Emerald Decision

by Craig Thomas

  March looked up as if slapped. "Beneath your absolute conviction of your own brilliance, Charles, are you equally convinced of the reality of this German invasion?"

  "Sir, I am." Walsingham's cheek glowed at the accusation of arrogance. Its truth struck him as he went on staring at the portrait of the King-Emperor. "Yes. Admiral, I'm convinced that the Germans are planning an invasion of Ireland — as a beach-head to replace the foundered Sea Lion venture. A second front against the mainland United Kingdom. And a means of closing, finally, the convoy routes. Just imagine U-boat bases in Ireland—"

  March, surprisingly, nodded. "We've been wrong, or behindhand, or short-sighted most of this year. We can't afford to be wrong again." His eyes were hard as he looked up into Walsingham's young face. "God, Charles, I hope you're wrong about this!" Then he seemed to shrug off such speculation as useless. "We'd better get something organized. You'll want experts, of course—"

  "Sir, I'd like to use my man McBride, and Lieutenant Gilliatt, the officer who—"

  "Yes, I know who Gilliatt is. Formerly of the Intelligence Division, yes." March pondered it. "You have a predilection for this man McBride — you obviously think him good." Walsingham nodded. "If you in your unbounded arrogance think him good, then he must live up to an impossible standard! You're ruthless in your assessment of people, Charles—" Walsingham's features remained an inexpressive mask, and March brushed his hand across the desk as if to dismiss the ineffectual reprimand. "Very well, get McBride here as soon as you can. Operation plan to be on my desk first thing in the morning!"

  October 198-

  "I see. Very well. If Mr Walsingham is going to be absent for the next few days, perhaps you could give him a message when he returns — would you inform him that the son of Michael McBride — yes, that's right, Irish spelling — his son is making enquiries into Emerald Necklace—" Drummond chuckled. "Yes, it does sound mysterious. Please tell him that, would you. Goodbye."

  Drummond replaced the receiver, and sat back in his chair, smiling up at the ceiling of his study. Outside, the evening was quiet except for a fresh little wind that had sprung up at sunset. The house, too, seemed silent, and empty. His face sagged into folds that mirrored his mental lethargy now he had delivered his message. Walsingham was Head of the Directorate of Security, and it had consequently taken Drummond a considerable time to get through even to his senior aide. As Head of the DS (MIS), Walsingham had an official civil service rank as a Permanent Under-Secretary at the Home Office, and was hedged about with the expected number of assistants, aides, secretaries, all of whom had needed placating before he could leave his cryptic message. A glimpse of Walsingham's face when he received it would have been worth having.

  Drummond felt tired, and edgy, unrelaxed. He was disinclined to listen to the gramophone or Radio 3. Nothing attracted him to the television. On the ceiling, clear as pictures, his own past glimmered. McBride was roughly assisting him down a road he did not wish to follow. And the father lurked behind the son, the recollected smile a pain in his side. His stomach felt gaseous and empty, but he could not be bothered to cook a meal. He was nearly eighty, for heaven's sake, and these pictures bobbing unwilled out of the dark at the back of his mind were harsh and unwelcome.

  He heard a small car approaching, and suddenly shuddered as if he had opened a window to the breeze. It stopped outside, and he heard the approaching footsteps with something like terror. The present wiped away the ceiling-images rudely, insisting with a contemporary nightmare of its own. The doorbell rang. Sighing, he got shakily to his feet and went to the front door. He switched on every light he passed.

  It was Moynihan, as he had known it would be. He had recognized the car engine. Moynihan was grinning.

  "You'll invite me in, then?" he said. Drummond reluctantly made way for him. Moynihan, familiar with the house, made for the study, warming his hands at the fire whose flames shimmered on the ceiling. He sat down in the easy chair opposite Drummond's own. With unwilling complicity, Drummond poured two whiskies and handed one to Moynihan. "I suppose your coming was inevitable," Drummond said, sitting heavily in his chair, swallowing at his drink.

  "Naturally, Admiral." Drummond winced at the rank, his face pursing. "I made sure they got off all right from the airport." Drummond appeared startled. "Don't worry. McBride didn't see me. But, as I was saying to you, I saw them off, then came straight here — for a briefing." Moynihan laughed.

  "Claire will be all right!"

  "Come now, Admiral. We know they're not looking for her. She's your daughter, dear God — how safe could she be?" He laughed again. "No, just tell me what he'll be up to in London."

  "Admiralty records, for the most part. He'll find the sort of thing you need there—" A swift passage of emotions across Drummond's face, to which Moynihan attended. Many of them puzzled him, and Drummond, he finally decided, was confused with age and senility. Fear, concern, sense of betrayal like repeating images. Claire had suggested her father was totally pliable, which he was. But she hadn't suggested an intense mental life surrounding what he had been forced to do with regard to McBride — point him back to London.

  "Gilliatt—" Drummond began, then fell silent.

  "Yes? Us, do you mean?" Drummond nodded. "No, I think he died naturally — old age. Unless it was — someone else?" Moynihan thought of Goessler, but remained silent. He didn't know.

  "God, it's a mess!"

  "Your daughter joining us, you mean?" Drummond nodded. "Ah, well, Admiral. Not your fault she's more Irish than a lot of the Irish are. She was born here." Regret again on Drummond's face. "I'll keep an eye on her in London, don't you fret, Admiral. She'll be quite safe. And you've played your part splendidly, haven't you now?"

  Drummond, staring into the fire, regretted his call to Walsingham, regretted even mentioning his name to McBride. Claire had no idea that Walsingham was still in intelligence work; she thought of him as a civil servant. What had he done to her? Had he betrayed her?

  He was horribly, inescapably caught in a trap. He saw that now. How could he save his daughter by betraying her? How would that get her out of Moynihan's hands? He'd led McBride on, played his part in McBride's betrayal, as she had wanted and demanded. But what had he done to her, telling Walsingham?

  Even after Moynihan had left, indifferent to the old man's silence, he sat on staring into the fire, the empty glass still clenched in his hand. What had he done to Claire? What would happen to her?

  Even when he occasionally glanced at the ceiling, it was only a screen for the past. McBride's father. All those years ago, what had he done to Michael McBride?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  French Leave

  October 198-

  On the screen, the Irish Prime Minister — the bastard — was waving to the camera, smiling broadly yet with appropriate gravity at the little knot of reporters and their microphones closing in on him like an ambush. Nodding — giving away what he had to say even before he opened his bloody mouth — smiling like a child, beatifically… like a priest at a fund-raising. Beginning to answer the press of questions, the excited demands to know of the Cabinet's decision… would he go to London next week? Nod, nod — nod -

  Guthrie had done it, he'd persuaded Dublin to talk, to take the first step in reaffirming that bloody, damned, bloody Agreement over Ulster and the Provisionals!

  Moynihan crossed the room and switched off the television. The screen flared down to a white spot which he watched as if mesmerized. Then, when he seemed satisfied that the images from the BBC news would not reassert themselves on the screen, he returned to his chair. The hotel room was thick with cigarette smoke, there were opened and empty beer bottles on the small writing-desk and the low table by his chair. The bed was unmade. The hotel in Bloomsbury had been his London base on more than one occasion; one of those anonymous hotels used by commercial travellers or football supporters and by members of illegal organizations. Moynihan was not a man the Special Branch or MI5 put high on wanted lis
ts or whose movements they assiduously watched, and the hotel was one remove from the seedier refuges of terrorists and illegal immigrants.

  He lit another cigarette, glancing distastefully at the crowded ash-tray as he did so. He exhaled the smoke towards the ceiling. He knew — they all knew by now — that Guthrie and the British had gained a crucial advantage; they had outwitted and outdistanced the whole organization! A furious, angry frustration possessed him, making his free hand clench and unclench repeatedly as he sat waiting for his visitor. He was impotent, in the hands of others. He wanted to hit back, make assertions of his own. Claire was in London with McBride, but the thought brought no comfort or respite from his anger. McBride, fiddling in old records, could not, in Moynihan's imagination, successfully oppose this latest setback. People wanted results — he wanted results. This was no way to get them. Damn the British — they'd seized the advantage. He was left with McBride, a useless dummy. There was a knock at his door. He stubbed out the cigarette instantly, came out of the chair like a lithe animal, gun appearing in his hands from behind the cushion, and he moved silently to the door. Action, even this action, charged him with a subtle electricity. He almost wanted it to be Special Branch on the other side of the flimsy woodwork, flimsy as flesh and bone—

  "Yes?"

  "Lobke."

  Carefully, he opened the door on its safety-chain. The young East German's face smiled at him, saw the gun, and smiled more broadly. Moynihan unlatched the chain and let Lobke in.

  "You're late," he said, closing the door. Lobke seated himself almost primly in a chair opposite that bearing the impression of Moynihan's weight. He had shaken his head quickly at the unmade bed.

  "I'm sorry, Herr Moynihan. Business, you know—" He raised his hands, let them drop, recollecting his purchases in Selfridge's and John Lewis's.

  "Making sure McBride dots his i's and crosses his t's, I suppose?" Moynihan sneered.

  "You seem on edge, Herr Moynihan?" Lobke was looking at the beer bottles. He waved towards them with one hand. "You have any that are full?"

  Moynihan took two bottles of Guinness from the string bag under the bed, opened them and poured some of the black stout into a tooth-glass, almost deliberately letting the thick head overflow. He handed it to Lobke, who sipped, then said, "I prefer the dark beer they make in Prague — you've tried it, Herr Moynihan?" He sipped again. "It's very good — the Czech beer, I mean."

  "Bloody connoisseur," Moynihan muttered, sitting down, lighting another cigarette. Lobke watched him.

  "Count the stubs, Herr Lobke?" Moynihan invited. Lobke shook his head, smiling.

  "I understand how you feel — like a caged animal." Moynihan nodded, disliking even that much agreement with Lobke's analysis. "Herr Goessler has sent me to tell you that we think McBride is making good progress — he is refining his researches just as we would wish."

  "God, this bloody game you and fatty Goessler are playing!" Lobke's nose wrinkled in disgust. Moynihan leaned forward in his chair, drawing deeply on the cigarette. Stout slopped from his own glass onto the thin carpet between his feet. "You tied my bloody hands from the beginning, Lobke. I had no choice!" His fist clenched in front of him; the glass of stout appeared fragile and threatened in his other hand.

  "You were like a greedy child," Lobke observed, speaking almost with Goessler's tones.

  "Mother of God, you take some beating, Lobke. Goessler offers me the chance to create the biggest mess the Brits could find themselves in — what in hell do you think I'd have done for that? You can have my right arm, Lobke, but for God's sake get something done!" Moynihan's upper lip was shining with sweat. His eyes were intense, burning as if with a fever.

  "Calm down, Herr Moynihan. McBride is now clearly on the right track. He will soon bring to the surface the elements of the situation that you require. Then — you can have him."

  "Tell me—"

  "No. Not yet. But it will ruin Guthrie, it will discredit the British Government in Ulster, poison the atmosphere for future talks for perhaps ten years, alienate world opinion, especially America, bring funds from NORAID and Libya flooding back into your pockets — what more could you ask, Herr Moynihan?" Lobke's smile was especially irritating at that moment. Moynihan wanted to hit him, but wanted more to remove from his own features the hungry eagerness he knew they displayed.

  "So you say," he said.

  "We know, Herr Moynihan. What we promise, we deliver. Guns, explosives, papers — and Guthrie's head on a plate. But, patience is a virtue—"

  "All right, all right. What about Claire?"

  "She is doing her job, I believe?"

  "Has she been to bed with him yet?"

  "Soon, I believe. Another little sacrifice, Herr Moynihan. In the expectation of great things, mm?"

  "Just deliver, Lobke — or I'll have your balls, so help me I will. In a specimen jar, and labelled."

  * * *

  Thomas McBride considered, as he heard the key scraping in the lock of her hotel room next door to his, the last few days, since their meal in Kilbrittain. Moynihan had been a momentary irritation, having left after sharing a drink with them, walking out of their lives quite deliberately, it now seemed to him. She had explained him away as a friend, and he believed her. He listened intently, sitting at his desk, the day's notes in front of him, as she opened her door and entered her room. The kisses on the hill above Leap, and since, had promised without fulfilment. He did want her, yet more he attended to her noises in the next room as if to something loved through familiarity. He was prepared to wait for her.

  He disregarded his recent sexual experiences, the few relationships with students of his — plus one brief affair with a feminist associate professor that had ended a year before — because Claire Drummond had placed them in an un-flattering, immature light. They displayed themselves to his memory as pointless affairs of self-flattery, affairs of taking rather than giving. By ignoring or despising them now he understood himself to be more than half in love with Claire already, and entirely acquiescent to the idea of loving her.

  Tourist things, they'd done mainly tourist things. The shops, the sights, a lot of laughter that shaded into smiles of promise and acceptance. He was — this he was prepared to admit because he welcomed the sensation — besotted with her. He wanted to make love to her; more he wanted to love her and be loved. He felt his breathing shallow and quick as he waited for her to knock on the interconnecting door between rooms 402 and 404 of the Portman Hotel. And when she came in, he wanted her arms to be full of parcels purchased with the money he had given her for clothes — she had her own money, enough for Liberty's and all the expensive clothes she wanted, but he had given her the gift of a blank cheque as a declaration. No strings attached, he had said, and almost meant it.

  She knocked, and walked in. Her arms were full of bags, above which she was smiling almost apologetically, and she suggested a past and a context to their relationship which had remained absent until that moment. He felt a rush of gratitude in his chest.

  She was wearing new boots, and a new dress. She heaped the packages on his bed, taking a winter coat from one of the larger bags, which she put on and paraded before him. She did not make the fashion show an occasion for titillation, nor did he regard her as an object of immediate desire. She seemed closer to him, better known, than that.

  "You like them, then? You approve?" He nodded. She draped the coat over a chair, then sat down. "Pour me a drink — shopping in London is murder."

  He poured whisky for them both, toasted her, then she came and stood by his side, looking down at his notes.

  "Busy day?"

  "It must be easier than shopping in London," he observed, his hand wiping across his notebooks, the arranged scraps of paper.

  "Are you getting anywhere?" she asked. He was aware of her thigh against his shoulder; aware too, of another mood suggested. He watched her parading her purchases now in a different way, replaying the images to himself — turn of the body, line
of the thigh and hip he could sense through his shirt-sleeve, breasts only emphasized by the new dress.

  "I — yes, I think I am. I'm looking at naval activity around that period, near the Irish coast and the French coast."

  "What have you found?" Her thigh pressed with an emphasis — he was sure of it — against him. He heard the rustle of the dress against her tights.

  "I'm not quite sure, yet. There are some important factors I know already, of course. The St George's Channel minefield, for example—" He looked up at her. She seemed almost brooding, not looking at him but at his papers.

  "What—?"

  "The minefield protecting the channel between Cornwall and Ireland. The Germans would have had to deal with it if they wanted to land between Cork and Waterford."

  "And—?" Her hand on his shoulder was an almost absent gesture. He shivered, barely perceptibly, and she seemed not to register the reaction she had created.

  "I haven't found any evidence of the minefield having been swept by the Germans. But a British minesweeping flotilla left Milford Haven — in Pembrokeshire — under sealed orders at just about the right time. I'm trying to follow their progress. I'd like to know where they went, and what they did."

  "Why?"

  "I don't know — maybe it's just a hunch? I have some reports from Admiralty Intelligence about troop movements in the Brest area of Brittany about the time—" He looked up at her. "I know I'm close to it!"

  She smiled with a peculiar intensity, transferring her gaze to her hand on his shoulder, then swallowing some of the whisky. She seemed intensely alert, expectant, and for a moment McBride thought her concentration had nothing to do with their physical proximity.

  "Good," she said, and it was obvious she had lost interest. Her hand rubbed the hair at the nape of his neck.

  "That minesweeping flotilla lay at anchor on its return for three days — the flotilla captain was ordered to London—" Then he added, his voice thick and his concentration elsewhere: "There's something about the time of return, and the sailing date — I almost realized what it was just as you walked in—" Then he gave up the small, and quite uninteresting, spark of enquiry, putting his arm around her thighs, squeezing her against him. She moved slightly closer, then bent in front of him, putting down her glass on his notes. Normally fastidious, the wet ring created on his notebook did not irritate him.