by Bonnie Toews
“Another victory for the fatherland is close at hand.” Erich displayed suitable optimism. “And with it,” he continued, “the glory which rightfully belongs to you, mein General.”
Erich could picture a bland smile crossing Schellenberg’s lips at the other end of the line as his superior officer spoke.
“Without your patient reconnoitering all these years, Erich, there would be no victory and therefore no glory. We shall share the limelight in the event that monitoring the scientist bears fruit. In the meantime, the balance of the war may hang on how artfully you extract the information we want without alerting the good scientist to our ulterior purpose.”
It was questionable whether Schellenberg would share praise, but it was clear he would never share blame. Whatever Dr. Nielsen did was Erich’s responsibility in the view of his superior. Ride or fall, Schellenberg was right about one thing: the balance of the war did depend on what Dr. Bernhard Nielsen planned to do next.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Thursday, October 7th, 1944
Ten days later, Grace landed in Sweden. “I’m sorry there’s no more time to talk,” she said while unbuttoning her coveralls and slipping them off. “Here. Put these on.”
She handed the flight suit to the rather plump Swedish girl standing beside her. “I left the helmet in the plane,” she told Astrid Andersson. “Put it on as soon as you climb in. Close the hatch tightly and buckle up. You’ll find an oxygen mask folded directly above you. The pilot will instruct you when and how to use it through the earphones in your helmet. He can talk to you, but you can’t talk to him. If you have any questions, now is the time to ask them.”
“I understand. Mme. Orsted has already explained everything to me.”
The young girl began pulling the coveralls over her clothes. The thermal suit was still snugly warm from Grace’s body heat.
Mme. Orsted removed a canvas shopping bag from her car and brought it over to the Danish musician Grace was replacing in Copenhagen.
“Remember, Astrid,” she cautioned the young girl. “Answer no questions and stay in your room. Lady Grace’s life is in your hands.”
“I know. Don’t worry, Mme. Orsted,” the girl reassured her as she fitted Grace’s flight boots on her feet. She then dragged the canvas bag up the ladder and climbed into the tandem cockpit behind the pilot. Astrid’s head disappeared, as she stuffed the rucksack into the tiny space beside her feet on the floor. Raising her head again, she almost bumped foreheads with Grace, who had climbed up behind her.
“You don’t want to forget this.” Grace smiled at the young girl as she pointed to the oxygen mask above her head and to the seat belt. Grace buckled her in firmly. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” she told her. “Lizzie here can fly by herself if she has to.”
“Lizzie?”
“That’s what we call this old bird. She’s the best.”
Grace pointed to the latch.
“Remember now to close down the hatch and secure it when I step down.”
Astrid nodded. Grace grasped her hand and shook it.
“Thank you for letting me take your place. If all goes well, I will see you in a week, and you can carry on as you were before we involved you. If not,” Grace paused, “I’m afraid you’ll have to sit out the rest of the war in London.”
The young girl nodded again, this time regretfully, before she looked into Grace’s eyes and whispered, “Good luck.”
Grace grinned. “Likewise.” And then she climbed back down the Lysander’s ladder, jumped off the last few rungs, grasped one of the flashlights from Mme. Orsted and gestured for them to stand back.
Lizzie’s Bristol Perseus XII engines growled and roared. The Lysander shook as it lined itself up along the axis of the airstrip and rolled forward. Almost instantly it was airborne and banked in a shallow turn to the north. Mme. Orsted’s impulsive wave was like a flapping flag. The moon plane, as the RAF designated the Lysander for its midnight missions, hugged the treetops. Its black shape blended into the dark shades coloring the horizon, and disappeared.
Above the mountain peaks, a faint crown of pink began to rise gracefully, like a royal ballerina, bright and blazing, dancing on an orb of gold. As maroons diffused into mauves and blues, the crescent moon hung over the filtering streaks of gold beginning to shoot out from behind the distant tree line. They fanned into shimmering sheets of bronze over the grassy slopes.
A mixture of emotions played on Mme. Orsted’s face when she turned towards Grace. “Of all people, why you?”
“Why not me?” Grace greeted her concern with amusement.
“Why not, indeed.”
The older woman grabbed Grace and hugged her. “It’s good to see you again. How’s your mother?”
Grace pulled back and looked into Mme. Orsted’s face.
“Did no one tell you? Mommy and daddy were killed in a bombing raid at the start of the war… September 11th, 1940, to be exact.”
The other woman’s eyes filled with tears. She pulled Grace to her again and wrapped her in a comforting hug. Most people remembered Denmark’s diva of opera for her hearty laugh as much as for her sonorous voice. These days, Pia Margretha Orsted rarely laughed.
“Surely, King Christian must have known. Wouldn’t he tell you?” Grace asked with concern when they finally broke away.
“A breakdown in communication, no doubt, dear. We only receive intelligence directly related to our activities. Who knew your mother was related to King Christian?”
“In London, you mean?”
Mme. Orsted nodded.
“King George, of course.” Grace frowned as she considered the connections. “Yes, Mommy used to joke about our being line bred and not too selectively. It is rather complicated. If I’ve got it right, King Christian’s son, King Haakon of Norway, married the daughter of King Edward VII, who was Mommy’s second cousin by marriage …”
Grace stopped and sighed.
“I see what you mean. Mommy’s connection to King Christian is trivial. Even King George may have forgotten they’re related.”
“Are you close to his two young princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret Rose?”
“Oh no, Mommy and Daddy didn’t want to be part of the royal circle. Too much public attention. We’ve lived the way we’ve wanted. But before I left England, I handed over the management of Radcliffe estates to King George. He’ll see our horses are well looked after, while I’m gone.”
Mme. Orsted squeezed Grace’s shoulder. “So much responsibility for one so young. It’s not what your mother wanted for you, Grace.”
Grace glanced away, and whisked imaginary dust off her sleeve, in an effort to divert the diva’s sympathy. It didn’t work.
“She was so proud of you. Your mother believed you could have a brilliant concert career.”
Grace stepped back. “Perhaps after the war.” She spoke in a matter-of-fact tone. “Right now, we have a more important job to do.”
Mme. Orsted nodded.
“Forgive me. I must learn to think of you as Astrid Andersson, but it is very difficult for me, my dear.”
As they walked toward the diva’s car, she told Grace, “I want everyone in Uppsala to see you with me. It will confirm for any questioning eyes I have picked up Astrid at the university dormitory and we are en route to Stockholm to see her family before carrying on to Malmo and Copenhagen this afternoon.”
Grace jumped into the front seat of the elegant two-door, canvas-topped Model J Duesenberg. “Vintage luxury,” she remarked admiringly as Mme. Orsted took her place behind the steering wheel.
“A diva’s luxury,” she corrected Grace.
Merriment danced in Mme. Orsted’s green eyes as she started the Duesenberg’s engine and reversed the classic car back onto the dirt road running beside the landing field. But, the twinkle did not quite stretch down to her voice. She clipped her words.
“A suitcase with all the clothes you’ll need is packed and waiting for you at the Andersson’s. They h
ave been carefully briefed. It is wiser to play this mission assuming we are all under Gestapo surveillance.”
By a stroke of uncanny luck, Goring had invited Astrid Andersson, whom Grace was impersonating, to replace the Tivoli Orchestra’s original pianist. He had been killed a year ago in April in a mysterious explosion at the Concert Hall. The resulting fire had shut down the Concert Hall, but, by permitting the Danes to rebuild the hall so they could hold nightly concerts again, Goring hoped to win King Christian’s collaboration.
“Some of Astrid’s clothes have been altered for you,” Mme. Orsted explained as they drove along. “Padding has been sewn inside to fill out your elegant figure.”
She gave Grace a sidelong glance. “The poor girl is quite dumpy,” and went on. “The make of her shoes have been duplicated in your size. They are suitably scuffed and worn-looking. You already have spectacles exactly like hers and her actual passport with your picture pasted in instead of hers.”
The diva drove on, deep in thought. Abruptly she asked, “Do you speak any Swedish?”
“No, but my German is still fluent.”
“Not good enough.” Mme. Orsted bit her lower lip.
“Around Germans, we must appear to be conversing in Danish. It would be more natural to speak Danish rather than German unless we have to. Now pay attention. I’m going to teach you a few key phrases. If I raise my eyebrows, you just nod as if you agree with what I am saying. If I frown, you shake your head and wince. If I tug my right ear, you laugh. If I touch the tip of my nose as if I’m saying something confidential, look sad. Go over these signals for me.”
Grace nodded, and repeated each cue with her correct response.
“What happens to your music program, while you’re over here?” Mme. Orsted asked curiously.
“Champagne Serenade will go on as usual.”
“That’s impossible. You’re here! How can you be two places at once?”
Grace smiled. “That’s exactly what we hope the Germans will think. But, it’s not that difficult. We have such a backlog of submissions to DITTIES FOR DOTTIES I could pre-record for a full year without anyone missing me.”
In truth, Grace had stopped making up silly limericks to disguise coded messages. Once she had become a radio telegraphist, with her own set of field operators’ transmissions to monitor, she could no longer host her Champagne Serenade program, so she and Lee had devised a way to hide her absence from the audience.
They had pre-recorded invited guests, usually a star entertainer, to make the introductions for the selections Grace played each week. Next, they had recorded Grace playing her repertoire of classical and popular music and then rotated these selections with the prerecorded introductions. They still needed to send coded messages in the DITTIES FOR DOTTIES segment, so they had catalogued all the backlogged submissions of limericks made up by their listeners and recorded Grace reading them to tunes she appeared to be composing spontaneously as she spoke.
On air, it was impossible to distinguish a recording from a live performance. It meant any Allied Intelligence service, not just Project Amanita, could select a pre-recorded ditty to represent an operational code. Lee had nicknamed the process Canned Codes. Even if German Intelligence did intercept the show on the air, it could not break down what the message meant, to whom it was directed, or where the receiver was located.
For the rest of the drive to Uppsala, the two women traveled in silence.
Grace dropped her head against the back of her seat and gazed out the car window. The sun’s full blossom promised a delightful day ahead, but her mood did not match its promise. An inaudible sigh escaped. She needed to be quiet within herself, to still the nerves ripping at her stomach and heart, the same attack of jitters, which gripped her before every concert performance. There could be no mistakes.
She changed her focus and thought of Lee, of the changes in her that had saddened Grace. But once Lee set out training Grace for this mission, her understanding those changes came more easily. Every day, every minute really, Lee dealt with dismal statistics and even starker realities. Her growing hardness reflected the survivor’s stiff shell Grace had yet to acquire.
The thought of possible capture tormented Grace. How courageous was she? Was she tough enough to resist the sadistic viciousness of a Gestapo interrogation? How much pain could she endure? She prayed to God for strength, but was her faith sufficient to sustain her?
Wrestling with this fear meant she had no choice. If she were captured, because of who she was, she would have to take her own life. Her capture would compromise both Churchill and King George. Her whole being cried out against dying, against activating the awful cyanide pill. It contradicted every belief she held dear. Surely God didn’t want her to die when she wanted to live. The intervention of her own will chastised her. Her wants may not be God’s will. She was dictating to God what she wanted.
In training, she had succeeded in squelching her original revulsion of the L-pill. Learning the art of survival to evade capture taught her the silent art of killing, from the lethal karate chop to slipping a sewing needle into the area of the neck yielding instant death. In less than a week, she learned all the vulnerable parts of the body; how to maintain her balance in a hand-to-hand attack on a man (to shove the heel of her hand upward to smash his jaw or to knee him in the groin); the right way to explode a box of matches, blazing, into the eyes of a sneak attacker to blind him; and most importantly how to use ordinary objects a woman carries in her purse as weapons such as a nail file, a pin, a fountain pen (actually a trick atomizer that sprayed poison gas), incendiary cigarettes set in a plain case with miniaturized detonators that looked like replacement wicks for the lighter, or a marzipan bar that smelled like almonds but was plastic explosive camouflaged as a bar of chocolate.
Grace momentarily closed her eyes. God please forgive me. I want to live… I want to live…
The thought persisted despite her prayers to God for a sign to carry out His will. Since the moon plane had taken off from a secret base somewhere in northern Scotland, wanting to live was all Grace thought about. Her tongue slid over the drilled tooth where the lethal L-pill had been inserted. She shivered.
Past the university in Uppsala and all the way on the cushioned drive to Stockholm in Mme. Orsted’s Duesenberg, the thought continued to pester her.
I want to live… I want to live…
TWENTY-NINE
Friday, October 8th, 1944
Since Rolf Haukelid’s death had been confirmed more than a year ago, a vital part of Lee had died. She functioned, yet she did not feel. But, as her heart had withered in grief, her mind excelled, the same as the taking of one sense strengthened another. Her passing fulfillment of love had finally resolved her restless search for acceptance, which she desperately needed, and this love committed her more to Rolf in death than in life.
Professionally, she had hardened, driving her agents to develop wired instincts, testing their endurance and stamina to their outer limits, pushing them to block out all interference except for a focus on their objective and their determination to survive.
“When your gut screams at you,” she told them over and over again, “listen to it. Obey it. Your subconscious can absorb more than you consciously can. Trust it. Believe in it. A highly developed sixth sense is your guardian angel.
“If you relax, even for one second, you become vulnerable. Thinking you’re safe betrays more agents than any other single thing. You are never safe as long as you are on occupied soil.”
Ironically, Rolf’s death transformed her into the inscrutable machine she had accused Quinn of becoming. Her impulse to react to everything had been stilled. Instead, she had learned how to pull back to the realm of abstract detachment, to the level of cold-blooded decision-making that could zero in on a single objective with special tunnel vision. In her mind’s eye, she saw a blown-up Teletype message in neon lights blinking in the darkest region of remaining sanity: Destroy Hitler, it repeated.
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br /> Her rationale charged Hitler’s evil power with Rolf Haukelid’s murder. He bombed children in the name of victory, leaving most of them maimed and mutilated. He took loved ones away, tortured them, and butchered them, without mercy, without remorse. For her, he alone was responsible for this cruel war, for turning ordinary people into terrorists and killers. There could be no peace, no satisfaction, until Adolf Hitler was utterly squashed and squished into the ground, like the disgusting worm he was.
Lee could not, would not, let Rolf’s death pass in vain. He symbolized all the death and destruction, pain and suffering she had helplessly witnessed since the Spanish Civil War. Every agent she prepared now was a human weapon, a faithful hunter supremely engineered to persevere to the end against Hitler’s concerted madness. She consumed no further energy in resenting the human sacrifices necessary to the process and focused solely on the success of each mission, on the effectiveness of the task to be done. Each one chalked up another square tag on the wall map above her desk. White tabs sprinkled the black areas of Nazi-occupied territories.
When Sir Fletcher briefed her about sending Grace into Denmark to convince Dr. Nielsen to escape and to carry counter orders to the double agent called Watchdog, she accepted the decision without protest.
From the time Lee had discussed her recurring nightmare with Grace, it had not bothered her. But, on the same night Grace departed for Sweden, her first rendezvous before entering Copenhagen, Lee’s nightmare returned. Its vividness seized her like a stuck record played over and over again. It refused to push away the sea of open mouths she saw screaming …
Their voices were silent. Lips chewed and churned. Bubbles boiled everywhere, spitting up mouths jawing in disgust. The gurgling waves sunk deeper and deeper … out of sight into the endless pit. In a daze, Lee peered over the rim. The bottom was sucked dry. Below her lay a massive grave piled end to end with skeletal bodies lined standing up side by side. Hollow-eyed skulls rattled, bobbing back and forth on eroded spines as if dancing on invisible strings. Their staring sockets and gangrenous tongues lolled out of their wide-open mouths, accusing her. Every senseless grotesque detail magnified itself.
