Blood game, p.29
Blood Game, page 29
“Right you are. By the way, there's a lad been asking for you. He came in with a group earlier. They're over at the command unit.”
A lad? Nico?
He headed for the command post, a sprawling tent that had been set up for the joint Allied command, and he couldn't help wondering if they'd yet figured out who was supposed to be in charge.
His head came up at the sound of his name, and he grinned. There was no mistaking that lanky frame that looked as if he'd added at least two inches, that shock of dark hair that spilled across his forehead, or those dark eyes that had seen too much. Fourteen going on forty. But the flash of that grin was all boy.
A handshake would probably have been more appropriate, but Paul wrapped his arms around that bony frame, and hugged him like he would any of the mates back home.
“When did you arrive?”
“Just a couple of hours ago,” Nico replied. He brushed back the hair on his forehead. “We've been on the move the last four days, trailing a company of Germans.” His expression tightened.
“We ran into one of your patrols and thought your people should have the information.”
Paul nodded. “When was the last time you had a hot meal.”
A shrug of that thin shoulder. He shook his head. “A week, maybe longer. It's not a good idea to build a fire when you're in enemy territory.”
“Aye, well come along. I'm with the press corps. They eat a bit better than the others.” He glanced past Nico, but no one was with him.
“She's not here,” he said. “I haven't seen her since Bouville.”
The food was mostly tasteless, but hot as promised. The coffee was better.
“Is she well?” It seemed a foolish question, all things considered, when what he wanted to ask was if she had mentioned him, passed any messages along in case they met up.
Nico nodded. “The last I saw her. Then she left with another group.”
“Do you know where?” A question he had no idea if Nico would answer.
He'd learned more about her in the weeks since they were together, a shrugged shoulder when he asked a question of one of the French Resistance when their unit crossed paths, no answer at all when he mentioned the name he'd learned, Jehanne.
Or a grudging nod, “That one is fearless. The Germans have a price on her head.”
“Paris, maybe?” Nico answered in that way that might mean something, or nothing at all.
Paris. Dangerous, still held by the Germans. They weren't about to give it up without a fight.
According to Dunnett, they were headed north as well—Belgium, and it was going to be bad. Dunnett couldn't wait.
He flicked a cigarette into the fire beyond the table. Would he ever see her again? Did she want to?
Nico scraped his plate clean, then stood. “Merci.” He thanked him for the meal, then reached inside his jacket.
“She said I was to give you this, if I saw you again.” Nico handed him an envelope.
“She said to tell you that she didn't burn it.”
Paul tore open the envelope that contained a folded note, and a photograph.
Dear Paul,
We are moving again, there is still much to do. I think of that night and your funny smile when I said that I knew what was beneath the kilt.
I pray you are safe—you and your camera. Do not think too harshly of my camera skills. I borrowed it from a friend.
You must continue to take your photographs, so the world will know.
It was signed with just her initial, “M.”
He took out the photograph. It was a black-and-white shot, poor lighting, the hand less than steady as if quickly taken, but it was enough that he recognized the tapestry and remembered what she had said at the abbey.
“I would burn it before I would let the Germans have it!”
There had been reports of raids across the whole of France after the Allied landing, including the rumor of a raid at the abbey and other places they passed through, valuable artwork and priceless artifacts stolen in a last, defiant, humiliating act by the German army.
The tapestry had meant a great deal to her, an important symbol of so much that had been lost, and her refusal to see it confiscated to decorate some high-ranking German official's bungalow or tent. Her people's history, she had called it, with that fierce passion.
The tapestry was safe. Somewhere.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-TWO
Where the hell was Innis?
James marked the time on his watch: ten seconds, fifteen, twenty.
Pick up the fuckin' call!
He scanned the electronics store as customers came and went—an older couple, the young man who had arrived just after he walked in, with tattoos that would have impressed Innis, and a couple of girls, teenagers checking out the latest in cell phones.
The signal at the inn had been weak at best. The signal was stronger inside the store, through the rooftop dish he'd spotted earlier and no doubt a signal booster somewhere in the back of the store.
It was almost noon. Gamers that were in for the full tournament in Paris would still be at it. Those who dropped by to watch had gone home hours ago, or zoned out on their substance of choice.
Thirty seconds—the minimum amount of time needed to track a call, if someone was scanning for a hit, and if they were capable of it.
After everything that had happened, after Cate's phone log had been hacked, he wasn't into taking chances.
The voice that eventually came on was hoarse—too much to drink, or too much recreational substance—but recognizable.
“I need information.” James stepped to the back of the store where no one would overhear the conversation.
“Do you fucking know what time it is?” Innis croaked irritably on the other end of the call.
Did he? James wondered.
“Most people call it the 'next day,'” he replied, no patience for attitude or conversations about the time. “I need information.”
He ignored the crude response on the other end of the call.
“I need to know about Marcus Aronson,” he replied. “Everything you can find on him—interviews, his early career as a field correspondent, then at the university, known associates, wives, lovers, children. Everything,” he said again.
Forty seconds. He was running out of time, out of that safety zone.
“He's probably among the dead.” Innis replied the obvious. “They're still sifting through the rubble. It was all over the news.”
But why was he dead?
In the wrong place at the wrong time? A coincidence? He didn't believe in coincidences.
“And I need you to work your magic on that image from the security film. It's important. I need a face and an identity to go with it.”
“Anything else?” Innis sarcastically replied.
“I'll let you know.”
Fifty seconds. The muscles at the back of his neck tightened.
“Call me as soon as you have something.” He ended the call, cutting Innis off mid-complaint. He tapped in another number and left a message.
“Aye, Danny, I need your help. That friend of yours. It's important.” He gave the name of the person at the gallery that the Captain had given him.
“It's important.”
He didn't leave a name but ended with something Danny would recognize.
“Running on empty, my friend.”
Both calls had been brief, short enough that they might not have been picked up.
Call it paranoia, call it that extra sense that woke him in the middle of the night, that had saved his ass more than once. He liked to think of it as insurance.
Watch, listen, be aware of your surroundings. He scanned the shop—Mr. Tattoo in a long conversation with the clerk, no doubt something philosophical considering the words inked down one arm under an elaborate skull—'brotherhood, love, peace;' the older couple, staring at Mr. Tattoo and whispering back and forth; the careful glances between the two girls, then the quick grab of the display phone that would have made a street thief envious, and in a few years they would be mothers of the future generation, or supporting a habit with whatever could be stolen and sold on the street.
He pocketed the throw-away phone and headed for the exit, passing the girls on his way out.
“Put it back,” he told them. “They've got you on camera.” He angled a glance toward the camera scanning the store. The risk of hanging out in such places, but he had to take it.
There was that deer-in-the-headlights look from both of them, then a quick exchange of conversation. The phone was placed back on the counter.
Out on the street, he marked the time again. Danny was a creature of habit and a connoisseur of all things female. He checked his voicemail regularly to connect with the latest 'love of his life.'
If he was still in the country, it was only a matter of hours before he checked his voicemail and got his message.
The museum archives were a labor of love and determination, that those who had been part of the French Underground were never forgotten.
There were hundreds of documents that had been scanned, hundreds of personal stories in letters, journals, notes scribbled at the edge of an old newspaper, a message passed from someone to someone else with dates, times, and numbers that Sophie Martin explained were troop numbers, strengths, numbers of vehicles, all in coded messages.
Some of the records contained an index that then sent her to a particular page within the document. But for most there was no such thing as 'word search.'
Kris eventually found an entry under the name of a young boy who had fled Czechoslovakia after his family was murdered. He had joined the resistance in France. He looked back at her from a black-and-white photograph taken over seventy years before by Paul Bennett.
Nico Simonescu.
There were three entries about Nico, from those who had either met him, or worked with him. He was nicknamed the Sewer Rat, from stories of how he had escaped from Prague by crawling through the sewers until he reached the edge of the city and met up with a group of gypsies fleeing the Nazis. He was small for his age, possibly from poor diet in the months after his country was invaded, but his eyes told a different story, of anger and fierce determination.
She'd read other accounts of survival, often unable to comprehend how people lived through such horrible times. Nico survived, and had made his way to France where he joined the Resistance, no longer a child from what he'd experienced.
From the journal of a Resistance fighter, translated into English:
“The boy slipped into the town, past the roadblock, and was able to bring out four of our brothers who most certainly would have been caught and executed. He is called the Sewer Rat, and for good reason.”
Then another entry, scanned from a letter Sophie had been sent to be included in the archive, written by a young woman in the photograph of the tapestry taken over seventy years earlier:
“He is young, but not when you look into his eyes. He reminds me of my brothers, who I pray are safe. But I have seen that same look in his eyes—reckless, unafraid, so young.” It was signed simply with the letter 'J.'
And then an entry from a faded letter dated December 9, 1944:
“We cannot know if we will succeed. It is ridiculous, preposterous, and yet we must try. Too much has been lost, stolen by the Germans. It must not fall into their hands. I would burn it before I would let them have it. Tomorrow we go to the hospital. If I do not return, I know it will be safe. J.”
Then what appeared to be a prayer. “God will protect from the godless.” It was signed with just the initial 'J.'
“Jehanne,” Sophie Martin explained. “It was the name the people gave her. She was much like the Maid of Orleans.”
“Joan of Arc?”
Sophie nodded. “She was their heroine in a very dark time, the things she did, the lives she saved. She was someone for them to believe in, she gave them hope. Her real name was Micheleine Robillard.”
Kris stared at the scanned copy of the wrinkled letter.
“What are these?” she asked, pointing to a series of images that had been drawn in the margin of the note.
Sophie shrugged. “Perhaps something that reminded her of home. It is hard to know.”
“And this?” She pointed out the mark, a cross with two bars hastily drawn in pencil, made at the bottom of the last page beneath the initial the young woman had signed.
“It is the Cross of Lorraine. It was carried by Saint Joan. It is said that she believed that as long as the cross never touched the ground she would be protected by God. It became the sign of the Resistance.”
Another religious myth? The things people believed in that crossed cultures and centuries.
“You do not believe in such things?” Sophie asked.
Kris had believed, once. She had studied religion, then she had walked away from it.
“It didn't protect her,” she pointed out.
“It protected the people, the promise of God in a young woman, and centuries later, a small, poorly armed Resistance that also carried the cross and helped turn back evil.”
Messages, ancient symbols, a young woman the people of war-torn France had called Jehanne. It was all very entertaining, but it didn't explain what Cate was after, or the reason she was dead.
James found her in at the back of the of the museum sitting in front of a computer screen.
Reckless! Stubborn!
She shouldn't have left the inn. Didn't anything that had happened mean anything to her? The attack in London, at the abbey, the day before?
“Kris...”
“I found the woman in the photograph that Cate sent.”
CHAPTER
THIRTY-THREE
“Her name was Micheleine Robillard. She was fifteen when the Germans invaded France. She lost her father and two brothers during the war. She joined the Resistance, carrying messages across enemy lines, once inside a fake cast on her arm. She guided people out of France who were on watch lists, sabotaged communications, and was rumored to have killed a high-ranking German officer.”
“Go on,” he told her. They needed to talk, but it was clear certain things were off limits. For now.
“They put a price on her head,” Kris continued. “That didn't stop her.”
Like someone he knew.
“She went behind enemy lines, disguising herself, and managed to smuggle weapons into a hotel where several Resistance fighters who were to be executed the following morning were being held.”
She'd tried to imagine the courage it had taken. But there were always stories of people who did incredible things in horrible times.
“She was caught by the Germans in the last months of the war, sometime after that picture was taken, as they retreated towards Belgium.
The Battle of the Bulge. He had studied it—that last bloody battle where the Germans had almost turned the Allies back. Almost. But fate, divine intervention, sheer blind luck, whatever you wanted to call it, they had succeeded. Strategists, military scholars, and historians still analyzed the series of battles that eventually led to the liberation of France and the end of the war.
He could guess how it had ended for a young French girl who joined the Resistance. An army making a last stand didn't have time or manpower to guard prisoners. Every soldier was needed for that last offensive, prisoners were expendable.
Kris’s voice softened. “She was tortured and then shot, her body burned in the forest as the Germans retreated. According to another resistance fighter who escaped and survived the war, she never gave them the information they wanted. A letter was found after the war in a cellar where she and others hid from the Germans. It was probably the last letter she wrote to her mother.”
She skipped over the personal part of the letter, and read the last part.
“Too much has been lost. It must not fall into enemy hands. Tomorrow we will go the hospital.”
“You think she was referring to the tapestry?”
She heard the doubt in his voice, the skepticism that a young girl referred to a lost artifact that had been hidden from the Germans to keep it safe.
“She knew where the tapestry was at the time of the Allied invasion—the photograph Paul Bennett took at the abbey proves that,” Kris pointed out. “After everything that had happened during the war, it makes sense she didn't want it to fall into the hands of the Germans.”
According to everything they'd learned about it, the tapestry was considered an important piece of art, even if it wasn't as well known as the Bayeaux tapestry. And it was no secret that the Germans had looted thousands of pieces of art and other valuables during the war—paintings, sculptures, gold, jewelry.
“And she left this letter, hoping someone would find it.”
“What hospital?” James replied. “Where?”
She folded the papers and put them in her bag. She didn't know, but she had found something else—where Micheleine lived before the war.
The next step. She'd just found it.
“Her family had a farm near Arras before the war,” she explained as they left the museum. “It's possible someone still lives there.”
He knew where she was going with this. He pulled the phone out of his jacket pocket.
“You need to see this.”
The text message from Innis had come in just after he got back, with a link to a site that contained those images he'd asked him to have a go at. He enlarged the photo when it came up. Even with the limitations of the size of the screen on the phone, the details were sharp, picking up the background in the warehouse at the back of the Paris gallery, enhanced so that there were no shadows, no blurry details in the image of the young woman that emerged.
Even with her hair tucked under the cap, the bill pulled low, it was the same—a brief glimpse at the airport in Edinburgh, a certain way of moving that came up in the next shot, the profile shot. That shadowy figure had a name.
Alyia Malik. The artist they'd met briefly at the London gallery, and Jonathan Callish's wife.
Kris stared at the images, one after the other, her brain slowly catching up with what she was seeing.
