her heart leaped with hope. “Has Monty changed his mind?”
“I’m afraid not. But I need you to brief someone.”
She bit her lip, suppressing her disappointment. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
She dressed quickly and took the Underground to Baker Street. Percy was waiting for her in the flat in Portman Square. “I’ve found a radio operator. No experience, but he’s done the training. I’m sending him to Reims tomorrow.”
Flick glanced reflexively at the window, to check the weather, as agents always did when a flight was mentioned. Percy’s curtains were drawn, for security, but anyway she knew the weather was fine. “Reims? Why?”
“We’ve heard nothing from Michel today. I need to know how much of the Bollinger circuit is left.”
Flick nodded. Pierre, the radio operator, had been in the attack squad. Presumably he was captured or dead. Michel might have been able to locate Pierre’s radio transceiver, but he had not been trained to operate it, and he certainly did not know the codes. “But what’s the point?”
“We’ve sent them tons of explosives and ammunition in the last few months. I want them to light some fires. The telephone exchange is the most important target, but it’s not the only one. Even if there’s no one left but Michel and a couple of others, they can blow up railway lines, cut telephone wires, and shoot sentries-it all helps. But I can’t direct them if I have no communication.”
Flick shrugged. To her, the chateau was the only target that mattered. Everything else was chicken feed. But what the hell. “I’ll brief him, of course.”
Percy gave her a hard look. He hesitated, then said, “How was Michel-apart from his bullet wound?”
“Fine.” Flick was silent for a moment. Percy stared at her. She could not deceive him, he knew her too well. At last she sighed and said, “There’s a girl.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“I don’t know whether there’s anything left of my marriage,” she said bitterly.
“I’m sorry.”
“It would help if I could tell myself that I’d made a sacrifice for a purpose, struck a magnificent blow for our side, made the invasion more likely to succeed.”
“You’ve done more than most, over the last two years.”
“But there’s no second prize in a war, is there?”
“No.”
She stood up. She was grateful for Percy’s fond sympathy, but it was making her maudlin. “I’d better brief the new radioman.”
“Code name Helicopter. He’s waiting in the study. Not the sharpest knife in the box, I’m afraid, but a brave lad.”
This seemed sloppy to Flick. “If he’s not too bright, why send him? He might endanger others.”
“As you said earlier-this is our big chance. If the invasion fails, we’ve lost Europe. We’ve got to throw everything we have at the enemy now, because we won’t get another chance.”
Flick nodded grimly. He had turned her own argument against her. But he was right. The only difference was that the lives being endangered, in this case, included Michel’s. “Okay,” she said. “I’d better get on with it.”
“He’s eager to see you.”
She frowned. “Eager? Why?”
Percy gave a wry smile. “Go and find out for yourself.”
Flick left the drawing room of the apartment, where Percy had his desk, and went along the corridor. His secretary was typing in the kitchen, and she directed Flick to another room.
Flick paused outside the door. This is how it is, she told herself: you pick yourself up and carry on working, hoping you will eventually forget.
She entered the study, a small room with a square table and a few mismatched chairs. Helicopter was a fair-skinned boy of about twenty-two, wearing a tweed suit in a checked pattern of mustard, orange, and green. You could tell he was English from a distance of a mile. Fortunately, before he got on the plane he would be kitted out in clothing that would look inconspicuous in a French town. SOE employed French tailors and dressmakers who sewed Continental-style clothes for agents (then spent hours making the clothes look worn and shabby so that they would not attract attention by their newness). There was nothing they could do about Helicopter’s pink complexion and red-blond hair, except hope that the Gestapo would think he must have some German blood.
Flick introduced herself, and he said, “Yes, we’ve met before, actually.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t remember.”
“You were at Oxford with my brother, Charles.”
“Charlie Standish—of course!” Flick remembered another fair boy in tweeds, taller and slimmer than Helicopter, but probably no cleverer-he had not taken a degree. Charlie spoke fluent French, she recalled— something they had had in common.
“You came to our house in Gloucestershire once, actually.”
Flick recalled a weekend in a country house in the thirties, and a family with an amiable English father and a chic French mother. Charlie had had a kid brother, Brian, an awkward adolescent in knee shorts, very excited about his new camera. She had talked to him a bit, and he had developed a little crush on her. “So how is Charlie? I haven’t seen him since we graduated.”
“He’s dead, actually.” Brian looked suddenly grief-stricken. “Died in forty-one. Killed in the b-b-bloody desert, actually.”
Flick was afraid he would cry. She took his hand in both of hers and said, “Brian, I’m so terribly sorry.”
“Jolly nice of you.” He swallowed hard. With an effort he brightened. “I’ve seen you since then, just once. You gave a lecture to my SOE training group. I didn’t get a chance to speak to you afterwards.”
“I hope my talk was useful.”
“You spoke about traitors within the Resistance and what to do about them. ‘It’s quite simple,’ you said. ‘You put the barrel of your pistol to the back of the bastard’s head and pull the trigger twice.’ Scared us all to death, actually.”
He was looking at her with something like hero-worship in his eyes, and she began to see what Percy had been hinting at. It looked as if Brian still had a crush on her. She moved away from him, sat at the other side of the table, and said, “Well, we’d better begin. You know you’re going to make contact with a Resistance circuit that has been largely wiped out.”
“Yes, I’m to find out how much of it is left and what it is still capable of doing, if anything.”
“It’s likely that some members were captured during the skirmish yesterday and are under Gestapo interrogation as we speak. So you’ll have to be especially careful. Your contact in Reims is a woman codenamed Bourgeoise. Every day at three in the afternoon she goes to the crypt of the cathedral to pray. She’s generally the only person there but, in case there are others, she’ll be wearing odd shoes, one black and one brown.”
“Easy enough to remember.”
“You say to her, ‘Pray for me.’ She replies, ‘I pray for peace.’ That’s the code.”
He repeated the words.
“She’ll take you to her house, then put you in touch with the head of the Bollinger circuit, whose code name is Monet.” She was talking about her husband, but Brian did not need to know that. “Don’t mention the address or real name of Bourgeoise to other members of the circuit when you meet them, please: for security reasons, it’s better they don’t know.” Flick herself had recruited Bourgeoise and set up the cut-out. Even Michel had not met the woman.
“I understand.”
“Is there anything you want to ask me?”
“I’m sure there are a hundred things, but I can’t think of any.”
She stood up and came around the table to shake his hand. “Well, good luck.”
He kept hold of her hand. “I never forgot that weekend you came to our house,” he said. “I expect I was a frightful bore, but you were very kind to me.”
She smiled and said lightly, “You were a nice kid.”
“I fell in love with you, actually.”
She wanted to jerk her hand out of his and walk away, but he might die tomorrow, and she could not bring
