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265 pages

English

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A Mystic's daughter flees Moscow on the eve of the Great War.A French soldier lies wounded on the Western Front.A German officer veers between loyalty and integrity.An English courtesan reclines on a sea of books.Each will make a journey that changes history.The constellations will force the Mystic's daughter to make an impossible choice. To remain at her harp as the shadow of the war looms again - or join the top-secret Special Operations Executive (SOE). Babouli to her Sufi father, Madeleine to the Gestapo, a lone mission to Occupied Paris promises to be the most hazardous of World War Two.Inspired by real events, Codename: Madeleine is the most unexpected spy story ever told. It teems with tigers, zeppelins, elephants, U-boats, angels, assassins, chessmen, cyanide, beetles, butterflies and Rumi. Revolving between Paris, London, Prague, India and Latin America, Codename: Madeleine is a kaleidoscope of love, war, music, betrayal, poetry and resistance.

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Historical fiction

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Publié par	Distributed by eBookpartnership
Date de parution	21 juillet 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781915036148
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	3 Mo

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Extrait

First published in 2022 by Whitefox Publishing
Copyright © Barnaby Jameson 2022
The moral right of Barnaby Jameson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
While inspired by real events, this book is entirely a work of the author’s imagination.
ISBN 9781915036131
Also available as an ebook
ISBN 9781915036148
And audiobook
ISBN 9781915036155
Typeset by seagulls.net
Cover design by Dom Forbes
Printed and bound by CPI
To Firo and to Tricia and Briggi
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Part One
Chapter 1: ‘The Mystic’
Chapter 2: ‘Le Sergent’
Chapter 3: ‘The Shadows’
Chapter 4: ‘The Sailor’
Chapter 5: ‘The Musketeers’
Chapter 6: ‘El Comedor’
Chapter 7: ‘Treasure’
Chapter 8: ‘La Cumparsita’
Chapter 9: ‘The Electric Eel’
Chapter 10: ‘The Lost Brother’
Part Two
Chapter 11: ‘The House of Blessings’
Chapter 12: ‘The Tin Man’
Chapter 13: ‘The Cherry Tree’
Chapter 14: ‘The Rare Booksellers’
Chapter 15: ‘Le Stryge’
Chapter 16: ‘SHE’
Chapter 17: ‘The League’
Chapter 18: ‘The Charmer’
Chapter 19: ‘The Monkey Bridge’
Chapter 20: ‘Achilles and Patroclus’
Chapter 21: ‘The Swan Kingdom’
Chapter 22: ‘Radio Tour Eiffel’
Part Three
Chapter 23: ‘Dot Dash’
Chapter 24: ‘The Bishop’
Chapter 25: ‘Middle Earth’
Chapter 26: ‘The Iron Heart’
Chapter 27: ‘When the Blood Creeps’
Chapter 28: ‘The Quickening’
Chapter 29: ‘The Quartermaster’
Chapter 30: ‘Dinner in Madrid’
Chapter 31: ‘The Picnic’
Chapter 32: ‘Conservatory Number Five’
Chapter 33: ‘The Knock’
Chapter 34: ‘The Reluctant Diva’
Chapter 35: ‘The Request’
Chapter 36: ‘The Second Crossing’
Chapter 37: ‘The Historian’s Pen’
Chapter 38: ‘N + N’
Epilogue
Dramatis Personae
Prologue
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book would not have been possible without the guidance and support of four stars of the book world: Philip Watson, Charlie Campbell, Marina Kemp and the ever-generous Joanna Penn. The book was fortunate enough to have a world class editor, Philip Connor, and a world class copyeditor, Jenni Davis. In addition, the author would like to thank those listed below for helping him, in their unique ways, to scale a daunting (and at times impossible) mountain.
Isabelle Bruccianni
Liz Campbell
Catherine Cardwell
Peter Carter QC
James Curran
Jessica Dash
Mark B. Fuller
L-M Lidén
Clarissa Machitski
Frank Musker
Lucy Peter
Maximillian Wakefield
Olivia Williams
Miles Woolcock
‘What you seek is seeking you.’
-Rumi
PROLOGUE
Occupied Paris, 1943
Noor’s pace quickened.
The battered suitcase concealing her Mark II radio transmitter was heavy. Caught with a hidden transmitter-receiver, she would be taken for immediate interrogation at Gestapo headquarters. Even the reinforced walls in the basement of 84 Avenue Foch could not shut out the screams. In extremis there was Plan C. Hidden in the button of her dress above her belt was a white pill stamped on both sides with red letters.
DANGER! KCN
Scientific compound: Cyanide. The words of her handler had a reassuring echo.
It will take about twelve seconds.
On her lapel was a silver bird studded with jewel eyes – ruby, like the letters on the cyanide pill.
She was the last radio transmitter left in Paris. Her predecessor, Denis Rake, had made an emergency stage-exit. Any longer and he would have been sitting, arms clamped to a chair, in 84 Avenue Foch.
Noor exited Le Colisée on the Champs-Elysées, suitcase in hand. The café was approved by London. The coat attendant knew the password. Nothing about the two male contacts she left sitting at the corner table had aroused Noor’s suspicion. Their French was convincing, if hard to place. One, perhaps, took more than a passing interest in the reddish tint of her hair, though most was concealed under her cloche hat.
As she walked north along the Champs-Elysées, she noticed a man engrossed in a copy of Le Monde fold his newspaper. Another, on the opposite side of the Champs-Elysées, put on a pair of sunglasses. Nothing out of place on a warm October day, even in wartime.
Despite the weeping blister on her heel, a strange euphoria came over Noor as she walked. London would be extracting her within twenty-four hours. She had succeeded, where others failed, in eluding the Gestapo. Gestapo units had been scouring the city for weeks like a plague of black beetles in search of a wireless operator who would vanish, like the tap of Morse code, into the ether. She knew she was London’s only remaining eyes in Paris. She had refused orders to leave once before. Now even Georges Morel and the extrême fighters of the Paris Resistance said it was too dangerous to stay a minute longer.
Noor noticed splashes of colour returning to the drained Renoir of occupied Paris. The burgundy of a woman’s beret. The purple of a bougainvillea entwined around the entrance of a florist. The pink of a ribbon around a box of pâtisseries . The weather was still balmy. She felt as if she were back at the Sorbonne, carrying her harp instead of a Mark II transmitter. The following afternoon she and her radio would be clambering aboard a Lysander sent by the phantom RAF squadron used to extract agents. Her inner harp strings, so long taut to the point of snapping, were beginning to release.
She cut through Rue Marbeuf. On the wall of a kiosk, she saw a reward for 200,000 francs for information in connection with the disappearance of a Gestapo officer last seen in the 5ème Arrondissement. Her heart quickened. That day she had jumped through Morel’s attic window when she heard the pounding on the porte d’entrée . As she walked, she felt a presence. The ruby eyes on her lapel glowed a deeper red. The man she had seen folding his copy of Le Monde was matching her pace. The man in sunglasses was visible in the reflections of the shop windows. Was it her imagination? She recalled the last Morse transmission from London. Be extra careful.
When a shadow crossed her heart, Noor would think always of her father’s words. In times of strife, Bābouli, always find and follow your breath. She focused on her lungs and initiated adhyam pranayama – upper chest breath. She felt her pulse steady. As she breathed, the same conflict stirred in the ventricles of her heart. Could she extinguish the divine light of life? Next to the transmitter was her treasured book: The Wisdom of Rumi. Her father, Inayat, had underlined one of the Sufi master’s sayings:
‘With life as short as a half-taken breath, plant nothing but love.’
She reminded herself that if she was caught and taken to 84 Avenue Foch, the Gestapo, in their black leather trench coats, would be planting nothing but hate. There was a saying among SOE agents. If you are taken for interrogation, smile while you still have teeth. Her mind spun. What could she use? Her .38 calibre pistol was in the safe house. The curriculum of Special Training School No. 5 also included unarmed combat. Even the peaceable mind of a mystic’s daughter had one mantra driven home like a sledgehammer. Everything is a weapon.
She could feel the softness of her cloche, so familiar it felt like part of her head. Hats were an obvious precaution. This one had a feature unknown to anyone except the F-Section technician who devised the fast-acting toxin for the tip of the hatpin. It was lodged three inches above her right ear.
Noor moved the suitcase to her left hand. The footsteps behind her quickened. She could feel the brachial nerve in her right forearm twitch.
The gentle hand of a Sufi harpist was ready to sting like a scorpion.
PART
ONE
CHAPTER 1
‘The Mystic’
Moscow, Midnight 31st December 1913
Inayat Amina Noor
Snow fell like muffled drumbeats on the frozen crust of the Moskva River and on the circus-striped domes of St Basil’s Cathedral. Snow fell on the twin heads of the Romanov eagle glancing east–west above the Imperial Bolshoi Theatre. Snow fell on the waiting troika carriages and on the plumes of black Orlov horses restive in their harnesses. Snow blew northwards through the jangle of harness bells and gathered, as the Kremlin Clock struck midnight, above the Vysoko-Petrovsky Monastery.
In a vaulted chamber lay Amina, her green eyes clamped shut as she writhed, oblivious to the fireworks. Her long barley-coloured hair was streaked wet at the temples. Her mouth was twisted as she bit into a bloodless bottom lip. Her palm gripped a subha of ninety-nine prayer beads. Seven altar candles encircled the bed, flickering in the brass, threading the air with Siberian pine. A nun placed a leather strap between Amina’s teeth. The nun locked her hands in prayer, looked up at the red stained glass, and recited an invocation to the Most Blessed Theotokos. Her black apostolnik headscarf rocked as she incanted. Twelve rows of icons looked down, their black eyes doleful and expectant.
In the outer cloister, Inayat hugged his woollen cloak about his shoulders and gripped his wooden staff. Beneath his cloak he wore a long golden robe tied at the waist. Around his neck hung a ruby in a gold clasp, radiating a ring of crimson. His black hair was anointed with oil, parted in the middle and falling into curls like a lawyer’s wig. His skin was the colour of burnt umber, his features delicate and masculine: an Indian Rasputin. His eyes were closed, his brow rucked, his face taut. Snow gathered on his shoulders like white epaulettes as he clasped his abdomen. He breathed inwards and outwards with a concentration that mirrored the prone woman.
Amina felt a quickening. A tearing. She bit further into the leather. Th