Page 57 of Tides of Resistance
‘What are you doing, Liz?’ he asked, reverting to her real name. ‘I realised you were here on some kind of undercover work, but this is way more dangerous than anything I expected.
‘I’m one of Churchill’s special agents and I need to send a message to London. I know about Judith and I hoped you would help.’
Fabian panicked at the mention of Judith. ‘I must keep her safe.’
Lizzie touched his arm. ‘Of course, and I have no intention of doing anything to stop you, in fact, I will willingly help you both in any way I can, but first I must send a message.’
Fabian hesitated and then seemed to make up his mind. ‘What do you need me to do?’
‘Nothing,’ Lizzie said. ‘Leave me the key and go back to Judith and act normally. The less she knows the better.’
Fabian left Lizzie alone with the radio. She locked the door behind him, and the earthy smell of homegrown potatoes overwhelmed her senses in the small space. Then she slipped the headphones on and knelt next to the radio as she tapped out her signal in a series of beeps to establish it was a secure channel.
The tides are high, but the weather is fine.
Then Lizzie waited for the return call signal from the SOE operator. Every second that ticked by seemed like a minute and beat in time with her anxious heart until eventually she heard the familiar pattern of beeps telling her it was safe to go ahead.
Lizzie tapped her message in Morse code and imagined the radio signal reaching London. Was Jack in the cipher room? He tried to intercept every message she sent, but she knew it was a tall order.
But then the return beeps started, and she immediately recognised Jack’s familiar fist—they all had a unique style of messaging. She let out a breath as her intense love for him consumed her. All was well with Raven. He was supposed to be in London, but just like they had sent her on a mission at short notice, it was entirely possible he would have been sent away again too.
The thought of him sitting in the cipher room allayed her fears and made her increasingly dangerous mission seem more possible to handle. When Raven was watching over her, even from London, she felt protected.
Lizzie transmitted she had found a secure place for the package and gave the exact location of the farmhouse in a combination of confusing conversational references she knew he would decipher but that would be meaningless to a German operator even if they intercepted the message and broke their main coded system. There were some mission benefits to being intimate with her commanding officer. She knew exactly how he thought and what he would understand.
A sense of relief settled over her now that Jack knew where she had stored the radio. After a dangerous mission in the early days when she had disobeyed his orders, he had made her promise to always let him know her location as soon as she could.
‘Seagrove, I don’t delude myself into believing you won’t disobey an order again. That would be naive,’ he said, his black eyes smouldering and a sardonic smile on his shapely lips. ‘But I do ask that you don’t mislead me, and that you let me know your plans as soon as possible so I can have your back.’
She gave him a brief overview of the intelligence she had gathered so far and said it seemed likely that Jersey played a role in the Atlantic Wall fortification plans. She told him she was evaluating her next steps and would be in touch again when she had something to report. She signed off with Seagrove misses home, which was the closest she could get to words of love without arousing suspicion if someone else read the message. It wouldn’t do for their relationship to be revealed in the middle of a secret meeting with higher-ranking officials.
Lizzie disassembled the radio set and packed it away in the small portable case. She shone her torch along the shelves looking for a suitable spot to stash it out of sight. After searching through a row of small boxes containing an assortment of dry food supplies, she found several larger boxes and tapped on the bottoms looking for anything irregular. After years of practice,Lizzie had an expert eye, and it wasn’t long before she detected a hollow panel in one of them. Her experience had shown her that many households in occupied France had hidey holes of one type or another.
A couple of well-placed taps later and the false panel clicked open, and her hands fumbled inside and touched a folded piece of thick paper, which she studied in the light of the torch.
It was a map marking German positions around St. Malo and the Brittany coast. That could mean only one thing. Fabian was involved in some kind of Resistance activity. She returned the map to its hiding place and repositioned the false panel. Then she set about locating another suitable place to hide her case and stashed it in a cupboard behind several boxes containing old household equipment.
Emerging from the underground storeroom and locking the door, she dusted off her hands and breathed in the fresh air as she crossed the garden towards Fabian and Judith, who stood, heads together over a piece of furniture. They were both absorbed in the task, but looked up as she approached.
‘All well?’ Fabian asked.
Lizzie nodded and slipped him the key.
Judith’s eyes met hers, and they smiled as if sealing an unspoken pact. Lizzie didn’t ask Fabian what he had told Judith, but meeting the Jewish girl, who had lost everything and was living under a Catholic identity to survive, only reinforced her resolve to do all she could to end the Nazi reign over Brittany.
Heinrich entered her thoughts, and tension gripped her stomach, forming a tight knot. During lunch at the villa, he had told her that groups of criminals were increasingly causing chaos on their military transport networks.
He sipped his wine and lit a cigarette before turning to Lizzie. ‘We are scaling up our operations to catch these traitors and make them wish they had never been born.’
His thick blond hair shone in the sun, and the expression in his grey-blue eyes assured her he meant every word.
Lizzie looked at Fabian and Judith and remembered the map she had found. Did they play an active role in the transport sabotage? Even if they were just a minor cog in the wheel, she should warn them.
‘May I speak frankly?’ she said, her voice dropping to a whisper as she looked from Fabian to Judith and back again.
Fabian glanced around. ‘Let’s go for a walk.’
The back gate opened into the woods behind the farmhouse, and Lizzie followed Judith, with Fabian closing the gate behind them.
