Read Online Citadel by Stephen Hunter - Free Book Online Page B

his
parachute arrival in France, his exhausting ordeal
by Luftwaffe Oberst on the long train ride, and his
miraculous escape from Montparnasse station,
also courtesy of the Luftwaffe Oberst, whose name
he did not even know.
    The limousine was open; he crawled into a back
seat that had once sustained the arsses of a prominent
industrialist, a department store magnate, the
owner of a chain of jewelry stores, a famous whore,
whatever, and quickly went to sleep.
    He awoke at three in the afternoon and had a
moment of confusion. Where was he? In a car?
Why? Oh, yes, on a mission. What was that mission?
Funny, it seemed so important at one time;
now he could not remember it. Oh, yes, The Path
to Jesus .
    There seemed no point in going out by day, so
he examined the house from the garage, determined
that it was deserted, and slipped into it, entering
easily enough. It was a ghostly museum of
the aristocratic du Clercs, who’d left their furniture
under sheets and their larder empty, and by now
dust had accumulated everywhere. He amused
himself with a little prowl, not bothering to go
through drawers, for he was a thief only in the
name of duty. He did borrow a book from the library
and spent the evening in the cellar, reading
it by candlelight. It was Tolstoy’s great War and
Peace , and he got more than three hundred pages
into it.
    He awakened before dawn. He tried his best to
make himself presentable and slipped out, locking
the padlock behind himself. The early-morning
streets were surprisingly well populated, as workingmen
hastened to a first meal and then a day at
the job. He melded easily, another anonymous
French clerk with a day-old scrub of beard and a
somewhat dowdy dark suit under a dark overcoat.
He found a café and had a café au lait and a large
piece of buttered toast, sitting in the rear as the
place filled up.
    He listened to the gossip and quickly picked up
that les boches were everywhere today; no one had
seen them out in such force before. It seemed that
most were plainclothesmen, simply standing
around or walking a small patrol beat. They preformed
no services other than looking at people,
so it was clear that they were on some sort of stakeout
duty. Perhaps a prominent Resistance figure—
this brought a laugh always, as most regarded the
Resistance as a joke—had come in for a meet-up
with Sartre at Les Deux Magots, or a British agent
was here to assassinate Dietrich von Choltitz, the
garrison commander of Paris and a man as objectionable
as a summer moth. But everyone knew
the British weren’t big on killing, as it was the
Czechs who’d bumped off Heydrich.
    After a few hours Basil went for his reconnaissance.
He saw them almost immediately, chalkfaced
men wearing either the tight faces of hunters
or the slack faces of time-servers. Of the two, he
chose the latter, since a loafer was less apt to pay
attention and wouldn’t notice things and further-
more would go off duty exactly when his shift was
over.
    The man stood, shifting weight from one foot
to the other, blowing into his hands to keep them
warm, occasionally rubbing the small of his back,
where strain accumulated when he who does not
stand or move much suddenly has to stand and
move.
    It was time to hunt the hunters.
    A few days ago (cont’d.)
    â€œIt’s the trust issue again,” said General Cavendish,
in a tone suggesting he was addressing the scullery
mice. “In his rat-infested brain, the fellow still believes
the war might be a trap, meant to destroy
Russia and Communism. He thinks that we may
be feeding him information on Operation Citadel,
about this attack on the Kursk salient, as a way of
manipulating him into overcommitting to defending
against that attack. He wastes men, equipment,
and treasure building up the Kursk bulge on our
say-so, then, come July, Hitler’s panzer troops
make a feint in that direction but drive en masse
into some area of the line that has been weakened
because all