The feeling made her all the more determined to return to France. She wanted another chance to attack the chƒteau. She pictured the people she had left behind at Sainte-C‚cile: Albert, young Bertrand, beautiful Genevieve, and the others dead or captured. She thought of their families, distraught with worry or stunned by grief. She resolved that their sacrifice should not have been fruitless.
She would have to start right away. It was a good thing she was to be debriefed immediately: she would have a chance to propose her new plan today. The men who ran SOE would be wary at first, for no one had ever sent an all-female team on such a mission. There were all sorts of snags. But there were always snags.
By the time they reached the north London suburbs it was full daylight, and the special people of the early morning were out and about: postmen and milkmen making their deliveries, train drivers and bus conductors walking to work. The signs of war were everywhere: a poster warning against waste, a notice in a butcher’s window saying No Meat Today, a woman driving a rubbish cart, a whole row of small houses bombed into rubble. But no one here would stop Flick, and demand to see her papers, and put her in a cell, and torture her for information, then send her in a cattle truck to a camp where she would starve. She felt the high-voltage tension of living undercover drain slowly out of her, and she slumped in the car seat and closed her eyes.
She woke up when the car turned into Baker Street. It went past No. 64: agents were kept out of the headquarters building so that they could not reveal its Secrets under interrogation. Indeed, many agents did not know its address. The car turned into Portman Square and stopped outside Orchard Court, an apartment building. The driver sprang out to hold the door open.
Flick went inside and made her way to SOE’s flat. Her spirits lifted when she saw Percy Thwaite. A balding man of fifty with a toothbrush mustache, he was paternally fond of Flick. He wore civilian clothing, and neither of them saluted, for SOE was impatient of military formalities.
“I can tell by your face that it went badly,” Percy said.
His sympathetic tone of voice was too much for Flick to bear. The tragedy of what had happened overwhelmed her suddenly, and she burst into tears. Percy put his arms around her and patted her back. She buried her face in his old tweed jacket. “All right,” he said. “I know you did your best.”
“Oh, God, I’m sorry to be such a girl.”
“I wish all my men were such girls,” Percy said with a catch in his voice.
She detached herself from his embrace and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “Take no notice.”
He turned away and blew his nose into a big handkerchief “Tea or whisky?” he said.
“Tea, I think.” She looked around. The room was full of shabby furniture, hastily installed in 1940 and never replaced: a cheap desk, a worn rug, mismatched chairs. She sank into a sagging armchair. “I’ll fall asleep if I have booze.”
She watched Percy as he made tea. He could be tough as well as compassionate. Much decorated in the First World War, he had become a rabble-rousing labor organizer in the twenties, and was a veteran of the 1936 Battle of Cable Street, when Cockneys attacked Fascists who were trying to march through a Jewish neighborhood in London’s East End. He would ask searching questions about her plan, but he would be open minded.
He handed her a mug of tea with milk and sugar.
“There’s a meeting later this morning,” he said. “I have to get a briefing note to the boss by nine ack emma. Hence the hurry.”
She sipped the sweet tea and felt a pleasant jolt of energy. She told him what had happened in the square at Sainte-C‚cile. He sat at the desk and made notes with a sharp pencil. “I should have called it off,” she finished. “Based on Antoinette’s misgivings about the intelligence, I should have postponed the raid and sent you a radio message saying we were outnumbered.”