The Great Game: The Bookman Histories, Book 3

by Lavie Tidhar

  And Harry knew he was doomed.

  "What will you do with me?" he said. Was the effect of the drug wearing off? He tried to move his hands – the tips of his fingers, he thought, had moved a little.

  "He wants to see you," Mr Dombey said. "Therefore…"

  "He who?"

  The shadowed figure behind the desk shook its head. "My dear," it said to Mina Murray. "Would you?"

  "My pleasure," Mina Murray said. She came to Harry and stood close to him; he could smell her perfume. She nodded to someone behind him; he couldn't see. The sound of a heavy object being dragged on the ground. Then she put her hands on him – they were warm – and she pushed. Harry fell back with a cry. Hands grabbed him, lowered him. He found himself inside a wooden crate. Mina Murray towered over him, and suddenly there was nothing pretty or kind in her face. Her smile was predatory.

  "It won't hurt a bit," she said. In her hand she held a syringe.

  "What… What is it?" Harry whispered. He couldn't move.

  "It will send you to sleep," she said, gently. The needle lowered. Mina pulled up Harry's sleeve. He couldn't resist her.

  "Where… Where am I going?"

  Mina Murray tested the syringe. A bubble of liquid and air formed at the top of the needle. Harry watched it, hypnotised.

  "Where?" Mina Murray said, as though surprised. She knelt over Harry and with a quick, efficient move pushed the needle into Harry's arm. He felt a pinprick of pain, then a spreading numbness.

  "Why, you are going to Transylvania," Mina Murray said.

  Then the lid of the crate was placed above him, and nails were driven into the wood to close it tight, and a darkness settled over Harry Houdini.

  PART VI

  The Stoker Memorandum

  THIRTY-THREE

  "Tell me about Stoker," Lucy said.

  It was getting into the late afternoon. Beyond the windows the spray from the sea rose high into the air on the cliff. Seagulls dived, dark shapes against the weak sun. Miss Havisham had baked cinnamon buns.

  Lucy was still following Mycroft's tortured trail. Miss Havisham's memory was, in many ways, the Bureau's own. But what was Mycroft after? Closeted in his club, seeing no one, what did he see, what mystery was he trying to unravel?

  "Stoker, Abraham," Miss Havisham said, thoughtfully. "Yes, I remember dear little Abe. That's what I called him, you know. My darling little Abe. One of the theatre folks, naturally. And Irish." She sighed. "An unlikely agent for anyone," she said. "Which is why no one wanted to follow up on it. Not even Mycroft, at first…"

  Name: Stoker, Abraham.

  Code name: none.

  Place of birth: Dublin.

  Parents: deceased.

  Family: wife, Florence, one child.

  Affiliation: unknown.

  Notes:

  "Notes?" Lucy said.

  Miss Havisham rubbed the bridge of her nose. For the first time, she had placed a file folder on the table. A single sheet of white paper inside, and the notes section, Lucy saw, had been left blank. Miss Havisham smiled, wistfully. "As you can see, we had nothing on him. A theatrical manager, working for Henry Irving's Lyceum Theatre in London. An unremarkable man, clean as this sheet of paper."

  "So what drew you to him?" Lucy said.

  Miss Havisham shook her head. "It was before the Orphan case, when we were busy monitoring the European side of things. Later there was a shift, Fogg wanted to watch Vespuccia, and the Chinese Desk was getting new funding, but by then I was out. It was… little things that kept coming up. And then there was First Night of Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of the Carib Sea…"

  Lucy waited. Miss Havisham moved at her own pace. Her eyes were clouded. She was going back in time, to a better time and place, before her forced retirement, when she was still a player of the Great Game…

  It had been a great coup for the Lyceum (Miss Havisham told her). It had been one of the times when Gilbert and Sullivan were fighting again and, to make it worse, Gilbert had charged their manager, Richard D'Oyly Carte, of cheating them out of money – over a carpet, of all things.

  So the Lyceum had managed to steal them away, if not for long, and had put on the opening night of their latest production, The Pirates of the Carib Sea, at the Lyceum rather than the Savoy.

  There had been no indication of anything remarkable in the offing. As I said, little things…

  Two weeks before the opening night, an extraction team had brought in a German defector. He had been a low-level employee of Krupp's, and our hopes of getting technical information regarding Krupp's latest monster cannon were in vain. They had put him in Ham, in the interrogation centre, and had been sweating him for three days without anything useful coming out, when I decided to pop in and see him. I had only routine questions to ask him, you see. I remember the interrogation room, the defector's bruised face, sweaty hands that left print marks on the metal desk between us. I had a cup of tea and offered him one, which he accepted, as well as a cigarette.

  "You are Marcus Rauchfus?" I said. He confirmed his name.

  "Engineer with Krupp Industries?"

  Again, he nodded.

  "What made you decide to defect?" I asked, with honest curiosity. Krupp looked after his people well. It was hard to get deep into his organisation, and what agents of ours had tried to infiltrate his organisation tended to… well, disappear. Loyalty and ruthlessness, as Mycroft liked to say, were powerful together.

  Rauchfus shrugged. Perhaps he truly didn't know why. After three days of interrogation no one was very enthusiastic about him any more, he'd given us nothing we could use. "I was…" His voice was hoarse; they had sweated him hard those three days. He spread his arms in a helpless gesture. "Always I love the English."

  "We are not at war with Germany."

  "No." But he did not sound convinced, and for the first time my curiosity was aroused.

  "What do you know of Alfred Krupp's plans?" I asked. Rauchfus looked uncomfortable. He leaned towards me across the desk. There was something in his eyes that wanted to come out. I nodded to the guard, and he left the room, leaving the two of us alone. "Well?" I said.

  "Them I don't tell!" He hit the desk with his fist. "You I tell. You give me house in Surrey?"

  "We look after our defectors," I said. "As long as they can offer us something substantial."

  "I make statement," Rauchfus said. "To you I make statement."

  "Well?"

  "My name is Marcus Rauchfus, and I am an engineer for Krupp Industries, yes. Yes! But not general section. I was assistant to one man, four, five years ago. His name is Diesel, Rudolf Diesel. Great engineer. The best! Top secret project." Marcus Rauchfus smiled, shyly. "Top secret," he repeated, as if there was a magic in the words.

  "What was the nature of the project?" I asked.

  "To make new engine," he said. "New power source! Yes! But…"

  "What sort of new power source?"

  He waved his hand. This was not important. "Petroleum," he said. "Krupp has network, yes, to bring it in from the Arabian Peninsula. Also Vespuccia, we believe, has much."

  "Petroleum?"

  I knew what it was, of course. Moreover, I knew very well we had our own research facility dedicated to finding new, more efficient sources of power than coal. But Rauchfus shook his head. "Not important," he said, placidly.

  "Why not?"

  "Decoy! I find out, by accident. Yes, I know, you have research also. French, Chinese, same! But–"

  There had been a girlfriend, he told me. Working in Krupp's private office. She told him, once. They had a fight. "You think you are special? You are Top Secret?" she had laughed at him. "Real work not done on Diesel project. Real work classified Ultra!"

  "Ultra?" I said.

  Rauchfus nodded.

  "What's Ultra?" I said.

  "Ultra is secret project," Rauchfus said.

  "Of what nature?"

  "I do not know."

  I sighed. "This is all you have for me?"r />
  "Yes. No! Ultra not Krupp project."

  At that I sat up straighter. "Not Krupp? What do you mean?"

  Here Rauchfus lowered his voice. "Not Krupp," he said. "International. Very dangerous to know. One, two months later, girlfriend not at work. Not at home. Gone." He clicked his fingers sadly. "Like this, gone."

  "And you?"

  "No one know I know!" But he looked fearful. "British," he whispered to me. His eyes were round. "British too. She tell me. British too."

  "British? British who?"

  He shook his head. "I do not know. I should not have said."

  He wouldn't speak again, after that. I had left instructions for the interrogators not to touch him. I wanted him kept isolated, safe. When I got back to the Bureau I dug deeper into the files.

  It was as I had thought. Rauchfus had lied to me. He had not come over voluntarily to our side. He had thought, rather, that he was dealing with an agent of the French's Quiet Council. He must have been horrified to realise he had been duped. If what he said was true, someone high up in the clandestine world was involved in a plot with Alfred Krupp. It was more likely Rauchfus was a plant, a false flag sent to us by Krupp's intelligence people. A decoy. But I couldn't take the chance.

  Fogg was out of the Bureau at that time. Mycroft, I believe, had sent him away, I was not sure where. It was shortly after Moreau had been exiled, or banished, or transferred – versions varied – to an isolated research facility on an island in the South Seas. Rumour had it Mycroft wanted Fogg far away – and making sure Moreau stayed banished might have been a good enough reason.

  For myself, though, I did not think giving Fogg access to Moreau's research was a good idea, and said so. But back then Fogg was Mycroft's golden boy, and he could do no wrong. Or so it seemed…

  Mycroft always plans further, deeper, I know that now. He plays the long game. Did he suspect Fogg even then?

  I came to him that day. It was night time, the gas lamps were lit outside, and inside the Bureau it was cold. We were running a shadow operation in Afghanistan then, following that disastrous war we had run over there. The operation, as I recall, did not go well. Berlyne was coming in and out of the fat man's office, sneezing and coughing and politely barring access to anyone who came. But Mycroft saw me. He always made the time – for his own benefit, have no doubt. He needed me, and he knew it. On that we were of one mind.

  "What do you want, Havisham?" the fat man had said, looking up at me from his desk. I knew he hated it, preferred his armchair at the Diogenes, the silence there, his food…

  I said, "Ultra."

  He went very still. Mycroft has the talent. "What are you talking about?" he said at last. I looked at him. "Krupp," I said.

  "Yes?"

  He was giving nothing away. So I told him about Rauchfus, and watched him go even stiller, as if delving deep inside himself.

  "Is he real?" he said.

  I shrugged.

  "Your gut instinct."

  "My instincts took me to look at him in the first place."

  He nodded. That was all, but it was decided, there and then. Just like that.

  "Is he safe?"

  "We need to move him."

  "Where?"

  "The village?"

  He shook his head. "Too public. It needs to be close by. A relation."

  Meaning family. Meaning one of us…

  We looked at each other with the same thought.

  "Mrs Beeton."

  "Isabella Beeton?" Lucy said, interrupting. Miss Havisham looked momentarily surprised. "Do you know another one?" she said.

  "Our Prime Minister Isabella Beeton?"

  Miss Havisham smiled tolerantly. "She wasn't Prime Minister then," she said, reasonably. "But she'd always been family. Even when she was fomenting revolution, later, in eighty-eight."

  "Mrs Beeton worked for the Bureau?"

  Miss Havisham shook her head at that. "A relation," she said. "One of the people we used to call Mycroft's Irregulars. She ran a safe house for the Bureau, every now and then. And Mycroft and I decided it was the perfect place to move our reluctant German defector to."

  Lucy looked at her closely. "But something went wrong?" she said, softly.

  Miss Havisham sighed. "Something went wrong," she agreed, sadly.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  That same night (Miss Havisham said) we undertook a rare excursion together, Mycroft and I. At Ham Common we picked up Rauchfus, and drove him, in Mycroft's baruch-landau, to Mrs Beeton's place. We erased Rauchfus's trail of paperwork, excised all mention of him on the Ham facility's records, and returned to the Bureau, confident he was safe, and that we had time.

  As it turned out, we were wrong.

  I was woken up in the archives. I had dozed at my desk. Mycroft's voice on the Tesla unit. I had never heard him so angry, so controlled.

  "We lost him," he said.

  I said, "What?"

  "Rauchfus. He's gone."

  "Gone where?"

  A silence on the line. Then: "Gone."

  I saw him being carted away. We came there, to the safe house, and there he was, peaceful, at rest. The resultant autopsy revealed a minute hole in the back of his neck, as if a thin needle had been inserted there all the way to his brain. There had been no reports of intruders, no one unauthorised entering or leaving the house. Mrs Beeton was – justifiably – outraged. I thought I heard Mycroft murmur, "The Bookman," just once, but that was that. We burned Rauchfus's files. There was no more mention of Ultra, or a highly placed British power playing in the sandbox with Krupp, or what it could mean.

  Then there was the mess in eighty-eight… I was made redundant and Mycroft was beleaguered. The political landscape changed, Moriarty lost the elections, the Byron automata ran against him but in a surprise move it was Mrs Beeton who won…

  Is this why you are here? Why Mycroft sent you?

  Are the old suspicions resurfacing?

  "You mean…" Lucy wasn't sure what to say. "You suspected Mrs Beeton?"

  "No one knew Rauchfus was there. Only Mycroft, and myself, beside her. It was Occam's Razor, Lucy. The simplest explanation is the most likely correct one."

  Miss Havisham smiled, suddenly. "We are shadow players," she said, and shrugged. "We seldom keep to only one side."

  There was a silence. "What happened in eighty-eight?" Lucy said at last.

  Miss Havisham shook her head. "I do not know, exactly. Something is buried, deep under Oxford, which needs to remain buried. That is all I will say." She glanced at Lucy sharply. "Mycroft never sent you to me, did he?" she said.

  "No."

  "What are you playing at, Miss Westenra?"

  Lucy didn't know what to tell her. "I need you to trust me," she said, simply.

  "Why?"

  "Because I think Mycroft is in trouble."

  Miss Havisham snorted. "He is always in trouble."

  "I think… I think the Bookman is back."

  Miss Havisham fell quiet. Then, as if, between them, something had been decided, she said: "Tea?"

  "Please," Lucy said.

  But you were asking me about Abe Stoker, and I quite went about it in a roundabout way (said Miss Havisham). Well, Rauchfus had awakened our suspicions, but my interest in Stoker came two weeks later, at that first-night performance of The Pirates of the Carib Sea, a performance in which the very man who had so concerned us made a rare appearance.

  Alfred Krupp had come to London unannounced. He had come, naturally, on business, but had taken time for the theatre–

  Which had us curious. Krupp was seldom seen in public. Even on our home turf following him was near impossible. He had his own team of anti-surveillance experts.

  Could the theatre be something more than entertainment? Could this engagement mean a clandestine meeting of some sort?

  And if so, with whom?

  In light of what we had learned – or thought we had – from Rauchfus, I was insistent that we monitor the theatre as closely as po
ssible. Fogg was back by then, and argued vehemently against it. Krupp was too important – we had to be careful – we didn't have the budget – the staff–

  I had argued with him. Mycroft was distracted – the Afghanistan operation had gone badly – at last we agreed on a compromise, a small but select team of watchers, and I myself secured a ticket to the show, which had by then sold out.