by Cara Black
A signal, but not for Kate.
For whom?
Kate’s heart pounded. This only made sense if she’d been set up.
Footsteps sounded behind her in the café. The young couple were now standing in front of the door.
RADA.
All her instincts were telling her the same thing.
Leave. Get up and leave.
Instead of taking out her lipstick, she scooped up her bag, stood and beat it back down to the café’s loo.
Sunday, June 23, 1940
The War Rooms under London | 12:40 a.m. Paris Time
Running a live mission with agents, when everything depended on split-second coordination, was enough to give anyone ulcers, Stepney thought. Never mind exacerbate the one he already suffered from. Now he had to endure this meeting with the Secret Intelligence Service crew, who felt Stepney’s section should concentrate on the imminent German sea invasion.
“We know they’re planning it, sir,” said the prime minister’s SIS advisor, a wet-behind-the-ears thirty-year-old with thick-lensed glasses. “You’ve seen the aerial photos of bunker and jetty construction along the Brittany coast. You were the one who told us about the decoded naval messages.”
Stepney’s tea tasted sour as he reiterated that of course he would keep on top of the invasion, but in the meantime he needed to rebuild his Paris intelligence-gathering network. As the meeting adjourned, an aide arrived and handed him a decoded report.
“What’s this?”
“An update, sir. You said you wished to be informed on the latest from Y sector in Paris.”
Y sector submitted, via a diplomatic pouch to Lisbon, weekly reports only; this was off schedule. Stepney read the decoded telex quickly and his throat caught. Kate hadn’t met her contact at the drop site. However, Y sector reported contact with her this morning, and reported passing her the message. They’d thought it important enough to report this to the British embassy in Lisbon.
He tried to think how they’d have this information. His only conclusion being that the Y sector, a Portuguese priest and his sister working in a bakery, were in contact with other cells.
“How’s the American’s diversion going?” asked the PM’s SIS advisor.
Worried she was running loose, Stepney wondered for a moment if Kate could have actually been capable of pulling off the impossible. Not that it mattered now.
“No word from the link at her drop site,” he said, recovering. “However, there’s a report she’s made contact in Paris.”
“Please back up, sir. Are you saying Rees got to Paris on her own?”
“It looks that way. She’s most likely on her way to the café meeting.”
“Odd, that, for her to go off plan.” The SIS advisor adjusted his glasses. “Wouldn’t you say?”
Stepney needed time to find out. “Not really. She’s trained to think on her feet. The important thing is she made contact.” Stepney glanced at the clock. “I’ll know more when Martins radios after the one o’clock meet. Any chatter from Berlin?”
“Nothing new from Bletchley, sir.”
Stepney hobbled as quickly as he could through the underground passage to the listening station below King Charles Street. Men ran back and forth along the warren of hallways. The gas mask hanging from Stepney’s belt scraped the walls as he made his way to the radio operator’s desk. Damn cramped down here for a military intelligence hub.
Billy, the operator, headphones clamped over his brown curly hair, looked up as Stepney approached. “One minute forty-five seconds until Martins makes contact, sir.”
Stepney consulted the latest report to verify that the Germans had not made yet another time zone change—Fritz had made Paris run on Berlin time after the occupation, an hour ahead, wreaking havoc with the train system. “Good. Upon authentication follow standard procedure.”
“Of course, sir.”
Martins was a good radio operator, with six missions under his belt. Stepney hoped this radio transmission would be the end of his compromised Paris network.
“Sir?” Billy’s eyes twinkled as he handed Stepney the spare set of headphones.
Right on schedule, Stepney heard long and short taps of Morse code. In pencil Billy inscribed them on the keypad, then aligned the dots and dashes to the code tablet and noted the time. When Billy looked up, the light was gone from his eyes.
“What’s he say, Billy?”
“Meeting imminent. Advise details.” Billy swallowed. “But it’s not Martins’s key touch, sir.”
Alarm flooded Stepney. Each radio operator used a distinctive keypad touch—a lighter or heavier tap, a longer or shorter pause, a particular rhythm. His own signature, or fist, as operators called it. This was a built-in security step to confirm identification.
Martins had been compromised. Did they have him?
Stepney clenched his cane. “You’re sure?”
“Afraid so, sir. It’s not Martins’s finger pressure.” Billy pointed with his pencil to a series of bold and light marks. “As I listen I bold the heavier taps. There’s too many heavy taps for Martins’s usual signature. What do I do, sir?”
Stepney tamped down his panic. Before he cut the transmission and shelved the whole operation, he needed more verification. Rules be damned. He wanted this to succeed too much.
“Respond asking for double authentication.”
Billy dashed the message. Stepney leaned on his cane in the cubicle, trying to maintain calm. Martins was a valuable radio operator, the only link to his operatives for this operation in France.
“Martins says he sprained his wrist in the drop, sir. Injured his arm.”
“Did he give the double authentication, Billy?”
“Yes, sir. See for yourself.”
Stepney cast his eyes over the code verification. If it was indeed Martins, he had given the proper authentication, and an injured hand was a plausible enough reason for the discrepancy in touch. But it was a little too convenient.
“What do you think, Billy?”
“Me, sir?”
“Could German intelligence have cracked our authentication codes?”
“Not for me to venture an opinion, sir,” Billy said, like the weasel he was. No responsibility for him. Like all the young ones, he wanted the glory but had no guts.
Stepney took a moment to think. He had a bad feeling. “We delay. In the meantime, we compare this message and Martins’s previous messages to other examples of compromised touches the department has discovered.” He would meet with the code experts before he killed the whole operation and stranded his snipers.
Stepney felt a black ache in the back of his head. The harbinger of a migraine. He’d be lucky if that was the extent of it, he thought, hurrying to the SIS head’s office.
Sunday, June 23, 1940
Place de la Sorbonne, Paris | 1:01 p.m. Paris Time
Kate smiled at the waiter, passing the café counter as if it were the most normal thing in the world for her to be making a second trip to the bathroom. Tension crackled in her brain. In the café’s mirror she saw the young couple at the door turn. Would they follow her? In several steps she was down the staircase, heading toward the WC and beyond to the exit.
At the coved door, a man wearing a worker’s cap and duster coat stood in her way. Was he her contact or had he been sent to intercept her? She froze. Despite all her training she couldn’t move.
“It’s important,” he whispered, palming something into her hand. With his cap pulled low she couldn’t make out his face in the shadows but his accent was French.
Just like that—what about procedure? Could she trust him?
Read, Assess, Decide, Act.
“Pardonnez-moi, monsieur. I need to apply my lipstick.”
He didn’t move. Worse, he smelled like the sewer. “This meeting’s been co
mpromised,” he said. “The eagle got away.”
Code for the Führer. But she already knew that. Could she believe him?
“Answer my question first. Why should I trust you?”
He flashed a dirty index and middle finger in a V.
That was what her contact was supposed to do when they met at the bus stop. Still wary, she stood back in the low-ceilinged walkway.
“What’s this you’ve given me?” she whispered.
“Get out of here. Go to that address. Our group’s been infiltrated. There’s a traitor.”
Her breath came fast. Uneasy, she asked, “How did you know I’d come to the café today?”
In the dim light she saw how his large blue worker shirt hung on him, disguising a smaller frame.
“I was told an agent would come here yesterday or today. So I checked. Then today the paper was gone from the hollow key,” he said. “Signaling the meet was on. You brought the rifle?”
She realized she must have been meant to hand it over to him. She trusted him a little more now.
“Non, it’s safe, but . . .”
“Later. There’s Boches everywhere. You need to leave; the radio contact’s blown.”
This café rendezvous had been her only hope of learning an escape plan. Her stomach clenched. She finally noticed the Paris sewer insignia on the man’s jacket. No wonder he smelled so fragrant. One of the lenses in his glasses was cracked.
“How do I escape?”
He moved toward the service door behind her in the hallway. “Take the back exit.”
“Yes, but I mean to England.”
“We’ll make contact later.”
He’d disappeared the way he must have come—through the sewers.
She stooped and stuck whatever he’d slipped her in her shoe, then hurried to the exit door and turned the bronze knob. Stuck. Should she go through that coved service door as he had, try the sewer?
No damn way.
Chairs scraped above her; she heard arguing voices approaching the stairs. She reached for the lockpick set safety-pinned to her panties. Her hands trembled, slippery with perspiration. Get with it, girl. Concentrate. She played her lock-picking lesson in her head, hearing the instructions in her teacher Tony’s East End accent. Toggle ever so gently, massaging the lower pick down until it connects.
Tony, the cat burglar on Stepney’s training roster, could charm birds from the trees. Not that she’d thought so at first when he’d locked her in a dark room. He’d told her to listen to his voice and let the feel of the lock mechanism guide her. Like you would with a lover, darling. Thirty minutes later, sweaty and furious, she’d opened the door. Tony, a rakish salt-and-pepper-haired sprite of a man, beamed and handed her a glass of fizzing champagne. Bravo! Celebrate, darling. He toasted her, clinked her glass. Now again, darling. Again and again until you open her in less than sixty seconds. And she’d done it again and again.
The voices were getting closer. Echoes of a scuffle on the stairs. Her heart pounded.
Click.
She turned the knob and didn’t look back.
Sunday, June 23, 1940
Communications Center under King Charles Street, London
1:10 p.m. Paris Time
Stepney’s outward demeanor radiated, he hoped, controlled calm. Inside, he fumed. “Coubert’s body was found yesterday in the Fontainebleau forest,” he said. “And you’re only telling me now?” Coubert was the French contact who was supposed to have met Martins on his drop.
Fleming, a member of the Joint Intelligence Committee, avoided answering the question. “He never met Martins.” Fleming had served with Stepney in the first war, a former officer who’d been mothballed out and now appeared decidedly rotund in a brown suit. “One of the Chantilly network agents waited for Martins at the second meet to take him to Paris. Martins never showed. You know what this means?”
“Why didn’t I know earlier?” Good God, the implications.
“Ask Teague,” said Fleming. “He’s waiting for you in the Tactical room.”
The Tactical room was swarming with activity. Teague summoned Stepney to a table stacked with a sheaf of reports from the teleprinter. Bright spotlights illuminated the maps covering the wall, colored pins indicating troop locations. The place was so damned hot, full of scurrying staff and stale odors of tea.
“Bletchley Park decrypted this ten minutes ago, that’s why none of us knew.” Teague, his khaki shirtsleeves rolled up, shook his head. “We suspect the code’s been compromised. As we speak, Bletchley’s changing the cipher codes, but the Germans already have an hour’s start on us. More, probably. We don’t know anything, Stepney. It’s a fiasco.”
More like a tragedy. Martins, their best radio operator, dead; his code key in the Germans’ possession. He didn’t want to think of the torture Martins must have endured before cracking. They all cracked; it just took some longer than others.
As he’d feared, the message Billy had received from Martins hadn’t been from Martins at all.
“Don’t tell me the whole Alpha network’s compromised, too?”
“Unknown at this point,” Stepney said. “Y sector reported Rees made contact.”
“Good. We need that Yank alive to provide diversion more than ever now,” said Teague. “You’ve assured me they won’t get anything useful from her, correct?”
Stepney winced inside. Kate Rees would be caught, interrogated, tortured. He hoped that cowgirl moxie came to her aid. America wasn’t at war with Germany yet; at least there was a chance the Germans would honor the Geneva Convention regarding prisoners.
Stepney let out a sigh. “She knew the risks when she signed on.”
How many times had he trained agents and signed their death warrants?
Always in the service of King and country.
Sunday, June 23, 1940
Near the Sorbonne, Paris | 1:07 p.m.
Kate emerged in a rectangular courtyard by trash bins smelling of fish. Shafts of bright sunlight cut though the shadows cast by the backs of buildings. Runner beans climbed a trellised wall beside a chicken pen. Laundry hung from windowsills; the sound of a violin drifted from somewhere.
Run. Escape. Hide.
She lugged a trash bin to the back door, blocking the exit.
Sweat broke out on her upper lip. She forced herself to breathe, think and keep moving as she’d been trained. She’d go to the Jardin du Luxembourg, as she’d planned.
In the portico across the cobbled courtyard a concierge was sweeping and talking with the postman, whose yellow postbag hung from his shoulder as he paused in the tall open doorway. They’d both remember her if they were questioned.
Head down, she walked at a steady pace. No break in their conversation. Good.
A church bell rang. Pigeons scattered as she passed.
“Mademoiselle, mademoiselle!” a man called.
She didn’t turn around. Footsteps were coming toward her, were coming faster.
Sunday, June 23, 1940
Near the Sorbonne, Paris | 1:06 p.m.
“Oui, monsieur?” a woman’s voice rang across the courtyard behind Kate.
The approaching footsteps stopped. “You forgot your mother-in-law’s mail.”
It must have been the concierge he was calling. Phew. Kate kept walking.
Before she turned into the street, she heard a German- accented voice behind her.
“Entschuldigen Sie, bitte, excusez-moi, madame. Did you see a woman . . . ?”
Not out of the woods yet. Kate hurried out onto the street and into a swarm of young schoolchildren.
“Attention, les infants!” their teacher was saying and pointing to a statue across the street.
Not now. She couldn’t get stuck like a sitting duck! Spying a doorway, which opened to another courtyard, she beelined inside to the woode
n outhouse under the eaves. The toilet was a hole in a wood plank, ripe with the odor of pipi and damp leaves. Like outhouses back home, only here the torn-up newspaper squares that served as toilet paper were in French. Her hands were shaking as she removed her blue sweater and folded it into her bag. They shook so much she almost poked out her eye putting on the brown-framed glasses.
Breathe.
The message in her shoe was written on a rolled-up caramel bonbon wrapping. She memorized the information about the next meeting and tossed the paper in the stinking hole.
She removed the tortoiseshell comb and gathered up her hair into a ponytail. Tied a blue ribbon around it and got the hell out of there.
Back on the street, Kate focused on keeping her knees close together as she walked, pointing her toes outward to change her naturally pronated gait. Clutched her basket like a woman going shopping.
Believe.
At the first shop, a quincaillerie, she went inside to catch her breath. She was surprised to see crochet needles among the hardware offerings. Perfect for self-defense. Back home in Yreka the hardware stores only sold things like feed and shovels. She bought a beige canvas shopping bag, exchanged the contents and ditched the blue one.
Her heart was still pounding from her close shave.
“If you’re trying to lose a tail, change tactics at a moment’s notice,” Stepney had told her. “If you’re going north, turn south.”
So ten minutes later, instead of strolling under the shadowed allée of trees in the Jardin du Luxembourg as she had planned, she was riding the bus toward the Right Bank. She couldn’t recall ever having been to this neighborhood before. She found the address the sewer man had given her at 224 rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin near a canal by a closed music store. The shop’s windows, like many she’d noticed, were crosshatched by tape to prevent glass shattering in case of bombing.
Inside the sun-drenched courtyard both of the third-floor shutters were closed—the all-clear, according to the message. But she debated—the sewer man had mentioned a traitor. Was she walking into another trap?