Sotheby's, London, 1936. A paper by Sir Isaac Newton is sold at auction to a bookseller's agent and within minutes of leaving the auction house, he is killed and the paper stolen. For the Nazis are desperate to get their hands on a Newton formula that will unleash the Secret Fire - a weapon beyond all imagining that can wipe their enemies off the face of the earth. And this document is the key . . . unless the French Resistance and SOE operatives also on its trail can stop them.

New York, 2007. Katherine Reckliss learns her grandmother's SOE radio has started picking up disturbing messages from occupied France, warning that a V1 containing the Secret Fire is being launched by the Nazis. Its target? Present-day London.

So begins the desperate race to halt the Secret Fire - both in 1940s Nazi-occupied France and modern-day London. The clock is ticking as history starts to re- write the future in a new and terrifying script . . .

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New York

25 June 2007

The hidden drawer opened at Robert’s first touch.

For a split second the room seemed to twist and roar about him, buckling and cracking, as if the walls of the world were caving in. Robert raised his arms over his head, pushing his chair violently back from the desk, knocking it over onto the wooden floor. He stood staring at the drawer, breathing hard.

Voices rustled at the edge of his mind: go no further, they whispered. Stop now.

Hatred echoed around him. For an instant, he had seen a bloodless face, stark-eyed and vengeful, floating in the darkness that had descended on him. A familiar face.

‘You’re dead!’ Robert hissed in anger.

Outside the window was a fifty-foot drop to the street below. There couldn’t be anyone there, and he was alone in the apartment. No one could be whispering to him. Robert slowly lowered his arms, peering into the darkness outside. Wraiths of mist swirled and eddied in random patterns. No apparition there now. He stood still, listening intently, blood rushing in his ears.

The face was that of a man Robert had fought to the death, two and a half years earlier, a servant and soldier of the Enemy. The memory still haunted him, nightly, in terrifying flashes: trapped underground, a stark sense of loathing rumbling around him like slow thunder . . . For a moment Robert was back there, and he tensed again, ready to defend himself, fists clenched, feet firmly planted, hyper alert to his surroundings.

Nothing. Silence.

He’d seen pale skin, a halo of white hair, piercing eyes . . . it was a face he knew, yes, and yet it was different. There was something else to it that he couldn’t name.

Robert brought his breathing under control, allowing himself to relax slightly.

He let his eyes roam over the desk he had been working at, the abandoned workspace of dear, crazy, loving Adam, his friend, whom the Enemy had destroyed.

His eyes returned to the hidden drawer, now open. Was this what Adam had wanted him to find?

Robert and Adam had been friends at Cambridge University twenty-five years before, rivals in love through the years since, co-conspirators in existential games, mostly of Adam’s devising, colleagues and competitors in the international news business. They’d been two halves, perhaps, of a single man. Air and fire were Adam: spontaneous, daring, ungraspable; earth and water were Robert: grounded, reliable, unstoppable. Each in turn had sought and won the hand of Katherine, the blue-eyed, raven-haired penitent spy who was now Robert’s wife.

There had been darkness over the decades. Adam had tipped over into madness in the 1990s, clawing his way back to the light with Katherine’s and Robert’s help. And throughout, they had been watched over by their mentor, a man charged with guiding them even when they rejected him: Horace Hencott, an Anglophile American and sometime academic, a wartime colleague of Adam’s grandfather. He was an octogenarian mage, the overseer of their individual psychic gifts, which each of them had denied, espoused, fought with, lost and regained over the years.

It was Horace who had brought them to their darkest game nearly three years earlier, a contest with real risks and real victims, the one that had claimed Adam’s life. The Enemy had tried to detonate a doomsday device in Manhattan. Millions of lives had hung by a thread, millions more had faced unbearable suffering. Robert had succeeded by the skin of his teeth in stopping it, at terrible cost to others, and to himself.

But, as Horace had said, the snake was never killed, only scotched. The Enemy had been angered, and would be back, working through new avenues, through new souls, aiming at new targets. It would have to be fought again. Robert, still agitated, stepped forward again to Adam’s desk. On either side were stacked the last ofthe files Horace had instructed Robert to go through after the events in Manhattan, seeking to understand just what Adam had been focusing on in the final months before his death.

Robert was sure Adam had left a message, a series of clues. With Adam, there had always been one more game to play, one more riddle to dragoon his friends into solving, one more chance to organize a party, a scavenger hunt, or another shot at self-discovery.

Robert stood, hands on his hips, staring down at the most recent batch of papers and photographs he had been examining. It had been his obsessive project, as Kat had called it, part of the recovery process Horace had devised for him after 2004: track down and gather together all the research papers and writings Adam had accumulated over his years in London, Miami, Havana and elsewhere, as well as in New York. See what he had learned about himself, and about the Enemy. It was a way of making peace with Adam’s memory, and with the things Robert had done.

Robert raised his eyes and peered into the hidden drawer that he had not noticed until this evening, until a glimmer of light, like a sunbeam reflected on water, had fallen on it repeatedly as he’d worked. A shard of ghost light, from God only knew where.

Snatches of words formed in his mind: Mar . . . regret . . . Robert shook his head, dismissing them, banishing the last echoes of the vision. Focus.

He reached inside the drawer.

It contained a sealed envelope. As he took it out, the air grew colder around his neck and shoulders. Robert felt eyes upon him, and he shivered.

The letter was addressed to him in Adam’s handwriting.

Re-imagining the Past: Research and Reminiscence in writing The Secret Fire
 
I listened, spellbound. It had been nearly 64 years since wartime secret agent Pearl Cornioley’s parachute jump into Nazi-occupied France, but her recollection of that night in September 1943 held me mesmerized.
 
“It was a static line, and consequently as I dropped I could feel the little bits of string cracking. Pop, pop … pop, pop, pop, until finally I felt the shock of the parachute opening itself …”
 
As she spoke, Mme Cornioley, a legendary courier and Resistance organizer with Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), conjured up a whole world of sharp, personal impressions from the dark days of World War Two.
 
It would become the world of The Secret Fire, my second novel.
 
She described the fear of waiting to leap into thin air through a hatch in the fuselage of a Halifax bomber, just 300 feet above the ground, and what it smelled like in a particular SOE safe house. I learned of her determination as a young woman to fight the Nazi domination of her beloved France, and how it felt to stand for hours on unheated night trains, criss-crossing the French countryside with false identity papers …
 
The Secret Fire is set in London and Paris, during World War Two and in the present day. It is both a stand-alone thriller, and a sequel to my first novel, The Malice Box.
 
In 2007 and early 2008, I tracked down several veterans, all in their 90s, of Britain’s wartime intelligence operations in occupied France, seeking to root my story – a tale of love, betrayal and forgiveness, with a strong supernatural twist – as firmly and accurately as possible in the detailed, gritty reality of the period.
 
(Photos and audio clips of our conversations, as well as more details about the historical background to The Secret Fire, can be found on my website, here.)
 
I felt honoured to hear their stories, and scared for my interview subjects even decades after the events. I was appalled at the risks they had run, and at the personal price even some of the survivors had paid.

I was grateful for the opportunity to share their memories, and to fold them, fictionalized and transformed, into my own work, alongside eye-witness accounts of wartime London that I’d found in museums and archives -- some of them unread for years -- and stories of World War Two told by my own parents.

I thought it would be a suitable tribute to try to recapture some of the past they had described to me, in a story that reflected their courage and sacrifice – one in which time itself is treacherous, and even the settled history of nations might be rewritten.
Pearl Cornioley, née Witherington, spoke to me in 2007, just a few months before her death, at the retirement home in central France where she spent the last years of her life.
 
The distinguished historian M.R.D. Foot, author of the official history of SOE, kindly met me for lunch at a Mayfair restaurant, and reminisced about flying into occupied France as an SAS intelligence officer – a mission he barely survived after hostile French farmers, wielding pitchforks, broke his neck.
 
A tough Cockney, Arthur Staggs, saw me at his comfortable flat in the Oxfordshire town of Thame to talk about his time as an SOE radio operator in the Lille region – and the terrifying experience of being captured by the Gestapo.
 
“Rat-a-tat at the door. My friend’s wife opens the door, and who bursts in? Gestapo,” he said. “The Germans walk in, and they’ve got these submachine guns, and one is stuck in my belly. That’s the biggest fright I had. That’s when the shivers came, that’s when the sweat came. I thought: he’s only got to press that trigger, and I’m oblivious.”

Mr Staggs survived weeks of Gestapo interrogation, and was eventually released, his cover story intact. One of his captors even gave him a half-apology, saying they’d thought he was an English agent.

As a result of his wartime experiences, though – the loss of brave friends, the constant strain of clandestinity, his time in captivity -- Mr Staggs suffered from what doctors termed “nervous exhaustion” for seven years after returning home.

Readers of The Malice Box may recall a few glimpses of World War Two in the history of its main characters. The hard-nosed octogenarian Horace Hencott had fought the Nazis as a member of the American OSS, the forerunner of the CIA. The grandmother of penitent spy Katherine Reckliss may also have moved in espionage circles. There was mention that an alchemical document written by Sir Isaac Newton had been acquired by Nazi agents at a 1936 Sotheby’s auction …
 
The Secret Fire tells the story behind those references – a tale mixing documented fact with fiction. Pre-war Parisian occultists pursue the secrets of the alchemical Great Work that is said to turn lead into gold, even as scientists in the same city – the Curie family to the fore – explore the transmutation of the elements by purely physical means, in their experiments with radioactive decay.

As war grips Europe, both kinds of secrets – the atomic and the alchemical – are sought by the Nazis, and the Allies mount a joint SOE-OSS mission to ensure neither falls into enemy hands.
 
Heading the mission is a young Horace Hencott. He’s aided, unbeknownst to him, by an array of selfless forces in rural England, for whom the Nazis are only the latest in a long line of threats against their island kingdom, dating back to the Spanish Armada.
 
Opposing him is the chilling, sadistic Isambard – an acolyte of SS chief Heinrich Himmler, and a leading operative in Himmler’s Ahnenerbe, sometimes known as the Nazi Occult Bureau.
 
The two men battle, in wartime Paris and through the subsequent decades, for the allegiance of double agent Peter Hale, in a contest that may shape the fate of the world – because time, like memory, can fade and flare in The Secret Fire, eddying and flowing in unexpected ways. Guilt and betrayal defy time. Forgiveness can melt its grip.
 
How different might the world be, Horace asks in the novel, if the Nazis were to manage to set off a weapon of mass destruction in London, just a few weeks after D-Day? Or if one of them could still do so today …?

In exploring such alternative histories, I was inspired by the speculation of eminent historians, for example in a 2004 BBC radio programme marking the 60th anniversary of D-Day, about what might have happened if the Normandy landings had failed. In The Secret Fire, I took their musings a step further. What if Himmler’s Ahnenerbe had acquired something akin to an atom bomb …?

In addition to my interviews with wartime secret agents – none of whom were privy to, or responsible for, any of the supernatural elements of my story – I also drew on many other sources.
 
At the National Archives at Kew, and in the reading room of the Imperial War Museum, perched up in the museum’s magnificent dome as though in a pigeon loft, I inspected eyewitness accounts, official reports and photographs of V-1 flying bomb attacks on London – the dreaded “robot bombs”, to use a contemporary phrase, which terrorized Londoners in the months following D-Day. I gathered as much information as I could about the June 30, 1944 V-1 explosion at Aldwych that features so centrally in The Secret Fire.

In rural Northamptonshire I met writer Jean Overton Fuller, who reminisced with me about her close friend Noor Inayat Khan, known in the French Resistance as Madeleine. An SOE radio operator based in Paris in 1943, Ms Inayat Khan was one of the inspirations for my character Rose Arden -- a heroine of The Secret Fire, and the grandmother of Katherine Reckliss. The real-life Madeleine was betrayed, and sent to die at Dachau.
 
I read Madeleine’s SOE personal file at Kew, handling heartbreaking scraps of her life – her practice signatures for her false identity, official reports on her training as a clandestine agent, and a pencil-written note sent to London from the field asking for more radio crystals.

It was a privilege for me to gain these glimpses into the lives of people who lived through such extraordinary circumstances. I hope – at least in fiction – to have recaptured a few fragments of their remarkable pasts.