Christian looked terrified. Flick could tell that he wanted with all his heart to back out. But he hardly could, after his big talk about the Resistance.
Jean-Marie was calmer. “It will work,” he said. “They won’t be suspicious of police officers in uniform.”
Ruby climbed back into the carriage. “Flick!” she said. “That poster—”
“I know. The gendarmes are going to march me through the checkpoint in handcuffs and release me later. If things go wrong, you’re in charge of the mission.” She switched to English. “Forget the railway tunnel, that’s a cover story. The real target is the telephone exchange at Sainte-Cecile. But don’t tell the others until the last minute. Now get them back in here, quickly.”
A few moments later they were all crowded into the carriage. Flick told them the plan. Then she said, “If this doesn’t work, and I get arrested, whatever you do, don’t shoot. There will be too many police at the station. If you start a gun battle you’ll lose. The mission comes first. Abandon me, get out of the station, regroup at the hotel, and carry on. Ruby will be in command. No discussion, there isn’t time.” She turned to Christian. “The handcuffs.”
He hesitated.
Flick wanted to scream Get on with it, you big-mouthed coward, but instead she lowered her voice to an intimate murmur and said: “Thank you for saving my life-I’ll never forget you, Christian.”
He took out the cuffs.
“The rest of you, get going,” Flick said.
Christian handcuffed Flick’s right hand to Jean-Marie’s left; then they stepped down from the train and marched along the platform three abreast, Christian carrying Flick’s suitcase and her shoulder bag with the automatic pistol in it. There was a queue at the checkpoint. Jean-Marie said loudly, “Stand aside, there. Stand aside, please, ladies and gentlemen. Coming through.” They went straight to the head of the line, as they had at Chartres. Both gendarmes saluted the Gestapo officers, but they did not stop.
However, the captain in charge of the checkpoint looked up from the identity card he was examining and said quietly, “Wait.”
All three stood still. Flick knew she was very near death.
The captain looked hard at Flick. “She’s the one on the poster.”
Christian seemed too scared to speak. After a moment, Jean-Marie answered the question. “Yes, captain, we arrested her in Chartres.”
Flick thanked heaven that one of them had a cool head.
“Well done,” said the captain. “But where are you taking her?”
Jean-Marie continued to answer. “Our orders are to deliver her to avenue Foch.”
“Do you need transport?”
“There is a police vehicle waiting for us outside the station.”
The captain nodded, but still did not dismiss them. He continued to stare at Flick. She began to think there was something about her appearance that had given away her subterfuge, something in her face that told him she was only pretending to be a prisoner. Finally he said, “These British. They send little girls to do their fighting for them.” He shook his head in disbelief.
Jean-Marie sensibly kept his mouth shut.
At last the captain said, “Carry on.”
Flick and the gendarmes marched through the checkpoint and out into the sunshine.
CHAPTER 33
PAUL CHANCELLOR HAD been angry with Percy Thwaite, violently angry, when he found out about the message from Brian Standish. “You deceived me!”
Paul had shouted at Percy. “You deliberately made sure
I was out of the way before you showed it to Flick!”
“It’s true, but it seemed best—”
“I’m in command-you have no right to withhold information from me!”
“I thought you would have aborted the flight.”
“Perhaps I would have-maybe I should have.”
“But you would have done it for love of Flick, not because it was right operationally.”
There Percy had touched Paul’s weak spot, for Paul had compromised his position as leader by sleeping with one of his team. That had made him more angry, but he had been forced to suppress his rage.
They could not contact Flick’s plane, for flights over enemy territory had to observe radio silence, so the two men had stayed at the airfield all night, smoking and pacing and worrying about the woman they both, in different ways, loved. Paul had, in his shirt pocket, the wooden French toothbrush he and Flick had shared on Friday morning, after their night together. He was not normally superstitious, but he kept touching it, as if he were touching her, making sure she was okay.
When the plane returned, and the pilot told them how Flick had become suspicious of the reception committee at Chatelle, and had eventually dropped near Chartres, Paul had been so relieved he almost wept.
Minutes later, Percy had taken a call from SOE headquarters in London and had learned of Brian Standish’s message demanding to know what had gone wrong. Paul had decided to respond by sending the reply drafted by Flick and brought home by her pilot. In case Brian was still at liberty, it told him that the Jackdaws had landed and would contact him, but it gave no further information, because of the possibility that he was in the hands of the Gestapo.
Still no one was sure what had happened out there. The uncertainty was unbearable for Paul. Flick had to go to Reims, one way or another. He had to know whether she was walking into a Gestapo trap. Surely there must be a way to check whether Brian’s transmissions were genuine?
His signals bore the correct security tags: Percy double-checked. But the Gestapo knew about security tags, and they could easily have tortured Brian to learn his. There were subtler methods of checking, Percy said, but they depended on the girls at the listening station. So Paul had decided to go there.
At first Percy had resisted. It was dangerous for operational people to descend on signals units, he said; they disrupted the smooth running of the service for hundreds of agents. Paul ignored that. Then the head of the station said he would be delighted for Paul to make an appointment to visit in, say, two or three weeks? No, Paul had said, two or three hours is what I had in mind. He had insisted, gently but firmly, using the threat of Monty’s wrath as a last resort. And so he had gone to Grendon Underwood.
As a small boy in Sunday school, Paul had been vexed by a theological problem. He had noticed that in Arlington, Virginia, where he was living with his parents, most of the children of his age went to bed at the same time, seven-thirty. That meant they were saying their prayers simultaneously. With all those voices rising to heaven, how could God hear what he, Paul, was saying? He was not satisfied with the answer of the pastor, who just said that God could do anything. Little Paul knew that was an evasion. The question troubled him for years.
If he could have seen Grendon Underwood, he would have understood.
Like God, the Special Operations Executive had to listen to innumerable messages, and it often happened that scores of them came in at the same time. Secret agents in their hideaways were all tapping their Morse keys simultaneously, like the nine-year-olds of Arlington kneeling at their bedsides at half past seven. SOE heard them all.
Grendon Underwood was another grand country house vacated by the owners and taken over by the military. Officially called Station 53a, it was a listening post. In its extensive grounds were radio aerials grouped in great arcs like the ears of God, listening to messages that came from anywhere between the arctic north of Norway to the dusty south of Spain. Four hundred wireless operators and coders, most of them young women in the FANYs, worked in the big house and lived in Nissen huts hastily erected on the grounds.
Paul was shown around by a supervisor, Jean Bevins, a heavy woman with spectacles. At first she was terrified of the visiting big shot who represented Montgomery himself~ but Paul smiled and talked softly and made her feel at ease. She took him to the transmitting room, where a hundred or so girls sat in rows, each with headphones, notebook, and pencils. A big board showed agents’ code names and scheduled times for
