Free Betrayal by J. Robert Janes Page B

seventy-five feet in length, and at the end of it, more stairs began again and it was still so very silent, it made her shudder.
    Jimmy was waiting on the battlements some eighty feet above. The wind was freezing. It drove the flag above him to desperation, and at first he didn’t say a thing, and she thought then that it really was all up for her, but she wouldn’t beg, not even for Hamish’s sake.
    A Vickers machine gun covered the bailey. One of the merlons had been taken down so as to widen the embrassure and give the thing a greater field of fire. Sandbags helped to buttress the gun and its crew of three.
    Two sentries, armed with Lee Enfields, stood to attention in the wings. Was she to be arrested?
    â€˜Well, Mrs. Fraser, good of you to have come. Major Trant thought you might like the view. I hope you’re not dizzy.’
    â€˜Jimmy, why this? Why up here? What’s happened?’
    She was looking positively ill. Allanby hesitated, asked harshly of himself as he had many times before, Why the bloody hell did Hamish Fraser have to have a wife like this?
    Her eyes were moistening rapidly—was it simply because of the wind, he wondered, or because she was afraid of what she’d been up to? ‘The prisoners are confined to their barrack rooms until further notice.’
    â€˜Then why the machine gun?’ demanded Mary, seeing nothing in his gaze but the brutal emptiness of an accuser.
    â€˜They’re allowed an hour of exercise under Sergeant Stuart’s command—push-ups, calisthenics, a forced run of three miles around the compound.’
    The bailey and its ring road. ‘I see,’ she said, turning away to look out over the place and catch glimpses of other machine guns and other sentries on the high points, on subordinate towers and along the battlements of the intervening walls. Had they always been up here? Had there always been so many, and why would Jimmy let her see them if he knew she was meeting Erich Kramer in secret and would be bound to tell him?
    â€˜They’ve threatened to break out, have they?’ she asked, unable to keep the sarcasm from her. Like Fay Darcy, Jimmy had chosen to stand directly behind her, the gun crew and sentries hearing everything, of course, because normal conversation was impossible and one had to all but yell.
    â€˜They’ve hanged an innocent man, Mrs. Fraser. A man who had no use for their Nazi doctrines and was strong enough to have said so.’
    â€˜An informer?’ she asked too swiftly, biting back the tears, knowing that it really was all up for her.
    She was still clutching her latest bundle of books by its string. A gust of wind flung her hair about, she still not turning to face him. Crying now, was she? he wondered. Allanby knew he wanted to break her, wanted to smash that infernal pride. ‘That husband of yours has threatened to take his bitching to London, to a higher authority than the British High Command in Belfast. To put it bluntly, he wants to mollycoddle murderers—Nazi swine, Mrs. Fraser. There’s a war on.’
    â€˜And some of them have been pretty badly wounded.’
    Must she always rankle him? ‘Our authority can’t be challenged. There is the law of the land to be obeyed. British law.’
    â€˜Then why let me in?’
    Allanby wanted to shriek, ‘Look at me, damn you!’ but would hold himself in check and every bit as erect. ‘Because, as a measure of our good faith, and in hopes one of them will come forward, the colonel’s decided to allow the library to be reopened three afternoons a week.’
    â€˜From two until four?’ she asked, knowing Hamish must have raised hell.
    â€˜On market days.’
    Stung by this, Mary turned to angrily face him. He couldn’t have known she had agreed to meet Nolan and the others on those days. He couldn’t! Yet still there was that emptiness. Jimmy was watching her far too closely. A raw,