The Folks at Fifty-Eight

Not that Marcus Allum imagined for a second that Hammond hadn’t seen him. When you have been trained to scan a sea of faces for a single nervous look, you don’t miss something as obvious as an old friend avoiding an embarrassing reunion; you don’t miss anything. And when your life has so often depended on you seeing them before they see you, you make damn sure you see them first.

However, as Gerald Hammond wandered past the frontage, his attention didn’t shift from the sidewalk and his face betrayed little of his thoughts. He seemed preoccupied and distant, almost to the point of morose. He obviously hadn’t noticed Allum duck into the coffee shop, or seen him watching from behind his newspaper. Given Hammond’s well-publicized problems, Marcus Allum could fully understand why.

Allum ordered a black coffee and sat moodily remembering, as the doubts began to nag at what little conscience he possessed. Two years ago Hammond wouldn’t have missed him. Two years ago Gerald Hammond was the best in the business. Two years ago he would have seen Allum at least fifty yards before Allum saw him.

Maybe returning from the war in Europe to find OSS disbanded and his wife sleeping with strangers had jointly conspired to blunt all those finely-honed skills that had once set Gerald Hammond apart from other agents. Maybe all those rejected applications to join the State Department had dented the ego and sedated all those extra senses. Maybe loved ones and circumstance at home had succeeded where a deadly enemy and war overseas had failed.

Had he suffered anything more than a minor twinge of conscience, Allum might have resolved to look up his old Princeton friend and former OSS colleague, but Marcus Allum wasn’t the type to allow distraction. These days the State Department’s Head of Occupied Territories had more important problems to wrestle than the disastrous marriage and sudden career nose-dive of Gerald Hammond.

Nonetheless, it disturbed him.

Allum vigorously stirred his coffee and stared into the resulting vortex as the memories swirled and his mood deepened. He was thinking back to Princeton and those early days, when they had both been young enough to believe in naïve pledges of loyalty and honour and friendship.

But that had been long before London, and even longer before Rouen.

Gerald Hammond always said that Marcus Allum was never the same after they made him London Station Chief. Marcus Allum always said that Gerald Hammond was never the same after Rouen. Both accusations held more than a grain of truth.

In Allum’s case the reason was simple. His all-consuming ambition, political chicanery and lack of any moral code merely confirmed Hammond’s assertion that the quest for power can sometimes corrupt as absolutely as the power itself. With Gerald Hammond the reasons were more worthy and more complex, but neither man was ever the same.

“Excuse me, sir. . . Mr Allum.”

The interruption jolted Marcus Allum from his thoughts. He let go of the memories, and looked up from his coffee. An immaculately-suited underling stood before him, impatiently shifting his weight from one highly-polished brogue to the other.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, sir.”

“What is it?”

“It’s the girl, sir. They’ve found her.”

“Where?”

“In Magdeburg, sir.”

Uncharacteristically, Marcus Allum allowed his surprise to show.

“Magdeburg? Are they sure? Not Berlin?”

“No, sir. They say she’s definitely in Magdeburg.” The young man furtively scanned the surrounding area and then lowered his voice to little more than a whisper. “The Sovs are already out looking for her, sir. They say it’s just a matter of time.”

The thunder on Allum’s face deepened.

“Shit! All right, tell Alan Carlisle I want to see him as soon as I get back.”

“Yes, sir.”

The young man turned to make his way out of the shop. Allum stopped him.

“Just a minute. . . How did you know where to find me?”

“Uh, I ran into Mr Hammond, down the street, sir. He told me.”

The young man stood nervously watching, uncertain as to whether a conversation with Gerald Hammond might be construed as fraternization. He needn’t have worried. The look of thunder on Allum’s face fell away and previously scowling features suddenly broke into a grin.

“Did he now? I bet he even told you which table I was at?”

“Yes, sir, he did.”

“All right. Tell Carlisle I’ll be back directly.”

A casual ten-minute stroll away, Gerald Hammond had returned to his office and was thinking similar thoughts to those that had troubled Marcus Allum, but Hammond’s thoughts were blacker than any of those that Marcus Allum might have conjured from his coffee. Hammond was thinking of London and OSS, but mostly he was thinking of Rouen.

The assault on Rouen had happened two years earlier, a little over six weeks before D-Day, when a reckless bureaucrat with the token rank of Major had flown a solo reconnaissance mission over Occupied France. A lone Messerschmitt intercepted the Lysander, and his resulting capture threw Allied plans for invasion into chaos.

The Normandy Resistance discovered his location. They radioed London with the news. The Gestapo were holding him in Rouen, not in the infamous tower, but in the headquarters opposite. A highly-skilled team, with a lot of luck, just might get him out.

A frantic Allied command immediately dumped the problem into Allum’s lap. He just as quickly dumped it into Hammond’s. The orders were clear: Make sure you get to him before they realize who they’ve got and transfer him to Gestapo headquarters in Paris. Oh, and bring him back safely if possible. The obvious question had received a chilling answer.

“It is essential to the successful outcome of the war that he does not reach Avenue Foch or the rue des Saussaies alive. How you achieve that is your decision.”

Hammond’s team hit the Rouen Gestapo Headquarters at four-thirty the next morning, in those muddled few minutes between night and day, when darkness retreats into shadow and the eyes can so easily deceive.

They began the carnage, not with the crash of grenades and the rattle of small-arms fire, but with stealth and skeleton keys, suppressed Sten-guns firing subsonic rounds, and a silent bullet that shattered the skull of the only external guard.

From there, they moved noiselessly through the building, killing as they went, leaving no room unvisited in their search for a reckless bureaucrat, and no one alive to raise the alarm. Few of the victims woke in time to see their killers. None put up any kind of fight.

It took almost fifteen minutes of searching and killing before they found their objective, locked in a top-floor bedroom, guarded by a single SS trooper.

A minute after that they were out of the building and away.

Whenever Hammond thought of Rouen, and that was often, he would recall the disgust and shame he had felt at the need for so many cold-blooded killings, so many that the heat of the Sten’s suppressor had blistered his hand. He would then go on to recall each briefly-illuminated face of each slumbering victim, and finally bring to mind the look of terror on a reckless bureaucrat’s face as the torchlight searched him out.

That same bureaucrat went on to help plan the invasion of mainland Europe and the downfall of Adolf Hitler. The powers that be may have privately called him a reckless fool, but they publicly feted him as a hero and awarded him the Silver Star.

Those same powers that be had also recommended Hammond for a medal, someone even mentioned the Congressional Medal of Honour, but then someone else whispered something about ‘handing out gallantry medals for killing people in their beds’ and that idea was quickly shelved. Gerald Hammond hadn’t cared. The last thing he had wanted was a further and tangible reminder of that night.

And so Hammond’s reward was a curt nod of thanks and a hearty slap on the back for having killed so many and saved just one, before another Marcus Allum order saw him loaded on to a night flight and dropped back into Occupied France with Operation Jedburgh.