“Monsieur Brasch. Monsieur!”

Brasch turned away from his vantage point. The room behind him was dark. The few hours a day of unreliable electricity the city had recently enjoyed were over. The lights had been out for two days now.

Madam Colbert stood in the doorway, her modesty protected only by a moth-eaten bathrobe.

“Do you think it will be long before your friends come?” she asked. “They will come won’t they? It is just that…well…”

She trailed off, unable to speak the truth of it. She owed him. He had saved her daughter from rape at the hands of two drunken Wehrmacht men a month earlier. She didn’t need to know that he had done so on purpose, to establish a connection with a suitable local and a safe house for the flight he’d always known was coming. As far as Colbert was concerned, he was simply a man on the run from the Boche who had done her a great service.

But he was still a German, and no matter that he needed to hide out while waiting to “defect”-a new word, much in use these days-he remained a German, and so his presence here might bring any number of evil consequences down upon her house.

“It shouldn’t be long,” he promised her, holding up his flexipad. “I have had word. They are very close. In the next arrondissement, in fact. Coming up the Boulevarde Haussman.”

Madam Colbert worked the greasy belt of her old bathrobe into a huge Gordian knot. “It is just that I have word, too, monsieur. My lookouts, they tell me there are Germans coming. They are two streets away now. Gestapo. They must be looking for you. They are checking all the bordellos in Place Pigalle.”

Damn.

Brasch checked the two collaborators again at the end of the alleyway. The man remained stock still, but the woman continued dancing around in her nervous fashion. He could have sworn she’d glanced up at his window, then turned her head quickly at the last moment.

He did not want to break cover. He had run out of bolt-holes, and he was so close to being safe.

But what good would it serve staying here, if the Gestapo arrived ahead of his extraction team? He could hold them off for a few minutes at best. How long did he have?

Not very long at all, to judge by the sick terror contorting the features of Madam Colbert. He had no faith in her ability to bluff it out. The Gestapo would see through her without even trying.

“You are sure they are Gestapo? Coming this way?” he asked.

“My little pigeons do not lie. They have been dodging the gendarmerie for years. They say it is certain, monsieur. Please. You must go.”

Brasch checked the widow again. The woman in the helmet was staring straight at him now, smiling wolfishly.

That sealed it.

He brought his flexipad awake and opened a file stored on the desktop. An encrypted signal pulsed out of the handset, up through the roof, and away into the summer sky. At ten thousand meters it painted the smart-skin arrays of a Big Eye drone on station above the French capital. The drone’s Restricted Intelligence recognized the distress beacon from a high-value asset, consulted its daily protocol, and discovered an extraction team five kilometers from the asset, headed in its direction. It alerted both the team and the Combat Intelligence back on its home vessel, HMS Trident.

“What is that?” Colbert asked, back in the cramped, musty bedroom.

“A cry for help,” Brasch said as he fetched his Luger and checked the load.

“But what shall we do? They will kill us, torture us,” Colbert protested.

Brasch took a fat envelope from within his jacket and tossed it across to her. “American dollars,” he said. “Close enough to four thousand. I would get your girls out of here, and be quick about it.” He paused. “I cannot go any farther. I have to wait here. Go. Quickly.”

Confusion, fear, and greed all played across the woman’s face. Greed and self-preservation won out. She nodded.

“Thank you, monsieur, and thank you for saving my little Michelle. You are a good German.”

Brasch shook his head. “Please don’t call me that. Now go, quickly, before it is too late.”

Colbert fled, calling out to her girls as she thundered down the hallway. Brasch pushed aside the window curtain again, using the muzzle of his sidearm. The woman was clearly anxious that he not get away. He thought about shooting her but decided against it. It would only speed things up, and he needed all the time-and ammunition-he could get. Downstairs he could hear the squeals and cries of the whores as they exited. He probably had less than five minutes.

It was probably too late.

The radar confirmed reports of a storm system building in the mid-Atlantic. History told them that one of the great storms of the decade was due to touch down on this side of the ocean in a few days, but then history had been an increasingly erratic guide of late, and Captain Karen Halabi didn’t fancy hanging around in the comparatively shallow Bay of Biscay with a force-nine gale bearing down on her. It’d be hellish enough in the CI-controlled trimaran, but she feared for the lives of the men-they were all men-on the ships of her escorting force. Some of them would founder for sure.

“Keep me informed, Ms. Novak, and make sure your bulletins go out to group and back to London on Fleetnet. Everyone will want to know what’s happening.”

“Everybody talks about the weather…,” mugged her chief forecaster.

“…but nobody ever does anything about it,” Halabi finished. “Even so, Lieutenant, stay alert. Some of our escorts would roll in a duck pond.”

Halabi turned to leave the small office devoted to the ship’s Meteorology Division, taking one last look at the radar. On the screen a deep red low-pressure cell was unquestionably forming. She could almost feel the ship beginning to move on the swell in response.

The commander of the Trident continued her tour of the decks, stopping in at the air division, the sick bay, and the ops room one after the other. In the latter she found herself among more ’temps than she’d be likely to find anywhere outside the Combat Information Center, where they tended to be observers anyway. In operations, the ’temps ran the show.

An ensign called the room to attention as she entered. The men-again, they were all men-snapped to with commendable promptness, and she bade them to carry on with their work. It was a different matter on shore, but after two years she’d at least established her right to command on this vessel, if no other.

“How goes it, Mr. McTeale?” she asked. Halabi made sure at least one of her senior officers was always on hand in ops, and today she found her XO, the dour Scot, in attendance.

“She goes well, Cap’n,” he answered. “Or as well as could be expected.”

The others seemed grateful that she’d released them back to their screens and printouts. They were never going to be very comfortable in her presence. She had been to high tea at both Downing Street and the palace, but she’d never once been invited to anything other than briefings and conferences at the Admiralty or any of the clubs favored by the contemporary Royal Navy’s ruling elite.

Strangely enough, she frequently got on best with the army’s old India hands, especially those who’d had anything to do with the subcontinent’s innumerable “princely states,” where local potentates ruled on behalf of the British Crown. The Raj veterans seemed to regard her as something akin to a minor warrior princess of some tiny Muslim principality on the Northwest Frontier. At least this meant that they treated her with some civility.

“What do we have on the Soviet advance?” she asked McTeale. He threw the question to Colonel Charles Hart, one of her favorite Indiamen.