Safe Houses

by Dan Fesperman

  Then she thought again of Helen, living like an infiltrator on enemy soil, which in turn reminded her of a conversation at Langley two years ago, right before her posting. Peggy Mullen, a kindly old gal from counterintelligence, had sought her out in the CIA cafeteria to wish her well. Mullen, pushing sixty, had been based in London during the war for the OSS, enduring the Blitz along with all the heavyweights like Wisner and Angleton. She’d helped prep operatives for parachute drops into occupied France, and decades later she still talked about it with great animation as she discussed the pressures of knowing you couldn’t afford to overlook a single detail.

  “Get the slightest thing wrong—the button you sewed onto their shirts, or even the lint in their pockets—and they might never come back. You were always on a wartime footing.”

  That’s how Claire felt now—a wartime footing, worrying about every detail. It was the most urgent matter she’d handled in months, even though it was completely off the books. She absently picked up the sheet of paper once again, and was on the verge of rolling it back into her typewriter when there was a knock at her door.

  “Yes?”

  It was Maguire, her chief of station, oozing with forced charm as he entered with a hearty hello, which could only mean that he had some sort of disagreeable assignment. Get bogged down in scut work now and she might not even be able to reach a phone booth at four to call Helen. It would be unthinkable to phone from the office.

  Maguire was past his prime, but had enjoyed some glory days during the latter years of de Gaulle’s reign, when the French had pulled out of NATO and flirted with the Soviets. He was not unkind, and not a groper, but he was too old-school to see what Claire had to offer. Although she enjoyed calling him her POS COS, she sometimes felt sorry for him, especially when the younger males laughed behind his back.

  He had been resistant to Claire’s posting from the beginning. When informed that a woman would soon be assigned to operations at his station, Maguire had requested that the slot be filled by a “contract wife,” meaning a female employee married to a CIA male. Instead, he got Claire, all by her lonesome, so his next move was to try to slot her in an office job. On her second night in Paris he’d taken her to a bar to explain why.

  “I don’t really believe in women ops officers,” he’d said, smiling unctuously.

  Claire, who wasn’t above being a suck-up when the occasion called for it, maintained a game face and said, “You’re certainly in position to know best, but why do you feel that way?”

  “Because, well, you know, women have babies. Eventually. I know you’re not married, not yet, but you might still get pregnant—this is Paris, after all, city of l’amour—and then of course you’d need all that time off even if you were right in the middle of something big. So you see?”

  “Oh, absolutely. You’re quite right.” Having established the nature of the hurdle, Claire then proceeded to vault it in a single bound. “But that won’t be a problem for me, you see, because I’ve been fixed.” She said it with a winning smile, even as Maguire’s jaw dropped.

  “Fixed?”

  “Yes. You know, like with a dog or cat?”

  It was a lie, of course. An utter fiction. Not that Maguire would ever know.

  “Oh.”

  His smile turned queasy, the discomfort of a man backed into a corner by his own words.

  “Well, then. I suppose you’re a reasonable enough candidate.”

  And that was that.

  While getting acquainted with her new co-conspirator the previous day at lunch, Claire had discerned that if Helen lacked one vital office skill it was probably tact, or the willingness to suffer fools when necessary. Maguire would have loathed her, and she would have lost by fighting back. Yet the Agency needed women with attitudes like Helen’s, just as much as it needed ones who knew how to play along.

  “So, how is my favorite cabinet minister?” Maguire asked. “Has he yet frequented the love nest of our scarlet damsel?”

  “He has not. But one thing I’ve noticed, only yesterday, is that I’m not the only one who has taken an interest.”

  Maguire frowned and sat down.

  “Tell me more.”

  “A certain ambitious young reporter for Le Figaro has been lingering in a bar across the street from her place, two of the last three times I was there.”

  “Did he make you?”

  “God, no. But I made him, and he wasn’t just there for a drink. There was a camera in his bag and he was taking notes as he gazed out the window. He was none too subtle.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think we’re not the only ones who’ve been peddled this story. Although why the French would even bat an eye at a sex scandal is still a mystery to me. But if they would, then I suppose our journalist will be willing to run with it much harder and longer than we’d ever want to.”

  “Meaning that any interest on our part—”

  “Is probably a moot point, although I’m certainly willing to keep plugging away.”

  She expected him to respond as he usually did—by gloomily telling her, yes, plug away a while longer. Instead, he perked up and said, “Actually, this news couldn’t have come at a better time. I have something else for you that’s much more urgent.”

  “I’m all ears.” She wanted to groan.

  “Remember that full alert we got the other night, on the renegade clerk from Berlin station?”

  Clerk. Poor Helen, although it was probably a blessing in disguise if everyone was underestimating her.

  “You mean the brunette with the nice eyes?” She knew Maguire would respond better if she spoke in his language.

  “They were nice eyes, weren’t they? I’m told she also has quite a figure.”

  “Well, that’s helpful to know.”

  “Anyhow, they still haven’t found her, and I was wondering if, well…”

  “If I could join the hunt?” More good news. And if Maguire was assigning Claire, then he definitely saw Helen as a low priority. Gilley, unfortunately, probably saw things differently.

  “Yes! I was thinking the search could use an injection of feminine intuition.”

  “I see. Great minds thinking alike, and all that.”

  “Exactly. Knew you’d see my point.” He seemed relieved that she hadn’t frowned and called him some sort of pig.

  “Any reason to think she’s in France?”

  “None, really. But she hasn’t turned up anywhere else, and, well, how many different places could she go?”

  “A few dozen?”

  “Well, yes, but…”

  “But she’s only a clerk with a limited imagination, and France is right next door, so…”

  “Exactly.”

  “I think I might have some insights on her mentality, if you’d like me to get on it right away.”

  “Perfect, Claire. I knew you’d see what I was after. Her clearance was pretty low, so no one’s all that worried about what she might spill. Still, it would be a real feather in our caps if we could run her down for Berlin.”

  A feather in Maguire’s cap, he meant. But now Claire had carte blanche to make sure that everything would work better for Helen. Her eyes flicked around the room as Maguire prattled on. Her coat hung by the door. She thought her handbag was atop her bookshelf, but then she spotted it over to the side. She glanced at her watch. Even after accounting for the usual counter-surveillance techniques, if she left now she should have enough time to swing by the mailbox before going to Helen’s hotel for their four o’clock contact. She stood from her desk.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To check with sources. If anyone like her is looking for help, they’d be the first to know.”

  Maguire stood, too, and smiled again.

  “Of course! Good to see you jumping right into the fra
y. Happy hunting, Claire.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  He gracefully stepped aside as she breezed out of the office.

  47

  Claire sensed she was being watched from the moment she stepped into the street. That man on a bench, reading Le Monde—hadn’t she also seen him at lunch, when she’d dashed out for a sandwich? A TV repair van on the opposite curb eased into traffic in the same direction she was heading. Why would it have even been there? Both the embassy and the Hôtel de Crillon handled those kinds of jobs in-house. Maybe it was her excitement, maybe it was her sense of urgency, but her instincts told her that she had better shake not only the van but also the fellow on the bench, who had just stood and folded his newspaper.

  She reversed course. Two blocks later she hailed a cab, ordered the driver to make a U-turn, and then a mile later hopped out and doubled back in the opposite direction of traffic on a one-way street. She didn’t care if they knew she was trying to lose them, and that made the job easier. She went into the front entrance of a fruit vendor and exited out the back. She caught a bus, and another cab. Finally, a half hour later, she found herself alone and unobserved as she entered the main gate of the Cimetière de la Villette, in the 19th arrondissement. Her Sisterhood mailbox was beneath a stone planter by a stone crypt for the Famille Gérard.

  She had chosen the location by the same rationale she had used to pick Helen’s hotel, orienting herself to the northeast for its proximity to Bondy, where she expected Marina to turn up. Looking around, Claire saw that no one else seemed to be inside the stone walls of the small cemetery. The view from the surrounding houses was blocked by a canopy of trees, which were in all their autumn glory.

  She strolled up a cobbled path beneath shedding maples to the Gérard vault, where she reached beneath the planter and yanked free an envelope. Normally she would have opened it in a more secure location, but she was in a hurry. She slit it open, unfolded a sheet of paper, and read a single line of typewritten characters: 18:00, the vista, Parc de Belleville, the bench.

  So there it was. A meeting was set, either with Marina or a cutout. She had more than an hour to relay the message to Helen, and now that she was free of surveillance, she could deliver it personally. Helen was supposed to take any four o’clock phone calls in her room, so that’s where Claire would meet her.

  She arrived at the hotel on Passage de Flandre with more than twenty minutes to spare. No one was manning the front desk, so she went straight upstairs. When there was no answer to her knock, she easily picked the lock with a small tool from a vinyl packet in her handbag. Then she plopped onto the end of the bed to wait.

  My, but this place was dusty, and her nose wrinkled in response. Then she sneezed. A moment later, feeling a second one on the way, she reached into her purse for a packet of tissues she had bought that morning.

  Instead of the softness of the tissues she felt a single tissue wrapped around something hard and heavy. She pulled out the packet for a closer look. It was the density of lead. Unwrapping it she found a small black box with a tiny red light on the end, flashing at one-second intervals.

  It was a radio wave tracking beacon.

  She cursed her stupidity, or maybe it was carelessness. Beacons like this were impractical for tracking individuals, because there was no way to strap them onto someone unawares. Unless, of course, you could slip one into their briefcase or handbag. Fearing the worst, she stepped to the window and peered between the slats in the shuttered door.

  Nothing suspicious. She exhaled slowly, and was about to turn away from the window when a TV repair van turned onto the street and pulled onto the opposite sidewalk.

  “Fuck!”

  She backed away from the window. Her first impulse was to smash the beacon, but then they’d know it had been discovered and would plan accordingly. Still, the damage was done. This was the only hotel on the street—the only hotel for blocks. They’d know for sure that Helen was staying here, and they’d snatch her the moment she showed up.

  Who could have planted the beacon? It had to have been someone in Paris station, probably a confederate of Gilley’s. Hansen, a recent arrival, had phoned her at around noon to come critique one of his reports. It had seemed a bit odd at the time, but nothing alarming, and she had left her office door open. Meaning at least two people had been involved. When you did work like Gilley’s, you put out feelers everywhere, she supposed—people to do small favors with no questions asked.

  Claire checked her watch. Eighteen minutes before four o’clock. Stay calm and think fast. She should have taken the Metro on the way over. Going underground would have killed the signal for sure. But it was too late now. Adjust and move forward.

  “Think, goddammit!”

  Claire opened Helen’s overnight bag and took out a baggy blouse that she’d bought for her the other day. She threw off her own jacket and pullover and hastily buttoned up the blouse. She took out a pair of bobby pins, pulled her hair up into a bun and pinned it into place, and then put on an orange scarf from her handbag, along with a pair of reading glasses. Then she unfolded the message from Audra with the details of the rendezvous and scribbled a handwritten addendum.

  She moved the beacon to the console table, to ensure a clearer signal to the van. That’s when she noticed the copy of Paris Match that she’d given to Helen the day before. If Helen was unable to return, she’d never retrieve it, so Claire stuffed it into her handbag. What else? Nothing she could think of, so she left the room, took a back staircase, and pushed through an emergency door into a rear alley. Fortunately, no alarm sounded.

  She worked her way to a courtyard that opened onto Passage de Flandre near the canal. Helen would approach either from there or from the Avenue de Flandre. Fifty-fifty. An incorrect guess could be fatal, and Claire might already be too late. She decided that if she were Helen, she’d want to return by the least populated route, so she headed toward the canal.

  She reached the street that ran along the canal. No sign of Helen. Across the road was a concrete stairway to a footbridge over the water. Claire climbed the steps to a landing halfway up, trying not to hurry now that she was out in the open. She took up a position at the railing with a commanding view.

  It was now fourteen minutes before four. The van was still parked on the sidewalk, engine idling. The fellow whom she’d seen outside the embassy now stood on the near corner of Passage de Flandre, keeping a lookout along the canal just as Claire was doing. He gave no indication that he’d recognized Claire. Hoping to keep it that way, she pulled out her copy of Paris Match and pretended to read. Flipping open the pages she noticed right away that Helen had removed the report, probably to hide it in her room. Shit! Nothing was going right.

  The lookout’s attention was suddenly drawn to the other end of the street. He stepped around the corner and peered past the van toward a young woman who had just turned off of Avenue de Flandre, two hundred yards away—too far to see whether it was Helen. If Claire had guessed wrong, her friend was doomed.

  She again checked her flanks. To the right was a man approaching on a bicycle. To the left, a couple of boys in shorts, playing tag. Behind her, a houseboat motored along with a pop-pop-pop, keeping time with her pulse. She glanced right again—and there she was!—making her way forward beneath the plane trees along the canal footpath, maybe forty yards away. Claire headed down the steps, restraining herself from breaking into a run. She stared at the sidewalk in hopes that Helen wouldn’t recognize her and call out her name.

  The lookout’s attention was still diverted in the opposite direction, so she quickened her pace while planning her move. Helen carried the bag on her left, so Claire eased to that side, reaching Helen about twenty-five yards short of the intersection. She pretended to trip on a tree root and threw herself forward, grabbing Helen’s left shoulder while dropping Audra’s message into the tote bag.

  “Turn around
!” she rasped. “They’ve staked out the hotel. Go!”

  Helen faltered, but only for a second. Without a word she pivoted back down the canal, away from danger. Claire turned in the opposite direction. To a bystander it must have looked as if they’d bounced off each other, like atomic particles in a cloud chamber.

  The lookout had taken notice and was now pursuing Helen, and ignoring Claire. His mistake. Claire reached into her handbag for the sharp tool she’d used to pick the lock and set off on a collision course. He didn’t look up until she was almost on him, and by then it was too late. Claire jammed the splinter of steel into his left ear canal, feeling something pop as he shrieked and fell to the sidewalk. No one else had yet emerged from around the corner where the van was parked. The only other people nearby were the two boys, who looked up in surprise, and an older man carrying a grocery bag, twenty yards off.

  “Help him!” Claire shouted in a burst of French. “He’s hurt himself. I’ll go for a doctor!”

  The man put down his bag and stepped forward. The lookout held his head with both hands and writhed in agony as blood trickled from his left ear. Claire took off in the opposite direction from Helen. Having helped clear her friend’s path to safety, it was time to disappear while she had the chance. Later she could discreetly work her way over to Helen’s rendezvous point, in case help was needed there.

  A few blocks later she checked her flanks. Gilley’s people were gone. She hoped Helen had made it.

  48

  Helen’s ears were ringing, a high-pitched whine like the wail of an inner alarm. Only as she emerged back onto Avenue de Flandre, one block up from her hotel’s cross street, did the noise begin to subside. She still wasn’t quite sure what had just happened. All she knew for certain was that she was back on the run, and that Claire had dropped a message into her bag.