The Eden Inheritance (13 page)

As Paul Sullivan walked briskly up the street the cold seemed to seep out of the pavements and clam in around him. He turned up the collar of his greatcoat, bending his head so that his chin was buried inside it, and thrust his gloved hands deep into his pockets.

It was, he thought, going to be a long, hard winter – and it had set in early in France, where he had spent the last months, just as in England. Though it was still only mid-November he had been out on nights much colder and darker than this one and the
frisson
of fear that always accompanied him on his missions had meant that the cold chilling his fingers and toes had been less noticeable than the aching awareness of danger that ran in his blood.

The weather assumed enormous importance in that dangerous shadowland that spanned both sides of the demarcation line between occupied territory and Vichy France, where the uniform of a Vichy policeman could be as much of a threat as that of a German soldier and danger wore a thousand different faces. A clear sky with a bright moon meant that planes could fly – friendly English planes, bearing arms and supplies and sometimes men to help him in his work. A dark night meant extra cover for operations which needed to be cloaked in secrecy. Rain misted windscreens, soggy fields muffled footsteps, frosty ground and snow meant tracks that were all too easy to follow. Paul Sullivan had seen them all and quickly learned to assess their importance – assess it so automatically that now, without even so much as glancing at the sky, his fine-tuned mind was telling him there would be no aircraft crossing the Channel tonight.

Paul thought briefly of the friends who had watched the sky with him, friends who were now dead, and felt a sickness start in his stomach. The circuit he had formed and run in north-east France was shattered, its members taken or shot as they ran on a night when no cloud had obscured the moon. He had not been with them that night. If he had been, could he have saved them, or would he too have ended up in a shallow grave? The question tormented him as it had tormented him ever since that night, and he thrust it away. To believe he could have prevented their deaths was a form of arrogance, and arrogance, in Paul Sullivan's war, was a dangerous thing.

At the corner of the square a group of Home Guard were standing outside their pillbox smoking and stamping their feet against the cold; the sight of them and the ‘Mobile Mollies' – the small anti-aircraft guns – reminded Paul that the thickness of the night had a different meaning for war-torn England – tonight there would be no bombers dropping their loads of death and destruction on London. It shocked him almost that he could have forgotten so easily that here the struggle had a different face, that England was still engaged in open warfare with the Third Reich whilst France had, on the surface at any rate, capitulated. For Paul, France, where nothing was quite what it seemed, had become a way of life these last months.

As he approached the doorway that was his destination Paul glanced quickly over his shoulder, instinctively checking that he was not being followed. An unnecessary precaution here in London, he hoped, but one that had become second nature to him during his time in France. But for the Home Guard the street was deserted; satisfied, he went inside and gave his name to the doorman.

In peacetime the building had been nothing more intriguing than an elegant old house converted into flats; now several of them had been hired by the newly formed French section of the SOE. Here agents could be seen by the home staff – much safer, for reasons of security, than allowing them to visit the SOE headquarters in Baker Street, the exact location of which was a carefully guarded secret. As a very early recruit Paul had been interviewed in a basement in Whitehall where the labyrinthine corridors were policed by uniformed soldiers, but that hidey-hole had been returned to the military now, abandoned in favour of the anonymous rented apartments, and Paul was glad. Though he would never admit it he had.hated descending in the ancient creaking lift to the bowels of the earth. From childhood he had suffered from – and largely conquered – the creeping menace of claustrophobia, and the basement had reawakened his feelings of dark panic and the fear of being buried alive. He had understood, of course, that the theory was that the basement afforded protection against air raids, but he had thought he would prefer to take his chances with a bomb above ground level where at least the air was pure and escape no more than the thickness of the Ministry walls away.

He went up the staircase now to the designated apartment and knocked on the door. It was opened by a young woman.

‘Captain Sullivan.' A flush of pleasure, that not even the professionalism for which she had been chosen for her special duties could suppress, coloured her cheeks and replaced some of the warmth that her khaki uniform had taken away. Paul Sullivan had this effect on most of the women he met – they warmed to his narrow face with its slightly irregular features, admired the lean frame which suggested not weakness but power, melted at the wry twist of his mouth and the way his hazel eyes crinkled when he smiled. The fact that he seldom smiled nowadays coupled with his lack of awareness of his attractiveness only made it the more potent; they longed, almost without exception, to be the one to break through that barrier of reserve. But there was a strange, still vibrance about him too and an edge of something that might almost be danger, whilst on the surface he presented an impression of total immovable calm. He might, thought the young woman, have just returned from a relaxing leave instead of a perilous mission.

‘Hello, Rita.' His voice was deep, deceptively lazy. ‘You're still with the department then?'

‘Just let them try to get rid of me! Actually I'd say I was quite enjoying the war if it wasn't for the damage those bastards are doing! Do you know last night a bomb destroyed the church where my mother and father were married? If we don't soon put a stop to their tricks there won't be anything left worth fighting for.'

Paul's lips twisted grimly. Principles are worth fighting for, he felt like saying. The right of every human being to live their lives in freedom is worth fighting for. And people, most of all, are worth fighting for. But he did not voice the thought. He was too well aware of the desire for revenge burning inside of him to feel that such noble sentiments would be anything but hypocritical. Fine motives were all very well, but Paul knew he was driven most of all by the need to avenge his own personal loss.

Two years ago, when this bloody war had erupted, volcanolike, from the molten lava base of Nazi Germany, he'd had a wife and child who had meant the whole world to him. Now they were dead. They had been visiting Gerie's parents in Rotterdam when the Germans had attacked and they had been caught in the aerial bombardment that was known as the blitzkrieg. Desperate to discover their fate Paul had battered on every door available to him only to learn the horrifying truth – the street where Gerie's parents had lived had been reduced to a mass of smoking rubble, Gerie and his little daughter Beatrice were numbered amongst the eight hundred people who had died when Rotterdam had fallen.

‘Major Fawcett is expecting me, I believe,' he said, businesslike suddenly.

The girl's eyes shadowed at the sudden end to the easy rapport of a moment ago, but young as she was she was too good at her job to allow it to show for more than a moment. Rita Barlow had been hand-picked for her qualities of efficiency and courage to do a difficult and demanding job; she would never allow what she thought of as a ‘soft spot' for one of the department's agents to get in the way of duty.

‘He is expecting you, yes. I'll tell him you've arrived.' She went through into what had once been a bedroom but was now coverted into an office. ‘Captain Sullivan is here to see you, sir.'

‘Sullivan. Come in, old chap.' The Major rose to his feet behind a desk strewn with papers he had been perusing whilst he waited for Paul; he was not a man who believed in wasting a single momentof his precious time. In an ashtray an abandoned cigar lay in a heap of pungent ash. ‘Have a seat, won't you? And Rita, rustle us up some coffee. It's a cold night out there, isn't it?'

‘It certainly is.' Paul unbuttoned his greatcoat and sat down in the chair opposite the Major's.

‘Perhaps we'll have a tipple of something else to warm us up, too.' The Major reached into his briefcase and extracted a half-bottle of brandy. ‘ You wouldn't say no, I imagine?'

Paul smiled wryly.

‘You're right – I wouldn't.'

The Major found two glasses in an official-looking cabinet, poured a generous measure of brandy into each of them and handed one to Paul.

‘Your health. Seems as appropriate a toast as any in the circumstances.'

Paul said nothing and the Major's eyes narrowed thoughtfully. Then he put down his glass, took a fresh file from his briefcase and opened it.

‘Right. Let's get down to it then, shall we? I've talked to Major Allen who debriefed you when you first got back to London and I've been through his reports and your own. You've done well, Captain Sullivan.'

Paul took a long swig of brandy.

‘I'd hardly call losing an entire circuit doing well.'

‘Hmm. Yes. Bad business that. It happened through loose talk, you think?'

‘I've no proof, but I believe it was that, yes. For the Germans to turn up in such force at the very place and the very time we were moving the arms cache seems too convenient to be just coincidence. An odd patrol, yes. There are plenty of those. But a whole fleet of armoured vehicles … no, somebody talked, I'm sure of it.'

‘Any idea who?'

‘Try whichever of my trusted band is still walking the streets,' Paul said drily. ‘ No, I don't actually mean that, I don't think we were betrayed, as such. I knew my men – at least, I like to think I did. No, I think it was a careless word in the wrong ear. A wife, a girlfriend who knew too much, someone trying to be clever or impress … I warned them, God knows, but it doesn't come easy to simple, good country folk to mistrust people they've known all their lives. The divisions over there are so blurred. Those who want to resist, those who prefer to keep their heads down, and those who simply don't understand what all the hiss is about. There are Communists, Pétainists, those who look to de Gaulle for salvation, even Facists. There are plenty of good men, I'm sure, who only want to do what they can to overthrow the Nazis, but. recruiting them is a bloody nightmare and getting them to toe the line even worse. They're still learning what it's like to live in an occupied country.'

‘We are all feeling our way in a situation that is new to us.' The Major drained his glass and replenished it. ‘Inevitably that will mean some blunders. And we in the SOE are fighting our own battles here at home too. The old guard believe active resistance will only stir up more trouble than it's worth. They want to restrict us to an information-gathering role. But we'll get there, never fear.'

A tap at the door interrupted his flow and Rita came in with mugs of coffee. The aroma of it filled the small room and Paul thought wryly that shortages or no shortages the hierarchy of the SOE were making sure of the supplies they needed to keep them going – and awake – through the long nights.

‘You were lucky not to be taken with the rest of them,' the Major said when the door had closed after Rita once more.

‘I have a punctured bicycle tyre to thank for that. It made me late getting to the meeting place. I arrived just in time to hear the shots and see the Germans arresting my men.'

‘A very fortuitous puncture.'

‘I suppose so.' Paul grimaced. ‘It seems to me that I have a knack of being absent when disaster strikes.'

Without him having to mention them by name Major Fawcett knew that Paul was referring to what had happened to his wife and daughter.

‘I can't send you back there, Sullivan,' he said abruptly. ‘But of course, you must already realise that. Chances are your cover is totally blown.'

‘Chances are. If they didn't already know who I was when they swooped that night they know now. At least two of my men were taken alive, and though I think they would do their best to keep what they knew secret, the Gestapo can be very persuasive.'

‘So. The whole of that sectoris out of the question as far as you are concerned. We shall put someone else in as soon as we can to try and re-form a circuit.'

As if he had forgotten the cigar he had abandoned in the ashtray the Major drew a fresh one from a packet in the breast pocket of his battledress and searched for matches.

‘I do want to go back, though,' Paul said. ‘I know it looks as if I buggered it up this time but I believe I've learned useful lessons.'

‘And you haven't been put off by the fact that you only just escaped with your life?'

Paul's mouth tightened.

‘I always knew the risks. I was prepared to take them. Nothing has happened to change that. Besides, how many men have you got who know France as I do and who can speak French like a native?'

The Major applied a match to his cigar.

‘My father worked for the Embassy in Paris, but I spent holidays with friends all over the place and when I finished school I had a year or two of a sort of hobo existence, backpacking and getting work where I could.'

‘So you think you could pass for a native anywhere?'

‘I've always had a good ear for dialects, certainly.'

‘That's what I was hoping you would say.' His cigar going at last, the Major tossed aside the matches and reached for another file. ‘I do have something in mind for you as it happens. Do you know the west at all – Charente and Charente-sur-Mer?'

‘Cognac country? I've been there, yes. I was there for the grape harvest.'

‘But you're not known there?'

‘No. I was just one more ex-student looking for work to pay my board and lodging. And I had a beard at the time, I think.' Paul rasped his fingers thoughtfully over his now clean-shaven chin. ‘Besides, it's ten years since I was there. I don't think anyone would remember me.'