by Joel N. Ross
“There’s a man who calls himself Dietrich Sondegger. A Nazi agent. Sondegger is—Sondegger is . . .”
“Abwehr?”
“No, SD. Sicherheitsdienst. You’ve heard of it?”
Tom shook his head.
“The RSHA?” Davies-Frank asked.
“Himmler’s new secret police?”
“Not so new. The RSHA combines the Gestapo, the Kripo, and the SD—the Nazi Party security service.”
“What about the Abwehr, then?”
“That’s precisely what Admiral Canaris—the Abwehr chief—wants to know. The SD has domestic and foreign arms, and they despise the Abwehr, a sentiment that is ardently returned.”
“And Dietrich . . .” Tom remembered the name, but he wanted to check if he’d imagined the stress in Davies-Frank’s voice when he said it.
“Sondegger.”
Couldn’t tell. “He’s SD? He’s the link to Earl?”
“Yes. And he’s here.”
“In England?”
“In London. In what we optimistically call ‘a safe house.’”
“So he’s already caught?”
“He turned himself in—”
“Ready-made double agent, just add water.”
“He allowed himself to be captured, I should say. I don’t pretend to understand his motives, or his goals, or the bottomless pit he calls a mind.”
“What’s the problem? You have him in custody.”
“Why did the SD send an agent? To evaluate the Abwehr network? Do they suspect it’s turned? Worse, Sondegger arrived with another agent—who’s still free. His wireless operator, code-named ‘Duckblind.’”
“He admitted it?”
A wistful glint appeared in Davies-Frank’s eyes. “He was that close to hanging. He mentioned his partner only to save his neck. Duckblind could destroy the Twenty—one transmission and the whole thing collapses. And Sondegger is our only lead to Duckblind.”
“So follow the lead.”
“Sondegger has been . . . unhelpful.”
“Ask him nicely. Then ask him again.”
Davies-Frank was suddenly old. “Wait until you meet him.”
Tom would be meeting him? “Every man breaks.”
“So I’d always thought.”
“This is all—this has nothing to do with me.”
“Sondegger won’t tell us where to find Duckblind. He’ll speak only to Earl.”
“Earl?” Tom shook his head. “He knows Earl?”
“Claims he’s been in contact for some time. Not personal contact—they’ve never met—but letters were passed, a good many, judging by his knowledge of your brother’s life. He claims he’s here with Earl’s consent.”
“And Earl’s gone.”
“Indeed.”
“So you’re stuck.”
“Which is why it’s an excellent thing,” Davies-Frank said, “we have you.”
PRETEND TO BE EARL. Tom had the accent, the background. He had the look. Earl was three years older, but they’d sometimes been taken for twins. Pretend to be Earl. Find Earl. Stop Earl. It was spinning beyond his comprehension. Could he trust Davies-Frank? Probably not, but he did. Could he pass himself as Earl? Probably not . . .
He let the idea wash over him. Pretend to be Earl. Smile and laugh with careless ease. Walk like he owned the street. Walk like he was going home to Harriet. Could he pretend to be Earl?
No.
“If this Nazi is Earl’s contact,” Tom said, “the COI has the record. Why isn’t this an American job?”
“This isn’t America,” Davies-Frank said.
“If you’re asking me to work against the States—”
“The Abwehr has a functioning—a vibrant—network in the United States. You are now one of half a dozen Americans who know of the Twenty Committee. Telling the Americans is telling the Abwehr.”
“You told me.”
“Because it was necessary. Because you occupy a unique position in the spectrum of believability. Because you’re subject to the Commonwealth Army Act—we can throw you in a cell if need be.”
“So ask the COI what Sondegger’s doing here, and don’t mention the Twenty Committee.”
“We did. They’ve no idea. Earl keeps his own counsel, and the COI is not entirely . . .” Davies-Frank gave the impression of a shrug without actually shrugging.
Tom understood. The COI was not, entirely. The U.S. military was currently ranked nineteenth in the world—even the Royal Dutch Army was larger—and the COI was even lower on the list. Wild Bill Donovan had Roosevelt’s backing, but the COI was still in nappies, as Mrs. Harper would say, and the Brits had no reason to trust an infant.
“If Sondegger’s not lying,” Tom said, “this is Earl’s personal initiative?”
“Earl has that reputation.”
“I’m supposed to go in empty? I know shit about this; I get lost between my right hand and my left.”
“Earl probably doesn’t know much more. Contact was made—Sondegger’s proven that much—and perhaps a rendezvous was set. But if it progressed further, I’d be surprised.”
“You think Sondegger set up a meet with Earl?”
“It’s an educated guess.”
“Why risk coming to England? Why not a neutral country? Doesn’t make sense. Why turn himself over to your custody? Why not—”
“Tom, I don’t know. We’re operating blind. I expect nothing of you—not success, not insight—but that you’ll try. Will you?”
“It won’t work.”
Davies-Frank made a noise in his throat. “There’s a man in Berlin, one of our most highly placed assets. He has a wife and three children, two boys and a girl. His code name is ‘Whiskbroom,’ and if Duckblind transmits, if the double-cross system falls, they kill his wife, they kill his children, and, if he’s lucky, they kill him.” He was silent a moment. “What are you, Tom? An invalid or a soldier?”
“There’s gotta be another option.”
“Not for you.”
“If I fall flat with Sondegger,” Tom said, “you’ll still lead me to Earl?”
“I will,” Davies-Frank said.
“No way this will work.”
“Let me ask you, Tom. That bit of wire?”
Tom shook his head.
“In the showers. The bit of wire.”
“You saw that?”
“I saw you.” Davies-Frank extended his hand across the desk. “May I have it?”
It was some kind of test. Check if Tom was planning to escape, was crazy enough to be pocketing trash. He reached into his pocket, dropped the wire in Davies-Frank’s palm.
“You’re a soldier, Sergeant,” Davies-Frank said. “What’s an invalid doing with this?”
There was that spark, warming him again. Tom looked at his hands, the one whole and the other bandaged. Pretend to be Earl. With Harriet and Chilton on one side, his squad on the other. Pretend to be Earl. He lost himself in the thought for a long moment.
Then he lifted his head and smiled—a reckless, confident smile. “Lead me to him, brother.”
CHAPTER
SEVEN
AFTERNOON, DECEMBER 1, 1941
HARRIET WALL BRUSHED a wisp of fine brown hair from her forehead and knelt in the cold dirt of her garden. She dug her fingers into the earth to rouse its scent, inhaled, exhaled: the first breath she remembered taking since she woke at dawn. Her knees ached with cold as moisture seeped through her skirt and stockings. Her back ached from ten hours at a desk—with four more still to come, at home. Her mind ached from the flurry of details, the awful proximity of death.
This was her time. Between Baker Street and Shepherd Market. She wasn’t home yet; she was in between. She’d stepped inside, drawn the blackout curtains, discovered Earl hadn’t retur
ned, and shot outside before the stack of paperwork could entrap her. She’d not even changed. She’d forked and bone-mealed the cramped bed by the rambler trellis and was now ruining her crepe de chine skirt planting bulbs.
Still, she needed the time, the scent and surety of her preposterous kitchen garden: a thumbnail of a yard, mostly paved over, converted from the approach to the adjoining stable block. It was why she’d taken this particular house. Rare thing, in Shepherd Market, to have even a single stitch of earth—but it kept her sane.
She cupped a handful of the dark soil in her hand. Her hands were her best feature, well-proportioned fingers, a graceful wrist, unvarnished nails with slender crescent half-moons. Her hands didn’t allow her to forget.
She dug into the earth. It was too late in the year for anything but tulips and accents of seedling forget-me-nots. She’d try the daffs, as well. Better in the ground than the bag—if they didn’t flower well next spring, they’d recover for the spring after. A rough start, but they would blossom. Some things were reborn after dying back. Others were not.
It was her hidden ritual. In a world of secrets, this was hers: She planted bulbs for the women she sent into the night. She tried to believe that if she tended the bulbs, if she sheltered and nourished them, her agents would return alive. They would not be captured by a traitor, by a mistake or a misfortune. They would not be taken to a basement cell.
Harriet turned a wrong-shaped bulb over in her hand, an anemone hidden among the daffs. She’d soak and pot it, then place it in the bedroom window. She put it aside and stopped, her gaze caught by her best feature. Her fingers outstretched, her nails dirty but unmarred.
The first agent Harriet had befriended was code-named “Governess,” a working-class girl, twenty-two years old, with impish green eyes and a short bob of dark hair, a faint echo of an American flapper. She had the build, too, lissome and boyish—and the boldness. But in Essex, in 1940, the bob only meant she didn’t fuss, and the boldness only meant she needn’t.
Her mother was French, and she spoke the language as perfectly as she understood the people. She had the quick wit of a successful agent, the engaging manners, the ability to flirt and the wisdom to flee. After the lessons—the weapons, the documents, the codes, and the cyanide pill—she’d flown east. Harriet had stood alone on the grass airstrip at the Moon Squadron base at Tempsford and waved her droning Lysander into the night sky.
An hour later, Harriet had been back at her dining room table, doing the sort of paperwork one was allowed to take home—on Inter-Services Research Bureau letterhead, it could have been for a bank or a shipping company. She’d been unable to focus, watching the clock: Now Governess’s pilot was watching for the flare path on the ground, the inverted L of the drop zone. Now waiting for the signal lights. Now Governess would be sitting, her slim legs dangling through a hole in the plane’s floor, waiting for a red light to turn green. Now she would be falling through the air, now yanked upward as the static line engaged. Harriet prayed the parachute would open. Prayed the drop would be easy. Her prayers were answered: Governess had parachuted safely into France.
Directly into a tainted network.
Two months later, a man code-named “Aubergine” escaped from a dank Nazi cell. Harriet had read his report in Mr. Uphill’s office, the door locked behind her. Governess hadn’t had time to swallow her cyanide. She’d lost her ten toenails, then her fingernails, in a period of ten days.
Yet she’d revealed not a single scrap of information the Nazis didn’t already know. She was killed with a bullet to the neck. She was the first of Harriet’s women to die. She was not the last.
HENNESSEY GATE WAS a two-story farmhouse beyond the outskirts of London, squatting on what Tom figured were thirty or forty acres of hill and pasture. There were a handful of outbuildings along the pocked dirt drive—a long, low barn, an off-kilter chicken coop, and what was maybe an old milking shed or collapsed granary.
The farmhouse itself was a neglected hodgepodge—faded, rain-streaked shingles hung above new wide boards haphazardly whitewashed and hammered to the walls. The front doors, flanked by sandbags, had once been red but were now a fleshy pink. There were no chickens, no geese, no farmhouse dogs.
“Lovely to have a place in the country,” Tom said.
“Isn’t it?” Davies-Frank said. “Our charming rustic hideaway.”
“Reminds me of Burnham Chase. Except homier.”
“Never been invited to Chilton’s heap, myself.”
“Weep bitter tears, Rupert. You’ve missed cold floors, cold food, and the coldest company.” Tom could feel Earl within him like the flu, a swirling black patch of virus, guiding his words and his gestures.
During the ride, Davies-Frank had briefed him on Earl’s life in the COI, the interdepartmental struggles and the personnel. Tom learned Earl had traveled to Cairo and Lisbon, had joined a cricket team. Tom memorized the new names and places, and was utterly unprepared. But he was Earl—he’d fly by the seat of his pants and land with a flourish to great acclaim. Earl always did.
They stepped out of the Daimler. The afternoon sun was yellow and round behind a wispy gray cloud, like a child’s new toy with a smudge of grease. A lone cricket chirped halfheartedly and the air smelled of fallow fields and mud, and Tom saw two sentries in the shadow of the barn.
“Not open to the public?” he said, gesturing toward them.
“Kew Gardens during the Blitz,” Davies-Frank said. “Closed up tight and guarded, because a bomb at the palm houses would cause a rain of broken glass—a thousand guillotine blades slicing down. And that would still be less dangerous than what we have at Hennessey.” He turned as a man stepped from the house. “Ah. Highcastle. This is Mr. Wall.”
“Earl Wall.” Highcastle was a bull. Short and solid, with a bullet head and a pugnacious jaw. He was wearing a brown suit and a brown hat and a yellow tie. He extended his hand, scowling. “You came.”
Tom lifted his bandaged hand to show why he couldn’t shake. “Now I’ve seen. Next I’ll conquer.”
Highcastle grunted. “I’ll finish Wall,” he told Davies-Frank. “You call Special Branch about Tipcoe.”
“Tell them what?”
“Invent something.”
“To what end?”
“Have him released to our custody.”
Davies-Frank nodded. “I’ll speak with Illingworth. . . .”
“Come,” Highcastle told Tom.
Inside, the farmhouse was a warren of small dark rooms, cramped with furniture that had once been colorful and frilly. Highcastle glared at the stairs, said, “He’s up,” and led Tom to a sitting room, which had been converted to an office, at the far end of the house. He closed the door and crowded Tom into a chair.
“Rupert and I know who you are. We’re the only ones.”
“The rest think I’m Earl?”
“Right.”
“Because you don’t trust me, or because you don’t trust them?”
“It was decided.”
“No,” Tom said. “You’re afraid.”
Highcastle balanced a pair of wire-rimmed reading glasses on his nose. He opened a desk drawer and considered its contents.
“You reek of it,” Tom said. “You and Davies-Frank both.”
Highcastle closed the drawer, lifted his head. His eyes were almost yellow. “Heard you were a patient at Rowansea, not a doctor.”
“I’m not the one asking for help.”
“No?”
“You like swing, Highcastle? Benny Goodman? If you lead like you’re all wet, that’s how I’ll follow—you follow?”
“Week and a half ago,” Highcastle said, “two auxiliary firemen heard a commotion over Grand Union, behind the stables. Thought it was a tart having a quick one. The firemen gave it a moment—always polite—then found the Hun sitting on a bench, sucking a cheroot, singing o
pera.”
“He turned himself in to firemen? Keystone Kops were busy that day?”
“Don’t look for sense. You’ll find none. He’d been in-country for at least two days. Probably more.”
“You have no point of entry?”
“Nothing. Except he’d taken a nasty swipe to the face.” Highcastle lifted a hand to forestall Tom’s question. “No idea how. Still trying to backtrack.”
“For a man who gave himself up, he doesn’t sound forthcoming.”
“He were forthcoming, we wouldn’t need you. Hun claims he’ll feed us Duckblind—his wireless operator—if we give him Earl.”
“Give him Earl?”
“For conversation. I don’t know his business with Earl. Don’t care. All that concerns me is the Twenty.”
“You think turning himself in—to a couple firemen—was his best way to Earl? He couldn’t have taken the sixteen to the twelve to Shepherd Market and knocked on the front door?”
“Don’t know, don’t care. Long as he gives us the wireless operator.”
“And if he does?”
A grim smile. “Then we address the deeper issues.”
“I’m supposed to get the wireless operator’s contact information without knowing word one about Sondegger’s business with Earl?”
Highcastle grunted. “You fail, people die.”
“That’s swell,” Tom said airily, feeling Earl uncoil within him. “Long as it’s just for kicks.”
“People die and you return to the basket factory. I will personally see you never find Earl. Personally ensure you never leave the Rowansea. You signed the Army Act. Your country’s afraid to fight—but you signed, you’re mine. Treated for shell shock. You know the names for it. Combat fatigue, cowardice, desertion.” Highcastle lowered his head as if he were going to charge. “Don’t much care that you’re a faintheart nancy. Don’t much care you haven’t any guts, hiding behind ‘shell shock.’ All I care is that you walk up those bloody stairs, soldier, and you talk to that bloody Hun and you get the bloody rendezvous information. Then scurry back to your hole, and I never see you again.”
