The Paris Agent(20)
Only local residents were allowed to be within the forbidden zone, which was why my cover story and papers listed an address in Le Havre as my home and I would need to register my visit to secure a permis de sejour, a visitor’s permit.
The SOE had arranged the finest forger to create my papers so they should pass review, but I was not at all disappointed about orienting myself in the town before I tested that theory.
“Thank you,” I said, feigning surprise and relief. “But I do hate to be a burden to you.”
“It’s no trouble. Where are you staying?”
“Well, first I’ll store my luggage with the consigne at the Gare Rive Droite. My uncle has friends in business I can check in with nearby, you see.”
“Of course. I’ll have the driver drop me to the Hotel De Ville first and he can take you wherever you like after that.”
As we traveled into the town, I felt a pang of grief at the endless rubble. It was clear that the Allies targeted the blocks around the Seine again and again, destroying the historical bridges, then the temporary pontoons the Germans constructed in their place, and so on. And in Rouen, like Paris, German soldiers and the Milicens held a very visible presence on the street.
My gut was a churning mix of emotions I didn’t want to acknowledge and couldn’t afford to name. To focus on them would be to show them on my face.
“All the best, Miss Leroy,” the colonel said as he left the car to go into his hotel. I thanked him profusely and wished him well too, and several minutes later, his driver deposited me at the Gare Rive Droite. I went into the station, waited a few moments, then came back out onto the street to find the car gone, so I continued on foot to my lodgings.
By lunchtime, I was alone in my newly rented room, ready for the first test of my mission. I would move around constantly while in Rouen, but selected that first night’s accommodation based on the directions of my commanding officer, Basile, during our final briefing before I left Paris. His agents had long used a void behind a loose brick in the laneway opposite my room as a “drop box”—a place where the members of the circuit could pass information to one another.
“The first task of your mission is simple: just hide behind the drapes in your room and watch that laneway,” Basile told me.
He had been evacuated to London for a debrief two months earlier, leaving the SOE’s proud Normandy region network, the Janitor network, in the hands of his trusted w/t operator, Jérémie.
Jérémie was a loyal, dedicated agent, but he tended to prioritize speed over accuracy when it came to signaling. A team of highly trained secretaries at Baker Street did most of the decoding for the rest of the SOE, but Jérémie’s signals tended to be so muddled they required Freddie Booth, architect of the SOE’s cryptography procedure, to detangle each message.
Then, a few weeks after Basile’s evacuation, Jérémie’s accuracy abruptly improved. No longer was each message littered with mistakes—now every letter of every word was perfectly accurate, raising suspicions. Then when an agent returned from a mission to the south of France to report vague but troubling rumors of resistance arrests near Rouen, SOE officials became anxious about sending Basile back into the region.
The stakes could not be higher when it came to the Janitor circuit. Although only those closest to Churchill himself knew the precise details of the D-Day operation, we all knew the Allies were planning a landing on the continent and we all suspected the Normandy region would play a vital role. Basile built the Janitor network so his knowledge of the SOE’s operations in the region was simply too great to risk his exposure.
It was decided that he would return to France but would remain in hiding in Paris until conditions in Rouen could be confirmed. That’s where I came in. Baker Street had signaled Jérémie, instructing him to check the drop box between 13:00 and 13:30 hours. My first task was to watch to see who turned up. If Jérémie arrived, I’d make contact with him to request a comprehensive briefing on the circuit’s status. If all went well from there, I would go back to Paris to tell Basile that his return to Rouen would be a relatively safe prospect.
By 12:50, I had positioned myself behind the drapes in my room so that I could watch the laneway. I’d done my best to memorize Jérémie’s features from the photograph in his personnel file back in London. He was baby-faced and eager, grinning into the camera as if he was on his way somewhere exciting, not headed to a risky mission in occupied territory.
Right on cue, at 13:35, a figure walked casually into the laneway. He felt around for the brick, checked behind it, then continued on his way. The man was in his forties or fifties—portly and slovenly. He looked nothing at all like the sweet young man I’d been sent to find.
I recalled Basile’s warning to me the previous night.
“If anyone other than Jérémie arrives to check that drop box, that likely means Baker Street has been communicating directly with the Germans for over a month. It probably means the rumors are true about arrests, and Jérémie has been captured. You’ll find yourself in a tenuous situation.”
“I’ve done the same training you have, Basile,” I reminded him. “I’m ready for this.”
“If a stranger arrives to check that drop box tomorrow, you’ll have to figure out what happened to that network all on your own. You’ll be entirely alone in one of the most contentious regions in the occupied territories, with no way to know who to trust, no easy access to weapons, not even a way to call for help. If it all goes horribly wrong, you’ll have to figure out how to get yourself to Spain without any assistance at all. You’ve had less than three months training. Even hardened soldiers with years of experience would be terrified in a scenario like that.”