The Unlikely Spy Read Free Page A

murder itself. She dropped the three items next to the body and steadied herself. Fighting off another wave of nausea she took the mallet in her gloved hand, raised it, and crushed Beatrice Pymm's nose.

    When it was over she could barely look at what was left of Beatrice Pymm's face. Using first the mallet, then the brick, she had pounded it into a mass of blood, tissue, smashed bone, and shattered teeth.
    She had achieved the intended effect--the features had been erased, the face rendered unrecognizable.
    She had done everything they had ordered her to do. She was to be different. She had trained at a special camp for many months, much longer than the other agents. She would be planted deeper. That was why she had to kill Beatrice Pymm. She wouldn't waste her time doing what other, less gifted agents could do: counting troops, monitoring railways, assessing bomb damage. That was easy. She would be saved for bigger and better things. She would be a time bomb, ticking inside England, waiting to be activated, waiting to go off.
    She put a boot against the ribs and pushed. The corpse tumbled into the grave. She covered the body with earth. She collected the bloodstained clothing and tossed it into the back of the van. From the front seat she took a small handbag containing a Dutch passport and a wallet. The wallet held identification papers, an Amsterdam driver's permit, and photographs of a fat, smiling Dutch family.
    All of it had been forged by the Abwehr in Berlin.
    She threw the bag into the trees at the edge of the barley field, a few yards from the grave. If everything went according to plan, the badly decomposed and mutilated body would be found in a few months, along with the handbag. The police would believe the dead woman to be Christa Kunst, a Dutch tourist who entered the country in October 1938 and whose holiday came to an unfortunate and violent end.
    Before leaving, she took a last look at the grave. She felt a pang of sadness for Beatrice Pymm. In death she had been robbed of her face and her name.
    Something else: the killer had just lost her own identity. For six months she had lived in Holland, for Dutch was one of her languages. She had carefully constructed a past, voted in a local Amsterdam election, even permitted herself a young lover, a boy of nineteen with a huge appetite and a willingness to learn new things. Now Christa Kunst lay in a shallow grave on the edge of an English barley field.
    The killer would assume a new identity in the morning.
    But tonight she was no one.

    She refueled the van and drove for twenty minutes. The village of Alderton, like Beatrice Pymm, had been carefully chosen--a place where a van burning at the roadside in the middle of the night would not be noticed immediately.
    She pulled the motorbike out of the van along a heavy plank of wood, difficult work even for a strong man. She struggled with the bike and gave up when it was three feet from the road. It crashed down with a loud bang, the one mistake she had made all night.
    She lifted the bike and rolled it, engine dead, fifty yards down the road. Then she returned to the van. One of the jerry cans still contained some petrol. She doused the inside of the van, dumping most of the fuel on Beatrice Pymm's blood-soaked clothing.
    By the time the van went up in a fireball she had kicked the bike into life. She watched the van burn for a few seconds, the orange light dancing on the barren field and the line of trees beyond.
    Then she turned the bike south and headed for London.

2

    OYSTER BAY, NEW YORK: AUGUST 1939

    Dorothy Lauterbach considered her stately fieldstone mansion the most beautiful on the North Shore. Most of her friends agreed, because she was richer and they wanted invitations to the two parties the Lauterbachs threw each summer--a raucous, drunken affair in June and a more reflective occasion in late August, when the summer season ground to a melancholy conclusion.
    The back of the house looked out over the