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Historical,
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World War; 1939-1945,
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World War; 1939-1945 - Secret Service,
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France - History - German Occupation; 1940-1945,
World War; 1939-1945 - Underground Movements,
Women in War
ago, was now standing in the shadow of Dieter's car.
As Dieter looked, her coat flapped open, and to his astonishment he saw that
his imagination had been prophetic: under the coat she had a submachine gun
with a skeleton-frame butt, exactly the type favored by the Resistance.
"My God!" he said.
He reached inside his suit jacket
and remembered he was not carrying a gun.
Where was Stéphanie? He looked
around, momentarily shocked into a state close to panic, but she was standing
behind him, waiting patiently for him to finish his conversation with Weber.
"Get down!" he yelled.
Then there was a bang.
CHAPTER
THREE
FLICK WAS IN the doorway of the
Café des Sports, behind Michel, standing on tiptoe to look over his shoulder.
She was alert, her heart pounding, her muscles tensed for action, but in her
brain the blood flowed like ice water, and she watched and calculated with cool
detachment.
There were eight guards in sight:
two at the gate checking passes, two just inside the gate, two patrolling the
grounds behind the iron railings, and two at the top of the short flight of
steps leading to the château's grand doorway. But Michel's main force would
bypass the gate.
The long north side of the church
building formed part of the wall surrounding the château's grounds. The north
transept jutted a few feet into the parking lot that had once been part of the
ornamental garden. In the days of the ancien regime, the comte had had his own
personal entrance to the church, a little door in the transept wall. The
doorway had been boarded up and plastered over more than a hundred years ago,
and had remained that way until today.
An hour ago, a retired quarryman
called Gaston had entered the empty church and carefully placed four half-pound
sticks of yellow plastic explosive at the foot of the blocked doorway. He had
inserted detonators, connected them together so that they would all go off at
the same instant, and added a five-second fuse ignited by a thumb plunger. Then
he had smeared everything with ash from his kitchen fire to make it
inconspicuous and moved an old wooden bench in front of the doorway for
additional concealment. Satisfied with his handiwork, he had knelt down to
pray.
When the church bell had stopped
ringing a few seconds ago, Gaston had got up from his pew, walked a few paces
from the nave into the transept, depressed the plunger, and ducked quickly back
around the corner. The blast must have shaken centuries of dust from the Gothic
arches. But the transept was not occupied during services, so no one would have
been injured.
After the boom of the explosion,
there was a long moment of silence in the square. Everyone froze: the guards at
the château gate, the sentries patrolling the fence, the Gestapo major, and the
well-dressed German with the glamorous mistress. Flick, taut with apprehension,
looked across the square and through the iron railings into the grounds. In the
parking lot was a relic of the seventeenth-century garden, a stone fountain
with three mossy cherubs sporting where jets of water had once flowed. Around
the dry marble bowl were parked a truck, an armored car, a Mercedes sedan painted
the gray-green of the German army, and two black Citroëns of the Traction Avant
type favored by the Gestapo in France. A soldier was filling the tank of one of
the Citroëns, using a gas pump that stood incongruously in front of a tall
château window. For a few seconds, nothing moved. Flick waited, holding her
breath.
Among the congregation in the church
were ten armed men. The priest, who was not a sympathizer and therefore had no
warning, must have been pleased that so many people had shown up for the
evening service, which was not normally very popular. He might have wondered
why some of them wore topcoats, despite the warm weather, but after four years
of austerity lots of people wore odd clothes, and a man might wear a raincoat
to church because he had no jacket. By now, Flick hoped, the priest