by Thomas Wood
My driver, the only other occupant in the car, barely said a word to me other than to confirm my name, and to also question me as to why he only had one passenger and not the expected two.
“The other man is dead,” was the only reply that he received and, evidently, the only one that he needed as he launched himself into the driving seat, and began pushing his accelerator so hard into the floor that I thought he would soon have his foot dangling from the underside of the vehicle.
The vaguely light blue sky began to be kissed by orange tinted clouds, as the sun began to bless the first parts of nature by making its presence known. I decided now would be a good time to try and get some sleep, as based on previous experiences with British intelligence soon after getting back from France, I would have a long wait before I would be able to see a bed, let alone kip in one.
As I closed my eyes, I could see nothing, quite unexpectedly. I didn’t see the faces of Rudolf or Louis staring back at me, disappointed. There was no visions of death and destruction, or the replays of what I could have done better or the mistakes that I had made. It was as if my subconscious mind had simply given up on me, it had gone on strike, there was nothing there, just a totally perfect darkness. It was bliss.
It was the first time in months that I had seemingly been able to switch off my mind with nothing to plague my thoughts or drag me into a deep depression. The all-encompassing darkness was the only initiator that I needed to drop into the deepest sleep that I had experienced in a long time. It was only when we reappeared at the hotel that I was suddenly awoken.
This time, unlike before, I was allowed a few minutes of respite before I was frogmarched to room 424, into a standard hotel room that quite easily could have been the one that I had been in last time. On the far side of the lavishly decorated room, was a series of hangers, all home to my uniform that had been laid out for me, all freshly laundered and pressed to perfection. It was almost nice to be able to slip back into my uniform and for a moment, I hoped that it had been here ever since I had departed, maybe Jimmy and the others had displayed a small amount of faith that I would make it back.
It felt familiar to me to have the khaki back on and it had felt like an age since I had last worn it, when in reality it couldn’t have been more than a couple of months. My uniform for the last few weeks had been the pullovers and slacks of a normal French villager, before that the royal blue of the Royal Air Force, each one making me feel like an imposter that would get me caught if anyone was to look at me for more than five seconds.
I was alone in my room for no longer than five minutes, just long enough to pull the uniform on, give my teeth a quick blitz with a toothbrush and run my hand over the scar that was forming up on my cheek, before my chaperone began pounding at my door declaring that I should come out. I wondered what they had expected of me, that maybe I had made a rope out of the curtains and bed sheets and was already halfway down the side of the building, shimmying and sliding my way to freedom.
I opened the door to him, a clean shaven and well rested young Second Lieutenant, who immediately began pacing his way down the corridor beckoning for me to follow him. Looking at him, an energetic and enthusiastic young officer, made me realise that I couldn’t have been more different to him right now.
He was clean and got his eight hours’ worth of sleep recently, he was straight backed and official, whereas I was tired and hungry, my shoulders slumping forwards on account of my weariness and lack of energy.
As we approached the end of the corridor, a figure seemed to step out from the shadows, ambushing my path as well as my thoughts. His moustache hadn’t changed, neither had his piercing blue eyes that always made him look like he was elsewhere, thinking of some other wacky plan to exfiltrate his field agents or otherwise get them killed.
“Alfie…” he said, nodding at me, clearly just as concerned with how I would react to him as I had been. I didn’t know how to feel about him. For the last few days and particularly the last twelve hours or so, I thought that when I laid eyes on him I would want to launch into a tirade of abuse, maybe even land a nice square punch on his jawline for good measure. All the hatred and anger at not knowing what was going to come my way next would surely come to a head, when I caught a glimpse of the one that I held responsible for all the things that had gone wrong in my life.
He seemed sheepish as he approached me, not wanting to hold out his hand, just in case I was to snap it in two or assault him in some other way. I respected him for the way that he had come to face me so early on, if that was me, the cowardice within would have prevailed and I would have avoided coming into contact with me ever again.
In that brief moment that I looked at him though, I got the distinct impression that he knew he had screwed up, he knew that I had every right to be completely incandescent at him and he was facing up to that. As soon as I saw him, every emotion associated with anger or ill-feeling was swept away and I was just so glad to see my commanding officer who had also become one of my best friends.
I held out my hand, which he gladly took, outwardly relieved that I had decided to accept him back into my fold. As the handshake evolved into a brotherly embrace, I made sure that I recalled all the things that I still held over him. I knew deep down, that I could not trust him but, by withholding that statement of fact from him, I was somehow winning.
I thought of everything that had felt like some sort of set up. I thought about Joseph and the way in which he had handled me, Rudolf and the fact that he had known my name as soon as I had stepped through the door and, most importantly of all right now, Geranium.
There were so many questions that I had for him, so many suspicions over his true motivations in sending me back to France, but I bit my tongue with them all. No way was he going to know exactly how I felt about him, not yet anyway.
“I’m sorry about the change of the objective, old boy. We needed someone in country waiting for the right intelligence about the Standartenführer, and there was no way that we were going to get it officially sanctioned. We needed a cover op and that’s what that was with Joseph.”
I flicked my hands around in a ‘these kinds of things happen’ type of way, in the hope that my apparent neutrality on the subject would make him trust me wholeheartedly once again. He knew that I had heard the word Geranium mentioned more than a few times now and that it would only be a matter of time before I had pieced it all together, but to try and get him to spill the beans, I would need him to put his faith in me.
“Look, I know it’s been a journey and a half for you these last few weeks, but they’re going to need to debrief you before we can talk properly.” I knew what that meant. It wasn’t so much of a debrief but an interrogation, a constant bombardment of questions to double check that I hadn’t been turned by the Germans, or that I had suddenly become sympathetic to the plight of the German soldiers. Everyone would have been subjected to it, but I had a feeling that Jimmy was behind this one, instructing my interrogators to push me especially hard, to see if I would crack and reveal what he was hiding.
“But really Alf, I’m glad that you’re still alive. Truly I am.”
After he had shown me into the room, I spent the next few hours staring into the eyes of the two disenchanted questioners in front of me, clearly paying more attention to what came out of their noses and into their handkerchiefs than what I had to say. Which was good for me, because I didn’t care much for their questions, instead I was already at home in Kent, getting endlessly lost in the fields and spending hours staring up into the blue sky littered with wispy clouds. I was already there in my head, and I would be getting a first-class ticket there the minute I could get my hands on one.
The questioning with my two disinterested chums began to come to a close, but not before their closing dialogue speeches, like some sort of barristers as they pleaded with the jury to find the defendant guilty.
“You were told to kill the German, Standartenführer Rudolf Schröder, were you not?”
“Yes, you know I was.”
“Then why is it that until about twelve hours ago, he was still very much alive?”
I pulled my chair in closer to the table and picked on the more nervous looking man. I was no longer the naïve and immature soldier that had occupied a similar chair to this just under a year ago. I was now a cynic, a murderous one, a man that no longer felt he could believe anything that anyone said, not even his fellow countrymen. The anger was beginning to boil up inside me and I began to daydream about crushing the man’s skull on the side of the old wooden table, smashing it down repeatedly until he could ask no more questions. The second man wouldn’t be wanting a fight after that, he would deal with himself.
“I told you. He had valuable intelligence to share.”
“Which you claim he was unable to give you.”
“The man was killed before we got on the plane. He refused to hand it to me.”
The two men seemed to finally be getting the message, even if Rudolf had given me the intelligence, that there was no way that I would be giving it up easily to these two desk jockeys, who thought they knew more about the way the war should be fought than those who were down there on the ground, the men who were actually pulling triggers.
“So, you didn’t get the intelligence that you claimed the German had?”
“No. How many times are we going to go around in circles?” They knew that I was lying, they could tell that I knew something, but if I was to tell them everything, then I wouldn’t be getting the answers that I wanted.
They began to look at one another as if they needed each other’s approval to discontinue the interrogation before they both placed their pens on the desk in front of them with a flourish.
“We’re all done here, thank you Captain.” I was surprised for the apparent gratitude of the man, however fake it had been, but began to wonder whether it was a thanks for my time in the interrogation room, or for what I had done out in France.
I was led out of the room to be met by another familiar face, one that was not as welcoming as some, but one that I was glad to see regardless.
“Captain Jameson.”
“Captain Lewis. It’s good to see you.” He came across far more sincere than he ever had done before, and, for a moment, I even believed that he was glad to see me.
“It’s good to see you too, Robert.”
“You must be shattered, the room you were just in is yours for the night. Head up there and get some rest. We’ll talk again in the morning.”
“Thanks,” I said, trying to sound as grateful as possible for the provisions laid out for me, “but I really must speak to Jimmy first. It’s urgent.”
30
It felt good to be able to demand to see Jimmy, a superior to me, and that I all of a sudden found that I could command quite an authority if I wanted to. There seemed to be a new air to the walls of MI9, which had now graduated to an entire floor, renamed 424 floor, instead of the insufficient boundaries of the solitary room that they had been operating in before I left for France.
There seemed to be more bodies around now, faces that I did not recognise, ones that I was fairly certain hadn’t even been in uniform when I was here last. There must have been quite a few Uncle Ruperts at the War Office, all pulling strings like Robert Jameson’s uncle had done, just to make sure that none of them ever got close to what they would consider as the frontline. Maybe they had all been relatives of Captain Jameson and this war was being run by his entire family.
I gave a lot of them the benefit of doubt however, most of them, I was sure, were well accomplished men and women who had proved themselves on the various battlefields and executive offices that had sprung up because of this war. I refused to believe that the army would be using inexperienced and cowardly young individuals to run the clandestine operations of getting Allied soldiers away from France. Even the army was not that stupid.
Although the faces seemed new and just as fresh as their recently laundered uniforms, they all seemed to know exactly who I was. I received curt salutes from more than a handful of junior officers, all addressing me as ‘Captain Lewis,’ something which I was not expecting at all. The last time I had blessed these corridors with my presence, it had been more in passing than on a permanent basis and it struck me as odd as to how they all seemed to know who I was. Maybe they had all been listening in to my radio transmissions when I was with Rudolf. Maybe they had all been tracking my progress.
I was shown into a room that clearly belonged to Jimmy’s private secretary, the typewriter on the desk unused for now and the chair that accompanied it, vacant. It was six o’clock in the morning after all and I wondered if Jimmy and Robert ever actually went to sleep.
I got my answer as soon as I was called into Jimmy’s office. There was a blanket sprawled out over the leather chair that was in the corner of the room, just beneath the window ledge. It wouldn’t have surprised me if Jimmy and Robert had taken it in turns; one sleeps while the other mans the phones, waiting for news from their various men out in the field.
Jimmy’s desk was adorned with paper, which made it almost impossible to see that there was even a desk beneath it. For all I knew, the whole structure was just a tower of paper and confidential files, all neatly balanced to resemble something close to a work station.
“Alf…Alfie, come in, come in. Sit down.” I did as I was told, not because he had demanded that I did it, but because by now I was feeling the full effects of the cramp and muscle aches and pains associated with total exhaustion. I was close to being completely burnt out as a human being.
“I’m glad you asked to speak to me. I’ve also asked Robert to join us, I hope that’s okay with you?”
“Fine.”
As if on cue, Robert stepped into the room, before pulling a chair up for himself and settling himself next to Jimmy. The uncharacteristic politeness of the two of them, coupled with the feeling of giving me some of their valuable time, gave me a sense of uneasiness, as if something bad was going to happen.
“How are you, Alf? It must have been an absolute nightmare.”
“I’m okay. It would have been good to have all the intelligence I possibly could when I went in though. I need to know if my objective was going to be changed at the last minute.”
“Of course, of course,” Jimmy conceded, holding his hands up in mock surrender, “I take the blame on that one, my fault entirely. The issue was that we wouldn’t have got the op sanctioned if it was a straight kill mission. We needed something as cover before switching you.”
“So, none of it was sanctioned?”
“Not exactly, no,” Jimmy said, uncomfortably giving a sideways glance in Robert’s direction. Jameson shifted in his seat uncomfortably and I got the distinct impression that there had been some sort of disagreement between the two of them about what I was to do.
A silence ensued, an uneasy one that told me that we weren’t going to get much further on that topic of conversation. It was my turn to step up, to tell them about what had actually happened and what I had kept hidden from the two boys in the interrogation room.
“Rudolf did give me something just after he was shot,” I said, looking at both of them in turn, in the eye. Immediately, the air in the room changed and Jimmy suddenly looked quite on edge, as he started to bite at the inside of his lip. Robert on the other hand leant forward slightly, his eyes narrowing as he tried to focus in on exactly what I was going to say. He was hoping for something big.
“I didn’t want to tell your two boys in that room there, because of the nature of the intelligence. It is quite sensitive.”
Something held me back from simply handing over the information to them. Rudolf had died to give me this intelligence and here was I, sat comfortably in a lovely, plush London office, about to just give it away in the most flippant way possible.
“It’s okay. Let us know, we’ll handle it in the best way,” there was something about Robert that made me suspicious that he alr
eady knew what I was going to say. It was as if he had been expecting something from me as soon as I had got back, that all he needed was to hear it from the horse’s mouth.
“Rudolf was not killed as per the instructions that I received for a number of reasons, most of which seemed unbelievable to me at the time. The first was, that when I got into his quarters to kill him, he knew exactly who I was. It was like he had been waiting for me for a while. He knew that I was coming, but he hadn’t moved away, that struck me as odd. It was if he had wanted to make contact, and he knew the attack was coming. How was that?”
They both stared at me, mulling over my rhetorical question while at the same time trying to anticipate what might come from my mouth next.
“He seemed like he was prepared, that this had all been some sort of prearranged pick up and he knew exactly how to force me to show my hand. Maybe that’s because he’s been in the intelligence game a lot longer than me and frankly, their intelligence seems to outclass ours.”
I let my latest outburst fester for a little while, to see if either of them would be courageous enough to offer up some sort of explanation for me, but none was forthcoming.
“Can I get a drink? I’m parched.”
Robert seemed irate at the simple request, forcing me back into the events of the year before, where he had been the one interrogating me after making my escape from France. He shot up from his chair and charged from the room, hollering at anyone within earshot to bring in a tray of refreshments immediately.
We sat in silence until a young corporal shuffled into the room, limping heavily on his right foot. I wondered what had happened to him and as the tea sloshed around in their cups, I noticed that he had a long running scar across the back of his hand that disappeared up his sleeve.
Once he had hobbled from the room, I began sipping at my refreshments, longing for one of Louis’ cups of milk rather than the tepid mixture that was supposedly a cup of tea. I let them stew in their impatience for a minute or two longer, before finally opening my mouth.