Erica stared at him in despair, then slumped over in submission. Like all other SOE agents, she’d been issued a cyanide capsule, in case of situations such as this. But hers was concealed in a fountain pen in her handbag, which had been confiscated.
“Yes, we know everything, Mademoiselle Calvert.” Von Waltz moved to the edge of his seat. “Look—give us the names and locations of the remainder of the English spies, tell us where they’re storing their arms and explosives, and we’ll forget the rest. Those arrested as a result will be interned until the end of the war—they won’t be killed. You won’t have betrayed them.” He smiled, revealing even white teeth. “This is an agreement we will make—you and I.”
Erica sat with her head down, mute, seemingly broken.
“If this does not happen, the villages around where we believe the depots are will be burned. And all of the inhabitants, including your fellow agents, will be killed.”
“No…”
“We are all afraid in this war, mademoiselle. But now you can free yourself from fears. There’s nothing dishonorable in it. Help us!” He leaned forward and grasped her hands, holding them gently in his.
Erica shuddered at the physical contact.
“Give us the location of your agents, weapons, explosives, safe houses. And no one will be hurt. I give you my word, as an officer of the Third Reich.”
Erica peered up at him. “I think I’ll have that drink now.”
He dropped her hands and clapped his together with delight. “Good, good!” he exclaimed, rising and going to the bar cart. He splashed two fingers of scotch into a glass, then passed her the heavy tumbler.
She downed it in two gulps. “I will talk to you,” she promised him. “I’ll tell you everything I know. But I’m exhausted. I need to wash. Change my clothes. Eat.”
Von Waltz’s eyes lit up. “Of course, my dear.”
“And I’d like my handbag—I have a compact in there. And some lipstick.”
“I’m afraid that’s not permitted until we’ve gone through everything. But we can show you to a place where you can freshen up. And I will have a hot meal prepared for you, for when you’re ready, and some good French wine. And after that, we’ll chat.”
“Yes,” she said, struggling to her feet.
“You’ve made the right decision.” He opened the double doors, gesturing to the guards outside. “Please take Mademoiselle Calvert to the lavatory on the fifth floor and allow her to freshen up. When she is finished, bring her back to me. And be certain to treat her as the esteemed guest she’s proving herself to be.”
—
The fifth-floor servants’ quarters had a shared bath. The guards admitted her, then stationed themselves outside the closed door. Erica looked around. There was a dirty tub and a ragged towel on a hook. Over the chipped enamel sink was a mirrored medicine chest. She looked inside—nothing but rust on the shelves.
Grimly, she studied her reflection in the tarnished mirror. Her battered face stared back. She could break the glass and try to slit her carotid artery, but the guards would hear the crash, and they would surely stop her before she could achieve her goal. She’d already been through days of torture and deprivation. She couldn’t take much more. Resolutely, she went to the window, opened the curtains, and looked out. From the fifth floor, it was a long drop to the pavement below. No one could survive such a fall.
While her courage from the scotch still held, she opened the window and crawled out, finding footing on a rain gutter. If she killed herself, the secret of the Normandy sands and soil would die with her. The planned invasion would have a chance. She had confronted death back in Rouen and made her peace with it. She knew what she had to do. Only one thing still tormented her: who was the mole in SOE? Who had betrayed her?
She stepped out into the air, hovering for a moment, like a bird, before she fell.
Chapter One
The time was wrong.
Maggie Hope startled when the ormolu clock on the fireplace’s mantel struck the incorrect hour, metallic chimes ringing through the house’s chilly, high-ceilinged library. Heart pounding, she snapped her head to look over at it. Gilt Gemini twins flanked its pearlized face, and the thin black hands that should have been set to 1:00 Paris time were instead moved to 3:00—the hour in Berlin. The Nazis’ first official act after the Occupation of France had been to impose the Reich’s time on the captured country.
What, she wondered, would Albert Einstein think of the arbitrary positions of the hands? Hadn’t he himself posited that time is only a relative construct? Of course, he never counted on the Nazis and their hubris, she thought.
As a mathematics major at Wellesley College before the war, planning to pursue her doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Maggie had often speculated about such things—time and space and numbers. Back then, her greatest ambition had been to become a professor of mathematics at one of the Seven Sisters colleges.
But she’d inherited her grandmother’s house in London in 1937 and stayed on, even as war broke out, to work as a typist for the new Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. After she solved a mystery regarding an IRA bomb plot, Peter Frain, head of MI-5, asked her if she spoke fluent German and French, and if she’d be willing to do more for her adopted country.
She’d said yes, without realizing exactly what that would entail.
Now, almost two years later, in June 1942, Maggie Hope was a British officer with the rank of major. Officially, she belonged to the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the all-female service known as the ATS—as well as the one with the worst uniforms. But that was only a cover. In fact, she worked for a secret organization, the Special Operations Executive, responsible for deception and sabotage behind enemy lines. “Set Europe ablaze!” Prime Minister Churchill had thundered when he created the unit, and, across the Continent, his spies were doing their bit. At twenty-seven, Maggie was one of SOE’s more senior agents, although back at headquarters at Baker Street, her opinions and ideas were mostly ignored.
Before coming to France as an undercover agent, she’d never understood Salvador Dalí’s painting The Persistence of Memory. But now, after looking up endlessly at the gilt clock, she understood its warped imagery of time all too well.
She was in occupied territory, waiting for forged identity papers—and if she were found out, she would be tortured by the Gestapo, then hanged as a spy. Maggie had been in Paris for three months, and every minute of every day since she’d arrived she’d been tracking shadows from the corners of her eyes, flinching at strange noises, and swallowing her meager meals with the constant threat of discovery and capture lodged in her throat. Worry was her daily diet, ever since she’d left London for Paris on a two-pronged mission: to discover the truth about what had happened to her half sister, Elise Hess, a German Resistance fighter in hiding, as well as her fellow SOE agent Erica Calvert.