A Treachery of Spies

by Scott, Manda

  ‘No plan survives first contact and all that,’ Laurence says. ‘Our priority is Kramme.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘In the cow byre at the end of the yard, I think. We need to keep him there. He’ll be trying to get to the Americans.’

  ‘So let’s stop them leaving.’ She taps Laurence’s arm. ‘Cover me.’

  He’s a soldier. He stands up and blazes a full clip of his Colt at the armoured BMWs and the Americans on either side. Sophie throws herself prone in the snow with her elbows on the solid ground and takes a proper aim. Her first shot misses. The second hits. The nearest BMW’s nearside front tyre collapses.

  ‘Good idea.’ Laurence stands over her, reloading. ‘Keep going. I’ll stop anyone who tries to stop you.’

  This is a good idea that lasts exactly as long as it takes for the incomers to realize what she’s doing. One more tyre hisses flat, and then she becomes the focus for fire of a savagery she has forgotten.

  Patrick saves her. He appears at the jockey door to the barn, shouting, waving his stick. ‘Laurence! Front and right!’ He draws fire, giving Sophie time to crawl out of the kill zone before he steps back inside.

  When next she looks, a snow-hazed figure is standing at the limits of the floodlights. She knows that shape, even in this light. ‘Look out!’ She jerks her head away, covers her eyes with her arm. ‘It’s Paul. He’s got—’

  A flare.

  It soars scarlet into the night.

  Laurence pulls a face. ‘Paul always did have a flair for the dramatic.’

  ‘He wasn’t meant to—’

  ‘I think we can safely conclude that Paul has not kept his promises.’

  ‘I’ll kill him.’

  ‘Yes, but Kramme first.’

  Sophie eases back out of the door. The snow spirals down, making her dizzy. She empties her Hi-Power into the havoc, wriggles back and ejects the magazine.

  Laurence, ever-organized, shoves a box of shells across the floor towards her. She refills, plotting the geography of the yard. ‘Where’s Céline?’

  ‘With any luck at all, she’s gunning down Paul Rey.’

  ‘She isn’t. She can’t find him.’ Céline stands behind them, a grim, mud-soaked figure, with her hair up under a cap so she looks like a man. She started off with the Colt that JJ got for her, but from somewhere, she’s found a Sten. It suits her better.

  ‘She did see an ape of positively Slavic proportions, though,’ she says. ‘And if Uncle Joe really has sent people to the party, I’d be inclined to let them have him. I can’t think of a better way for Kramme to end his days than in the basement of the Lubyanka.’

  ‘He’d talk, though.’ Laurence is lighting up a cigarette. He lights a second from the first and hands it to his cousin. ‘We’d lose a whole nest of networks in the east.’

  Céline nods, cheerily. ‘Some prices are worth paying.’

  Sophie takes the third cigarette. Outside, men are killing each other. She says, ‘They’re not Russians, they’re Americans trying to confuse us. The one with the white hair was in Poland with Kramme’s Einsatzkommandos: Obersturmbannführer Rudi Schäfer.’

  ‘Bugger.’ Céline frowns. ‘Gehlen, then. Which means CIA. Which means Paul Rey really has dumped us in it. That’s a pity, I rather liked him.’

  Sophie says, ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. You are not your lover’s keeper.’ Smiling fiercely, Céline pushes herself to her feet. ‘There’s still plenty we can do. The Cousins can’t have Kramme if he’s dead. And if we can hit Schäfer as well, I’ll consider it a night well spent.’

  ‘What about Diem?’

  ‘If anyone looks as if they’re firing the wrong way, then we have our man.’

  ‘Right.’ Laurence stabs his cigarette into the kitchen floor. ‘I rather think this might have become a point of honour, don’t you? Our mess. Our job to clear it up.’ He offers them both his best and brightest smile. It’s like the old days. They clasp hands to elbows, as they used to do before a jaunt. He nods, as if Sophie has answered a question, which perhaps she has. ‘Shall we go?’

  One. Two. Three. Covering lines of fire. There are textbooks written that don’t capture the smoothness of what they can do when they work as a team. It’s a kind of magic whose time has passed and Sophie mourns its loss even as she sprints forward to huddle in the doorway to the dairy with twenty metres to go to the uncertain safety of the byre.

  Céline comes after, and then Laurence. Daniel is to their right, offering suppressing fire. More tyres have been shot out: only one car of the three BMWs is fit to drive, the one furthest away from the farmhouse.

  A figure is in the driving seat, head down, gunning the engine: Paul. It’s tempting to go for him. At Sophie’s side, Céline says, ‘If Paul gets Kramme, they’ve got a clear route out, between the barn and the byre.’

  ‘So we get him first.’ Sophie sprints again, nearly fires at a shape that appears from the barn on her right, but it’s Patrick, running, sort of. She didn’t know he could. They collide at the doorway.

  He grabs her shoulder, spins her round. Go left!

  Left leads into warmth, a dark and breathy space. The first thing she meets is the gathering yard, a clear area four metres square where the bins of hard feed are kept, the buckets, the scoops, the shovels and brushes of daily dairy use. At the back is a crush for holding single cows. A fenced partition separates the cattle from their food.

  Sophie ducks under the top rung and bumps into a large, hairy body that jilts away from her touch.

  She crouches down, keeping the door in view. Underfoot is straw. The waft of old urine and fresh dung is pungent, but not impossibly so. Even at the end of winter, Daniel’s cow byre is well maintained. Around her move the matriarchs of the Fayette herd: thirty cows in all, progeny of ten generations of careful breeding, nurtured through war and peace. She knows this and yet, still, she wants a grenade, and she will pay for a whole new herd, because she can feel Kramme in here, in the way she felt him in the bar in town, so that her hair becomes a sensory organ and her hands sweat.

  Someone else slides in through the open doorway, a felt presence, easing through the dark. Her gun hand twitches round even as her head tells her it’s Céline, or Laurence, or both. She keeps from firing by a sustained act of will. Dear God, let me not kill someone I know.

  She follows the prickle of her skin. Near the back wall is a place where the cattle are still, a cluster of relative calm. They are trusting of men; where one is, they will be at peace, even tonight. Sophie is easing forwards when headlights flood in and a brilliant blond head and a hoarse voice – a German voice with a shine of Aryan hair to back it up – shouts, ‘Kramme! For the love of God, here. Now!’

  She is sure that’s Laurence, but he makes a convincing Rudi Schäfer. Certainly Kramme believes the figure is offering succour. He looms from her left, not her right, jumps the partition and sprints for the opening, running low, but Patrick has set himself by the door, and everyone else knows one thing above all else: Kramme is his.

  He steps sideways, into the beam of the headlights, gun raised.

  Hello, Max.

  For one rigid moment, Maximilian Kramme and Patrick Sutherland face each other: a man and his obscene mirror image, hunter and hunted, whole and … not.

  In wonder, Kramme says, ‘You have more lives than a cat.’

  And Patrick smiles.

  A single shot shatters the moment, and a second after it, a burst of machine-gun fire, cut off.

  Sophie drops on instinct. Patrick drops too, because he has missed – how? They were three metres apart. How could he miss? – but he has, and Kramme is running for the door and the figure in the doorway has fallen and it wasn’t Laurence shouting from the door, because Laurence is here, falling to his knees at her side. ‘Patrick?’

  Oh, God. Laurence is kneeling by Patrick, his face a landscape of grief. And at the door, whence came the call for Kramme, a shine of blonde hair lies fann
ed across the threshold.

  ‘Céline.’ Sophie is up, running for the door. ‘Céline …’

  She can’t think. She must not. Instinct stitches facts together and she goes down on one knee beside Céline’s body, firing, firing, firing at the back of the retreating BMW, at Paul and Kramme and whoever else is in it, at the Americans and the Germans She fires until her magazine is empty and the gun doesn’t kick and the only sound is the harmless tap of steel on steel, lost in the maelstrom of shouting, and the final desperate scream of an armoured BMW accelerating out of the rutted yard, through a fence and out onto the road.

  Patrick is still alive, bleeding. She pushes Laurence out of the way. ‘Let me take him. JJ will help. You bring Céline.’

  ‘In here. On the table. Marianne, we’ll need sheets and hot water. JJ, get on the phone. We need an ambulance with blood and—’

  Stop.

  He has hold of her arm. Fabien was like this, long ago. Sophie. Stop. It’s all right. Honestly.

  ‘No. We can stop the bleeding. Pressure on the site and then a transfusion and—’

  Sophie. We’re halfway up a mountain in the middle of a blizzard and even if we weren’t, the nearest clinic with transfusion facilities is an hour away. And if it was next door, it still wouldn’t work. Stop. It’s all right.

  He is speaking fluently now, at the end. His, the shattered liver she had dreamed of for Kramme. His, the life blood leaking from a thousand ruptured veins.

  But his, too, the hand that lies easy on her arm. All his pride is melted away and underneath is the man he could have been, and always was. And he is smiling, a relaxed, wry smile that takes a dozen years of brittle hardship and smoothes them to a minor misunderstanding.

  Do what you’re good at. His hand reaches hers; he glances back over her shoulder. See to the living. They will need you.

  The living. None of them needs her. Daniel was clipped close by a round or a ricochet. He is bleeding, but not badly. JJ has it in hand.

  They are to her right, near the range at the back of the kitchen. She follows the line of Patrick’s gaze the other way, and at the end of it, Laurence Vaughan-Thomas stands in the doorway to the farmhouse with his cousin cradled across his arms.

  Céline. The one they all loved, in their own ways. Her blonde hair fans long past his wrists. One hand flops loose. Fat, cherried drops of blood splash from her dangling index finger onto Marianne Fayette’s scrubbed stone floor.

  Sophie grabs the last of the white linen sheets, looks round for where else to put her.

  Laurence says, ‘The floor will do. She was never fussy.’

  He brings her alongside the table, lowers her with care, and crosses her arms on her chest. Her features are smoothed free of the irony, the mask against the world. She is serene.

  ‘Laurence, I’m so—’

  ‘Don’t. She knew what she was doing.’

  Patrick says, Heart of a lion. I’ll tell her when we meet.

  ‘Tell her—’ Laurence is lost. Grief has stolen all his words. She thinks he might melt, drain away into the stones and mortar. He lifts his head, pulls on whatever reserves he holds close. ‘When she’s found Julie, tell her to wait for me.’

  Patrick’s hand, fumbling, finds his. We did our best. It was a good run.

  ‘More than we deserve.’

  ‘We didn’t find—’

  Stop.

  Sophie says, ‘This isn’t the end. We can track him. We can—’

  No. Sophie, my she-lion, let it go. Laurence, you too. All of it. All. His gaze hooks them together, draws them in. To Laurence, he says, Look after her.

  ‘Of course.’

  No. Truly look after her. She will need you. Swear. Her care shall be your first concern. Say it.

  Laurence drags his forearm across his nose. Snot-soaked, he says, ‘Her care shall be my first concern, I swear it. Truly. Trust me. I will do what it takes.’

  Thank you. That smile again. He is so peaceful. He tilts his head. Sophie?

  ‘I’m here.’

  You will take care of Laurence as he will of you.

  ‘I don’t need—’

  You do. Let him do it. Be kind to each other.

  ‘What if we’re both in gaol?’ This is not impossible. There are more dead out there than are dying in here. Five former Nazis lie still in the yard. Two of them have disabling trunk wounds, but what killed them was a single shot to the head. René did that, weeping. René, it seems, shot quite a lot of people, Americans and Germans both.

  You think there will be blowback from killing the Americans? Having lost all his blood, Patrick is losing breath and colour. Life is leaking from him.

  ‘Nothing insurmountable.’ Laurence takes his hand. ‘JJ will make it all go away.’

  Sophie is not listening. She is losing him and some things matter more than dead enemies. ‘I love you. I love you. I always did.’

  And I you. From the moment you dropped out of the sky. He pulls her close. Really, he is gone now, the light in his eyes, the smile, the language, it is all happening in the place where the dead gather. He glances down, at her abdomen. If it’s a boy …

  ‘I shall name him for you.’

  Thank you. You always were … a wonder. So fierce. So beautiful. So brave. He presses his lips to her hand, reaches for Laurence, who is blind with tears, and brings their hands together, links them, binding. Forget me now. Take care of each other.

  ‘Patrick! Don’t go. Patrick, please …’

  But he is lost, slipping from between her fingers. Gone.

  The clear-up happens around her. JJ is efficient and powerful. The phone lines have been cut, but it doesn’t delay him by much. Men in dungarees and caps with buckets and mops and clipboards approach the mess as a logistical problem and make it all go away. Except for Patrick, who is not moved.

  Sophie stands at his side until Laurence brings her a chair, makes her sit, hands her coffee and stands over her while she drinks.

  She says, ‘I can’t do this. Whatever you promised, I can’t be mothered like this.’ He steps away, hurt. She catches his sleeve, draws him back. ‘I’m sorry. He was yours as much as mine.’

  ‘I gave him to you, remember?’

  ‘You never asked him whether that was what he wanted.’

  ‘I did, actually. A long time before you met him.’ They sit together. They drink coffee. They do not move.

  Some time in the night, the newly pregnant Lisette Fayette, who was once Lisette Moreau, wades two kilometres through the snow from their cottage with news that a phone call has arrived at Daniel’s house. It is the third call she has taken in her life and the first from a stranger – the phone was installed at Christmas, JJ’s gift for their coming child, in case they need to call a hospital for the birth. To their certain knowledge, only JJ and both sets of parents have the number. Still, Paul Rey has called.

  ‘He wants to meet with Sophie.’ She has a map reference that, when examined, denotes a road in the high mountains, close to the border with Switzerland.

  Laurence says, ‘Under the circumstances, it’s probably a trap.’

  Of course it is. She says, ‘Did he say when?’ And writes down the directions, the time. To Laurence, she says, ‘I will come to you afterwards, but this I will do.’

  He catches her arm. ‘What if you don’t come back?’

  ‘Then the cabin is yours. He would have wanted you to have it. If you’d rather not, then give it to Lisette and Daniel, for the children.’

  THE FRENCH–SWISS BORDER

  7 March 1957

  The road bends in a hairpin hard to the left and soon after, tucked into the shoulder of the mountain, is the lay-by. A coil of old rope marks it as the right spot, and a pile of three tyres, out of place this high up. Sophie parks in gear and steps out, swaps warmth for the crisp, sharp cold of early evening.

  Another storm is coming; far to the west, heavy clouds grinding on the mountains squeeze out a layer of light the colour of crushed lemons.


  The silence makes her spine itch. She crouches by the car, but the tick-purr of the cooling engine is too loud and she has to worm out, arms extended, nerves chafed to screaming point, has to slide on her belly across the road and into the forest.

  The scent of cigars draws her in, so familiar, so comfortable – just now, so dangerous. She circles round, comes in from the east and very nearly, she shoots him, but someone else has got there first. In the fusillade that followed the BMW, she thought she saw him hit, and it is true.

  ‘Hello.’ He is waiting under a tree. He looks unarmed. He lifts his hands to show them empty. His face is deathly white and full of grief. ‘Patrick?’

  ‘Dead. And Céline.’ Her weapon is trained on his chest. One unclear thought and he is dead.

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  She shrugs. Yesterday, she grieved, and probably tomorrow. Today, she is white-hot angry. ‘Who is Diem?’

  ‘I don’t know. Did he not show himself?’

  Really, she might shoot him now. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Oh, Sophie.’ He closes his eyes. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘You betrayed us.’

  ‘I did not.’

  ‘You expect me to believe that?’

  ‘Please. Please. You have to.’

  There’s something about his face. She takes a step back. ‘What happened?’

  ‘They locked me out of the planning. They knew …’ What can he say?

  ‘They knew about us?’

  He gives a smile that brightens towards its end. ‘Everyone knows about us. But this time, they knew – or they were prepared to guess – that I wasn’t going to let Kramme leave France alive. I didn’t tell them. I. Did. Not.’

  ‘Diem.’

  ‘Or Kramme. Perhaps it was obvious all along.’

  ‘But Paul, you drove the car that got him out.’ She did not know she could put so much outrage into so quiet a sentence. ‘You could have killed him.’