“So what should we do?” Jane looked up at Eleanor uncertainly, asking whether to transmit the information about the next arms drop.
Eleanor hesitated. She had trained the girls, backed them with everything they had. But she was just being overly cautious now, and it wasn’t like her. She had to believe that they were up to the job and would make the right decisions. Otherwise, none of this would work and the whole thing would fall apart.
Eleanor had to make the call. She stared at the radio, as though she might actually be able to hear Marie’s voice and know it was her. Eleanor believed that, despite Marie’s difficulties while training at Arisaig House, the girl was strong and smart enough and had grown sufficiently in training to rise to the challenges of the field; she would have otherwise never sent her into such dangerous territory. She had to trust now that Marie would never let anything happen to her wireless. And stopping the transmission would mean delaying operations. It was this or nothing.
She lifted her chin defiantly. “Send it,” she instructed Jane. Then she walked from the room.
Chapter Fourteen
Marie
France, 1944
Marie sat alone in the garret, waiting for the hours to pass so that she could transmit and trying not to think about the German on the other side of the wall.
It had been over a week since Julian brought her to Rosny-sur-Seine. He had not come again and she wondered where he had gone in the days he had left her. The tiny flat was pleasant enough, with two paned glass windows, one on the front overlooking the street and a second at the rear facing the canal. Late-day sunlight shone through the latter now, causing funny-shaped patterns to dance across the worn duvet on the bed.
It had turned out that the Germans did not just frequent the café downstairs. They were billeted in the same building, including one in the adjacent flat, which occupied the other half of the top floor, others below. When Marie had first discovered this, on a late-night trip to the toilet down the hall, she had thought Julian mad. Or perhaps he simply did not care if she was caught. But she had come to see that it was the perfect safe house because they never would have expected anything so close. And she took a peculiar satisfaction in transmitting quite literally under the Germans’ noses.
Marie looked up at the clock. Five fifteen. Nearly time to transmit the message that a courier she did not recognize had brought her earlier. It was the waiting that was the hardest—and the part nobody had told her about in training. Each day she waited for instructions to transmit. At night she listened to the radio, hoping the BBC broadcast might contain at the end messages personnel that signaled an agent’s arrival, or might secretly announce that the invasion was coming. She had left the flat once to go to the market on the square on Tuesday and another time to the patisserie shop, little errands so the locals wouldn’t talk about that strange woman closed up in the apartment on Rue Anton. She’d been out so little that, except for in a few brief encounters with the landlady, she hadn’t needed to use her alias or cover story at all.
Gazing out the window at the meadows bathed in soft light, she thought longingly of Tess and hoped the weather was nice enough in East Anglia to take advantage of the lengthening days and play outside after supper. If only she had been allowed to bring a photo of Tess with her. The image of the child was still crisp in her mind, though she had probably changed since Marie saw her last.
Marie moved her chair close to the low table in the corner where her radio sat, thinly disguised as a gramophone, with a top that inverted to quickly disguise the device. She pulled from her slip the tiny paper the courier had delivered earlier bearing Vesper’s now-familiar handwriting. First she had to code the message. She felt in the lining of her shoe for the worked-out code, a small slip of silk bearing a cipher. The message was barely intelligible to Marie, filled with cryptic terms and messages that only made sense to Vesper and, hopefully, whoever was receiving it back at Norgeby House. She wondered if Eleanor might be there. Marie read the coded text she was to transmit several times to make sure she had it just right. Then she burned the original, uncoded message over the candle in front of her, dropping the last bit so her fingers would not get singed.
She selected from the spare parts pocket the crystal that would enable her to transmit on the proper frequency. After inserting the crystal, she began to type the message that she had coded. The wireless key clicked under her fingertips with satisfying purpose. Her radio touch was light and deft. She had noticed her own improvement during her short time in the field, like a foreign language she had once learned in the classroom now becoming fluent in-country. She could weave together a message quickly without wasting a single word.
A loud burst of laughter and song erupted from below, causing Marie to pause. She stood and walked to the rear window of the flat. The noise had come not from outside, but from the café below. She noticed outside the window, though, that the aerial wire she’d secretly hung the night after she arrived had dropped from where she had fixed it among the branches. Without the proper placement, her signal might not be sent. She opened the window and started to reach out.
Then she froze, hand suspended in midair. On the balcony of the room below stood a German soldier, watching her with interest.
Marie managed a smile, waved as though she was simply hanging wash. “Bonsoir,” she called, trying to keep her voice light. She pulled her arm back inside, then closed the window with shaking hands.
She should stop typing, she knew. The German had seemed not to suspect anything, but he could be reporting her right now. She had to get this message out, though, and there were only a few more keystrokes. She tapped furiously and then stopped, her heart beating louder than the keys. She turned the radio top back over to disguise it as a gramophone, hoping that it had not been too late.
Marie heard the footsteps on the stairs. Someone was coming. Had her transmission been detected? Destroy the radio, and if you cannot, then at least the crystals. The instructions she had received in training played hurriedly in her mind, but she found herself unable to follow them. She sat like an animal trapped in headlights.
The footsteps grew louder. Would they split the door or knock, forcing her to answer? She gripped the necklace containing the cyanide capsule in her hand. “Chew it quickly,” Eleanor had said. Tess appeared in her mind, left behind without parents at the age of five. The guilt that Marie had buried all these months sprung forward. She was a mother of a small child who needed her, and who would pay the price if anything happened. Being here was simply irresponsible.
The footsteps stopped in front of her door. Marie counted: seven, eight, nine. There was a knock at the door.
Marie looked desperately over her shoulder, wishing there was another way to escape. Hiding in the tiny flat was impossible. The knock came again. Reluctantly, she walked to the door and opened it.
She was surprised to see the pilot Will standing on the other side. “You scared me to death,” she said.