“None. She didn’t socialize or share much. She didn’t seem interested in men, and I don’t mean that in the way it sounds. She wasn’t interested in women either. Only the work. She was an island unto herself. Very private. One got the sense...that there might have been something more to her than met the eye.”
“Tell me more about Special Operations.”
“There were problems from the start,” Annie replied. “You can’t take a bunch of young girls with no experience and think that because you ran them up and down the Scottish Highlands for a few weeks and showed them how to shoot they will manage in a war zone. It takes years to develop the instinct and the nerve to survive. You can’t teach that.”
Annie continued, “And then there was the size. Everyone knows that a covert operation with three people is less safe than one with two. But take Vesper circuit, for example. That was the big one, the unit operating in and around Paris. It was headed up by Vesper, or the Cardinal, I think he was called in code. He must have had dozens, maybe hundreds of agents under his control. The bigger the network got, the greater the risk for betrayal and leaks.”
“I’m sorry,” Grace said. “What do you mean betrayal?”
“Betrayal of the girls, of course.” The room seemed to shift slightly under Grace. “You didn’t think so many of them were arrested on their own, did you? No,” Annie said, answering her own question. “Someone must have given them up.” Though Grace was surprised, she managed not to react; she did not want Annie to stop talking. “They were caught by the SD, the Sicherheitsdienst, or German intelligence, mostly in the weeks just before D-Day. And not just in Paris, but all over France. Someone gave them up. At least that’s what Eleanor thought.”
“Eleanor? How do you know?”
“I saw her once, after the war. She came to see Sally, asked to talk to her privately. I wasn’t supposed to be in the room, but I listened in. I had to look out for my sister, you see. Sally had come back from the war in such a fragile state and she didn’t need Eleanor stirring up trouble for her again. She had dozens of questions about the girls who had gone missing during the war. Kind of like you.” Grace’s guilt rose; talking about the war and the work her sister had done could not have been easy for Annie. “A week later my sister was killed in the wreck.”
“So Eleanor wanted to talk about what happened to the girls?” Grace asked.
“Not what happened, but how. It was all she could talk about. She said that it had something to do with the radios, someone transmitting and pretending to be one of the wireless operators. She wanted to know if Sally knew anything about it. Sally didn’t, of course. Eleanor was determined to find out what had happened to the girls—and who had sold them out.”
Grace’s breath caught at this last part. Could that have possibly been what had brought Eleanor to New York?
“I have to get back to work,” Annie said, standing.
“Thank you,” Grace replied. “I know this couldn’t have been easy.”
“It wasn’t. But if you find out anything more, it will have been worth it. You’ll let me know, won’t you?” Annie asked.
Grace nodded. “I will. I promise.”
“Thank you. Those girls were like sisters to Sally.” It should really be her thanking Annie, Grace thought, and not the other way around. But before Grace could do so, Annie shook her hand firmly and returned to her job behind the bar.
Chapter Sixteen
Eleanor
London, 1944
Eleanor stood in the door of the Director’s office, paper clutched in her hand. “Sir, something isn’t right.”
Ten minutes earlier, a message had come across the wireless. “It’s Marie,” the operator Jane had said. Eleanor raced across the room as Jane decoded the message.
It was not that Marie’s message was overdue, as had been the case after her arrival. The girl had been broadcasting regularly—in some cases more often than expected. And some of her messages sounded just fine. But that first message, which had seemed somehow off, still rankled. Eleanor had tried to tell herself that it was just Marie’s newness in the field, nerves making her typing less than smooth. There would not, could not, be further problems.
But as she scanned the paper now, her heart sank. The message purported to be from Angel. But the substance of what she was asking was wrong: “Awaiting weapons for the Maquis. Please advise the location of the next arms drop.” The message, too unguarded and overt, was not something a trained operator would ask.
And it was not just the content of the message; the stamp at the top of the message, “Security Check Assent,” which would have signaled that Marie’s bluff and true checks were both present in the coded transmission, was missing.
“Bloody hell!” Eleanor swore, crumpling the message into a ball. Jane blinked at Eleanor’s unusual loss of composure. The problem was not just Marie for which she was concerned; a compromised radio could mean a much bigger leak or breach.
Eleanor started to throw the message away. Then, thinking better of it, she smoothed out the paper and started for the Director’s office.
As she approached the Director’s door, she could tell from his hunched posture that it was not a good time and that the intrusion would not be welcome. But he would not turn her away. He looked up wearily now from the report he had been reading and set his pipe down. “Trigg?”
“It’s about one of the girls, sir.” Of course, for her it was always about the girls. “That is, her radio transmissions.” Eleanor normally hated to create any needless intrusion and risk the Director’s impatience. She wanted to be self-sufficient, capable of running the unit she’d created. But now she was too worried to care. “Look here,” she said, nearing his desk and placing the paper in front of him.
“It’s from Roux,” he observed. “A few weeks back, you were worried because she wasn’t transmitting. This is good news, isn’t it?”
“I’m afraid not, sir.” Eleanor ran her finger under the last line of the transmission: “Please advise the location of the next arms drop.” “Marie would never ask that directly, nor would Vesper, or anyone else for whom she might be transmitting.”
The Director looked up from the paper skeptically. “You always said the girl was green. Maybe she made a mistake, or was rushed.”
“I said she was innocent, perhaps even naive. Not careless. It’s more than that, sir.” He looked at her expectantly as she faltered to find more evidence to support her claim. “Something isn’t right. This message makes no sense. And her security checks weren’t present.”