alone, she rechecked her papers: identification and ration cards, travel and work permits. Each was false—and each had to be perfect.
It was not the first time Marie had prepared to go. Three nights earlier, as she waited, she had watched the fog roll in, low and menacing. She knew there would be no flying that night. Still she’d gone through the motions, picking up her bag and walking dutifully outside to the car. She had made it to the side of the plane before the mission was called off.
Now Marie waited in her room once more, hoping that the rain she felt coming in the night air was not enough to stop the flight. It was nearly a month since that day at Arisaig House when Eleanor had given her the option of giving up and going home. Often she wondered if she had made the right choice. Each night before she went to bed, she told herself she might ask the next day if the offer to leave still stood. But there was something about the crispness of those mornings in the Scottish Highlands, the mist rising above the hills as the girls marched stiff-backed around the loch, that had gotten into her soul. This was where she was meant to be, and there was no turning away.
It was more than just the beauty of the Scottish countryside, which she would inevitably leave behind, that held her. And it wasn’t just about the money anymore either. After Josie had deployed, something within Marie had changed. She became engrossed in the training. She strained to learn her radio codes quicker and faster. “You might have to transmit from inside a toilet so quickly no one suspects anything more than a trip to the loo,” the instructor had once explained. She’d completed a three-day mission outside without food, forced to trap or scavenge from the brush whatever she needed to eat. She could feel the other girls watching and following her lead. It was as if she had risen up to take Josie’s place. She became so focused on her role and succeeding at the job that she forgot to be afraid.
Then a week earlier, she’d been called to the office at Arisaig House before the morning run and told to pack her things. Her departure was so abrupt she had not even had time to say goodbye to any of the others. There was no explanation, just a black sedan with a driver who hadn’t spoken. As the rugged coast faded behind her, she wondered if she were being sent home. But instead, they had brought her down to the military airfield in rural West Sussex to take care of the last-minute items. There was endless paperwork to be completed, which seemed odd for a job and a mission that wasn’t meant to exist at all.
The morning after she arrived at the air base there was a knock on her door. “Eleanor.” Marie had not seen her since her visit to Arisaig House. Eleanor, she had come to realize, was much more than just the recruitment officer she professed to be at their first meeting. In fact, she ran everything at SOE having to do with the women.
Eleanor had summoned her to follow and led Marie to a private office in a building not far from the barracks at the airfield where Marie had been staying. She produced a bottle of wine. It seemed strange that they would serve alcohol in the middle of the day.
But Eleanor didn’t mean for them to drink the wine this time; instead, she unwrapped the newspaper that covered the bottle and pored over the first page. “Ah, the ration cards are changing in Lyon!” It was the news, not the drink inside it, which interested Eleanor.
Eleanor continued, “You must stay current on affairs. Outdated intelligence is worse than no intelligence at all and will give you away twice as quickly.
“And you must never neglect the importance of open-source intelligence,” Eleanor continued. Marie cocked her head. “Information you can learn that is publicly available, from the newspapers, the locals. The flotsam method of intelligence gathering, it’s called. Little pieces of information gathered from the most mundane sources. Things that you can observe with your own eyes, like movements of trains and soldiers. Like when you see a bunch of Jerrys cashing in their francs, you know they are about to deploy.”
Eleanor looked up from the newspaper. “You are Renee Demare, a shopgirl from Épernay, a