That was how he had got Stephanie. Poised, sensual, and shrewd, she had been the owner of a Paris store selling ladies’ hats that were devastatingly chic and obscenely expensive. But she had a Jewish grandmother. She had lost the store and spent six months in a French prison, and she had been on her way to a camp in Germany when Dieter rescued her.
He could have raped her. She had certainly expected that. No one would have raised a protest, let alone punished him. But instead, he had fed her, given her new clothes, installed her in the spare bedroom in his apartment, and treated her with gentle affection until one evening, after a dinner of foie de veau and a bottle of La Tache, he had seduced her deliciously on the couch in front of a blazing coal fire.
Today, though, she was part of his camouflage. He was working with Rommel again. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the “Desert Fox,” was now Commander of Army Group B, defending northern France. German intelligence expected an Allied invasion this summer. Rommel did not have enough men to guard the hundreds of miles of vulnerable coastline, so he had adopted a daring strategy of flexible response: his battalions were miles inland, ready to be swiftly deployed wherever needed.
The British knew this-they had intelligence, too. Their counterplan was to slow Rommel’s response by disrupting his communications. Night and day, British and American bombers pounded roads and railways, bridges and tunnels, stations and marshaling yards. And the Resistance blew up power stations and factories, derailed trains, cut telephone lines, and sent teenage girls to pour grit into the oil reservoirs of trucks and tanks.
Dieter’s brief was to identify key communications targets and assess the ability of the Resistance to attack them. In the last few months, from his base in Paris, he had ranged all over northern France, barking at sleepy sentries and putting the fear of God into lazy captains, tightening up security at railway signal boxes, train sheds, vehicle parks, and airfield control towers. Today he was paying a surprise visit to a telephone exchange of enormous strategic importance. Through this building passed all telephone traffic from the High Command in Berlin to German forces in northern France. That included teleprinter messages, the means by which most orders were sent nowadays. If the exchange was destroyed, German communications would be crippled.
The Allies obviously knew that and had tried to bomb the place, with limited success. It was the perfect candidate for a Resistance attack. Yet security was infuriatingly lax, by Dieter’s standards. That was probably due to the influence of the Gestapo, who had a post in the same building. The Geheime Staatspolizei was the state security service, and men were often promoted by reason of loyalty to Hitler and enthusiasm for Fascism rather than because of their brains or ability. Dieter had been here for half an hour, taking photographs, his anger mounting as the men responsible for guarding the place continued to ignore him.
However, as the church bell stopped ringing, a Gestapo officer in major’s uniform came strutting through the tall iron gates of the chateau and headed straight for Dieter. In bad French he shouted, “Give me that camera!”
Dieter turned away, pretending not to hear.
“It is forbidden to take photographs of the chateau, imbecile!” the man yelled. “Can’t you see this is a military installation?”
Dieter turned to him and replied quietly in German, “You took a damn long time to notice me.”
The man was taken aback. People in civilian clothing were usually frightened of the Gestapo. “What are you talking about?” he said less aggressively.
Dieter checked his watch. “I’ve been here for thirty-two minutes. I could have taken a dozen photographs and driven away long ago. Are you in charge of security?”
“Who are you?”
“Major Dieter Franck, from Field Marshal Rommel’s personal staff.”
“Franck!” said the man. “I remember you.”
Dieter looked harder at him. “My God,” he said as recognition dawned. “Willi Weber.”
“Sturmbannfuhrer Weber, at your service.” Like most senior Gestapo men, Weber held an SS rank, which he felt was more prestigious than his ordinary police rank.
“Well, I’m damned,” Dieter said. No wonder security was slack.
Weber and Dieter had been young policemen together in Cologne in the twenties. Dieter had been a high flyer, Weber a failure. Weber resented Dieter’s success and attributed it to his privileged background. (Dieter’s background was not extraordinarily privileged, but it seemed so to Weber, the son of a stevedore.)
In the end, Weber had been fired. The details began to come back to Dieter: there had been a road accident, a crowd had gathered, Weber had panicked and fired his weapon, and a rubbernecking bystander had been killed.
Dieter had not seen the man for fifteen years, but he could guess the course of Weber’s career: he had joined the Nazi party, become a volunteer organizer, applied for a job with the Gestapo citing his police training, and risen swiftly in that community of embittered second-raters.
Weber said, “What are you doing here?”
“Checking your security, on behalf of the Field Marshal.”
Weber bristled. “Our security is good.”
“Good enough for a sausage factory. Look around you.” Dieter waved a hand, indicating the town square. “What if these people belonged to the Resistance? They could pick off your guards in a few seconds.” He pointed to a tall girl wearing a light summer coat over her dress. “What if she had a gun under her coat? What if..
He stopped.
This was not just a fantasy he was weaving to illustrate a point, he realized. His unconscious mind had seen the people in the square deploying in battle formation. The tiny blonde and her husband had taken cover in the bar. The two men in the church doorway had moved behind pillars. The tall girl in the summer coat, who had been staring into a shop window until a moment ago, was now standing in the shadow of Dieter’s car. As Dieter looked, her coat flapped open, and to his astonishment he saw that his imagination had been prophetic: under the coat she had a submachine gun with a skeleton-frame butt, exactly the type favored by the Resistance. “My God!” he said.
He reached inside his suit jacket and remembered he was not carrying a gun.
Where was Stephanie? He looked around, momentarily shocked into a state close to panic, but she was standing behind him, waiting patiently for him to finish his conversation with Weber. “Get down!” he yelled.
Then there was a bang.
CHAPTER 3
FLICK WAS IN the doorway of the Cafe des Sports, behind Michel, standing on tiptoe to look over his shoulder. She was alert, her heart pounding, her muscles tensed for action, but in her brain the blood flowed like ice water, and she watched and calculated with cool detachment.
There were eight guards in sight: two at the gate checking passes, two just inside the gate, two patrolling the grounds behind the iron railings, and two at the top of the short flight of steps leading to the chateau’s grand doorway. But Michel’s main force would bypass the gate.
The long north side of the church building formed part of the wall surrounding the chateau’s grounds. The north transept jutted a few feet into the parking lot that had once been part of the ornamental garden. In the days of the ancien regime, the comte had had his own personal entrance to the church, a little door in the transept wall. The doorway had been boarded up and plastered over more than a hundred years ago, and had remained that way until today.
An hour ago, a retired quarryman called Gaston had entered the empty church and carefully placed four half-pound sticks of yellow plastic explosive at the foot of the blocked doorway. He had inserted detonators, connected them together so that they would all go off at the same instant, and added a five-second fuse ignited by a thumb plunger. Then he had smeared everything with ash from his kitchen fire to make it inconspicuous and moved an old wooden bench in front of the doorway for additional concealment. Satisfied with his handiwork, he had knelt down to pray.
When the church bell had stopped ringing a few seconds ago, Gaston had got up from his pew, walked a few paces from the nave into the transept, depressed the plunger, and ducked quickly back around the corner. The blast
