Read Online Jackdaws by Ken Follett - Free Book Online Page A

sped
through the Hertfordshire villages of Stevenage and Knebworth. Flick looked out
at the modest houses with vegetables growing in the front gardens, the country
post offices where grumpy postmistresses resentfully doled out penny stamps,
and the assorted pubs with their warm beer and battered pianos, and she felt
profoundly grateful that the Nazis had not got this far.
    The feeling made her all the more
determined to return to France. She wanted another chance to attack the
château. She pictured the people she had left behind at Sainte-Cécile: Albert,
young Bertrand, beautiful Geneviève, and the others dead or captured. She
thought of their families, distraught with worry or stunned by grief. She
resolved that their sacrifice should not have been fruitless.
    She would have to start right away.
It was a good thing she was to be debriefed immediately: she would have a
chance to propose her new plan today. The men who ran SOE would be wary at
first, for no one had ever sent an all-female team on such a mission. There
were all sorts of snags. But there were always snags.
    By the time they reached the north
London suburbs it was full daylight, and the special people of the early
morning were out and about: postmen and milkmen making their deliveries, train
drivers and bus conductors walking to work. The signs of war were everywhere: a
poster warning against waste, a notice in a butcher's window saying No Meat
Today, a woman driving a rubbish cart, a whole row of small houses bombed into
rubble. But no one here would stop Flick, and demand to see her papers, and put
her in a cell, and torture her for information, then send her in a cattle truck
to a camp where she would starve. She felt the high-voltage tension of living
undercover drain slowly out of her, and she slumped in the car seat and closed
her eyes.
    She woke up when the car turned into
Baker Street. It went past No. 64: agents were kept out of the headquarters
building so that they could not reveal its Secrets under interrogation. Indeed,
many agents did not know its address. The car turned into Portman Square and
stopped outside Orchard Court, an apartment building. The driver sprang out to
hold the door open.
    Flick went inside and made her way
to SOE's flat. Her spirits lifted when she saw Percy Thwaite. A balding man of
fifty with a toothbrush mustache, he was paternally fond of Flick. He wore
civilian clothing, and neither of them saluted, for SOE was impatient of
military formalities.
    "I can tell by your face that
it went badly," Percy said.
    His sympathetic tone of voice was
too much for Flick to bear. The tragedy of what had happened overwhelmed her
suddenly, and she burst into tears. Percy put his arms around her and patted
her back. She buried her face in his old tweed jacket. "All right,"
he said. "I know you did your best."
    "Oh, God, I'm sorry to be such
a girl."
    "I wish all my men were such
girls," Percy said with a catch in his voice.
    She detached herself from his
embrace and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. "Take no notice."
    He turned away and blew his nose
into a big handkerchief "Tea or whisky?" he said.
    "Tea, I think." She looked
around. The room was full of shabby furniture, hastily installed in 1940 and
never replaced: a cheap desk, a worn rug, mismatched chairs. She sank into a
sagging armchair. "I'll fall asleep if I have booze."
    She watched Percy as he made tea. He
could be tough as well as compassionate. Much decorated in the First World War,
he had become a rabble-rousing labor organizer in the twenties, and was a
veteran of the 1936 Battle of Cable Street, when Cockneys attacked Fascists who
were trying to march through a Jewish neighborhood in London's East End. He
would ask searching questions about her plan, but he would be open minded.
    He handed her a mug of tea with milk
and sugar.
    "There's a meeting later this
morning," he said. "I have to get a briefing note to the boss by nine
o'clock. Hence the hurry."
    She sipped the sweet