Madeleine's War by Peter Watson Read Free Book Online Page B

makes Nazi Party propaganda, and that includes anti-Semitic propaganda.”
    â€œAnd you approve of
that
?”
    â€œNo, of course I don’t. That’s not what I mean. She’s an adventuress, an opportunist—an opportunist with talent—oh yes. Nazi Germany is hardly a place where women are allowed to shine most of the time, but she
does
, she breaks all the rules.”
    â€œHow come you know so much about her? You sound as if you want to be like her.” I could quite believe that Madeleine had an ambition to match that of her German counterpart.
    She inched away from the fire.
    â€œI admire her from a distance. And it’s not hard to find out things, if you know where to look. When I was in London with FANY, I would spend some of my spare time in Fleet Street. All the national newspapers there have libraries or archives, archives of their back copies, and they keep cuttings by category. They all have Leni Riefenstahl files. A little bit of rouge and lipstick gets a girl into places a man could never go.” She smiled.
    â€œSounds like you’re an adventuress in your own way.”
    Briefly she placed her hand on my arm. “I can’t wait till you teach us how to kill with our bare hands. Then I can really get on your wrong side.”
    â€œYou’d pick on someone who has only one lung?”
    â€œYou promised to tell me what happened.”
    I looked down. “As you say, the fire’s dying. It’s late and this room will be sub-zero any minute now. Why don’t I tell you another time?”
    She looked at me and drained her whisky. “And in another place, perhaps. The beaches here go on for ever.”

· 4 ·
    THE MAIN LECTURE ROOM AT ARDLOSSAN —what in pleasanter and plusher days must have been the drawing room—boasted a high ceiling, sculpted into plasterwork lozenges, a stone fireplace with an enormous mantel at head height, a dado where the walls changed colour, from cream to white going up, and a row of French windows giving on to the lawns and the pines, and beyond them the rocks and the sea. When the weather was in the wrong place, as it was the following morning—as Duncan had predicted—the westerly rains hurled themselves against the panes of glass with a ferocious rasping sound. Every so often, I had to raise my voice.
    In front of me the four recruits sat on plywood chairs. Ivan Wilde and Katrine Howard were both smoking. They had all been working since seven, including Madeleine. All recruits did an hour’s training in wireless transmission every day between seven and eight, before breakfast. No one was allowed to be dropped into France until they could transmit forty words a minute by Morse code. So far, Madeleine had reached only thirty.
    â€œOne point of protocol, before we get going this morning. Rank is important in armies, generally speaking, but SC2 is a small outfit and an unconventional one. We live by our wits, our imagination, our
cunning
. That means we often break out of the strictly military way of doing things. As an example, we tend to be more informal than the more regular army units and that is reflected in the way we use first names. By now, you all know what the pecking order is here at Ardlossan. That doesn’t mean there will be any relaxation of discipline, or professionalism, but it will make the business of day-to-day instruction less starchy. That’s what we have found, anyway.”
    I held up a small booklet. “Now, this is what we call ‘a one-time pad.’ I’ll come to what that means in just a minute but first I want to draw your attention to the fact that it is made not of paper but of silk.”
    I passed it around so they could run their fingers over the material.
    â€œIt may seem ridiculously extravagant of the War Office to sanction silk pads, but there is method in their madness. Can anyone work out what?”
    I looked from one to the