The Escape - Robert Muchamore Page 0,52
Marc asked.
‘I can’t come back here,’ Henderson said, ‘so I’m taking everything. There’s about a hundred thousand francs in French currency, but the Boche might bring in their own and make it worthless. On the other hand, gold never goes out of fashion.’
‘It’s lucky the Germans didn’t find this lot,’ Marc said. ‘I thought they did a pretty thorough search.’
Henderson smiled and pointed up at the ceiling. ‘I expect they found the handgun, false passports and ten thousand francs under the skirting upstairs and thought they’d got everything.’
‘Dummy stash,’ Marc said, nodding as his tongue explored the mound of dry blood that had built up around his missing tooth. ‘That’s pretty smart.’
‘I never should have had to come back here,’ Henderson said firmly. ‘Smart would have been moving all this stuff out before the Germans reached Paris. But with everything that’s been going on, with thousands of documents at the Embassy to destroy, plus a hundred Embassy staff to evacuate and two dozen agents and their families … I don’t think I’ve slept more than three hours at a stretch in the last fortnight.’
‘So what now?’ Marc asked.
‘We’re certainly not doing ourselves any favours by standing around here,’ Henderson said. ‘I’ll pack up everything we need. You go to the bathroom, wipe yourself down and put your shirt back on. There should be some pain killers in the bathroom cabinet if you want them. The Germans have announced an eight o’clock curfew, so we’d better get a move on if we want to make it to the Hotel Etalon without getting pulled up at a road block.’
Henderson reached into the wall cavity and pulled out a small tin. He unscrewed the lid and took out a metal phial barely bigger than his thumbnail.
‘What’s that?’ Marc asked, as Henderson dropped it into his bloody palm.
‘No spy leaves home without one,’ he explained. ‘Cyanide capsule. Put the pill in your mouth and crunch it. You’ll be dead within twenty seconds.’
‘Is it painful?’ Marc asked, as he stared dumbly at the metal pill case.
‘Less painful than being tortured by Oberst Hinze until your heart gives out.’ Henderson shrugged. ‘Look, you don’t have to come with me. I’ll hold nothing against you if you want me to drop you off somewhere instead.’
Marc shook his head determinedly. Henderson struck him as a decent man and for some reason the prospect of the Hotel Etalon and facing the Gestapo scared him far less than the prospect of being dropped on a street corner and left to wander Paris alone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Charles Henderson didn’t feel great about having Marc alongside him. Before joining the Espionage Research Unit he’d been a naval intelligence officer and their training course gave strict instructions never to use kids. The intelligence manual said that children were physically weak, untrustworthy, unable to handle stress and liable to panic or scream.
But Marc was the only help on offer and Henderson wasn’t ungrateful for it. He’d slept less than ten hours in the past four days. He hadn’t washed or eaten a proper meal and was only keeping himself going with strong black coffee and Benzedrine pills. The worst part was knowing that it wasn’t over. If Henderson made it out of Hotel Etalon alive, he’d still have to break through the German and French lines and somehow get to Tours ahead of Potente, who was already on the road.
Henderson drove a small Fiat and the clock on the dashboard told him it was just a few minutes until the eight o’clock curfew, though at this time in June there was still plenty of daylight. The roads were dead, except for the odd truck packed with German troops. Most cars had left the city crammed with refugees, and the few remaining drivers didn’t want to risk being made into an example by the newly arrived Germans. Everyone had seen newspaper pictures of the corpses hanging from lampposts in Warsaw.
Marc sat in the passenger seat. The mix of adrenaline and whisky made him feel better, and regular beatings at the orphanage had left him with an unusually high pain threshold. He was worried about Henderson though. Sweat poured down the man’s face, his driving was crazy and a couple of times his expression glazed over so badly that Marc thought the car was going to end up ploughing into a wall.
They cruised past Hotel Etalon at just six minutes to eight. The private road leading up to its grand lobby was lined with open-topped Kübelwagens and three