Dedication

This book is for Kate Miciak,

with thanks

for all the brilliant years

OceanofPDF.com

OceanofPDF.com

PROLOGUE

March 12, 1940

There were nine people waiting in the stuffy room that faced the aerodrome’s tarmac, ten if you counted the sleeping child swaddled in a blanket in the Italian girl’s arms. Three women, six men, several nationalities, and the brazen churn of propellers beyond the frosted window.

Each of the waiting passengers was desperate enough to leave Oslo in the dead of night and dead of winter, so the air hummed with suppressed violence and restlessness and incipient hysteria. No one spoke.

Jacques Allier had his back to the wall nearest the door, an evening newspaper grasped in one gloved hand, the other thrust in his pocket. The unheated room was freezing, but his skin was beaded with sweat and his hidden fingers clutched a gun.

The clock read three minutes until midnight. The plane would leave at 12:07. Allier’s passport had been taken ten minutes ago and not returned.

The man named Demars—who had all his luggage—was inexplicably missing from the aerodrome, and this was only one of the factors contributing to Allier’s sweat. He hated to fly. When he’d undertaken this operation he’d asked for a submarine out of Brest. A destroyer from Tønsberg. He’d gotten an eight-seater with ice on its wings and no guns to speak of.

He was praying he’d be allowed to board, although Allier was one of those who could not believe in God. Not now.

He was a spare, bland-faced man in the good cloth coat and spectacles of a banker, mid-forties perhaps, clearly European but shockingly unmilitary for the times. His eyes drifted away from the damning clock—the man Demars was still missing—and roved indifferently over the faces of his fellow passengers. Two men arguing politics in Dutch. A gawky boy in his teens, his looks feverish and his hands drumming nervously against the arm of his chair, fingers spilling cigarette ash onto the linoleum floor. A gray-haired woman stolidly eating pickled herring from a waxed paper box furnished by an Oslo shop. None of them spoke. None made eye contact.

Only the tall, burly blond fellow in the impeccable camel-hair coat was staring openly, a slight smile curving his lips, at the Italian girl with the sleeping child.

And who could blame him? Allier thought irritably. She was exquisite, with her fur collar grazing her faintly flushed cheek, her dark knot of hair shining beneath the arc of her hat. Her fingers were gloved in ostrich skin; the frail hunch of her shoulders might reflect the penetrating cold, or the solicitude that kept her bent, Madonna-like, over the face of her infant. Was she even twenty? Her passport and ticket lay on the hard wooden bench beside her; like Allier, she was bound for Amsterdam in the dead of night.

Turn back, he urged. Go north. Go west. Go anywhere but home. He had caught one glimpse of her mouth, curved like a G clef, and her eyes, disconcertingly blue in an olive-skinned face. The blond hero opposite had glimpsed them, too.

“Madam,” the man said gently in Italian, “you look chilled to the bone.

Perhaps a cigarette?…If I were to light it for you…?”

The girl ignored him, failing to so much as lift her head. Allier exulted in this, in the snub offered the blond hero who might from his looks have been Norwegian or even English but who Allier knew now was German—a broad-shouldered, perfect German in civilian dress lounging in the very aerodrome where he, Allier, had elected to escape. This could not be coincidence; this was part of a plan. The fact of the German presence meant that Allier was already a dead man. Demars and the luggage would not be coming.

He tossed the folded newspaper into a waste bin and moved casually toward the door leading out to the planes. One of them bound for Perth, the other for Amsterdam. The propellers whined in the cold, the pilots worried about ice. It was possible that they would all be told to go home—to try again tomorrow—and for Allier there would be the certainty of an armed escort at some point along his route back to the French legation, a sudden flurried movement into an enemy car, a bullet in the temple after how many agonizing hours of interrogation? He continued to stare through the waiting-room window, his gloved hands clasped behind his back. Conscious of movement. Some kind of rank closing behind.

It was barely two weeks since he’d vaulted up the marble steps of the Armaments Ministry and accepted the fake passport in his mother’s maiden name. Freiss. He was Michel Freiss of Salzburg, aged forty-one, a banker with no interest in this phony war between France and the Germans that had been going on for seven months now without a shot fired. That night he’d taken the last train across the border, bound for Amsterdam, and then by slow degrees traveled north to Stockholm and finally Oslo. There were five days of negotiation in a tiny snowbound town near the Telemark mountains, ponderous dinners and pledges of eternal friendship and risky flourishes of the French flag. Oblique counsels in the legation, none of the usual diplomats in on the secret, and the lights burning all night in the German intelligence pavilion across the garden wall.

“You’re famous,” the French ambassador assured him with a twisted smile. “Everybody wants to talk to you. Our people caught this the day you left Paris.”

It was a decoded German radio transmission he carelessly handed Allier: At any price intercept a suspect Frenchman traveling under the name of Freiss. What the ambassador had not bothered to point out was that Allier had been betrayed before he’d boarded the night train to Amsterdam.

Who? he asked himself now. A spy in Dautry’s office? Somebody at the bank?

The two-beat note of a police siren was audible, suddenly, in the distance; insistent, rising, certainly closer.

Perhaps it was the lab. One of Joliot’s people. Or fucking Demars. He’s probably sold the luggage.

“Mr. Freiss,” said a voice at his elbow.

He turned, caught the untroubled face of Norwegian Border Control. A woman, neatly uniformed. Her clipped hair so fair it might almost be white.

She was offering him a bunch of papers, but he ignored her extended hand.

The police sirens had pulled up to the aerodrome door. The butt of his gun twisted in his fingers, slippery with sweat. In a matter of seconds the door would burst open, a clutch of men tripping over themselves in their haste to seize him. He might have time to take one of them down—the big German, perhaps—but there were these women, that child in the Madonna’s arms…

“Your passport and ticket for Amsterdam,” Border Control persisted.

“Everything is in order. You may proceed to the tarmac.”

He glanced over her head and met the German’s eyes. The man was still smiling faintly, the same indulgent look he’d turned on the young Italian princess, who was rising now from her seat, magnificent and indifferent.

He’s let me run all this way so he could follow my trail, Allier thought. I’ll lead him no further.

He took his passport and ticket from the woman’s hand and without a word held the door wide. The Italian girl flicked him one glance from her arresting blue eyes as she passed; not even this, Allier thought, was comfort before dying. Then he and the blond hero followed her into the cold.

There was confusion about the planes: A huge black Daimler had driven straight onto the tarmac and thrust itself between them. A man was running distractedly beneath the wings, shouting inaudibly over the clatter of the engines and barely avoiding the propellers. His driver pulled an astonishing number of suitcases from the idling car. The police and their sirens were silent now, beyond the runway gates; it was the Daimler they had escorted through the streets of Oslo, wailing right up to the Amsterdam flight. Allier felt his face flush with heat and his hands clench: This is what hope feels

like. Terror and a clenched fist. He recognized the dapper, black-haired figure pirouetting beneath the fuselage; he recognized the suitcases.

Demars’s driver was loading them even now into the belly of the Perth plane.

Allier counted them as best he could across the distance and darkness.

Thirteen, he thought. Please God let there be thirteen.

Demars collided headlong with the German’s camel-hair coat; whiskey fumes and cigar smoke wafted through the frigid night air.

“Pardon, most esteemed sir.” He spoke Norwegian and he clutched the German’s sleeve like a spoiled child. “Which of these is the Amsterdam plane? Have I missed it? I must at all costs make the Amsterdam plane!”

They argued the destination of both flights, the Daimler’s right to park in the middle of the tarmac, the abuse of police escort, the advisability of arriving on time. Allier kept walking. He did not look back. The Italian girl boarded the Amsterdam plane with a grimace on her face, the saintly infant now screaming in her arms. Allier’s ticket fluttered to the ground. He pulled a second one—stamped for Perth—from his breast pocket.

As the Amsterdam pilot taxied toward his takeoff, Allier caught a glimpse of the blond German under the tarmac lights: hatless, his coat flying back like wings, running hopelessly after the wrong plane.

Fog diverted them. As was expected.

They landed near dawn in a town Allier had never heard of, somewhere on the east coast of Scotland. A small field, quite deserted, the waiting-room windows blacked out with painted canvas. The pilot gave him tea.

From politeness he tried to drink it.

“Did you hear?” the man asked him. “The Germans shot down that plane.

The one bound for Amsterdam last night.”

Allier thought of the young Italian girl, the two men arguing in Dutch, the child that would have been wailing, certainly, as the flames bloomed in the cockpit and the frantic pilot beat them back. The long tight fall into the North Sea, implacable as a destroyer’s hull.

He set down the tea.

“What have you got in all those suitcases?” the pilot asked curiously.

“The crown jewels of Norway?”

Allier glanced at the man. The truth was a breach of security but the pilot would never believe him, anyway.

“Water,” he replied.

OceanofPDF.com