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

tea and felt a
pleasant jolt of energy. She told him what had happened in the square at
Sainte-Cécile. He sat at the desk and made notes with a sharp pencil. "I
should have called it off," she finished. "Based on Antoinette's misgivings
about the intelligence, I should have postponed the raid and sent you a radio
message saying we were outnumbered."
    Percy shook his head sadly.
"This is no time for postponements. The invasion can't be more than a few
days away. If you had consulted us, I doubt it would have made any difference.
What could we do? We couldn't send you more men. I think we would have ordered
you to go ahead regardless. It had to be tried. The telephone exchange is too
important."
    "Well, that's some consolation."
Flick was glad she did not have to believe Albert had died because she had made
a tactical error. But that would not bring him back.
    "And Michel is all right?"
Percy said.
    "Mortified, but
recovering." When SOE had recruited Flick, she had not told them her
husband was in the Resistance. If they had known, they might have steered her
toward different work. But she had not really known it herself, though she had
guessed. In May 1940 she had been in England, visiting her mother, and Michel
had been in the army, like most able-bodied young Frenchmen, so the fall of
France had left them stranded in different countries. By the time she returned
as a secret agent, and learned for certain what role her husband was playing,
too much training had been invested in her, and she was already too useful to
SOE, for her to be fired on account of hypothetical emotional distractions.
    "Everyone hates a bullet in the
backside," Percy mused. "People think you must have been running
away." He stood up. "Well, you'd better go home and get some
sleep."
    "Not yet," Flick said.
"First I want to know what we're going to do next."
    "I'm going to write this report—" "No I mean about the telephone exchange. If it's so important, we
have to knock it out."
    He sat down again and looked at her
shrewdly. "What have you got in mind?"
    She took Antoinette's pass out of
her bag and threw it on his desk. "Here's a better way to get inside.
That's used by the cleaners who go in every night at seven o'clock."
    Percy picked up the pass and
scrutinized it. "Clever girl," he said with something like admiration
in his voice. "Go on."
    "I want to go back."
    A look of pain passed briefly over
Percy's face, and Flick knew he was dreading her risking her life again. But he
said nothing.
    "This time I'll take a full
team with me," she went on. "Each of them will have a pass like that.
We'll substitute for the cleaners in order to get into the château."
    "I take it the cleaners are
women?"
    "Yes. I'd need an all-female
team."
    He nodded. "Not many people
around here will object to that—you girls have proved yourselves. But where
would you find the women? Virtually all our trained people are over there
already."
    "Get approval for my plan, and
I'll find the women. I'll take SOE rejects, people who failed the training
course, anybody. We must have a file of people who have dropped out for one
reason or another."
    "Yes—because they were
physically unfit, or couldn't keep their mouths shut, or enjoyed violence too
much, or lost their nerve in parachute training and refused to jump out of the
plane."
    "It doesn't matter if they're
second-raters," Flick argued earnestly. "I can deal with that."
At the back of her mind, a voice said Can you, really? But she ignored it.
    "If the invasion fails, we've
lost Europe. We won't try again for years. This is the turning point, we have
to throw everything at the enemy."
    "You couldn't use French women
who are already there, Resistance fighters?"
    Flick had already considered and
rejected that idea. "If I had a few weeks, I might put together a team
from women in half a dozen different Resistance circuits, but it would take too
long to find them and get them to Reims."
    "It might still be
possible."
    "And then