“Inside?”
He saw the gleam of her smile in the moonlight.
“While they are busily looking for us out here, the one place they won’t think of is inside the house.” Caitrin pulled the electrical fuses from her pocket and threw them aside. “And without these, in there it will be equally dark for everyone.”
“Why don’t I watch them while you go over the wall and raise the alarm?”
“No. Let’s just imagine that for a moment, shall we? I go over the wall, run down to the village, and find the one person who is awake and who miraculously also happens to speak English. If I can convince them about what’s happening—battling Welsh/Portuguese accents—they’ll ring up the mayor, who’ll ring up, oh, I don’t know who, his mistress, or his mum?” She gave a Portuguese shrug, eyebrows mimicking her shoulders. “And by the time they sign the right triplicate forms, work out who’s paying for the overtime, and get their pitchforks out to assault the castle, the Germans will be gone, over the hills and far away with the Crown Jewels tucked in their lederhosen. And this time they won’t take you with them.”
“Then what do you suggest we do?”
“We find le SS-Brigadeführer Walter Schellenberg and show him the error of his ways. And if we have to run over swashbuckling Heiko von Eisen and the irritating mountain-climbing Jungfrau Leni Riefenstahl in the process, so be it. I would actually enjoy that bit.”
He laughed, but she was not finished.
“Then we pack up the Crown Jewels and head for Blighty. For performing such heroic deeds in service to the empire, they’ll give me the morning off and probably make you a lord—oh, I forgot, you already are one.”
“And you are irrepressible.”
“Perhaps they could make you Groom of the King’s Stool, and you’d get the great honor of wiping the king’s bum.”
“Stop it.”
“Now we actually have to go and sort these Nazeez out.”
“How do we get in?”
“The way they won’t expect. The way we left, through the cellar. And Billy the Brick was wrong.”
“Who?”
“I’m not changed, I still want to defeat these men, and I’ll shoot every one of them to do it.”
Headlights swept across the wall above them as a car pulled in.
“That will be James returning,” Hector said. “What do we do about him?”
Caitrin shook her head. “No idea. Yet.”
Inside the house Schellenberg’s men had found an oil lamp and a few candles to cast pools of light in the darkness as James entered. He pushed past several soldiers and found Schellenberg, Riefenstahl, and von Eisen in the conservatory. “What happened to the lights?”
“We had an intrusion,” Schellenberg said.
“From the Englishwoman and your friend Lord Marlton,” von Eisen said. “He freed her from the cellar after she killed three of my men.”
Schellenberg stared hard at James and said, “You have something to tell me, don’t you, James? Something you think is important.”
The question surprised James, and he stumbled over an answer before managing to say, “Yes, I do. I told Sir Charles where you are.”
“Where we are.”
“No, not me, not anymore,” James said and gained courage from his admission. “I should never have done this. I betrayed my country.” He pointed to the array of jewels. “Those should not be here, they belong to Britain. And that is where I should be, not here.”
“A little late in the day for that sort of self-revelation, no?”
“They’re sending up guards from the embassy.”
“Oh dear,” Schellenberg said. “How disappointing.”
Schellenberg’s serenity disturbed James. He had expected anger. Heiko von Eisen was angry, though, the saber scar on his cheek livid, while Leni Riefenstahl simply gazed at him in disgust, as though he were some odd, foreign creature. And he had no idea what to do next.
“Well, here we are, then,” Schellenberg said. “What do you think we should do now, James?”
“It’s . . . it’s finished. Just surrender and be done with it.”
“Surrender?” Schellenberg leaned closer, and there was something frightening in his placid demeanor as he answered in a soft voice. “James, I am SS-Brigadeführer Walter Schellenberg of the Third Reich. The Führer personally gave me my commission. I planned, organized, and carried out this operation to steal the British Crown Jewels.” He waved a hand toward the table. “And there they are, in my, in the Third Reich’s possession. This success will propel me higher, and you suggest I should just throw my hands in the air and surrender?”
James Gordon, son of William Gordon, and survivor of Dunkirk, looked into SS-Brigadeführer Walter Schellenberg’s eyes, saw the simmering rage behind the calm, and knew at that moment he was about to die. But Schellenberg surprised him.
“It upsets me that we are no longer friends, James, because I trusted you and thought we agreed on our task. But, after all is said and done, a man’s fate is a man’s fate, and that being so, I suggest you leave us to go find your own,” Schellenberg said and gestured to the front door.
For what seemed an eternity, James could not move, and the word leave echoed in his mind. Leave. Leave. Leave, now. He nodded in relief that he was not about to die and said, “Thank you, Walter.”
Schellenberg put out his hand, and James gratefully shook it before walking away. He had taken three steps toward the front door when Schellenberg whispered one word: Gleiwitz.
“Gleiwitz,” von Eisen repeated with relish. He remembered Gleiwitz. In 1939, Schellenberg had helped create a plan to initiate the Nazi invasion of Poland by staging an attack on a German border radio station in Gleiwitz. Prisoners from the Dachau concentration camp were dressed in Polish military uniforms, killed, and left as “proof” of Polish aggression. They were shot in the head. By von Eisen. His Luger swung up as he stretched out his arm, aimed, and fired twice into the back of James’s head.
In the shadows at the top of the stairs, Caitrin and Hector witnessed the execution. Caitrin’s hand clamped onto Hector’s wrist and forced the Browning pistol down. “No, Hector,” she hissed. “Not yet. We’re still outnumbered.”
