Jackdaws (2 page)

Michel had been unable to resolve
the contradiction between the MI6 estimate and Antoinette's guess. He lived in
Reims, and neither he nor any of his group was familiar with Sainte-Cécile.
There had been no time for further reconnaissance. If the Resistance were
outnumbered, Flick thought with dread, they were not likely to prevail against
disciplined German troops.

She looked around the square,
picking out the people she knew, apparently innocent strollers who were in fact
waiting to kill or be killed. Outside the haberdashery, studying a bolt of dull
green cloth in the window, stood Geneviève, a tall girl of twenty with a Sten
gun under her light summer coat. The Sten was a submachine gun much favored by
the Resistance because it could be broken into three parts and carried in a
small bag. Geneviève might well be the girl Michel had his eye on, but all the
same Flick felt a shudder of horror at the thought that she might be mowed down
by gunfire in a few seconds' time. Crossing the cobbled square, heading for the
church, was Bertrand, even younger at seventeen, a blond boy with an eager face
and a .45-caliber Colt automatic hidden in a folded newspaper under his arm. The
Allies had dropped thousands of Colts by parachute. Flick had at first
forbidden Bertrand from the team because of his age, but he had pleaded to be
included, and she had needed every available man, so she had given in. She
hoped his youthful bravado would survive once the shooting started. Loitering
on the church porch, apparently finishing his cigarette before going in, was
Albert, whose wife had given birth to their first child this morning, a girl.
Albert had an extra reason to stay alive today. He carried a cloth bag that
looked full of potatoes, but they were No.36 Mark I Mills hand grenades.

The scene in the square looked
normal but for one element. Beside the church was parked an enormous, powerful
sports car. It was a French-built Hispano Suiza type 68 with a V12 aeroengine,
one of the fastest cars in the world. It had a tall, arrogant-looking silver
radiator topped by the flying-stork mascot, and it was painted sky blue.

It had arrived half an hour ago. The
driver, a handsome man of about forty, was wearing an elegant civilian suit,
but he had to be a German officer—no one else would have the nerve to flaunt
such a car. His companion, a tall, striking redhead in a green silk dress and
high-heeled suede shoes, was too perfectly chic to be anything but French. The
man had set up a camera on a tripod and was taking photographs of the château.
The woman wore a defiant look, as if she knew that the shabby townspeople who
stared at her on their way to church were calling her whore in their minds.

A few minutes ago, the man had
scared Flick by asking her to take a picture of him and his lady friend against
the background of the château. He had spoken courteously, with an engaging
smile, and only the trace of a German accent. The distraction at a crucial
moment was absolutely maddening, but Flick had felt it might have caused
trouble to refuse, especially as she was pretending to be a local resident who
had nothing better to do than lounge around at a pavement café. So she had
responded as most French people would have in the circumstances: she had put on
an expression of cold indifference and complied with the German's request.

It had been a farcically frightening
moment: the British secret agent standing behind the camera; the German officer
and his tart smiling at her, and the church bell tolling the seconds until the
explosion. Then the officer had thanked her and offered to buy her a drink. She
had refused very firmly: no French girl could drink with a German unless she
was prepared to be called a whore. He had nodded understandingly, and she had
returned to her husband.

The officer was obviously off-duty
and did not appear to be armed, so he presented no danger, but all the same he
bothered Flick. She puzzled over this feeling in the last few seconds of calm
and finally realized that she did not really believe he was a tourist. There
was a watchful alertness in his manner that was not appropriate for soaking up
the beauty of old architecture. His woman might be exactly what she seemed, but
he was something else.

Before Flick could figure out what,
the bell ceased to toll.

Michel drained his glass, then wiped
his mouth with the back of his hand.

Flick and Michel stood up. Trying to
look casual, they strolled to the café entrance and stood in the doorway,
inconspicuously taking cover.

CHAPTER

TWO

DIETER FRANCK HAD noticed the girl
at the café table the moment he drove into the square. He always noticed
beautiful women. This one struck him as a tiny bundle of sex appeal. She was a
pale blonde with light green eyes, and she probably had German blood—it was not
unusual here in the northeast of France, so close to the border. Her small,
slim body was wrapped in a dress like a sack, but she had added a bright yellow
scarf of cheap cotton, with a flair for style that he thought enchantingly French.
When he spoke to her, he had observed the initial flash of fear usual in a
French person on being approached by one of the German occupiers; but then,
immediately afterwards, he had seen on her pretty face a look of ill-concealed
defiance that had piqued his interest.

She was with an attractive man who
was not very interested in her—probably her husband. Dieter had asked her to
take a photo only because he wanted to talk to her. He had a wife and two
pretty children in Cologne, and he shared his Paris apartment with Stéphane,
but that would not stop him making a play for another girl. Beautiful women
were like the gorgeous French impressionist paintings he collected: having one
did not stop you wanting another.

French women were the most beautiful
in the world. But everything French was beautiful: their bridges, their
boulevards, their furniture, even their china tableware. Dieter loved Paris
nightclubs, champagne, foie gras, and warm baguette. He enjoyed buying shirts
and ties at Charvet, the legendary chemisier opposite the Ritz hotel. He could
happily have lived in Paris forever.

He did not know where he had
acquired such tastes. His father was a professor of music—the one art form of
which the Germans, not the French, were the undisputed masters. But to Dieter,
the dry academic life his father led seemed unbearably dull, and he had
horrified his parents by becoming a policeman, one of the first university
graduates in Germany so to do. By 1939, he was head of the criminal
intelligence department of the Cologne police. In May 1940, when General Heinz
Gudenan's panzer tanks crossed the river Meuse at Sedan and swept triumphantly
through France to the English Channel in a week, Dieter impulsively applied for
a commission in the army. Because of his police experience, he was given an
intelligence posting immediately. He spoke fluent French and adequate English,
so he was put to work interrogating captured prisoners. He had a talent for the
work, and it gave him profound satisfaction to extract information that could
help his side win battles. In North Africa his results had been noticed by
Rommel himself.

He was always willing to use torture
when necessary, but he liked to persuade people by subtler means. That was how
he had got Stéphanie. Poised, sensual, and shrewd, she had been the owner of a
Paris store selling ladies' hats that were devastatingly chic and obscenely
expensive. But she had a Jewish grandmother. She had lost the store and spent
six months in a French prison, and she had been on her way to a camp in Germany
when Dieter rescued her.

He could have raped her. She had
certainly expected that. No one would have raised a protest, let alone punished
him. But instead, he had fed her, given her new clothes, installed her in the
spare bedroom in his apartment, and treated her with gentle affection until one
evening, after a dinner of foie de veau and a bottle of La Tache, he had
seduced her deliciously on the couch in front of a blazing coal fire.

Today, though, she was part of his
camouflage. He was working with Rommel again. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the
"Desert Fox," was now Commander of Army Group B, defending northern
France. German intelligence expected an Allied invasion this summer. Rommel did
not have enough men to guard the hundreds of miles of vulnerable coastline, so
he had adopted a daring strategy of flexible response: his battalions were
miles inland, ready to be swiftly deployed wherever needed.

The British knew this—they had
intelligence, too. Their counterplan was to slow Rommel's response by
disrupting his communications. Night and day, British and American bombers
pounded roads and railways, bridges and tunnels, stations and marshaling yards.
And the Resistance blew up power stations and factories, derailed trains, cut
telephone lines, and sent teenage girls to pour grit into the oil reservoirs of
trucks and tanks.

Dieter's brief was to identify key
communications targets and assess the ability of the Resistance to attack them.
In the last few months, from his base in Paris, he had ranged all over northern
France, barking at sleepy sentries and putting the fear of God into lazy
captains, tightening up security at railway signal boxes, train sheds, vehicle
parks, and airfield control towers. Today he was paying a surprise visit to a
telephone exchange of enormous strategic importance. Through this building
passed all telephone traffic from the High Command in Berlin to German forces
in northern France. That included teleprinter messages, the means by which most
orders were sent nowadays. If the exchange was destroyed, German communications
would be crippled.

The Allies obviously knew that and
had tried to bomb the place, with limited success. It was the perfect candidate
for a Resistance attack. Yet security was infuriatingly lax, by Dieter's
standards. That was probably due to the influence of the Gestapo, who had a
post in the same building. The
Geheime Staatspolizei
was the state security
service, and men were often promoted by reason of loyalty to Hitler and
enthusiasm for Fascism rather than because of their brains or ability. Dieter
had been here for half an hour, taking photographs, his anger mounting as the
men responsible for guarding the place continued to ignore him.

However, as the church bell stopped
ringing, a Gestapo officer in major's uniform came strutting through the tall
iron gates of the château and headed straight for Dieter. In bad French he
shouted, "Give me that camera!"

Dieter turned away, pretending not
to hear.

"It is forbidden to take
photographs of the château, imbecile!" the man yelled. "Can't you see
this is a military installation?"

Dieter turned to him and replied
quietly in German, "You took a damn long time to notice me."

The man was taken aback. People in
civilian clothing were usually frightened of the Gestapo. "What are you
talking about?" he said less aggressively.

Dieter checked his watch. "I've
been here for thirty-two minutes. I could have taken a dozen photographs and
driven away long ago. Are you in charge of security?"

"Who are you?"

"Major Dieter Franck, from
Field Marshal Rommel's personal staff."

"Franck!" said the man.
"I remember you."

Dieter looked harder at him.
"My God," he said as recognition dawned. "Willi Weber."

"
Sturmbannführer
Weber, at your
service." Like most senior Gestapo men, Weber held an SS rank, which he
felt was more prestigious than his ordinary police rank.

"Well, I'm damned," Dieter
said. No wonder security was slack.

Weber and Dieter had been young
policemen together in Cologne in the twenties. Dieter had been a high flyer,
Weber a failure. Weber resented Dieter's success and attributed it to his
privileged background. (Dieter's background was not extraordinarily privileged,
but it seemed so to Weber, the son of a stevedore.)

In the end, Weber had been fired.
The details began to come back to Dieter: there had been a road accident, a
crowd had gathered, Weber had panicked and fired his weapon, and a
rubbernecking bystander had been killed.

Dieter had not seen the man for
fifteen years, but he could guess the course of Weber's career: he had joined
the Nazi party, become a volunteer organizer, applied for a job with the
Gestapo citing his police training, and risen swiftly in that community of
embittered second-raters.

Weber said, "What are you doing
here?"

"Checking your security, on
behalf of the Field Marshal."

Weber bristled. "Our security
is good."

"Good enough for a sausage
factory. Look around you." Dieter waved a hand, indicating the town
square. "What if these people belonged to the Resistance? They could pick
off your guards in a few seconds." He pointed to a tall girl wearing a
light summer coat over her dress. "What if she had a gun under her coat?
What if.."

He stopped.

This was not just a fantasy he was
weaving to illustrate a point, he realized. His unconscious mind had seen the
people in the square deploying in battle formation. The tiny blonde and her
husband had taken cover in the bar. The two men in the church doorway had moved
behind pillars. The tall girl in the summer coat, who had been staring into a
shop window until a moment ago, was now standing in the shadow of Dieter's car.
As Dieter looked, her coat flapped open, and to his astonishment he saw that
his imagination had been prophetic: under the coat she had a submachine gun
with a skeleton-frame butt, exactly the type favored by the Resistance.
"My God!" he said.

He reached inside his suit jacket
and remembered he was not carrying a gun.

Where was Stéphanie? He looked
around, momentarily shocked into a state close to panic, but she was standing
behind him, waiting patiently for him to finish his conversation with Weber.
"Get down!" he yelled.