‘No – not one.’

  ‘My God. Then we’d better hope that someone else kills her fast, or we are in serious trouble.’

  • • •

  C

  harlie Playfair was in his office at the embassy, writing a report on the views of US senators about the invasion of Europe, when his secretary buzzed him to say there was a foreign-sounding lady on the line. ‘Put her through,’ he said, knowing who it must be. He’d been expecting her call all day.

  Consuela Balcázar did not beat about the bush. ‘You swore to me that there would be no danger!’ she exclaimed, speaking to Playfair in Spanish, just as she had done with Jarvis. ‘Now a man is dead. What if I am next?’

  Playfair tried to reassure her. ‘Don’t worry, my darling, you won’t be.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I’m certain that Jarvis was unlucky. He was in a rough part of town and doubtless some local criminal saw him as easy meat.’

  ‘I’m still frightened,’ Consuela purred, unable to restrain her seductive instincts even at times of crisis. ‘Come to me tonight. I need you to comfort me and make me feel safe.’

  ‘I don’t think I can – not at such short notice. Anyway, don’t you have a date with Jorge or Carlos?’

  The two names belonged to the deputy Spanish ambassador and the consul general of Uruguay. ‘Don’t be mean,’ Consuela said in a pouting tone.

  ‘I’m not being mean, dear heart, just factual.’

  ‘Well, all right, then. Maybe I am seeing Carlos. But I can cancel him at a moment’s notice. He will be upset, of course, but then I will promise to see him in two or three days’ time and his sadness will disappear.’

  ‘Yes, but I have a wife who is expecting me home for supper.’

  ‘But this is a time of crisis, no? One of your people is dead. Of course you must work late tonight.’

  ‘Well, maybe . . .’

  ‘Come – please – because I am in danger.’

  ‘No, you aren’t, I assure you – but I will do my best.’

  Playfair hung up, inwardly cursing the day his path and Consuela’s had crossed. He should have ended his affair with her long ago. Not only did it pose a terrible threat to his marriage, but he had sworn blind to SIS that he would end his relationship with her once she became a British intelligence asset. The trouble was, Consuela was addictive. Sex with her was on an entirely different level from any other woman he had ever bedded. He could not give that up. And yet, Playfair had no doubt that he truly loved Mavis, thought of her as his best friend, felt certain that she would never betray him, and he had no desire to leave her. How can all these things simultaneously be true? he wondered, with a philosophical sigh at the complexities of life, sex and love.

  A moment later there was a knock on his door and in strode Millicent James. The sight of her, purse-lipped and disapproving, would normally have driven any thought of sex from Playfair’s mind. But today Millicent seemed to be in an unusually good mood. There was a bloom on her cheeks and a sparkle in her eyes. Good Lord, Playfair thought, she looks almost attractive.

  For once, he thought a cheery greeting might be in order. ‘Hello, Millicent. You look very bonny today, if I may say so.’

  ‘Oh . . .’ she said, taken aback by his unusually friendly greeting. ‘Thank you . . . Yes . . . Well . . . I have a message for you, Mr Playfair.’ She handed him a neatly folded piece of British embassy notepaper. ‘I wrote it down verbatim.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Playfair scanned the note, doing his best to contain his excitement as the blood started pounding through him again. ‘Thank you very much indeed.’

  Millicent gave a puzzled frown at his gleeful tone, then turned and left the room. Playfair waited a minute or so, to make sure Millicent had truly gone. He would not have put it past her to be pressing her ear to his office door. He picked up his telephone again and dialled a number he knew by heart.

  ‘Good news,’ he said when Consuela picked up. ‘I may be able to make it after all.’

  • • •

  S

  affron knew she needed to eat. All her instincts were telling her that the Stephenson assignment, which had been simmering for the past forty-eight hours, was about to come to the boil. She might soon be calling upon all the strength and energy she possessed. But her nerves were jangling, and she barely tasted the bowl of tagliatelle carbonara she ordered at an Italian restaurant a couple of hundred yards from the Senate Office Building.

  Much of the tension was frustration at not yet knowing the contents of the coded message. But there was something else that was nagging at her, like a word on the tip of her tongue.

  Saffron was distractedly lifting a forkful of pasta to her mouth when the realisation suddenly struck her.

  The man who had beaten her to the phone call – there was something about the way he’d spoken. Saffron thought hard, tried to hear again in her head those three words: ‘All yours, lady.’ There had been a heaviness to the voice that was more Germanic than, say, Italian or French. Or was it more Eastern European?

  Maybe that didn’t mean anything. Lots of Americans spoke with the accent of the country they or their parents came from. But then Saffron thought of the way he had looked at her as he was placing the call. Men always looked at her. That was a fact of life. But somehow he’d looked at her as if he knew who she was.

  But if he’d been following her, why make his presence so obvious by beating her to the phone?

  Saffron sighed. The answer was obvious. She had deliberately put temptation in Charlie Playfair’s way by giving him her appointments schedule to pass to Lady Halifax. Now a man with a Germanic accent was tailing her and passing on her movements to his boss.

  Or I’m making this all up, and he was just a man who beat me to the phone and wanted to talk to his wife . . . or his mistress . . . or his bookie . . .

  Saffron thought about her short walk from the phone booth to the restaurant. She couldn’t recall seeing anyone following her, but if she were honest with herself, she’d been too absorbed by her conversation with Stephenson to be paying proper attention. She checked the time: 13.15. Forty-five minutes until she could make that call to New York. And this time she’d make sure she found a phone booth without anyone tailing her.

  Having a plan took the edge off Saffron’s tension. She ordered a bowl of chocolate ice cream – another indulgence long forgotten in London – and a strong, bitter espresso. She powdered her nose, paid her bill and left the restaurant at precisely 13.40.

  There was a huge department store across the street from the restaurant, covering most of a block. That meant it had multiple exits. Saffron went into the store, browsed some cosmetics stands and flicked through a couple of racks of dresses, scanning her surroundings as she did so. She didn’t see anyone suspicious.

  The store was busy. Saffron made her way through the other shoppers as quickly as she could without breaking into a run, took a zigzag path across the ground floor, and left by a different door from the one by which she’d entered.

  The map of the city that she’d memorised when looking down from the Washington Monument told her that Union Station was fewer than ten blocks away. Stations had telephones and lots of entrances and exits. That was where she would go. Saffron crossed the street, heading north.

  Behind her, a black Chrysler sedan came to a sudden stop. A man quickly got out and the sedan moved off. The man crossed the street as Saffron had done and set off after her.

  Saffron walked on, slipping into doorways every now and then to check behind her and see if anyone stopped at the same time. She saw no one.

  She arrived at the station at 13.58, saw a long line of wooden telephone booths and quickly occupied one. This time, no one tried to beat her to it. She took her pen and notebook out of her bag, called Stephenson’s number and was put straight through. He didn’t beat about the bush. ‘My people decoded the message. Can you write it down?’

  ‘Yes . . . go ahead.’

  ‘The message is in English. It reads, “Urgent meet Shadow 3127MNW 19.”’

  Saffron gave a sharp intake of breath. ‘So Gerald does exist.’

  ‘I never doubted it.’

  ‘And he is Charlie Playfair.’

  ‘That’s a reasonable assumption. The rest of the message is presumably an address and time for a rendezvous. If I recall, M Street is in Georgetown. There are lots of restaurants, bars, coffee shops. I imagine the rendezvous is at one of them.’

  ‘And the one-nine means they’re meeting at seven p.m. I had better be there.’

  ‘Yes, but now I am going to give you two orders, on my and Gubbins’ behalf. First, your job is just to observe the rendezvous, and confirm Gerald’s identity. You are not – repeat, not – to engage in any way with either Gerald or “Shadow”, who must be his controller. This is a matter of covert surveillance. Do I make myself clear?’

  ‘Yes, sir. But what if no one believes me? I’ve already had two chaps from the embassy telling me that there’s no spy and they don’t want me snooping around, looking for one. And General Donovan made it very clear that he took the same view. If I start claiming that I’ve identified an agent they’ve all told me doesn’t exist—’

  ‘They won’t want you telling them that they were wrong. Yes, I can see the problem . . .’

  ‘Particularly me being a woman.’

  ‘Well, then, you’d better get a man who can tell them that he saw Shadow, too. An American would be good. Might make it easier to persuade Donovan . . .’ A tone of wry amusement entered Stephenson’s voice. ‘Why don’t you ask Lieutenant Stackpole to accompany you?’

  ‘He’s in the OSS, sir,’ said Saffron. ‘I wondered whether you knew that.’

  ‘Yes, Donovan told me . . . but only after you’d arrived in Washington. He added that Stackpole’s role was almost entirely medical. He’s useful to have around, as a Russian speaker, but he’s not a field agent, like you, which would explain why he was easy meat for that cop at the Copa. You’d do well to bear that in mind.’

  ‘Yes, sir . . . And of course I’d be delighted to have Lieutenant Stackpole with me. But I’d be disobeying an order from General Donovan.’

  ‘You are not under Donovan’s command. As much as I like and admire him, it is not for him to say what you should or should not do.’

  ‘No, sir . . . But General Donovan is Lieutenant Stackpole’s CO, and I wouldn’t want to get Stackpole into trouble by involving him in all this.’

  ‘Hmm . . .’ There was a moment’s silence while Stephenson pondered. ‘If you do as I have asked, and simply observe the situation, then there is no reason why Stackpole should be in any trouble at all. You arrange with him to meet for dinner. You don’t say anything that suggests that this is any more than a social encounter. If you see nothing suspicious, then no harm has been done. But if, on the other hand, you do get evidence that Playfair is up to something, then you pass that information immediately to me and it will be followed up, without you or Stackpole being involved. And I entirely agree with Donovan that you can’t be getting into any rough stuff.’

  ‘But what do I do if I see something that might put other people in danger?’

  ‘Call me. I’ll deal with it. In the meantime, find a place to eat that overlooks the rendezvous point. Keep an eye out for Mr Playfair . . . or anyone else from the British embassy, for that matter.’

  ‘The only one I’d recognise for sure is a man called Jarvis, who’s with SIS.’

  ‘Not anymore,’ said Stephenson. ‘Jarvis is dead.’

  Saffron was taken completely by surprise. ‘But I only saw him a couple of days ago . . . What happened?’

  ‘He was stabbed in an alley in a rough part of town.’

  ‘That explains it . . . Playfair left his house this morning earlier than usual. I heard him shouting “Bloody hell!” and he was out of the door and into his car like a scalded cat.’

  ‘I’m told there was a hell of a flap at the embassy when people saw the morning papers. The police didn’t have the victim’s ID, but everyone knew who he was. Then the question became – what, if anything, to tell the police, or the White House? Perhaps I should have told you about all this earlier. I assumed you already knew. But this doesn’t change anything from our point of view. And let me say this again – do not engage with Gerald or Shadow. Do not allow yourself to be spotted. Understood?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Saffron said, doing her very best to mean it. She knew she would be tempted to pull out her gun and charge into the place where Playfair and his contact were meeting. But she swore to herself that this time she would stay out of trouble and be a good girl. Well, maybe not entirely good. After she carried out the surveillance and dutifully reported what she and Stackpole had seen, she would consider her working day over. And then she planned to be a very naughty girl indeed.

  • • •

  I

  n Berlin, SD Sturmbannführer Preminger was shouting into the telephone. ‘Our man saw your man engaged in surveillance. I can give you the address of the damn property!’

  Preminger held the handset away from his ear as a furious denial came back at him from Abwehr headquarters. ‘This is ridiculous,’ he muttered to himself. ‘You have not heard the end of this.’ He slammed the handset down.

  A few minutes later he was in Hertz’s office. ‘You know,’ he admitted, after he had given his colleague an account of the conversation, ‘I almost believe him. I mean, suppose it were the other way around and the Abwehr had been calling me, after they had stumbled on to one of our operations, I would not deny that the operation was happening.’

  ‘I suppose not,’ said Hertz. ‘After all, you would want them to go away, and why would they do that, if you had not given them a reason to do so?’

  ‘Exactly. I would be firm, but calm. I would say that it was none of their damn business, but if they did anything that harmed our operations, I would take this matter to the highest reaches of the SS – so high, in fact, that Himmler himself would hear of it. And then the Abwehr would soon find themselves buried under an avalanche of shit.’

  Hertz laughed. ‘Maybe you should do that anyway!’

  ‘Maybe . . .’ Preminger nodded. ‘But in the meantime, Hertz, we are faced with another question. If the Abwehr is not carrying out surveillance on Saffron Courtney, who the hell is?’

  ‘Our Japanese allies?’ suggested Hertz, though he sounded far from convinced.

  ‘No. What interest would they have in Courtney? She works for SOE. They do not conduct operations in the Far East. Besides, Macedo assumed that the men he had spotted were German, so they must have looked European.’

  ‘Italians, maybe? That will be where the Allies go next, now that Tunisia has fallen.’

  Preminger sighed. ‘Ach . . . I don’t know. But let us pray that whoever they are, they can take care of Saffron Courtney, permanently. Because if they don’t terminate her, Von Meerbach will surely terminate us.’

  • • •

  I

  n Johnson City, Tennessee, Clayton Stackpole, wearing a white doctor’s coat over his army air force uniform, was standing beside the bed in which Gilbert Wermuth lay with his plaster-encased left leg suspended in traction. The private room was spartan, but spotlessly clean. A china vase filled with flowers stood beside the glass of water on the bedside table.

  There was nothing to suggest the six-and-a-half hours of messy, bloody work it had taken Stackpole and the local doctors and nurses to clean the wound caused by a compound fracture of Wermuth’s left tibia: to remove stray scraps of bone, and bits of dirt and even grass that had entered the wound; to cut away pieces of muscle that may have been contaminated by dirt and bacteria; to reassemble and pin the broken bone; and then to close and stitch the incision that ran the full length of Wermuth’s leg.

  Stackpole yawned. He had not gone to bed until past two in the morning, and though he had slept through till eight he was still dog-tired. The DC-3 had been fitted out with passenger seats, rather than the bare metal benches used for troop transportation, but the flight back to Washington would be loud, bumpy and uncomfortable. Stackpole didn’t care. He was planning on being asleep all the way.

  He looked at his patient. ‘How are you feeling?’

  Wermuth did his best to smile. ‘Better than this time yesterday. How long before I’m fit for duty?’

  ‘You had a compound fracture. That’s a serious break. It’ll be four to six months before you’re walking unaided.’

  ‘I’ve got to be able to do more than walk.’

  ‘You can expect to recover well enough to lead a normal life. But you’ll never be as fast or strong as you were before your accident.’

  Stackpole watched Wermuth slump back onto his pillows. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Maybe you won’t be able to run the hundred-yard dash, but you’ll still be a valuable asset to OSS.’

  ‘Thanks, doc. I guess I should count myself lucky, right?’

  ‘Right. Now take it easy, okay?’ Stackpole left the room and walked down the hospital corridor towards the exit. A driver was waiting outside to take him to the airport. He could still get back to Washington by six. Maybe Saffron would be free for dinner. And then they’d make up for missing last night.

  • • •

  L

  ewandowski was too experienced to take anything for granted. He had seen apparently flawless operations go to hell at the last minute, had seen too many officers pay the ultimate price for their failures. But the hook had been set, and unless everything his sources had told him about Saffron Courtney was wrong, she would not be able to resist taking the bait.

  Her behaviour had certainly been that of a professional preparing for action. The thoroughness of her counter-surveillance routine on the route between the Italian restaurant where she had lunched and Union Station, where she made another call – presumably to Stephenson in New York – testified to that. It was only a stroke of luck that two of his men – having lost her in the department store – happened to be driving past the exit at the precise moment she emerged onto the street.