by Joe Joyce
‘You’ve fired one of these before?’ the captain asked, seeking reassurance as he noticed Duggan’s hesitation.
Duggan nodded, working the bolt forward and back again without realising it. If the ship was a legitimate target in German eyes, he was thinking, then everyone on board was at risk. Not just now but possibly on future voyages as well. We can’t let them sail this route again if they are, he thought. It would only be a matter of time before they came into someone’s sights. I have to know.
‘You think you can hit it?’ the captain asked.
‘I don’t think it’ll work,’ Duggan said, making a decision. ‘It won’t necessarily set off the explosives. If there are any,’ he added.
‘We only want to sink it.’
‘I don’t want to put your ship at risk. But I have to know what’s in it.’
The captain shook his head, about to assert his authority.
‘It’s vital for my mission,’ Duggan added, before he could order him to do something. ‘Whatever is in that suitcase will answer an important question. A matter of life or death.’
The captain gave him a sceptical look and took out his pipe and gripped it between his teeth. ‘What do you want to do?’ he asked at last.
‘Take a look inside it. If I can get a sharp knife.’
‘You know how to defuse a bomb?’
Duggan shook his head.
The captain chewed on the pipe, making it bob up and down. ‘Life and death,’ he muttered.
‘I’m not trying to sound dramatic.’ Duggan gave an apologetic shrug. ‘But it’s important.’
‘Your funeral,’ the captain said at last.
‘Thanks,’ Duggan said without irony, in gratitude that the captain hadn’t simply ordered him to toss the suitcase overboard. ‘Would you have a sheet of paper?’
The captain opened the drawer underneath the top of his tiny desk and took out a sheet. Duggan realised he was still holding the Lee Enfield and he propped it back in its cabinet.
‘It might be no harm,’ Duggan said, remembering the conversation with the two crewmen earlier and his suspicion that one might have been in Strasser’s brothel, ‘to make sure nobody else brought any unopened presents on board. Just in case.’
‘And you want a knife,’ the captain nodded.
Duggan sat at the captain’s desk and wrote a quick report for Commandant McClure on the main points of what had happened in Lisbon: his discovery about Hopkins and Maisie, his conversations with Wiedermeyer and Strasser, his delivery of the Norden. He paused before explaining the last of these, keeping Gerda out of the story, but describing his delivery system as a retaliation for Maisie’s and Hopkins’s roles in reporting Aiken’s speeches in Lisbon to the Americans.
He didn’t know how to end it. If you are reading this, he thought, I’m dead. Which was unreal. Melodramatic. Laughable. But possible. Even probable, now that he looked back on the demeanours and the reactions of the Germans. They hadn’t been convinced by anything he’d told them. They know, he thought. Why did I think otherwise, even for a moment?
‘Please inform Grace Matthews,’ he wrote at last, giving Gerda’s New York address. He signed the report ‘Paul’ and found an envelope in the captain’s drawer and addressed it to Commandant George McClure, adding ‘To be delivered in person’.
On the bridge he handed the sealed letter to the captain and the captain gave him a thin stiletto blade with a mother-of-pearl handle. Duggan took it with a look of surprise, wondering which of the crewmen had had that. It was perfect for his purposes.
He walked up the deck, rolling with the ship, the wind cutting through his shirt, now dry again, chilling him. The bow rose and dipped as he approached, rising towards the bright blue sky and then dipping to reveal a line of grey clouds beginning to gather on the horizon. Back behind them the coast was receding, its details smudging with distance.
He knelt behind the suitcase and examined it visually as it swung gently from side to side. It was made of grey cardboard with reinforced corners of a dark red material that were probably more for show than to provide any real protection. There were two tin catches with small keyholes on the front, which were also as much for show as for security. He leaned down to listen along the top but could hear nothing over the wind and the creaking of the ship and the slough of the water passing by.
Would they bother booby-trapping something like this? he wondered. Probably. As a matter of course. Opening the catches would probably set it off. But how would it be protected against someone doing what he was going to do. He had no idea.
He took a deep breath of the salty air and began reciting a Hail Mary under his breath: ‘Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death . . . ’ He pushed the sharp point of the knife into the centre of the lid and sweat broke out on his forehead. The lid dipped under the pressure and then stopped. He raised the knife again, not wanting to press against anything in the suitcase.
He picked another spot, about an inch in from the edge of the lid, and pressed down on it. The point of the knife broke through the cardboard. He began to pull it slowly towards him, careful to let nothing more than the tip of the knife into the suitcase. It was difficult to cut the cardboard with just the tip of the knife but he worked at it slowly until there was an incision about two inches long.
He tried to raise one side of it with the knife and peer in but there was little space and the interior was dark against the sunlight on deck. He knelt back on his heels for a moment, breathing slowly, raising his face to the sun, seeking its warmth as the cold wind chilled the sweat on his brow. Then he made a careful cut at a ninety-degree angle to the first one, and about the same length, and raised the cut patch to peer in.
The capped sailor in a circular buoy on the front of a packet of Player’s Navy Cut cigarettes stared upside down at him, and he laughed as relief surged through him. Careful, he ordered himself. That doesn’t mean there isn’t something nasty inside. But there wasn’t.
He made several more quick cuts near the front edge of the lid before he was confident enough to snap the catches and open the suitcase. It was packed with cartons of Player’s and Gold Flake cigarettes and bags of coffee and four bottles of port. He opened a bag of coffee at random and let the beans pour out and rattle away down the deck. He also sliced open a couple of the cigarette cartons and opened an individual packet from each to make sure they were what they seemed. Finally, he stood up and turned towards the bridge and held aloft a bottle of port in each hand. The captain gave him a thumbs up and a big smile.
I did it, he thought as he carried the suitcase in both hands, staggering down the deck to the bridge in a wide-legged walk. I fooled them.
The captain came down to greet him and Duggan put the suitcase on the deck and presented him with two bottles of port. ‘Everyone help themselves,’ he said, throwing back the torn-up lid as some of the crew gathered around.
The captain clapped him on the back and handed him back his letter to McClure. Duggan took one of the packs of Player’s he had already opened and lit a cigarette in the shelter of the bridge and went back to the stern. He leaned on the railing and felt the adrenalin drain away and the tension in his shoulders fade. He tore the letter into tiny pieces and tossed them, like a handful of confetti, into the ship’s wake. The receding continent was now little more than a suggestion of land, a darker haze on the bright horizon, less tangible than the band of clouds building up ahead of them.
Epilogue
The marine at the gate to the American legation in the Phoenix Park raised the barrier and Duggan drove up to the building and parked to one side. Linqvist came out to meet him. Duggan rolled down the window and picked up the copy of Life magazine off the passenger seat and handed it to Linqvist.
‘What’s this?’ Linqvist asked in surprise.
‘Page 24,’ Duggan said.
Linqvist found the double-page spread: mugshots of thirty-two people, three of them women, under the headline ‘Greatest Spy Rou
ndup in US History Produces a Great Gallery of Faces’. Almost all had German names. Linqvist gave him an enquiring look.
‘Look at Hermann Lang,’ Duggan said.
Lang’s was the first mugshot on the second page of the spread. He had a strong-looking face with kiss-curls above a large forehead. The caption described him as a German-born American who had worked for Carl I. Norden Inc. ‘as inspector of the famed super-secret Norden bombsights’.
‘You lied to me,’ Duggan said as Linqvist read it. The magazine was dated a couple of days after he had left for Lisbon and referred to FBI arrests the previous week.
‘Nobody told me about this at the time,’ Linqvist said, shrugging and handing the magazine back to Duggan. ‘Forgot to keep us in the loop.’
‘Bollocks,’ Duggan said. ‘I did what you asked me to do. Took the Norden to the Germans. What was it all really about?’
‘What I told you at the time,’ Linqvist said, nodding at the magazine on the passenger seat. ‘Building a case against those guys.’
Duggan shook his head in disgust. He knew what it was really about but he was here to play the innocent, to protect Gerda. ‘I took a lot of risks,’ he said. ‘Meeting the Germans in Lisbon. Giving them the Norden for you. All for nothing.’
‘It wasn’t all for nothing.’
‘It was a load of lies,’ Duggan said, nodding at the magazine, noting that Linqvist didn’t dispute his statement that he had given the Germans the Norden. Maybe they had collected it from Maisie’s house. They had made no further mention of it in their radio messages to him. He knew nothing about the fallout from his last-minute manoeuvre with the bombsight in Lisbon. There was no word from the British either about what had happened. But that didn’t surprise him. Hopefully they were all still trying to work out what was going on, who was playing whom. ‘Those guys were under arrest before I even got to Lisbon.’
‘You got to meet Grace again.’
‘Leave her out of it,’ Duggan exploded. ‘Don’t fucking threaten her again.’
‘No, no,’ Linqvist raised his hands in surrender and took a half-step back. ‘I’m not threatening her. She’s one of ours, you know that.’
‘And you knew it before, when you forced me to do your bidding.’
‘No, I didn’t,’ Linqvist protested.
‘Jesus. That makes it worse. You really were threatening her.’
‘Look,’ Linqvist said, trying to take a metaphorical step backwards, to calm the discussion. ‘None of this is personal. It was just a fuck-up. Lack of communications. Nobody knows what the FBI is up to. Probably Hoover doesn’t even tell himself.’
‘You made it personal.’
‘OK. That was a mistake. Obviously, it won’t happen again.’
Duggan rubbed his eyes and sighed. ‘Any word of her?’ he asked in a quiet voice, in two minds about revealing his concern, letting Linqvist know that he still had leverage over him. But there was little point pretending otherwise. Besides, he wanted to know anything he could find out about her whereabouts – had she returned from Vienna, was she safe – to have some link with her, however tenuous. And Linqvist was his only possible conduit.
Linqvist shook his head. ‘I’ll let you know if I hear anything.’
Duggan nodded his thanks.
‘By the way, we’ve talked to people about those ships your government wants to buy. The logjam should be shifted soon.’
‘Thanks,’ Duggan said.
‘Look,’ Linqvist added, ‘as I said to you before, we’ve got to keep in touch. Try and keep communications clear so that our bosses don’t hunker down into their corners.’
‘Then we’ve got to be straight with each other,’ Duggan said, conscious of his hypocrisy but not doubting for a moment that Linqvist was being just as hypocritical. It went with the job.
‘Totally.’ Linqvist held out his hand and Duggan reached through the window to shake it.
He drove back to the office, passing the growing clamp of turf, now eight feet high, as a sudden cloudburst sent rain hammering down. The turf workers scattered for shelter under the side of an army lorry and he slowed down: the wipers made little impact on the volume of water hammering on the windscreen. The rain stopped as quickly as it had begun and the sun came out again, raising little wisps of steam from the bonnet when he parked outside the Red House and went inside.
Author's Note
Like the other novels in the ‘Echoland’ series this is a work of fiction set against a background of real events, in this case in June and July 1941. The political, diplomatic and military backgrounds are broadly accurate, but the plot and the main characters are fictitious.
Once again I’m indebted to my friend and unpaid researcher Maurice Byrne for his assistance with period details and, especially, for introducing me to the Norden bombsight, which was the most expensive piece of military hardware developed by the United States before the Manhattan Project.
My thanks also to Sam Tranum, my editor at Liberties Press, for keeping the plot on track and his many helpful and insightful comments, and to Liberties’ marketing team, Ailish White and Lisa Scanlon, and managing director, Seán O’Keeffe.
About the Author
Joe Joyce is the author of five thrillers including the three historical spy novels in the ECHOLAND series; a history/biography of THE GUINNESSES and a critically acclaimed play, THE TOWER, about James Joyce and Oliver St John Gogarty. He is co-author with Peter Murtagh of THE BOSS, the classic account of Irish politician Charles Haughey inpower, and BLIND JUSTICE, about a celebrated miscarriage of justice in Ireland in the 1970s.
He has worked as a journalist for The Irish Times, The Guardian, and Reuters news agency and currently edits a weekly feature from the archives of The Irish Times.
www.joejoyce.ie
Also by Joe Joyce
Fiction
Echobeat
Echoland
The Trigger Man
Off the Record
Non-Fiction
The Guinnesses: The Untold Story of
Ireland’s Most Successful Family
Blind Justice (with Peter Murtagh)
The Boss: Charles J Haughey in Government
(with Peter Murtagh)
Plays
The Tower
www.joejoyce.ie
