The Paris Chase

Book 3: Secret Churchill Files

by David Lewis

Genres: World War II; International Crime & Mystery; Historical Thrillers

Synopsis

In this cinematic, suspenseful World War II mystery, Caitrin Colline, the sharp-witted Welsh spy who has become one of Winston Churchill’s most trusted agents, is dropped into France to retrieve vital Nazi documents . . .

London, 1942: The threat of German invasion has abated, and the war has entered a new chapter, famously summed up by Winston Churchill as “the end of the beginning.” While Churchill faces mounting pressure and calls for his resignation, a dark new horror is unfolding across the channel, as the Nazis move forward with their plan to murder Europe’s Jews.

In the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, young SS officer Dieter Silber helps organize the conference where Reinhard Heydrich outlines his “Final Solution.” Horrified, Dieter steals a copy of Heydrich’s proposal and flees to Paris. Soon there are posters all over the city seeking his whereabouts. If he is not found swiftly, many innocents will die in his place.

Caitrin has her mission directly from Churchill himself: bring Dieter and the document back to London. Posing as a maid for another female spy, she takes up residence at the mansion opposite SS headquarters on Paris’s Avenue Foch. Once Dieter is located, the chase will begin in earnest.

Among Caitrin’s allies are a local gangster, and her aristocratic friend, Lord Hector Neville-Percy. The Resistance is formidable and courageous. But always, the SS are in close pursuit. And as Caitrin has learned, this is a war in which every moment and even the smallest decision can mean the difference between life and death.

Release date: July 28, 2026

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

December 12, 1941. 512 was dead, and its few remaining agents were going to the funeral. But no one knew where it was, and the chauffeur refused to tell them.

There were four passengers in the black Daimler heading out of London: Bethany Goodman, a middle-aged woman who had perfected the art of being unnoticed while moving mountains. She founded 512 in 1939 as the first all-female intelligence organization because, as she explained, women are invisible in society, and invisibility is essential for a secret agent. Sitting next to her was their most competent agent, Caitrin Colline, a spirited young woman from the Welsh coal mining valleys who was committed equally to the destruction of Adolf Hitler and the overthrow of the British landed gentry. Facing them was the sole exception to the all-women rule, Hector, Lord Marlton Neville-Percy, the last of his ancient lineage and seconded to 512 from the Special Operations Executive (SOE). There had been idle chatter in the service about a romantic connection between Lord Hector and Caitrin, and there was a mutual attraction, but the class difference made any such relationship unlikely. To his left sat the newest agent, Evelyn Despenser, real name Nimrata Ramanuja, a wealthy young Indian/French woman whose family had import businesses in Occupied France.

512 was dedicated to capturing spies and saboteurs, and in the first two years of a seemingly endless war had rescued the Crown Jewels and stopped a fifth column bent on destroying some of Britain’s most cherished historical buildings. Unfortunately, eliminating all enemies inside Britain, along with the fear of German invasion fading, meant 512 no longer had a valid reason to exist. The well-established, male-dominated SOE and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), which had become MI6, had always resented 512’s accomplishments and encouraged its demise. 512 agents had been retired or absorbed into the other services as clerks and typists, and now the four survivors were going to pay their final respects to the dead organization. Presumably.

It was dark when the Daimler turned off a country road, passed a stone gatehouse, and drove down an endless driveway flanked by towering beeches toward the brooding presence of a country home. There were no lights and blackout was absolute. The man who opened the front door was in shadows that concealed his face, but the moment he wished them a good evening in a broad Cumbrian accent Bethany knew who he was, and then who had issued the mysterious order that they should come to this remote place. He was Frank Sawyers, a personal valet, short, eggshell-bald with a ridiculous comb-over, vibrating with self-importance, and to her one of the world’s more irritating men. “Good evening, Frank,” she said.

“Good evening, Mrs. Goodman. Come this way.”

He led them into the library: oak-paneled, book-lined, with leather chairs, a desk, and a wood fire. As soon as Caitrin entered, she recognized the smell; all of England’s stately homes smelled the same way. When she and Lord Hector, Hecky to her, were in pursuit of the Crown Jewel thieves, they had stayed at a series of homes throughout the country, and every one of them smelled of woodsmoke, mold, and wet dogs. Or was it wet dukes? No matter the actual temperature, the houses were always cold, uncomfortable places layered with the suffocating dust of countless generations. Then again, as a working-class girl she had her own righteous biases.

“He’ll be right with you,” Sawyers said, and left.

“Who will be right with us?” Evelyn asked.

Bethany was about to reply when the door opened and the man who entered answered the question for her. “Thank you for coming,” Winston Churchill said. “Please sit.”

Sawyers appeared, vibrating into the room after Churchill sat behind the desk and pressed a button. “Brandy, Lord Hector?”

“Thank you, sir. Brandy would be fine.”

“Sherry for the ladies?”

“Brandy.”

“Brandy.”

“Brandy.”

“I forgot I was dealing with the New New Woman,” Churchill growled. “Brandy for everyone, Sawyers.”

“Yes, sir.” Sawyers vanished with the ease of a cartoon character.

Bethany was alarmed at Churchill’s appearance. He was an old man now at sixty-seven, but looked much older. He seemed to have shrunk and his face was an unhealthy grey. But whenever she looked in a mirror nowadays a more aged and strained woman stared back at her. This war was diminishing all of them. Sawyers appeared, served them drinks, and left.

“You worked yourself out of a job,” Churchill said. “If only the other organizations could be as efficient as yours.”

“If only,” Bethany replied.

“We meet here because what is about to be said must remain secret. The Japanese did us a great service by bombing Pearl Harbor and finally bringing America into the war. But they also invaded Thailand, Malaya, and the Philippines. Yesterday, the Repulse and the Prince of Wales were sunk in the South China Sea by Japanese bombers.”

The room was grave-silent with shock.

“Eight hundred and forty souls lost. It is not going well for us.”

“That is awful,” Bethany said.

“And there are grumblings about my leadership.”

“There’s no one who could replace you, sir,” Hector said.

“Thank you. Others think differently. It’s a grievous loss, and not the first or last.”

Caitrin shuddered. Her brother Gareth was in the Royal Navy, although not on battleships. As far as she knew.

“Now, about 512. I have not come, nor brought you here, to bury Caesar but instead to give him, her, different form. Forgive the tortured metaphor.”

Bethany said nothing, and the others followed her lead.

“The war is spreading and will soon be worldwide, and that requires new skills. 512 is gone forever but will return embedded in SOE’s F Section. It will be known as 8 Unit.” He caught and returned Bethany’s wise smile.

“512. Five plus one plus two equals eight,” Bethany said.

“Yes.”

“What would we do there?” Caitrin asked. “Our expertise is fighting the enemy within Britain. F Section deals with agents in France.”

“The Wehrmacht is stalled outside Moscow and besieging Leningrad. Stalin is bellowing for an invasion of Western Europe to relieve the pressure. With so much equipment and material left behind in Dunkirk we are not yet strong enough to do that, but we can begin by laying the groundwork in France.”

“I don’t understand,” Bethany said. “SOE is the big presence in France. What can we possibly do without bumping into them?”

Churchill sipped at his brandy before answering. “The Empire must endure, but the century will belong to the Americans. Our organizations, civil and military, are mostly run by public school chaps and venerable titled gentlemen. I am an Old Harrovian myself but recognize the changes this war is going to make to our country. Power will no longer exclusively reside in country estates. Those days are gone forever. Leadership will come from people like you.”

“Just what does that mean?” Caitrin asked. Yet again, Hector was astonished at her direct honesty. She paid homage to no title. Caitrin Colline’s respect had to be earned. For two years, he had worked with and studied her and still didn’t know how she managed to avoid censure. It was no doubt a female, or perhaps a Celtic, talent.

“It means Lord Hector goes back to his section.”

“Excuse me, sir, but we have worked so well together,” Hector said. “It seems a pity—”

“You will have to work so well with your old section. There’s a war on, and that’s an order,” Churchill answered. “Miss Despenser returns to Paris to wait until she can be of use. I believe your parents have an apartment there.”

“Yes, sir. My father’s company is in Pondichéry, in the Établissements Français dans l’Inde, while my mother lives in an upper floor apartment at 67 Avenue Foch.”

“And it is directly across from the SS headquarters?”

“Yes.”

“That is fortunate.”

“But we were there first. Avenue Foch is very wide, with trees in the middle, so it is hard to see buildings on the other side.”

“No matter, you will be close enough when needed, and at the right time. Mrs. Goodman will set up an office in SOE. I’m sure they’ll shove you in a dark corner somewhere.”

“Out of sight, out of mind, means free to explore without being noticed,” Bethany said.

“That’s the idea.”

“What about me?” Caitrin asked.

“Do you speak French?”

“Not yet.”

“Not much good in France, then.”

“I can learn.”

“Not fast enough to be considered French. You are now no longer a 512 agent, and SOE does not want women. They want file clerks and typists.”

“I can’t type. But I can change their minds.”

“To do that, you would have to go through their training courses for new agents.”

“I’m already trained and have field experience.”

“This is more intensive, and the last part of the training is done exclusively in French, which you admitted you do not speak.”

“I repeat, I can learn.”

“And I repeat, not well enough. Perhaps a year from now.”

“Let me at least try.”

“You are persistent. Try if you must, but you will fail in the end because you’re a woman and they want you to fail. After you do, return to work with Mrs. Goodman. I need people inside the system who understand what is happening in the field, not reports from some sodden ex-cavalry officer lolling around White’s believing horses can still win the day.”

“Go back as a snagger or a typist?”

“If necessary, but only for a while. You are a soldier. Begin by learning French.”

Caitrin was not at all convinced.

Churchill lit a cigar. “My whole life I have been at war. Sandhurst in the 1890s; the Fourth Hussars in India; one of the last full gallop, close order cavalry charges at Omdurman; captured and escaped from the Boers; and led a battalion of Royal Scots Fusiliers at Ploegsteert in Belgium during the Great War.”

“We have been at war too,” Caitrin said, and silenced the room. “Bethany lost her husband on HMS Exeter chasing the Graf Spee, Hector’s girlfriend died hunting the fifth column bombers, Evelyn’s husband was killed in the Battle of Britain, and my fiancé died in the Blitz.” The memory of Max dying in front of her surfaced and made her pause. But only for a moment. That had happened so long ago, so near, so far, and to a different woman in a different life. “In my valley families live in damp houses the size of pigsties that have outhouses with squares of newspaper. The kids have rotten teeth, girls flower for an instant before withering into old women, and men with coal-dust-black lungs work for less pay. The chapel soup kitchens keep them alive, just. The war to survive has been going on all my life.”

Churchill sat back in his chair and focused his attention on her. “Miss Colline, I see you have lost none of your fiery candor.”

“I never will.”

“And I also pray you never will. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers … and sisters too,” Churchill nodded his head and vanished behind a blue cloud of cigar smoke. “We must fight together, or we will surely lose alone. But do not think for one moment you are being put out to pasture. 512 is gone, but I, and your country, will have need to call on you to do great things, and soon. To win, we must fight by the rules.”

“What rules?” Caitrin asked.

Winston gave her his little boy smile. “Winston’s Rules.”

“I don’t know them.”

“I’ll tell you.” He carefully enunciated his rules and finished with, “Be ready. Happy Christmas.” He stood, surveyed them, one by one, opened his mouth as though to speak, thought better of it, jammed in his cigar, grunted, and left the room. Of course Caitrin still had questions, but he was gone.

Sawyers appeared and ushered them out to the car, apologizing for the haste by saying, “Excuse the rush, but we’re going away.”

“Holiday in Blackpool?” Bethany said.

“Secret.” Sawyers’s head spun left and right so hard Bethany almost expected it to turn a complete revolution. “Not Blackpool. America, to meet the president. Shouldn’t tell you.”

“Too late, you already did,” Bethany answered as she got into the Daimler.

On the drive out of the estate Evelyn asked, “Why all the secrecy?”

“Because Churchill trusts hardly anyone,” Caitrin said. “But he does trust us, and we’re being inserted into the SOE as his eyes and ears.”

“Agreed,” Bethany said. “Ignoring the Henry V ‘we precious few’ speech, and the flattery about we common folk soon running the world, Churchill’s creating his own secret secret service. That would be me, you, and Evelyn.”

“But not me,” Hector said.

Caitrin patted his knee. “We shall miss you, Hecky.”

“I will miss you,” he answered with more emotion than anyone, including himself, expected, before becoming English again and sheltering behind a graceful smile. “Why do I get the feeling this is not over? Not at all.”

“My mother will be happy to see me,” Evelyn said. She glanced through the rear window, where there was only darkness, and asked, “Does anyone have any idea where we just were?”

“Exactly where Winnie wanted us,” Caitrin said. “Now I have to learn French.”

“No, it’s much harder than that, Cat,” Hector said. “You must learn to be French.”

Churchill left the next morning with his entourage, including Frank Sawyers, his bodyguard Walter Thompson, the service chiefs, and a mobile version of his War Room, and traveled to Greenock in Scotland to board the battleship HMS Duke of York for the United States. The sinking of the Repulse and the Prince of Wales, along with the loss of so many men lay heavily on his mind. The weight was not lessened when he remembered coming to Scotland just a few years earlier. He was First Lord of the Admiralty in 1939 when on October 14, the battleship HMS Royal Oak was torpedoed by a German U-47 submarine in the supposedly safe harbor of Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands. Of the Royal Oak’s complement of one thousand two hundred and thirty-four men and boys, eight hundred and thirty-five were killed or died later of their wounds.

The country was beaten and numbed by the war, and there had been one defeat after another. From September 7 to November 2, with one exception, London had been bombed for hours every night; the population was on severe rationing; countless ancient buildings were destroyed; and although the British Museum had removed its artifacts to safety, still two hundred and fifty thousand priceless books were destroyed by German incendiaries. Just days earlier, Vice Admiral Karl Dönitz had sent his submarines out on Untermehen Paukenschlag, Operation Drumbeat, to sink merchant ships sailing from the States. The journey across the Atlantic in either direction was a dangerous one, even for a swift-moving battleship like the Duke of York, because German U-boats owned the sea in what they called Zweite glückliche Zeit, the Second Happy Time, when they were sinking Allied convoy ships with impunity. It was a risk Churchill was willing to take, because Roosevelt had to be encouraged to keep supplying equipment to Britain before Pearl Harbor diverted America’s attention to the Pacific. If he failed to do that a badly wounded Britain would surely founder.

Twenty-year-old Dieter Silber was an exemplar of Aryan Youth, a glittering member of the Herrenvolk. He had thick blond hair, the clearest of complexions, ice-blue yet friendly eyes, and a generous smile. He was a gifted athlete with a winning personality. Intelligent and curious, he learned languages easily and was a natural organizer.

Dieter wanted to be an artist and made money on the streets of his home town, Oberhausen, drawing quick sketches that captured both a likeness and something of a subject’s personality. But he grew up in hard times. In the 1930s, Germany was suffering from years of stagnation and political upheaval. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 saw American investors pull their money out of Germany, which, coupled with crushing war reparations, brought hyperinflation and drove the country to its knees. A loaf of bread that could be bought for one hundred and sixty marks in 1922, cost two hundred million marks a year later. Dieter’s father’s business collapsed, and a year or so later he killed himself. A year after his death, his mother, never a mentally strong woman, had a fatal heart attack brought on by acute despair and a massive overindulgence in Schladerer schnapps.

By then, Dieter had discovered Hitlerjugend, Hitler Youth, and it became his family, after he was deemed racially pure. He loved everything about the organization: the discipline, the camaraderie, the sports, and most of all attendance at the annual Nuremberg Rally. No one pounded a drum with more fervor than Dieter or shouted Heil Hitler louder. His first rally was in 1936, the Rally of Honor, so-named because the Rhineland had just been taken back by Germany. After being stabbed in the back and exploited by capitalists, the country was rising from the ashes.

He rose quickly through the Hitlerjugend ranks to become an Obersturmführer but was already contemplating his next move when he turned seventeen. At the rallies he had been awed by the SS’s black and silver uniforms. They seemed so much more authoritative and glamorous than the Wehrmacht or Luftwaffe outfits. It was there he first saw his idol, Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich. To Dieter, Heydrich looked like an Aryan god. He was taller than most of the men around him, stood erect, sleek and arrogant, and his SS uniform had been tailored to fit an athletic physique. To the very core of his being, Heydrich was a committed Nazi.

After measurement of Dieter’s head and features, along with another careful background check to confirm his Aryan bloodline, he was inducted into the SS. By the end of 1941, he was a new SS-Untersturmführer posted to work in Reich Security Head Office Referat IV B4. His superior was known to be a dull man, although a good organizer overly obsessed with details, often at the expense of the larger cause, but Dieter did not care. This posting was only a way station to higher rank.

Dieter Silber was indeed an exemplar of the ideal Aryan Youth, a glittering member of the Herrenvolk—almost. Sublimated, but not eradicated by years of Nazi propaganda, were a strong conscience and an innate morality. They would surface when he least expected and change the course of his life and that of many others, especially his new commanding officer, SS-Obersturmführer Adolf Eichmann.

Churchill was partly right. SOE gave Bethany a small corner room in F Section’s offices in Norgeby House on Baker Street, but it was not a dark one. High on the top floor, with strutting pigeons on the window ledge, the room was brightened by the morning sun, while afternoon light reflecting from the white limestone building opposite softened any late shadows. A handwritten sign taped askew to the door said: 8 UNIT, B GOODMAN, and the office had a desk, two chairs, a telephone, and an indestructible aspidistra spying on her from one corner. Bethany put her husband’s photograph on the desk and hung one of Langland Priory, 512’s old headquarters, on the wall opposite a poster that read: NO TALK. NO SURPRISE. 8 Unit was now officially part of F Section, but only peripherally so.

Caitrin had to borrow a chair from another office when she and Evelyn came to meet her.

“We’ll start with you, Evelyn,” Bethany said. “Once you have reached Gibraltar, a Lieutenant Marian Krajewski, Polish, will take you from there in the felucca Seawolf to Port Miou, near Cassis, just a few miles southeast from Marseille.”

“A woman skipper?”

“Yes, and probably as madly brave as all the other Poles.”

“We have an office in Marseille. Not that we do any business now because of the war,” Evelyn said. “But it does give me a reason to visit, and I can take a train from there to Paris.”

“Get a first-class ticket on a late, slow train, not an express. You are less likely to encounter the Germans doing an identification check. I suppose even Nazis like their sleep.”

“And once I’m home in Avenue Foch?”

“Keep your eyes open for anything of interest and wait for Winston’s call to action.”

“What are they like here, in F Section?” Caitrin asked.

Bethany rolled her eyes. “Winston was right. Old Etonians and Harrovians. How ever did they manage to build an empire?”

“Being English, it never entered their heads they couldn’t. Have you heard from Winston?”

“Heavy weather slowed down the ship, and it took eight days to cross the Atlantic.”

“That sounds awful.”

“My intelligence network tells me he was not at all affected by mal de mer—unlike his entourage, who were terribly sick—loved the trip and spent hours playing darts in the mess room. He also watched Western films and read a book about Napoleon and Josephine,” Bethany said, with a polite expression of disbelief. “But Walter Thompson, his bodyguard, said he was a terrible sailor, was seasick and demanded sailors walking past his cabin not whistle. He hates people whistling, as does Hitler. The only thing they have in common. Who to believe?”

“Your intelligence network?”

“Not SOE or MI6, which controls all of SOE’s signals.”

“Who?”

“Mrs. Churchill.”

“Clementine?”

“Yes. No one would dare open and read the prime minister’s letters to his wife, and they write each other frequently. She relays what he wants me to know, and neither SOE nor MI6 are any the wiser.”

“The WWN,” Caitrin said, and explained. “The Wise Women Network.”

“Yes, indeed. Winston also wrote that being on a ship is like being in prison, with the chance of being drowned.”

“That’s a Samuel Johnson quote.”

“Oh, the rascal. Clementine did mention the president gave him butterflies.”

“He made Winston nervous?”

“No, real butterflies. It seems Winnie is a keen lepidopterist. Has been since he was a little boy.”

“I would never have imagined.”

“Me neither. The man is full of surprises.”

“Now that he is safe with his butterflies, and Evelyn’s mission is taken care of, what do you have for me?”

“FANY.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“SOE regulations. All SOE female employees, agents or not, are to wear FANY uniforms as a cover. First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. Motto: Arduis Invicta. In Difficulties Unconquered,” Bethany said beneath arched eyebrows. “And no, I haven’t a clue.”

“Probably some Lord Treble Chin’s ancient family motto. Do I really have to join?”

“I’m afraid it’s off to Lilywhites for you to be fitted for a dashing FANY uniform. Khaki serge is so becoming to the female figure.”

Caitrin made a face and asked, “And then?”

“Weeks in the Western Highlands of Bonnie Scotland, learning all sorts of survival tricks, like catching and skinning bunnies or haggis. It seems there’s even a place called Sniper Valley. Bit scary, no?”

“No.”

“As Winston said, they are expecting you to fail and in doing so prove women should not be used in the service.”

“So I won’t fail.”

“Then, having not failed, it’s back home and onto a course in matters miraculous.”

“Such as?”

Bethany read from a document on her desk. “How to blow up railway trains, put itching powder in submariners’ underwear and contraceptives, scoop the innards out of dead mice and rats and replace them with explosives. A neat but nasty Nazi comes along, tosses the furry corpses into a furnace and bang, no more neat, nasty Nazi.”

“Are you serious?”

“Oh, yes. We also have exploding lumps of coal, bars of soap, and even bicycle pumps. Ingenuity is our middle name.”

“The mind boggles.”

“Boggle this. For the bovine- and equine-inclined, we have cow pies and horse droppings, indistinguishable from the real thing, there are even bits of straw sticking out of them. They come in two varieties: high explosive land mine and incendiary. Deposit them in the road, a lorry drives over, and bang-flash. Blown up and burnt down.”

“There is no end to it all.”

“Wait, there’s more. Assuming you survive Scotland, there are five parachute jumps to be made, two of them at night, at Ringway Airfield outside Manchester. Out of a tethered balloon, I believe. You get your wings at the end, hopefully not heavenly ones.”

“Encouraging. I can hardly wait.”

“You won’t have to,” Bethany said with a wicked grin. “You leave tomorrow.”

The train north from London to Scotland was slow and halted several times to let express or goods trains through. It was packed, mostly with soldiers, and had an atmosphere thick with tobacco smoke. Caitrin was groped as she read a French textbook but only once, by an optimistic lance-corporal who was stopped with an elbow. . .