"I couldn't," Flick said. It was a ridiculous idea.

Or was it? Greta had convinced her. She could probably do the same to the Gestapo. If they arrested her and stripped her they would learn the truth, but if they got to that stage it was generally all over anyway.

She thought of the hierarchy at SOE, and Simon Fortescue at MI6. "The top brass would never agree to it."

"Don't tell them," Mark suggested.

"Not tell them!" Flick was at first shocked, then intrigued by that idea. If Greta was to fool the Gestapo, she ought also to be able to deceive everyone at SOE.

"Why not?" said Mark.

"Why not?" Flick repeated.

Gerhard said, "Mark, sweetie, what is all this about?" His German accent was stronger in speech than in song.

"I don't really know," Mark told him. "My sister is involved in something hush-hush."

"I'll explain," Flick said. "But first, tell me about yourself How did you come to London?"

"Well, sweetheart, where shall I begin?" Gerhard lit a cigarette. "I'm from Hamburg. Twelve years ago, when I was a boy of sixteen, and an apprentice telephone engineer, it was a wonderful town, bars and nightclubs full of sailors making the most of their shore leave. I had the best time. And when I was eighteen I met the love of my life. His name was Manfred."

Tears came to Gerhard's eyes, and Mark held his hand. Gerhard sniffed, in a very unladylike fashion, and carried on. "I've always adored women's clothes, lacy underwear and high heels, hats and handbags. I love the swish of a full skirt. But I did it so crudely in those days. I really didn't even know how to put on eyeliner. Manfred taught me everything. He wasn't a cross-dresser himself, you know." A fond look came over Gerhard's face. "He was extremely masculine, in fact. He worked in the docks, as a stevedore. But he loved me in drag, and he taught me how to do it right."

"Why did you leave?"

"They took Manfred away. The bloody fucking Nazis, sweetheart. We had five years together, but one night they came for him, and I never saw him again. He's probably dead, I think prison would kill him, but I don't know anything for sure." Tears dissolved his mascara and ran down his powdered cheeks in black streaks. "He could still be alive in one of their bloody flicking camps, you know."

His grief was infectious, and Flick found herself fighting back tears. What got into people that made them persecute one another? she asked herself What made the Nazis torment harmless eccentrics like Gerhard?

"So I came to London," Gerhard said. "My father was English. He was a sailor from Liverpool who got off his ship in Hamburg and fell in love with a pretty German girl and married her. He died when I was two, so I never really knew him, but he gave me my surname, which is O'Reilly, and I always had dual nationality. It still cost me all my savings to get a passport, in 1939. As things turned out, I was just in time. Happily, there's always work for a telephone engineer in any city. So here I am, the toast of London, the deviant diva."

"It's a sad story," Flick said. "I'm very sorry."

"Thank you, sweetheart. But the world is full of sad stories these days, isn't it? Why are you interested in mine?"

"I need a female telephone engineer."

"What on earth for?"

"I can't tell you much. As Mark said, it's hush-hush. One thing I can say is that the job is very dangerous. You might get killed."

"How absolutely chilling! But you can imagine that I'm not very good at rough stuff. They said I was psychologically unsuited to service in the army, and quite bloody rightly. Half the squaddies would have wanted to beat me up and the other half would have been sneaking into bed with me at night."

"I've got all the tough soldiers I need. What I want from you is your expertise."

"Would it mean a chance to hurt those bloody flicking Nazis?"

"Absolutely. If we succeed, it will do a very great deal of damage indeed to the Hitler regime."

"Then, sweetheart, I'm your girl."

Flick smiled. My God, she thought; I've done it.

THE FOURTH DAY

Wednesday, May 31,1944

CHAPTER 17

IN THE MIDDLE of the night, the roads of southern England were thronged with traffic. Great convoys of army trucks rumbled along every highway, roaring through the darkened towns, heading for the coast. Bemused villagers stood at their bedroom windows, staring in incredulity at the endless stream of traffic that was stealing their sleep.

"My God," said Greta. "There really is going to be an invasion."

She and Flick had left London shortly after midnight in a borrowed car, a big white Lincoln Continental that Flick loved to drive. Greta wore one of her less eye- popping outfits, a simple black dress with a brunette wig. She would not be Gerhard again until the mission was over.

Flick hoped Greta was as expert as Mark had claimed. She worked for the General Post Office as an engineer, so presumably she knew what she was talking about. But Flick had not been able to test her. Now, as they crawled along behind a tank transporter, Flick explained the mission, anxiously hoping the conversation would not reveal gaps in Greta's knowledge. "The chteau contains a new automatic exchange put in by the Germans to handle all the extra telephone and teleprinter traffic between Berlin and the occupying forces."

At first Greta was skeptical about the plan. "But, sweetheart, even if we succeed, what's to stop the Germans just rerouting calls around the network?"

"Volume of traffic. The system is overloaded. The army command center called 'Zeppelin' outside Berlin handles one hundred twenty thousand long-distance calls and twenty thousand telex messages a day. There will be more when we invade France. But much of the French system still consists of manual exchanges. Now imagine that the main automatic exchange is out of service and all those calls have to be made the old-fashioned way, by hello girls, taking ten times as long. Ninety percent of them will never get through."

"The military could prohibit civilian calls."

"That won't make much difference. Civilian traffic is only a tiny fraction anyway."

"All right." Greta was thoughtful. "Well, we could destroy the common equipment racks."

"What do they do?"

"Provide the tones and ringing voltages and so on for automatic calls. And the register translators, they transform the dialed area code into a routing instruction."

"Would that make the whole exchange unworkable?"

"No. And the damage could be repaired. You need to knock out the manual exchange, the automatic exchange, the long-distance amplifiers, the telex exchange, and the telex amplifiers-which are probably all in different rooms."

"Remember, we can't carry a great quantity of explosives with us-only what six women could hide in their everyday bags."

"That's a problem."

Michel had been through all this with Arnaud, a member of the Bollinger circuit who worked for the French PTF-Postes, Telegraphes, Tlphones-but Flick had not queried the details, and Arnaud was dead, killed in the raid. "There must be some equipment common to all the systems."

"Yes, there is-the MDF."

"What's that?"