Jack Higgins – Night of the Fox

She delivered the speech with an air of bravado and an illusion of calm sophistication that in one so young was strangely moving.

Munro, unusually for him, felt uncomfortable. “This is important, believe me.” He leaned forward, put a hand on her arm. “We wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t.”

She nodded. “I know, Brigadier. I know ” She turned and stared out of the window again at the passing scenery, thinking about Martineau.

He awoke with a dull ache just behind the right eye and his mouth tasted foul. Only one answer to that. He pulled on an old tracksuit and grabbed a towel, left by the front door and ran down to the sea.

He stripped and ran out through the shallows, plunging through the waves. It wasn’t even a nice morning, the sky the color of slate gray, and there was rain on the wind. Yet quite suddenly, he experienced one of those special moments. Sea and sky seemed to become one. For a little while all sounds faded as he battled his way through the waves. Nothing mattered. Not the past or the future. Only this present moment. As he turned on his back, a herring gull fled overhead and it started to rain.

A voice called out, “Enjoying yourself, Harry?”

Martineau turned toward the shore and found Munro standing there in old tweed coat and battered hat, holding an umbrella over his head. “My God,” he said. “Not you, Dougal?”

“As ever was, Harry. Come on up to the cottage. There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”

He turned and walked back across the beach without another word. Martineau floated there for a while, thinking about it. Dougal Munro wasn’t just paying a social call, that was for sure, not all the way from London. Excitement surged through him and he waded out of the water, toweled himself briskly, pulled on the old tracksuit and ran across the beach and up the cliff path. Jack Carter was standing on the porch, watching the rain and smoking a cigarette.

“What, you too, Jack?” Martineau smiled with real pleasure and took the other man’s hand. “Does the old sod want me to go back to work?”

“Something like that.” Carter hesitated, then said, “Harry, I think you’ve done enough.”

“No such word in the vocabulary, Jack, not until they nail down the lid and put you six feet under.” Martineau brushed past Carter and went inside.

Munro was sitting by the fire, reading the notepad he’d found on the table. “Still writing bad poetry?”

“Always did.” Martineau took the pad from him, tore off the top sheet, crumpled it up and tossed it into the flreplace. It was then that he became aware of Sarah Drayton standing in the kitchen doorway.

“I’m making tea for everyone. I hope that’s all right, Colonel Martineau. I’m Sarah Drayton.”

She didn’t bother holding out her hand, for it would have trembled too much. She was aware that she was close to tears and her stomach was hollow with excitement, throat dry. Coup defoudre, the French called it. The thunderclap. The best kind of love of all. Instant and quite irrevocable.

And at first, he responded, brushing a lock of black hair back from the white forehead, his face illuminated by a smile of great natural charm, and then the smile faded and he turned on Munro, anger in his voice, as if seeing everything.

“My God, what a bastard you are, Dougal. So now we’re using schoolgirls?”

Hugh Kelso’s adventures did not take long in the telling, but when he was finished, Munro carried on.

“The other month we knocked off a man called Braun in Paris. Jack has the details. I think you’ll find it interesting.”

“What was he, Gestapo?” Martineau asked.

“No, SD.” Carter turned to Sarah Drayton sitting on the other side of the fire. “That’s the Secret Intelligence Department of the SS, responsible only to Himmler himself. More powerful than any other organization in Germany today.”

“Go on about Braun,” Martineau said.

“Well, according to his papers, he was RFSS.” Carter turned again to Sarah. “That means Reichsfuhrer SS. It’s a cuff title that members of Himmler’s personal staff wear on their uniform sleeve.” He took a paper from the file he was holding and offered it to Martineau. “It seems Braun was a kind of roving ambassador, empowered to make his own investigations wherever he pleased.”

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