Читать книгу Blind Instinct - Фиона Бранд - Страница 10

Seven

After trying to watch a sitcom for the better part of an hour, Sara checked the locks on the apartment and went to bed.

An hour of tossing and turning later, she turned on the bedside light and reached for a novel. Her head felt heavy, her eyes grainy. She had sleeping pills, but she was reluctant to take one. The battle to relax into sleep was in her mind and therefore controllable. Annoyed as she was at still being wide-awake when she needed to be asleep, she hated the thought of being dependent on any drug.

She stared at the lines of print, forcing herself to concentrate on the story line. Gradually, the novel worked its magic and she became hooked on the story and began to relax.

Outside the wind had picked up. Rain rattled against the windowpanes, the monotony of the sound, soothing her even more. The words began to merge, blur. Her eyes drooped, shutting out the bright, intrusive gleam of the bedside lamp.

The book slipped from her fingers as she dropped into sleep.

France, 1943

Cold seeped through the stone walls of the Château Vassigny as Sara Weiss stepped into the cavernous reaches of the library.

She bypassed Oberst Reichmann’s desk and retrieved the set of keys hidden behind a leather-bound tome on the bookshelf.

Moving quickly, she unlocked the door to what had once been an anteroom but which, since the Germans had moved in, had been converted into a makeshift strong room. Stepping inside, she closed the door. She selected a second key and opened the small, squat safe positioned against one wall.

Ignoring the neat piles of francs and the boxes of jewelry that Reichmann and his Waffen SS had “confiscated” during their occupation of Vassigny, she removed a correspondence file, the SS codebook and a second book, this one bound in brown leather, which she hadn’t ever seen before.

The codebook itself was nondescript. Bound with board, it was about the size of a school exercise book or a journal. Some codebooks were enormous volumes, but this one fell into the medium range: comprehensive but pared down for portability and ease of use by soldiers in the field. The SS, like the other branches of the German military, also used encryption machines. But as highly efficient and notoriously hard to break as the codes transmitted by their Enigma machines were, the “clear”—that is, the uncoded message—was often encoded before it was encrypted for added security, making the messages even more difficult to decipher.

Ears straining against Reichmann’s return, she opened the codebook and turned pages. A bright red thread floated onto the carpet. Reichmann’s additional security. The thread was always positioned between pages fifteen and sixteen.

She found the reference she wanted and committed it to memory.

One entry, no more.

She had been steadily stealing the code, one word at a time, for the past few months, ever since Reichmann, the head of the local Waffen SS had employed her as his personal secretary. Sometimes she didn’t have access to the safe for weeks. At other times, she managed to get several words or phrases in a day. To date, she had stolen more than seventy percent of the code.

Placing the codebook on top of the correspondence file, she pushed the spectacles she wore for close work higher on the bridge of her nose and opened the second unidentified book. For long seconds what she was reading didn’t make sense. Then her stomach clenched in automatic recoil and bile rose in the back of her throat. The book was a ledger, a list of the Jews Reichmann and his SS had sent to the death camps.

Her mind slid back three years, to darkness and horror and grief. Her parents, Dietrich and Janine Weiss, had been living in Paris under assumed names, running an underground paper for the French Resistance. It was safe, they had assured her. At the first hint of trouble they would leave and join her in England. Just days later they had been arrested. Shortly after, they had been transported to Ravensbruck and executed.

She flipped through pages, frowning. The documentation was highly unusual. It provided proof of genocide, something the Germans were determined to conceal. The book shouldn’t exist, and it shouldn’t be here.

Vassigny was a small, quiet village, a producer of vegetables, milk, cheeses and wine, and a provider of accommodation for the SS. Reichmann billeted his men and ran his operation from the Château, but the prison at Clairvaux held larger concentrations of German forces, better security and an administration center. Any sensitive documentation should have been kept there.