Lynd had finished lunch at Fortnum & Mason, where she dined every day unless she was meeting friends at Claridge’s. She returned to 64 Baker Street, an anonymous gray limestone building not far from Sherlock Holmes’s fictional address and Regent’s Park, only one of the many unremarkable SOE offices scattered around London’s Marylebone neighborhood. Because of lack of space in Whitehall, Baker Street and its surrounding area had become home for SOE, and several buildings had been fitted with discreet plaques reading INTER-SERVICES RESEARCH BUREAU. While that was considered off-putting enough for the general public, the staff and those in the know called it the Firm, the Org, or the Racket, and its employees were known as the Baker Street Irregulars, in honor of Sherlock Holmes’s young informants.
The Baker Street offices were shabby and dimly lit, with SOE agents passing through, often swearing poetically in French and smoking stubby Gauloises. The reception room was small, with only one window and a low ceiling. When Lynd arrived, the receptionist, a plain young woman dressed in an ATS uniform, sporting a fat pimple on her chin, said, “This just arrived for you, Miss Lynd. By motorcycle courier from Station 53a.”
Lynd nodded and accepted the large envelope. She made her way down the narrow hall to her tiny office, heels tapping. Inside, she unpinned her hat, then patted her hair into shape in a Venetian mirror she’d brought from home that hung behind the door. The window, with slatted blinds, looked out on a brick wall. The room was shabby but immaculate, with a banged-up metal desk, on which Lynd had a row of flip-flop card indexes, placed next to a silver-framed picture of the King.
Lynd settled herself at her wooden desk chair, opening the envelope and scrutinizing the missives inside. They were decrypts from Station 53a in Grendon Underwood.
Her cool exterior belied the stab of fear she felt. Lynd had the ominous feeling that F-Section’s agent Erica Calvert, known as TRV, was compromised.
When Maggie Hope, who’d worked as a receptionist in the office for a time in January, had alerted her and Colonel Gaskell to the missing security checks, he wasn’t concerned. “Tell Agent Calvert to be more careful next time!” he’d bellowed, putting the spy’s mistake down to stress and exhaustion.
Lynd had done just that. However, as time had gone on and more messages had come to her with the worrying red stamp, she became increasingly concerned about one of her “girls.” Now the latest decrypt read:
CALL SIGN TRV
20 JUNE 1942
AM SAFELY INSTALLED IN PARIS STOP WILL COMMENCE BROADCASTS AS SCHEDULED STOP BAR LORRAINE STILL SECURE OVER
While the message was unexceptional, at the bottom, stamped in red ink, were the words SECURITY CHECK MISSING. Lynd stared.
Again, there was every indication that Agent Calvert had been captured. And now, the message mentioned a specific place, Bar Lorraine. If the Gestapo knew about the café, any and all SOE agents who went there would inevitably be compromised.
She carried the communiqué to Colonel Gaskell’s office.
“What the devil is it now?” he rumbled from behind his paper-stacked desk when she knocked on his closed door. A short, round man with thinning pale hair, Colonel Harold Gaskell had a fleshy, shining face, red with rosacea. Although he’d served in the British Army’s Intelligence Corps as a doctor at the war’s outbreak, he’d been evacuated from Dunkirk in early June 1940 and posted to London. Despite the fact that he was in charge of F-Section, he had no firsthand knowledge of, or training in, guerrilla warfare.
“Ah, Miss Lynd,” Gaskell amended in a milder tone on seeing her. “What do you have there?”
“Another decrypt from Agent Calvert, Colonel. She’s missed the security check yet again, and one of our girls at 53a caught it. The message says she’s in Paris now and that Bar Lorraine is still operational.”
“Good, good.” Gaskell ran his hands through what was left of his hair.
“Sir, she left off her security check.”
“She’s probably hurrying to use the radio and sign off.”
Lynd spoke carefully as she handed him the decrypt. “But, sir, we’ve already admonished her a number of times—”
Gaskell looked it over, gnawing on his left index finger. “Miss Lynd, do I need to explain yet again the realities of being an agent? It’s nothing like the classroom. Who thinks about a security check when the Nazis are in hot pursuit?”
Lynd bit her tongue. She knew Colonel Gaskell had gotten his job through the old boy network, because he was an Eton alumnus. She felt he was woefully underprepared for the responsibility.
“Don’t think too much, Miss Lynd!” She heard the unspoken words: I still haven’t signed off on those papers you need.
“Yes, sir.”
“What about Calvert’s package?”
“She didn’t mention it, sir.”
“I received word from the top brass that package is more urgent than ever. We must recall her—now. Have Raoul give her word and get her back on the next Lysander. Let’s see, the next full moon, that’s—?”
“In a week, sir.”
“So, let’s get on with it then. Get her and her package back to Blighty posthaste.”
“Sir, if her radio is indeed compromised and if we send them a message about the package, that may alert them to something she might have hidden—”
“Zounds, woman, stop your fussing!” Gaskell pounded a fist on his desk for emphasis. “Get Calvert on that plane! That’s an order!”
—
Lynd wrote out a message to be sent to Raoul—code name for Jean-George Dubois, Air Movements Officer for SOE, known in France as Jacques Lebeau.
But she did so reluctantly, with a growing feeling of dread. What had happened to Agent Calvert? Not acknowledging even the possibility that an agent could have been compromised and captured was a horrible mistake, heading toward an even more tragic end.
Still, Lynd followed her orders. She had to. She didn’t think Colonel Gaskell was stupid, not exactly. Unburdened by brains was how she thought of him and men of his ilk in the privacy of her own mind. And yet, Gaskell held total power over her.
She had lived a luxurious life in Bucharest. Raised by English nannies, she’d been brought up speaking French, English, and German, in addition to Romanian. But by the 1930s, Fascism had risen to power, and the ultranationalist anti-Semitic movement, the Iron Guard, seized control of the government. In 1937, Miriam Rose Horowitz, age thirty-three, had fled to England—and then, on September 3, 1939, England declared war. By the end of that year, Romania had become an ally of Nazi Germany, and Miriam Horowitz, now known as Diana Lynd, was a citizen of Romania—what Britain now considered a “hostile territory.” To avoid being sent to an internment camp, she hid the country of her birth.
One of the few people who knew Lynd’s true identity was Harold Gaskell. She needed the colonel to keep her secret safe. She needed him for protection. And, as she was in the process of applying for British citizenship, she needed his support of her petition. And so her hands were tied. If Gaskell lost faith in her, she could easily lose the opportunity for British citizenship—and face imprisonment in an enemy internment camp.
And if the situation wasn’t fraught enough, Lynd had even more incentive not to question Colonel Gaskell, for she had, illegally, contacted high-ranking German authorities at the beginning of the war. While she and her mother had escaped to London in ’37, their Jewish cousins, trapped in Romania, were in grave danger. Lynd had intervened on their behalf, making an extraordinary venture to Holland a year later, when she heard they’d been threatened with deportation to a concentration camp. She had traveled alone through Nazi-occupied Holland and into Belgium to bargain for their freedom. A large amount of money had changed hands, and they were saved from the camp.
While she had had absolutely no contact with the Germans afterward, that one incident, if exposed, would have landed her in grave trouble. And Colonel Gaskell knew about her dealings with the Nazis, too. He knew everything. And so she said nothing to challenge his authority. Even against her better judgment.
Looking down at her delicate gold watch for the time, she noticed it had stopped. She took it off and began to wind it, relieved when she could hear its gentle ticking again.