The Age of Treachery (22 page)

Instantly her eyes opened and seconds later they were dressing. She asked no questions, revealed no surprises, simply did what had to be done. They did not hear either window or door being forced below them in the house: they did not need to. Neither of them was surprised as they heard the first creak on the stairs.

Forrester glanced towards the bedroom door: no lock. There was a chair, folk-painted with flowers. Would it delay them if he jammed it under the door handle? No, too flimsy. Sophie was already thrusting bolsters under the bedcovers. Pillows where the heads would have been. As the door handle turned, they flattened themselves against the wall on either side of the door.

The door swung open and as the silenced gun fired twice into the figures in the bed Forrester brought the painted chair down hard on the extended forearm. The chair disintegrated, but the impact was enough. There was a cry of pain and the gun went flying. Before the man had time to react Forrester was on him, grasping the gun-arm and wrenching it sideways.

But the man was strong, fit and trained. His free hand rabbit-chopped Forrester’s neck and his left foot entwined itself with Forrester’s, bringing him down through the open door onto the landing – as the second and third men came up.

But Forrester had not released his grip on the man’s arm and with a sudden jerk he sent him careering backwards down the stairs into the other two, darted back inside the room and slammed the door. Sophie was ready, pushing a heavy wooden chest towards the door even as he returned – and she had the fallen gun.

But the chest would only delay them for a moment, and whatever the first man’s injuries, there were still two more of them. “Window,” said Forrester, and seconds later they were climbing out. Already the door was shuddering under the blows of the men trying to get in, and the chest was beginning to move.

Forrester was out on the balcony and about to jump when her hand grasped his shoulder and the moon came out from behind a cloud, illuminating the old ploughshare lying in wait. Behind them, the chest screamed against the wooden floor as the men forced the door. “Up,” said Sophie, and then they were heaving themselves up from the balcony ledge and onto the roof, clawing their way over the snow-covered shingles, chunks of snow falling away behind them. The first of the intruders appeared on the balcony before they had reached the roof crest. Sophie swivelled round, pointed the gun and fired.

The shot went wide, but the man ducked back out of sight as Forrester and Sophie slithered down the far side of the roof, sending more snow avalanching before them. This time, as they reached the edge, the ground below them was clear, and without hesitation they jumped, landing thigh deep in the thick crystalline covering of the lawn.

Perfect targets, both of them, as soon as their pursuers saw them. Ahead, the lawn stretched level and unencumbered: a moonlit killing ground. “The trees,” said Forrester. “Make for the trees.”

And then they were running towards the darkness of the forest, as the first of the intruders reached the roof crest. Bullets hissed into the snow around them and sent splinters flying out of the trunk of birch trees as they ran on, their feet sinking into the snow, plunging blindly into the blackness. Forrester swerved to avoid a fallen log, hit an unseen dip, and as he crashed down into the snow slammed his face into a fallen branch. Suppressing a cry of pain, pressing one hand against his nose to stem the flow of blood, he rose to his feet with the branch in his hand and smashed it into the man pursuing him; his gun went flying.

And then he saw her, a hundred yards off, running hard up some kind of promontory, and the moon came out from behind the clouds and there was a shot from somewhere ahead and she cried out and fell. Sick with shock, Forrester began to run diagonally across the slope towards her.

But the killer was faster: he sprinted straight up the promontory towards the fallen body, gun held out before him, ready to fire again if she stirred.
No
, said Forrester,
no
, and then the man was gone, vanished as if plucked from the surface of the earth and Sophie was rising from the snow, unhurt, gesturing him away from the snowhole.

“They didn’t know the terrain,” she said. “I did.” Forrester looked down into the darkness and heard a splash as the man hit the water a thousand feet below.

Then they went looking for the man he had felled with the branch, but when they came to the bloody patch of snow where he had fallen he was gone and far away. Down the drive, they heard the sound of a car engine starting.

It was over, and Helga and Josef were coming out of the house to look for them, and Forrester allowed himself to be led back inside.

The hours after Sophie and Forrester returned to the house were unrelenting. He kept guard while the two old servants helped Sophie pack; only then did he allow them to deal with the damage to his nose. Even while they dabbed at him with antiseptic and various pine-scented herbs he kept the loaded gun at his side and his eye on the expanse of lawn that led down to the drive. During the war he had several times used the euphoria that often overcame defenders after they had repelled an attack to return when they were least ready for it – he was determined that was not going to happen now. But even if the killers did not come back tonight that did not mean they had given up. Even after Forrester himself left, this place would not be safe. Sophie must leave too – and Josef and Helga with her, because they too would be vulnerable. He cursed himself for assuming that whoever had been sent to attack him in Berlin would give up when they failed there.

At the same time he realised that this was exactly what had happened, time and time again during the war, when MacLean had sent him on some expedition and assured him it was just to gather a few facts he was almost certain of anyway, and that the whole thing would be a doddle. It never was then, it certainly wasn’t now.

His next task was to persuade Sophie of this, but to his relief, it didn’t take long. The Grevinne Arnfeldt-Laurvig had also spent the last five years in occupied Europe, much of it outwitting the occupying power – she knew when there was time to argue and when there was not. And despite her slightly formal, accented English, their communication was lightning fast. Each knew what the other meant almost before anything was said, and if there was any uncertainty, when their eyes met, it was gone.

He had guessed Sophie would have a car, and indeed she did, in one of the barns, but the tank was empty and so were the petrol cans. Instead, they hauled the big sleigh out of the front hall while Josef harnessed the horses. Helga brought fur coats from the cupboards and when they were all aboard, the old man cracked the whip and the horses began to move. Helga sat beside Josef and Forrester and Sophie sat bundled in furs behind them, while the horses’ breath crystallised in the freezing night air and the runners slid smoothly over the moonlit snow. Forrester kept his eyes on the dark verges of the road: if their attackers were going to try again, that’s where they’d be.

But no shots came from the darkness and after a mile or so he saw the tracks of the assassins’ car swing away onto the main road. He tapped Josef on the shoulder and gestured for him to bring the sleigh to a halt. Then he got out and knelt down to examine the tyre tracks. Worn, of course, as all tyres would be in Norway after the war years, but with a distinctive chunk out of the one that had been on the right rear wheel.

With numb fingers he drew out his notebook and made a sketch of the tyre track. “How will that help?” asked Sophie, not taking her eyes off the trees.

“I think they followed me from Germany,” said Forrester, “so they must have come by air and hired a car here. If we give this to the police they may be able to use it to trace the hire.”

“It’s possible,” said Sophie, “there are not so many cars back on the roads here yet.”

As he got back into the sleigh Forrester said, “They might still pull off the road and wait in ambush. Is there another route?”

“Yes.”

“Might it take us past a police station?”

“It will pass through a small town where I am known to the authorities.”

“Then we should go there,” said Forrester, and when they reached the next junction the sleigh hissed off to the left, away from the road bearing the tracks of their attackers.

“What should we tell the police?” asked Sophie.

“Everything,” said Forrester. “If only for your protection later on. At least one man is dead, but your house was invaded; you have nothing to hide. Josef and Helga should feel free to tell the truth too.”

“What about you?”

“I can’t stay,” said Forrester, and he felt rather than saw the expression on Sophie’s face. “As long as I’m with you, you’re in danger. And I have to get back to England as soon as possible. Is there a station somewhere along our route where you could drop me, so I can catch a train back to Oslo?”

There was a beat before she answered, “Yes.”

He took her hand. “I’ll come back,” he said.

She turned to look at him, and he wanted to look into those eyes for ever. “I’ll be waiting,” she said, simply.

Then they were racing along the edge of another fjord, the moonlight glittering on the distant waters and the sky above them jammed with stars. Forrester held Sophie’s hand until they paused beside a little log-built station beneath an icy mountain peak, glittering as if it was made of silver. He opened his mouth to speak, but she shook her head.

“We will talk again when you are safe,” she said, and moments later they saw the plume of white steam of an approaching train rising in the distance, and the sleigh slid back up to the road, turned a bend and disappeared.

He stood there for a long moment after it had gone and then walked onto the snow-covered platform and waited until the train pulled in.

* * *

Forrester sat in the carriage, looking into the darkness of the forest, fighting off sleep. He could not afford to sleep. Besides, his nose hurt too much, which was good: the pain would keep him awake.

The train rattled along the edge of a long lake and Forrester saw, or imagined he saw, the sleigh racing along the road that ran along the far side and a tide of longing swept over him. Love had died in him long ago, and now, out of nowhere, it had returned, and he felt like a sleeper in a tomb when the stone is lifted from the entrance and the world opens up to him again.

The coffee in the station at Oslo scalded his mouth, and he drank it scanning the crowd, ready for the slightest thing that seemed out of place, but there was nothing. He needed to get out of Norway, back to Denmark at the very least. He would take the ferry. As he walked through the city to the terminal he watched warily, but no-one took any interest in him.

Little notice was taken of him on the ferry either, although he took the precaution of seating himself with his back to a metal bulkhead and a good view of the arriving passengers. With every minute that passed it was harder to fight off sleep, but he was determined to, and determined to think through what had happened and what he had learned.

But he managed neither. Instead he found his eyes closing and his thoughts filling with Sophie and then sleep came and when he woke the ferry was bumping against the jetty in Copenhagen and he was being bundled off with the others.

He drank more coffee at a restaurant on the Nyhavn, the dockside red-light district where Hans Christian Andersen had once lived and where Forrester had eaten before he crossed to Norway – a lifetime ago, it seemed, now – and then made his way to a phone box and called the RAF base at Lindquist.

The sergeant who answered was matter-of-fact and helpful. There was a flight leaving for Blighty at midnight, and if he was there, they could get him aboard. He looked at his watch: it was not yet noon. He had no desire to wander around Copenhagen until midnight, wondering if anyone was going to take a potshot at him, and even less desire to sit in a Nissen hut at the RAF base listening to bored squaddies make predictions about the Cup Final. And as one of the things Forrester had learned during the last five years had been that if any downtime became available you should seize it, he decided to visit the home of a man with whom, at times, he felt a certain spiritual affinity. He had lived in Kronborg Castle in the town of Helsingør and his Danish name had been Amleth.

Helsingør was just an hour or so up the coast from Copenhagen, and Forrester took a bus there, gazing idly out of the window at the deserted beaches as the road wound along the coast. At one point he passed a group of men removing the iron plating from what had clearly been an improvised armoured car, presumably used by the Danish resistance.

The resistance in Denmark had been slow to gather momentum, but they had kept crucial German reinforcements from heading to France after D-Day by sabotaging the railway network and to their everlasting credit they had steadfastly refused to persecute the Jews. Directive after directive from Berlin was sidestepped or prevaricated, and when German patience finally ran out and Hitler decided to send all Danish Jews to the concentration camps anyway, the Danes packed every Jew they could find aboard motor boats and fishing smacks and ferried them across the Baltic to the safety of Sweden. It was, Forrester thought, a typically Danish combination of decency and pragmatism.

Finally the bus reached Helsingør and he got out to stroll through the winding streets into the medieval Carmelite Priory, whose cloisters Hans Christian Andersen had insisted were the most beautiful in Denmark.

As he walked he let what he had learned during the last few days float down through his mind like sand drifting down through water. The first was that his attempts in Berlin to uncover the true nature of Peter Dorfmann’s activities during the war had clearly stirred up a hornets’ nest. A team had been assembled in Berlin to kill him, and when they had failed a second attempt had been made in Norway. Considerable resources had been devoted to this effort: this was clearly more than a personal matter.