They were sympathizers-thank God. Flick slumped with relief. "Thank you," she said.
Christian said, "When will the invasion come?"
He was naive to think that someone who really knew such a secret would reveal it so casually, but to keep him motivated she said, "Any day now. Maybe Tuesday."
"Truly? This is wonderful. Long live France!"
Flick said, "I'm so glad you are on our side."
"I have always been against the Germans." Christian puffed himself up a little. "In my job, I have been able to render some useful services to the Resistance, in a discreet way." He tapped the side of his nose.
Flick did not believe him for a second. No doubt he was against the Germans: most French people were, after four years of scarce food, old clothes, and curfews. But if he really had worked with the Resistance he would not have told anyone-on the contrary, he would have been terrified of people finding out.
However, that did not matter. The important thing was that he could see which way the wind was blowing, and he was not going to turn Allied agents over to the Gestapo a few days before the invasion. There was too strong a chance he would end up being punished for it.
The train slowed down, and Flick saw that they were coming into the Gare d'Orsay station. She stood up. Christian kissed her hand and said with a tremor in his voice, "You are a brave woman. Good luck!"
She left the carriage first. As she stepped onto the platform, she saw a workman pasting up a poster. Something struck her as familiar. She looked more closely at the poster, and her heart stopped.
It was a picture of her.
She had never seen it before, and she had no recollection of ever having had her photograph taken in a swimsuit. The background was cloudy, as if it had been painted over, so there were no clues there. The poster gave her name, plus one of her old aliases, Fran‡oise Boule, and said she was a murderess.
The workman was just finishing his task. He picked up his bucket of paste and a stack of posters and moved on.
Flick realized her picture must be all over Paris.
This was a terrible blow. She stood frozen on the platform. She was so frightened she wanted to throw up. Then she got hold of herself.
Her first problem was how to get out of the Gare d'Orsay. She looked along the platform and saw a checkpoint at the ticket barrier. She had to assume the Gestapo officers manning it had seen the picture.
How could she get past them? She could not talk her way through. If they recognized her, they would arrest her, and no tall tale would convince German officers to do otherwise. Could the Jackdaws shoot their way out of this? They might kill the men at the checkpoint, but there would be others all over the station, plus French police who would probably shoot first and ask questions later. It was too risky.
There was a way out, she realized. She could hand over command of the operation to one of the others- Ruby, probably-then let them pass through the checkpoint ahead of her, and finally give herself up. That way, the mission would not be doomed.
She turned around. Ruby, Diana, and Maude had got off the train. Christian and Jean-Marie were about to follow. Then Flick remembered the handcuffs Christian had in his pocket, and a wild scheme occurred to her.
She pushed Christian back into the carriage and climbed in after him.
He was not sure if this was some kind of joke, and he smiled anxiously. "What's the matter?"
"Look," she said. "There's a poster of me on the wall."
Both the gendarmes looked out. Christian turned pale. Jean-Marie said, "My God, you really are spies!"
"You have to save me," she said.
Christian said, "How can we? The Gestapo-"
"I must get through the checkpoint."
"But they will arrest you."
"Not if I've already been arrested."
"What do you mean?"
"Put the handcuffs on me. Pretend you have captured me. March me through the checkpoint. If they stop you, say you're taking me to eighty-four avenue Foch." It was the address of Gestapo headquarters.
"What then?"
"Commandeer a taxi. Get in with me. Then, once we are clear of the station, take the cuffs off and let me out in a quiet street. And continue on to your real destination."
Christian looked terrified. Flick could tell that he wanted with all his heart to back out. But he hardly could, after his big talk about the Resistance.
Jean-Marie was calmer. "It will work," he said. "They won't be suspicious of police officers in uniform."
Ruby climbed back into the carriage. "Flick!" she said. "That poster-"
"I know. The gendarmes are going to march me through the checkpoint in handcuffs and release me later. If things go wrong, you're in charge of the mission." She switched to English. "Forget the railway tunnel, that's a cover story. The real target is the telephone exchange at Sainte-C‚cile. But don't tell the others until the last minute. Now get them back in here, quickly."
A few moments later they were all crowded into the carriage. Flick told them the plan. Then she said, "If this doesn't work, and I get arrested, whatever you do, don't shoot. There will be too many police at the station. If you start a gun battle you'll lose. The mission comes first. Abandon me, get out of the station, regroup at the hotel, and carry on. Ruby will be in command. No discussion, there isn't time." She turned to Christian. "The handcuffs."
He hesitated.
Flick wanted to scream Get on with it, you big-mouthed coward, but instead she lowered her voice to an intimate murmur and said: "Thank you for saving my life-I'll never forget you, Christian."
He took out the cuffs.
"The rest of you, get going," Flick said.
Christian handcuffed Flick's right hand to Jean-Marie's left; then they stepped down from the train and marched along the platform three abreast, Christian carrying flick's suitcase and her shoulder bag with the automatic pistol in it. There was a queue at the checkpoint. Jean-Marie said loudly, "Stand aside, there. Stand aside, please, ladies and gentlemen. Coming through." They went straight to the head of the line, as they had at Chartres. Both gendarmes saluted the Gestapo officers, but they did not stop.
However, the captain in charge of the checkpoint looked up from the identity card he was examining and said quietly, "Wait."
All three stood still. Flick knew she was very near death.
The captain looked hard at Flick. "She's the one on the poster."
Christian seemed too scared to speak. After a moment, Jean-Marie answered the question. "Yes, captain, we arrested her in Chartres."
Flick thanked heaven that one of them had a cool head.
"Well done," said the captain. "But where are you taking her?"
Jean-Marie continued to answer. "Our orders are to deliver her to avenue Foch."
"Do you need transport?"
"There is a police vehicle waiting for us outside the station."
The captain nodded, but still did not dismiss them. He continued to stare at Flick. She began to think there was something about her appearance that had given away her subterfuge, something in her face that told him she was only pretending to be a prisoner. Finally he said, "These British. They send little girls to do their fighting for them." He shook his head in disbelief.
Jean-Marie sensibly kept his mouth shut.
At last the captain said, "Carry on."
Flick and the gendarmes marched through the checkpoint and out into the sunshine.
CHAPTER 33
PAUL CHANCELLOR HAD been angry with Percy Thwaite, violently angry, when he found out about the message from Brian Standish. "You deceived me!"
Paul had shouted at Percy. "You deliberately made sure
I was out of the way before you showed it to Flick!"
"It's true, but it seemed best-"
"I'm in command-you have no right to withhold information from me!"
"I thought you would have aborted the flight."
"Perhaps I would have-maybe I should have."
"But you would have done it for love of Flick, not because it was right operationally."
There Percy had touched Paul's weak spot, for Paul had compromised his position as leader by sleeping with one of his team. That had made him more angry, but he had been forced to suppress his rage.
They could not contact Flick's plane, for flights over enemy territory had to observe radio silence, so the two men had stayed at the airfield all night, smoking and pacing and worrying about the woman they both, in different ways, loved. Paul had, in his shirt pocket, the wooden French toothbrush he and Flick had shared on Friday morning, after their night together. He was not normally superstitious, but he kept touching it, as if he were touching her, making sure she was okay.
When the plane returned, and the pilot told them how Flick had become suspicious of the reception committee at Chatelle, and had eventually dropped near Chartres, Paul had been so relieved he almost wept.
Minutes later, Percy had taken a call from SOE headquarters in London and had learned of Brian Standish's message demanding to know what had gone wrong. Paul had decided to respond by sending the reply drafted by Flick and brought home by her pilot. In case Brian was still at liberty, it told him that the Jackdaws had landed and would contact him, but it gave no further information, because of the possibility that he was in the hands of the Gestapo.
Still no one was sure what had happened out there. The uncertainty was unbearable for Paul. Flick had to go to Reims, one way or another. He had to know whether she was walking into a Gestapo trap. Surely there must be a way to check whether Brian's transmissions were genuine?
His signals bore the correct security tags: Percy double-checked. But the Gestapo knew about security tags, and they could easily have tortured Brian to learn his. There were subtler methods of checking, Percy said, but they depended on the girls at the listening station. So Paul had decided to go there.
At first Percy had resisted. It was dangerous for operational people to descend on signals units, he said; they disrupted the smooth running of the service for hundreds of agents. Paul ignored that. Then the head of the station said he would be delighted for Paul to make an appointment to visit in, say, two or three weeks? No, Paul had said, two or three hours is what I had in mind. He had insisted, gently but firmly, using the threat of Monty's wrath as a last resort. And so he had gone to Grendon Underwood.
As a small boy in Sunday school, Paul had been vexed by a theological problem. He had noticed that in Arlington, Virginia, where he was living with his parents, most of the children of his age went to bed at the same time, seven-thirty. That meant they were saying their prayers simultaneously. With all those voices rising to heaven, how could God hear what he, Paul, was saying? He was not satisfied with the answer of the pastor, who just said that God could do anything. Little Paul knew that was an evasion. The question troubled him for years.
If he could have seen Grendon Underwood, he would have understood.
Like God, the Special Operations Executive had to listen to innumerable messages, and it often happened that scores of them came in at the same time. Secret agents in their hideaways were all tapping their Morse keys simultaneously, like the nine-year-olds of Arlington kneeling at their bedsides at half past seven. SOE heard them all.
Grendon Underwood was another grand country house vacated by the owners and taken over by the military. Officially called Station 53a, it was a listening post. In its extensive grounds were radio aerials grouped in great arcs like the ears of God, listening to messages that came from anywhere between the arctic north of Norway to the dusty south of Spain. Four hundred wireless operators and coders, most of them young women in the FANYs, worked in the big house and lived in Nissen huts hastily erected on the grounds.
Paul was shown around by a supervisor, Jean Bevins, a heavy woman with spectacles. At first she was terrified of the visiting big shot who represented Montgomery himself~ but Paul smiled and talked softly and made her feel at ease. She took him to the transmitting room, where a hundred or so girls sat in rows, each with headphones, notebook, and pencils. A big board showed agents' code names and scheduled times for transmission-known as "skeds" and always pronounced the American way- and the frequencies they would use. There was an atmosphere of intense concentration, the only sound being the tap of Morse code as an operator told an agent she was receiving him loud and clear.
Jean introduced Paul to Lucy Briggs, a pretty blonde girl with a Yorkshire accent so strong that he had to concentrate hard to understand her. "Helicopter?" she said. "Aye, I know Helicopter-he's new. He calls in at twenty hundred hours and receives at twenty-three hundred. No problems, so far."
She never pronounced the letter aitch. Once Paul realized that, he began to find it easier to interpret the accent.
"What do you mean?" he asked her. "What sort of problems do you get?"
"Well, some of them don't tune the transmitter right, so you have to search for the frequency. Then the signal may be weak, so that you can't hear the letters very well, and you worry that you might be mistaking dashes for dots-the letter B is very like D, for instance. And the tone is always bad from those little suitcase radios, because they're so small."
"Would you recognize his 'fist'?"
She looked dubious. "He's only broadcast three times. On Wednesday he was a bit nervous, probably because it was his first, but his pace was steady, as if he knew he had plenty of time. I was pleased-I thought he must feel reasonably safe. We worry about them, you know. We're sitting here nice and warm and they're somewhere be-hind enemy lines dodging the bloody Gestapo."
"What about his second broadcast?"
"That was Thursday, and he was rushed. When they're in a hurry, it can be difficult to be sure what they mean-you know, was that two dots run together, or a short dash? Wherever he was sending from, he wanted to get out of there fast."
"And then?"
"Friday he didn't broadcast. But I didn't worry. They don't call unless they have to, it's too dangerous. Then he came on the air on Saturday morning, just before dawn. It was an emergency message, but he didn't sound panicky. In fact I remember thinking to myself~ He's getting the hang of this. You know, it was a strong signal, the rhythm was steady, all the letters clear."
"Could it have been someone else using his transmitter that time?"
She looked thoughtful. "It sounded like him... but yes, it could have been someone else, I suppose. And if it was a German, pretending to be him, they would sound nice and steady, wouldn't they, because they'd have nothing to fear."
Paul felt as if he were wading through gumbo. Every question he asked had two answers. He yearned for something definite. He had to fight down panic every time he recalled to mind the dreadful prospect that he might lose Flick, less than a week after she had come into his life like a gift from the gods.
Jean had disappeared, and returned now with a sheaf of papers in a plump hand. "I've brought the decrypts of the three signals received from Helicopter," she said. Her quiet efficiency pleased him.
He looked at the first sheet.
CALL SIGN HLCP (HELICOPTER)
SECURITY TAG PRESENT
MAY 30 1944
MESSAGE READS:
ARRIVED OK STOP CRYT RENDEVOUS
UNSAFE STOP NABBED BY GGESTAPO
BUT GOT AWAY STOP IN FUTURE RENDEZVOUS AT CAFE DE LA GARE OVER
"He can't spell for nuts," Paul commented.
"It's not his spelling," Jean said. "They always make errors in the Morse. We order the decoders to leave them in the decrypt, rather than tidy them up, in case there's some significance."
Brian's second transmission, giving the strength of the Bollinger circuit, was longer.
CALLSIGN HLCP (HELICOPTER)
SECURITY TAG PRESENT
MAY 311944
MESSAGE READS:
ACTIV AGENTS NOMBER FIVE AS FOLOWS
STOP MONET WHO IS WOUNED STOP
COMTESSE OK STOP CHEVAL HELPS OCA
SI
ONLY STOP BOURGEOISE STILL IM
PLACE STOP PLUS MY RESCUER COD-
NAME CHARENTON STOP
Paul looked up. "This is much worse."
Lucy said, "I told you he was in a rush the second time."
There was more of the second message, mainly a detailed account of the incident at the cathedral. Paul went on to the third:
CALLSIGN HLCP (HELICOPTER)
SECURITY TAG PRESENT
Ken Follett - Jackdaws Page 30
