Jackdaws (52 page)

"Yes, the soldier told me that,
they clean it themselves, I didn't know."

Her accent was not English, Dieter
thought. But what was it? "How long have you worked here?"

"Only a week, and I've always
done upstairs until today."

Her story was plausible, but Dieter
was not satisfied. "Come with me." He took her arm in a firm grip.
She did not resist as he led her through to the kitchen.

Dieter spoke to the cook. "Do
you recognize this woman?"

"Yes, sir. She's the one who
was cleaning behind the oven."

Dieter looked at her. "Is that
true?"

"Yes, sir, I'm very sorry if I
damaged something."

Dieter recognized her accent.
"You're German," he said.

"No, sir."

"You filthy traitor." He
looked at the cook. "Grab her and follow me. She's going to tell me
everything."

FLICK OPENED THE door marked
Interview Room, stepped inside, closed the door behind her, and swept the room
with her flashlight.

She saw a cheap pine table with
ashtrays, several chairs, and a steel desk. The room was empty of people.

She was puzzled. She had located the
prison cells on this corridor and had shone her flashlight through the judas in
each door. The cells were empty: the prisoners the Gestapo had taken during the
last eight days, including Gilberte, must have been moved somewhere else… or
killed. But Ruby had to be here somewhere.

Then she saw, on her left, a door
leading, presumably, to an inner chamber.

She switched off her flashlight,
opened the door, stepped through, closed the door, and switched on her
flashlight.

She saw Ruby right away. She was
lying on a table like a hospital operating table. Specially designed straps
secured her wrists and ankles and made it impossible for her to move her head.
A wire from an electrical machine led between her feet and up her skirt. Flick
guessed immediately what had been done to Ruby and gasped with horror.

She stepped to the table.
"Ruby, can you hear me?"

Ruby groaned. Flick's heart leaped:
she was still alive. "I'll free you," she said. She put her Sten gun
down on the table.

Ruby was trying to speak, but her
words came out as a moan. Swiftly, Flick undid the straps that bound Ruby to the
table. "Flick," Ruby said at last.

"What?"

"Behind you."

Flick jumped to one side. Something
heavy brushed her ear and thumped her left shoulder hard. She cried out in
pain, dropped her flashlight, and fell. Hitting the floor she rolled sideways,
moving as far as possible from her original position so that her assailant
could not hit her again.

She had been so shocked by the sight
of Ruby that she had not shone her flashlight all around the room. Someone else
had been lurking in the shadows, waiting for his chance, and had slowly crept
up behind her.

Her left arm was momentarily numbed.
Using her right hand, she scrabbled on the floor for her flashlight. Before she
found it, there was a loud click, and the lights came on.

She blinked and saw two people. One
was a squat, stocky man with a round head and close-cropped hair. Behind him
stood Ruby. In the dark Ruby had picked up what looked like a steel bar, and
she held it above her head in readiness. As soon as the lights came on, Ruby
saw the man, turned, and brought the steel bar down on his head with maximum
force. It was a crippling blow, and the man slumped to the floor and lay still.

Flick got up. The feeling was
rapidly returning to her arm. She picked up the Sten gun.

Ruby was kneeling over the prone
body of the man. "Meet Sergeant Becker," she said.

"Are you all right?" Flick
said.

"I'm in bloody agony, but I'm
going to get my own back on this fucking bastard." Grasping the front of
Becker's uniform tunic, Ruby heaved him upright, then, with an effort, pushed
him onto the operating table.

He groaned.

"He's coming round!" Flick said. "I'll finish him off."

"Give me ten seconds."
Ruby straightened the man's limbs and strapped him in by his wrists and ankles;
then she tightened the head restraint so that he could not move. Finally, she
took the cylindrical terminal from the electric shock machine and stuffed it
into his mouth. He choked and gagged but could not move his head. She picked up
a roll of electrician's tape, tore off a strip with her teeth, and secured the
cylinder so that it would not come out of his mouth. Then she went to the
machine and fumbled with the switch.

There was a low hum. The man on the
table let out a strangled scream. His strapped-down body shook with
convulsions. Ruby looked at him for a moment; then she said, "Let's
go."

They went out, leaving Sergeant
Becker writhing on the table, squealing like a pig in the slaughterhouse.

Flick checked her watch. Two minutes
had passed since Jelly lit the fuses.

They passed through the Interview
Room and stepped out into the corridor. The confusion had died down. There were
just three soldiers near the entrance, talking calmly. Flick walked rapidly
toward them with Ruby close behind.

Flick's instinct was to walk
straight past the soldiers, relying on a confident air to get her through, but
then she glimpsed, through the door, the tall figure of Dieter Franck
approaching, followed by two or three other people she could not clearly see.
She stopped abruptly. Ruby bumped into her back. Flick turned to the nearest
door. It was marked Wireless Room. She opened it. The room was empty. They
stepped inside.

She left the door an inch open. She
heard Major Franck bark in German, "Captain, where are the two men who
should be guarding this entrance?"

"I don't know, Major, I was
just asking."

Flick took the silencer off her Sten
gun and flicked the switch for rapid fire. She had used only four bullets so
far, leaving twenty-eight in the magazine.

"Sergeant, you and this
corporal stand guard. Captain, you go up to Major Weber's office and tell him
Major Franck strongly recommends he conduct a search of the basement
immediately. Off you go, on the double!"

A moment later, Franck's footsteps
passed the Wireless Room. Flick waited, listening. A door slammed. She peeped
out. Franck had disappeared.

"Let's go," she said to
Ruby. They left the Wireless Room and walked to the main door.

The corporal said in French,
"What are you doing here?"

Flick had an answer ready. "My
friend Valerie is new to the job, and she came to the wrong place in the
confusion of the blackout."

The corporal looked dubious.
"It's still light upstairs, how could she get lost?"

Ruby said, "I'm very sorry,
sir, I thought I was supposed to clean here, and no one stopped me."

The sergeant said in German,
"We're supposed to keep them out, not keep them in, Corporal." He
laughed and waved them on.

Dieter tied the prisoner to a chair,
then dismissed the cook who had escorted her from the kitchen. He looked at the
woman for a moment, wondering how much time he had. One agent had been arrested
in the street outside the château. Another, if she was an agent, had been
caught coming up the stairs from the basement. Had the others come and gone?
Were they waiting somewhere to be let in? Or were they here in the building
right now? It was maddening not to know what was happening. But he had ordered
the basement searched. The only other thing he could do was interrogate the
prisoner.

Dieter began with the traditional
slap in the face, sudden and demoralizing. The woman gasped with shock and
pain.

"Where are your friends?"
he asked her.

The woman's cheek reddened. He
studied her expression. What he saw mystified him.

She looked happy.

"You're in the basement of the
château," he told her. "Through that door is the torture chamber. On
the other side, beyond that partition wall, is the telephone switchgear. We are
at the end of a tunnel, the bottom of the sack, as the French say. If your
friends plan to blow up the building, you and I will surely die here in this
room."

Her expression did not change.

Perhaps the château was not about to
blow up, Dieter thought. But then what was the mission? "You're
German," he said. "Why are you helping your country's enemies?"

At last she spoke. "I'll tell
you," she said. She spoke German with a Hamburg accent. "Many years
ago, I had a lover. His name was Manfred." She looked away, remembering.
"Your Nazis arrested him and sent him to a camp. I think he died there—I
never heard." She paused, swallowing. Dieter waited. After a moment she
went on. "When they took him away from me, I swore I would have my
revenge—and this is it." She smiled happily. "Your foul regime is
almost finished. And I've helped to destroy it."

There was something wrong here. She
spoke as if the deed was already done. Furthermore, the power cut had come and
gone. Had the blackout already served its purpose? This woman showed no fear.
But could it be that she did not mind dying?

"Why was your lover
arrested?"

"They called him a
pervert."

"What kind?"

"He was homosexual."

"But he was your lover?"

"Yes."

Dieter frowned. Then he looked harder
at the woman. She was tall and broad-shouldered, and underneath the makeup she
had a masculine nose and chin…

"Are you a man?" he said
in astonishment.

She just smiled.

A dreadful suspicion dawned on
Dieter. "Why are you telling me this?" he said. "Are you trying
to keep me occupied while your friends get away? Are you sacrificing your life
to ensure the success of the mission—"

His train of thought was broken by a
faint noise. It sounded like a strangled scream. Now that he noticed it, he
realized he had heard it two or three times before and ignored it. The sound
seemed to come from the next room.

Dieter sprang up and went into the
torture chamber.

He expected to see the other woman
agent on the table and was shocked to find someone else there. It was a man, he
saw immediately, but at first he did not know who, because the face was
distorted—the jaw dislocated, the teeth broken, the cheeks stained with blood
and vomit. Then he recognized the squat figure of Sergeant Becker. The wires
from the electric shock machine led to Becker's mouth. Dieter realized that the
terminal from the machine was in Becker's mouth, secured there by electrician's
tape. Becker was still alive, twitching and emitting a dreadful squealing
sound. Dieter was horrified.

He swiftly turned off the machine.
Becker stopped twitching. Dieter grasped the electric wire and jerked hard. The
terminal came out of Becker's mouth. He threw it to the floor.

He bent over the table.
"Becker!" he said. "Can you hear me? What happened here?"

There was no reply.

Upstairs, all was normal. Flick and
Ruby walked quickly through the ranks of telephone operators, all busy at their
switchboards, murmuring into their headsets in low voices as they plugged jacks
into sockets, connecting decision-makers in Berlin, Paris, and Normandy. Flick
checked her watch. In exactly two minutes all those connections would be
destroyed, and the military machine would fall apart, leaving a scatter of
isolated components, unable to work together. Now, Flick thought, if only we
can get out…

They passed out of the building
without incident. In seconds they would be in the town square. They had almost
made it. But, in the courtyard, they met Jelly—coming back.

"Where's Greta?" she said.

"She left with you!" Flick
replied.

"I stopped to set a charge on
the diesel fuel line in the generator room, like you said. Greta went on ahead
of me. But she never reached Antoinette's place. I've just met Paul, he hasn't
seen her. I came back to look for her." Jelly had a paper packet in her
hand. "I told the guard at the gate that I just went out to fetch my
supper."

Flick was dismayed. "Greta must
be inside—hell!"

"I'm going back for her,"
Jelly said determinedly. "She saved me from the Gestapo, back in Chartres,
so I owe her."

Flick looked at her watch. "We
have less than two minutes. Let's go!"

They ran back inside. The
switchboard girls stared at them as they raced through the rooms. Flick was
already having second thoughts. In attempting to save one of her team, was she
about to sacrifice two more—and herself?

When they reached the stairwell,
Flick paused. The two soldiers who had let them out of the basement with a joke
would not let them in again so easily. "As before," she said quietly
to the others. 'Approach the guards innocently and shoot at the last
moment."

A voice from above said,
"What's going on here?"

Flick froze.

She looked back over her shoulder.
On the staircase coming down from the top floor stood four men. One, in major's
uniform, was pointing a pistol at her. She recognized Major Weber.

This was the search party Dieter
Franck had asked for. It had appeared at precisely the wrong moment.

Flick cursed herself for a bad
decision. Now four would be lost instead of one.

Weber said, "You women have a
conspiratorial air."

"What do you want with
us?" Flick said. "We're the cleaners."

"Perhaps you are," he
said. "But there is a team of female enemy agents in the district."

Flick pretended to be relieved.
"Oh, good," she said. "If you're looking for enemy agents, we're
safe. I was afraid you might be dissatisfied with the cleaning." She
forced a laugh. Ruby joined in. Both sounded false.

Weber said, "Raise your hands
in the air."

As she lifted her wrist past her
face, Flick checked her watch.

Thirty seconds left.

"Down the stairs," said
Weber.