Angels in the Gloom wwi-3

by Anne Perry

  “Sabotaged?” She affected surprise, her dark eyes wide. “The Americans would never do that, surely?”

  “At sea,” he corrected her.

  “At sea? How?” She did not disguise her interest.

  That made it easier. Now they were playing the game again, threading the lies in with the truth, testing each other, tying the knots of emotion tighter and tighter.

  “Smoke bombs,” he answered. “Pack them in the hold, along with the shells, and set them to go off when the ship’s at sea. It looks like fire. Then, of course, the captain has no choice but to flood the holds, and the shells are damaged. Not all of them, and there’s no way to tell which. From the outside they look perfectly all right. We’re so desperate for munitions, we can’t afford to turn them down.”

  “How do you know they’re smoke bombs?” she asked. “Do you find them?”

  “We know they’re being put there,” he answered. “We have men in several of the American East Coast ports.” He was not sure whether to go on. Was that enough? Might she realize what he was doing if he added any more?

  “Then why don’t you stop it?” she said curiously, her faintly uneven brows giving her a quizzical look. “You can’t be squeamish! Or are you afraid of upsetting the Americans?”

  He gave her a sidelong, incredulous look. “Of course we aren’t squeamish! What about? Taking out one or two saboteurs? Showing them up to the Americans? We can do it without causing a diplomatic incident. It’s just too soon to act. We know who they are. If we take them out now, they’ll only be replaced by others that we don’t know. Far better to wait, and trace the whole organization, then we can get rid of all of them.”

  “How can you do that?” She turned her hands up and smiled broadly. “Sorry! Shouldn’t have asked. I’m Irish—you’d hardly tell me.” There was laughter in her eyes. And then she did laugh. He had realized weeks ago that the hunt, the battle, was part of her life. The legends of Celtic conquest and mysticism, the heroes of the past with their love and their loss woven together inextricably, were part of her identity. If she won this struggle, she would have to find a new one. She needed to seek the unattainable, to voyage beyond the known. Her crusades fed her dreams, and starved her heart.

  If she were more realistic, if the fire in her burned under control, he might like her just as much, but the magic that enchanted him would be gone, and the vulnerability that made her so very human.

  “If it were a secret I wouldn’t tell you, even if you were English,” he replied, smiling at her as she winced at the insult. “But it’s only the obvious,” he went on. “Just what you would do yourself: Follow the flow of money. If we get agents into the banking system at all the right points, we can prove to the Americans exactly what is happening. And the other thing, of course, is to put pressure at the right places, at exactly the right time, and turn one of their agents. Or should I say one of yours?”

  She shook her head. “Not ours! I’m strictly for freedom of my own land from British oppression, that’s all.”

  He did not challenge her. He might get into an argument in which he would say too much and give away more of his purpose than he could afford, or too little, and make his reason for being with her obvious. Nor did he want to quarrel with her. He smiled. “All right, not yours,” he conceded. “German.”

  The girl in blue was singing again, this time “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag,” with its injunction to “smile, smile, smile.”

  Detta looked at her glass, twisting it slowly in her fingers. “Do you think you can turn people’s loyalties?” she asked with a lift of doubt. “How would you know if you had, and they weren’t just feeding you the information their masters wanted you to have? Even taking back bits and pieces about you?” She lifted her eyes quickly to meet his, bright and dark, full of a hidden laughter that was always on the edge of sadness.

  He smiled back, a wall of humor against reality. “I don’t.”

  She gave an elegant shrug. Her shoulders were beautiful. He had no idea whether she was conscious of it or not.

  “There are ways,” he added, aware that he had not said enough. “You measure one against another, advance information against what actually happens. But it’s pretty hard to turn people. You must have powerful information to do it, and unless they’re stupid, they know the risks. Their own people will kill them if they’re caught.”

  She looked away across the room. “Part of the price. I can’t imagine betraying your own like that. I’d rather die.”

  He said nothing. The Irish did not kill their traitors easily; more often they made examples of them by breaking their knees. Many a man never walked again. But this was not the time to tell her how much he knew about that.

  “Probably spies for money rather than passion,” he said instead.

  She did not answer. She was staring somewhere into the hollowness and hurts of her own mind.

  “It’s nasty to turn someone,” he went on quietly. “But then if you see what’s happening in the trenches, that’s also pretty nasty. We need ammunition we can rely on.” He thought of Joseph, and allowed the pain to show in his face. He knew she was watching him.

  “I can’t imagine you related to a priest,” she said softly. “Actually I’m not sure I can imagine an English priest at all. You haven’t the fire or the mysticism for it.”

  “Is that what it takes?” He let the slight banter back into his voice.

  “Isn’t it?” she countered.

  “There’s not much room for mysticism when men are cold and frightened, squatting in the mud with the rats, or dying in crushing pain—armless, legless, their guts torn out. You need the reality of human pity and human love. It’s about all there is left.”

  She reached up and for a moment it was as if she were going to touch his face, then she changed her mind abruptly. The tenderness vanished from her eyes. “So isn’t that the time when you need a priest most of all?” she countered. “To make sense of the senseless? Or don’t Protestant priests do that?”

  “I don’t know. It sounds a bit like a retreat,” he said with more candor than he had intended. “Recite some comfortable piece of scripture and think you’ve solved the problem.”

  “You’ve no magic in your heart,” she accused him, but she was looking at him with searching eyes now, gentle and surprised, as if she had seen something that had awoken a new emotion in her.

  “Does magic help?” he asked with raised eyebrows.

  “I think when you’re face to face with the devil, you’ll find out. I’ve a horrible fear that maybe it doesn’t after all. What then, Matthew? English courage, naked, without any pretty clothes and nice music?”

  “Doesn’t have to be English,” he replied. “Any sort would do.”

  She sat silent for a while, staring at the dancers on the floor. They were holding each other closely and moving as if the music carried them like a tide. There was sadness and anger in her face as she watched them.

  “They know it, don’t they?” she said after a while. “You can see it in their eyes, hear it in the pitch of their voices, a bit high and with an edge. They could be dead in the Flanders mud this time next week.” The passion welled up in her, a rage and sorrow that spilled over in tears on her cheek. “It didn’t have to happen, you know!” she said fiercely. “You didn’t have to fight the Germans. It could all have been avoided, but one misguided idealist, an Englishman with an arrogant, narrow patriotism and blind to any vision for the world, stumbled onto the papers that would have stopped it. And because he didn’t understand that, he stole them and destroyed them.”

  She blinked, but it did not stop the tears. “I’ve no idea who he is, or what happened to him, but Mother of God, if he can see what he’s done, he must be in the madhouse with guilt and grief. All these men, so young, all gone, sacrificed on the altar of stupidity. Don’t you despair of us sometimes?”

  He didn’t hear her anymore. The words ran through him like fire, scorching with a pa
in he could not have imagined. She was talking about John Reavley and the treaty he had found, and for which the Peacemaker had had him murdered. The document had been in the gun room in St. Giles where he and Joseph had replaced it after reading it.

  Only one other man beyond the family knew of it, and he had paid with his life.

  The document was a conspiracy to create an Anglo-German empire of peace, prosperity, and domination, the cost of which was the betrayal of France and Belgium, and ultimately most of the world. It would be a dishonor that would cast a black pall over everything that England had ever been, or believed in. And how could Detta know that, unless she were part of it?

  Detta was talking to him and the words were a meaningless jumble of sounds.

  That she was involved with the Peacemaker was something he had not even considered. Her Irish nationalism he could understand. In her place he would have felt the same. He might have fought for Germany, if the reward were his own country’s independence, even if half of them did not want it. But this had to mean that she was close enough to the Peacemaker to be trusted with at least the core of the plan, the dream of it. There would be no need to tell her the name or the fate of the man who had foiled it. His death was regarded by everyone else as an accident and no one in the family had challenged that. The Peacemaker himself never knew that they had found the treaty, or understood its nature. John Reavley had said simply that he had found a document that would dishonor England and change the world.

  Detta was an idealist. It could be dangerous to tell her more of murder than she needed to know. The Peacemaker took no risks.

  Until now Matthew had had little idea of his identity, hard as he had sought. It was not Ivor Chetwin, John Reavley’s one-time friend; Matthew and Joseph had proved his innocence in Gallipoli. Nor, surely, was it Aidan Thyer; but then that had been only a passing thought because of his power in Cambridge as master of St. John’s. Matthew’s greatest fear had been that it was Calder Shearing himself, right at the heart of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service. Shearing was brilliant, charming, and elusive, and Matthew knew almost nothing about him outside those walls.

  He had never even considered Patrick Hannassey. He had thought of him only as the cleverest and most dedicated fighter for Catholic Ireland’s freedom from British rule. Now he had to face the possibility—in fact the probability—that he was wrong.

  Detta’s father!

  She was looking at him, her odd eyebrow raised in bitter irony. “You didn’t know about that paper, did you.” It was a statement. “You thought it was all inevitable.”

  “Given the political tides,” he said very quietly, “the alliances between Austria, Germany, and Russia—and ours with France and Belgium—yes, I thought there was no way to avoid it.”

  “You aren’t asking me if I’m sure about it,” she pointed out.

  “Would you say it if you weren’t?”

  She avoided his gaze. “No. Is there a point where madness becomes so common we think it’s sanity?”

  “I don’t know.” She was not going to say any more. He would not play the game of trying to make her. “Would you like to dance?” he asked. He wanted to forget about talking for a while. He simply wanted to hold her in his arms, feel the ease and grace of her movement, smell the perfume of her hair, and above all pretend for a few minutes that they were on the same side.

  “Dance?” she asked, her voice rising. “Perhaps you do understand magic after all! What’s the difference between looking for a supernatural answer, and simply running away, Matthew?”

  “Timing,” he answered. “At the moment I’m just running away.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, laughter touching her eyes again, but only with self-mockery. “Yes, I’ll dance. What better is there to do?”

  The following morning Matthew arrived at his office in a mood of optimism. This was dashed the moment he encountered Hoskins standing in the corridor, his thin face twisted with anxiety.

  For a moment Matthew thought of avoiding asking him what was wrong, and simply going on to his own door, but he quickly resigned himself to reality. All bad news had to be faced.

  “Good morning, Hoskins. What is it?”

  “Morning, Reavley. Just another ship gone,” Hoskins replied miserably. “U-boats got it. It was carrying food and munitions. All hands lost.” Hoskins stood motionless apart from the slight tic in his left eyelid. “That’s the fourth this month.”

  “I know,” Matthew said quietly. He could think of nothing else to say. There was no comfort to offer, and nothing to salvage.

  “Shearing wants to see you,” Hoskins added. “I’d go there first, if I were you.”

  Matthew acknowledged the message, left his coat in his office, and glanced at his desk to see if there were any overnight messages of urgency. There was nothing that Shearing needed to know, just the usual reports from his men in the eastern United States. Progress was slow.

  He crossed the corridor and, after a brief knock, went into Shearing’s office.

  Shearing looked up from his desk. There were hollows around his eyes, accentuating how dark they were. “What’s your progress with the Hannassey woman?” he asked.

  There was a sour irony to the situation. Shearing knew of John and Alys Reavley’s deaths and Matthew’s belief that there was a conspiracy behind it, but because of John Reavley’s warning, Matthew had not told even his own superior in the Intelligence Services.

  “Well?” Shearing barked.

  Matthew could not tell him that Detta had in one wild explosion of anger let slip her knowledge of the Peacemaker’s conspiracy. It pounded in his mind as if it could drive out all other thoughts, and he composed his expression with difficulty. One realization flooded out every other. Surely Hannassey had to be the Peacemaker? It was someone who trusted Detta with his life. It could not be Shearing.

  He cleared his throat. He was still standing more or less to attention in front of the desk. “I told her about the smoke bombs in the ships’ holds, sir,” he replied. “And that we have almost traced the money. We just need to turn one of their agents and we’ll be able to close it down.”

  “I see. And how do you propose to convince her that you have done that?” Shearing’s expression was skeptical, his lips tightly compressed.

  “With the information, and an appropriate dead body,” Matthew replied.

  Shearing nodded very slowly, his eyes not leaving Matthew’s face. “Good. When?”

  “Another week at the very least. I have to give it long enough to be believable.”

  “I suppose you know we lost another ship last night? All hands.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “When did you last hear anything from Shanley Corcoran?”

  “Two days ago,” Matthew replied. For just over a year now he had been the link between the Secret Intelligence Service in London and the Scientific Establishment in Cambridge where they were developing an underwater guidance system that would mean that torpedoes and depth charges would no longer randomly hit their targets but would strike every time. It would revolutionize the war at sea. Whoever had such a device would be lethal. No skill or speed would enable an enemy to escape, once they were found. The endless cat-and-mouse games that now meant a skilled and daring commander could outwit pursuit would avail nothing. Judgment of speed, direction, even depth, would be irrelevant. Every missile would strike.

  And of course if the Germans were to have such a weapon, the U-boats now reaping such a terrible harvest would become unstoppable. Britain would be brought to its knees in weeks. The supplies of food and munitions would dry up. There would be no navy to take reinforcements to France, or even to evacuate the wounded, and in the end not even to rescue what remained of the army, beaten because it had no guns, no food, no shells, no medicine, no new men.

  Shearing was waiting for an answer.

  Matthew smiled a little as he gave it. “They are very close to completing it, sir. He said within a week.”

&nbs
p; Shearing’s eyes were wide. “He’s certain?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Shearing eased back a little in his chair. There was a sheen of sweat on his brow. “Thank God,” he breathed.

  “Then if we don’t have any more lunatic action like the Santa Ysabel massacre, and Pancho Villa doesn’t lose his wits and storm over the Rio Grande, we just might make it. For God’s sake, be careful! Whatever you do, don’t jeopardize the code!”

  “No, sir.”

  Shearing made a small, dismissive gesture, and returned his attention to the papers on his desk.

  In Marchmont Street in a discreet residential area near the heart of London, the man known as the Peacemaker stood in the upstairs sitting room facing his visitor. He hated war with a passion that consumed every other wish or hunger within him. He had seen the human misery of the Boer War in Africa at the turn of the century, the death and destruction, the concentration camps for civilians, even women and children. He had sworn then that whatever it cost he would do everything within his very considerable power to see that such a thing never happened again.

  The passion of the man opposite was quite different. He was Irish, and the freedom of his country and its independence from Britain dominated every other emotion he felt, and justified all acts that served its end. But they could use each other, and both knew it.

  The subject under discussion was money, which the Irishman was going to use to continue his bribery of union officials in Pittsburgh and in the East Coast docks of America to sabotage the munitions destined for the Allies.

  “No more than five thousand,” the Peacemaker said flatly.

  “Six,” the other man answered. He was unimpressive to look at, the kind of man no one would notice in a crowd, average in height and build, nondescript of coloring and ordinary of feature. He was capable of a score of appearances depending upon his stance and expression, and the clothes he wore. That was part of his genius. He came and went as he chose, and no one remembered him. Another gift was his almost flawless memory.