"What do we do now?" said Hans.

"Go back to Sainte-Ccile."

They returned to the van, put the moped in the back, and drove to headquarters.

Dieter had just one ray of hope. He knew Helicopter's times for radio contact, and the frequencies assigned to him. That information might yet be used to recapture him. The Gestapo had a sophisticated system, developed and refined throughout the war, for detecting illicit broadcasts and following them to their source. Many Allied agents had been captured that way. As British training improved, so the wireless operators had adopted better security precautions, always broadcasting from a different location, never staying on air longer than fifteen minutes; but careless ones could still be caught.

Would the British suspect that Helicopter had been found out? Helicopter would by now be giving Michel a full account of his adventures. Michel would question him closely about the arrest in the cathedral and subsequent escape. He would be particularly interested in the newcomer codenamed Charenton. However, he would have no reason to suspect that Mademoiselle Lemas was not who she claimed to be. Michel had never met her, so he would not be alerted even if Helicopter happened to mention that she was an attractive young redhead rather than a middle-aged spinster. And Helicopter had no idea that his one-time pad and his silk handkerchief had been meticulously copied out by Stephanie, or that his frequencies had been noted-from the yellow wax crayon marks on the dials-by Dieter.

Perhaps, Dieter began to think, all was not yet lost.

When they got back to the chteau, Dieter ran into Weber in the hallway. Weber looked hard at him and said, "Have you lost him?"

Jackals can smell blood, Dieter thought. "Yes," he admitted. It was beneath his dignity to lie to Weber.

"Ha!" Weber was triumphant. "You should leave such work to the experts."

"Very well, then I shall," Dieter said. Weber looked surprised. Dieter went on, "He's due to broadcast to England at eight o'clock tonight. Here's your chance to prove your expertise. Show how good you are. Track him down."

CHAPTER 23

THE FISHERMAN'S REST was a big pub that stood on the estuary shore like a fort, with chimneys for gun turrets and smoked-glass windows instead of observation slits. A fading sign in its front garden warned customers to stay off the beach, which had been mined back in 1940 in anticipation of a German invasion.

Since SOE had moved into the neighborhood, the pub had been busy every night; its lights blazing behind the blackout curtains, its piano loud, its bars crowded and spilling over into the garden on warm summer evenings. The singing was raucous, the drinking was heavy, and the canoodling was kept only just within the bounds of decency An atmosphere of abandon prevailed, for everyone knew that some of the youngsters who were laughing uproariously at the bar tonight would embark tomorrow on missions from which they might never return.

Flick and Paul took their team to the pub at the end of their two-day training course. The girls dressed up for the outing. Maude was prettier than ever in a pink summer frock. Ruby would never be pretty, but she looked sultry in a black cocktail dress she had borrowed from somewhere. Lady Denise had on an oyster-colored silk dress that looked as if it had cost a fortune, though it did nothing for her bony figure. Greta wore one of her stage outfits, a cocktail dress and red shoes. Even Diana was wearing a smart skirt instead of her usual country corduroys and, to Flick's astonishment, had put on a smear of lipstick.

The team had been given the code name Jackdaws. They were going to parachute in near Reims, and Flick remembered the legend of the Jackdaw of Reims, the bird that stole the bishop's ring. "The monks couldn't figure out who had taken it, so the bishop cursed the unknown thief~" she explained to Paul as they both sipped scotch, hers with water and his on the rocks. "Next thing they knew, the jackdaw appeared all bedraggled, and they realized he was suffering from the effects of the curse, and must be the culprit. I learned the whole thing at school:

The day was gone

The night came on

The monks and the friars they searched till dawn When the sacristan saw

On crumpled claw

Come limping a poor little lame jackdaw No longer gay

As on yesterday

His feathers all seemed to be turned the wrong way

His pinions drooped, he could hardly stand

His head was as bald as the palm of your hand His eye so dim

So wasted each limb

That, heedless of grammar, they all cried: "That's him!

"Sure enough, they found the ring in his nest."

Paul nodded, smiling. Flick knew he would have nodded and smiled in exactly the same way if she had been speaking Icelandic. He did not care what she said, he just wanted to watch her. She did not have vast experience, but she could tell when a man was in love, and Paul was in love with her.

She had got through the day on autopilot. Last night's kisses had shocked and thrilled her. She told herself that she did not want to have an illicit affair, she wanted to win back the love of her faithless husband. But Paul's passion had upended her priorities. She asked herself angrily why she should stand in line for Michel's affections when a man such as Paul was ready to throw himself at her feet. She had very nearly let him into her bed-in fact, she wished he had been less of a gentleman, for if he had ignored her refusal, and climbed between the sheets, she might have given in.

At other moments she was ashamed that she had even kissed him. It was frightfully common: all over England, girls were forgetting about husbands and boyfriends on the front line and falling in love with visiting American servicemen. Was she as bad as those empty-headed shop assistants who went to bed with their Yanks just because they talked like movie stars?

Worst of all, her feelings for Paul threatened to distract her from the job. She held in her hands the lives of six people, plus a crucial element in the invasion plan, and she really did not need to be thinking about whether his eyes were hazel or green. He was no matinee idol anyway, with his big chin and his shot-off ear, although there was a certain charm to his face- "What are you thinking?" he said.

She realized she must have been staring at him.

"Wondering whether we can pull this off~" she lied.

"We can, with a little luck."

"I've been lucky so far."

Maude sat herself next to Paul. "Speaking of luck," she said, batting her eyelashes, "can I have one of your cigarettes?"

"Help yourself." He pushed the Lucky Strike pack along the table.

She put a cigarette between her lips and he lit it. Flick glanced across to the bar and caught an irritated look from Diana. Maude and Diana had become great friends, and Diana had never been good at sharing. So why was Maude flirting with Paul? To annoy Diana, perhaps. It was a good thing Paul was not coming to France,

Flick thought: he could not help being a disruptive influence in a group of young women.

She looked around the room. Jelly and Percy were playing a gambling game called Spoof, which involved guessing how many coins the other player held in a closed fist. Percy was buying round after round of drinks. This was deliberate. Flick needed to know what the Jackdaws were like under the influence of booze. If any of them became rowdy, indiscreet, or aggressive, she would have to take precautions once they were in the field. She was most worried about Denise, who even now was sitting in a corner talking animatedly to a man in captain's uniform.

Ruby was drinking steadily, too, but Flick trusted her. She was a curious mixture: she could barely read or write, and had been hopeless in classes on map reading and encryption, but nevertheless she was the brightest and most intuitive of the group. Ruby gave Greta a hard look now and again, and she may have guessed that Greta was a man, but to her credit she had said nothing.

Ruby was sitting at the bar with Jim Cardwell, the firearms instructor, talking to the barmaid but at the same time discreetly stroking the inside of Jim's thigh with a small brown hand. They were having a whirlwind romance. They kept disappearing. During the morning coffee break, the half-hour rest period after lunch, the afternoon tea time, or at any opportunity, they would sneak off for a few minutes. Jim looked as if he had jumped out of a plane and had not yet opened his parachute.

His face wore a permanent expression of bemused delight. Ruby was no beauty, with her hooked nose and turned-up chin, but she was obviously a sex bomb, and Jim was reeling from the explosion. Flick almost felt jealous. Not that Jim was her type-all the men she had ever fallen for were intellectuals, or at least very bright-but she envied Ruby's lustful happiness.

Greta was leaning on the piano with some pink cocktail in her hand, talking to three men who looked to be local residents rather than Finishing School types. It seemed they had got over the shock of her German accent-no doubt she had told the story of her Liverpudlian father-and now she held them enthralled with tales about Hamburg nightclubs. Flick could see they had no suspicions about Greta's gender: they were treating her like an exotic but attractive woman, buying her drinks and lighting her cigarettes and laughing in a pleased way when she touched them.

As Flick watched, one of the men sat at the piano, played some chords, and looked up at Greta expectantly. The bar went quiet, and Greta launched into "Kitchen Man":

How that boy can open clams

No one else can touch my hams

The audience quickly realized that every line was a sexual innuendo, and the laughter was uproarious. When Greta finished, she kissed the pianist on the lips, and he looked thrilled.