion
and red-blond hair, except hope that the Gestapo would think he must have some
German blood.

Flick introduced herself, and he
said, "Yes, we've met before, actually."

"I'm sorry, I don't
remember."

"You were at Oxford with my
brother, Charles."

"Charlie Standish—of
course!" Flick remembered another fair boy in tweeds, taller and slimmer
than Helicopter, but probably no cleverer—he had not taken a degree. Charlie
spoke fluent French, she recalled—something they had had in common.

"You came to our house in
Gloucestershire once, actually."

Flick recalled a weekend in a
country house in the thirties, and a family with an amiable English father and
a chic French mother. Charlie had had a kid brother, Brian, an awkward
adolescent in knee shorts, very excited about his new camera. She had talked to
him a bit, and he had developed a little crush on her. "So how is Charlie?
I haven't seen him since we graduated."

"He's dead, actually."
Brian looked suddenly grief-stricken. "Died in forty-one. Killed in the b-b-bloody
desert, actually."

Flick was afraid he would cry. She
took his hand in both of hers and said, "Brian, I'm so terribly
sorry."

"Jolly nice of you." He
swallowed hard. With an effort he brightened. "I've seen you since then,
just once. You gave a lecture to my SOE training group. I didn't get a chance
to speak to you afterwards."

"I hope my talk was
useful."

"You spoke about traitors
within the Resistance and what to do about them. 'It's quite simple,' you said.
'You put the barrel of your pistol to the back of the bastard's head and pull
the trigger twice.' Scared us all to death, actually."

He was looking at her with something
like hero-worship in his eyes, and she began to see what Percy had been hinting
at. It looked as if Brian still had a crush on her. She moved away from him,
sat at the other side of the table, and said, "Well, we'd better begin.
You know you're going to make contact with a Resistance circuit that has been
largely wiped out."

"Yes, I'm to find out how much
of it is left and what it is still capable of doing, if anything."

"It's likely that some members
were captured during the skirmish yesterday and are under Gestapo interrogation
as we speak. So you'll have to be especially careful. Your contact in Reims is
a woman codenamed Bourgeoise. Every day at three in the afternoon she goes to
the crypt of the cathedral to pray. She's generally the only person there but,
in case there are others, she'll be wearing odd shoes, one black and one
brown."

"Easy enough to remember."

"You say to her, 'Pray for me.'
She replies, 'I pray for peace.' That's the code."

He repeated the words.

"She'll take you to her house,
then put you in touch with the head of the Bollinger circuit, whose code name
is Monet." She was talking about her husband, but Brian did not need to
know that. "Don't mention the address or real name of Bourgeoise to other
members of the circuit when you meet them, please: for security reasons, it's
better they don't know." Flick herself had recruited Bourgeoise and set up
the cut-out. Even Michel had not met the woman.

"I understand."

"Is there anything you want to
ask me?"

"I'm sure there are a hundred
things, but I can't think of any."

She stood up and came around the table
to shake his hand. "Well, good luck."

He kept hold of her hand. "I
never forgot that weekend you came to our house," he said. "I expect
I was a frightful bore, but you were very kind to me."

She smiled and said lightly,
"You were a nice kid."

"I fell in love with you,
actually."

She wanted to jerk her hand out of
his and walk away, but he might die tomorrow, and she could not bring herself
to be so cruel. "I'm flattered," she said, trying to maintain an
amiably bantering tone.

It was no good: he was in earnest.
"I was wondering… would you… just for luck, give me a kiss?"

She hesitated. Oh, hell, she
thought. She stood on tiptoe and kissed him lightly on the lips. She let the
kiss linger for a second, then broke away. He looked transfixed by joy. She
patted his cheek softly with her hand. "Stay alive, Brian," she said.
Then she went out.

She returned to Percy's room. He had
a pile of books and a scatter of photographs on his desk. "All done?"
he said.

She nodded. "But he's not
perfect secret agent material, Percy."

Percy shrugged. "He's brave, he
speaks French like a Parisian, and he can shoot straight."

"Two years ago you would have
sent him back to the army."

"True. Now I'm going to send
him off to Sandy." At a large country house in the village of Sandy, near
the Tempsford airstrip, Brian would be dressed in French-style clothes and
given the forged papers he needed to pass through Gestapo checkpoints and buy
food. Percy got up and went to the door. "While I'm seeing him off, have a
look at that rogues' gallery, will you?" He pointed to the photos on the
desk. "Those are all the pictures MI6 has of German officers. If the man
you saw in the square at Sainte-Cécile should happen to be among them, I'd be
interested to know his name." He went out.

Flick picked up one of the books. It
was a graduation yearbook from a military academy, showing postage stamp-sized
photos of a couple of hundred fresh-faced young men. There were a dozen or more
similar books, and several hundred loose photos.

She did not want to spend all night
looking at mug shots, but perhaps she could narrow it down. The man in the
square had seemed about forty. He would have graduated at the age of
twenty-two, roughly, so the year must have been about 1926. None of the books
was that old.

She turned her attention to the
loose photographs. As she flicked through, she recalled all she could of the
man. He was quite tall and well dressed, but that would not show in a photo. He
had thick dark hair, she thought, and although he was clean-shaven, he looked
as if he could grow a heavy beard. She remembered dark eyes, clearly marked
eyebrows, a straight nose, a square chin… quite the matinee idol, in fact.

The loose photos had been taken in
all sorts of different situations. Some were news pictures, showing officers
shaking hands with Hitler, inspecting troops, or looking at tanks and
airplanes. A few seemed to have been snapped by spies. These were the most
candid shots, taken in crowds, from cars, or through windows, showing the
officers shopping, talking to children, hailing a taxi, lighting a pipe.

She scanned the photos as fast as
she could, tossing them to one side. She hesitated over each dark-haired man.
None was as handsome as the one she recalled from the square. She passed over a
photo of a man in police uniform, then went back to it. The uniform had at
first put her off, but on careful study she thought this was him.

She turned the photograph over.
Pasted to the back was a typewritten sheet. She read:

FRANCK, Dieter Wolfgang, sometimes
"Frankie"; born Cologne 3 June 1904; educ. Humboldt University of
Berlin Koln Police Academy; mar. 1930 Waltraud Loewe, 1 son 1 dtr;
Superintendent, Criminal Investigation Department, Cologne police, to 1940;
Major, Intelligence Section, Afrika Korps, to?

A star of Rommel's intelligence
staff this officer is said to be a skilled interrogator and a ruthless
torturer.

Flick shuddered to think she had
been so near to such a dangerous man. An experienced police detective who had
turned his skills to military intelligence was a frightening enemy. The fact
that he had a family in Cologne did not prevent his having a mistress in
France, it seemed.

Percy returned, and she handed him
the picture. "This is the man."

"Dieter Franck!" said
Percy. "We know of him. How interesting. From what you overheard of his
conversation in the square, Rommel seems to have given him some kind of
counter-Resistance job." He made a note on his pad. "I'd better let
MI6 know, as they loaned us their photos."

There was a tap at the door, and
Percy's secretary looked in. "There's someone to see you, Colonel
Thwaite." The girl looked coquettish. The fatherly Percy never inspired
that sort of behavior in secretaries, so Flick guessed the visitor must be an
attractive man. "An American," the girl added. That might explain it,
Flick thought. Americans were the height of glamour, to secretaries at least.

"How did he find this
place?" Percy said. Orchard Court was supposed to be a secret address.

"He went to number sixty-four
Baker Street, and they sent him here."

"They shouldn't do that. He
must be very persuasive. Who is he?"

"Major Chancellor."

Percy looked at Flick. She did not
know anyone called Chancellor. Then she remembered the arrogant major who had
been so rude to her this morning at Monty's headquarters. "Oh, God,
him," she said in disgust. "What does he want?"

"Send him in," said Percy.

Paul Chancellor came in. He walked
with a limp that Flick had not noticed this morning. It probably got worse as
the day wore on. He had a pleasant American face, with a big nose and a jutting
chin. Any chance he might have had of being handsome was spoiled by his left
ear, or what remained of it, which was the lower one-third, mostly lobe. Flick
assumed he had been wounded in action.

Chancellor saluted and said,
"Good evening, Colonel. Good evening, Major."

Percy said, "We don't do a lot
of saluting at SOE, Chancellor. Please sit down. What brings you here?"

Chancellor took a chair and removed
his uniform cap. "I'm glad I caught you both," he said. "I've
spent most of the day thinking about this morning's conversation." He gave
a self-effacing grin. "Part of the time, I have to confess, I was
composing wittily crushing remarks I could have made if only I had thought of
them in time."

Flick could not help smiling. She
had done the same. Chancellor went on. "You hinted, Colonel Thwaite, that
MI6 might not have told the whole truth about the attack on the telephone
exchange, and that played on my mind. The fact that Major Clairet here was so
rude to me did not necessarily mean she was lying about the facts."

Flick had been halfway to forgiving
him, but now she bridled. "Rude? Me?"

Percy said, "Shut up,
Flick."

She closed her mouth.

"So I sent for your report,
Colonel. Of course the request came from Monty's office, not me personally, so
it was brought to our headquarters by a FANY motorcyclist in double-quick
time."

He was a no-nonsense type who knew
how to pull the levers of the military machine, Flick thought. He might be an
arrogant pig, but he would make a useful ally.

"When I read it, I realized the
main reason for defeat was wrong intelligence."

"Supplied by MI6!" Flick
said indignantly.

"Yes, I noticed that,"
Chancellor said with mild sarcasm. "Obviously, MI6 was covering up its own
incompetence. I'm not a career soldier myself, but my father is, so I'm
familiar with the tricks of military bureaucrats."