The Winter Agent

by Gareth Rubin

  ‘Major, do you need the room?’ the naval officer barked.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The commander immediately lifted a bundle of papers from the wooden lectern and led the Wren out without another word, shutting the church’s door behind them with a heavy thud. The sound echoed around, resounding off the stone walls and high-vaulted ceiling until it died away like a sigh. Delaney took a step further into the room. ‘You need to speak to me, Maxime,’ he said as he turned around. He never saw the fist that cracked into his jaw. His feet stumbled and he fell backwards against the wooden screen that closed off the nave. And then he was on his back, pinned to the tiled floor, with Reece’s bloody and bruised hands on his chest. His lapels were in Reece’s fingers. The wooden lectern overturned and broke on the floor.

  ‘Are you running him?’ Reece shouted. He felt every stroke of the whip and beat of the cosh that he had suffered at the hands of Klaussmann in Amiens.

  ‘Take your hands off –’

  ‘Parade. Are you running him!’

  Delaney twisted and put his hand under Reece’s chin, forcing his head up.

  ‘Stand down!’

  Reece planted his knee into Delaney’s rib, but the other man was strong too, and tipped Reece’s body over. They stayed locked.

  ‘Tell me or –’

  ‘Look around you, Maxime. What do you see?’ Delaney demanded through gritted teeth. Reece’s eyes flickered to the walls. Faded and torn regimental colours hung above marble tombs and brass plaques, memorials to regiments long disbanded and men long dead. ‘All for the greater good.’ Reece stared at the names. All those other men who had been sacrificed.

  He felt Delaney’s strength beat him away and he couldn’t stop himself being pushed off. He grabbed at his OC but Delaney scrambled to his feet and out through the gap to the broken nave, where the rain was falling between the blank, fire-blackened walls.

  Reece sprinted after and threw all his body against his commander’s back, knocking him against a pillar and tumbling with him so that they both fell to the broken floor. An empty doorway opened on to the road, showing the young men tramping towards their transports to France.

  ‘What do you want me to tell you?’ Delaney mumbled, the back of his head swimming in a puddle of filthy water.

  ‘I want you to tell me if you’re running Parade!’

  Delaney lifted his face so that it almost touched Reece’s. He seemed to summon up fire Reece had never seen. ‘Yes!’ he shouted back, his voice full of fury. ‘Yes, I’m damn well running him. And I’d do it again and again and again! I’d do it a thousand times.’ Reece stopped, hollowed out by the knowledge. Delaney’s eyes met Reece’s, looking into his dark irises and, for a moment, everything was still. It seemed to Reece that the very air had disappeared and there was nothing between them. Then Delaney spoke again, his voice cold and measured against the soft rain. ‘You have no understanding of what is at stake, Maxime.’

  Reece’s fingers tightened on the fabric. ‘He’s –’

  ‘He’s a soldier! And so am I. And so are they.’ Delaney pointed through the empty doorway towards the rivers of young men in green-brown uniforms shuffling towards the waterfront, to their boarding craft, to their gun boats. ‘And succeeding today is more important than any of us.’

  Reece formed his hand into a fist, ready to strike it down. Delaney grabbed for Reece’s throat, but Reece was faster. His fist thudded down on to Delaney’s wrist, breaking a bone.

  A noise made him turn – the Blue Cap sentry barely out of his teens was standing in the opening between the nave and the chancel staring at the two men, frozen by the sight. Then his fingers grabbed for his side-arm, wrenching the gun from its white holster. Reece leaped to his feet and ran for him.

  The sentry hesitated as he lifted the pistol, giving Reece time to reach him and grab his forearm. A small explosion rent the air as a bullet burst from the barrel. It passed within a hand’s breadth of Delaney’s cheek, into an ancient stone pillar, ricocheting away in another direction. A wisp of heat and smoke from the gun was all that Reece could see of it.

  He kicked away the Blue Cap’s leg and, as the boy fell to the sopping floor, Reece snatched the gun, twisting it out of his hand. He trained the barrel on Delaney and placed his finger on the trigger. He could still hear the echo of the bullet’s report, coming back to him again and again.

  Delaney’s eye met his. They stayed still for what seemed like a minute. ‘Decide,’ Delaney growled.

  To his side, Reece saw movement. Another military policeman was charging through the doorway with his gun raised, pointing it at Reece. ‘You, stop!’ the soldier ordered.

  Delaney was dead centre in his aim. He could fire any second and he wouldn’t miss.

  Delaney spoke calmly. ‘Stand down,’ he told the policeman.

  ‘Sir?’ the man replied, aiming at Reece.

  ‘I said, stand down!’ Delaney shouted before sinking back, his chest rising and falling in rapid bursts. ‘Get the hell out of here.’ Reece could see the man hesitate and lower his gun. The other policeman was looking up at him from the broken floor. ‘Maxime,’ Delaney sighed. His hands lifted in the air and they gazed at each other, both knowing that the ground under them could fall away at any second. ‘Wait outside, both of you, say nothing to anyone,’ he ordered the two Blue Caps. ‘You understand?’

  ‘Y-yes, sir.’ The young man scrambled to his feet and the two left the broken body of the church.

  For a long time the two SOE officers’ eyes were chained together. Outside, there was the sound of men on the road, of vehicles moving and turning. Reece felt all the betrayals he had lived through: Charlotte, Thomas, the betrayal of France by so many of her own sons.

  And Delaney. His betrayal was so wide and deep it would bury all the others like a sea of mud.

  ‘Are you going to holster that weapon, Maxime?’ Delaney asked quietly. Reece looked down at the pistol. It was a Colt like his own. It was pointed now at the floor, where weeds were growing through the tiles. His hand tilted it up, levelling the barrel. He felt the steel trigger moving back, closer to the trigger guard. He left it there, feeling the tension in the spring. For a long time Reece searched Delaney’s eyes for recognition of what he had done, what he was guilty of, what it had cost. Then his finger relaxed. The trigger eased back into its cold position. He let the gun fall to his side. Then he turned his back on his OC. In the thin light and air, the rain drifting down to form a film on his hair and skin, he looked up to watch a wing of bombers slip overhead. ‘Was it always Normandy?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Delaney pushed himself to his feet and looked to the same sky and the squadrons heading for France. His uniform was muddied and wet, dripping to the ground. He brushed dirt from his face. ‘We’ve found a way to create artificial harbours. We can use the beaches there.’

  There was a pause. The engines overhead whined like wasps. ‘So they’ve died for nothing.’ Richard, Thomas, Sebastien.

  ‘It isn’t nothing. It’s the mission. It’s how the mission succeeds.’ Delaney stopped and his voice fell. ‘We had to make the Germans think we were going for the Pas de Calais. The best way of doing that was to let them beat it out of you. We ran Parade so he could give you to them.’

  ‘Thomas?’

  ‘He was under the highest orders to hand you to Klaussmann when you went back. He hated the instruction. Don’t blame him,’ Delaney said.

  ‘The meeting with Churchill. That was all to reinforce the impression?’ Reece had felt such a sense of duty that day, of a shared commitment to ending tyranny. Now he knew he had been their pawn sacrifice, a dupe first and last, for a plan he had no idea had wrapped him up. He knew it was just, but he had had no part in the bargain. He despised it with all the hate that he could clutch and he wanted to see Richard’s blood and Thomas’s blood on Delaney’s hands.

  ‘Yes.’ Delaney paused and stared at Reece’s back. ‘I’m sorry you went through what you did.’

/>   Sorry. Reece believed him. He didn’t care. ‘Did they believe it?’ asked Reece, searching for something at the bottom of it all. ‘Calais.’

  ‘Yes, they believed it.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Klaussmann told Berlin as soon as you talked.’

  Reece wiped his face. ‘So why did you send me back?’ He wanted to know it was worth Thomas’s death too. In the end, Thomas had been as loyal as he had. Reece felt guilty that he was the one who had survived, that Thomas had lain there, his body ripped by the grenade.

  Delaney walked to the doorway and stood beside Reece, staring at the shuffling troops. ‘That was hard. Yes, that was hard. One or two in the German high command were growing suspicious that Parade could provide such high-level intelligence. Sending you there told them we were worried and desperate to know who he was. He’s about to send them plans suggesting Normandy is just a feint and the real invasion is still to come in Calais. We need them to believe him and keep their forces away from the action.’

  A blue darkness seemed to mist over Reece’s vision. ‘You sent me back to be caught.’

  ‘I sent you back to be caught. And to talk. And to mislead them. And to save it all. Wouldn’t you?’ He turned and lifted his hands, palms up, asking for reason and understanding. ‘We estimate that every extra day Rommel’s Fifteenth Army waits for us in Calais, waits for a force that will never come, we save ten thousand soldiers and God knows how many tanks and guns. You were a part of the operation. It was the operation above all. And it’s worked.’

  ‘Parade One’s a plan to impersonate American officers. But you know it all, don’t you?’

  Delaney nodded. ‘They won’t get within a hundred miles of those posts.’

  A small brown bird soared down through the open roof, alighted on a broken pillar then flitted through to the sanctuary.

  All that he had been told, all he had been led to believe, by Churchill’s subtle questions, by Delaney’s insinuations, by the desperation of the mission to free him from Amiens, had been a deception that he was to pass on to the Germans like a virus.

  Would he have done the same as his commander? He didn’t know. He had never had to make the decision. He could picture himself behind Delaney’s desk, the papers laid out in front of him, the choice burning through in black ink, but he would never truly know the heat of that calculation.

  ‘You created Parade.’

  ‘Someone had to. I did it.’

  ‘Behind the mask. There you are.’

  ‘If you want to see it that way.’ They turned towards the sea, where the fleet lay, the greatest air, sea and land armada ever assembled. The boats and ships seemed so still, even though the beating waves were high. ‘Pity the poor Germans,’ Delaney said under his breath. ‘They don’t even know the storm that’s coming to them.’

  A platoon of Pioneers shuffled towards their embarkation point. A staff car appeared from the same direction and a senior American officer emerged, surrounded by other officers.

  ‘What was it called?’ Reece asked, turning to look Delaney in the eye.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Its name. The operation. The one I was part of.’

  Delaney wiped the rain from his face with his sleeve. ‘It’s had a few names. We called it Jael, then Torrent. Then we called it Appendix Y.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Maxime …’

  ‘What is it now?’

  ‘Fortitude. It’s called Operation Fortitude.’

  Reece turned the word over in his mind. Fortitude. What so many saints had placed their trust in. But it was another moral pillar that cracked and splintered as he tried to grasp it. All the roofs were falling in and the foundations cracking under their feet. ‘Was there ever a real Parade?’

  ‘There was, briefly,’ Delaney replied. ‘He was a desk officer in 5’s American Liaison section. Fascist leanings.’

  ‘But you caught him?’

  ‘At the start of the war a Dutch SD agent, a pianist, walked into a police station in Liverpool and offered to work as a double for us. She led us straight to our little traitor. Evans has been impersonating him from the beginning, pointing them towards Calais. He knows the Nazi mindset. He’s seen it first hand – even flirted with it a bit when he was a student, truth be told – so he’s a good mimic. But we had to feed them some genuine information along the way to make them trust him. Good men have died for it.’ He looked at Reece. There was silence between them, and noise from the troops all around. ‘What are you going to do now, Maxime?’ he asked. ‘You could probably break my neck before anyone could stop you. You know how to do it.’

  Reece looked him up and down. He saw the uniform and the small ribbons on the left breast designating service or bravery. And he turned and walked away, standing in the doorway to the churchyard, the pain in his limbs and his fingers beating with the blood through his veins.

  ‘We could do with you back out there.’

  Reece stopped. The words were unavoidable.

  ‘This is just the beginning. It will take months just to break out of Normandy. We need Paris to rise up. We need someone there to take charge. Weapons. Barricades, when the day comes. Will it be you?’

  Reece felt air enter his lungs, lifting his chest. When it sank again he walked on, along the path through the headstones to the street. The Blue Caps were standing guard at the entrance to the chancel with their pistol holsters unclipped. Reece saw them glance towards Delaney.

  Somehow, until he was in the middle of it, Reece hadn’t realized the chaos of that street. Hundreds of bodies were swarming, men and women shouting. Someone barged into him and said something, but he didn’t hear the words – an oath, an apology or a warning. He walked a few paces and, when he lifted his eyes from his feet, he found he was in the line of young men laughing and joking, pushing towards the quayside and the boats that would take them across the Channel. It was a stream that led to a sea that led to a beach that led to a battleground, and he had seen it before and he would see it again.

  ‘Move yourself, mate,’ muttered one of the figures shoving past. Reece gazed at him. An infantryman, twenty years old, perhaps. ‘Blokes trying to come through. Don’t want to miss it all, do we?’ His mates chuckled.

  ‘It’ll still be there,’ Reece muttered. He wanted to tell them what it meant to be on the front line, to dive for cover and lose friends to shrapnel. He couldn’t tell them.

  ‘Sure of that? Still a few Jerries to share around. Well, that’s nice to know.’ As they laughed again, Reece saw Charlotte’s face flash between their shambling bodies. She watched him come closer as someone began playing a mouth organ, a jaunty tune that contrasted with the slow pace of the men it was for. He reached her in a thin alleyway between two buildings. The ground was muddy with tramped dirt.

  He told her.

  She gazed at him, into his eyes. Then she tossed her cigarette to the pavement, where it lay burning in the dust. ‘What now?’

  He lifted his face to her. ‘Delaney needs people back there,’ he said. A young sailor squeezing past them tripped and dropped a metal canister at their feet. He apologized, hefted it over his shoulder and continued on his way. Reece saw him rejoin the line of men, then his vision swept over the heads of the moving mass to the dull sky peppered with fighters and soaring gulls, and to where Delaney stood watching him, from ground raised above the level of the street.

  ‘In Paris?’

  ‘Yes.’

  A staff car stopped beside the church. Its door opened and Huw Evans got out, carrying a sheaf of papers. He approached Delaney, who took them without moving his gaze from Reece. Evans followed the OC’s line of sight until he met Reece’s eyes. Soldiers tramped past but the three of them remained still.

  ‘You don’t have to go,’ she said.

  Reece watched his OC and the man who had brought all the brutality of the Reich down upon him. ‘I’m going.’

  She pulled her coat tighter. ‘Yes. I know.’
>
  ‘Will you come?’

  ‘I’ll come,’ she said.

  ‘It will be harder this time. The Germans will be desperate.’

  ‘What’s our mission?’

  ‘The Resistance will be open soon, an uprising. They need people to direct it.’ The men crowding the road began a song, led by the mouth organ. Reece recognized the melody but didn’t know where it was from. A show tune, he thought. It had been popular some years ago.

  ‘What are you thinking of?’ she asked.

  ‘Paris.’ He looked out at the boats on the sea. ‘The Germans running. Their barracks burning down. Our people taking the streets.’ He placed his foot on the still-smouldering cigarette butt and screwed it into the ground. Its ash spread out. ‘I’m thinking of that.’

  Historical Notes

  The book is inspired by the tragic story of the Physician circuit, which operated in Paris and northern France. The network was built by Major Francis Suttill, service name Prosper, an immensely brave man. Brought up in France by an English father and a French mother, he was recruited to SOE in 1940 and parachuted into France in 1942.

  Physician – widely known as Prosper, after its organizer – was a very large and successful network until 1943, when it was betrayed to the SD and began to unravel. The traitor was Henri Déricourt, a French air force officer who had joined SOE and been assigned to the circuit to identify drop zones for the RAF. In France, he was observed by SOE agents to meet SD officers. This may have been part of a plan to infiltrate the SD, but at least one SOE agent informed London that he suspected Déricourt of being a double agent.

  Suttill himself was captured in June 1943 and tortured for information. One of the German interrogators later claimed he gave up intelligence in return for the lives of his fellow agents being spared, although this is uncertain. He was later taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and executed in 1945.

  After the war, Déricourt was investigated for the crime of betraying Prosper. His defence was that he had been secretly recruited by MI6 and had acted under orders. Evidence emerged – certainly not conclusive, but substantial – that he was telling the truth. Why MI6 would do such a thing is uncertain, but in May 1943 Suttill made a trip to England, possibly for a meeting with Churchill. It is believed by some that Prosper was fed disinformation regarding the time and place of D-Day – that it would come in northern France in 1943 – and the disinformation was to be extracted from him by the Gestapo, thus tying up many German troops in the wrong place at the wrong time.