by Cara Black
“Halt!”
Her heart caught. The helmeted soldiers turned him around and put his arms up against the building, searching him, knocking his cap off to expose his thick black hair. Panicked, she stepped back in the shadowed recess. Remembered that the glass door behind her was locked. Nowhere to go. Despair filled her. Would he give her away?
She made herself small against the door, crouching, holding her breath. The black car’s engine revved, and there was a shout in German. One soldier grabbed Jean-Marie’s arms from behind and shoved him toward the car. He looked up and blinked in her direction before his head was pushed down. She heard the car doors slam. Then the car took off.
She was on her own.
She had to get out of this doorway, this quartier crawling with troop trucks. Had to figure they’d be on the alert for a woman wearing a straw hat on a bicycle. It would be suicide to return to the boulangerie for help.
Kate ditched the hat into a mailbox, wrapped the scarf she’d found folded in the dress’s other pocket around her head, dusted off the baby buggy with her sticky hand, and stuck her straw bag with the disassembled rifle inside. Her explicit instructions had been to keep the rifle.
She hesitated. What if she were searched?
Common sense told her to ditch the rifle. Hadn’t Stepney said to improvise and think on her feet? Her gut was telling her she’d be safer without it. Yet right now this was all the defense she had. Firearms were scarce and this was top notch, valuable. She might have to use it to shoot her way out or barter it for escape.
A second later she was pushing the buggy along the pavement, her knees shaking. She wanted to run. But she remembered the magazine Jean-Marie had carried under his arm, and how his arms had been empty when he raised them in surrender.
She pushed the buggy across the cobbled street and into the doorway he’d stood in. Shallow, no porte cochère, just a locked glass door. There was a shopping cart folded against the wall, one wheel broken. She rooted inside. Nothing. But in the side pocket she felt something and pulled it out. A folded French-language copy of Signal, the German propaganda magazine. Her lip quivered. Inside she found a blank sealed envelope. Quickly she slit it open. A cigarette paper with penciled words on it containing instructions to meet at 1 p.m.
More trucks pounded against the street. She’d read it more closely later. She stuck the envelope back in the magazine, which she dropped into the buggy. Her spine tingled with fear. Moving as casually as possible, she pushed the buggy out into the sunlight and toward the railroad bridge.
Sunday, June 23, 1940
Outside Paris | 9:30 a.m. Paris Time
“We’ve got close to a half hour’s drive, sir,” said Lieutenant Niels.
Nervous over losing valuable time, Gunter sat back against the leather seat. He was still wearing last night’s shirt. He should reread each report and make notes. No. Better to catnap so he’d be fresh to interrogate the radio man. The Steiff teddy bear poked from his bulging attaché case. Propping the bear under his head as a pillow, he leaned back and closed his eyes.
Sometime later a jolt bounced him awake. They were driving on a potholed dirt road, the smells coming in through the driver’s open window familiar, wild strawberries and manure. The bright sunlight revealed flat green fields and an open barn door.
A soldier stood guarding the door. “Papers, bitte.”
“RSD.” Gunter showed his badge. “We’ve been informed of a captured English parachutist. I’m here to question him.”
The soldier shrugged.
A gruesome scene awaited Gunter under the barn’s blackened beams. Blood-speckled hay, red-tinged water overflowing the horse trough, a set of steel instruments on a milking stool.
A body sprawled on the floor. Gunter knelt down and felt for a pulse. None. The body was cold, the clothing damp. He fingered the Saint Christopher medal still on a chain around the blood-streaked neck.
Idiots. Gunter motioned for his driver, took the camera out of his attaché case and handed it to Niels to photograph the scene. “I want every angle documented.”
“Caught the Bayern tailwind, eh? You’re such alarmists at RSD.” A man approached, wiping his bare arms with a towel. Gunter recognized Roschmann from SD, the intelligence service of the SS. Roschmann was the man they called the Vet. Why hadn’t someone put a muzzle on him?
“We needed him alive,” said Gunter. “From now on we need every one of them alive. Do you understand?”
Roschmann nodded. “The Englander talked. They all do when they spend time with me.”
Gunter heard rhythmic strokes of a shovel outside, then a metallic ting as it hit stone. “Scheisse,” someone swore in German.
“Give me a full report,” said Gunter. “Schnell. Too much time has been lost already.”
Roschmann recounted his interrogation as Gunter examined the English radio set and its case.
“But where’s his cipher code?” All radio operators carried a code transmission template. A manual, or sometimes just a paper.
“What you see is what we found.” Roschmann was pulling on his shirt.
Gunter chose his words carefully so as not to reveal the assassination attempt on the Führer. “The report suggested this radio man might have been connected with a gunman. What do you know about that?”
“Gunman? No idea. We picked him up near his parachute drop.”
“Show me the exact location where he landed. I want to go over every step. Meanwhile send a car back to the morgue . . .” Gunter paused to consult his notebook for the address. “The morgue at the Hôpital Lariboisière in Paris. Send the man’s body, clothing, and all his belongings.”
“Why create more paperwork? We bury him. Simple.”
Roschmann pursed his pale thin lips. The SD didn’t care much for the Reich Security Service. And this brute Roschmann oozed ambition.
“My orders come from the Führer so we’ll do it my way. Understood?” Gunter told him, annoyed by the cavalier attitude. “The body will be autopsied. This man could have stuck the code in his ear, in a suppository, or in a capsule he swallowed.” Roschmann was not the first lout he’d had to work with, nor would he be the last. Munich abounded with henchmen like Roschmann, backstreet thugs all out for sanctioned violence. Gunter reined in his frustration. He needed allies, not foes—any policeman knew that you needed eyes you could trust in the field.
“The English put their eggs in more than one basket,” said Roschmann. “My men have it under control. They’ll report from the drop when they find something.”
Under control? Gunter’s adrenalin coursed. These imbeciles’ actions had already wasted valuable time. Again he studied the interrogation log. “Who took these notes?”
With a shout Roschmann summoned the soldier who had been shoveling outside. In the light from the dusty window, Gunter showed him a page from the log notes.
“Can you explain these phrases?” Gunter’s English was passable but this looked like gibberish.
“He was crying,” said the soldier.
Gunter could imagine. He suppressed a shiver. A skilled interrogator obtained the information in other ways.
It took five minutes of the soldier sounding out the letters and words phonetically in German-accented English before Gunter grasped the radio operator’s last words.
A woman. Lipstick. 1 p.m. Café Littéraire. Sorbonne.
Was this related? He remembered that fleeting fragrance in the Montmartre apartment.
A woman sniper?
Sunday, June 23, 1940
Coordination Control Somewhere outside London
9:30 a.m. Paris Time
Stepney looked up from his charts as Brigadier Teague, the military Secret Intelligence Service liaison, entered the statistics room, a converted glass-walled conservatory in the Victorian manor house. Outside a fox crept across the rolling lawn, lea
ving a paw print trail on the dewed grass. Warm morning sunlight spread over the dark green horizon of forest.
Stepney tilted his cap over his receding hairline. “Any more news, Teague?”
His colleague held a clipboard under his arm. “Your man Martins overshot the landing site, Stepney.”
As if that was Martins’s fault? The fog had been unfortunate, but Stepney felt good about the plan.
“Blame the pilot and cloud cover. But overshot or not—”
“No word from him yet,” interrupted Teague. “Bad news, that. And using that American woman was a mistake.”
“Did you come up with a better idea, Teague?” Stepney wiped his brow. The heat and damn humidity in this place was stifling. Much better suited to growing orchids than war planning.
“I still don’t understand what the point of sending her in was.”
“Creating different levels of deception is a proven tactic.”
“That’s what you call your harebrained and scattershot missions, old man?”
“My missions have succeeded,” Stepney said mildly. “Diversion is a military strategy as old as the Greeks. Remember the Trojan horse.”
Kate was skilled, trained and credible—the perfect decoy assassin to distract from the primary four-man sniper team who had parachuted in this morning. These snipers were now in place outside the airfield at le Bourget. Their targets were Stossel, Lammers and von Duering of the German High Command, who were arriving to assume their posts in Paris.
Of course, Kate had the skill but there was no chance she would have been able to assassinate the Führer. Her drop point contact would have told her Hitler’s travel plans had changed and that she should go to the fallback plan. Kate would be directed to a café at the Sorbonne, where her contact would reveal her to the Germans—Stepney had planted enough information in his compromised network about the rendezvous that he had no doubt the mole would report it back to German command. With any luck, Kate would weather interrogation long enough to distract them from the four-man team, giving them time to complete their mission and escape. She was tough; Stepney thought she just might hold out. But if she cracked, anything she might confess about her supposed mission would ring as true as it possibly could. When she was arrested, she would have a rifle on her.
Meanwhile Martins, installed in the attic room overlooking the café where Kate was to be apprehended, would see who betrayed Kate at the café—who had already betrayed Stepney’s other operatives—and would transmit back the contact’s identity to London. Stepney knew it had to be one of two men. Using Kate as his expendable would kill two birds—as they said—with one stone.
The best diversions, Stepney had learned from the last war, were credible operatives. Expendable credible operatives.
“Well, there are too many moving parts in this scheme,” Teague said. “And Rees is the biggest one.”
“The plan only works if the Germans believe she’s an assassin.”
“A ranch girl from backwoods Oregon to assassinate the Führer? I don’t buy it and never have. They won’t either.”
Stepney leaned on his cane. “Quit complaining. Churchill signed off on it, for God’s sake. We’ll know more when Martins makes his scheduled transmission.”
Crows cawed from the fenced lawn.
“Never liked the idea of a woman in the field,” said Teague. “How can they withstand interrogation? What if she falls apart too early?”
What a waste of time, this whole conversation, considering the mission was already underway. Too late for cold feet now. “Rees’s been trained. And trained well.” He’d trained her himself, to the highest standards, as he did every agent in Section D.
“I give her one chance in ten of having even made it to Paris,” said Teague. The medals on his lapel caught the light as he set down his clipboard and took out his pipe. “How much time do we need her to survive?”
Stepney checked the flight maps. “Until thirteen hundred hours. So if she lasts four more hours, we’re fine.”
Sunday, June 23, 1940
Near Parc Monceau, Paris | 11:00 a.m. Paris Time
Stepney’s words pounded in Kate’s head: no one lasts long under interrogation. If Jean-Marie hadn’t given her up yet, how long could he resist under torture? His group was compromised. And for what? She’d botched her mission.
Guilt wracked her. She was worthless, and a liability now. Any chance to salvage her failure was gone.
Maybe she should have thrown herself out that window. Given up, like she wanted to. Forget trying to cross a whole city on a hot Sunday morning while troop trucks hunted for an assassin.
For her.
Sweating and ready to abandon the heavy baby buggy, she stopped, paralyzed, at rue de Lévis. A cordon of gray-green uniforms blocked the pedestrian market street, checking identification. Fear pulsed through her; perspiration dripped down her shoulder blades.
“Bonjour, madame,” said the tallest one. He reached down to peer inside the baby buggy. She’d be shot when he discovered the rifle under the flowers. By a damn Kraut with a whisker spot he’d missed shaving. Adrenalin filled her.
Think. Improvise.
“Mais, monsieur, mon bébé dort.” She smiled, cocked her head and mimed sleep with her hands together.
He nodded. “Moi aussi, je suis papa.”
Her insides curdled. Lisbeth’s face flashed in front of her, her fringe of blond eyelashes, her perfect O of a pink mouth. Stop thinking about Lisbeth. She needed to survive, to make them pay.
She gripped his big meaty hand before he reached into the buggy. Smiling, she slid herself in between him and the buggy. “Votre bébé, fille ou garçon, monsieur?” The sharp bulge of his magazine belt dug into her hip. Startled, he grinned.
“Sie liebt dich, Ulrich.” Sniggering came from his partners.
The smell of his stale breath was nauseating in the heat. There was shoving and jostling behind her. She pouted, full-on flirt. “S’il vous plaît, monsieur?” An old woman beside her gave a disgusted sigh.
He shrugged. “Lassen Sie das bitte.”
And she was through the control. Past the disapproving eye of the aproned housewives. Forget going this way again.
At a shadowed passage she huddled against a church wall until the tremors in her shoulders subsided. Until her pounding heart slowed down to match her breathing. Pigeon feathers spiraled above her through a slant of light piercing the dark passage. She felt like those feathers—floating on the current buffeted by forces beyond her control.
She thought about hunting with her father, miles from anywhere, with only the big open sky, the snowcapped Klamath Mountains and blue all around. Not another person until the next county, and yet she’d never felt this alone.
A thunderclap of bells pealed above her and she almost jumped out of her skin.
She couldn’t count on her papers holding up. Think. She had to decide what to do next.
Concentrate.
She tried to steady her breathing in the turgid warm air.
Her father’s words came back to her: When you’re hunting a wolf, Katie, better you track him than him sniffing after you.
She left the buggy in the passage, shouldered her bag and left the narrow corkscrew of a street, keeping her head down. Farther on, beyond the sign for Galleries Lafayette, a German soldier stood sentry by the grilled fence, his rifle pointing up. She kept moving.
Five minutes of walking down side streets in the broiling heat brought her to a tree-filled square—a few carts and horses parked nearby but otherwise deserted on this hot Sunday. She sat on a bench and pretended to read the magazine. She looked around. No one. Then, shielded by the magazine, she opened the envelope again, unfolded the cigarette paper. As she read the instructions her hand shook. Less than two hours to a café meeting at 1 p.m.
To a meeting where she mig
ht get instructions for escape.
Here she’d been pitying herself—stuck in a foreign country, alone, a failure. Pathetic. Hadn’t growing up on ranches with five brothers taught her anything? During the bitter bone-chilling winters no one shirked their chores; they were necessary to survive. No one complained, not even her work-worn mother, who had died giving birth to Kate’s little brother.
There was always a way, she remembered her mother saying, you just had to find it.
She’d missed her contact after the drop, yet she’d gotten herself to Paris—only to blow her mission. The weatherworn bench slat bit into her back. What if Jean-Marie, or whatever his name really was, gave up her rendezvous at the café?
Breathe.
Her mind returned to the meeting instructions inside the sealed envelope. It was different from the messages written on the other cigarette paper and bakery receipt. Had Jean-Marie been a cutout, as Stepney would have said? Cutouts only knew the information source and destination—a messenger from point A to B, Stepney had explained, but no other points, no identities revealed. What if Jean-Marie had only relayed the message, hadn’t even known what it said?
Her choices were to go to the rendezvous or not. She had to take that risk.
Sunday, June 23, 1940
Hôpital Lariboisière, Morgue Section, Paris | 11:15 a.m.
Gunter shoved open Hôpital Lariboisière’s morgue doors, stepping into dank, cold basement air tinted by acrid formaldehyde. He noted the standard fixtures: scales for weighing organs, bone saws and partially sheeted bodies on slabs, drains in the concrete floors. He’d lost count of the autopsies he’d attended as a policeman, yet they still made his scalp tingle.
“Ready with the findings, Dr. Breisach?”
“A preliminary report.” Dr. Breisach looked up from the porcelain autopsy table, his round spectacles slipping down his nose. He had hooded, heavy-lidded eyes and a tight mouth. “Here you’ve got an Englishman whose organs show good health apart from water filling the lungs, a concussed brain and ruptured kidneys.” He pointed with his scalpel to the man’s blue-tinged face and open, vacant eyes. “Cause of death? I’d say suffocation, indicated by the petechial spots in the eyes.” Dr. Breisach shook his head. Whether in disgust at the torture or that Gunter had woken him up for a rush job after a twenty-four-hour shift, it was hard to tell.
