Richards, surprisingly, did too. “Fair point. And your work,madame, cannot be faulted. MI6 is quite keen to keep you doing what you’ve been doing. They said to impress upon you that Alliance is critical to Allied efforts, and I’m to lend you any aid within my power to get operations back up and running. So. Tell me about this setback.”
She did, sparing no detail about all that happened in Marseille, so far as she had the facts. He nodded along and then, when she’d finished, leaned forward.
“I’m afraid it’s worse even than that,” he said. “A dozen agents in Pau and the surrounding region were arrested as well, along with several from Paris.”
“What?” She nearly tumbled from her chair. Marcel? He’d been bound for Paris. And their brothers were both in Pau. “Who?”
He rattled off a depressingly long list of names. But none of them were Marcel, Raoul, or Antoine. Though when he ended with, “And some opera singer. Gabriel something,” her heart lurched.
“Proust?”
“Yes, that’s it.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. Pau had been nearly decimated, only their brothers and a few new members escaping. Paris wasn’t quite so bad. Most of the agents Marcel had recruited hadn’t been named. Only the onesshehad stationed there. And Gabriel Proust, somehow. “How did this happen? And when?”
“Same night as the raid in Marseille. The police there must have sent word. The traitor—Laurent?”
“EmileLaurent,” she clarified. “He has relatives who are still with us and who havenotbetrayed us.”
Richards waved that away. “Emile Laurent gave these names as well.”
She quickly sifted through her memories—each time Emile had been with her, which names he’d have heard. Gabriel Proust was the only contact Marcel had ever mentioned by name at the villa—that must be why he’d been targeted. She never had cause to mention his agents otherwise... unlike her own recruits, and of course the ones he himself had known or brought in.
“One man,” Henri said softly, clearly for her benefit. “One man’s treachery. That’s all this is. It does not spell the end.”
“One man’s treachery has resulted in more than half of Alliance being either arrested or forced underground.” Too agitated to sit, she stood to pace the room. They used code names with MI6 and anything they sent over the radio, but clearly that wasn’t enough.
One man shouldn’t be able to undo the entire operation like this. She needed to reorganize with a different model. Something that involved protecting each group, perhaps even each individual, from the rest whenever possible.
If Emile Laurent could be pressured into turning on them, then she didn’t dare assume anyone was above it.
“We’ll come back from this.” She paused by the window, turned, met Richards’s gaze without flinching. “If MI6 will still back us, we won’t just survive. We’ll grow. This—this is the pruning of a rosebush in the winter. When we send out new shoots, the Nazis will be blinded by the number of blooms.”
“A gardening metaphor—you do understand us Brits, don’t you?” Richards grinned and took to his feet as well. “You have the full backing of MI6. Cohen instructed me to offer you whatever you need to rebuild. Radios, supplies, money. Notquitethe proverbial ‘up to half our kingdom,’ but whatever we can spare, we’ll send. I cannot stress too much how crucial Alliance is to the Allies. We’re especially keen on anything you can give us about North Africa—have you had any success in making contact with Navarre’s people there?”
“A few, yes. I’m expecting one of his friends to make his way to us in the new year.” She’d been putting Léon off, honestly, too angry with the man who’d dragged Navarre into a conspiracy to want to reply to his many messages to her, even knowing how much the British would want the connection. But it was time to put that aside. To focus on what they needed.
Her mind spun, considering and rejecting plans. None of them could be enacted from here, though. She needed to get back to France. “I’ll get you a list to pass along to Cohen before Christmas. And will alert MI6 as soon as I have a new headquarters set up.”
“Where will you go?” Henri asked, brow furrowed. “One of the sectors that hasn’t been breached, I assume. Brittany, Nice, Grenoble?”
A slow smile bloomed on Zelie’s lips. “Thatiswhat one would think, isn’t it? Let’s do what they’dneverexpect. Let’s go right back to Marseille.”
Seventeen
18 DECEMBER 1941
MARSEILLE, FRANCE
Marcel glanced through the glass of the broadcast booth, onto the stage. The seventy chairs usually arranged in a semicircle were stacked in the hallway, so that the floor could be polished before the orchestra returned in January.
It wasn’t odd for him to see an empty stage. But he’d never seen one populated by a little girl having a pretend tea party with her doll, a boy working on a drawing of an airplane with the help of a slide rule, and his own mother, knitting needles in hand and a sock underway.
There had been absolutely no reason for them to come along tonight for the broadcast. But Elise had begged, Blaise had piped in with his desire to come too, and Mère had joined them to keep the children quiet and supervised while Marcel managed both live and pre-recorded segments for tonight’s Radio Paris slot.
He hadn’t argued. When they were around, he could think of something other than worry for their mother, his brother, Gabriel.
Gabriel.Marcel lined up the records he would need, but thoughhis hands were steady, his heart was not. His best friend had been arrested, and it was Marcel’s fault. He hadn’t been the one to give thegendarmeshis name, no—but he’d been the one to bring him into Alliance. He’d been the one to mention it over the summer in his cousin’s hearing.
