The Paris Spy (Maggie Hope Mystery #7)(64)

Maggie nodded, thinking back to the reward poster in the train station. “It’s a risky situation. Do you know the Nazis are now offering ten thousand francs to anyone who can inform them of hidden British airmen?”

“No. We’re quite isolated here. But it doesn’t surprise me.” Elise’s voice was grim.

Maggie stopped and reached out to touch the novice’s arm. “The penalty for hiding an English soldier is death. What you’re all doing is unspeakably dangerous.”

“Well…” Elise responded with a wry smile. “Wouldn’t be the first time for that, now, would it?”

She and Maggie stared at each other. And then they began to laugh. Not demure, ladylike laughs, but real chortles, building into loud guffaws. When they had recovered, with a few snorts and hiccups, they looked at each other, intensely serious again.

“Well, I guess we really are sisters,” Elise said.

“I hope so,” Maggie agreed lightly.

They continued to walk. Elise glanced at Maggie from under her lashes. “Can you help get this pilot out? Get him to London? Where he’ll receive proper medical care?”

“Yes, of course,” Maggie answered without hesitation, even as she wondered how in heaven’s name she could pull it off. “We’ll do everything we can for him. Is he here? At the convent?”

Elise bit her lip. “I’d rather not say.”

Maggie nodded. “I understand. We always use the light of the full moon, so the next pickup will be approximately…” She counted off the days in her head. “Six days from now.”

She looked to Elise. This was the moment. Would her sister agree to return to London with her? “Should I ask for a pickup for just the pilot? Or would you—?”

“May I think about it?”

“Of course.” Inside, Maggie was overjoyed by even the chance of having her sister come with her. But she knew better than to reveal it. “How can we stay in touch? Is there a telephone here?”

“There’s one phone,” Elise replied. “It’s for emergencies.”

“I’d say this qualifies. When I call, I’ll use the name Paige Kelly.”

“That’s not a very French name!”

“No, it’s Irish…a long story—I’ll tell you all about it on the plane ride home.” Then Maggie remembered herself. “If your pilot’s as bad off as you say, I’d better get going.”

Elise scuffed one boot in the gravel of the path. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

The two women did not embrace. After a long moment, Maggie turned to go.





Chapter Fourteen




Outside 54 Broadway, close to St. James’s Park Tube station, a blind man in a rumpled suit sold boxes of wooden matches. Martens dropped a few coins in his tin cup, then loped on. He looked up, past the taped windows of the building, to admire the magnificent mansard roof, bristling with a thicket of radio antennae. A discreet brass plaque at the sandbagged entry identified the building as the Minimax Fire Extinguisher Company. But Martens ignored the main entrance. Instead, he strode to the rear, at 21 Queen Anne’s Gate, where there was another, smaller door.

Inside the building sat a receptionist, haggard and stoop-shouldered, but with a noble jaw, one of the legions of retired soldiers and sailors working as doormen and messengers all over London. He looked over Martens’s identity papers and then nodded the Master of Deception through.

The building was a dingy, shabby labyrinth of wooden partitions and frosted-glass windows. Martens took the ancient lift to the fourth floor. At the end of a gloomy corridor, he climbed a short staircase, turning to find the image of his face distorted in a great fish-eye mirror. He started.

“May I help you?” came the shrill tones of a secretary. She was large and muscular, with beady eyes and an officious air.

“I’m here to see Colonel George Bishop.”

“And you are?”

“Colonel Henrik Martens. My secretary telephoned this morning. I have an appointment.”

She frowned. “Go in, then.” He did.

The head of MI-6’s French Intelligence Section was standing at one of the long taped windows, staring down at the street below, hands clasped behind his back. As he turned, a tiny sparrow on the sill flitted off. “I’ve been expecting you,” he said in a flat, nasal tone. “Follow me.” He opened a narrow door that led to a flight of even narrower stairs. Martens climbed behind the colonel until they reached the roof, home to a pigeon loft.

“Homing pigeons,” Bishop said by way of explanation. “Neither Menzies nor I trust radio transmissions.”

The two men walked to the edge and looked down, over the emerald expanse of St. James’s Park. Martens had done his research on Bishop. Code-named V, Bishop was in his sixties, born into an aristocratic family in London, one of nine children. Educated at Wellington College, he joined the British Army at the age of twenty, serving in South Africa during the Boer War, making his way up the military ranks and befriending a young Winston Churchill. After the war, Bishop worked as a full-time agent for MI-6 in Italy, spying on Mussolini’s Fascists. In 1939, concerned about the growing shadow of Nazi Germany, Bishop returned to London and was asked by Menzies to head MI-6’s French covert intelligence operations.