“Makes no sense,” Woodie said grumpily, as if it were her fault.
She asked Digby, “Any context?”
“Not really. It seems that their radar operates in a
Hermia reached a decision. “I’ll have to go to Denmark myself,” she said.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Woodie said.
“We have no agents in country, so someone has to be infiltrated,” she said. “I know the ground better than anyone else in MI6, that’s why I’m chief of the Denmark desk. And I speak the language like a native. I’ve got to go.”
“We don’t send women on missions like that,” he said dismissively.
Digby said, “Yes, we do.” He turned to Hermia. “You’ll leave for Stockholm tonight. I’ll come with you.”
“Why did you say that?” Hermia asked Digby the following day, as they walked through the Golden Room in the Stadhuset, Stockholm’s famous city hall.
Digby paused to study a wall mosaic. “I knew the Prime Minister would want me to keep the closest possible watch on such an important mission.”
“I see.”
“And I wanted the chance to have you to myself. This is the next best thing to a slow boat to China.”
“But you know I have to get in touch with my fiance. He’s the only person I can trust to help us.”
“Yes.”
“And I’ll probably see him all the sooner in consequence.”
“That suits me fine. I can’t compete with a man who is trapped in a country hundreds of miles away, heroically silent and unseen, holding on to your affection by invisible cords of loyalty and guilt. I’d rather have a flesh-and-blood rival with human failings, someone who gets grumpy with you and has dandruff on his collar and scratches his bum.”
“This isn’t a contest,” she said with exasperation. “I love Arne. I’m going to marry him.”
“But you’re not married yet.”
Hermia shook her head as if to detach herself from this irrelevant talk. Previously, she had enjoyed Digby’s romantic interest in her-albeit guiltily-but now it was a distraction. She was here for a rendezvous. She and Digby were only pretending to be tourists with time to kill.
They left the Golden Room and went down the broad marble staircase and out into the cobbled courtyard. They crossed an arcade of pink granite pillars and found themselves in a garden overlooking the gray water of Lake Malaren. Turning to look up at the three-hundred-foot tower that rose over the redbrick building, Hermia checked that their shadow was with them.
A bored-looking man in a gray suit and well-worn shoes, he made little effort to conceal his presence. As Digby and Hermia had pulled away from the British Legation, in a chauffeur-driven Volvo limousine that had been adapted to run on charcoal, they had been followed by two men in a black Mercedes 230. When they stopped outside the Stadhuset, the man in the gray suit had followed them inside.
According to the British air attache, a group of German agents kept all British citizens in Sweden under constant surveillance. They could be shaken off, but it was unwise. Losing your tail was taken as proof of guilt. Men who evaded surveillance had been arrested and accused of espionage, and the Swedish authorities had been pressured to expel them.
Therefore, Hermia had to escape without the shadow realizing it.
Following a prearranged plan, Hermia and Digby wandered across the garden and turned around the corner of the building to look at the cenotaph of the city’s founder, Birger Jarl. The gilded sarcophagus lay in a canopied tomb with stone pillars at each corner. “Like a
Concealed from view on the far side of the cenotaph was a Swedish woman of the same height and build as Hermia, with similar dark hair.
Hermia looked inquiringly at the woman, who nodded decisively.
Hermia suffered an instant of fear. Until now she had done nothing illegal. Her visit to Sweden had been as innocent as it seemed. From this moment on, she would be on the wrong side of the law, for the first time in her life.
“Quickly,” the woman said in English.
Hermia slipped off her light summer raincoat and red beret, and the other woman put them on. Hermia took from her pocket a dull brown scarf and tied it around her head, covering her distinctive hair and partly concealing her face.
The Swedish woman took Digby’s arm, and the two of them moved away from the cenotaph and sauntered back into the garden in full view.
Hermia waited a few moments, pretending to study the elaborate wrought-iron railing around the monument, fearful that the tail would be suspicious and come to check. But nothing happened.
She moved out from behind the cenotaph, half-expecting him to be lying in wait, but there was no one nearby. Pulling the scarf a little farther over her face, she walked around the corner into the garden.
She saw Digby and the decoy heading for the gate at the far end. The shadow was following them. The plan was working.
Hermia went in the same direction, tailing the tail. As arranged, Digby and the woman went straight to their car, which was waiting in the square. Hermia saw them get into the Volvo and drive away. The tail followed in the Mercedes. They would lead him all the way back to the Legation, and he would report that the two visitors from Britain had spent the afternoon as innocent tourists.
And Hermia was free.
She crossed the Stadhusbron bridge and headed for Gustav Adolf Square, the center of the city, walking fast, eager to get on with her task.
Everything had happened with bewildering rapidity in the last twenty-four hours. Hermia had been given only a few minutes to throw a few clothes into a suitcase, then she and Digby had been driven in a fast car to Dundee, in Scotland, where they checked into a hotel a few minutes after midnight. This morning at dawn they had been taken to Leuchars aerodrome, on the Fife coast, and an RAF crew wearing civilian British Overseas Airways Corporation uniforms had flown them to Stockholm, a three-hour journey. They had had lunch at the British Legation, then put into operation the plan they had devised in the car between Bletchley and Dundee.
As Sweden was neutral, it was possible to phone or write from here to people in Denmark. Hermia was going to try to call her fiance, Arne. At the Danish end, calls were monitored and letters opened by the censors, so she would have to be extraordinarily careful in what she said. She had to mount a deception that would sound innocent to an eavesdropper yet bring Arne into the Resistance.
Back in 1939, when she had set up the Nightwatchmen, she had deliberately excluded Arne. It was not because of his convictions: he was as anti-Nazi as she was, albeit in a less passionate way-he thought they were stupid clowns in silly uniforms who wanted to stop people having fun. No, the problem was his careless, happy-go- lucky nature. He was too open and friendly for clandestine work. Perhaps also she had been unwilling to put him in danger, although Poul had agreed with her about Arne’s unsuitability. But now she was desperate. Arne was as happy-go-lucky as ever, but she had no one else.
Besides, everyone felt differently about danger today than at the outbreak of war. Thousands of fine young men had given their lives already. Arne was a military officer: he was supposed to take risks for his country.
All the same, her heart felt cold at the thought of what she was going to ask him to do.
She turned in to the Vasagatan, a busy street in which there were several hotels, the central railway station, and the main post office. Here in Sweden, telephone services had always been separate from the mail, and there were special public phone bureaus. Hermia was headed for the one in the railway station.
She could have telephoned from the British Legation, but that would almost certainly have aroused suspicion. At the phone bureau, there would be nothing unusual about a woman who spoke hesitant Swedish with a Danish accent coming in to phone home.
She and Digby had talked about whether the phone call would be listened to by the authorities. In every telephone exchange in Denmark there was at least one young German woman in uniform listening in. They could not possibly eavesdrop on every phone call, of course. However, they were more likely to pay attention to
