‘This is your first time in the States, right?’

  ‘Yes.’ Saffron opened her handbag and extracted the little packet of change that Stephenson had given her. She hadn’t even looked at the little coins until now. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know any of these,’ she said, putting a selection on the cart.

  ‘Here, let me help you,’ the man said, sorting them out. ‘So, you got your nickel, that’s five cents, which you need for this Coke. The dime there, that’s ten. And yeah, it’s smaller than the nickel and no, I don’t know why, any more’n you do. And that there’s a quarter – twenty-five cents.’

  ‘Because it’s a quarter of a dollar . . .’

  ‘There you go, you’re gettin’ the hang of it. We’ll make a Noo Yawker outta you yet.’

  ‘I consider that an honour,’ Saffron said, smiling. And as she walked away, she thought of the skyscrapers and the energy on the streets, and the sheer number of different fizzy drinks she could get from a single vendor in a park. She compared that now, not to London, but to Occupied Europe, and the crushing oppression, grimness and misery of life under the Nazis and thought, They can’t beat us. Not now. Not with America on our side.

  • • •

  I

  t was seven o’clock when Adomas Petruskas walked through the service entrance of the St. Regis Hotel and told the doorman that he had an appointment to see Mr Haecki. The doorman looked sceptical: this man he’d never seen before, coming in off the street and asking to see one of the concierges.

  ‘You don’t believe me, just call him,’ Petruskas said. ‘Tell him Adam Peters has arrived. He’s expecting me.’

  The doorman shrugged, muttered, ‘What the hell,’ and made the call. A few minutes later, Heacki appeared, looking very impressive in his hotel uniform. ‘I’ll deal with this,’ he told the doorman, and then said, with a suitably haughty air, ‘This way, Mr Peters.’

  They went down a series of short corridors and then into a room that resembled a walk-in wardrobe, filled with racks of St. Regis Hotel clothing for kitchen staff, waiters, bellboys, housemaids and, finally, maintenance staff. Haecki handed Petruskas a boiler suit with the hotel’s name embroidered upon it. He hesitated for a moment, then said, ‘You promise me no harm will come to Miss Courtney? I asked Mr Meyer, but I need to hear it from you, too.’

  ‘Buddy, I swear to you, there won’t be no rough stuff.’ Petruskas held his arms wide apart and said, ‘Search me . . . I got nothing to hide. And I ain’t lifting anything, neither. I’m not a criminal. I’m just a guy doing a job, same as you. And Mr Meyer is a respectable gentleman – a diplomat, for Pete’s sake.’

  Haecki nodded. ‘Okay then, take the service elevator to the fourteenth floor. Turn right along the hallway. Miss Courtney’s suite is the last room.’

  ‘Got it,’ said Petruskas.

  ‘And you’ll need this . . .’ Haecki reached into a trouser pocket. ‘It’s the pass key. And I need it back, okay?’

  ‘Sure thing.’

  ‘Okay, then. When Miss Courtney finishes her dinner and goes up to her room, I will be able to see her walk across the main lobby. At that point, I will call you to let you know she is coming. After that, you just have to listen for the bell when the elevator stops to let her out. Agreed?’ Haecki asked anxiously.

  ‘The ring of the bell is my cue to leave. Sounds fine by me.’

  ‘Good . . . so then you do what you have to do. There is a staircase, which is also a fire escape, right by the service elevator. It does not matter which method you use to get down to the bottom, you will end up in almost the same place. I’ll be waiting for you there. And trust me, if you try any tricks, or decide you want that key for yourself, I’ll go straight to Meyer. And maybe he’s a gentleman, but you can bet he’s got friends who are not.’

  ‘Relax, pal. My intentions are all good. Do the job, collect my pay, go home to the missus.’

  That seemed to satisfy Haecki. He returned to his desk. Petruskas changed into the overalls and took the service elevator to the fourteenth floor.

  Less than a minute later, he was walking into Saffron Courtney’s suite.

  • • •

  S

  affron had decided to continue the process of getting to know America by picking up a selection of reading matter at a news-stand on Fifth Avenue. She bought the latest edition of the New York Times, partly because of its lead story about fifty thousand German soldiers and four generals being captured as the Allied forces kicked the German and Italian forces out of North Africa. But she was even more intrigued by a headline lower down the page: ‘Bears beaten 7–6 by Bisons in 10th.’ It sounded as intriguingly mysterious as one of the coded messages attached to the end of BBC news bulletins for the benefit of the French Resistance. And Saffron giggled to herself as she pondered the question of which would win an actual contest between a bear and a bison, as opposed to what turned out to be a baseball match between a team from Newark, New Jersey and Buffalo, New York.

  Having worked up quite an appetite on her walk, she was looking forward to dinner back at the hotel restaurant. As soon as she was shown to her table, she ordered prawns for a starter and a fillet steak for her main course. The plump, juicy prawns were eagerly consumed while she flicked through the The New Yorker, whose cartoon cover showed two workmen repainting a dull, military green piece of artillery in a fresh spring colour to match the leaves on the trees all around it. The steak looked to her like an entire family’s weekly meat ration on a plate, but she wolfed it down with an unladylike enthusiasm, while perusing a special ‘Beauty Edition’ of Vogue whose cover encouraged her to ‘Look your best. Feel your best. Be your best.’

  I don’t know how good I look, but I feel absolutely splendid, Saffron thought, as she sipped the glass of red wine she had allowed herself, to follow the white she had drunk with her seafood. One of the features inside was called ‘The backbone of beauty’, and was illustrated with a picture of a pretty girl in a spotty dress walking side by side with a handsome naval officer in his dashing dress uniform. That could be me and Danny, she thought. And then, feeling a little disloyal, But Clay looks just as good in his army air force kit.

  According to the article, the current ideal of beauty was ‘part spine, part soul, part lipstick’. And one could easily spot a woman who possessed these qualities: ‘It’s the way she holds her head high, squares her shoulders, walks with purpose.’ Duly instructed, Saffron signed the bill for dinner, then walked across the restaurant towards the elevators in a suitably purposeful style. As the lift rose towards her suite, she felt as though her time in America had got off to a perfect start. Tomorrow she would meet William Stephenson and discover what task he had in store for her. And she felt confident that Clay Stackpole would be making contact as soon as he was able.

  The lift reached her floor. The smartly uniformed operator opened the door and said, ‘Good night, ma’am,’ as she stepped out into the corridor. She looked towards her suite.

  She smiled to herself, looking forward to the comfort and unadulterated luxury that awaited her.

  As Saffron walked down the corridor towards her suite, she saw a man walking towards her, wearing tradesman’s overalls and a flat cap. His head was down, so she could not see his face.

  As they approached each other, the man nodded, raised a finger to his cap in salute and said, ‘Ma’am.’

  He was perfectly polite. Close up, Saffron could see that his overalls bore the hotel’s name, so he must be one of their maintenance staff. She had not seen him come through her door. He could easily have been sorting out a problem in another room. There was nothing at all to suggest that he was anything but a working man going about his business.

  But still, there was something about him that set her nerves on edge. And then, just as he passed by, he turned his head a fraction, just to glance at her, and there was something about his smile that . . .

  No, don’t be so stupid! He’s not the same man. He can’t be.

  And yet, even as Saffron forced herself to stay calm and keep walking, she could not rid herself of the thought that the man in the overalls really had been the man on the motorbike.

  She turned back and looked down the corridor. The man was by a pair of swing doors, with a FIRE ESCAPE sign above them. He must have been thirty or forty yards away, but even at that distance, there was no mistaking the air of calculated, provocative mockery as he doffed his cap and disappeared through the door.

  It was the same man, all right.

  Saffron raced down the corridor, barged through the doors, saw that there was another lift and instantly discounted it. No one making a speedy exit would stop and wait for a lift to arrive. Taking a few more steps, she skidded to a halt at the top of the stairs. She bent over the metal handrail and looked down the stairwell, but there was no trace of the man, not even the sound of slapping feet on concrete steps.

  She gave a frustrated sigh and shook her head. A fit man, taking several steps at a time, could easily have gone down two floors in the time it had taken her to get there. She heard a noise behind her, coming from the lift. It was on its way down, and the arrow above it was halfway between the numbers nine and ten.

  Saffron told herself to forget it. If he had got hold of a hotel uniform, then why not hotel keys as well? And if he had a key, he surely would have used it to get into her room. When she reached her door, that supposition became a certainty. Like all personnel of British intelligence agencies, Saffron had been taught the simple trick of leaving a hair between the door and its frame when leaving a room. If the hair was still there when you returned, then there was no need to worry. If it was not, then someone had been inside.

  There was no hair in the jamb. The maintenance man had been there.

  Once in the suite, Saffron went straight to the safe. Her money was still there, not a dollar missing. Likewise, her jewellery was untouched, and her clothes had not been disturbed, including the ones she had thrown on her bed when she was changing for her walk. Her Beretta and all its ammunition were in her canvas shoulder bag.

  So, he’s not a thief. Maybe I was wrong to think he was the man on the bike. Maybe he really was just doing his job.

  She called the operator and was put through to the concierge desk. Mr Haecki answered. He asked how she had enjoyed her walk and her dinner. She replied that both had been very agreeable. And then, as casually as she could, she asked, ‘Have any of your maintenance staff been in my room this evening?’

  ‘Please excuse me for a moment, madam, while I check,’ Haecki replied. A moment later he said, ‘No, madam, but if there is anything wrong, I can certainly have someone sent to your suite at once.’

  ‘No, thank you, that won’t be necessary.’

  So, he wasn’t staff and he wasn’t a thief; what did that leave? To anyone with Saffron’s training, the obvious next answer was ‘saboteur’. She had been trained to make, place and detonate explosive devices small enough to kill a single target or big enough to blow a train off its tracks. She had been away from her room for more than three hours. In that time, she could have made a bomb big enough to blast half the hotel’s fourteenth floor to smithereens.

  She started looking: under the bed; behind the curtains; in the cupboards, the fireplace, the lavatory cistern; behind the bath and in the cupboard below the bathroom sink. She went back to her luggage and took all the clothes out, just in case the man had left something underneath garments that had appeared to be undisturbed.

  But there was nothing to be seen, except for a total mess strewn across what had been a lovely, tidy hotel suite.

  Saffron sat on the edge of her bed and racked her brain for another idea. Then she remembered a conversation at Baker Street about an old country house called Trent Park, which stood in what was now a north London suburb. The place was being used as a POW camp for senior German officers. It was far more comfortable than any normal camp, with agreeable grounds in which the captured generals, admirals and air marshals could stroll, or take more vigorous exercise. The idea was to relax them so that they would talk more freely, unaware that Trent Park was the one place in Britain where the Allies really did have ears.

  Small microphones linked to listening posts had been built into the fabric of the house, and were hidden around the grounds. So every word the Germans said was recorded and then sifted for useful intelligence. Plainly three hours was not enough to build microphones into the walls of Saffron’s suite. But it might have been long enough to hide some. But where?

  Well, since microphones had wires, the obvious place to put them was where there already were enough wires that an extra one might not be noticed. So, cursing the fact that she did not have a screwdriver with which to open lamps or tele-phones, or look behind the front plates of sockets, Saffron checked every single electrical fitting. But all she achieved was to create an even greater mess, make herself even more tired and anxious, and add to the feeling of violation which the knowledge that a man had been in her private room had given her.

  And that, she now realised, as the hands on her bedside clock moved towards midnight and she began the process of restoring some order to her surroundings, was the whole point. Someone wanted her to feel this way. They wanted her to feel spied upon and vulnerable. But who were they? And why were they going to such trouble?

  Before she finally went to bed, Saffron locked her door and jammed a dining chair under the handle. If the man in the overalls came back, he damn well wasn’t getting into her room a second time. But as she lay in bed, lights out but eyes still wide open, she thought of how close she had been to him in the corridor. It was touching distance, point-blank. And it was this thought that kept a last question going round and round in her mind . . . Why didn’t he just go right ahead and kill me?

  • • •

  S

  affron had not slept well. She told herself to forget everything that had happened. Someone was trying to unsettle her. Who they were and why they were doing it, she could not be sure. All she did know was that the best way to beat them was simply to ignore them. And she certainly wasn’t going to waste Stephenson’s time with this nonsense.

  But she was still jittery enough to check that no one was watching her as she left the St. Regis, or following her as she walked along Fifth Avenue, heading uptown to the Rockefeller Center.

  She passed the Gothic facade of St Patrick’s Cathedral and looked up at its twin spires. They had once been the tallest structures in the city. But now, the temples of Mammon were rising all around them, putting God in his place. Across the road was the greatest of all Manhattan’s tributes to the material world: the Rockefeller Center. And right before her eyes was the giant bronze figure of an almost naked Atlas, with his Superman muscles, holding up the heavens, just as Stephenson had mentioned.

  She crossed the avenue, passed the statue and walked towards the revolving doors of the International Building’s entrance. Above them, narrow windows, three storeys high, worthy of the cathedral opposite, seemed to confirm her feeling that this was a temple of other gods. And once Saffron passed into the soaring lobby, walled in green marble, with a ceiling of fiery copper leaf and escalators gilded in bronze, the sense of being in a palace or a place of worship grew even stronger.

  Somewhere in here William Stephenson was waiting for her, and Saffron could not help but wonder why. Hard-won experience had given her an instinct for impending danger. It also told her that a man did not go out of his way to make life nice for a woman, unless he expected something in return. Normally that meant sex, but Stephenson had not been flirtatious. No, he wanted favours of a different kind.

  So, get a grip, girl, she told herself. Stephenson needs a proper SOE agent, not some neurotic, unstable, unreliable Nervous Nellie! So, square shoulders, head up, and bloody well walk with purpose.

  ‘Mr Stephenson is expecting you, ma’am,’ said the immaculately uniformed and made up woman behind the reception desk. ‘His offices are in Suite 3606. Take the elevator to the thirty-sixth floor and there’ll be someone waiting for you.’ The receptionist smiled with what seemed like genuine enthusiasm. ‘Enjoy your stay in New York!’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Saffron, taken aback by this display of unabashed familiarity. It would take a formal introduction and several social meetings to produce such cheer in England. ‘I’m sure I will,’ she added, deciding that she quite liked the American style.

  As she rode the elevator, Saffron realised she had never been as high as a thirty-sixth floor before, and that was still only just over halfway to the top.

  The soberly dressed woman who greeted Saffron as she emerged from the elevator was more formal. ‘Good morning, I’m Grace Garner, Mr Stephenson’s personal assistant,’ she said. ‘I’ll take you right in.’

  Grace led Saffron down a long corridor, lined with doors whose frosted-glass windows bore the gold-painted names of the businesses and organisations that worked behind them. The British Passport Control Office was at the end. Grace opened the door and stood aside to let Saffron go in ahead of her.

  She was confronted by a hallway which also served as a waiting area, to judge by the four chairs arranged around a coffee table on which lay a small pile of Picture Post, the British answer to Life magazine. Two corridors branched off the hall at right angles, and looking down them, Saffron realised that this office was much larger than she had imagined. Grace led her down one of the corridors, with office doors opening off it, and across a large open space that was subdivided into a warren of small cubicles, occupied mostly by men, all in civilian dress.

  Everything Saffron had heard about Stephenson’s operation had led her to imagine something on a much smaller scale, little more than a one-man band. But this was clearly a full-sized intelligence agency. Can he really be paying for all of this out of his own pocket? Saffron wondered. Gubbins was wrong. He’s even richer than Croesus.

  Grace led Saffron through another door, into what appeared to be an outer office containing two desks, one of them unoccupied. Another woman, seated behind the other desk, got to her feet as Saffron came in. ‘This is my assistant, Pamela,’ Grace said. ‘Can we get you a cup of tea or coffee, Miss Courtney?’