The Unlikely Spy(28)
She thought, All in all, you're still a very attractive woman, Catherine Blake.
She climbed into the tub, feeling suddenly very alone. Vogel had warned her about the loneliness. She never imagined it could be so intense. Sometimes it was actually worse than the fear. She thought it would be better if she were completely alone--isolated on a deserted island or mountaintop--than to be surrounded by people she could not touch.
She had not allowed herself a lover since the boy in Holland. She missed men and she missed sex but she could live without both. Desire, like all her emotions, was something she could turn on and off like a light switch. Besides, having a man was difficult in her line of work. Men tended to become obsessive about her. The last thing she needed now was a lovesick man looking into her past.
Catherine finished her bath and got out. She combed her wet hair quickly and put on her robe. She went to the kitchen and opened the door to the pantry. The shelves were barren. The suitcase radio was on the top shelf. She brought it down and took it into the sitting room near the window, where the reception was the best. She opened the lid and switched it on.
There was another reason why she had never been caught: Catherine stayed off the airwaves. Each week she switched on the radio for a period of ten minutes. If Berlin had orders for her they would send them then.
For five years there had been nothing, only the hiss of the atmosphere.
She had communicated with Berlin just once, the night after she murdered the woman in Suffolk and assumed her new identity. Beatrice Pymm. She thought of the woman now, feeling no remorse. Catherine was a soldier, and during wartime soldiers were forced to kill. Besides, the murder was not gratuitous. It was absolutely necessary.
There were two ways for an agent to slip into Britain: clandestinely, by parachute or small boat, or openly, by passenger ship or airplane. Each method had drawbacks. Attempting to slip into the country undetected from the air or by small boat was risky. The agent might be spotted or injured in the jump; simply learning how to parachute would have added months to Catherine's already interminable training. The second method--coming by legal means--carried its own danger. The agent would have to go through passport control. A record would be made of the date and port of entry. When war broke out, MI5 would surely rely on those records to help track down spies. If a foreigner entered the country and never left, MI5 could safely assume that person was a German agent. Vogel devised a solution: enter Britain safely by boat, then erase the record of the entry by erasing the actual person. Simple, except for one thing--it required a body. Beatrice Pymm, in death, became Christa Kunst. MI5 had never discovered Catherine because they had never looked. Christa Kunst's entry and departure were both accounted for. They had no hint Catherine ever existed.
Catherine poured another cup of tea, slipped on her earphones, and waited.
She nearly spilled it on herself when, five minutes later, the radio crackled into life.
The operator in Hamburg tapped out a burst of code.
German keyers had the reputation of being the most precise in the world. Also the fastest. Catherine struggled to keep up. When the Hamburg operator finished, she asked him to repeat the message.
He did, more slowly.
Catherine acknowledged and signed off.
It took several minutes to find her codebook and several more to decode the message. When she was finished she stared at it in disbelief.
EXECUTE RENDEZVOUS ALPHA.
Kurt Vogel finally wanted her to meet with another agent.
8
HAMPTON SANDS, NORFOLK
Rain drifted across the Norfolk coast as Sean Dogherty, done in by five pints of watery ale, tried to mount his bicycle outside the Hampton Arms. He succeeded on his third attempt and set out for home. Dogherty, cycling steadily, barely noticed the village: a dreary place really--a cluster of cottages along the single street, the village store, the Hampton Arms pub. The sign hadn't been painted since 1938; paint, like nearly everything else, was rationed. St. John's Church rose over the east end. The graveyard lay at the edge of the village. Dogherty unconsciously blessed himself as he passed the lych-gate and pedaled over the wooden bridge spanning the sea creek. A moment later the village disappeared behind him.
Darkness gathered; Dogherty struggled to keep the bicycle upright on the pitted lane. He was a small man of fifty, green eyes set too deeply in his skull, a derelict gray beard. His nose, twisted and off center, had been broken more times than he cared to remember, once during a brief career as a welterweight in Dublin and a few more times in drunken street fights. He wore an oilskin coat and a woolen cap. The cold air clawed at the exposed skin of his face: North Sea air, knife edged, scented with the arctic ice fields and Norwegian fjords it had passed before assaulting the Norfolk coast.
The curtain of rain parted and the terrain came into view--broad emerald fields, endless gray mudflats, salt marshes deep with reeds and grass. To his left a wide, seemingly endless beach ran down to the water's edge. To his right, in the middle distance, green hills blended into low cloud.
A pair of Brent geese--down from Siberia for the winter--rose out of the marsh and banked out over the water, wings pumping gently. A perfect habitat for many species of birds, the Norfolk coast once was a popular tourist destination. But the war had made bird-watching all but impossible. Much of Norfolk was a restricted military zone, and petrol rationing left few citizens with the means to travel to such an isolated corner of the country. If they had, they would have found it difficult to find their way around. In the spring of 1940, with invasion fever running high, the government took down all the road signs.