The Winter Agent

by Gareth Rubin

  She nodded. ‘Are you sure you don’t want a weapon?’

  ‘We can’t. We’ll be breaking curfew and there’s a fair chance we’ll be stopped.’ He wished he could have taken his Colt, but a gun would have increased the danger. And infiltration in daylight would be too risky.

  ‘If you don’t come out?’ she asked.

  He lifted the glass of rum to his lips. It had left a slick of moisture on the nicotine-stained and metal-scratched wood. ‘Get back to London as soon as you can.’

  ‘All right.’ She met his gaze. ‘Do you trust me now, Maxime?’

  The question was as insidious as a chemical in the blood. She didn’t expect the truth, of course. She was just testing what he would say, how he would act. ‘Do you think I should?’

  ‘I can’t make you. But I want to know what you’ll say to me in return. I want to know if you’ll lie to me. I think I want you to lie to me. Lying can be a kindness.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘No more than that? You won’t answer the question? Well, another that you won’t answer: do you think you will ever forgive me for what I did?’

  ‘Working against me?’

  ‘It wasn’t against you,’ she corrected him. ‘It was with you but without you seeing it.’

  He knew she was right. But he still wanted to punish her. To turn the screw. ‘You can dress it however you like. It was still a trick.’

  ‘It was a necessity.’

  ‘You could have told me.’

  ‘I couldn’t have –’

  He grabbed her wrist. ‘No! You could have done. I would have seen to it that you and your family were safe,’ he whispered angrily.

  Her eyes flared. ‘Don’t be an arrogant fool. It’s dangerous.’

  He let go of her wrist and took a pace back. They stared at each other while they both cooled down. ‘Let’s try to get some rest,’ Reece said, taking control of his voice.

  He struck a match and lit the corners of the two photographs, dropping them into a metal pail as the boat continued to rise and fall. Every time it took a big wave head-on they would lift into the air and thud back down to the rock-like water below when they had cleared it.

  After a while they saw the round moon appear through the Plexiglass. And then, sailing across it, the masts of the French ketch that would take them to the coast.

  After transferring to the fishing boat they slipped through the heavy afternoon rain.

  Later, close to Brest on the coast of Brittany, they clambered into a dinghy, and were taken to a deserted cove. From there they walked to the railway station hand in hand like the first time that they had arrived in France together, and caught a train to Paris.

  Close to its destination, the train rolled past a column of German military vehicles full of soldiers. Reece noted the battle-hardened look they wore.

  CHAPTER 28

  Detective measures

  Agents provocateurs. Sometimes after small fry (black marketeers, etc.). More dangerous ones provoke subversive talk (by violent Nazism as well as by pretended patriotism), offer services, pose as members of subversive organization, ask for help as RAF pilots, escapers, etc., trap friendly police who let them pass control with arms, bogus clandestine newspapers.

  5 June 1944

  In the darkness before dawn, their footsteps rang off cracked pavements in Billancourt, western Paris. A seller of black bread rolls walked disconsolately past them, wordlessly offering his wares on a wooden tray. ‘We don’t have any money,’ Charlotte told him.

  They turned into a short road with five or six warehouses, the rears of which must have looked out on to the wharf. A dog was pawing through a heap of rubbish and it whimpered and trotted away when it saw them approach. Reece immediately saw which building was the target. Four German soldiers in Waffen-SS uniforms stood in front of a gate that was wide enough for a lorry to pass through.

  They walked straight past to the next corner. Reece reached into a buttoned pocket inside his pack. He drew out and swallowed a pill, watched by Charlotte. Within a minute the tiredness left him and he felt like running, but the Benzedrine washing over him wasn’t clean, it was full of grit. From there Reece carried on around the block, leaving Charlotte in place to divert the guards’ attention.

  He strolled down to the wharf front and carefully picked his way along the shoreline, past industrial relics: mooring points and rusting metal cranes that had once lifted heavy goods from barges. He gazed across the water to the heart of Paris. Without wanting to, his mind travelled back to when he was a boy and had walked along the water’s edge, with friends, with a girl, when things were better. They had to be better again soon.

  After checking around he knelt and grabbed some dirt from the ground, smearing it across his face and hands as camouflage against the dark, before creeping forward until he was behind the warehouse’s riverside fence. It wasn’t hard to spot the drain on the riverbank that took away the rainwater from the warehouse courtyard. It was concrete and less than a metre wide but with a thick steel bar across the middle, preventing all but a child from shimmying up it. Reece took the two glass phials and unscrewed their tops. The red-brown powder was iron oxide – rust – while the whitish powder was aluminium. He poured them both on to a sheet of paper, carefully mixed them, then poured the mixture back into the phials. He tied each phial on top of one end of the bar. He took the strip of metal – magnesium – divided it in two and inserted the two lengths into the mixtures. Then he put the dark glasses over his eyes, drew his cigarette lighter from his pocket and lit the end of the magnesium ribbons, and stepped back three paces.

  The magnesium flared with a blue-tinted flame. A few seconds later the flame hit the mixture of rust and aluminium and, as it did, a flash erupted, the glass phial exploding. The brightness of the thermite reaction hurt Reece’s eyes behind the specially treated glasses and he felt the intense heat – thousands of degrees high – on his face. The flame was so bright he couldn’t see the mixture within it, but almost immediately he saw the steel bar begin to melt underneath the core of the flame. In less than ten seconds the thermite had melted right through each end. With a thud, the middle part fell to the ground. As the remaining thermite dripped on to the wet bottom of the pipe, it flared once more, cracking the concrete. Reece put the glasses away, waited for the reaction to die down then smothered it with mud.

  He crawled into the wet pipe, lighting the way with his pencil torch, hoping there would be no bend or kink to squirm around. Luckily, it proved to be straight, slanting up to the ground. It was a foul crawl, but he had been through worse. About fifteen metres along, he could make out what had to be the drain inlet. He dragged himself underneath the iron grille, through which water was dripping. He waited, listening for the sound of footsteps. There was a sound, indistinct, that came to him distorted by the concrete passage – distant shouting, perhaps – but it died away. He stretched up and gently pushed the heavy iron grille away. Then, carefully, he lifted his head through.

  He found himself looking at the heels of two black leather army boots. The guard had his back to the drain entrance. Reece immediately drew back down, watching the grey-clad legs. He had to decide what to do. The grille was still out of place and he was exposed. He gingerly reached up, but then stopped. The guard was beginning to turn around. Reece got ready to retreat down the pipe. But then something made the guard turn back. Shouting. Faintly, Reece heard the word ‘Fire!’ It had to be the flares set by Charlotte. The guard muttered, ‘Scheisse,’ and dropped a cigarette end before striding away.

  Quickly, Reece hauled himself up, quietly replaced the grille and ran to the rear of the building. So far, it was working.

  All the windows on the building had been boarded up, no doubt to stop anyone looking in as much as to prevent light escaping during blackout. The warehouse had a door that would have led on to the riverfront, had the fence not been there, and Reece set about picking the ageing lock. When the tumblers fell into place he opened the
door a fraction, saw all was dark, and stepped in.

  It proved to be a short, empty corridor with metal stairs leading to an upper floor – where the offices were, Reece suspected. That would be the primary goal. He climbed noiselessly to find a landing with two doors, both bruised and scraped. There was no sound from either and he pushed the first open to be met with an unpleasant smell. By the light of his pencil torch he saw he was looking at a foul latrine. He pulled back and went to the other door, where a dim light was leaking around the edges. As he opened it, he made out a neat office and a candle burning on a wide, untidy desk. Beside it was a bottle of schnapps and, right behind it, a man was slumped in a plump chair, his eyes closed. He was using his jacket, which bore the insignia of an SS rifleman, as a blanket.

  Reece had no weapon except his lapel knife. He drew it and held it ready, carefully listening to the man’s breath. It was deep and long, faintly snoring. Reece would have liked to search the room, but the sleeping man was too much of a risk, so he eased himself back and drew the door towards its frame. As it moved into place, the hinges emitted a short, sharp whine. Reece stopped and watched the German, waiting to see if the breathing would change. By the orange candlelight Reece could see he was a big, barrel-chested man who had squeezed into his uniform. To his relief, the deep breaths continued just as they had. He began to back out. And then the man’s eyes flicked open. In the warm light they were a watery grey and they fixed on Reece in a moment.

  ‘Sorry, I was looking for the latrine,’ Reece said in German. For a moment, the man in the chair looked confused and pointed out, towards the other door. But then his line of sight fell to the knife in Reece’s hand. Reece knew it was time.

  The soldier jumped up and threw himself at Reece. But as he did so Reece pulled the door further towards himself, bracing it with his foot, and the rifleman crashed into the wood, rebounding off it and staggering back. Reece stepped forward, his knife tip pointing at the German. The big man responded by grabbing a solid-looking wooden stool and hurling it effortlessly at Reece’s arm. It smacked his hand open, knocking the knife somewhere under a cloth-covered table. The soldier glanced to his side and Reece saw where his gaze was heading: a pistol in a holster a couple of paces away. The German went for it and Reece charged forward. The soldier had his hands on the gun when Reece landed within arm’s reach of him, spun on his left foot and stamped with his right on to the German’s knee. Even without the cracking sound Reece knew he had fractured the bone. The trooper froze for a moment, both hands on the leather holster, his face blank in amazement, before crumpling to his side, falling with a cry of anguish on to the broken joint and knocking over the candle. Its light extinguished with a wisp of smoke.

  In the dark, Reece grabbed the man’s thick hair and brought his knee up hard into the temple, stunning him more. Then he clamped his right elbow under the German’s chin. He seized his own wrist with his left hand and tightened the grip on the man’s neck, cutting the carotid artery, restricting the flow of blood to the brain, tighter and tighter, until there was no flow at all. He felt the trooper desperately struggling, his hands clutching faintly at Reece’s arm. He fought hard, but Reece felt him growing weaker by the second. After half a minute the struggle became little more than a shuffling, and then it stopped altogether. Reece listened for breath, but it had ended. He let the German slump to the floor in the blackness. He checked the man’s wrist and then his neck. There was no pulse.

  By the light of his torch Reece dragged the body behind a large trunk and stowed the gun and jacket there too. The guard gone, he began to search the room. He looked over the desk, but the only papers were unimportant chits for rations and fuel. Two of them were authorized with a small, tight signature. Reece looked at it and his eyes narrowed. It was a name he knew. Otto Skorzeny’s rescue of Benito Mussolini had been trumpeted in the controlled French newspapers as much as in the German press and now his name had turned up in the Paris warehouse. Whatever Parade One was, it seemed that Skorzeny was commanding it.

  There was nothing in the drawers except for a few pens and pencils. Given the importance of the facility, that suggested more sensitive documents were hidden somewhere.

  He quickly looked around and began pulling the furniture away from the walls. In the corner, veiled by a cloth-covered table, he found a small grey steel wall safe. For once he blessed his luck that the big trooper had woken up. But he still had to get it open. It had a single dial to spin and presumably three numbers to find from the sixty on the dial. Reece examined it closely but there was no clue as to what the combination could be.

  He took the small microphone from his pocket, held it against the metal two centimetres to the right of the dial and placed the earpiece to his ear. He turned the dial gently, notch by notch, listening to the tumblers clicking, as he had been instructed at the Finishing School. Each sound was light and thin, until the number thirty-one fell harder. He had one. Then click click click the other way and the six slotted into place. A rustling sound above made him catch his breath, but it must have been a bird settling on the roof. And then more turns and the number two locked in. He took the steel handle and lifted. The door opened and he was presented with two buff brown folders. He checked behind him. There was no sign of anyone close, and he pulled out the papers. One contained records for personnel. Reece turned on an electric lamp on the desk and rapidly photographed the records. The men detailed, mostly Waffen-SS but a few from the Heer and Kriegsmarine, and one from the Luftwaffe, had impressive war records. Many had been decorated. Reece replaced the papers and opened the second folder.

  Five pages detailed nearly twenty Allied battleships and cruisers that would form the backbone of the invasion flotilla, naming their officers and specifying in detail the range and destructive power of the armaments carried. With that level of detail it could only have come from someone inside the Admiralty. Behind the documents were maps in small and large scale of the French coastline – the maps Luc had seen in the photographs, the maps of the possible invasion points and the German counter-attack plans in each case. The marked beaches were labelled with German regimental numbers, all grouped on the edge of the page as ‘Parade One’.

  At the bottom a number of lines had been typed – the names of Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS commanders to whom the map had been circulated, it appeared, and expression of the classification level. Below that there was one more point of information: ‘Parade to provide army Order of Battle, officers’ names and precise regimental objectives upon departure from port, to enable operational activation’ stood out in black letters. That meant that Parade – or one of his sources – was in a role whereby he would gain clearance for the Order of Battle as soon as the flotilla started steaming for France.

  Reece knew that there would be a precise list of who would be given details of the flotilla and that it would be divided into two classes: those who needed to know before departure and those who didn’t need to know until afterwards. The fact that Parade or his source was on the list and in the second category would narrow the search down for 5. But they would still have to find him before he transmitted the information.

  Reece photographed the pages under the lamplight. He didn’t have much time now. He replaced the folders precisely as they had been and turned the safe dial back to where he had found it.

  From there, he stole down the stairway and found a large door on the ground level. He passed through, and a change in the air – colder, harsher – told him he was in a vast room: the main warehouse space.

  In the dark, Reece decided to chance his blue-bulbed pencil torch. Its ghostly beam searched through the room. Just below the ceiling a metal gantry ran around the walls, accessed by a series of ladders. The glimmer fell on a few pieces of machinery pushed to the side of the room and on the wide sliding door along the side leading to the courtyard. But the strangest sight was a structure beside Reece. He stared before walking over and right into it, struck by how out of place it seemed, the strangeness
accentuated by the blue glow.

  It was a perfectly constructed army post set up at one end of the huge warehouse floor, complete with power supply, telephone lines, maps pinned to boards and desks. But what was strange was that all the maps and signs were in English. The officer’s jacket slung across the back of the chair was American. He checked the insignia on the uniform: US infantry. It was an American command post in a Waffen-SS training facility. It had to be for training for some sort of sabotage mission, but precisely what that mission would be was not yet clear.

  Beside the hut a series of tables were laid out with British and American weapons in neat rows, arranged by size. On the wall there were maps with Allied units marked on them, vectors showing intended movements. Points marked with red pins seemed to intercept the Allied forces close to the coast. Above the maps were large photographs cut from newspapers of the Allied commanders – not just Eisenhower, Patton, Montgomery, but a score of other brigadiers and generals. This seemed much more than the Germans simply knowing their enemy.

  Reece looked around and, as he peered to the other end of the warehouse, he saw three metal beasts lurking in the gloom. A Sherman tank with standard American markings sat beside a jeep and a British half-track; they must have been seized in battle – perhaps in Italy or North Africa.

  He took a pencil and paper from his breast pocket and noted down the names of the senior officers that the Germans had been learning to identify on sight. He took the camera from his pocket and recorded the scene as best he could with the weak torchlight. He was halfway through his task when he stopped.