“Tomorrow?” I repeated, dumbfounded.
“Nine a.m. We disguise ourselves—I’ll dress in my suit as if I’m a businessman. You’ll need to wear office clothes and pretend you’re my secretary. We’ll meet Sauvage at the factory and he’s going to show us around the entire facility. He’s also going to arrange for a set of plans for us.”
“Noah! I can’t just not go to work.”
“That’s the other thing,” he said carefully. “He wants Jullien to help us. We have to tell him the truth.”
“Oh, no,” I protested, shaking my head. “No! It would be too risky for them to know what we—”
“As Sauvage reminded me, your presence in their lives is risky enough already for them. Can you imagine if the Germans discovered what you and I have been up to? They would interrogate Mégane and Jullien half to death just because you have worked in their house!”
My breath caught in my throat at the very thought.
“But…”
“I know we wanted to protect them, but we inadvertently put them at risk the minute we made contact with them,” Noah said gently. “Sauvage assures me that Jullien will want to help. We should give him the opportunity to make the decision for himself.”
“So…you are not a child minder?” Mégane said in shock later that night, after Noah and I arrived unannounced and asked to sit with her and Jullien for a chat. The four of us were seated around a coffee table in their expansive lounge, the girls long asleep upstairs. I felt a pang of sadness that I’d no longer spend my days with the family. I’d quickly become so fond of them all. “But the girls love you, Béatrice—Chloe…”
“And I them,” I rushed to assure her.
“The minute we understood your situation, we agreed we would do nothing at all to put you at risk. We were never going to attempt to recruit you to help us,” Noah said, glancing between Mégane and Jullien. “But Fernand was adamant that you would want to be a part of this.”
“I suspected,” Jullien sighed, and even Mégane turned to stare at him in surprise. “Oh, not the specifics. I sleep poorly since the war began and the back gate off your courtyard squeaks just a little. I’d heard you coming and going at all hours, so I knew one or both of you were up to something.” He scrubbed a hand through his thinning hair then nodded. “I hate every aspect of the occupation. I loathe that they have co-opted the factory for these evil purposes. It kills me to think it will be destroyed, but to refuse to help you would mean blood on our hands.”
“You will still help me, won’t you?” Mégane asked me hopefully.
“She is needed elsewhere, my love,” Jullien told her gently. “We will find a new nanny immediately.” He rose suddenly and waved toward us. “Marcel. Chloe. I have blueprints in my study from the retooling project. We can begin planning right away.”
Six weeks after that disastrous bombing raid, Noah and I led two small teams of local resistance operatives to the Sauvage factory at 11:00 p.m. on an overcast night.
Sauvage and Jullien were safely at home, but they had given every imaginable support to the operation. Jullien liaised with key staff to make necessary arrangements—manipulating a rostering “mishap” that meant there were no security guards stationed on the night of the operation, and returning himself earlier that evening to unlock the necessary gates and doors. And as airdrops from London built up our supply of explosives over those preceding weeks, Sauvage arranged for workmen to pick up the crates of explosives and stockpile them right on the factory floor, disguised as components for the coming munitions project. I got a particular thrill imagining German soldiers supervising work in the plant, unknowingly walking past the largest explosive supply the region had ever seen.
Noah led one group of local operatives into the facility and I was responsible for the other. We both knew the layout by heart by then, and we’d planned the demolition to ensure all critical infrastructure was destroyed. Sometimes, I felt the handful of weeks of sabotage training we received preparing for the field was laughably inadequate, but as Noah and I planned that operation, I discovered we knew just enough to be very effective indeed.
We had placement of explosives to ensure maximum destruction with minimum manpower. And in the end, even working silently in the dark, it took us less than an hour to rig everything we needed to, and to secure the doors and fasten the padlocks on the gates. The latter was my idea. If any of that external infrastructure survived the blast, say if a gate was discovered intact somewhere, it needed to appear that it had never been unlocked for Sauvage and Jullien’s sakes.
Just before midnight, Noah and I dismissed the workers and they scattered into the night. We continued to work in silence, just the two of us now, rolling ignition wire behind us as we slipped back through the last unlocked gate. I hooked the padlock back on and clicked it closed, then ran to catch up to Noah, who was already in a deep ditch, a few hundred feet away. There was a heavy cloud cover that night. It was dark, but not so dark that I could miss the anticipation in his eyes.
“Ready?” he whispered.
“Do it,” I said flatly.
The explosion was everything we had hoped—maybe a little more. The force of it was phenomenal, like a physical wave had crashed through our chests, even as we crouched there in that ditch. Noah and I were thrown hard against the back wall of the trench, and my ears rang painfully even though I had covered them with my hands. Immense steel factory doors flew dozens of feet into the air, traveling on the force of a massive fireball that triggered secondary explosions in fuel tanks elsewhere in the plant.
“Are you okay?” Noah asked me. It looked like he was shouting but I could barely hear a word. I nodded, and scanned my gaze down his body, searching for injuries.
“You?”
“Better than good,” he said, but then he took my hand and led me toward our bicycles. It was difficult to ride at first—I was still so dizzy. I kept overbalancing, and I’d shoot my foot out to try to steady myself, only to find the ground was not where I expected it to be. But we could not stop—we couldn’t even afford the luxury of riding slowly. We went swiftly over dirt paths and back roads, zigzagging back toward our apartment. The lights were on in the Travers household and the girls were crying, likely roused from their sleep by the sound of the blast. I felt terrible for startling them, and likely other children across the town, but reassured myself: if we had not blown that factory up, we risked a second air strike hitting other innocent children. Disrupted sleep tonight might have saved those children’s lives. As we dumped our bicycles and slipped inside the apartment, I noticed that one of our back windows had shattered from the impact of the explosion, even from more than a mile away.
“Let’s change into our nightclothes then go out into the street,” Noah said, taking my hand and leading me to the laundry room. He wiped a smudge of dirt from my face with a washcloth then I did the same for him, blotting the sweat that had run across his brow. “Everyone else will be outside to see what the fuss is about. We should make sure we’re seen doing the same.”