The roar of an engine up the road and the guards scrambled to their guns, but too slow. The quiet of the streets had been of expectation, not peace. The van, stolen from the gendarme station, smashed into the courtyard, Juan leaped from the cab and took out the sentry who had escorted her in, while Rodrigo stood on the running plate and took out the left machine-gun post with a blast from his Bren. Juan was already running up the shallow steps to the right firing from his hip. Nancy watched, smiling, as René stood and fired the bazooka straight into the back door.
The building shook and the remaining glasses rattled on the sideboard behind Nancy. The girl squealed. Half a dozen more men charged in behind the van through the broken barrier, and four of them took positions in the high guard posts. The insistent regular burst of fire from the captured machine guns met the half-dressed guards stumbling out of the shattered back door.
Nancy stepped back over the corpses of the officers, checked the pistol and her ammunition, then stepped out into the hall. It was just like training, those walks in Inverness where the instructors pulled their levers and targets dropped down in front of you, out of the bushes, from behind doorways. Nancy shot from her hip, double taps, one, two, clearing out two sentries as they turned the corner into the paneled corridor. A sleepy-looking captain stumbled out of one of the rooms, still hooking his thin steel rimmed glasses behind his ears and blinking in confusion. He froze when he saw her, then raised his hands, started to speak. Nancy fired twice into the center of his chest and the force of the bullets knocked him back into the room. She crossed the corridor and glanced down at him. His lips were still moving, but she couldn’t hear his secrets any more than she had heard the secrets of that French boy she had watched dying on the street in Marseille. His eyes blinked behind his glasses. She shot him through his forehead and walked away. Another Nazi eaten by the void. She holstered her side arm and took out her knife.
The Germans were all focused on the assault at the rear, so half of the sentries she encountered had their backs to her. It made killing them almost too easy. The knife was becoming slippery in her hand, so she wiped her palm and its hilt on her dress, humming the Partisan song. She walked down the grand staircase as if she was meeting her husband for drinks in the hotel bar. Little men in gray-green, scurrying about. She heard a yell and a burst of gunfire from the direction of the kitchens. Some of the men were in the headquarters with her then. She had to move briskly. Ground floor. Offices.
A sergeant, urging his men through to the rear of the building, turned and found her facing him. He reacted quickly, knowing he had no time to reach for his gun or knife, and rammed his fist at her.
She caught the blow on her left forearm, felt the flesh and bone of her body shudder, then drove her knife into his belly, slicing upward. This knife was almost as good as her own Fairbairn-Sykes number. London had sent her out a replacement for the one she’d lost almost immediately. Thanks, Uncle Bucky.
The manager’s office. Of course that would be his, with its triple-locked safe and tall windows over the courtyard garden, which lay in the center of the hotel buildings. The door opened as she approached, and another young officer, this one with almost white-blond hair, emerged, a heavy-looking trunk of papers in his arms. He was speaking over his shoulder to someone in the room. She shot him in the face. She wasn’t sure if it was because she thought the box in his arms might deflect a bullet or just because she wanted to.
She stepped over his body and into the room. There he was, Major Böhm, looking exactly as he had in Marseille when they had last met, right down to the smile of polite surprise. He was standing by the neatly arranged bookcases as if choosing one for his night-time reading.
“Mrs. Fiocca! You have come to make another inquiry about your husband, I take it? I am afraid you are not here to make the deal we spoke of in Courçais, given the manner of your arrival.” He shook his head slightly. “I confess I am surprised. I felt sure you would trade your life for Henri’s after all you have put him through.”
He was speaking in English and she replied in the same language, the words feeling strange and awkward in her mouth.
“Anne told me you had murdered him.”
Böhm looked deeply saddened. “I understand. No, no, Madame Fiocca. Why would I kill someone so useful?”
Henri. She could see him as if he were in front of her, his dinner jacket slung over his shoulder. She holstered her revolver.
“He’s told me so much about you.”
Nancy’s head spun. Her rich, sustaining rage was now caught up and confused with love, with hope. “Is he here?”
“No. But he’s in a safe place though. Very safe.”
Enough. She would cut the truth out of Böhm’s black heart. She launched herself at him, her knife raised to slash across his face. Her line of attack was obvious. He took a step back so his back was against the desk and caught her wrist as she came into the strike and held it in his right hand. His left arm locked around her waist, stopping her pulling free. The blade shook, their strengths balanced between them.
“He wouldn’t know you now, of course,” Böhm said through gritted teeth. “You’re not Nancy Wake any more, are you?” She willed the blade forward, it shivered closer to his skin. “Or maybe you’ve discovered your true nature at last. You’re just what your mother said you were. A punishment to those who love you. Ugly, dirty, sin and waste of skin.”
The image of Böhm and Henri sitting together in a room, like confiding friends. Discussing what Nancy’s mother had said to her, the poison she had dripped into Nancy’s bloodstream every day until Nancy had run. And kept running.
“Mon colonel!” It was René looking for her, shouting from the lobby. “SS reinforcements arriving. Let’s go!”
There was another explosion from the lobby of the headquarters and Böhm thrust her away from him. She stumbled, went down on her knees and when she looked up again he had his revolver in his hand, aiming at her head.
“Better he does not see you as you really are.”
She bared her teeth at him. He grunted, as if amused, and kept the gun steadily pointing at her head.
She heard René call for her again.
“Do you know what this symbol means?” he asked.
She let her gaze flick down. The carpet on which she was kneeling, spattered with the blood of the man she had killed in the doorway, was patterned with swastikas, but not in black and red—they were spinning in rows of green and gold.
“It’s Tibetan in origin,” Böhm continued. “It represents the sun. The Supreme Masculine. The Führer reminds us of that so we all strive to please him. He is our father. And how old were you when your father left? What would he think of his little girl now?” Again, that polite smile. “You’ve killed your men, you know. You let a spy give away your position then pull out twenty of your best fighting men for a suicide raid here? I ordered an attack on your camp at Chaudes-Aigues as soon as reports of Anne’s signal came in.”
The door burst open. René, revolver at the ready. Böhm turned toward him, but before René could fire, Nancy sprang across the carpet, her knife in her hand, and slashed at Böhm’s face.
“Fuck!” René yelled, just managing to jerk the muzzle of his revolver upward so the bullet, already speeding from the chamber, shattered the window rather than burying itself in Nancy’s back.
Nancy caught him across his cheekbone, and the force of her attack made him stagger sideways, striking his wrist against the edge of the desk so his gun spun from his grip. He screamed, hand to the wound. The blood leaked immediately through his fingers and onto his collar. She came at him again, but René caught her around the waist lifting her away bodily, carrying her out of the room as she howled with rage.
“Now, Nancy!” He screamed at her, setting her down in the hall and shoving her in the small of the back toward the lobby. “Playtime’s over!”
Smoke, bodies. René threw grenades ahead of them to clear their path, pulling her sideways to shield her from the explosion. The mirrors shattered, the wood paneling splintering, the long after-hiss and rumble of masonry and plaster and a dense gray cloud of smoke and dust surrounding them. René dragged her forward again and she stumbled over a gut-shot soldier still twitching at her feet. The lobby. René rolled another grenade toward the double doors of the front entrance, and as it blew her hearing was knocked out, replaced by a high-pitched, insistent whine.
René pulled her through the burning doors into the street, then picked her up again, throwing her into the back of a flat-bed truck, its cold metal floor already slick with blood. Franc was slumped beside her, back against the cab, trying to hold his insides in with this hands. She snatched his Bren off his lap and fired short bursts at the few Germans trying to pursue. They fell or scattered, looking for cover. Only when they reached the outskirts of Montluçon did she look at Franc again. He was still, staring sightless back at the hell they had left behind them.