Jackdaws (48 page)

The rear doors opened. The other
three women threw their suitcases into the van and clambered in after them.
Ruby pulled the doors shut.

Flick put the gearshift into first
and drove away.

"We did it!" Jelly said.
"Thank gordon."

Flick smiled thinly. The hard part
was still ahead.

She drove out of town on the road to
Sainte-Cécile. She watched for police cars and Gestapo Citroëns, but she felt
fairly safe for the moment. The van's lettering announced its legitimacy. And
it was not unusual for a woman to be driving such a vehicle, when so many
Frenchmen were in labor camps in Germany—or had fled to the hills and joined
the Maquis to avoid being sent to the camps.

Soon after midday they reached
Sainte-Cécile. Flick noted the sudden miraculous quiet that always fell on
French streets at the stroke of noon, as the people turned their attention to
the first serious meal of the day. She drove to Antoinette's building. A pair
of tall wooden doors, half-open, led to the inner courtyard. Paul leaped out of
the van and opened the doors, Flick drove in, and Paul closed the doors behind
her. Now the van, with its distinctive legend, could not be seen from the
street.

"Come when I whistle,"
Flick said, and she jumped out. She went to Antoinette's door while the others
waited in the van. Last time she had knocked on this door, eight days and a
lifetime ago, Michel's aunt Antoinette had hesitated to answer, jumpy on
account of the gunfire from the square, but today she came right away. She
opened the door, a slim middle-aged woman in a stylish but faded yellow cotton
dress. She looked blankly at Flick for a moment: Flick still had on the dark
wig. Then recognition dawned. "You!" she said. A look of panic came
over her face. "What do you want?"

Flick whistled to the others, then
pushed Antoinette back inside. "Don't worry," she said. "We're
going to tie you up so the Germans will think we forced you."

"What is this?" Antoinette
said shakily.

"I'll explain in a moment. Are
you alone?"

"Yes."

"Good."

The others came in and Ruby closed
the apartment door. They went into Antoinette's kitchen. A meal was laid out on
the table: black bread, a salad of shredded carrots, a heel of cheese, a wine
bottle without a label. Antoinette said again, "What is this?"

"Sit down," Flick said.
"Finish your lunch."

She sat down, but she said, "I
can't eat."

"It's very simple," Flick
said. "You and your ladies are not going to clean the château tonight… we
are."

She looked baffled. "How will
that happen?"

"We're going to send notes to
each of the women on duty tonight, telling them to come here and see you before
they go to work. When they arrive, we will tie them up. Then we will go to the
château instead of them."

"You can't, you don't have
passes."

"Yes, we do."

"How…?" Antoinette gasped.
"You stole my pass! Last Sunday. I thought I had lost it. I got into the
most terrible trouble with the Germans!"

"I'm sorry you got into
trouble."

"But this will be worse—you're
going to blow the place up!" Antoinette began to moan and rock.
"They'll blame me, you know what they're like, we'll all be
tortured."

Flick gritted her teeth. She knew
that Antoinette could be right. The Gestapo might easily kill the real cleaners
just in case they had had something to do with the deception. "We're going
to do everything we can to make you look innocent," she said. "You
will be our victims, the same as the Germans." All the same, there
remained a risk, Flick knew.

"They won't believe us,"
Antoinette moaned. "We might be killed."

Flick hardened her heart.
"Yes," she said. "That's why it's called a war."

CHAPTER

FORTY-EIGHT

MARLES WAS A small town to the east
of Reims, where the railway line began its long climb into the mountains on its
way to Frankfurt, Stuttgart, and Nuremberg. The tunnel just beyond the town
carried a constant stream of supplies from the home country to the German
forces occupying France. The destruction of the tunnel would starve Rommel of
ammunition.

The town itself looked Bavarian,
with half-timbered houses painted in bright colors. The town hall stood on the
leafy square opposite the railway station. The local Gestapo chief had taken
over the mayor's grand office and now stood poring over a map with Dieter
Franck and a Captain Bern, who was in charge of the military guard on the
tunnel.

"I have twenty men at each end
of the tunnel and another group constantly patrolling the mountain," said
Bern. "The Resistance would need a large force to overcome them."

Dieter frowned. According to the
confession of the lesbian he had interrogated, Diana Colefield, Flick had
started with a team of six women, including herself, and must now be down to
four. However, she might have joined up with another group, or made contact
with more French Resistance cadres in and around Marles. "They have plenty
of people," he said. "The French think the invasion is coming."

"But a large force is hard to
conceal. So far we have seen nothing suspicious."

Bern was short and slight and wore
spectacles with thick lenses, which was presumably why he was stationed in this
backwater rather than with a fighting unit, but he struck Dieter as an
intelligent and efficient young officer. Dieter was inclined to take what he
said at face value.

Dieter said, "How vulnerable is
the tunnel to explosives?"

"It goes through solid rock. Of
course it can be destroyed, but they will need a truckload of dynamite."

"They have plenty of
dynamite."

"But they need to get it
here—again, without our seeing it."

"Indeed." Dieter turned to
the Gestapo chief "Have you received any reports of strange vehicles, or a
group of people arriving in the town?"

"None at all. There is only one
hotel in town, and at present it has no guests. My men visited the bars and
restaurants at lunchtime, as they do every day, and saw nothing unusual."

Captain Bern said hesitantly,
"Is it conceivable, Major, that the report you received, of an attack on
the tunnel, was some kind of deception? A diversion, as it were, to draw your
attention away from the real target?"

That infuriating possibility had
already begun to dawn on Dieter. He knew from bitter experience that Flick
Clairet was a master of deception. Had she fooled him again? The thought was
too humiliating to contemplate. "I interrogated the informant myself, and
I'm sure she was being honest," Dieter replied, trying hard to keep the
rage out of his voice. "But you could still be right. It's possible she
had been misinformed, deliberately, as a precaution."

Bern cocked his head and said,
"A train is coming."

Dieter frowned. He could hear
nothing.

"My hearing is very good,"
the man said with a smile. "No doubt to compensate for my eyesight."

Dieter had established that the only
train to have left Reims for Marles today had been the eleven o'clock, so
Michel and Lieutenant Hesse should be on the next one in.

The Gestapo chief went to the
window. "This is a westbound train," he said. "Your man is
eastbound, I think you said."

Dieter nodded.

Bern said, "In fact there are
two trains approaching, one from either direction."

The Gestapo chief looked the other
way. "You're right, so there are."

The three men went out into the
square. Dieter's driver, leaning on the hood of the Citroën, stood upright and
put out his cigarette. Beside him was a Gestapo motorcyclist, ready to resume
surveillance of Michel.

They walked to the station entrance.
"Is there another way out?" Dieter asked the Gestapo man.

They stood waiting. Captain Bern said,
"Have you heard the news?"

"No, what?" Dieter
replied.

"Rome has fallen."

"My God."

"The U.S. army reached the
Piazza Venezia yesterday at seven o'clock in the evening."

As the senior officer, Dieter felt
it was his duty to maintain morale. "That's bad news, but not
unexpected," he said. "However, Italy is not France. If they try to
invade us, they'll get a nasty surprise." He hoped he was right.

The westbound train came in first.
While its passengers were still unloading their bags and stepping onto the
platform, the eastbound train chugged in. There was a little knot of people
waiting at the station entrance. Dieter studied them surreptitiously, wondering
if the local Resistance was meeting Michel at the train. He saw nothing suspicious.

A Gestapo checkpoint stood next to
the ticket barrier. The Gestapo chief joined his underling at the table.
Captain Bern leaned on a pillar to one side, making himself less conspicuous.
Dieter returned to his car and sat in the back, watching the station.

What would he do if Captain Bern was
right, and the tunnel was a diversion? The prospect was dismal. He would have
to consider alternatives. What other military targets were within reach of
Reims? The château at Sainte-Cécile was an obvious one, but the Resistance had
failed to destroy that only a week ago—surely they would not try again so soon?
There was a military camp to the north of the town, some railway-marshaling
yards between Reims and Paris…

That was not the way to go. Guesswork
might lead anywhere. He needed information.

He could interrogate Michel right
now, as soon as he got off the train, pull out his fingernails one by one until
he talked—but would Michel know the truth? He might tell some cover story,
believing it to be genuine, as Diana had. Dieter would do better just to follow
him until he met up with Flick. She knew the real target. She was the only one
worth interrogating now.

Dieter waited impatiently while
papers were carefully checked and passengers trickled through. A whistle blew,
and the westbound train pulled out. More passengers came out: ten, twenty,
thirty. The eastbound train left.

Then Hans Hesse emerged from the
station.

Dieter said, "What the
hell…?"

Hans looked around the square, saw the
Citroën, and ran toward it.

Dieter jumped out of the car.

Hans said, "What happened?
Where is he?"

"What do you mean?" Dieter
shouted angrily. "You're following him!"

"I did! He got off the train. I
lost sight of him in the queue for the checkpoint. After a while I got worried
and jumped the queue, but he had already gone."

"Could he have got back on the
train?"

"No—I followed him all the way
off the platform."

"Could he have got on the other
train?"

Hans's mouth dropped open. "I
lost sight of him about the time we were passing the end of the Reims platform…

"That's it," said Dieter.
"Hell! He's on his way back to Reims. He's a decoy. This whole trip was a
diversion." He was furious that he had fallen for it.

"What do we do?"

"We'll catch up with the train
and you can follow him again. I still think he will lead us to Flick Clairet.
Get in the car, let's go!"

CHAPTER

FORTY-NINE

FLICK COULD HARDLY believe she had
got this far. Four of the original six Jackdaws had evaded capture, despite a
brilliant adversary and some mixed luck, and now they were in Antoinette's
kitchen, a few steps away from the square at Sainte-Cécile, right under the
noses of the Gestapo. In ten minutes time they would walk up to the gates of the
château.

Antoinette and four of the other
five cleaners were firmly tied to kitchen chairs. Paul had gagged all but
Antoinette. Each cleaner had arrived carrying a little shopping basket or
canvas bag containing food and drink—bread, cold potatoes, fruit, and a flask
of wine or ersatz coffee—which they would normally have during their 9:30
break, not being allowed to use the German canteen. Now the Jackdaws were
hastily emptying the bags and reloading them with the things they needed to
carry into the château: electric torches, guns, ammunition, and yellow plastic
explosive in 250-grain sticks. The Jackdaws' own suitcases, which had held the
stuff until now, would have looked odd in the hands of cleaners going to work.

Flick quickly realized that the
cleaners' own bags were not big enough. She herself had a Sten submachine gun
with a silencer, each of its three parts about a foot long. Jelly had sixteen
detonators in a shockproof can, an incendiary thermite bomb, and a chemical
block that produced oxygen, for setting fires in enclosed spaces such as
bunkers. After loading their ordnance into the bags, they had to conceal it
with the cleaners' packets of food. There was not enough room.

"Damn," Flick said edgily.
"Antoinette, do you have any big bags?"

"What do you mean?"

"Bags, big bags, like shopping
bags, you must have some."

"There's one in the pantry that
I use for buying vegetables."

Flick found the bag, a cheap
rectangular basket made of woven reeds. "It's perfect," she said.
"Have you any more like it?"

"No, why would I have
two?"

Flick needed four.

There was a knock. Flick went to the
door. A woman in a flowered overall and a hair net stood there: the last of the
cleaners. "Good evening," Flick said.

The woman hesitated, surprised to
see a stranger. "Is Antoinette here? I received a note.."

Flick smiled reassuringly. "In
the kitchen. Please come in."

The woman walked through the
apartment, evidently familiar with the place, and entered the kitchen, where
she stopped dead and gave a little scream. Antoinette said, "Don't worry,
Francoise—they're tying us up so that the Germans will know we didn't help
them."

Flick relieved the woman of her bag.
It was made of knotted string—fine for carrying a loaf and a bottle but no good
to Flick.