Jackdaws (24 page)

Weber looked across the north
transept and gave a nod. Following his gaze, Dieter saw two more Gestapo men
lurking beneath the organ loft. That was a bad sign. Weber did not need four
men just to observe. Dieter wondered if he had time to speak to Weber, get him
to call his men off. But Weber would argue, and there would be a row, and then—
As it turned out, there was no time. Almost immediately, Stéphanie came up from
the crypt with the agent right behind her.

When she reached the top of the
steps she saw Weber. A look of shock came over her face. She was disoriented by
his unexpected presence, as if she had walked on stage and found herself in the
wrong play. She stumbled, and the young agent caught her elbow and steadied
her. She recovered her composure with characteristic speed and gave him a
grateful smile. Well done, my girl, Dieter thought.

Then Weber stepped forward.

"No!" Dieter said
involuntarily. No one heard him.

Weber took the agent by the arm and
said something. Dieter's heart sank as he realized Weber was making an arrest.
Stéphanie backed away from the little tableau, looking bewildered.

Dieter got up and walked quickly
toward the group. He could only think that Weber had decided to grab the glory
by capturing an agent. It was insane but possible.

Before Dieter got close, the agent
shook off Weber's hand and bolted.

Weber's young companion in the check
jacket reacted fast. He took two big strides after the agent, flung himself
forward in a flying tackle, and threw his arms around the agent's knees. The
agent stumbled, but he was moving strongly, and the Gestapo man could not hold
him. The agent recovered his balance, straightened up, and ran on, still
clutching his suitcase.

The sudden running steps, and the
grunts made by both men, sounded loud in the hushed cathedral, and everyone
looked. The agent ran toward Dieter. Dieter saw what was going to happen and
groaned. The second pair of Gestapo men stepped out of the north transept. The
agent saw them and seemed to guess what they were, for he swerved left, but he
was too late. One of the men stuck out a foot and tripped him. He fell
headlong, his chunky body hitting the stone floor with a thwack. The suitcase
went flying. Both Gestapo men jumped on him. Weber came running up, looking
pleased.

"Shit," Dieter said aloud,
forgetting where he was. The mad fools were ruining everything.

Maybe he could still save the
situation.

He reached into his jacket, drew his
Walther P38, thumbed the safety catch, and pointed it at the Gestapo men who
were holding the agent down. Speaking French, he yelled at the top of his
voice, "Get off him now, or I shoot!"

Weber said, "Major, I—"

Dieter fired into the air. The
report of the pistol crashed around the cathedral vaults, drowning Weber's
giveaway words. "Silence!" Dieter shouted in German. Weber looked
scared and shut up.

Dieter poked the nose of the pistol
hard into the face of one of the Gestapo men. Reverting to French, he screamed,
"Off! Off! Get off him!"

With terrified faces the two men
stood up and backed away.

Dieter looked at Stéphanie. Calling
her by Mademoiselle Lemas's name, he shouted, "Jeanne! Go! Get away!"
Stéphanie began to run. She circled widely around the Gestapo men and dashed
for the west door.

The agent was scrambling to his
feet. "Go with her! Go with her!" Dieter shouted at him, pointing.
The man grabbed his suitcase and ran, vaulting over the backs of the wooden
choir stalls and haring down the middle of the nave.

Weber and his three associates
looked bemused. "Lie facedown!" Dieter ordered them. As they obeyed,
he backed away, still threatening them with the gun. Then he turned and ran
after Stéphanie and the agent.

As the other two fled through the
doorway, Dieter stopped and spoke to Hans, who stood near the back of the
church, looking stolid. "Talk to those damn fools," Dieter said
breathlessly. "Explain what we're doing and make sure they don't follow
us." He holstered the pistol and ran outside.

The engine of the Simca was turning
over. Dieter pushed the agent into the cramped backseat and got into the front
passenger seat. Stéphanie stamped on the pedal and the little car shot out of
the square like a champagne cork.

As they raced along the street,
Dieter turned and looked through the back window. "No one following,"
he said. "Slow down. We don't want to get stopped by a gendarme."

The agent said in French, "I'm
Helicopter. What the hell happened in there?"

Dieter realized that
"Helicopter" must be a code name. He recalled that Gaston had told
him Mademoiselle Lemas's code name. "This is Bourgeoise," he said,
indicating Stéphane. "And I'm Charenton," he improvised, thinking for
some reason of the prison where the Marquis de Sade had been incarcerated.
"Bourgeoise has become suspicious, in the last few days, that the
cathedral rendezvous might be watched, so she asked me to come with her. I'm
not part of the Bollinger circuit—Bourgeoise is a cut-out."

"Yes, I understand that."

"Anyway, we now know the
Gestapo had set a trap, and it's just fortunate that she had asked me to be
there as backup for her."

"You were brilliant!"
Helicopter said enthusiastically. "God, I was so scared, I thought I'd
blown it on my first day."

You have, Dieter thought silently.

It seemed to Dieter that he might
have saved the situation. Helicopter now firmly believed that Dieter was a
member of the Resistance. Helicopter's French sounded perfect, but obviously he
was not quite good enough to identify Dieter's slight accent. Was there
anything else that might cause him to be suspicious, perhaps later when he
thought things over? Dieter had stood up and said "No!" right at the
start of the rumpus, but a plain "No" did not mean much, and anyway
he did not think anyone had heard him. Willi Weber had shouted
"Major" in German at Dieter, and Dieter had fired his weapon to drown
out any further indiscretion. Had Helicopter heard that one word, did he know
what it meant, and would he remember it later and puzzle over it? No, Dieter
decided. If Helicopter had understood the word, he would have assumed Weber was
addressing one of the other Gestapo men: they were all in plain clothes so
could be any rank.

Helicopter would now trust Dieter in
all things, being convinced Dieter had snatched him from the clutches of the
Gestapo.

Others might not be quite so easy to
fool. The existence of a new Resistance member codenamed Charenton and
recruited by Mademoiselle Lemas would have to be plausibly explained, both to
London and to the leader of the Bollinger circuit, Michel Clairet. Both might
ask questions and run checks. Dieter would just have to deal with them in due
course. It was not possible to anticipate everything.

He allowed himself a moment of
triumph. He was one step closer to his goal of crippling the Resistance in
northern France. He had pulled it off despite the stupidity of the Gestapo. And
it had been exhilarating.

The challenge now was to make
maximum use of Helicopter's trust. The agent must continue to operate,
believing himself unsuspected. That way he could lead Dieter to more agents,
perhaps dozens more. But it was a subtle trick to pull off.

They arrived at the rue du Bois and
Stéphanie drove into Mademoiselle Lemas's garage. They entered the house by the
back door and sat in the kitchen. Stéphanie got a bottle of scotch from the
cellar and poured them all a drink.

Dieter was desperately anxious to
confirm that Helicopter had a radio. He said, "You'd better send a message
to London right away."

"I'm supposed to broadcast at
eight p.m. and receive at eleven."

Dieter made a mental note. "But
you need to tell them as soon as possible that the cathedral rendezvous is
compromised. We don't want them to send any more men there. And there could be
someone else on his way tonight."

"Oh, my God, yes," the
young man said. "I'll use the emergency frequency."

"You can set up your wireless
right here in the kitchen."

Helicopter lifted the heavy case
onto the table and opened it.

Dieter hid a sigh of profound
satisfaction. There it was.

The interior of the case was divided
into four: two side compartments and, in the middle, one front and one back.
Dieter could see immediately that the rear middle compartment contained the
transmitter, with the Morse key in the lower right-hand corner, and the front
middle was the receiver, with a socket for headphone connections. The
right-side compartment was the power supply. The function of the left-side
compartment became clear when the agent lifted the lid to reveal a selection of
accessories and spare parts: a power lead, adaptors, aerial wire, connection
cables, a headset, spare tubes, fuses, and a screwdriver.

It was a neat, compact set, Dieter
thought admiringly; the kind of thing the Germans would have made, not at all
what he would expect from the untidy British.

He already knew Helicopter's times
for transmission and reception. Now he had to learn the frequencies used
and—most important—the code.

Helicopter plugged a lead into the
power socket. Dieter said, "I thought it was battery-operated."

"Battery or mains power. I
believe the Gestapo's favorite trick, when they're trying to locate the source
of an illicit radio transmission, is to switch off the town's electricity block
by block until the broadcast is cut off."

Dieter nodded.

"Well, with this set, if you
lose the house current, you just have to reverse this plug, and it switches to
battery operation."

"Very good." Dieter would
pass that on to the Gestapo, in case they did not already know.

Helicopter plugged the power lead
into an electrical outlet, then took the aerial wire and asked Stéphanie to
drape it over a tall cupboard. Dieter looked in the kitchen drawers and found a
pencil and a scratch pad that Mademoiselle Lemas had probably used to make
shopping lists. "You can use this to encode your message," he said
helpfully.

"First I'd better figure out
what to say." Helicopter scratched his head, then began to write in
English:

ARRIVED OK STOP CRYPT
RENDEZVOUS

UNSAFE STOP NABBED BY
GESTAPO BUT

GOT AWAY OVER

"I suppose that's it for
now," he said.

Dieter said, "We should give
them a new rendezvous for future incomers. Say the Café de La Gare next to the
railway station."

Helicopter wrote it down.

He took from the case a silk
handkerchief printed with a complex table showing letters in pairs. He also
took out a pad of a dozen or so sheets of paper printed with five-letter
nonsense words. Dieter recognized the makings of a one-time-pad encryption
system. It was unbreakable—unless you had the pad.

Over the words of his message,
Helicopter wrote the five-letter groups from the pad; then he used the letters
he had written to select transpositions from the silk handkerchief. Over the
first five letters of ARRIVED he had written the first group from his one-time
pad, which was BGKRU. The first letter, B, told him which column to use from
the grid on the silk handkerchief. At the top of column B were the letters Ae.
That told him to replace the A of ARRIVED with the letter e.

The code could not be broken in the
usual way, because the next A would be represented not by E but by some other
letter. In fact, any letter could stand for any other letter, and the only way
to decrypt the message was by using the pad with the five-letter groups. Even
if the code breakers could get hold of a coded message and its plain-language
original, they could not use them to read another message, because the next
message would be encoded with a different sheet from the pad—which was why it
was called a "one-time" pad. Each sheet was used once, then burned.

When he had encrypted his message,
Helicopter flicked the on/off switch and turned a knob marked in English
"Crystal Selector." Looking carefully, Dieter saw that the dial bore
three faint markings in yellow wax crayon. Helicopter had mistrusted his memory
and had marked his broadcast positions. The crystal he was using would be
reserved for emergencies. Of the other two, one would be for transmission and
the other for reception.

Finally he tuned in, and Dieter saw
that the frequency dial was also marked with yellow crayon.

Before sending his message, he
checked in with the receiving station by sending:

HLCP DXDX QTC1 QRK? K

Dieter frowned, figuring. The first
group had to be the call sign "Helicopter." The next one,
"DXDX," was a mystery. The number one at the end of "QTC1"
suggested that this group meant something like: "I have one message to
send you." The question mark at the end of "QRK?" made him think
this asked if he was being received loud and clear. "K" meant
"Over," he knew. That left the mysterious "DXDX."

He tried a guess. "Don't forget
your security tag," he said.

"I haven't," Helicopter
said.

That must be "DXDX,"
Dieter concluded.

Helicopter turned to
"receive" and they all heard the Morse reply:

HLCP QRK QRV K

Once again, the first group was
Helicopter's call sign. The second group, "QRK," had appeared in the
original message. Without the question mark, it presumably meant "I am
receiving you loud and clear." He was not sure about "QRV," but
he guessed it must mean "Go ahead."

As Helicopter tapped out his message
in Morse, Dieter watched, feeling elated. This was the spy catcher's dream: he
had an agent in his hands and the agent did not know he had been captured.

When the message was sent,
Helicopter shut down the radio quickly. Because the Gestapo used radio
direction-finding equipment to track down spies, it was dangerous to operate a
set for more than a few minutes.