He moved swiftly up the passage and found the knapsack. He opened it to check that everything was in order. Then he started back down the passage again.

As he reached the chamber, Luc appeared in the lamplight, looking pale.

Thomas put the lamp down by Charlie’s head, then in the shadow, he squatted over the knapsack and began to open it. He looked up at his brother.

“You needn’t have worried, you know,” Thomas said quietly. “I’d never have let them hurt you.”

Luc nodded.

Thomas smiled.

“I love you, little brother.”

“I know.”

Luc never saw the big Welrod with its silencer in his brother’s hand. Thomas fired once. The shot went straight into Luc’s heart. Thomas stepped over and quickly put a second shot into the back of his head.

The shots made a sound in the cave, but not much. Outside the cave, there was no sound at all.

Fifteen minutes later Thomas met Max and handed him back the knapsack containing the Welrod.

“It was him. It’s done,” he said.

“The contact?”

“Gestapo. Schmid.”

If the Allies had hoped they would sweep across northern France, they had been disappointed. All through June the fighting in Normandy was intense. The western port of Cherbourg was taken on the twenty-first, but the Germans left its deepwater harbor almost inoperable. Reinforced, the panzer divisions at the old city of Caen held out, into July. Even a month after Cherbourg fell, the Allies had been able to take only the heights south of Caen. In the last week of July, the Allied forces in the far west began to swing around below the Germans, but the going was still tough.

Then, early in August, news came that General Patton’s Third Army had joined this forward swing. One of the divisions serving under him was French. Drawn from the Frenchmen who had managed to get abroad, and by troops from Algeria and other parts of North Africa, General Leclerc’s Second Armored Division had just landed, eager to fight for France.

But where would Patton and his Frenchmen go?

One thing seemed almost certain. They wouldn’t be coming to Paris. It made no sense. Eisenhower wouldn’t want one of his armies to get bogged down in weeks, perhaps, of bloody street fighting. He would sweep across to the Rhine and beyond, and deal with Paris later.

Meanwhile, for Schmid there was his regular duty to attend to.

There were still huge stores of pictures in Paris that had not been sent back to Germany. But when it came to the confiscations for which Schmid was responsible, he had impressed his superiors very much. On his own initiative he had contrived to get everything crated and sent back into grateful hands in Berlin, and his zeal had been noticed.