The Paris Agent(43)

There was no time to grieve, no time to sulk. After a sleepless, tearful night in Noah’s arms, I found myself on the train station platform the very next morning.

All around us, other people were saying their goodbyes, but those people faded into oblivion for me. I only had eyes for Noah—and because we were supposedly husband and wife, we didn’t hesitate to show the pain of the moment or our affection for one another. Tears ran down my face and there was a sheen in his eye. The platform attendant blew the whistle and Noah pulled me into his arms for one last embrace.

“Don’t go,” he blurted against my hair. “Stay. I’ll tell them I can’t be without you. We’ll tell them we—that you—” But there was nothing more to say—no way to avoid our separation, and we both knew it. With palpable frustration, he finally whispered, “Josie, this is all my fault. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s like you said,” I whispered unevenly. “Life has brought us together twice. We will find each other again.”

“Josie, I love you.”

A sob built in my chest, and I barely suppressed it as I whispered back, “I love you too, Noah. I always will.”

I had always wanted to find someone of my own. Even in my younger years, when a fulfilling, healthy life was just a dream, I’d imagined my own prince like Noah—someone sensitive and kind, courageous and in his own way, brilliant. Our love had been born under pressure but it all stretched before us—the coming of peace, and years and years to learn who we each were in ordinary times, to build the family and the home we both dreamed of.

But first, we had to face this separation. It was time to focus individually on the work that was so much bigger even than the love we shared. The woman Noah saw when he looked at me was brave enough to follow the order to Paris. The man I knew Noah to be was brilliant enough to survive whatever came next for him too.

A kind older gentleman reached down to help me climb up into the carriage, and I stowed my suitcase at my feet and stared out the window at the platform. My eyes locked with Noah’s as the train began to pull away.

“I love you,” I mouthed, and the last time I saw him, he was mouthing it right back.

C H A P T E R 12

ELOISE

Rouen, France

February, 1944

Several days had passed and the butcher’s apprentice was still refusing to speak to me about the arrest of his boss or the work of the circuit.

“My boss has been arrested and his family and mine are relying on me to keep this business going,” he hissed, when I offered him money in exchange for information. “I cannot risk speaking to you!”

I went instead to each of the addresses Basile had asked me to memorize. Some had once been safe houses. All were empty now. There were homes that had been secret training venues for Maquis groups, but as far as I could tell, these had also been abandoned. I made my way to the garages where Basile and his operatives had stored the tons of weapons and explosives Baker Street once dropped to fields near Rouen.

“A garage is the perfect place for such storage because no one bats an eye when cars or even lorries transport the shipments there. Our caches are behind false walls that were installed with the blessing of the business owners,” Basile had explained. “Go in and ask to hire a bicycle but drop the phrase blue basket into the conversation. If the owner is there, he’ll take you to his office and you can verify that the weapons caches are intact.”

But at both garages, even though I batted my eyelashes and asked to hire a “bicycle, maybe something with a basket—oh, even a stylish little blue basket!”， I saw not so much as a flicker of recognition from the men I spoke to.

“Miss,” a worker at the second garage told me, scratching his head. He’d been to ask the other workers if they knew anything about hire bicycles. “Most of us are new but as far as we know, we’ve never had bicycles for hire. Sorry.”

“Could I perhaps speak to the manager?” I asked in desperation. He shrugged.

“He’s away on business. No one knows when he’ll be back.”

Basile had described his key operatives at each garage in detail and told me they should be easy enough to find, but I didn’t locate a familiar face at either business. At a loose end, I lingered in the street after the first garage closed and followed two of the young workers from there to a nearby café bar. I sat near them, but almost as soon as I took my seat, another man approached me.

“Perhaps I could buy you a drink, mademoiselle?”

I offered him a polite smile, and he suggested I might enjoy a cup of coffee. I bit back a sigh as I nodded.

We spent a lot of time in SOE training drinking absurd amounts of alcohol to practice maintaining our cover story while drunk, so it was a real surprise to me to step into a bar on my second afternoon in Rouen to discover that, as a woman, the rations rules prohibited me from buying so much as a sip of wine. I’d now been in Rouen for almost a week and I was starting to wonder if any one of the senior SOE trainers had spared a single thought as to what a woman in the field might need to know.

As for the coffee, I knew the bar would likely prepare me a cup of roasted corn coffee and the thought of it turned my stomach, but a woman sitting alone in a bar was always going to attract the attention of male patrons and to blend in, I had to work with that reality.

“I’m Régis,” the man said once he’d placed our orders. “And you are…”