of Gestapo men stepped out of the north transept. The agent saw them and seemed to guess what they were, for he swerved left, but he was too late. One of the men stuck out a foot and tripped him. He fell headlong, his chunky body hitting the stone floor with a thwack. The suitcase went flying. Both Gestapo men jumped on him. Weber came running up, looking pleased.
“Shit,” Dieter said aloud, forgetting where he was. The mad fools were ruining everything.
Maybe he could still save the situation.
He reached into his jacket, drew his Walther P38, thumbed the safety catch, and pointed it at the Gestapo men who were holding the agent down. Speaking French, he yelled at the top of his voice, “Get off him now, or I shoot!”
Weber said, “Major, I—”
Dieter fired into the air. The report of the pistol crashed around the cathedral vaults, drowning Weber’s giveaway words. “Silence!” Dieter shouted in German. Weber looked scared and shut up.
Dieter poked the nose of the pistol hard into the face of one of the Gestapo men. Reverting to French, he screamed, “Off! Off! Get off him!”
With terrified faces the two men stood up and backed away.
Dieter looked at Stephanie. Calling her by Mademoiselle Lemas’s name, he shouted, “Jeanne! Go! Get away!” Stephanie began to run. She circled widely around the Gestapo men and dashed for the west door.
The agent was scrambling to his feet. “Go with her! Go with her!” Dieter shouted at him, pointing. The man grabbed his suitcase and ran, vaulting over the backs of the wooden choir stalls and haring down the middle of the nave.
Weber and his three associates looked bemused. “Lie facedown!” Dieter ordered them. As they obeyed, he backed away, still threatening them with the gun. Then he turned and ran after Stephanie and the agent.
As the other two fled through the doorway, Dieter stopped and spoke to Hans, who stood near the back of the church, looking stolid. “Talk to those damn fools,” Dieter said breathlessly. “Explain what we’re doing and make sure they don’t follow us.” He holstered the pistol and ran outside.
The engine of the Simca was turning over. Dieter pushed the agent into the cramped backseat and got into the front passenger seat. Stephanie stamped on the pedal and the little car shot out of the square like a champagne cork.
As they raced along the street, Dieter turned and looked through the back window. “No one following,” he said. “Slow down. We don’t want to get stopped by a gendarme.”
The agent said in French, “I’m Helicopter. What the hell happened in there?”
Dieter realized that “Helicopter” must be a code name. He recalled that Gaston had told him Mademoiselle Lemas’s code name. “This is Bourgeoise,” he said, indicating Stephanie. “And I’m Charenton,” he improvised, thinking for some reason of the prison where the Marquis de Sade had been incarcerated. “Bourgeoise has become suspicious, in the last few days, that the cathedral rendezvous might be watched, so she asked me to come with her. I’m not part of the Bollinger circuit-Bourgeoise is a cut-out.”
“Yes, I understand that.”
“Anyway, we now know the Gestapo had set a trap, and it’s just fortunate that she had asked me to be there as backup for her.”
“You were brilliant!” Helicopter said enthusiastically. “God, I was so scared, I thought I’d blown it on my first day.”
You have, Dieter thought silently.
It seemed to Dieter that he might have saved the situation. Helicopter now firmly believed that Dieter was a member of the Resistance. Helicopter’s French sounded perfect, but obviously he was not quite good enough to identify Dieter’s slight accent. Was there anything else that might cause him to be suspicious, perhaps later when he thought things over? Dieter had stood up and said “No!” right at the start of the rumpus, but a plain “No” did not mean much, and anyway he did not think anyone had heard him. Willi Weber had shouted “Major” in German at Dieter, and Dieter had fired his weapon to drown out any further indiscretion. Had Helicopter heard that one word, did he know what it meant, and would he remember it later and puzzle over it? No, Dieter decided. If Helicopter had understood the word, he would have assumed Weber was addressing one of the other Gestapo men: they were all in plain clothes so could be any rank.
Helicopter would now trust Dieter in all things, being convinced Dieter had snatched him from the clutches of the Gestapo.
Others might not be quite so easy to fool. The existence of a new Resistance member codenamed Charenton and recruited by Mademoiselle Lemas would have to be plausibly explained, both to London and to the leader of the Bollinger circuit, Michel Clairet. Both might ask questions and run checks. Dieter would just have to deal with them in due course. It was not possible to anticipate everything.
He allowed himself a moment of triumph. He was one step closer to his goal of crippling the Resistance in northern France. He had pulled it off despite the stupidity of the Gestapo. And it had been exhilarating.
The challenge now was to make maximum use of Helicopter’s trust. The agent must continue to operate, believing himself unsuspected. That way he could lead Dieter to more agents, perhaps dozens more. But it was a subtle trick to pull off
They arrived at the rue du Bois and Stephanie drove into Mademoiselle Lemas’s garage. They entered the house by the back door and sat in the kitchen. Stephanie got a bottle of scotch from the cellar and poured them all a drink.
Dieter was desperately anxious to confirm that Helicopter had a radio. He said, “You’d better send a message to London right away.”
“I’m supposed to broadcast at eight p.m. and receive at eleven.”
Dieter made a mental note. “But you need to tell them as soon as possible that the cathedral rendezvous is compromised. We don’t want them to send any more men there. And there could be someone else on his way tonight.”
“Oh, my God, yes,” the young man said. “I’ll use the emergency frequency.”
“You can set up your wireless right here in the kitchen.”
Helicopter lifted the heavy case onto the table and opened it.
Dieter hid a sigh of profound satisfaction. There it was.
The interior of the case was divided into four: two side compartments and, in the middle, one front and one back. Dieter could see immediately that the rear middle compartment contained the transmitter, with the Morse key in the lower right-hand corner, and the front middle was the receiver, with a socket for headphone connections. The right-side compartment was the power supply. The function of the left-side compartment became clear when the agent lifted the lid to reveal a selection of accessories and spare parts: a power lead, adaptors, aerial wire, connection cables, a headset, spare tubes, fuses, and a screwdriver.
It was a neat, compact set, Dieter thought admiringly; the kind of thing the Germans would have made, not at all what he would expect from the untidy British.
He already knew Helicopter’s times for transmission and reception. Now he had to learn the frequencies used and-most important-the code.
Helicopter plugged a lead into the power socket. Dieter said, “I thought it was battery-operated.”
“Battery or mains power. I believe the Gestapo’s favorite trick, when they’re trying to locate the source of an illicit radio transmission, is to switch off the town’s electricity block by block until the broadcast is cut off”
Dieter nodded.
“Well, with this set, if you lose the house current, you just have to reverse this plug, and it switches to battery operation.”
“Very good.” Dieter would pass that on to the Gestapo, in case they did not already know.
Helicopter plugged the power lead into an electrical outlet, then took the aerial wire and asked Stephanie to drape it over a tall cupboard. Dieter looked in the kitchen drawers and found a pencil and a scratch pad that Mademoiselle Lemas had probably used to make shopping lists. “You can use this to encode your message,” he said helpfully.
“First I’d better figure out what to say.” Helicopter scratched his head, then began to write in English:
ARRIVED OK STOP CRYPT RENDEZVOUS
