by Anne Perry
“The situation in the Balkans is getting worse almost by the day,” Shearing went on harshly, glaring at him. “There are rumors that Austria is preparing to invade Serbia. If it does, there is a very real and serious danger that Russia will act to protect Serbia. They are allied in language, culture, and history.” His face was tight, and his hands, dark-skinned, immaculate, were clenched on the desk until the knuckles shone white. “If Russia mobilizes, it will be only a matter of days before Germany follows. The kaiser will see himself as ringed by hostile nations, all fully armed, and growing stronger every week. Unbalanced as he is, to a degree he is right. He will face Russia to the east, and inevitably France to the west. Europe will be at war.”
“But not us,” Matthew said. “We are no threat to anyone, and it’s hardly our concern.”
“God knows,” Shearing replied.
“Isn’t that exactly the time the Irish Nationalists would strike?” Matthew could not forget the document and the outrage in his father’s voice. He could not let go. “It would be if I were their leader.”
“I daresay God knows that, too,” Shearing said waspishly. “But you will leave it to the Special Branch. Ireland is their problem. Concentrate on Europe. That is an order, Reavley!” He picked up a small bundle of papers from the top of his desk and held it out. “By the way, C wants you in his office in half an hour.” He did not look up as he said it.
Matthew froze. Sir Mansfield Smith-Cumming had been head of the Secret Intelligence Service since 1909. He had begun his career as a sublieutenant in the Royal Navy, serving in the East Indies, until he was placed on the inactive list for chronic seasickness. In 1898 he had been recalled and had undertaken many highly successful espionage duties for the Admiralty. Now the agency he led served all branches of the military and the high-level political departments.
“Yes, sir,” Matthew said hoarsely, his mind racing. Before Shearing could look up, he turned on his heel and went out into the corridor. He was shaking.
Precisely thirty minutes later Matthew was shown into Smith-Cumming’s inner office. Smith-Cumming looked up at him, his face unsmiling.
“Captain Reavley, sir,” Matthew said. “You sent for me.”
“I did,” C agreed.
Matthew waited, his heart pounding, his throat tight. He knew that his entire professional future lay in what he said, or omitted, in this interview.
“Sit down,” C ordered. “You are going to remain until you tell me all you know about this conspiracy you are chasing.”
Matthew was glad to sit. He pulled the nearest chair around to face C and sank into it.
“Obviously you do not have the documentary proof,” C began. “Neither, apparently, does the man who has been shadowing you, and occasionally me.”
Matthew sat motionless.
“You did not know that?” C observed.
“I knew someone was following me, sir,” Matthew said quickly, swallowing hard. “I did not know anyone had followed you.”
C’s eyebrows rose, softening a little of the sternness of his face. “Do you know who he is?”
“No, sir.” He thought of offering excuses and decided instantly against it.
“He is a German agent named Brandt. Unfortunately we don’t know much more about him than that. Where and when did you first hear of this document, and from whom?”
Matthew did not even consider the possibility of lying. “From my father, sir, on the telephone, on the evening of June twenty-seventh.”
“Where were you?”
“In my office, sir.” He felt his face grow hot as he said it. The crumpled car was sharp in his mind, his father’s face, the scream of tires. For a moment he felt sick.
C’s face softened. “What did he say to you?”
Matthew kept his voice level with difficulty, but he could not control the hoarseness in it. “That he had found a document in which was outlined a conspiracy that would ruin England’s honor forever, and change the world irreparably for the worse.”
“Had you heard anything of this before?”
“No, sir.”
“Did you find it hard to believe?”
“Yes. Almost impossible.” He was ashamed of it, but that was the truth.
“Did you repeat it, to make sure you had understood him?”
“No, sir.” Matthew felt the heat burn up his face. “But I did repeat the fact that he was bringing it to me the following day.” The admission was damning. The only thing more completely guilty would have been to lie about it now.
C nodded. There was compassion in his eyes. “So whoever overheard you already knew that the document was missing, and that your father had it. That tells us a great deal. What else do you know?”
“My father’s car was deliberately ambushed and sent off the road, killing both my parents,” Matthew answered. He saw the flash of pity in C’s face. He took a deep breath. “When I heard about it from the police, I went to Cambridge to pick up my elder brother, Joseph—”
“He didn’t know?” C interrupted. “He was closer, and older than you?”
“Yes, sir. He was at a cricket match. He lost his wife about a year ago. I don’t think the police wanted someone from college telling him. The master was at the match as well, and most of his friends.”
“I see. So you drove to Cambridge and told him. What then?”
“We identified our parents’ bodies, and I searched their effects, and then the wreckage of the car—to find the document. It wasn’t there. Then when we got home I searched there also, and asked the bank and our solicitor. When we returned from the funeral, the house had been searched by someone else.”
“Unsuccessfully,” C added. “They appear to be still looking for it. Presumably a second copy, which would suggest it is some kind of agreement. Your father indicated no names?”
“No, sir.”
C stared at him, frowning. For the first time Matthew sensed the depth of his anxiety. “You knew your father, Reavley. What was he interested in? Whom did he know? Where could he have found this document?”
“I’ve thought about it very hard, sir, and I’ve spoken to several of his closest friends, and as far as I can tell, they know nothing. When I mentioned plots, they all said Father was naive and out of touch with reality.” He was surprised how much that still hurt to say.
C smiled, the amusement reaching all the way to his eyes.
“It seems they did not know your father very well.” Then his face hardened. “Resist the temptation to prove that they are wrong, Reavley, whatever it cost you!”
Matthew swallowed. “Yes, sir.”
“So you have no idea what this is about?”
“No, sir. I imagined it might be an Irish plot to assassinate the king, but—”
“Yes.” C waved his hand briefly, dismissing it. “I know that. Pointless. Hannassey is not a fool. It is European, not Irish. Mr. Brandt is not interested in the independence or otherwise of Ireland, except as it might affect our military abilities. But that is something to consider. If we are involved in civil war in Ireland, our limited resources will be strained to the maximum.”
He leaned forward a few inches. “Find it, Reavley. Find out who is behind it. Where did the document come from? For whom was it intended?” He pushed a piece of paper across the top of his desk. “This is a list of German agents in London of whom we know. The first is at the German embassy, the second is a carpet manufacturer, the third is a minor member of the German royal family presently living in London. Be extremely discreet. You should be aware by now that your life depends on it. Confide in no one at all.” He met Matthew’s eyes in a cold, level gaze. “No one! Not Shearing, not your brother—no one at all. When you have an answer, bring it to me.”
“Yes, sir.” Matthew stood up, reached for the paper, read it, and passed it back.
C took it and put it in a drawer. “I’m sorry about your father, Captain Reavley.”
“Thank you, sir.” Matthew stood to attention for
a moment, then turned and left, his mind already racing.
In the upstairs sitting room of the house on Marchmont Street, the Peacemaker stood by the window. He watched as a younger man walked briskly along the pavement, glancing occasionally at the houses to this side. He was reading the numbers. He had been here before, twice to be exact, but on both occasions brought by car, and at night.
The man in the street stopped, glanced up, and satisfied himself that he had found what he was looking for.
The Peacemaker stepped back, just one pace. He did not wish to be seen waiting. He had recognized the man below even before he saw his thick dark hair or the broad brow and wide-set eyes. It was a powerful face, emotional, that of a man who follows his ideals regardless of where they led him . . . over the cliffs of reason and into the abyss, if need be. He knew his easy walk, the mixture of grace and arrogance. He was a northerner, a Yorkshireman, with all the pride and the aggressive stubbornness of the land from which he came.
The doorbell rang, and a moment later it was opened by the butler. There followed a short silence, then footsteps up the stairs—soft, light, those of a man used to climbing the fells and dales—then a tap on the door.
“Come,” he answered.
The door opened and Richard Mason came in. He was almost six feet tall, an inch or two less than the Peacemaker, but he was more robust, and his skin had the wind and sunburn of one who travels.
“You sent for me, sir?” he said. His voice was unusual, his diction perfect, as if he had been trained for drama and the love of words. It had a sibilance so slight one was not certain if it was there or not, and one listened to catch it again.
“Yes,” the Peacemaker assured him. They both remained standing, as if to be seated was too much a sign of ease for the situation that brought them together. “Events are moving very rapidly.”
“I am aware of that,” Mason said with only the merest touch of asperity. “Do you have the document?”
“No.” That was a tight, hard word carrying a burden of anger in it so great one expected to see his shoulders bend under it. But he remained upright, his face pale. “I’ve had men searching for it, but we have no idea where it went. It wasn’t in the car or on the bodies, and we’ve tried the house twice.”
“Could he have destroyed it?” Mason asked dubiously.
“No.” The answer was immediate. “He was”—he gave the merest shrug—“an innocent man in some ways, but he was not a fool. He knew the meaning of the document, and he knew no one would believe him without it. Under his calm manner, he was as stubborn as a mule.” His face tightened in the sunlight through the bay windows. “He would never deliberately have defaced it, let alone destroyed it.”
Mason stood still, his pulse beating hard. He had some idea of how much was at stake, but the enormities of it stretched into an unimaginable future. The sights of war still haunted his nightmares, but the blood, the pain, and the loss of the past would be no more than a foretaste of what could happen in Europe, and eventually the world. Any risk at all was worth the price in order to prevent that, even this price.
“We can’t waste any more time looking,” the Peacemaker went on. “Events are overtaking us. I have it from excellent sources that Austria is preparing to invade Serbia. Serbia will resist, we all know that, and then Russia will mobilize. Once Germany enters France it will be over in a matter of days, weeks at the most. Schlieffen has drawn up a plan of absolute exactitude, every move timed to perfection. The German army will be in Paris before the rest of the world has time to react.”
“Is there still a chance we will remain out of it?” Mason asked. He was a foreign correspondent. He knew Austria and Germany almost as well as the man who stood opposite him, with his background, his aristocratic connections stretching as high as the junior branches of the royal family on both sides of the North Sea, his brilliance with languages. They shared a rage at the slaughter and destruction of war. The highest goal a man could achieve would be to prevent that from ever happening again, by any means at all.
The Peacemaker chewed his lip, his face strained with tension. “I think so. But there are difficulties. I’ve got an SIS man breathing down my neck. Reavley’s son, actually. He’s not important, just a nuisance. I doubt it will be necessary to do anything about him. Don’t want to draw attention. Fortunately he’s looking in the wrong direction. By the time he realizes it, it won’t matter anymore.”
“Another copy of the document?” Mason asked. The idea in it was brilliant, more daring than anything he could have imagined. The sheer size of it dazzled him.
When the Peacemaker had first told him of it, it had taken his breath away. They had been walking slowly along the Thames Embankment, the lights dancing on the water, the smell of the incoming tide, the sounds of laughter across the river, the pleasure boats making their slow way upstream toward Kew. He had stood rooted to the spot, lost for words.
Slowly the plan had moved from a dream, lightly touched on, into a wish, and finally a reality. He still felt a little like a man who had created a unicorn in his imagination, only to walk into his garden one day and find one grazing there, milk-white, with cloven hooves and silver horn—a living and breathing animal.
“We haven’t found a second copy,” the Peacemaker answered grimly. “At least not yet. I’ve done a certain amount to discredit John Reavley. I wish it hadn’t been necessary.” He looked sharply at Mason as he saw the alarm in his eyes. “Nothing overt!” he snapped. “We need to give it time for the dust to settle.” His mouth pinched unhappily, a shadow in his eyes. “Sometimes the sacrifice is heavy,” he said softly. “But if he had understood, I think he would have paid it willingly. He was not an arrogant man, certainly not greedy, and not a fool, but he was simplistic. He believed what he wanted to, and there is no use arguing with a man like that. A pity. We could have used him otherwise.”
Mason felt a heaviness settle on him, too, an ache of regret inside him. But he had seen the devastation of war and human cruelty in the Balkans only a year ago, between Turkey and Bulgaria, and the memory of it still soaked his nightmares in horror and he woke trembling and drenched in sweat.
Before that, as a younger man he had gone east and reported the eyewitness accounts of the Japanese sinking of the entire Russian fleet in 1905. Thousands of men were buried in steel coffins under the trackless water, nothing remaining but the stunned loss, the grief of families from half a continent.
Earlier still, on the first foreign assignment of his career, he had watched the farmers on the veldt in Africa, the pitiable dispossessed, wending their slow way across the endless open plains. He had watched the women and children die.
None of it must happen again, Richard Mason vowed to himself. One should not permit such things to happen to other human beings. “A statesman has to think of individuals,” he said.
“We have other things to consider,” the Peacemaker said. “Without the document war may be inevitable. We must do what we can to make sure that it is quick and clean. There are many possibilities, and I have plans in place, at least on the home front. We can still have tremendous effect.”
“I imagine it will be brief,” Mason concurred. “Especially if Schlieffen’s plan works. But it will be bloody. Thousands will be slaughtered.” He used the word bitterly and deliberately.
The Peacemaker’s smile was thin. “Then it is even more important that we ensure it is as short as possible. I have been giving it a great deal of thought over the last few days—since the document was taken, in fact.” A sudden fury gripped him, clenching his body and draining the blood from his face until his skin was pallid and his eyes glittered. “Damn Reavley!” his voice choked on the name. “Damn him to hell! If he’d just kept out of it, we could have prevented this! Tens of thousands of lives are going to be lost! For what?” He flung his hand out, fingers spread wide enough to have played over an octave with ease. “It didn’t have to happen!” He gulped in air and carefully steadied himself, breathi
ng in and out several times until his color returned and his shoulders relaxed.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t bear to think of the ruin of a way of life that is the culmination of millennia of civilization—all unnecessary! How many widows will there be? How many orphans? How many mothers waiting for their sons who will never come home from a war they didn’t ask for and didn’t want?”
“I know,” Mason said almost under his breath. “Why do you think I’m doing this? It’s like drinking poison, but the only alternative is a slow journey into hell from which we won’t come back.”
“You’re right,” the Peacemaker responded, turning toward the light streaming in through the window. “I know! I’m heartsick that we came so close and lost it through an idiotic piece of mischance—a German philosopher with good handwriting and an inquisitive ex-politician who was damned useless at it anyway, and all our plans are jeopardized. But it’s too early to despair.
“We must prepare for war, if it comes. And I have several ideas, with the groundwork already laid, just in case. Everything we value depends on our success.” He rubbed his hand over his brow. “Goddamn it! The Germans are our natural allies. We come from the same blood, the same language, the same heritage of nature and character!”
He stopped for a moment, regaining his composure. “But perhaps it is no more than a setback. We don’t have the document, but neither do they. If they did, Matthew Reavley wouldn’t still be looking for it and asking questions.” His face hardened again. “We have to see at all costs that he doesn’t obtain that document. If it fell into the wrong hands, it would be disastrous!”
