The Darkest Hour(80)
“Only because I interceded.”
“I wasn’t planning on killing him.”
“I beg to differ.”
I stop in the middle of the hall and remove my arm from his grasp. “If I’d wanted him dead, he’d be dead.”
“He’ll need medical attention, you know,” Colonel James says with a sigh.
“Then give it to him. But I’m going to make sure that he spends the rest of his days in a jail cell. No trial. Just those four cement walls. You can count on that.”
I stride away quickly before the colonel can answer me. I’m not arguing with him about this matter. Dorner will never take another breath as a free man again.
As I climb up the stairwell, I can still hear him shouting from his cell. He’s calling for me. He’s cursing my name. His fury is a song to my heart.
“Good-bye, Herr Reinhard,” I whisper.
When the Nazis stop me at a checkpoint these days, I’m ready for them with a new string of lies.
My name is Julia Bellerose. I’m eighteen years old. I reside in Brest, at the very tip of western France where the winds howl and the sea spray is frigid cold. And you’ll often find me carrying a basket of brown eggs at my hip, plucked fresh this morning from my grand-père’s farm.
I’ve been lucky so far. Since I parachuted back into France five months ago, I’ve had four run-ins total with German soldiers, but all of them were as harmless as mosquito bites—irritating, but nothing a sharp scratch couldn’t fix. They’d search through my purse and my basket of eggs, pilfering a couple for their own stomachs, but then they’d send me away. I don’t blame them for not prodding further. I’m not much to look at nowadays, just a skinny farm girl with dirt under her nails and mud beneath her shoes; and the Nazis have much more important things to worry about, like the Allies overtaking Italy or the American soldiers arriving in Europe by the week.
The war is slowly shifting, and I along with it. After eight weeks in London, I was itching to get into the field again, but the OSS was wary. They spent another eight weeks assessing me, administering physicals and mental tests and asking so many questions about Zerfall that I lost my voice answering all of them. In the end they deemed me “adequately recovered.” I take that to mean that they don’t think I’ll turn into a Nazi. Then the agents gave me two choices: either desk duty in England or an honorable discharge and a plane ticket home. Much to their irritation, I picked a third option: returning to France.
They flat-out refused at first. They called me mad. In the end, however, I wore them down. After all, Covert Ops needs spies like me who can speak fluent French and who are trained to kill if it comes to that. That’s why they finally handed me a new parachute and gave me a battle promotion to agent. Finally. I’m sure they doubted that I’d last a week, yet here I am almost a half year later.
This time around, my assignments have been simple. I sell my eggs and listen for intelligence. I collect parachute drops from Allied planes. Then I radio all my findings back to London. Rinse, repeat, and without much of a mess. I’m sure Harken would be proud. I hope he would be, anyway. Tonight, however, I’ve written up a different agenda for myself—one that’s for me, and me only.
Under a new moon, I shoulder my leather satchel and hurry across a dirt road that carves a lonely trail toward the chilly shore. I glance around me, just to be safe. It’s long past curfew and civilians aren’t allowed anywhere near the beach, but I’ve already decided that I’ll take my chances. Besides, I’m not exactly a civilian, now, am I?
The winter wind blasts me from behind while the icy mist of the ocean hits me from the front, but I press on toward the white-capped Atlantic waters. There’s a good layer of fog that greets me, too, which will provide me enough cover for what I need to do.
If Major Chapman knew what I was up to he’d probably flay me alive, but he’s hundreds of miles away in Paris, hidden in a tiny flat in the 4th arrondissement with just a bed and a radio to keep him company. Chapman is Harken’s replacement. He was sent by Covert Ops to France three months ago, but he has inherited a very different organization than the one Harken created. There’s no more headquarters. No more briefings. Covert Operations has been stripped to the basics—just Chapman and a network of field agents, each of us buried in our little corners of France, keeping our eyes open and our fingers busy and wreaking havoc however we can. I send him updates every week to keep him satisfied, and that’s the extent of our correspondence. So Covert Operations has lived on, despite all the turmoil it has gone through. I just wish that Harken were here to see it.
I reach the barbed-wire fence the Nazis have erected along the coast and grab a blanket from my bag to throw across it. Once I climb to the other side, my boots plant onto the craggy rock that covers most of the Breton shoreline.
As I tiptoe over those rocks, I can’t help but think about Tilly. I got a letter from her only a week ago, smuggled to me via the OSS. She told me that she has a view of the ocean from her room in Connecticut and that she takes walks on the sand every morning as part of her recovery. Her family flew her back to the States right before my return to France, and her parents have hired a hive of doctors to help her recuperate. The nurses poke me from sunup to sundown, and they keep giving me these tonics to drink that taste like gasoline, she had written. She had ended the letter with: How are things going with the new crew? Maybe one of these days I’ll be able to join you all.