Frieda closed the bedroom door and took a moment to check the window before running the power cord to a wall socket and plugging it in. She examined the crystal to make sure that it hadn’t been damaged, then turned on the radio and, once it was warmed up, fitted the headphones over her ears. The telegraph key was located on its wood plaque; she rested it on her leg, turned the frequency knob to the proper setting, then tapped out a quick, coded message—Mistletoe arrived and in position—before switching off again. Repeating the message or waiting for confirmation was an unnecessary risk; if the Gestapo picked up the transmissions, they might be able to trace them to their point of origin. As it was, she was on and off the air so fast, it was doubtful that she’d even been noticed.
Frieda switched off the Mk III and unplugged it, then put everything back into the suitcase, closed it, and found an innocuous place for it on a closet shelf. Now she could begin the more routine business of making herself at home. But first, she wanted to get a look at the scenery. After all, it was the principal reason why she was here.
A back door from the sitting-room door let her out into a small garden, its flower beds and rosebushes colorless with the coming of winter but no doubt quite pleasant the rest of the year. The cottage was surrounded by woods, with no other houses in sight; her privacy was assured, but it still made sense for her to set up her easel here and get started on a painting, to provide an explanation to anyone who might happen to drop by as to why Frau Carlsberg spent so much time in the backyard.
Standing with her arms folded across her chest, Frieda gazed into the distance. Beyond the trees, she could see the Harz Mountains just a few kilometers away to the north. Approaching the rocket base MI-6 knew to be hidden somewhere within them would be risky, even if she pretended to be lost, but those weren’t her orders. Her job was to simply maintain an observation post: watch, listen, and immediately report any unusual activity.
Frieda smiled to herself as she turned to go back inside. An important assignment, yes, but probably rather tedious as well, at least on a day-to-day basis. At least she’d get a chance to broaden her skills with a few landscapes. Being a spy was only her wartime occupation; once this was all over, she intended to become an artist for real.
THE CHRISTMAS TEST
DECEMBER 25, 1942
The first snow of winter fell on Worcester the night of Christmas Eve, a tender and sparkling powder reminiscent of childhood, lifting spirits depressed by a war that was only a year old but had already cost thousands of American lives. It put a sugarcoating across rooftops and sidewalks and cars and glittered as it drifted through streetlights. The snow softened the footsteps of families who went door to door, singing yuletide carols while collecting pennies and nickels for the Red Cross. It quietly hissed as it fell, and when the midnight hour came, it whispered secrets.
The City Hall bell tower had just tolled twelve when a pair of double doors parted at a massive warehouse deep inside the Wyman-Gordon Company’s sprawling factory complex on the outskirts of town. The factory was silent this evening; all three shifts had the day off, so the only people present were night watchmen and custodians. Or at least this was the appearance that had been deliberately created. Yet, although the doors were being opened by workmen, no lights shone from within the warehouse. The ceiling fixtures had been turned off; the only illumination permitted were handheld flashlights, and even those were shielded with cardboard strips to narrow their beams, making them hard to spot from a distance.
Once the doors were open, one of the workmen stepped onto the railroad tracks leading into the warehouse. Facing away from the building, he raised his light above his head and flashed it three times. From another side of the factory grounds, three more flashes answered him. He stepped off the tracks and waited, and a few minutes later a diesel locomotive slowly rumbled from the darkness.
The locomotive approached the warehouse backward, the engineer and brakeman leaning from the cab windows to watch the flashlight signals of the man beside the tracks. The big machine backed into the darkened warehouse and slowly came to a halt, brakes making a shrill shriek that nearby residents had become so used to that they barely noticed it, until there was the loud bang of railcar couplings coming together. Long minutes passed. Then, slowly and still with the minimal amount of light, the train emerged from the warehouse.
The locomotive now had six cars: three tankers, two of them refrigerated; a flatbed carrying a diesel electric generator and other pieces of equipment; a passenger car whose windows had been blacked out by heavy curtains; at the end, another flatbed, this one holding an enormous, vaguely cylindrical object concealed by heavy canvas. U.S. Army infantrymen in winter gear and bearing submachine guns rode on each corner of the flatbed; others were in the locomotive and the passenger car.
Slowly and quietly, the train followed the tracks until it left the factory through the north rail gate. There it switched to the siding, which, in turn, led it to a freight line just outside town. The train had no trouble going on the line; there was no schedule for it to keep save its own. In cooperation with the War Department, the company that owned this particular railroad had cleared the tracks so that, for a six-hour period in the wee hours of Christmas morning, only one train would be able to use them between Worcester and Greenfield, about a hundred miles to the west.
The train picked up speed once it left Worcester; it moved quickly into the rural countryside of western Massachusetts. The engineer didn’t once blow the air horn when the train approached a crossing, nor did he need to; at each crossing, the soldiers on the rear flatbed caught glimpses of others maintaining a series of roadblocks along the route, not letting anyone get near the tracks. Some might hear the train as it went by, but few would actually see it.
An hour and a half after the train left the Wyman-Gordon yard, it entered the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts, where the Connecticut River forms a lowland east of the Berkshires. At the valley’s north end lies a small range of low mountains. Bordered by the villages of Sunderland, Montague, and Leveritt, with Greenfield the nearest large town, these Berkshire foothills were largely uninhabited. Farms had come and gone from here since the 1600s, leaving behind exhausted fields the forests had reclaimed; only loggers, hunters, and hikers ventured into the mountains, save for the occasional hermit who’d inhabit a lonely shack in solitude.
The train slowed as it came into the hill country, and the last house lights had already vanished when it entered a narrow ravine between Mount Toby and its smaller neighbor, Roaring Mountain. Once again, brakes squealed as the train came to a halt. A brakeman jumped down from the engine and, lantern in hand, ran forward to a siding running parallel to the tracks. Four concrete pillars, each five feet tall with deep grooves running through their flat tops, had been recently built on the siding by the Army Corps of Engineers, two on either side of the tracks. The brakeman pulled down the switch beside the tracks, then raised the lantern and swung it back and forth. Once again, the locomotive huffed and slowly moved forward, pulling the cars onto the siding. The brakeman carefully guided him until the rear flatbed was exactly between the four pillars, then he swung the lantern again. The train stopped, and several things happened at once.
The soldiers who’d been riding the rear flatbed jumped off and trotted down the track in both directions, taking up positions fifty yards east and west of the siding. As they did this, other soldiers climbed onto the first flatbed and unloaded four portable spotlights. Once they’d set them up in a ring around the siding, they ran insulated cables from them to the generator. It growled to life; a second later, the tripod-mounted lights flared on, wiping away the darkness with a bright oval flecked by falling snow.