Seven

After trying to watch a sitcom for the better part of an hour, Sara checked the locks on the apartment and went to bed.

An hour of tossing and turning later, she turned on the bedside light and reached for a novel. Her head felt heavy, her eyes grainy. She had sleeping pills, but she was reluctant to take one. The battle to relax into sleep was in her mind and therefore controllable. Annoyed as she was at still being wide-awake when she needed to be asleep, she hated the thought of being dependent on any drug.

She stared at the lines of print, forcing herself to concentrate on the story line. Gradually, the novel worked its magic and she became hooked on the story and began to relax.

Outside the wind had picked up. Rain rattled against the windowpanes, the monotony of the sound, soothing her even more. The words began to merge, blur. Her eyes drooped, shutting out the bright, intrusive gleam of the bedside lamp.

The book slipped from her fingers as she dropped into sleep.

   

France, 1943

   

Cold seeped through the stone walls of the Château Vassigny as Sara Weiss stepped into the cavernous reaches of the library.

She bypassed Oberst Reichmann’s desk and retrieved the set of keys hidden behind a leather-bound tome on the bookshelf.

Moving quickly, she unlocked the door to what had once been an anteroom but which, since the Germans had moved in, had been converted into a makeshift strong room. Stepping inside, she closed the door. She selected a second key and opened the small, squat safe positioned against one wall.

Ignoring the neat piles of francs and the boxes of jewelry that Reichmann and his Waffen SS had “confiscated” during their occupation of Vassigny, she removed a correspondence file, the SS codebook and a second book, this one bound in brown leather, which she hadn’t ever seen before.

The codebook itself was nondescript. Bound with board, it was about the size of a school exercise book or a journal. Some codebooks were enormous volumes, but this one fell into the medium range: comprehensive but pared down for portability and ease of use by soldiers in the field. The SS, like the other branches of the German military, also used encryption machines. But as highly efficient and notoriously hard to break as the codes transmitted by their Enigma machines were, the “clear”—that is, the uncoded message—was often encoded before it was encrypted for added security, making the messages even more difficult to decipher.

Ears straining against Reichmann’s return, she opened the codebook and turned pages. A bright red thread floated onto the carpet. Reichmann’s additional security. The thread was always positioned between pages fifteen and sixteen.

She found the reference she wanted and committed it to memory.

One entry, no more.

She had been steadily stealing the code, one word at a time, for the past few months, ever since Reichmann, the head of the local Waffen SS had employed her as his personal secretary. Sometimes she didn’t have access to the safe for weeks. At other times, she managed to get several words or phrases in a day. To date, she had stolen more than seventy percent of the code.

Placing the codebook on top of the correspondence file, she pushed the spectacles she wore for close work higher on the bridge of her nose and opened the second unidentified book. For long seconds what she was reading didn’t make sense. Then her stomach clenched in automatic recoil and bile rose in the back of her throat. The book was a ledger, a list of the Jews Reichmann and his SS had sent to the death camps.

Her mind slid back three years, to darkness and horror and grief. Her parents, Dietrich and Janine Weiss, had been living in Paris under assumed names, running an underground paper for the French Resistance. It was safe, they had assured her. At the first hint of trouble they would leave and join her in England. Just days later they had been arrested. Shortly after, they had been transported to Ravensbruck and executed.

She flipped through pages, frowning. The documentation was highly unusual. It provided proof of genocide, something the Germans were determined to conceal. The book shouldn’t exist, and it shouldn’t be here.

Vassigny was a small, quiet village, a producer of vegetables, milk, cheeses and wine, and a provider of accommodation for the SS. Reichmann billeted his men and ran his operation from the Château, but the prison at Clairvaux held larger concentrations of German forces, better security and an administration center. Any sensitive documentation should have been kept there.

Stomach tight, she flipped pages. Account numbers and figures leaped at her, and the reason for the book’s existence became clear. It wasn’t an official record. Reichmann was a former Swiss banker, and this was his own personal ledger. A secret accounting of murder and the transfers of the money he had stolen from the people he had condemned.

She stared at the neat lists of dates, names and bank accounts spanning more than two years, the dizzying amounts of money Reichmann had stolen.

Her task in Vassigny was to coordinate airdrops of supplies from Special Operations Executive in England for the local French Resistance, the Maquis, and run the escape pipeline. The fact that the job with Reichmann had fallen into her lap, giving her access to the codebook, had been a bonus. The code breakers at Bletchley Park in England needed the information she supplied, but Reichmann’s ledger represented another priority.

Her jaw tightened at the sheer numbers Reichmann had sent to the camps. The ledger was proof of genocide, and of Reichmann’s unconscionable greed.

Reichmann wasn’t just stealing from the Jews, he was stealing from the Reich. With access to the accounts of Jews sent to the death camps, before those accounts were declared to the Reich, he could transfer money into nominated accounts. The theft would be concealed behind a serpentine raft of paperwork, and was, no doubt, supported by the connivance of a bank. Reichmann might not be entirely suited for his SS command, but when it came to moving money, he was at the top of his game.

Her parents’ names wouldn’t be recorded here, because at that time Reichmann had been based in Lyon. But whether or not they were listed, it didn’t matter. Her parents had given their lives to stop this kind of evil. She needed the book for them—and for every individual and family listed in it.

A name registered. Simon de Vernay.

Shock reverberated through her. She checked the ledger entry. The amount of money transferred made her mouth go dry. She didn’t know any one person could have such an amount.

The de Vernays were very well-known, an old Jewish family that had settled in Angers, their principal business, the diamond trade. No diamonds, as such, were listed, but that made sense. The de Vernay’s were traders, not jewelers. Their stocks of diamonds would have been concentrated in Antwerp, the main diamond-trading center and, since war had broken out, no doubt in other, safer centers offshore.

Setting the book down, she opened Reichmann’s private correspondence file, which contained personal and classified materials that never crossed her desk. A telegram, received that morning, was sitting on top.

“Code leak traced to Vassigny Stop Find traitor Stop”

Her heart kicked hard, once. With fingers that shook slightly, she replaced the telegraph in the file and returned it to its correct place on the shelf, placing the ledger and the codebook on top. She locked the safe, then closed and locked the door to the strong room and returned the key to its hiding place.

The echo of footsteps in the front hall signaled that Reichmann had returned from his meeting. She slipped out of his office, walked through to her own room and sat down behind her desk. She checked her wristwatch. Almost fifteen minutes had passed while she had been in the strong room. The risk she had taken was huge. Normally, three minutes was her maximum turnaround time, but the information she had gathered had been crucial, not only for her own survival, but for the Maquis.

Code leak traced to Vassigny Stop Find Traitor Stop.

There were two possibilities, perhaps a third. Her radio transmissions to SOE HQ in England could have been intercepted. The success of their sabotage program could have aroused suspicion. Or they had a traitor.

The leak, if there was one, couldn’t be local. Her cover was simple. She was married to Armand de Thierry, the former occupant of the Château and the marriage, on paper at least, was real. Armand, a wealthy landowner, was seen as a valued Nazi collaborator, owing to the fact that he owned a great deal of productive land and was able to supply the German soldiers with wine, fresh meat, vegetables and cheeses. He was also the head of the local Maquis, a small, but effective group of French Resistance fighters.

Armand was in his fifties, but the fact that he was wealthy meant his second marriage, after the death of his first wife, to a much younger woman was not considered strange.

For Sara, the cover was natural and impeccable. The fact that her mother was a Parisienne, and her father German, that she had spent her childhood in Berlin, her formative years in Paris and most of her adult life in Oxford, England, suited her uniquely for this mission.

During her time in Vassigny, she had been cared for and protected. Armand and the Resistance had gone to great lengths to integrate her into the village and their lives. The fact that she had devised the present cipher system that the Allied ground forces used to communicate with each other was the one glaring weakness in her suitability as an agent, although that risk was offset by the fact that her link with the cipher had been kept secret.

Armand and the SOE had protected her, but her time in Vassigny was over. There were a limited number of codebooks, and only a handful of people with access to the Château. It was only a matter of time before Reichmann, or more likely, Stein, the local Gestapo officer, unmasked her. When she transmitted the code information at her next scheduled radio contact, she would make arrangements to leave.

Reichmann bypassed her office and walked directly into his. Breathing a sigh of relief, Sara walked through to his office and bade him good-night.

Returning to her desk, she stripped off her spectacles, carefully stored them in her glasses case and slipped the case into her purse. Shrugging into her thick lined coat, she wound a woolen scarf around her neck, tucking it in against the cold. Collecting her purse, she straightened and caught a glimpse of her face in the ornate gilded mirror opposite her desk. Her skin was as pale as the empty marble fireplace, but that wasn’t what held her attention.

The scarf was bright red. The significance of the color drained the blood from her face.

She had forgotten about the thread in the codebook.

* * * 

Sharp pain shooting up her shins jerked Sara awake. She stared blankly at the dimly lit room and the rectangular shape of a coffee table, for long seconds unable to grasp where she was.

A shudder swept through her when she identified the cozy familiarity of her sitting room. Dim light flowed from the hallway—her bedroom—which meant that when she’d fallen asleep, she must have left her bedside lamp on.

Gripping the nearby arm of the couch for support, she sat down, her hands shaking as she rubbed away the pain in her shins.

The sharp clarity of the dream, the jolt of raw terror, had already faded, sliding into automatic, practiced blankness.

Pushing to her feet, she flicked on the lights and poured herself a glass of ice water from the fridge. Sitting on a stool at the kitchen counter, she slowly sipped the water and waited for her pulse to even out.

There was an easy explanation for the dream. Something had happened when she had picked up the codebook. She had experienced a flash of déjà vu, which had, in turn, triggered the dream.

The purity of the logic didn’t help her with the fact that she had the dreams in the first place or that she had started sleepwalking again.

Or the certainty that her past was inextricably entwined with the now.