World War II Thriller Collection (82 page)

“I'm sure. You sound as if you have a migraine.”

“It's just beginning.”

“Do you have the medicine?”

“Hans has it.”

“I'm sorry I'm not there to give it to you.”

He was, too. “I wanted to drive back to Reims tonight, but I don't think I can make it.”

“Don't you dare. I'll be fine. Take a shot and go to bed. Come back here tomorrow.”

He knew she was right. It was going to be hard enough getting back to his apartment, less than a kilometer away. He could not travel to Reims until he had recovered from the strain of the interrogation. “Okay,” he said. “I'll get a few hours' sleep and leave here in the morning.”

“Happy birthday.”

“You remembered! I forgot it myself.”

“I have something for you.”

“A gift?”

“More like . . . an action.”

He grinned, despite his headache. “Oh, boy.”

“I'll give it to you tomorrow.”

“I can't wait.”

“I love you.”

The words
I love you, too,
came to his lips, but he hesitated, reluctant from old habit to say them, and then there was a click as Stéphanie hung up.

IN THE EARLY
hours of Sunday morning, Paul Chancellor parachuted into a potato field near the village of Laroque, west of Reims, without the benefit—or the risk—of a reception committee.

The landing gave him a tremendous jolt of pain in his wounded knee. He grit his teeth and lay motionless on the ground, waiting for it to ease. The knee would probably hurt him every so often for the rest of his life. When he was an old man he would say a twinge meant rain—if he lived to be an old man.

After five minutes, he felt able to struggle to his feet and get out of his parachute harness. He found the road, oriented himself by the stars, and started walking, but he was limping badly, and progress was slow.

His identity, hastily cobbled together by Percy Thwaite, was that of a schoolteacher from Epernay, a few miles west. He was hitchhiking to Reims to visit his father, who was ill. Percy had got him all the necessary papers, some of them hastily forged last night and rushed to Tempsford by motorcycle. The limp fitted quite well with the cover story: a wounded veteran might well be a schoolteacher, whereas an active young man should have been sent to a labor camp in Germany.

Getting here was the simple part. Now he had to find Flick. His only way of contacting her would be via the Bollinger circuit. He had to hope that part of the circuit was left intact, and Brian was the only member in Gestapo custody. Like every new agent dropping in to
Reims, he would contact Mademoiselle Lemas. He would just have to be especially cautious.

Soon after first light he heard a vehicle. He stepped off the road into the field alongside and concealed himself behind a row of vines. As the noise came closer, he realized the vehicle was a tractor. That was safe enough: the Gestapo never traveled by tractor. He returned to the road and thumbed a lift.

The tractor was driven by a boy of about fifteen and was pulling a cartload of artichokes. The driver nodded at Paul's leg and said, “War wound?”

“Yes,” Paul said. The likeliest moment for a French soldier to have been hurt was during the Battle of France, so he added: “Sedan, nineteen-forty.”

“I was too young,” the boy said regretfully.

“Lucky you.”

“But wait till the Allies come back. Then you'll see some action.” He gave Paul a sideways look. “I can't say any more. But you wait and see.”

Paul thought hard. Was this lad a member of the Bollinger circuit? He said, “But do our people have the guns and ammunition they need?” If the boy knew anything at all, he would know that the Allies had dropped tons of weaponry in the past few months.

“We'll use whatever weapons come to hand.”

Was he being discreet about what he knew? No, Paul thought. The boy looked vague. He was fantasizing. Paul said no more.

The lad dropped him off on the outskirts, and he limped into town. The rendezvous had changed, from the cathedral crypt to the Café de la Gare, but the time was the same, three o'clock in the afternoon. He had hours to kill.

He went into the café to get breakfast and reconnoitre. He asked for black coffee. The elderly waiter raised his eyebrows, and Paul realized he had made a slip. Hastily, he tried to cover up. “No need to say
‘black,' I suppose,” he said. “You probably don't have any milk anyway.”

The waiter smiled, reassured. “Unfortunately not.” He went away.

Paul breathed out. It was eight months since he had been undercover in France, and he had forgotten the minute-to-minute strain of pretending to be someone else.

He spent the morning dozing through services in the cathedral, then went back into the café at one-thirty for lunch. The place emptied out around two-thirty, and he stayed drinking ersatz coffee. Two men came in at two forty-five and ordered beer. Paul looked hard at them. They wore old business suits and talked about grapes in colloquial French. They were eruditely discussing the flowering of the vines, a critical period that had just ended. He did not think they could possibly be agents of the Gestapo.

At exactly three o'clock a tall, attractive woman came in, dressed with unobtrusive elegance in a summer frock of plain green cotton and a straw hat. She wore odd shoes: one black, one brown. This must be Bourgeoise.

Paul was a little surprised. He had expected an older woman. However, that was probably an unwarranted assumption: Flick had never actually described her.

All the same, he was not yet ready to trust her. He got up and left the café.

He walked along the pavement to the railway station and stood in the entrance, watching the café. He was not conspicuous: as usual, there were several people hanging around the station waiting to meet friends.

He monitored the café's clientele. A woman walked by with a child who was demanding pastry and, as they reached the café, the mother gave in and took the child inside. The two grape experts left. A gendarme went in and came out immediately with a packet of cigarettes in his hand.

Paul began to believe this was not a Gestapo trap. There was no one in sight who looked remotely dangerous. Changing the location of the rendezvous had shaken them off.

Only one thing puzzled him. When Brian Standish had been caught at the cathedral, he had been rescued by Bourgeoise's friend Charenton. Where was he today? If he had been keeping an eye on her in the cathedral, why not here, too? But the circumstance was not dangerous in itself. And there could be a hundred simple explanations.

The mother and child left the café. Then, at three-thirty, Bourgeoise came out. She walked along the pavement away from the station. Paul followed on the other side of the street. She went up to a small black car of Italian design, the one the French called a Simca Cinq. Paul crossed the street. She got into the car and started the engine.

It was time for Paul to decide. He could not be sure this was safe, but he had gone as far as he could with caution, short of not making the rendezvous at all. At some point, risks had to be taken. Otherwise he might as well have stayed at home.

He went up to the car on the passenger side and opened the door.

She looked coolly at him. “Monsieur?”

“Pray for me,” he said.

“I pray for peace.”

Paul got into the car. Giving himself a code name, he said, “I am Danton.”

She pulled away. “Why didn't you speak to me in the café?” she said. “I saw you as soon as I walked in. You made me wait there half an hour. It's dangerous.”

“I wanted to be sure this wasn't a trap.”

She glanced over at him. “You heard what happened to Helicopter.”

“Yes. Where's your friend who rescued him, Charenton?”

She headed south, driving fast. “He's working today.”

“On Sunday? What does he do?”

“Fireman. He's on duty.”

That explained that. Paul moved quickly to the real purpose of his visit. “Where's Helicopter?”

She shook her head. “No idea. My house is a cut-out. I meet people, I pass them on to Monet. I'm not supposed to know anything.”

“Is Monet all right?”

“Yes. He phoned me on Thursday afternoon, checking up on Charenton.”

“Not since?”

“No. But that's not unusual.”

“When did you last see him?”

“In person? I've never seen him.”

“Have you heard from Leopardess?”

“No.”

Paul brooded as the car threaded through the suburbs. Bourgeoise really had no information for him. He would have to move to the next link in the chain.

She pulled into a courtyard alongside a tall house. “Come inside and get cleaned up,” she said.

He got out of the car. Everything seemed to be in order: Bourgeoise had been at the right rendezvous and had given all the correct signals, and there had been no one following her. On the other hand, she had given him no useful information, and he still had no notion how deeply the Bollinger circuit had been penetrated, nor how much danger Flick was in. As Bourgeoise led him to the front door and opened it with her key, he touched the wooden toothbrush in his shirt pocket: it was French-made, so he had been permitted to bring it with him. Now an impulse seized him. As Bourgeoise stepped into the house, he slipped the toothbrush from his pocket and dropped it on the ground just in front of the door.

He followed her inside. “Big place,” he said. It had dark, old-fashioned wallpaper and heavy furniture, quite out of character with its owner. “Have you been here long?”

“I inherited it three or four years ago. I'd like to redecorate, but you can't get the materials.” She opened a door and stood aside for him to go first. “Come into the kitchen.”

He stepped inside and saw two men in uniform. Both held automatic pistols. And both guns were pointed at Paul.

DIETER'S CAR SUFFERED
a puncture on the RN3 road between Paris and Meaux. A bent nail was stuck in the tire. The delay irritated him, and he paced the roadside restlessly, but Lieutenant Hesse jacked up the car and changed the wheel with calm efficiency, and they were on their way again within a few minutes.

Dieter had slept late, under the influence of the morphine injection Hans had given him in the early hours, and now he watched with impatience as the ugly industrial landscape east of Paris changed gradually to farming country. He wanted be in Reims. He had set a trap for Flick Clairet, and he needed to be there when she fell into it.

The big Hispano-Suiza flew along an arrow-straight road lined with poplars—a road probably built by the Romans. At the start of the war, Dieter had thought the Third Reich would be like the Roman Empire, a pan-European hegemony that would bring unprecedented peace and prosperity to all its subjects. Now he was not so sure.

He worried about his mistress. Stéphanie was in danger, and he was responsible. Everyone's life was at risk now, he told himself. Modern warfare put the entire population on the front line. The best way to protect Stéphanie—and himself, and his family in Germany—was to defeat the invasion. But there were moments when he cursed himself for involving his lover so closely in his mission. He was playing a risky game and using her in an exposed position.

Resistance fighters did not take prisoners. Being in constant peril themselves, they had no scruples about killing French people who collaborated with the enemy.

The thought that Stéphanie might be killed made his chest tighten and his breathing difficult. He could hardly contemplate life without her. The prospect seemed dismal, and he realized he must be in love with her. He had always told himself that she was just a beautiful courtesan, and he was using her the way men always used such women. Now he saw that he had been fooling himself. And he wished all the more that he was already in Reims at her side.

It was Sunday afternoon, so there was little traffic on the road, and they made good progress.

The second puncture occurred when they were less than an hour from Reims. Dieter wanted to scream with frustration. It was another bent nail. Were wartime tires poor quality? he wondered. Or did French people deliberately drop their old nails on the road, knowing that nine vehicles out of ten were driven by the occupying forces?

The car did not have a second spare wheel, so the tire had to be mended before they could drive on. They left the car and walked. After a mile or so they came to a farmhouse. A large family was sitting around the remains of a substantial Sunday lunch: on the table were cheese and strawberries and several empty wine bottles. Country folk were the only French people who were well fed. Dieter bullied the farmer into hitching up his horse and cart and driving them to the next town.

In the town square was a single gas pump on the pavement outside a wheelwright's shop with a Closed sign in the window. They banged on the door and woke a surly
garagiste
from his Sunday-afternoon nap. The mechanic fired up an ancient truck and drove off with Hans beside him.

Dieter sat in the living room of the mechanic's house, stared at by three small children in ragged clothes. The mechanic's wife, a tired woman with dirty hair, bustled
about in the kitchen but did not offer him so much as a glass of cold water.

Dieter thought of Stéphanie again. There was a phone in the hallway. He looked into the kitchen. “May I make a call?” he asked politely. “I will pay you, of course.”

She gave him a hostile glare. “Where to?”

“Reims.”

She nodded and made a note of the time by the clock on the mantelpiece.

Dieter got the operator and gave the number of the house in the rue du Bois. It was answered immediately by a low, gruff voice reciting the number in a provincial accent. Suddenly alert, Dieter said in French, “This is Pierre Charenton.”

The voice at the other end changed into Stéphanie's, and she said, “My darling.”

He realized she had answered the phone with her imitation of Mademoiselle Lemas, as a precaution. His heart gladdened with relief. “Is everything all right?” he asked her.