Greta studied a card by the light of her flashlight. “Yes.”
Jelly said, “Scatter them around the thermite bomb. They’ll go up in seconds.”
Flick threw the cards on the floor in loose piles.
Jelly placed an oxygen-generating pack on the floor at the blind end of the room. “This will make the fire hotter,” she said. “Ordinarily, we could only burn the wooden frames and the insulation around the cables, but with this, the copper cables should melt.”
Everything was ready.
Flick shone her flashlight around the room. The outer walls were ancient brick, but the inner walls between the rooms were light wooden partitions. The explosion would destroy the partition walls and the fire would spread rapidly to the rest of the basement.
Five minutes had passed since the lights went out.
Jelly took out a cigarette lighter.
Flick said, “You two, make your way outside the building. Jelly, on your way, go into the generating room and blow a hole in the fuel line, where I showed you.”
“Got it.”
“We meet up at Antoinette’s.”
Greta said anxiously, “Where are you going?”
“To find Ruby.”
Jelly warned, “You have five minutes.”
Flick nodded.
Jelly lit the fuse.
W H E N D E T E R PASSED from the darkness of the basement into the half-light of the stairwell, he noticed that the guards had gone from the entrance. No doubt they were fetching help, but the ill discipline infuriated him. They should have remained at their post.
Perhaps they had been forcibly removed. Had they been taken away at gunpoint? Was an attack on the chƒteau already under way?
He ran up the stairs. On the ground floor, there were no signs of battle. The operators were still working: the phone system was on a separate circuit from the rest of the building’s electricity, and there was still enough light coming through the windows for them to see their switchboards. He ran through the canteen, heading for the rear of the building, where the maintenance workshops were located, but on the way he looked into the kitchen and found three soldiers in overalls staring at a fuse box. “There’s a power cut in the basement,” Dieter said.
“I know,” said one of the men. He had a sergeant’s stripes on his shirt. “All these wires have been cut.”
Dieter raised his voice. “Then get your tools out and reconnect them, you damn fool!” he said. “Don’t stand here scratching your stupid head!”
The sergeant was startled. “Yes, sir,” he said.
A worried-looking young cook said, “I think it’s the electric oven, sir.”
“What happened?” Dieter barked.
“Well, Major, they were cleaning behind the oven, and there was a bang-“
“Who? Who was cleaning?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“A soldier, someone you recognized?”
“No, sir… just a cleaner.”
Dieter did not know what to think. Clearly the chƒteau was under attack. But where were the enemy? He left the kitchen, went to the stairwell, and ran up toward the offices on the upper floor.
As he turned at the bend in the stairs, something caught his eye, and he looked back. A tall woman in a cleaner’s overall was coming up the stairs from the basement, carrying a mop and a bucket.
He froze, staring at her, his mind racing. She should not have been there. Only Germans were allowed into the basement. Of course, anything could have happened in the confusion of a power cut. But the cook had blamed a cleaner for the power cut. He recalled his brief conversation with the supervisor of the switchboard girls. None of them was new to the job-but he had not asked about the Frenchwomen cleaners.
He came back down the stairs and met her at ground level. “Why were you in the basement?” he asked her in French.
“I went there to clean, but the lights are out.”
Dieter frowned. She spoke French with an accent that he could not quite place. He said, “You’re not supposed to go there.”
“Yes, the soldier told me that, they clean it themselves, I didn’t know.”
Her accent was not English, Dieter thought. But what was it? “How long have you worked here?”