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.”
I’d completed all of the SOE’s intensive training—weeks spent at SOE “schools” in various manor houses all over England and Scotland. I’d studied everything from demolitions to “silent killing,” close combat designed to disarm men much stronger than me with just a knife, or even my bare hands. I’d mastered the art of fashioning makeshift disguises, and eventually, managed proficiency with the complex cryptography we relied upon. I knew by heart the structure and ranks of each wing of each German and collaborating French military organization. I’d endured mock interrogations and survived psychological and physical tests that lasted for days at a time. I could tail someone undetected and knew how to tell when someone was tailing me. I could assemble a Sten gun even with my eyes closed, and I was a better shot than most of the men I trained with, even though it was clear at the outset that many were already familiar with munitions.
In the end, my active training time totaled somewhere in the order of eleven weeks. Perhaps an unfathomably short period of time to acquire such a skill set, but Basile knew as well as I did that the SOE training program was designed to be the most challenging, intensive immersion imaginable.
“I’ll be fine,” I assured him, and even now that the worst-case scenario had transpired right before my very eyes, I knew I would be. I watched the stranger walk away from the drop box. It would do me no good to follow him—my focus now had to be on finding the remains of our network, not hunting down those who had infiltrated it.
I was alert but unafraid. If anything, the sight of that stranger had only left me more determined to get to the bottom of the problems in Rouen.
And the sooner I completed my mission, the sooner I could return to my son.
C H A P T E R 6
JOSIE
Montbeliard, France
December, 1943
The moon was full and the air was still that night. We could not have asked for more perfect conditions for the factory sabotage operation Marcel and I had spent two months planning. After a busy day playing the role of nanny with the Travers children, I was abuzz with nerves as I rode my bicycle through the fields.
I had gone right from work that afternoon to a meeting with our radio transmitter Adrien at a safe house. He’d received a transmission from Baker Street and I now had to deliver that message to Noah, who was waiting at a farm just out of the city, owned by a local resistance operative.
Just as Noah hoped, my presence in Jullien Travers’s household opened the family up to us in a whole new way. I quickly learned that his wife Mégane was chronically ill with unexplained seizures, and the phenytoin her doctor had prescribed her caused such intense fatigue she tended to sleep for hours every afternoon. Her sweet toddlers, Sévère and Aimé, were a delight, but had mysterious health challenges of their own—both girls had unusual facial features and misshapen fingers and toes. Aimé’s vision was so poor she was almost blind. I quickly came to adore those girls, and Mégane and I bonded over a shared understanding of what it was like to inhabit a body that was periodically unreliable. But it was also immediately clear to me that although Jullien despised the Germans, he would not risk his family’s safety. Their lives were complicated enough already.
As it turned out, we didn’t need to recruit him. When Jullien was at the factory, I had access to his home office and I was often alone with the children for hours at a time as Mégane slept. Only a few weeks after my arrival I found paperwork in Jullien’s desk which confirmed that a factory retooling operation was well underway and the factory would soon be building bombs. That was all Noah and I needed to begin planning a sabotage operation, and tonight, a Pathfinder target-marking plane would drop flares to mark out the factory for dozens of bombers to carpet-bomb the site.
“Do you have news?” Noah greeted me when I dumped my bicycle at the back door of the farmhouse. He was seated at a small wooden table with Clément Masson, the farm’s owner and a member of the local resistance network. Both men were drinking cognac from glass tumblers. Clément seemed calm, and on the surface so did Noah—but I knew him well enough to see beyond his façade. My “husband” was every bit as anxious as I was.
“The planes left exactly on time. The operation is proceeding as planned,” I said breathlessly.
Noah was concerned that Baker Street had agreed to a plan with the RAF that was more brute force than precision, and I’d been ferrying messages from him to Adrien over the past few weeks raising this concern over and over again. But the message from London was clear: an air raid was the only course of action. Over the past week, Noah and I camped out in the forest near the factory several nights in a row to confirm it was mostly empty overnight, other than a handful of security guards who would hopefully hear the flares as they landed and flee. Now, he briefly closed his eyes.
“God, I hope this works,” he whispered.
Clément pushed his chair back and gave me a smile.
“Are you hungry, Chloe? Modestine can cook you some potatoes.”
“Yes please,” I said gratefully. “I’d so appreciate that.”
I’d worried about finding food I could tolerate on this return to France, but I underestimated the kindness of the French country folk. Once I explained my limited diet to Mégane, she had taken to procuring extra meat and vegetables for me. It felt as though hardly a day went by when one of our contacts, particularly the farmers, didn’t offer me fresh produce. Clément left the room to find his wife, and I took his chair opposite Noah.
“We’ve done everything we could,” I reminded him.
“We’ve done a remarkable job,” he agreed. He sipped at the cognac, then looked me right in the eye. “You have done a remarkable job. My God. I couldn’t have done any of this without you.”
“Nonsense,” I said dismissively. “You had the Postmaster circuit well and truly established when I arrived.”