Lars paused outside the entrance to a platform in the midst of a large crowd of waiting passengers. Turning to face her, he slid a hand into his inside coat pocket.
“This is it,” he said with a smile, pulling a rather large, oil-skin wrapped parcel out of his coat. “Take great care of this. At least one man has died to get that out of Germany, and probably more.”
Evelyn took the parcel and slid it into her coat smoothly. The entire transaction was completed in an instant, and he nodded in approval.
“I will. Thank you.”
“Inside are photographs of the Daimler plant in Stuttgart,” he said in a low voice. “There are also top-secret blueprints for two underground munitions factories. According to the plans, they will be impervious to bombing raids. It’s those plans that the Germans don’t want out in the open. Be very careful. We know they already have agents looking for the package. Don’t trust anyone.”
“I won’t,” she assured him. “They’ll be safe with me.”
Lars hesitated for a moment, then held out his hand. “I wish you speed and safe passage.”
Evelyn grasped his hand and nodded, and then he was gone, disappearing into the crowds. Waiting until he was out of sight, she turned and moved away from the platform, moving towards another exit. She would not leave the station the same way she had come, but take a longer route back to the hotel. Not that she had any reason to suppose that she’d been followed, but she supposed it was better to be safe than sorry. If nothing else, she was learning that caution was the better part of valor these days.
She made her way through the crowds easily, heading towards the exit on the other side of the large station. A man had died getting the heavy package that rested against her side out of Germany. How? Had he been captured by the Gestapo? And how did Lars know? She supposed someone in the line of couriers had passed along the information with the package, but the thought made her blood run cold. It was one thing to know that people were dying trying to get information out, but it was quite another to physically be in possession of one of those packages. The very thought that someone who had handled the oil-skin wrapped parcel was now dead made Evelyn feel a heavy sense of uneasiness.
She shook her head impatiently. There was no point in being maudlin over it. Her task was to get the package back to Bill, not grieve over the lives that had been lost because of it. Even so, she couldn’t shake the disquiet that had taken hold deep in her gut. If the Germans already had agents looking for the package, then they would be watching the networks not only in Belgium, but also in France. Bill had cautioned her to trust no one, and now Lars had just reiterated the same warning. They didn’t know who was friend and who was foe in the new network stretching across the continent.
Evelyn’s lips curved faintly. It didn’t matter how many agents the Germans had watching the networks in France. She wasn’t passing the package onto them. She would be taking it directly to London, something Lars didn’t know. He thought she was just another courier.
And that just might be the thing that would allow her to get the package back to England safely.
Evelyn turned the corner and tucked her hands into the pockets of her coat. A brisk wind streaked down the street, snatching at tendrils of blonde hair that had escaped her hat, and she took a deep breath, enjoying the breeze on her face. She had left the train station behind and was walking towards the hotel, but she was in no rush to return. While she was tired and hungry, Evelyn was enjoying the fresh air after being cooped up in trains all day. Pausing outside a shop, she looked in the window at the selection of women’s gloves displayed, her eyes drawn to a dove gray pair in the corner. She hesitated, then turned to continue walking. She had a pair very similar at Ainsworth Manor, and she wasn’t in Antwerp to shop. In fact, she realized with a start, she didn’t really have any desire to shop.
Her lips curved in amusement. If only her mother could see her now. She would think she was ill. There had never been a time when Evelyn wasn’t interested in shopping for new accessories. The smile faded as she walked. A lot of things were changing about her, and soon she felt as though her mother wouldn’t recognize her at all. Giving herself a mental shake, Evelyn reminded herself that when she was in England, she could live her life as she always had. But while she was on the continent working for MI6, she had to be a different person. That didn’t mean that she was changing who she was, it only meant that she was learning to separate the socialite from the spy. And shopping for gloves when she had a parcel that had been smuggled out of Germany in her coat was not part of the spy.
Pausing at the next corner, Evelyn glanced over her shoulder before running lightly across the narrow side street. It was a little unnerving how comfortable she was becoming with navigating around foreign cities, she reflected. Then again, after fleeing across Norway in the snow, this seemed like a vacation. The weather was beautiful, the city was stunning, and everything was going perfectly to plan. She had the package, and tomorrow she’d go to Brussels to meet with Vladimir, right on time. This was turning out to be one of the easier assignments to date, even though it was also one of the most dangerous.
There was no way she could
