“An Englishman.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“You are an Englishman working for the Germans?”
“I would prefer to say liaising.”
“Would you now?” Sir Charles got out of his car to face James. He was a few inches taller than the young man. “While you are liaising, to which country are you loyal, James?”
“I am, and will always be, English, Sir. Could never be anything else. Would you please come with me?”
Sir Charles glanced at his Aston Martin.
“It will be quite safe there, I assure you. You’ll be back within the hour.”
Sir Charles got into the Citroën. It was foreign and shoddy compared to his Lagonda.
“I have to ask you to wear this until we get there, Sir. My apologies,” James said and offered him a pillowcase.
“Is this silliness really necessary, just so I can examine some objects found in a horse box?”
“I’m afraid so, and they are rather extraordinary objects, so the Germans do not want their location known. Understandably.”
“Hmm.” Sir Charles made a sour face and slipped the pillowcase over his head.
“It’s just for a few minutes,” James said, started the motor, and pulled away.
* * *
Billy the Brick, Caitrin’s weapons instructor, had consistently emphasized to his trainees that taking a life would forever change their own, and so it was not to be done hastily. Having decided to fire a weapon, it was essential not to stop until your assailant was no longer a threat. Always fire more than once, because in the adrenaline heat of action often a person would not know they had been shot. And even after being shot, there was still enough blood circulating to keep a man, or woman, active for several seconds. That could be a lifetime and long enough for them to end yours. First shot in the body, to the heart if possible, and the second to the head. Shoot until convinced all danger was gone, but remember, after, you will have been permanently changed.
Caitrin was one of the few women who passed her shooting test the first time. If ever Billy had to walk down a dark alley in unfriendly territory, he would want her at his side. Now she was sitting in the dark cellar with her Webley-Fosbery revolver in hand, waiting. Hector would need to tell her a story when he returned—a true story, one that she could believe, if he wanted to live.
“Caitrin.” Hector’s voice came from behind the cellar door.
She moved to the steps. “Yes?”
“Schellenberg’s got all his men in the conservatory, but this door’s locked and there’s no key.”
“There’s a delivery trapdoor at the back of the building, but I’ll need a crowbar or something to free the bolt.”
“All right, I’ll go around there.”
“Wait. If I’m to trust you, tell me why you’ve switched sides again.”
“I didn’t. I was supposed to work with Die Brücke so we could expose them at the right time.”
“Might have helped if I knew that when we started. Keeping the invisible little woman in the dark again, huh? That worked out well for us both, didn’t it?” She held back her anger and wondered yet again when she, and all women, would be as valued and accepted as men. There was a touch of guilt there too that she had so quickly assumed Hector was a traitor, and perhaps their different backgrounds, along with indignation at being considered a second-class person, had unfairly colored her opinion of him. She had much to learn.
“I would have told you more but didn’t expect you to jump out of a moving lorry,” Hector said, although that was not necessarily true. He might not have told her anything more but did not know why. Perhaps it was because his training emphasized his life depended on secrecy, or it might have been because no matter how remarkable, brave, and intelligent she was, Caitrin was still a woman, untried in battle.
“I leaped out of the lorry because when captured, escape,” she said. “They never taught you that? We’ll fight about it later. Go.”
Caitrin heard him hurry up the steps. Waiting in the dark for someone else to take action before she could do anything was grating on her nerves. But it did give her time to correct an oversight. Pleased at discovering the delivery doors as a likely exit, she had stopped exploring what remained of the cellar, especially the right-hand corner. Bethany Goodman’s instruction came to mind: Do not be afraid to act alone and always, always finish the job. She was not going to wait long for Hector to return but would find her own way out by finishing the job.
42
The sun was behind the Palácio Nacional da Pena, making it look even more like a fairy-tale castle, as James pulled up to the house. The gates swung shut behind them.
“Please leave it on, Sir,” he said to Sir Charles, who was peeling off the pillowcase. “It will be just a minute more, I promise you. I’ll guide you safely inside.”
Sir Charles let himself be led into the house and stripped the pillowcase away the instant he heard the front door close. He blinked to clear his vision and saw he was facing a man and a woman. The woman he knew; the man, an SS officer, was a stranger.
“Thank you for coming, Sir Charles,” the officer said as he stepped forward. “I am SS-Brigadeführer Walter Schellenberg.”
To Charles’s relief, Schellenberg did not click his heels or thrust out his arm in that silly Heil Hitler salute. Instead he put out his hand. Charles ignored it.
The woman, elegantly dressed in a long silver gown, stepped forward, kissed both his cheeks, and murmured, “Charles, how wonderful to see you again. You do remember me, don’t you?”
“Yes, of course I remember you,” Charles said. He remembered Leni Riefenstahl well as being both a shameless self-promoter and an ardent Nazi. He had met her a few years ago in Vienna, at some pointless banquet celebrating “eternal friendship” between Germany and Austria. The Anschluss came a little later and changed everything. She had recently finished Olympia, her film about the 1936 Berlin Olympics, to great acclaim. After the banquet, Leni had cornered him to gush about her first meeting with Hitler. It was such an outlandish statement he scribbled it into a notebook as soon as she left. I had an almost apocalyptic vision that I was never able to forget. It seemed as if the Earth’s surface were spreading out in front of me, like a hemisphere that suddenly splits apart in the middle, spewing out an enormous jet of water, so powerful that it touched the sky and shook the earth.
Charles was well aware that the Nazis were much inclined to cockeyed myths and legends to support their odious Aryan beliefs, but this bizarre imagery baffled him utterly. No doubt the good Doctor Freud, given enough time, could have explained what the woman was babbling about. Leni Riefenstahl was beautiful, talented, and poised, but with her devotion to broadcasting these ludicrous ideas he thought her the most repulsive woman he had ever met.
“I promise you this will not take long, and the journey will be well worth your while,” Schellenberg said as he led them to a set of double doors and made a theatrical gesture. “Are you ready?”
Before anyone could reply, he pulled open the conservatory doors, and the brilliant light from a dozen film lamps blinded them. At the same time, Heiko von Eisen and his twelve SS soldiers snapped to attention with a synchronized clicking of heels. As bright as the lights were, more startling were the jewels strewn along the center table. They absorbed the light and reflected it back in a million blade-sharp stars. Schellenberg urged them into the room.
Sir Charles was dazed. It was almost too much to take in, and for long moments he did not understand what he was looking at, and then, to his horror, he did. “The Crown Jewels.”
