A Gathering of Spies

by John Altman

  A low whining sound reached her ears. As she listened, it climbed higher to a piercing shriek. She began to tremble. An alarm, she thought. Because of her? Was every person in this godforsaken stretch of country going to be looking for her now? She would hang, no doubt about it, hang, hang, hang. For a moment she believed it, and the panic that had been nibbling at her began to slaver.

  Then spotlights poked up into the night. Four, six, an even dozen. She heard the first coughing rattle of antiaircraft fire: ack-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack.

  Not an alarm, she realized.

  An air-raid siren.

  Then she could hear the planes themselves, far away. She craned her neck out the window as she drove, searching the sky.

  Why bomb out here, in the middle of nowhere?

  The railroad. They would be trying to bomb the railroad.

  The bombs would smash the perimeter for her.

  She spun the wheel, and the lorry bounced off the road into a rocky field, heading west.

  When the first bombs hit, Winterbotham pulled the Bentley to the side of the road and watched.

  The bombs were falling in a scythe pattern some distance away—seven or eight miles, he guessed, to the west. The railroad tracks, then. Some of the planes would probably also make a go for the oil refinery, if they had the fuel and the bombs to spare.

  He sat, hands on the wheel, watching the geysers of flame rise up into the night, and he tried to think.

  If she hadn’t turned off the road, he would have caught up to her by now. The Bentley could outrun that lorry; he had no doubt of it. And so she had turned off the road. But why? She must have known that her progress would be severely impeded by the fields. How far could she hope to get?

  Put yourself in her place, he thought. The net closing all around; time running out; nowhere to go.

  Another carpet of bombs exploded far away. Pillars of brackish smoke began to rise. He thought of all the wildlife, the varied flora and fauna, being destroyed—Abies grandis, Taxus baccata, Cerastium glomeratum, Pteridum aquilinum. Countless others. The creeping buttercup, however tenacious, could not hold its own against a bomb.

  This goddamned war, he thought.

  And how would she feel, witnessing this?

  Proud of her country for penetrating England’s defenses? He rather doubted it. The bombing put her in danger, after all—a few miles was a small distance with this kind of operation. All it would take was one Heinkel, one Dornier drifting slightly off-course, and bombs might saturate this very spot. Her own people could be the ones who kill her.

  When she saw the planes, then, she would turn away. East was her direction, in any case. It led to the coast, her ultimate goal.

  But she’s not one to lose her head, he thought then. She’s not one to run blindly away from danger. On the contrary. She embraces danger, simply because it makes her unpredictable. Perhaps when she sees these geysers of flame she does not see them as a threat. Perhaps she sees them as just the opposite—a curtain of fire to shield her from the prying eyes of MI-5.

  In that case, she heads toward them.

  Winterbotham turned west.

  The lorry jounced over a ditch, nearly got hung up on a bush, tore free, tilted up onto two wheels, balanced precariously, and then righted itself.

  The explosions were moving east and north. Katarina twisted the wheel hard, pointing herself toward them, and jammed her foot down on the accelerator. The trick would be to get close enough to slip through any gap made in the perimeter, but not so close as to become incinerated.

  She crashed through a hedgerow, splashed through a fen, then broke out into an open field.

  She saw the explosions marching toward her. She held the wheel with both hands, squeezing hard, and kept on. At the last instant, she would turn—but not before. If she lost her nerve now, she would lose her last chance.

  The noise was deafening, apocalyptic, night turned to day.

  Her hands started to twist the wheel, to veer away.

  Her mouth formed a tight line.

  She turned the wheel back.

  Kept on.

  They were perversely beautiful: multicolored spouts of earth and flame, trees and debris and grass and stone and funneling smoke, sixty feet away, forty feet, thirty …

  She spun the wheel—too late.

  The world became a slow and sweet place.

  Winterbotham saw the lorry an instant before it vanished into a wall of flame.

  He stepped on the brake. He blinked, then reached up and rubbed his eyes.

  He prepared to follow her—to drive the Bentley into the inferno.

  Instead, he found himself sitting where he was at an almost-safe distance, engine idling, heart thudding in his wrist.

  The perimeter, he thought, would have crumbled. Even the most stalwart SF man wouldn’t stand still while a Junker dropped a bomb on him. They would close ranks as soon as the barrage had ended, plugging any hole; but if she survived, she would find her chance. They wouldn’t be able to reorganize effectively until dawn.

  He kept watching. He raised his thumb to his mouth and nibbled on the nail, a habit he had vanquished forty years before.

  The explosions continued.

  Nobody could survive that, he thought.

  Katarina watched, feeling pleasantly high.

  She felt as if she had been swatted with an especially large, soft pillow. Tiny somethings rained on the car all around her, on the undercarriage and then the roof, undercarriage and then roof, as she rolled again and again, slowly and sweetly.

  Then something happened, very loud. The world went dark. A huge rushing filled her ears.

  Time passed. She decided that she was thirsty. It was hot out here, after all. Hot sitting on the beach, the sun baking the sand all around her …

  Then the lorry rolled again and she was flung against a door made of tissue paper, a door that parted as she fell against it, spilling her out onto the ground. The ground was covered with molten metal. Still, better than the two-ton burning coffin on top of her. She huddled as close to the ground as she could manage as the lorry rolled away, and somehow God was with her and she managed to avoid sticking her face into any pools of molten shrapnel.

  The rushing in her head became a rushing in the sky.

  The planes overhead, banking, coming back for another pass.

  Katarina, she thought calmly, stand up and move.

  Hadn’t she been in a truck a moment before?

  What happened to the truck?

  She was still wondering this when something happened yet again, not very far to her left this time. There was a furnace there, and somebody had flung the door open, and now she was getting a bad sunburn here on the beach—it was a very hot beach, after all, and …

  Crawl.

  She pulled herself forward, ignoring the inferno all around her, ignoring the terrible sunburn she had gotten from the furnace.

  A few moments later, she encountered a cool eddy of air—a single eddy slipping away almost the moment she sensed it. But it had been cool nonetheless, and that gave her hope. Blessed coolness, blessed relief. She managed to stumble up onto her feet. She staggered forward, dizzy, and found another cool spot. This time the coolness was coming from below. It was grass. Cool grass, not even scorched. She collapsed onto it.

  She rested.

  After a few moments, she rolled over onto her back and looked behind herself.

  The fires were already dying down, but the smoke was growing thicker, ever thicker. She could see the remains of the lorry, upside-down, perhaps thirty feet away. It was burning.

  I crawled away from that, she realized.

  She allowed herself a few moments of congratulations. Then she gained her feet again, carefully. Her head was ringing and she felt weak, but she was alive, in one piece.

  She found more grass leading away from the fire.

  Cool, damp, blessed grass.

  She followed it.

  In the light of dawn, the devas
tation looked minor.

  The land was scorched; cool chunks of shrapnel were scattered hither and yon; the lorry was a crumpled box. But the railroad tracks themselves were intact, and as the sun came up, a bird was singing merrily from somewhere off in the trees.

  Taylor and Winterbotham held tin cups of coffee and smoked cigarettes, surveying the area. Around them, agents poked and prodded the greenery, searched through the wreckage, spoke softly among themselves. Two dozen bloodhounds pulled on their leashes, mewling.

  After a time, Kendall separated himself from the rest, approached Taylor, and saluted.

  “No sign of her, sir.”

  “Any chance she was incinerated?”

  “I don’t see how anything could have gotten out of that lorry alive, sir.”

  Winterbotham snorted.

  Taylor turned to him, raising an eyebrow. “She would need the luck of the devil to drive into that and walk away.”

  “If she was in the lorry, Andrew, where’s the body?”

  “Perhaps we’ll find it if we beat the bushes a bit.”

  “But you won’t. We need to establish another perimeter—the sooner the better. How many more men can you raise?”

  Taylor considered. “Another two dozen, perhaps, between CID and Special Forces.”

  “If you went to the board and called in all those old favors you’re so fond of cultivating, how many?”

  Taylor smoked his cigarette. “Four score,” he decided. “Not for long, of course. Twenty-four hours.”

  “Do it,” Winterbotham said.

  11

  PETERBOROUGH, NORFOLK

  The air raids, in Gladys Lockhart’s opinion, made the rest of the war worthwhile.

  Every time the Germans sent their planes winging over the Channel, Gladys and her employer, Sir John Frederick Bailey, left their brick, ivy-covered farmhouse and went to wait in the Anderson shelter in the yard. They sat together in the darkness, talking in low voices, listening to the wireless he kept on a shelf there. From time to time, their legs brushed in the close confines; and then Gladys thrilled, silently, and bit her lip, and tried not to blush, and prayed to herself that the war would never end.

  Each time the alarm sounded, she felt the same flood of nervous exhilaration. She would promptly put aside whatever duty she was engaged in and meet her employer at the back door—he was, invariably, coming from his study. Together they would leave the little country house, walking quickly past the small garden, the few prickly rosebushes, the twin hedgerows. Then Sir John Frederick Bailey would, with an air of great chivalry, allow Gladys to enter the shelter before him. She would duck her head and climb in, as often as not stepping into a pool of water collected from the previous night’s rain. But who cared? Damp feet were a small price to pay for minutes, and sometimes even hours, spent alone with Sir John Frederick Bailey.

  Eventually, of course, the raids would end. Then they would go back into the farmhouse, which was, of course, a much more modest domicile than Sir John could have afforded—Sir John’s modesty, in Gladys’s opinion, was one of his most winning features—and return to their respective roles of master and maid. Sir John Frederick Bailey would return to his study to pore over his books and his papers and try to meet whatever deadline was hanging over him on that particular evening.

  And Gladys, polishing a divan or emptying a dustbin, would begin to look forward to the next night’s raids.

  Tonight had been an especially good night.

  Sir John had started to talk about his work. He rarely spoke to Gladys of his work; whenever the subject did arise, he tended to speak in only the broadest generalities. Tonight, however, he had become involved with the telling—postwar reconstruction, Gladys could clearly see, was his greatest passion since the death of his wife. He had lost track of the time. Nearly an hour had passed after the last Nazi plane had lumbered back over the Channel before he realized what had happened.

  Then he laughed, taking off his glasses and polishing them on his sleeve.

  “I apologize, dear Gladys,” he said. “I’ve become carried away. I must have been boring you terribly.”

  Gladys smiled. “Not at all,” she said.

  “You are a patient darling, aren’t you? But, no, I know that you’re only being polite. Come on, then. Just time for a cake before bedtime.”

  They climbed out of the shelter—he let her go first, as always; in Sir John’s world, chivalry took precedence over class—and strolled back to the house. Gladys, walking out front, allowed herself a moment of hope. It had been such a good night, such a wonderful night, as Sir John Frederick Bailey had forgotten himself and spoken with intensity about his work. He had spoken to her as an equal, and now it seemed impossible, simply unimaginable, that they would revert to their old roles the moment they stepped over the threshold of the ivied farmhouse. They had passed some crucial watermark in their relationship. After tonight, everything would be different.

  She reached the door and paused for a moment so that he could catch up with her. She could smell smoke, but only faintly; the bombs had fallen far southwesterly. She could hear the hum of cicadas and the slow thumping of the gate around the front of the house. She would need to go latch the gate before bed, she reminded herself. But first she would wait to see how Sir John Frederick Bailey treated her, after they stepped inside. Perhaps he would ask her to join him in a cake instead of simply expecting her to serve him, as was the routine. How could he not? They had connected, sitting in the shelter, in an intimate and personal way. She had served the role of—well, of a wife, if that wasn’t too presumptuous: listening, supporting, occasionally facilitating with a particularly apt comment or question. Surely that level of profound connection did not vanish in an instant.

  But he turned to her as they stepped inside, and said, “I’ll take the cake in my study, please, Gladys, just as soon as you’ve finished with the dishes.”

  He turned and shuffled off down the hall. After a few seconds, she heard the door to his study close with finality.

  She drew a breath, wiped absently at the corner of her eye, and went to finish with the dishes.

  She was not an unattractive girl.

  On the contrary: Boys had always seemed to give her plenty of attention, when there had been boys her age around. Now, of course, she was older—she would be eighteen the next month—and there were no boys her age around anymore. They all were crouched in muddy foreign fields somewhere, fighting the war.

  But she didn’t think she had lost her looks yet. In the past year, as a matter of fact, her legs had grown longer, more graceful and womanly; her waist had risen and narrowed; her hips had plumped pleasantly; her bosom had grown large and firm and now pushed at her uniform in an undeniably mature fashion. Her skin was milky, her cheeks rosy, her hair long and blond and shining.

  So why would Sir John Frederick Bailey never try for a kiss?

  She examined herself from different angles in the mirror above her dresser, holding in her stomach, thrusting it out, pouting into the glass, frowning, smiling. Perhaps, she thought, the trouble was with her teeth. They were a bit yellow. But Sir John Frederick Bailey’s teeth were mottled themselves—far more mottled than hers.

  His wife had been dead for twelve years; he must have been lonely. He must have had needs. And yet he had never even looked at her, not so much as looked at her, with anything like lust in his eyes.

  Outside, the gate banged against the fence.

  Perhaps her breasts had grown too large. She frowned at the thought, which had the ring of truth. She had always believed that men were fond of large breasts—that had been the conventional wisdom at school, which she had left at age fourteen, and in Bristol, where she had worked as a shop girl before coming to the agency. But why must it always be so? Perhaps men had different tastes for breasts, the same as they had different tastes for opera, or for the cooking of meat. Perhaps Sir John Frederick Bailey preferred small-breasted women.

  She sighed, held her bre
asts up in the mirror, pressed them down, and wondered if she could possibly create some kind of device to hold them flatter to her chest.

  On the other hand, perhaps her body wasn’t the problem. Perhaps it was her face. She hollowed her cheeks, checking her profile from both sides. As far as she could tell, she was pretty. But how would she truly know? How would one ever know if one were truly pretty or not? The boys had paid her attention, true enough; but boys lacked standards. Boys …

  She frowned. Something had changed.

  Something outside. The wind? No, it continued to whistle around the little farmhouse.

  The gate, she realized then. The gate had stopped banging.

  She moved to her window and looked out at the road. She saw, in the starlight, a woman collapsed at the foot of the walk. The gate, oblivious to the woman’s presence, was banging soundlessly against her, again and again and again.

  They had intended to bring her to the guest bedroom on the second floor, but carrying her up the stairs proved to be too much trouble—the woman was less petite than she looked. Finally, they gave up on the idea and took her into Sir John’s bedroom. They lay her down on the bed, then stepped back in unison and regarded her.

  And there you have it, Gladys Lockhart thought sourly. In the house five minutes and already in Sir John’s bed—which is farther than I ever got.

  Sir John removed his glasses, wiped them on his sleeve, put them on again, and said: “Quite a beauty, I’d venture, beneath all that grime.”

  The woman was perhaps twenty-seven or twenty-eight, Gladys estimated; and she was pretty, prettier than Gladys herself, although in a different way. She had short dark hair, stylishly cut, and clean cheekbones, and a taut thin body that suggested curves rather than describing them. But she was also filthy, covered with soot, scratches, burns, and dried blood. Her right hand was bleeding, wrapped in a sordid strip of cloth. She stank of perspiration and something else, something worse—cooked flesh. Her dress was torn in at least a dozen places. Her breathing was ragged and shallow; and, as they carried her, she had drooled on herself rather uncharmingly.