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surely
would not turn him away.
    Anyway, Flick had no alternative.
    Antoinette had a ground-floor
apartment in a building with a courtyard. Flick came to the open gateway, a few
yards along the street from the square, and staggered under the archway. She
pushed open a door and lowered Michel to the tiles.
    She hammered on Antoinette's door,
panting with effort. She heard a frightened voice say, "What is it?"
Antoinette had been scared by the gunfire and did not want to open the door.
    Breathlessly, Flick said,
"Quickly, quickly!" She tried to keep her voice low. Some of the
neighbors might be Nazi sympathizers.
    The door did not open, but
Antoinette's voice came nearer. "Who's there?"
    Flick instinctively avoided speaking
a name aloud. She replied, "Your nephew is wounded."
    The door opened. Antoinette was a
straight-backed woman of fifty wearing a cotton dress that had once been chic
and was now faded but crisply pressed. She was pale with fear.
"Michel!" she said. She knelt beside him. "Is it serious?"
    "It hurts, but I'm not
dying," Michel said through clenched teeth.
    "You poor thing." She
brushed his hair off his sweaty forehead with a gesture like a caress.
    Flick said impatiently, "Let's
get him inside."
    She took Michel's arms and
Antoinette lifted him by the knees. He grunted with pain. Together they carried
him into the living room and put him down on a faded velvet sofa.
    "Take care of him while I fetch
the car," Flick said. She ran back into the street.
    The gunfire was dying down. She did
not have long. She raced along the street and turned two corners.
    Outside a closed bakery, two
vehicles were parked with their engines running: one a rusty Renault, the other
a van with a faded sign on the side that had once read Blanchisserie
Bisset —Bisset's Laundry. The van was borrowed from the father of Bertrand, who
was able to get fuel because he washed sheets for hotels used by the Germans.
The Renault had been stolen this morning in Châlons, and Michel had changed its
license plates. Flick decided to take the car, leaving the van for any
survivors who might get away from the carnage in the château grounds.
    She spoke briefly to the driver of
the van. "Wait here for five minutes, then leave." She ran to the
car, jumped into the passenger seat, and said, "Let's go, quickly!"
    At the wheel of the Renault was
Gilberte, a nineteen-year-old girl with long dark hair, pretty but stupid.
Flick did not know why she was in the Resistance—she was not the usual type.
Instead of pulling away, Gilberte said, "Where to?"
    "I'll direct you—for the love
of Christ, move!"
    Gilberte put the car in gear and
drove off.
    "Left, then right," Flick
said.
    In the two minutes of inaction that
followed, the full realization of her failure hit her. Most of the Bollinger
circuit was wiped out. Albert and others had died. Geneviève, Bertrand, and any
others who survived would probably be tortured.
    And it was all for nothing. The
telephone exchange was undamaged, and German communications were intact. Flick
felt worthless. She tried to think what she had done wrong. Had it been a
mistake to try a frontal attack on a guarded military installation? Not
necessarily—the plan might have worked but for the inaccurate intelligence
supplied by MI6. However, it would have been safer, she now thought, to get
inside the building by some clandestine means. That would have given the
Resistance a better chance of getting to the crucial equipment.
    Gilberte pulled up at the courtyard
entrance. "Turn the car around," Flick said, and jumped out.
    Michel was lying facedown on
Antoinette's sofa, trousers pulled down, looking undignified. Antoinette knelt
beside him, holding a bloodstained towel, a pair of glasses perched on her
nose, peering at his backside. "The bleeding has slowed, but the bullet is
still in there," she said.
    On the floor beside the sofa was her
handbag. She had emptied the contents onto a small table, presumably while
hurriedly searching