Free V for Vengeance by Dennis Wheatley

harbour was reported as blocked with wrecks, and all the Thanet towns as in ruins. Then the Germans carried raids much farther inland, attacking all the air bases in south and south-eastern England, and penetrating as far as London.
    Each night these triumphs were announced over the radio with impressive figures of British planes destroyed both in aerial combat and on the ground. In spite of British counterclaims, it seemed to the people of Paris that this was the beginning of the end of their ex-Ally. It was common knowledge that the Germans were massing a great Army of Invasion all along the Dutch, Belgian and French coasts, and clearly they were only waiting until they had driven the numerically inferior R.A.F. from the skies before despatching the great flotillas which would carry the irresistible panzer divisions across to England. The friends of Britain could only watch and pray.
    Stefan Kuporovitch was by now rapidly regaining his strength. As soon as he had recovered his powers of thinking and talking clearly he had expressed the keenest interests in all news, and, having nothing to occupy him, decided to improve his scanty English, so that he might hear at first hand as much of the B.B.C. broadcasts as escaped the German jamming. For the purpose Madeleine bought him a Russian-English primer and dictionary, and each evening, as she spoke English well herself, she gave him a lesson. His concentrationon the subject and the fact that he could spend hours on it each day without interruption enabled him to make rapid progress, so that in quite a short time he was able to understand most of the broadcasts and converse with Madeleine in passable English.
    By mid-August he was allowed to get up; by the end of the month he was able to dress himself unaided and walk about the apartment. He now spent a portion of each day sitting with Madame Lavallière, and she took a great fancy to him. While, in fact, being an extremely shrewd realist, he appeared to have all the irresponsibility and lack of care for the future of the traditional Russian. He never tired of talking, and he laughed a lot, making light of the many little hardships which were now beginning to be felt by the Lavallières as a result of the Occupation.
    He told them that to know what hardship really meant they should have lived in Russia during the years immediately following the Revolution. As a young man he had been a Czarist officer, and it was in those days that he had been used to visit Paris on his leaves. Only the confusion of the Civil War and later a passionate admiration for Marshal Voroshilov had caused him to throw in his lot with the Bolsheviks.
    That he had managed to avoid a firing-party and attain the rank of General in the Soviet Army was ample testimony of his extraordinary ability in steering a course through the troubled water of Russian political intrigue; but, although he had so skilfully backed the right people at every turn of the wheel, he was at heart a reactionary, and in secret had always disliked the Soviet régime. For years he had seized every chance to make illegal purchases of foreign
valuta
against the day when, with this hoard of dollars, pounds, francs, marks and lire to support his old age, he would be able to get out; and Gregory Sallust’s coming to the Castle of Kandalaksha, far away upon the White Sea, of which he had been Governor at the time, had given him his longed-for opportunity.
    He was now no longer suffering so acutely from headaches, as Madeleine knew very well, since when he had a bad one she could always see the pain of it reflected in his eyes, but he pretended that he was, particularly in the evenings, as thatgave him an excuse for long sessions of holding her hand. She did not mind that in the least, and it rather amused her to see him pretend that a headache was coming on, only to forget it completely ten minutes later for a good half-hour; then suddenly to remember for a short while that he was