Chapter 31
After tailing his suspect around and then receiving intermittent reports on the others’ whereabouts, Jack was exhausted and resigned to the fact that after too many sleepless nights, he was in desperate need of some shut-eye.
It didn’t seem like his suspect was the traitor and he was wrapping up loose ends at his desk, yawning and sipping cold black coffee, when the two F Section agents assigned to follow the other suspected intelligence officers, reported that no dead drops, or suspicious meetings had taken place.
He instructed them to continue observing the two throughout the night.
Jack sighed and realised he would be working late again.
His secretary, whom he would trust with his life, alerted him when Chest Puffer left his office, and Jack grabbed his coat and cigarettes and ran down the backstairs to wait in a quiet side street.
Londoners had finished work and gone home for dinner on this wintry evening, and he guessed those who liked to venture out into the vibrant London wartime nightlife were yet to emerge from the shadows.
Jack pulled his collar up to shield his neck from the icy wind that lashed at his bare skin, but it wasn’t long before he spotted his man walking along Baker Street toward the station.
His hands were thrust into his pockets, and his pace was fast. Jack followed at a distance; his hat pulled down to shield his face as he boarded a different carriage on the same train and watched the man from behind a newspaper that had been discarded on a seat.
He kept his eyes on him through the carriage door until he got off the train at West Brompton and exited onto Fulham Road.
Jack disappeared behind some bushes and watched as the officer entered Brompton Cemetery.
The main gates were closed, but he slipped through a small side gate, and Jack waited before following him into the old cemetery without making a noise.
The moonlight cast eerie shadows on the gravestones, and Jack spotted the man walking along the central avenue, lined by grand Victorian colonnades, and heading towards the Domed Chapel.
Jack left the central avenue for a smaller parallel path in case the agent checked behind him, which was likely if he was about to commit a treasonous act.
This wasn’t a location for another lover’s tryst, and when the man paused in front of a grave as if paying his respects, Jack peered out from behind a nearby monument.
He would bet this was no ordinary respects-paying visit, but the man knelt as though it was quite normal to visit someone’s grave in the pitch black in the dead of a freezing winter night.
The wind whistled through the cemetery, and Jack shivered.
The officer looked from side to side, and then Jack saw him reach his hand over the grave as if he were touching it. It was too dark to see clearly, but a minute later, he stood, scanned the cemetery again, and was soon back on the avenue, hurrying towards the gate.
Jack waited. The agent was no novice, and he needed to be sure he didn’t suspect a shadow and wasn’t lurking nearby to catch him.
A freezing, torturous five minutes passed before Jack crossed towards the grave and ran his hands across the mossy surface, illuminated only by the silvery moon.
The Victorian grave was ornate, and after checking a few slimy nooks and crannies with no luck, Jack’s fingers touched something hard, and he withdrew a small tin box that had been tucked under a stone ledge.
He shone his tiny torch so he would know exactly where it had been hidden, and then retreated into a copse off one of the winding pathways, still keeping watch over the grave in case someone arrived to retrieve the box.
As Jack suspected, inside the open box, the torchlight revealed a folded paper that contained top-secret classified intelligence. He scanned the contents of it quickly, used his mini camera to snap a photograph of the paper, and hastily returned the tin box to its hidden spot under the ledge.
Within five minutes he had left the cemetery and was walking along Old Brompton Road. He made no attempt to catch up with the intelligence officer, who had completed a dead drop and revealed himself to be a traitor.
Jack guessed the contact would have a pre-arranged schedule to check the drop regularly, so it was unlikely they would appear tonight.
It would have been a thankless task to wait in the cemetery overnight, and in this weather he would more likely freeze to death.
He decided he would put agents on the job first thing to monitor the cemetery over the next few days until the box was collected and they could follow them to discover the identity of the contact.
That night Jack crawled into the large empty bed he usually avoided when Lizzie was away, still partially dressed, weary in body and soul, and for the first time in weeks slept peacefully until sunrise when the pale, ghostly light crept into the room.
At Baker Street, he went straight to Val’s office, where she was predictably already deep in files, drinking coffee.
‘Ah, there you are. How did it go?’ she asked.
Jack closed the door and dropped into the chair opposite. ‘Sadly, just as I suspected. One of them serviced a dead drop at Brompton Cemetery last night.’
Val cursed under her breath. ‘I was hoping you had it wrong.’
‘You’re not the only one,’ Jack said, lighting a cigarette and crossing to the window where he admired the iconic St. Paul’s dome on the London skyline. ‘It’s a sad day when you find one of your own has been orchestrating your demise.’
‘It is indeed,’ Val said, rising and joining him at the window.
‘Which one was it?’
‘Captain Richard Thornton,’ Jack said, inhaling deeply. ‘Early forties, Cambridge educated, was a banker in Berlin before the war, recruited for his Germany expertise and working as an intelligence officer with X Section since the beginning.’
‘Hmm,’ Val bristled. ‘That explains why X Section has been such a fiasco. It appears he has rather too much German expertise!’
‘Quite,’ Jack said, raising one eyebrow.
‘I’ve got agents watching the cemetery so they can follow the pickup contact, but it could be a few days.’
Val hunched her shoulders. ‘Damn it all. I could punch him in the nose right now.’
Jack smoked, and they both fell silent, knowing what had to follow. No one wanted to hear that a traitor had duped them and they had facilitated their access to top-secret operations.
Val spoke first. ‘Shall I break the news to the head of X Section, or do you want to have the honour?’
They agreed it might come better from her as she’d been working closely with him since they launched the new Berlin mission.
‘What was in the box?’ she asked, sitting back down at her desk.
Jack cleared his throat, fury gnawing at him again as he pictured the agent betraying them. ‘Besides the gibberish I fed him, which will send the Boche on a wild goose-chase, it said that a courier route to Switzerland has been set up.’
‘Bugger,’ Val swore.
‘Exactly. It seems he has a seat at the top table in X Section, so the sooner you warn the boss, the better.’
‘How many SOE agents lost their lives because of him?’ Val pondered, her expression grim. ‘I could slip cyanide into his coffee with no regrets.’
‘You’re not the only one. I had to hold myself back from cutting his treacherous throat in the cemetery last night.’
Val tapped her fingers on the desk. ‘This must not blindside us. Does it mean Lizzie’s mission should be immediately aborted?’
Jack wished he could in all sincerity say they must pull her out, but after studying the files, he saw it was unlikely Berlin had enough details of the operation to identify her.
‘It’s clear from the contents of the dead drop they don’t have specifics.
Yet. What a blessing Lizzie was forced to go in blind and build it all herself.
As for Hannah, I don’t know how she arranged her position at the Air Ministry, but I’m confident she would have covered her tracks.
Lev is an excellent forger, and he handled her papers.
The identity and position of the source aren’t in the files. ’
Val said, ‘Going in blind instead of having an existing network in place would seem to be the reason they weren’t compromised immediately like the other poor souls they sent into the traitor’s trap.
Should we call it off now? I’m not inclined to risk Seagrove and Angel in this den of betrayal unless there’s solid evidence their cover as war widows hasn’t been blown. ’
Jack stared at Val, his mind ticking over as he scrambled for their next move. His priority, as always, was to keep Lizzie and Hannah alive, but in this deadly espionage game, there were other factors to consider. ‘Even if we want to pull them out, we don’t have a way to warn them.’
Val sighed. ‘You’d better give me one of those damned cigarettes,’ she said.
Jack lit it for her, and she puffed softly.
‘You’re right, we don’t. On the upside, even if the contact collects the contents of the box confirming a Swiss courier route, it won’t reach Berlin for some time.
The channels move at a snail’s pace, no matter how they send it. ’
They talked through the various scenarios and concluded that the traitor’s handler would likely by now know there were two female spies in Berlin.
‘What shall we do about Thornton?’ Jack asked.
Val stubbed out her cigarette. ‘Let’s leave the bastard in play. God help him, from now on our revenge will be spinning him fanciful yarns to get him and his diabolical Nazi paymasters chasing their tails in Berlin. They have played us for too long. Now we’ll show them how the game is played.’