Ian knew that Hudson’s title was simply cover for far more interesting work: he was one of Wild Bill Donovan’s handpicked aides—a spymaster in the Office of Strategic Services. Ian had helped draft the blueprint for the OSS a few years back, during an official visit to New York. He’d probably gotten Hudders his job.
“A Yale man,” he’d suggested, “by way of Eton and Durnford. You can’t possibly find a better liaison, Bill. He already knows how the English think.”
Ian was personal assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence, a deeply conventional and unimaginative sailor by the name of Rushbrooke. He did not like Rushbrooke much; he thought his mind small and his courage stillborn. As a consequence, Ian spent a lot of the war ignoring Rushbrooke’s instructions and issuing his own. Liaising, when possible, with his American friends.
He was still whispering to Hudders in the companionable dark, plotting the ruin of their enemies. The Too Bad Club was alive and well.
“Of course FDR cares,” Hudson said now. “Our boys are dying every day in the Pacific. Chiang’s fighting the Japs. We need him just as much as you Brits need us.”
“But does America need England anymore?” Ian threw himself into a chair by the carved sandstone fireplace; coal was burning feebly in its depths. “The PM’s beginning to wonder. A few months ago it felt like a marriage made in heaven, Churchill and FDR. But the starch is off the bedsheets, the bloom is off the rose. Admit it, Hudders—we Brits bore you. We talk too much and haven’t a fiver between us.”
“Hear, hear,” Leathers intoned.
There was an uncomfortable silence. The truth usually shut people up, Ian thought. He’d planned the Cairo meeting as he’d planned all the others between Churchill and Roosevelt, and he knew the Chinese were only a sideshow. Cairo was just the first stop on a far trickier journey ending in Tehran—where Roosevelt would meet Joseph Stalin for the first time.
Uncle Joe, as the American press admiringly called him.
Stalin had been keeping Hitler busy for years now, tossing cannon fodder at his guns on the Eastern Front. He’d tried to use the Nazi war machine to his own ends, but he’d been stabbed in the back and lost millions of people to starvation and siege. The Soviet strongman wanted only one thing from his allies in Tehran: Overlord. Their promise to invade Europe. As soon as possible. So that Hitler would turn around. So that Hitler would go home.
Talk of invasion made Churchill nervous. He didn’t think his army was ready to attack Hitler in France, and he wanted Roosevelt’s support for a simpler approach. A series of lightning raids, maybe, from various parts of the Mediterranean. More time, perhaps, to train for a brutal amphibious landing across the unpredictable Channel. Stalin would pressure them in Tehran for a date and a detailed plan, anything that would guarantee him a pitched battle on Hitler’s Western Front within six months. But Churchill was stalling. A commitment to Overlord meant concentrating all his military effort on one terrible stroke; and if Overlord failed, it would take England down with it.
Churchill was deathly afraid of putting his head into a noose of Stalin’s making. It was vitally important that he explain his position to Roosevelt, here in Cairo, before their joint delegation arrived in Tehran. He and Roosevelt had to stand together—present a unified front against Stalin’s demands.
But Roosevelt was playing hard to get.
—
THE PRESIDENT had been polite but distant to his British friends since his plane had touched down three days before. He’d seized every opportunity to draw Chiang Kai-shek aside, instead, and to talk Broadway shows with his stunning wife. So far, Churchill hadn’t been able to get a word in edgewise. And they were flying to Tehran in thirty-six hours.
Hudson lifted his glass in salute. “Hey. No England, no Scotch. How in the hell did you find this bottle in Cairo, Johnnie?”
“Brought it with me on Leathers’s plane.” The Scotch was Ian’s personal poison, a single-malt bottled in secrecy on the remote Scottish island of Islay. The Laphroaig distillery had been converted to a military depot since the start of the war, but precious bottles could still be found. Ian’s family was Scots. One of his bottles had smashed during a rough patch of turbulence over Rabat. Leathers’s plane cabin smelled like caramel and peat.
The Minister for War Transport snorted. “Needn’t have bothered,” he said. “The PM has flown in enough drink to flood the Nile.”
“Let’s hope he can swim, then.”
“That’s why he brought me,” said a voice from the doorway. “Keep his head above water and floating in the right direction.”
She was a mirage of gold and turquoise, a perfect hourglass in shimmering silk. Her smile was aloof and enigmatic. Ian had seen that feline look before, lit by flaring torches, on the wall of a pharaoh’s tomb.
But Pamela was the sort of woman who bored him silly. The kind who might as well be a pet, something fed and cosseted and groomed. Played with when she demanded it. Never an equal. Never anything but owned.
“Mrs. Randolph.” Leathers harrumphed and struggled to his feet.
“Pamela,” Ian murmured.
Michael merely saluted with his drink. She had the ability to strike him dumb.
She fixed her glowing gaze on Ian. “I’ve got something for you, Commander. A telegram. Passion by post, direct from the PM’s private wireless. A penny says it’s Ann!”
A faint line furrowed Ian’s brow. He set down his Scotch and held out his hand. “Give,” he said quietly.
“You might offer a girl a drink.”
“Hudders, the girl wants a drink.”
Michael rose hurriedly to his feet. “We’ve got whiskey here, but I’m sure you’d prefer—”
“Champagne,” she murmured. On Pamela’s lips, the word was a bauble. Something to toss in the air and catch in the teeth. Michael was mesmerized. He held out his arm. She took it.
“Pamela,” Ian said wearily. “The telegram?”
She drew it from her bodice like a harem girl of old. Still warm from her skin when she handed it to him. He noticed Leathers almost try to touch it.
“If you’ll excuse me,” he said.
And left the Minister for War Transport in possession of the Laphroaig.
—
THE TELEGRAM was not from Ann O’Neill, of course. Ian’s latest flirt could hardly gain access to Churchill’s private commo network.
It was from Alan Turing, an eccentric and solitary man who lived out his days in Hut 8 at a place called Bletchley Park, working for something known affectionately as the Golf, Cheese, and Chess Society—the Government Code and Cypher School. Turing was an odd fish in most people’s estimation, but Ian had learned long ago to ignore most people.
He strolled out onto the Mena House terrace. The Great Pyramid’s hulking silhouette blotted out a few stars. A November chill was rising from the desert; he was completely alone for the first time in days. He tore open the telegram.
The Fencer’s in town. He’s brought a girlfriend with him.
Ian’s fingers tightened, briefly, on the paper. Then he reached into his jacket for his gold cigarette lighter and burned Turing’s words to ash.
CHAPTER 2
The Prof, as Alan Turing’s friends called him, was an indisputable mathematics genius, with degrees from Cambridge and Princeton and a mind that shook up the world like a kaleidoscope, rearranging it in unexpected and intricately beautiful ways. He saw the war as waged not by Fascists or heroes, tanks or bombers, but by bits of information reeled out into the ether in a code so complex and constantly mutating it was virtually impossible to break: the German Enigma encryption.
Ian didn’t understand Turing’s mathematical world in the slightest. Codes, and breaking them, were games he’d played with Hudders in their public school days. But the Enigma problem was urgent—the German naval cyphers, in particular, were the most comp
lex encrypted communications known to man, and they told submarines where to sink Allied shipping in the Atlantic. Thousands of tons of cargo Britain desperately needed were torpedoed daily. Countless lives were lost. Breaking the codes was critical to survival—not just for the men drowning in the frigid Atlantic seas, but for all of Europe going under.
Turing had set up a series of “bombes,” as he called them, at Bletchley. These were electromechanical machines that mimicked the rotor and plugboard settings of an actual Enigma encoder, sifting through millions of variations in those settings for the one correct combination that could translate gobbledygook into plain German text. Ian had no idea how the bombes worked. Turing had tried to explain it to his layman’s mind in terms he would understand. But the Prof spoke in stuttering, truncated words that seemed to reel off his own rotors. Snatches of code, opaque in meaning.
“Expect the world to make sense. Certain co-co-co-herence. Isn’t the key. Not to codes. Not to life. Co-co-herence hides meaning. Seas hide a shark. Ha! Contradic-ic-ic-tion’s what matters. Fin on the sea’s surface. Tells you the shark’s there. Contradiction gives up the gh-gh-ghost.”
From a single contradiction, Ian translated, you can deduce everything.
The Enigma’s contradiction was that no letter could ever be encyphered as itself. If the bombe’s trial settings produced that result for an intercepted German message, the combination was instantly discarded. Which meant one less set of variables in the cipher universe. And so on, and so on, for days and hours, disproving every incorrect combination of settings until only the right one remained. The combination that broke the code.
Ian had met Turing two years ago, in the old loft of the converted stable that was Bletchley Park’s Hut 8, where the Enigma naval ciphers were parsed by Turing and his team. The mathematician never met another person’s eyes and avoided physical contact; he winched lunch baskets up into the loft with a block and tackle and sent requests back down on slips of paper with his dirty plates.
“C-c-could learn heaps from a single Enigma r-r-rotor,” he’d said when Ian climbed up the treacherous ladder and introduced himself. “Or a c-c-codeb-b-book. German bits left b-b-b-behind when there’s a raid.”
What he was saying, Ian figured out, was that they needed the right sort of men on the ground after an enemy rout. The sort who knew how to spot treasure among the wreckage of German Signals equipment or torpedoed ships, and pocket it for analysis at Bletchley. It would save Turing time. But nobody was actually looking for such things in the heat of battle; anything haphazardly salvaged appeared in Hut 8 like a bit of the True Cross.
The Prof’s words had lingered in Ian’s mind. Like everybody in Naval Intelligence, he tried to do whatever Alan Turing asked. On the train back to London, Ian scribbled down a few words: Special unit. Targeted collection. Intelligence support. Rushbrooke’s predecessor at Naval Intelligence, Sir John Godfrey, was enthusiastic about the idea.
“It must be a small group of fellows,” he warned. “Thoroughly trained in survival techniques. Nontraditional warfare. Commandos, we’ll call them. Churchill will like that name.”
Co-Co-Co-Commandos.
“I want to volunteer, sir,” Ian had said, with the first real pulse of excitement he’d felt since the beginning of his war.
But no, Godfrey replied with a regretful shake of the head. Ian was too valuable. Too creative in the deception operations he’d unleashed against the Germans over the years. He knew far too much about the inner workings of Naval Intelligence. They could not risk his capture in the field.
A year later, Rushbrooke said the same.
And so it was Peter Fleming who’d volunteered for Commando training in the wilds of Scotland instead . . .
The closest Ian came to action was the deck of a landing boat off Dieppe, when his Red Indians, as the intelligence commandos were called, had gone in on a raid. Ian’s heroics that night were limited to comforting an eighteen-year-old kid under fire for the first time. He might look like a hero—tall, broad-shouldered, Byronically handsome, with a broken nose women swooned over—but he was denied all opportunity to prove himself. Ian was a planner. The brains of every operation.
And his desk job was driving him mad.
He’d taken to writing down the wild ideas in his head, lately—improbable contests with a sinister enemy—just to vent his frustration. It was King Solomon’s Mines all over again. Cracking good stories, none of them real.
What would Mokie think of him now?
He pocketed the lighter and dusted ash from his fingertips. The Fencer’s in town . . .
He needed more information than Turing would give in a one-line telegram. And, unfortunately, that meant grappling with Grace. She’d assume he’d invented a reason to see her, when in fact he wanted nothing less. But it couldn’t be helped.
He stepped off the terrace and made for one of the sanded paths that led directly from the hotel to the Prime Minister’s villa.
—
“NO EVENING GOWN FOR GRACIE?”
“Ian!” She glanced over her shoulder, a distracted look in her gray eyes, and snatched irritably at the earphones she was wearing. They’d muffled the sound of his approach to the Signals Room, and Grace would resent the fact. A security breach, she’d say. In the future he should expect a cordon of alarms to herald his approach, if not a locked door.
It could be a metaphor, Ian thought, for his entire history with Grace Cowles.
She was an expert Signals operator, a composed and efficient twenty-six-year-old from Lambeth who was cannier than her education and more vital to the British war effort than most people knew. Grace served as General Lord Ismay’s right arm—and Ismay was chief of Churchill’s military staff. Since Ian coordinated intelligence and Grace disseminated it all over the British field, they’d been thrown together for years. Ismay could not function without her.
Only last week, Grace had flown to Moscow; a few months before, she’d worked the Quebec conference; and before that, she’d shared a silent cab with Ian down Pennsylvania Avenue. There’d been a time in London last summer when they’d shared dinners and films, too—The Thin Man, he remembered. Grace probably didn’t. She’d embarked on a ruthless campaign to forget his existence. And she was the kind of woman who took no prisoners.
He ran his eyes over her elegant figure, the way her dark hair coiled sleekly behind her ears. He’d known the hollow at the base of her neck and the scent of her skin. He’d taken her to bed on nights when the blitz shuddered and screamed in the air around them and hadn’t cared, then, if they’d died in the act. But her eyes were hard and flat tonight; the windows to her soul, a brick wall. Her fingers twisted impatiently on her earphones. In a few seconds she’d throw him out.
“You’re on duty,” he said.
“Obviously. And you should be with the Americans.”
“They might have let you try the President’s turkey.”
“Choke on it, more like,” she retorted, “watching poor old Pug swallow the bloody insult Roosevelt’s offered him. The President’s demanding we agree on a chief to coordinate American and British bombing—a Yank, no doubt. With about as much experience of real war as Eisenhower. Pug’s furious. Could barely knot his tie, poor lamb. I expect he’ll have a stroke before dinner’s out.”
Ismay was Pug to his friends, although Ian doubted Gracie called him that to his face.
“You took down the cable from Bletchley?” he asked.
“Yes.” Her mouth pursed. “Don’t fret, Ian. I won’t talk about your Fencer and his girlfriend. I’m not that interested in your social life.”
“I didn’t think you were. But I need to reach Turing. As soon as possible.”
She picked up a pad and pencil. “Fire away.”
Ian shook his head. “It’s urgent. I’d like to place a trunk call to Bletchley on the Secraphone.”
&nbs
p; Her eyes strayed to a black Bakelite telephone with a bright green handle. The nondescript box beside it was filled with something that scrambled voice frequencies. A similar box on Turing’s end would unscramble them.
“You’re not supposed to know it exists.”
“But I do.” He stepped toward her desk, that safe barrier, willing all his charm into his voice, caressing rather than challenging her. “It’s absolutely vital that I use it. You’re my only hope, Grace.”
“I’ve heard that lie before.” Her eyes narrowed. “Is this to do with the stray Dornier?”
“What stray Dornier?”
She brushed a strand of hair from her forehead. “Spotted over Tunis. Possibly zeroing in on us. Pug ordered snipers in the heights and an RAF post on the top of the pyramid on the strength of it. He doesn’t want this conference to end in a blaze of German glory.”
Ian’s hands were propped on Grace’s desk and his body yearned toward her. It was she who’d ended things between them, and he’d never quite gotten her out of his system. He suspected she knew that and enjoyed having the upper hand. Enjoyed denying him. He was intoxicated by her closeness, the fold of her mouth when she smiled, and his mind was only dimly processing the fact of the Dornier, which would be the 217 model, not the lighter and older 17, a reconnaissance plane and bomber that could outrun most defending fighter craft. Certainly most fighter planes the RAF could throw at it. Particularly in North Africa. The gun site on the Great Pyramid suddenly made sense.
“Do you know,” he murmured, “that your left eye has a green cast in the iris?”
She swatted his head, hard, with her steno pad.
“For the love of God. Romancing the bloody secretaries again?”
Gracie came to attention, her eyes fixed on the door; Ian spun around. “Prime Minister.”
—
WINSTON SPENCER CHURCHILL was nursing a foul bout of bronchitis with cigar smoke, whiskey, and petulance. He was frowning now, a portrait in annoyance and white tie.
Too Bad to Die Page 3
