Code Name Verity(60)

I confess that it was my idea to find a substitute.

After the sergeant hung up there was a lot of flap as everybody gasped in dismay and concern and disappointment. We had been tut-tutting from time to time all evening over Peter’s late arrival, but it never occurred to anyone that he wouldn’t turn up well ahead of take-off. And now it was dark and the BBC announcement had been made and the reception committees in France were waiting and the Lysanders were out there with their long-range tanks full of fuel and their rear cockpits full of guns and radios. And bouncing on her flat heels, full of coffee and nerve and code, was Eva Seiler, Berlin’s interpretive liaison with London, soon to insinuate herself into the German-speaking underworld of Ormaie.

‘Maddie can fly the plane.’

She has presence, Eva Seiler or whoever she thought she was that night, and people pay attention to her. They don’t always agree with her, but she does command attention.

Jamie laughed. Jamie, sweet Jamie – the interpretive liaison’s loving, toeless Pobble of a brother laughed and said with force, ‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Just – no! Never mind the breach of regulations, she’s not even been checked out –’

‘On a Lysander?’ the liaison said scornfully.

‘Night flying –’

‘She does it without a radio or a map!’

‘I don’t fly without a map,’ Maddie corrected prudently, playing her cards close to her chest. ‘It’s against the rules.’

‘Well, you don’t have your destination or the obstacles marked most of the time, which is much the same thing.’

‘She’s not flown to France at night,’ Jamie argued, and bit his lip.

‘You made her fly to France,’ said his sister.

Jamie looked at Maddie. Michael, and the goddess-like Special Operations officer who was there to oversee Queenie’s packing, and the RAF police sergeant, and the other agents who were flying out that night, watched with interest.

Jamie played his ace.

‘There’s no one to authorise the flight.’

‘Ring the Bloody Machiavellian English Intelligence Officer.’

‘He’s got no Air Ministry authority.’

ATA First Officer Brodatt made her move at last, and trumped him calmly.

‘If it’s a ferry flight,’ she said, ‘I can authorise it myself. Let me use the telephone.’

And she rang her C.O. to let him know she had been asked to taxi one of her usual passengers from RAF Special Duties to an ‘Undisclosed Location’. And he gave her permission to go.





Ormaie 24.XI.43 JB-S

He knows now.

Nacht und Nebel, night and fog. Eva Seiler is going to fry in hell. Oh – I wish I had some clue whether I have done the right thing. But I don’t see how I can finish this story and keep Eva secret. I did promise to give him every last detail. And ultimately, I can’t imagine that giving her identity away will change my fate much, whatever it is.

Because I’d written such a lot the day before yesterday it has taken a while for Hauptsturmführer von Linden to get caught up on the translation, and he and Engel (or somebody) must have kept going without me after I’d been locked up in my cell again last night. I have still not quite slept off the excesses of that day and was out cold at 3 a.m. or whenever it was that he came in – but woke instantly when the padlocks and bolts on my door began their official-sounding sequence of thuds and clicks, as it always fills me with the most curious mixture of wild hope and sick dread when they unlock my door. I have slept through air raids more than once, but when my door is unlocked I am instantly On My Guard.

I stood up. It is pointless backing against the wall, and I have stopped bothering about my hair. But the Wallace in me still makes me want to face the enemy on my feet.

It was von Linden of course – I almost want to say ‘as usual’ as he often comes in now to chat briefly with me about German literature when he’s finished work. I think it is the only self-indulgence of his day’s strict routine – Parzival as a nightcap, to clear his mind of the blood that flecks the silver pips on his black collar patches. When he stands in my door and asks my opinion on Hegel or Schlegel, I dare not give him less than my full attention (though I have suggested he needs to take modern writers like Hesse and Mann more seriously. How those schoolboys of his, back in Berlin, would love Narzi? und Goldmund!).