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sandbagged, and the
ceilings had been reinforced with steel girders and poured concrete. Obviously
that was to prevent Allied bombers from putting the phone system out of action.
    At the end of the corridor was a
door marked Interrogation Center. He went inside. The first room had bare white
walls, bright lights, and the standard furniture of a simple interview room: a
cheap table, hard chairs, and an ashtray. Dieter went through to the next room.
Here the lights were less bright and the walls bare brick. There was a
bloodstained pillar with hooks for tying people up; an umbrella stand holding a
selection of wooden clubs and steel bars; a hospital operating table with a
head clamp and straps for the wrists and ankles; an electric shock machine; and
a locked cabinet that probably contained drugs and hypodermic syringes. It was
a torture chamber. Dieter had been in many similar, but still they sickened
him. He had to remind himself that intelligence gathered in places such as this
helped save the lives of decent young German soldiers so that they could
eventually go home to their wives and children instead of dying on
battlefields. All the same, the place gave him the creeps.
    There was a noise behind him,
startling him. He spun around. When he saw what was in the doorway he took a
frightened step back. "Christ!" he said. He was looking at a squat
figure, its face thrown into shadow by the strong light from the next room.
"Who are you?" he said, and he could hear the fear in his own voice.
    The figure stepped into the light
and turned into a man in the uniform shirt of a Gestapo sergeant. He was short
and pudgy, with a fleshy face and ash-blond hair cropped so short that he
looked bald. "What are you doing here?" he said in a Frankfurt
accent.
    Dieter recovered his composure. The
torture chamber had unnerved him, but he regained his habitual tone of
authority and said, "I am Major Franck. Your name?"
    The sergeant became deferential at
once. "Becker, sir, at your service."
    "Get the prisoners down here as
soon as possible, Becker," said Dieter. "Those who can walk should be
brought immediately, the others when they have been seen by a doctor."
    "Very good, Major."
    Becker went away. Dieter returned to
the interview room and sat in the hard chair. He wondered how much information
he would get out of the prisoners. Their knowledge might be limited to their
own town. If his luck was bad, and their security good, each individual might
know only a little about what went on in their own circuit. On the other hand,
there was no such thing as perfect security. A few individuals inevitably amassed
a wide knowledge of their own and other Resistance circuits. His dream was that
one circuit might lead him to another in a chain, and he might be able to
inflict enormous damage on the Resistance in the weeks remaining before the
Allied invasion.
    He heard footsteps in the corridor
and looked out. The prisoners were being brought in. The first was the woman
who had concealed a Sten gun beneath her coat.
    Dieter was pleased. It was so useful
to have a woman among the prisoners. Under interrogation, women could be as
tough as men, but often the way to make a man talk was to beat a woman in front
of him. This one was tall and sexy, which was all the better. She seemed to be
uninjured. Dieter held up a hand to the soldier escorting her and spoke to the
woman in French. "What is your name?" he said in a friendly tone.
    She looked at him with haughty eyes.
"Why should I tell you?"
    He shrugged. This level of
opposition was easy to overcome. He used an answer that had served him well a
hundred times. "Your relatives may inquire whether you are in custody. If
we know your name, we may tell them."
    "I am Geneviève Delys."
    "A beautiful name for a
beautiful woman." He waved her on.
    Next came a man in his sixties,
bleeding from a head injury and limping too. Dieter said, "You're a little
old for this sort of thing, aren't you?"
    The man looked proud. "I