In Secret Service

by Mitch Silver

  Oh, that Philip. Prince Christophe’s brother-in-law, the one with all the sisters married to…Nazis. Now that I thought about it, I was pretty sure I’d seen him years before. A tall teenage British naval cadet who had spent time in France and was back on leave in 1939 Paris at Wallis’s Christmas party. And even earlier, as the fifteen-year-old who had been dragged along by his princely parents to Wallis’s wedding at the Château de Candé. Was he the one who had tipsily sung along with Chevalier and Coward? The one who had seemed to know Charles Bedaux? If so, that Philip’s eyes had read…and fingers had handled…and fingerprints had been deposited on…the note the English ex-monarch was sending to Adolf Hitler telling him he’d be glad to go back to being King after the Germans won.

  Amy, I don’t presume to know what the world will be like in the year 2014, when you read this. But I do know, if I’ve calculated right, that all the people with an interest in this matter will have gone to their reward: Winston and all the members of his Government, Blunt and his friends, that Hess stand-in in Spandau prison, the Queen and Prince Philip, the Duke and Duchess themselves, and, of course, your grandfather and me. Which will leave you free of any but the interests of history and your own conscience.

  Edmund Burke is supposed to have said, “All that’s necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” May I add a coda to that thought: the wicked haven’t won a blessed thing while there’s one good man (or in your case, woman) to bear witness to their crimes.

  Now it’s up to you.

  Chapter 61

  Amy had had to read Fleming’s final words through twice. She was still playing mental catch-up. Prince Philip? The figurehead at the Queen’s side? If he had been Bedaux’s go-between…Amy flipped back to the document itself, the incriminating letter to “Lieber Herr Hitler” covered in fingerprints. Right here, this was proof. Real proof. She put the pages down.

  Scott was saying, “So what is it? What’s the secret?” but Amy didn’t hear him. She had glanced up at the stone carving that ran along the top of the administration building, Woodbridge Hall. It was the university crest with its Latin motto, Lux et veritas. Light and truth.

  What a random way to have a decision made for you. Of course: bring the truth to light. If you couldn’t do that here among the cloistered walls, where could you do it? Amy realized it was no longer a decision of whether but simply one of how to make the truth known. But first they had to survive the evening.

  Then she had a brainstorm: if she and Scott could make it to the Yale Daily News building, Amy could do the right thing and hand the manuscript over. Devlin would be forced to go home empty-handed. The trouble was that the Oldest College Daily, as they liked to call it on the masthead, was on the other side of the Cross Campus Library and the police. Okay, she’d give them a call. “Scott, I need your phone.”

  Scott was looking at her instead of reaching into his jacket pocket and handing it over. “I can’t. I dropped it in the library when I pulled you away from Devlin.”

  Damn. If they’d simply gone to the newspaper office in the first place, they’d be home free all now. All right, they’d just have to hoof it. Amy got up, and Scott was asking for the third time what she had learned from Fleming when they saw the young couple from the library, the ones who’d been such good sprinters. The woman shouted, “There they are!” to someone Amy couldn’t see. Amy and Scott changed course and were making a full-blooded dash away across the empty space of the plaza by the time the woman called again, “I saw them!”

  There was no place to hide. Off to their right Amy could see an artsy sculpture garden, sunken a full story below grade and part of the courtyard level of the Beinecke Library complex, the easternmost of the trio of Yale libraries and the one devoted to rare books. A low wall ran all the way around it. Too low. It would have to be the library itself if they were to hide from their pursuers.

  About five minutes before the eight o’clock closing time, a cluster of scholars was filing out past the security guard, holding briefcases open for inspection and shielding Scott and Amy from the guard’s view as they stumbled in through the revolving glass doors, huffing and puffing.

  Like a high-tech jewel box, every nook and cranny of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library has been created to preserve the priceless materials kept there from the ravages of air, light, and thieves. The building itself is made of rectangular one-and-a-quarter-inch-thick panes of translucent Vermont marble, designed to filter daylight so that rare materials can be displayed without damage. And there are video cameras everywhere: above the main entrance, over the sliding doors to the sculpture garden in the lower courtyard, across from the access to the stack of books itself. In fact, cameras have all but replaced human eyes.

  Amy was thankful the dim lighting would make it hard for anyone viewing a monitor to recognize her and Scott as they slipped away from the little knot of people filing out and made their way to the lower level.

  A bell began to sound and a guard called down, “Closing time, people,” to all the slowpokes who were walking up the stairs as they were hurrying down. Amy and Scott had the idea at the same time: hide in one of the bathrooms until everyone had gone. Stupidly, they tried to drag each other into different bathrooms. Amy was trying to steer him into the men’s, because it was closer, and Scott was pulling her toward the women’s because “the guard’s a guy and he won’t be as comfortable checking out the ladies’ stalls.” Scott won.

  The police chose that moment to burst into the library. The acoustics were garbled, but Amy and Scott could make out at least two newcomers with raised voices. Whatever was said, a pair of footsteps went up to the mezzanine and another pair was coming down the stairs to this, the courtyard level. The descending footsteps grew louder as the fugitives huddled in the next-to-last stall, Scott on the closed toilet seat and Amy sitting on his lap. A man’s voice called, “Everybody needs to leave! Now!” The voice wasn’t Devlin’s.

  They could hear a faucet run in the men’s bathroom next door and then shut off again. They heard a door open and the same cop asking, “Anyone else in there?”

  “No, I’m it” was the barely audible answer, just before the straggler headed up the stairway.

  It was possible to hear the guard or policeman or whatever he was moving around in the reading room on this level; he was opening and closing things wherever he went. And then he was outside the ladies’ again. The door banged open. Scott had had the foresight of raising his feet off the floor and wedging them against the stall door. Now anyone looking for them would have to make a door-to-door search to find them. This guy didn’t do that. He could have, he should have, but he didn’t.

  It was another five to ten minutes, well after the last muffled voices had faded away, before Scott even dared to drop his feet to the floor. He jostled Amy off his lap. “My legs are asleep!”

  Okay, the object so far had been to hide from their pursuers, and they had succeeded. Now what? For the next few minutes, the two of them stood in the tiny space with the toilet between them, Scott alternately standing on one leg and then the other like a stork. When all his limbs were again functioning, he opened the stall door.

  This was the opportunity Amy had been hoping for. They had the library all to themselves except for the cameras, one of which was fixed over the entrance to the reading room and aimed at the heavy sliding-glass door to the sunken sculpture garden outside.

  Tonight, Noguchi’s huge marble pieces representing the Earth, the Sun, and a cube that was meant to be Chance could be seen in bold relief, thanks to a floodlight several stories up on the library wall. Amy and Scott were sitting again, cross-legged on the floor in the hallway just outside the reading room and the prying digital eye’s field of vision. From here, you could see over the granite retaining wall above the courtyard to a small section of the evening sky. It was romantic if you squinted a little and tried not to notice you were sitting on the floor.

  “Scott, do you love me?�
�

  He turned to her, openmouthed. “Are you serious? Are you kidding?”

  She wasn’t kidding. “Do you love me? Tell me.”

  Scott was getting huffy. “Would I have proposed if…Of course I love you.”

  “Say it without the ‘of course.’ ”

  “I love you, Amy. You must know that by now.”

  She twirled the temporary ring again and again around her finger, half taking it off each time. “Right now I’m not sure what I know.”

  Scott was reaching into his pocket. “Then let me prove it.” Now he had something in his right hand. “I was waiting for a quiet moment, but there haven’t been any.” He opened the small, dark blue box in his hand.

  Her real engagement ring was a perfectly clear diamond flanked by two smaller ones in a simple white gold setting. Amy took the ring out of the box and read the inscription. “For AMG from SHB. Always.” It was absolutely beautiful. For once in her life, words failed her.

  Scott said, in a soft voice, “Now you’ll never have to ask me that question again. Because you’ll always have my answer. Always.” He kissed her, just as softly, on the cheek. Right where the first of her tears had paused on its way down her face.

  She hadn’t expected the tears. Funny, wasn’t “Always” the word Ribbentrop was supposed to have written on all those florist’s cards to Wallis? “Scott, sweetheart, I’ve been thinking. If we have children—”

  He gently put his finger to her mouth. “When. When we have children.”

  “All right. When we have children…in the Jewish religion you can’t name the son after the father if he’s still alive.”

  “So no little Scott Jr.? That’s okay.”

  Amy had to keep going. “So if it’s a boy, let’s name him after the grandfather.”

  Scott smiled. “Robert Brown? He sounds very serious. How about Chief Brown?”

  Amy took both of his hands in hers. “I was thinking of his paternal grandfather. Anthony Brown.” She pronounced it like Antony and Cleopatra.

  Scott tried to withdraw his hands but Amy held on tight. “How…how did you know?” he asked.

  “Your mother, the famous art historian, is Margaret Harcourt Brown. But years ago, at the Courtauld, she was just Maggie Brown. Right? And then she married Anthony Blunt, who made it possible for her to have you. And that made it possible for me to have you.”

  Amy had never seen Scott tear up, let alone cry. Then the whole story came tumbling out. The one he had tried to tell her on the train. The day he had graduated from University, his mother had decided he was old enough to know that she wasn’t the widow she had claimed to be, raising her only son on an art historian’s salary and an army pension. That there had never been a Major Harry Brown, only a boyfriend who had refused to marry her when she had gotten pregnant. And that the well-off benefactor who’d agreed to be named on Scott’s birth certificate as the father was her employer, Sir Anthony Blunt.

  “The thing is,” Scott continued, “Anthony Blunt died in the early nineteen eighties, before I ever really had a chance to know him. Mother told me of this wonderful thing this man had done for her, for us—even as all the horrible things he had done by spying for the Soviet Union were beginning to come out.

  “Three years before he died, the new prime minister, Mrs. Thatcher, was asked a question in Parliament concerning the identity of the Fourth Man, the Cambridge spy who had never been caught. She outed my stepfather on the spot, the cow. They stripped him of his knighthood and his Cambridge fellowship. Mother said that one time he had even been booed out of a cinema in Notting Hill.”

  Amy tried to stroke Scott’s cheek, but he gently moved her hand away. “I’ve been wanting to tell you all this, but up to now I didn’t know how. About my stepfather…Near the end there was a glimmer of hope. To keep going, he’d had to go out and find rich people who would continue to underwrite his work and have him appraise their purchases, the way the Crown had done previously. One of these wealthy patrons had a daughter, a girl named Diana Spencer.”

  Amy gave him a look. Scott went on. “Yes, that Diana. When it was announced that she would marry Charles, the Prince of Wales, my stepfather tried to use the connection, the influence of knowing her father, the Earl of Spencer, so well. To obtain a royal pardon, perhaps even a rehabilitation. A real long shot. But without his honors and his pictures, my stepfather had nothing to live for.

  “He was writing and phoning Diana with no reply. Mother tried to talk him out of it, but he made quite a thing of his wartime service and the ‘unfair’ revocation of his military pension. And then he made this awful blunder. He wrote Diana that he had ‘devastating information’ concerning the family she was about to join. That he ‘might not be able to remain silent’ about it. All about some secret wartime mission he took with Ian Fleming and an American driver named Greenberg, the one man alive who could vouch for what he said.”

  Scott shifted his position a little on the floor. “The thing is, Diana did meet with him then, after the honeymoon. But only to tell him she had pled his case with her husband, Charles, and had been turned down cold. Well, Anthony Blunt was not one to take no for an answer. So he told her Fleming had assembled a file of incriminating information about the royal family, things that had happened in the nineteen thirties and forties. And that he, Blunt, knew where it was. The last part was an enormous lie, of course.

  “Diana must have gone back to the family again, because this time, it was the Queen who responded. She sent a note, politely but firmly asking him to ‘cease all further communication with the Princess and the family.’ Mother still has it. In the end, it didn’t matter. He died within the month.”

  “Naturally I was shocked down to my toes to discover that my father wasn’t a deceased army major after all but a notorious Russian spy. That my whole life had been a lie. That evening, to celebrate my leaving University, we had a little dinner at home. I remember I was still sitting at the kitchen table when mother laid a little journal bound in blue cloth on it. It was Blunt’s.”

  Where there had been tears, there was now a determined look in Scott’s eyes. He needed Amy to know the truth. “Anthony Blunt wrote down everything he knew about the Duke of Windsor’s letter, how he had made two copies of it and kept the original, what Ian Fleming had told him—all of it. He gave it to my mother for safekeeping.”

  Amy said quietly, “So Maggie knows everything.”

  “Everything Blunt knew. Not that she could ever prove any of it. When he died, she decided to keep quiet, for my sake. Until she thought I was old enough to understand.

  “Well, I already had my A levels in art history, and I made a rash decision. To find out what this big dark secret was that my stepfather had been going on about, and maybe to somehow clear his name. And mine.”

  “And so you came to America?”

  “A retired American officer named Robert Greenberg was not hard to find, not for a young man like myself used to researching things. And then to discover we were in the same field! It was kismet or something. So I came here to America to study under Dr. Greenberg. And, to be honest, find out what he knew.”

  “And what did my grandfather tell you?”

  “Nothing. He drove a couple of guys in a car up a mountain and down again. He never knew why.”

  “Chief never told me any of this.”

  “I think he knew how attracted I was to you, and I guess he didn’t want to spoil it. I hope I’m not spoiling it now. But when you received that letter from the Irish bank about a secret bequest, naturally I was curious…”

  Amy kissed him on the nose. “I understand.”

  Scott got up. “My legs are starting to cramp again. We really have to figure out—” He made one of his cranelike movements and seemed to duck his head even as he was getting up. “Sweetheart, step back, would you? Now?”

  Amy was nonplussed. “What—?”

  Scott took her by the arm and pulled her back from the doorway while raising her
to her feet. “He’s out there. Up there.”

  “Who?”

  “Devlin.”

  Amy was just on the verge of an involuntary scream when Scott clapped his hand over her mouth. When she looked at him, he said, “I owed you one.”

  As she retreated, she glimpsed a man leaning over the sculpture garden wall and peering down at them. Then he was gone. If it really had been Devlin, they were up against a pro who was armed to the teeth. A Special Forces killer against a top-notch hide-and-

  seeker and her boyfriend. Amy heard the desperation in her voice as she shared with Scott her last-ditch plan to stay alive, the one she’d come up with while hiding in the library’s bathroom.

  The crash behind them told her all bets were off. Brian Devlin must have shot out the glass in the sliding doors. They looked back and saw him standing on top of the sculpture garden’s retaining wall, looming over them. He had peeled off his jacket and thrown it down. She could see Macken’s gun in his right hand. And then he jumped.

  Devlin had aimed his leap so he would land on one of the sides of the angled cube of Chance, apparently rolling the dice that he could land on his butt and slide down to the ground in one piece. His intended victims didn’t hang around to see if he’d make it. They were already scrambling up the stairs to the main floor.

  This was it. Devlin had knowingly set off the alarm, so he must be figuring he could quickly neutralize them and confiscate Fleming’s manuscript before witnesses arrived. They had seconds…a minute at the most.

  Chapter 62

  Brian Devlin stepped over the broken glass of the sculpture garden doors and made a hurried reconnaissance of the reading room. Then he checked out each of the bathrooms and storage areas on the lower level before returning to the stairs that led up to the street-level lobby. There was a camera in a corner above his head. As he started up the stairs, he smiled for the camera and the security people, off in their control room in the main library.