than angry. His father became exasperated and told him he was one of those men who couldn’t settle down after the war. But that hadn’t been the case. The war had unquestionably been a turning point in his life. God, how could it have been anything else? But he hadn’t spent a lot of time drifting afterwards. He tried working for his father for a few weeks. One sunny morning late in May of 1919 he left the business’s ledgers and order books and went off impulsively on a canoe trip to northern Quebec.
In the North, he’d met a retired Mountie who ran a fishing lodge. Despite their difference in age, they had a lot in common. The ageing pensioner seemed to understand what he had been through, and the pensioner’s descriptions of police work appealed to Rory. It was a thinking man’s life, with a healthy balance between activity and deliberation. That was almost two decades ago. It seemed like last week. He smiled. Had he become a cliché? Not likely. He knew his life had hardly been routine and he never regretted his time in the Mounted Police.
He walked quickly for forty minutes, and with the exercise, the rain, and the fresh air, his mood shifted. A few blocks from Charing Cross he called a cab. With the exception of a dull pain in the socket of his missing eye, a pain that he always got in damp weather, by the time he got to the Crossleys’ he was feeling more like somebody whose company he might enjoy.
Ewen Crossley met him effusively at the door of their large brick house. “Rory, so good to have you here at last. Sandra and I have been meaning to have you over for so long now, but this damn war, it’s always been getting in the way.” Crossley laughed good-naturedly.
His wife was attractive, probably at least a decade younger than her husband. Slender, wearing a tight-fitting blue cashmere sweater and a tweed skirt, she had her dark hair pulled back dramatically in a bun. She smoked a cigarette in a long tortoise-shell cigarette holder. Sandra Crossley could have stepped out of a Noël Coward play. Everything about her was a fashionable cliché, but she was genuinely friendly and more than attractive enough to get away with it.
When Rory first saw them together he was surprised that Crossley’s wife was so pretty and chic. From outward appearances there was a huge difference between the two. Ewen had matured into a pleasant, unassuming, and nondescript sort of man – the perfect individual for an intelligence officer. He was shrewd and personable, but entirely forgettable, while Sandra wasn’t the sort of woman one forgot easily. Despite these differences, Rory knew that they were both astute judges of character. They were a good match. Crossley was a solid type; Rory had known him on and off for twenty-odd years. He was a decent man, likeable with a strong character and a perceptive and alert mind. Rory had met Sandra on at least two other occasions. He enjoyed her company but couldn’t say he knew her well. They were one of those couples you instinctively like. They were completely relaxed in one another’s presence.
The evening at the Crossleys’ turned out to be more enjoyable than Rory expected. Ewen had invited some old friends he had known since his army days, and several other couples who cheerfully presented themselves with vague introductions of “… actually Ewen and I have worked together for years.” It was evident that in this line of work it was a forbidden conversational gambit to pry into anyone’s background. As for himself, he responded equally as imprecisely, “I’m in police work. I’ve spent years in northern Canada and I’m just here doing the odd job for the war effort.” It was a successful ploy. Nobody asked about his present employment, but he soon had a small circle of jolly looking faces quizzing him about his past exploits, and questioning him at length about his experiences in northern Manitoba.
“Did you ever have to go long distances by dog team?”
“Well, yes. Most of the major outposts are accessible by ski plane in the winter, but to get to the more remote locations we generally took dog teams up the frozen rivers.” This response earned him a cheer, an energetic round of “well dones,” and a flurry of questions on life in the North. It seemed that few in this small and friendly crowd seemed interested in anything but Rory’s life in the depths of winter, and he found himself fending off questions as to how often he had managed with frostbite and did he ever have to arrest mad trappers or whisky runners.
It wasn’t until later in the evening that Ewen joined him in one of these animated circles. “You seem to have made a big hit, Rory,” he said.
“No, not me. It’s a great party, Ewen.”
Ewen abruptly changed the subject and turned so his back was to the group, allowing a degree of privacy. He changed his tone. “I know that you’ve been sidelined since you’ve been here, and I want you to know that I’m aware that you are seriously underemployed. I’m sorry.”
“Fair enough. So what do we do now?”
“Well, I’m afraid there’s not a lot that I can do about it just now. You see, Colonel Harris, he’s got it into his head that he’s saving you for some other project. When the time’s right, he’s going to pluck you out and give you something dramatically different.”
“You could have left me in Canada to do that. How many others in our original group have you kept on ice like this?”
“None. All the others are from this side of the Atlantic. They’ve gone back to their original jobs. You’re the only one that we actually have a line on. The others all still have a degree of independence until we call upon them. Harris thought things would have turned out differently by now, but he’s still convinced that the situation is going to go downhill quickly once this phoney war ends. He’s very stubborn. Look, Rory, I’m really sorry about this. I’ve talked to Harris repeatedly. He’s a good man, honest as the day’s long, but he’s not an easy man to deal with. For one thing, he actually thinks you’re gainfully employed. He really does. He reads everything you put out and he likes it.”
Rory chuckled. “That’s not a good sign. We aren’t producing anything anybody with an ounce of common sense hasn’t figured out already.”
“If we push him into a corner, he’s as likely to do something he knows you don’t want just to prove he’s in control. Rory, I shouldn’t say it, but he’s one of those leaders who doesn’t quite know what he wants, but he’s damned certain that whatever it is, he’s going to control it.”
“We’ve both seen a few of those in our time. Anyway, I appreciate you telling me this.”
Ewen gave an understanding smile and turned back into the circle and struck up a conversation with the couple to his left. The moment of conspiracy was over.
6
Berlin, 12 March 1940
HE LET THE PHONE ring just once. It was late at night and Major Wolfgang Erhlichmann of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht planning staff wanted to go home. He had already drunk so much coffee that his nerves were on edge and his mouth had that metallic taste. He’d have difficulty again sleeping. Erhlichmann had been working for months on “Case Yellow,” the plan for the invasion of France via the Low Countries and across the Maginot Line. He had been assigned to this one operation for so long now that he could run through every possible move in his head, like a chess prodigy able to play several games simultaneously, blindfolded. He rubbed his bald head and took off his glasses. The voice at the other end of the phone was clipped and to the point.
Erhlichmann put the telephone down and spoke quietly to Major Carl Faber across the desk from him. “They want us to brief them again on the Manstein plan, first thing tomorrow morning. They want us to emphasize the detail of striking through Holland and Belgium, and only provide a broad brush outline for the breakthrough into France. Apparently there’s some concern with those close to the Führer as to whether or not we can do it. This time the task has been given
