Maggie remembered she was supposed to be a society girl. “I—I don’t have a mask.”
“Somehow, I doubt that.” Chanel quirked an eyebrow. “Still…come to my room tomorrow morning and I’ll find you something. I’m a woman of many masks myself—and don’t mind sharing.”
Chapter Fifteen
The next afternoon, Henrik Martens made his way to Boodle’s, a prestigious private gentlemen’s club, located at 28 St. James’s Street. When he arrived, he was shown directly to a smoking room. The walls were covered with gold-framed oil paintings of men on horseback surrounded by hunting dogs.
Bishop was waiting for him at a table in a dimly lit corner, glass of amber liquid in hand. “Sit down,” he instructed. The small room was acrid with the odor of stale cigar smoke.
Martens obeyed, noting a silver-haired waiter leaving. Bishop called, “Close the doors!” which the man did. They now had the room to themselves.
“If you’re going to have any power as ‘Controlling Officer of Deception,’ you’ll need to know a bit more than what’s in the files,” Bishop told Martens. “The important things aren’t necessarily written down. I know you have experience in the field with SOE’s Norway Section, but there are any number of overarching intelligence plans in the works, and SOE’s in the dark.”
“Sir?”
“What a tangled web we weave…” Bishop’s eyes went to a wall of leather-bound books, titles tooled in gold: The Greek Tragedy by Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles; The Art of War by Sun Tzu; Carl von Clausewitz’s On War. “Want a drink? You might need one by the time I’m done.”
“Perhaps I should, then.” Martens rose and made his way to the bar cart, pouring himself two fingers of scotch.
“Because the Allied landings will take place in France,” Bishop was saying, “British intelligence operating there will be called upon to perpetuate the greatest lie ever told—the false location of the Allied invasion. We’re outmanned and outarmed. Deception is our only chance for survival.”
Martens took the seat opposite Bishop. “I was brought up with the adage that gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail.”
“I was afraid of that.” Bishop lit a Player’s cigarette. “The gentleman’s way of waging war died with mustard gas and trenches,” he said with a certain waspish glee, “and now the British secret service is the best there is. We’re ruthless, vicious, and cruel—and believe that the ends always justify the means. If you’re going to work with us, Colonel, you’re going to have to toughen up.” Bishop exhaled smoke, the blue tentacles weaving around his head.
“You’re educating me,” Martens observed, setting down his drink and reaching for a cigarette.
“Why, yes.” Bishop pushed the silver case across the table to him. “If we’re going to work together, you need to be brought up to speed.”
Martens plucked a Player’s; Bishop lit it for him. “I specialize in what we call ‘misleading deception’—creating an attractive possibility for the enemy that’s dead wrong. I’m like a novelist—in that I create a setting, a cast of characters, and plausible details, all of which tell the same story.”
“Story?”
“I’m talking about what we’re calling ‘Operation Fortitude.’ It’s still in the planning stages and we’re still waiting on those damn sand samples. But once we get the official go-ahead that Normandy is the invasion site, my job—and yours—will be convincing the enemy that it will take place anywhere but there. Everything must point to an attack on Pas de Calais. If we can convince Hitler to believe the lies of Fortitude, on the day of the invasion the German Army will be massed in Pas de Calais—leaving the beaches of Normandy relatively free.” He tapped his ash into a bronze tray with an embossed dragon.
“Even with the Yanks and the Canadians,” Martens mused as he exhaled smoke, “we’ll only have thirty divisions. If we’re preparing to invade Normandy, how can we possibly convince the Germans of a Pas de Calais attack? We simply don’t have enough men.”
“A web of lies,” Bishop responded. “A story, if you will. For a setting, we’ll use the Thames Estuary and East Anglia, Dover, and Ramsgate. That’s the logical place to build up our army of ghosts.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“Think! What would we have to do in real life if we were planning to invade Pas de Calais? Remember that old children’s saying: ‘Softly, softly, catchee monkey’?”
“Amass troops in East Anglia?”
Bishop looked like a headmaster let down by a star pupil. “Wrong! First, we’d need to widen the roads before bringing in men and tanks. And so that’s what we’re actually doing, of course. At night, using the cover of darkness. But the regular German aerial reconnaissance that flies over our fair island nation will soon note changes in the roads. They’ll take the information back to Hitler. He’ll know exactly what it portends.”
“But then what? We don’t actually have any men—or tanks—to spare.”
“Ah—” Bishop tapped ash into a cut-glass tray. “This is where the dark magic comes in. We don’t need real tanks, we just need something to look like tanks for the Luftwaffe’s Leicas taking photographs at twenty thousand feet. Have you ever seen the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade? In New York City?”
“Yes?” Martens was now thoroughly confused.
“The balloons! We’ve gone to B. F. Goodrich, who makes the balloons for the parade each year. We’ve commissioned balloon models of Sherman tanks, two-ton trucks, guns…They ship them over, and we inflate them with an air compressor. Every night, we’ll move them around—takes a few men for each—so that any Kraut flying over will be convinced he’s photographing maneuvers.”
Martens’s eyes widened. “But—but what about people? The soldiers? The officers? All the support staff? You’re talking about thousands of men!”
“Actors get drafted for war work, too,” Bishop replied with a grim smile. “We’re going to create a phantom army, voiced by radio actors. They’ll be a cast of characters—real men with real issues. Not just the war, but men who need haircuts and have cheating wives. Who use toilet paper and condoms.”
“That’s insane!”
“Not at all, dear boy. We know Hitler can pick up radio messages. So we’ll create fake wireless communications about fictional activity in real time.”
“And you believe Hitler will buy it?”
“That’s where counterespionage comes in. You’ve read up on the Twenty Committee?”
“Not yet,” Martens admitted.
“Well, you should. You’ll find out that all of the agents Germany sent to Britain as part of the so-called Fifth Column have been captured by MI-Five. They’re all radioing back to the Fatherland under our control. Through their transmissions, we will pass the most vital secrets about Fortitude and the buildup for the attack. We’ll have the turned spies send messages back about activity they’re supposedly seeing—tank maneuvers and so forth that will corroborate our story.”
“Then what?”
Bishop took a sip of his drink. “Then we pray Hitler swallows our lies.”
“If you’re building up a ghost army near East Anglia,” Martens said slowly, “you must realize that the civilians nearby are in danger of being bombed. The Luftwaffe could decide to attack the fake buildup and kill some very real Englishmen.”
“Yes.”
“Yes?” He crushed out his cigarette. “People could die thanks to that scenario you’ve dreamed up.”
“Ends and means, old thing.”
“The British people will never stand for this!”
“The British people will never find out.”
“Do General Ismay and the P.M. know?”
“We have their blessing to do whatever we need to do to win.”
Martens shook his head. “Is there nothing you wouldn’t sacrifice?”
“For survival?” Bishop gave a bitter laugh. “No, I have no limits. None at all. Before I let those Huns win, I’ll sell my soul to the Devil himself.”
—