“In here, in case they have the police after you.”
She wasn’t mad, just a little flushed and out of breath. She ducked into the doorway and he closed it behind her.
“You skinned your knee.”
“I did?” She looked down. “Oh. Yes, I did.”
He handed her a handkerchief and she pressed it against her knee.
“And my wallet?”
He handed that over too, and she checked it.
“I didn’t steal anything.”
“No, I don’t suppose you would. Did I pass?”
“Pretty close. A pro would have been able to walk out the front door with a wave goodbye from the waiter.”
“I have one more day of training.”
“We have too much to cover. You ready? I don’t think the police are out there.”
“After you. Lead the way, Coach.”
“Quite.”
8
The shop window, angled at forty-five degrees from the pavement, gave Aubrey an excellent view of the street behind her. There were elegant ladies’ shoes on display in the window. Normally, Aubrey would have ogled all of them and then entered the store for a purchase. But in this case, she was searching the glass, looking for him. Hewitt Purnsley of His Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service. He was out there somewhere. Watching her. Following her.
It was early morning, and the street was alive with activity. After a few additional minor exercises in counter-surveillance the night before, Hewitt had seen her to her hotel. It had been a long day and she was fatigued, but she’d found it difficult at first to go to sleep. Her mind swirled with possibilities. She had been switched on, as Hewitt called it. An inner awareness of everything around her was growing, and she was overwhelmed by it.
And it wasn’t just the memorizing of license plate numbers, something she was getting good at by the end of that first day, but the whole idea of it, of playing at spying.
“No,” she scolded herself again. “Stop calling it that. And certainly, don’t call it that in front of Mr. Purnsley.” He might get on the transatlantic phone to John Walton and have her pulled from this assignment.
No, she was going into a foreign, hostile land, intent on engaging in espionage. There was no playing about it. If that attitude crept in one iota during her stay in Nazi Germany, it might very well mean the end of her. The Germans had tried to kill her once already.
She was up with the dawn, bathed and dressed before the city started to come alive. She could see the upper half of the Eiffel Tower from the slim window in her modest hotel room. She could smell the smells and hear the sounds of a city coming alive.
Hewitt was in the lobby, looking like he hadn’t even gone to bed. She had no idea where he was staying, whether he too was in a hotel or whether he had a flat. She knew better, now, than to ask these questions outright. Even if he did answer her, they would probably be all lies. Knowing that gave her some confidence. The man sent to train her for her first mission was a professional. She had no way of knowing whether he was the best or not, but she would wager money he was very, very good.
They’d gone over what they’d discussed the day before and discussed the practical exercises, and then she was off. Her assignment: to move about the city and “lose him.” He was going to tail her, at first openly, then more discreetly. She was to lose him without seeming to lose him.
He had explained more than once in the short time they’d been together that she was not to let surveillance know she was on to them. To run away, make a mad dash from a tail in a hostile land, was the worst thing she could do. It would confirm their suspicions that she was up to something. And it would only lead to her arrest. It would give them grounds to pick her up and start extracting information from her. She didn’t need to be a grizzled grunt of the intelligence world to know that meant torture. She shuddered at the thought. She suspected that the Gestapo, the German secret police, had very effective means of extracting information.
She started off simply enough, trying to catch a glimpse of him without turning around. Once, she turned one hundred and eighty degrees and marched off in the direction she’d just come like she’d forgotten something or changed her mind about something she’d seen in a store window. The first time she pulled that sudden move, she’d caught a glimpse of Hewitt behind her, a half block away. He didn’t seem to notice her at all and was doing his own pantomime of window shopping. Then afterwards, when she did the same quick one-eighty again, Hewitt seemed to vanish at will. He was there and then he wasn’t.
After a while, she caught glimpses of him again in store windows or the rear glass of taxicabs.
She went into a dress shop, lingered and saw him. The shop’s window had its venetian blinds drawn down halfway to block the sun. She could see the lower half of him across the street. The bored-looking shop girls snapped to attention when she spoke to them in French. They’d assumed she was a tourist, but now they gave her some serious attention. It was all for show; in reality she was determining where the rear exit was.
She rebuffed the girls. They took up new customers. Aubrey made her way to the back. When
