“Now,” Ludlow continued, “let’s talk shop.”
He led the shopkeeper around one of the freestanding shelves, thus enabling Lillian to sweep her professional eyes over the rest of the store without attracting any undue attention.
The majority of the shop consisted of shelves and shelves of stuff. The stuffiness of it all made her feel somewhat claustrophobic. She kept her Washington apartment clean, almost Spartan. It was a direct result of her time with a Japanese-American monk in the months immediately after her breakup with James and her fleeing Paris after Frank’s ill-advised proposal.
***
In those early months, her heart broken, she literally wandered the world. It wasn’t an easy thing to do as a single woman, but she made it work. She ended up back in San Diego, having nowhere else to go. She hated being back home. Absolutely hated it. Her parents loved having her being back under their roof, but Lillian looked for any reason, even the most flimsy, to get out of the house. That’s how she ended up stranded in the mountains east of Los Angeles one summer’s day.
Lillian had taken a bus out to the country with the intent of climbing a mountain for no other reason than to see if she could. She hadn’t brought the proper supplies and burned through her remaining money buying what she needed. Having conquered the mountain, she felt exhilarated but empty. The thrill of the climb filled the hole in her soul only as long as she was on the mountain. Once back on level ground, the hole was there again. She considered climbing the mountain again, but decided against it, knowing she’d need something to fill the void in her life.
She decided to hitchhike down the mountain roads and make her way back to San Diego. Being an attractive red-haired woman meant she didn’t lack for cars that stopped. She fought off one man who tried to take advantage of her. His response was literally to throw her out of the car. Dirty and disheveled, Lillian was walking when an old black Model A Ford slowed to a halt next to her. Inside, an old man gazed at her. She shielded her eyes from the sun and approached the car. Lillian was surprised to discover the man was Oriental. He introduced himself as Kenji Tanaka and offered to drive her all the way back to her home in San Diego. She didn’t think the Ford could make it that far, but she climbed in nonetheless. There was a comfort level she immediately felt, so much so that she started to talk. She talked and talked and told this old stranger everything. By the time they pulled up to her childhood home hours after dark, he knew her entire story.
“Thank you for driving me and listening me ramble on,” the young Lillian had said.
“It was a pleasure, Miss Saxton.” He smiled warmly. “If you wouldn’t mind a piece of advice, I might have the answer for you.”
“What is it?”
“Would you meet me tomorrow at this address and you can determine if what I have to offer is for you.” He scribbled on a piece of paper and handed it to her.
The location turned out to be an academy for martial arts and Zen teachings. Lillian tried it. Six months later, she found herself content and longing for a new mission in life: to give back. She joined the Army the following spring and quickly found herself a member of a group that looked out for American interests at home.
And abroad, she thought to herself now, standing in the antiques shop. The academy had brought her a sense of contentment with the world; her time in the Army, working secret missions, had trained her to find the odd thing in a given situation.
She let her eyes move across everything inside Buckley’s. Nothing seemed out of place, really. Glass cabinets showcased jewelry. A mirror on the wall allowed potential buyers to see themselves with the new jewelry. The china had little cards with typed descriptions of locations and origins. To the casual observer, this was a normal antique shop in Liverpool.
But Theodore Montgomery had placed a call here last night. Montgomery was a spy and a murderer. Something was here. And she was damn well going to find it.
Lillian glanced at Ludlow. He had the shopkeeper discussing something on a far shelf. They faced away from her. She took that opportunity to slip behind the counter. Again, nothing seemed out of place. All looked normal.
Her eyes found the closed door that led to the rear of the store. Another glance at Ludlow to confirm he still had the shopkeeper enthralled and she opened the door and slipped inside.
A short hall was lit only by a single bulb located in the center of the ceiling. Two doors, on opposite sides of the hallway, were the only things to see here. The floor was covered by a long rug that ran the length of the hall. Waste-high wainscoting ran along all the walls in this area.
But she heard something faint. The sound came from down the hall. On tiptoe, she walked deeper into the antique shop. The sound grew louder. It was talking, but she couldn’t make out any words. She moved to the door on the right and put an ear to it. She frowned. The sounds were not any clearer.
Something caught her eye on the floor. It was a sliver of light. For some reason, it ran the length of the wall. On a hunch, she stepped forward and put her ear to the wooden paneling.
Here, the sound was much clearer. It was talking, but she couldn’t make out what she heard. There was little doubt about where this talking emanated from: a secret room. It was the only conclusion to be drawn from the current facts.
A shiver of fear coursed through her body when she realized why she couldn’t make out what she heard: the person inside this secret room was not speaking English.
He was speaking German.
Involuntarily, Lillian’s upper lip curled into a snarl. Her jaws clenched. Now, she had a decision to make: leave this hallway, alert Ludlow, exit the store, and return with all of Bratton’s men. In this scenario, the shopkeeper might get suspicious and destroy any evidence behind this wall.
Or she could find the secret switch and go in alone.
It was an easy decision. She pulled out her pistol, checked the clip, and secured her purse over her shoulder.
She knelt on the floor and pulled up the rug. No scratches appeared on the floor, which meant the door swung inward. Standing, she felt around the wall for some sort of hidden lever or knob. The walls above and below the wainscoting were perfectly smooth. She ran her fingers along the wainscoting and found a break in the wood. She discovered another one about a foot away. Was this the handle?
From out in the shop, she heard the shopkeeper speaking loudly. He was asking about where she was. Any moment, he would barge through that door and discover her. Granted, she had a gun, but she preferred the element of surprise to be on her side.
Holding her pistol up, her arm at a ninety-degree angle, Lillian Saxton turned the length of wainscoting. A click from within the wall sounded. She pushed the wall, at once feeling foolish and ready. The wall swung inward at the same time as the door from the shop burst open.
CHAPTER 14
Lillian Saxton risked a glance at the shop door. The shopkeeper filled the door frame. Ludlow stood behind him, moving to her position. She had to have faith that Ludlow could handle himself. Of that, she wasn’t one hundred percent sure, considering his slight size.
Her eyes shifted to the visage before her. Inside the wall was a room she considered too large, considering her mental image of this small antique shop. A part of her mind wondered if this was a false wall to the neighboring store. Immediately in front of her were two wooden desks butted up against each other like she found in police stations back in America. On the far side, facing away from her, a man wearing a brown shirt sat at a table. On top of this table was a radio receiver and transmitter. To her immediate right, the wall stopped and a larger interior revealed itself.
“Ludlow, take him!” Lillian raised her gun to the man at the radio. The sound of scuffling emanated from the direction of the main shop. She, however, did not take her eyes off the radio man.
He whirled, his eyes wide with fear. A split second later, his hand reached out for the pistol—a Luger something in the back of her mind registered—lying on the table.
Lillian squeezed the trigger twice. Two short bursts erupted in the small room. Lead slugs bit into the wooden table, one of them knocking the Luger to the floor.
“Don’t move!” she shouted at Radio Man. Her arms extended, she stepped into the room to cover him.
A third, previously unseen person lunged at her from the right. Lillian saw it coming, but could do nothing to prevent the person’s body from slamming into hers. They both fell to the floor. Her martial arts training had prepared her for situations such as this. She pivoted in mid-fall, enabling her to land on her shoulder and fling her assailant off balance and, more important, off her. It was a he, she noted. He smacked into the left wall.
Radio Man, taking the opportunity his co-conspirator gave him, bent down and snatched up his Luger. He turned and brought the firearm to aim at her.
Lillian had not lost her grip. She saw what was about to happen and fired off three more rounds. The bullets chunked into Radio Man’s body, sending streams of blood from the man’s body and splattering on the walls.
“No!” The cry came from the man who had tackled her. He lay behind her.
Lillian rolled away from him. Her thinking was to scare him enough to surrender. She still had many questions she wanted answered. Ludlow also would need any potential spies captured alive. He had made the point abundantly clear when he allowed her to join him. It was his only condition.
In the heat of the moment, orders and intentions could get muddled. That was not the case here, but her assailant only saw her bringing her gun to face him. He had gotten to his feet. She didn’t think she’d have any problem curtailing him.
He lashed out with his foot. His shoe caught her pistol. She lost her grip and her gun skittered across the floor. The force knocked her to her knees.
She looked up at him to assess if he had any weapons. Seeing none, she thought her skills might win the day. If only she could get her feet under her.
The man didn’t give her a chance. He kicked at her face. Lillian moved. The heavy boot missed her face, but passed so close she felt the breeze.
Lying on her right side, she replied to the missed kick by bringing her knee up. It caught him on his ankle. Her blow along with the spent momentum of his strike caused him to lose his balance. He crashed on his back right in front of her.
She threw a punch directly into his side, hoping to land a blow to the kidney. He was already moving and her hand crunched on his ribs. Sharp pain shot up her arm. She cried out despite herself.
The man was rising to his feet. Lillian saw no good opportunity to smack him, so she did the next best thing: she scrambled to her feet and moved to the opposite side of the room. She positioned the two wooden desks between her and her opponent. It wasn’t out of fear. She was more than able to hold her own, but she needed a few seconds to get her bearings and devise a plan.
The man who stood opposed to her crouched in a fighting stance. His dark hair was disheveled, his red shirt untucked. A line of blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. He grinned; she saw blood coating his front teeth.
“Your move,” he grunted. He gestured to her with his finger to rejoin the fight.
Lillian grinned back at him. “Not today.”
“Scared?” His voice dripped contempt.
“Not in the least. I could easily take you, but why bother when I know the cavalry’s here?” Her eyes flicked to the doorway. Her opponent’s did likewise.
George Ludlow stood there, barely ruffled from his skirmish with the shopkeeper. He aimed a pistol at the man. “Funny you should say that. I never learned to ride a horse.”
CHAPTER 15
Much like Lillian Saxton imagined the police did the previous night at the Adelphi Hotel, Bratton’s men quickly swooped in and secured the antique shop. They slapped cuffs on the man whom Lillian had fought. Curiously, when they walked him out the front door, he started speaking German until he was loaded into a police car and driven away.
Ludlow made some calls and within a half hour, some of his fellow spies descended on the shop. They allowed Lillian to remain, especially when she showed them transcripts in German and proved to them that she could not only read the language but speak it as well. They let her scour the papers while they went about the task of discovering the true nature of this enterprise.
All afternoon Lillian, Ludlow, his men, and the police investigated Buckley’s Antique Shop. They found a good number of communiques to and from England, Wales, France, Belgium, and, of course, Berlin. Lillian compiled a list, complete with dates and destination cities of each communication. Naturally, the messages Radio Man was working on when she barged in were the most recent. She stifled her fear when she categorized the messages from the previous evening: she read her own name. The communique requested information about her. She found her name on two separate messages. One went to Boston. The other went to Berlin.
It was plain to her that her mission was known by the enemy and not just because of Frank. Now someone in Germany knew her name, knew she had accompanied Frank and, if her room at the hotel was any indication, knew she carried something secret, probably the book of poetry. Fat chance anyone would have read the messages James had sent, but the enemy spies didn’t know that.
The mission. In a moment late in the afternoon as the sun set, she remembered what had brought her to Liverpool in the first place. It had never really left her conscious mind, but she had been focused so long on reading the German communiques that she had pushed it aside. Now it returned. How did the enemy know about Frank and Lillian and their mission?
She knew one way to find out.
Lillian hitched a ride back to the main police station where they had taken Radio Man. The shop keeper was the contingency plan. Maybe he knew nothing about the secret organization behind him, although that was highly unlikely. No, the person she’d start her interrogation on was the man who had fought her.
Ludlow had left the antique shop earlier in the afternoon. She wanted to touch base with him and see if he had learned anything from the spy. Upon reaching the police station, some of the pure exhaustion that adrenaline had kept at bay returned. She got a cup of hot tea. Holding it in both hands, she walked down the hallway to the interrogation room Ludlow’s men had set up headquarters. She opened the door and her mouth hung open in astonishment.
Sitting at the table, wrists uncuffed, all cleaned up—and looking rather handsome, she had to admit—eating a plate of food, was the man she had fought.
Ludlow turned and beamed at her. “Ah, Sergeant Saxton, welcome. We’ve been waiting for you to arrive.”
***
The man Johannes Bauer called Herr Colonel sat in his well appointed office and read through the daily communiques from all regions. His large oak desk was roomy enough to accommodate different stacks. He had a system. He visualized his desk like the map of Europe. Reports from the Soviet Union were stacked on the far right while reports from England sat on the far left. Everything else was in between. The messages from America, while slim, were on a smaller table that stood next to his main desk.
Herr Colonel sipped French cognac as he read. A cigarette smoldered in the overflowing ashtray. He glanced at his watch and noted he needed to eat supper shortly. He wondered what his wife had cooked for them.
The sheer number of messages that crossed his desk in a day was staggering. No human could keep up with it all. Yet someone had to be accountable, and it fell to Herr Colonel. He devised his own system, hand-picked his own staff, and assigned them specific regions to monitor. Their orders were simple: read everything from their assigned region, make a summary report, and flag anything that appeared out of the ordinary. These reports Herr Colonel read daily, just before supper over cognac. If he found anything of note, he would follow up after his meal.
With the so-called Phoney War in effect, Herr Colonel knew it was only a matter of days before the invasion of Western Europe began. The number of messages from his agents in the Low Countries and France was
mountainous. Most of the spies had been recruited before and during the invasion of Poland last fall. Now, it was time for those assets to come out into the open and show themselves.
The last stack on his mind that evening was the one from England. Not that there wasn’t important news from the island, it was just that the British Expeditionary Force was deployed on the Continent. Not a lot was happening on their home shores.
Which was why Herr Colonel was somewhat reluctant to review the British communiques. If anything unusual had occurred, he would have already known about it.
He lit another cigarette and polished off the cognac. Of all spirits, he admired French cognac the most. After the successful invasion, he would make it a point to acquire some for his personal bar. He poured just a little more, picked up the top paper from Britain and read the summary. Again, Herr Colonel insisted his officers be as concise yet as thorough as possible. If reports warranted two pages or more, so be it. But if the daily activities could be summarized in one page, so much the better.
The most recent report from Britain was notable for a blank line next to Liverpool. Herr Colonel preferred his daily reports to be on his desk by 6:00 p.m. local time. All units needed to account for the time differences and send messages accordingly. England was an hour behind Berlin so the 6:00 p.m. report needed to be sent by 5:00 p.m. from England.
Herr Colonel had a temper that he worked daily to control. Little errors and mistakes in the chain of command really got under his skin. Immediately, his anger toward Alfred Wilhelm, his officer in charge of England, was profound. He picked up the receiver on his desk and jammed his finger on a button. When the operator answered the line, Herr Colonel all but hissed the order to summon Wilhelm. Less than a minute later, breathing heavily because he had to climb four flights of stairs, Wilhelm stood at attention.
“Where’s today’s report from Liverpool?”
Ulterior Objectives: A Lillian Saxton Thriller Page 7