Jackdaws

“Not yet,” Flick said. “First I want to know what we’re going to do next.”

“I’m going to write this report—”

“No I mean about the telephone exchange. If it s so important, we have to knock it out.”

He sat down again and looked at her shrewdly. “What have you got in mind?”

She took Antoinette’s pass out of her bag and threw it on his desk. “Here’s a better way to get inside. That’s used by the cleaners who go in every night at seven o’clock.”

Percy picked up the pass and scrutinized it. “Clever girl,” he said with something like admiration in his voice. “Go on.”

“I want to go back.”

A look of pain passed briefly over Percy’s face, and Flick knew he was dreading her risking her life again. But he said nothing.

“This time I’ll take a full team with me,” she went on. “Each of them will have a pass like that. We’ll substitute for the cleaners in order to get into the château.”

“I take it the cleaners are women?”

“Yes. I’d need an all-female team.”

He nodded. “Not many people around here will object to that-you girls have proved yourselves. But where would you find the women? Virtually all our trained people are over there already.”

“Get approval for my plan, and I’ll find the women. I’ll take SOE rejects, people who failed the training course, anybody. We must have a file of people who have dropped out for one reason or another.”

“Yes-because they were physically unfit, or couldn’t keep their mouths shut, or enjoyed violence too much, or lost their nerve in parachute training and refused to jump out of the plane.”

“It doesn’t matter if they’re second-raters,” Flick argued earnestly. “I can deal with that.” At the back of her mind, a voice said Can you, really? But she ignored it.

“If the invasion fails, we’ve lost Europe. We won’t try again for years. This is the turning point, we have to throw everything at the enemy.”

“You couldn’t use French women who are already there, Resistance fighters?”

Flick had already considered and rejected that idea. “If I had a few weeks, I might put together a team from women in half a dozen different Resistance circuits, but it would take too long to find them and get them to Reims.”

“It might still be possible.”

“And then we have to have a forged pass with a photo for each woman. That’s hard to arrange over there. Here, we can do it in a day or two.”

“It’s not that easy.” Percy held Antoinette’s pass up to the light of a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling. “But you’re right, our people do work miracles in that department.” He put it down. “All right. It has to be SOE rejects, then.”

Flick felt a surge of triumph. He was going for it. Percy went on, “But assuming you can find enough French-speaking girls, will it work? What about the German guards? Don’t they know the cleaners?”

“It’s probably not the same women every night-they must have days off. And men never notice who cleans up after them.”

“I’m not sure. Soldiers are generally sex-hungry youngsters who pay great attention to all the women with whom they come into contact. I imagine the men in this château flirt with the younger ones, at least.”

“I watched these women entering the château last night. and I didn’t see any signs of flirting.”

“Still, you can’t be sure the men won’t notice the appearance of a completely strange crew.”

“I can’t be certain, but I’m confident enough to take the chance.”

“All right, what about the French people inside? The telephone operators are local women, aren’t they?”

“Some are local, but most are brought in from Reims by bus.”

“Not every French person likes the Resistance, we both know that. There are some who approve of the Nazis’ ideas. God knows, there were plenty of fools in Britain who thought Hitler offered the kind of strong modernizing government we all needed-although you don’t hear much from those people nowadays.”

Flick shook her head. Percy had not been to occupied France. “The French have had four years of Nazi rule, remember. Everyone over there is hoping desperately for the invasion. The switchboard girls will keep mum.”

“Even though the RAF bombed them?”

Flick shrugged. “There may be a few hostile ones, but the majority will keep them under control.”

“You hope.”

“Once again, I think it’s a chance worth taking.”

“You still don’t know how heavily guarded that basement entrance is.”

“That didn’t stop us trying yesterday.”

“Yesterday you had fifteen Resistance fighters, some of them seasoned. Next time, you’ll have a handful of dropouts and rejects.”

Flick played her trump card. “Listen, all kinds of things could go wrong, but so what? The operation is low-cost, and we’re risking the lives of people who aren’t contributing to the war effort anyway. What have we got to lose?”

“I was coming to that. Look, I like this plan. I’m going to put it up to the boss. But I think he will reject it, for a reason we haven’t yet discussed.”

“What?”