Daniel Silva: The Unlikely Spy

© 1995

In April 1944, six weeks before the Allied invasion of France, the Nazi propagandist William Joyce-better known as Lord Haw-Haw-made a chilling radio broadcast directed at Britain.

According to Joyce, Germany knew the Allies were at work on large concrete structures in the south of England. Germany also knew those structures were to be towed across the English Channel during the coming invasion and sunk off the coast of France. Joyce declared, "Well, we are going to help you boys. When you come to get them under way, we're going to sink them for you."

Alarm klaxons sounded inside British Intelligence and the Allied high command. The concrete structures referred to by Joyce were actually components of a giant artificial harbor complex bound for Normandy code-named Operation Mulberry. If Hitler's spies truly understood the purpose of Mulberry, they might very well know the most important secret of the war-the time and place of the Allied invasion of France.

Several anxious days later those fears were put to rest, when U.S. intelligence intercepted a coded message from Japan's ambassador to Berlin, Lieutenant General Hiroshi Baron Oshima, to his superiors in Tokyo. Oshima received regular briefings from his German allies on preparations for the looming invasion. According to the intercepted message, German intelligence believed the concrete structures were part of a massive antiaircraft complex-not an artificial harbor.

But how did German intelligence make such a crucial miscalculation? Did it simply misread its own intelligence? Or had it been deceived?

Beatrice Pymm died because she missed the last bus to Ipswich.

Twenty minutes before her death she stood at the dreary bus stop and read the timetable in the dim light of the village's single streetlamp. In a few months the lamp would be extinguished to conform with the blackout regulations. Beatrice Pymm would never know of the blackout.

For now, the lamp burned just brightly enough for Beatrice to read the faded timetable. To see it better she stood on tiptoe and ran down the numbers with the end of a paint-smudged forefinger. Her late mother always complained bitterly about the paint. She thought it unladylike for one's hand to be forever soiled. She had wanted Beatrice to take up a neater hobby-music, volunteer work, even writing, though Beatrice's mother didn't hold with writers.

"Damn," Beatrice muttered, forefinger still glued to the timetable. Normally she was punctual to a fault. In a life without financial responsibility, without friends, without family, she had erected a rigorous personal schedule. Today, she had strayed from it-painted too long, started back too late.

She removed her hand from the timetable and brought it to her cheek, squeezing her face into a look of worry. Your father's face, her mother had always said with despair-a broad flat forehead, a large noble nose, a receding chin. At just thirty, hair prematurely shot with gray.

She worried about what to do. Her home in Ipswich was at least five miles away, too far to walk. In the early evening there might still be light traffic on the road. Perhaps someone would give her a lift.

She let out a long frustrated sigh. Her breath froze, hovered before her face, then drifted away on a cold wind from the marsh. The clouds shattered and a bright moon shone through. Beatrice looked up and saw a halo of ice floating around it. She shivered, feeling the cold for the first time.

She picked up her things: a leather rucksack, a canvas, a battered easel. She had spent the day painting along the estuary of the River Orwell. Painting was her only love and the landscape of East Anglia her only subject matter. It did lead to a certain repetitiveness in her work. Her mother liked to see people in art-street scenes, crowded cafes. Once she even suggested Beatrice spend some time in France to pursue her painting. Beatrice refused. She loved the marsh-lands and the dikes, the estuaries and the broads, the fen land north of Cambridge, the rolling pastures of Suffolk.

She reluctantly set out toward home, pounding along the side of the road at a good pace despite the weight of her things. She wore a mannish cotton shirt, smudged like her fingers, a heavy sweater that made her feel like a toy bear, a reefer coat too long in the sleeves, trousers tucked inside Wellington boots. She moved beyond the sphere of yellow lamplight; the darkness swallowed her. She felt no apprehension about walking through the dark in the countryside. Her mother, fearful of her long trips alone, warned incessantly of rapists. Beatrice always dismissed the threat as unlikely.

She shivered with the cold. She thought of home, a large cottage on the edge of Ipswich left to her by her mother. Behind the cottage, at the end of the garden walk, she had built a light-splashed studio, where she spent most of her time. It was not uncommon for her to go days without speaking to another human being.

All this, and more, her killer knew.

After five minutes of walking she heard the rattle of an engine behind her. A commercial vehicle, she thought. An old one, judging by the ragged engine note. Beatrice watched the glow of the headlamps spread like sunrise across the grass on either side of the roadway. She heard the engine lose power and begin to coast. She felt a gust of wind as the vehicle swept by. She choked on the stink of the exhaust.

Then she watched as it pulled to the side of the road and stopped.

The hand, visible in the bright moonlight, struck Beatrice as odd. It poked from the driver's-side window seconds after the van had stopped and beckoned her forward. A thick leather glove, Beatrice noted, the kind used by workmen who carry heavy things. A workman's overall-dark blue, maybe.

The hand beckoned once more. There it was again-something about the way it moved wasn't quite right. She was an artist, and artists know about motion and flow. And there was something else. When the hand moved it exposed the skin between the end of the sleeve and the base of the glove. Even in the poor light Beatrice could see the skin was pale and hairless-not like the wrist of any workman she had ever seen-and uncommonly slender.

Still, she felt no alarm. She quickened her pace and reached the passenger door in a few steps. She pulled open the door and set her things on the floor in front of the seat. Then she looked up into the van for the first time and noticed the driver was gone.

Beatrice Pymm, in the final conscious seconds of her life, wondered why anyone would use a van to carry a motorcycle. It was there, resting on its side in the back, two jerry cans of petrol next to it.

Still standing next to the van, she closed the door and called out. There was no answer.