“Val Fleming’s boy,” he muttered. “Peter, is it?”
“Ian, Prime Minister. Peter’s my brother.”
“Ah, yes. Splendid chap. Commando. Read his book on Brazil.”
Everyone had. Ian said only: “That will give him the greatest pleasure, sir.”
“I didn’t say I enjoyed it,” Churchill barked. “Knew your father once upon a time. Excellent fellow. We shall not see his like again.”
It was true Mokie and Churchill had been friends. Members of Parliament together. Churchill’s younger brother, Jack, had served with Val Fleming, and Ian remembered hating him as a boy—hating anyone who’d failed to die in the stinking mud trenches. It was infuriating to know that even one man had escaped to take his morning tea in the comfort of London, to snap open the newspaper his valet handed him and carelessly ruffle the head of a hunting dog or a ten-year-old son, while thinking idly of his breakfast. Survived, when Val Fleming hadn’t. They never saw Mokie’s body. It was buried with all the other waste among the poppies and the sagging trenches.
Ian drew his wallet from his jacket. There was a newspaper clipping tucked in one of the folds, much creased and yellowed with age.
“I wonder if you might sign this, Prime Minister,” he said.
Churchill’s paw reached for it. “Lord! My tribute to Val from the Times. How do you still come to have it?”
“He could not share the extravagant passions with which the rival parties confronted each other,” Ian recited. “He felt that neither was wholly right in policy and that both were wrong in mood. You cannot know how those words marked my childhood, sir.”
“For good, I hope,” Churchill growled. “From what your mother says, you’re a bit of a scoundrel. Left Sandhurst under a cloud, didn’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
The PM swept Ian’s length with frowning eyes. “Have you a pen, Cowles?”
Grace offered him one.
He scrawled his signature in the faded margin of the piece. As he handed it to Ian, he was swept by a fit of coughing. They watched as Churchill doubled over, his jowls heaving. A man of his corpulence did not double easily. Ian wondered whether Gracie worried, as he did, that Churchill might drop dead, worn out by this war. And abandon them to their various fates.
“What’s all this?” the PM demanded, his eyes streaming as he surfaced. With a gesture of his cigar he encompassed Ian, Grace, and the Signals equipment. A clump of silver ash fluttered to the Turkish carpet.
“Commander Fleming received an urgent cable from Bletchley, sir,” Grace said. “He’s requested the use of the Secraphone to answer it.”
“Ah.” Churchill drew a fraught breath and paused to bury his nose in his handkerchief. “You’ll tell me what it’s about? After dinner?”
“Certainly, sir,” Ian said.
“Good man. Carry on, Cowles.”
“Yes, sir. Enjoy your dinner, sir.”
Churchill grunted.
His valet materialized with coat and hat. The Prime Minister allowed himself to be babied into them, his jaw contorting with the threat of another cough. He lifted his hand vaguely in Ian’s direction and moved heavily toward the villa’s front door.
“You still love him,” Grace said.
“Churchill?”
“Your father. When was that piece written?”
“May 1917.”
He recalled a plimsoll. A straight-backed chair. The summer that followed.
His impossible mother, painting every room of the hunting lodge black.
“And you’ve kept that bit of paper, all these years.”
Annoying, to be analyzed by Grace Cowles.
“Now it’s signed, I’ll have to insure it.” Ian pocketed his wallet. “I’ll wait for that call, if you don’t mind.”
“Provided you sit in the lounge,” she said briskly. “This could take upwards of an hour. Why do you always pretend, Ian? That you don’t feel things?”
He looked at her.
“I feel things,” he said. “Hunger, for instance. Lust.”
“Loneliness. Pain. Fear?”
“Hunger,” he repeated. “Is there food?”
“There’s a cook. I’ll have something sent out to you. Omelet do?”
“Of course.”
“Drink anything you can find. He’ll never miss it.”
She reached for the bright green receiver and began speaking in coordinates, one exchange to another, the long relay of scrambled frequencies reaching across continents, Ian already dismissed.
Pamela, he thought, would have teased him relentlessly for information, like a poodle worrying at a ball. But Grace was too well trained in the white lies of war.
What if he said to her: Not the Dornier. An enemy agent.
They were surrounded by guns and concertina wire. But facts—the date and location of the greatest land invasion in Europe’s history—could slip through both.
What would Grace say if he admitted he was afraid?
—
IN THE CHARMING salon of the PM’s rented villa he chose a club chair by the coal fire and warned himself he must not fall asleep. He was exhausted to his bones—the reaction of an introvert to constant, enforced interaction with other people. In London he might have disappeared into White’s club or gone to ground in his own flat, which had miraculously escaped being leveled by German bombs. It was filled with his carefully chosen collection of books in their special bindings, the walls lined in pinstripe-gray fabric. He invited very few people there. Ian, by nature, was a loner.
He was especially distant around women, who often seemed like an alien race. How could they be anything else, when from the age of eight he’d been raised by and with men? First Durnford, then Eton; and after his prepping and athletics were done, the martial heartiness of Sandhurst. At home there were three brothers. He craved the company of women as a cave dweller craves sunlight. But he was afraid of that light as well, because his mother had always blinded him.
Eve Fleming was a Force. She had been a good political wife while Mokie was alive, but at his death she turned Bohemian, selling the house they’d loved in Hampstead (once owned by William Pitt), and buying a cavernous space in Cheyne Walk surrounded by painters’ studios. She was a beautiful and beguiling woman whose looks endured over the years. She favored trailing silk gowns with diaphanous veils. Mokie’s money went to the boys if she married again, so she stayed single and had passionate affairs.
Of the four Fleming sons, she managed not to damage three of them.
Ian worshipped his mother for years. Eve, on the other hand, worshipped Peter. Ian looked rather like his elder brother but was utterly different—an athlete, where Peter was a scholar; a man of passions and moods, where Peter was cool and steady. A failure, where Peter was a flaming success. The fact that he actually liked his brother made it worse. Hating Peter would have been far more satisfying than depending on him; instead, Ian was forced to admit his inferiority in everything but sports. At fifteen, he won the Slater house colors for his play in the Field Game, Eton’s odd mix of soccer and rugby; and his height made him a natural cricket bowler. But in general he disliked teams. Steeplechase and hurdles and long jump were Ian’s real meat. With Hudders stumbling behind him, one rain-sodden mucky February, he pounded round the mile at Eton in just under five minutes; Hudders came in twenty-third, and vomited while Ian was lifted on the shoulders of his Slater housemates. It was not enough, however. He might be named Victor Ludorum—Champion Athlete of Eton—two years running, but his grades were shite. Eve made sure Ian knew how profound a Disappointment he was to both parents, living and dead.
She was certain that Sandhurst would be the making of him. What use was an athlete, if not as cannon fodder? And Mokie had liked the cavalry. But Ian slept with a tart in his final year and contracted VD. Furious, Eve pulled him f
rom the academy a few months before graduation.
Obviously, she’d talked about it, too. Even Churchill had known he’d left Sandhurst “under a cloud.”
Please, dear God, help me to grow up to be more like Mokie, he thought. Not without irony.
His response to his mother’s disapproval was to lead a careless and rakish life. There were women. Sudden forays into strange countries with dangerous friends. A maudlin collection of poems he published himself.
Peter married a famous actress from the London stage and settled on the old Fleming estate in Oxfordshire. He went on far-flung adventures and wrote about them for a living.
Ian prepped for the Foreign Office, but didn’t score high enough for a post. He wrote long letters full of disillusionment back to Hudders, who replied with a bitterness of his own. They were both going through difficult patches—Hudders with finances, Ian with women; he’d broken an engagement and was almost sued by the girl’s father. He cast about aimlessly for a passion he could not feel. He dabbled in journalism for Reuters, tried stockbroking in the family firm. When the boredom was too much, he devoured thrillers and spy novels, the one lasting effect of his Durnford education. The outbreak of war in 1939 came as a relief.
Ian discovered, at last, something he was exceptionally good at. Something nobody else could do with quite his brilliance or flair.
Lie to the Enemy.
In the Office of Naval Intelligence, where he was hired as the chief’s assistant, Ian spent his days writing fiction: elaborate deception operations intended for the Nazis to swallow—hook, line, and sinker. It was Ian who suggested dumping a corpse padded with fake Top Secret documents on a beach in Spain, where German agents were sure to find it; Ian who came up with the idea of luring a German ship to rescue British pilots falsely downed in the Channel. The object that time was to overpower the crew and steal their Enigma encoding machine—for Alan Turing’s use, of course.
Ian was good at planning conferences as well—he’d been behind all of the meetings between Churchill and Roosevelt over the past four years—but his true gift was for conspiracy. He was a natural deceiver. He delighted in the confusion of his enemies.
It was the kind of success, of course, that he could never tell his mother about.
—
THE OMELET ARRIVED. Oranges came with it, and dates; bitter black coffee and eesh baladi, the flatbread the Egyptians made so well.
Ian ate and smoked and pursued his thoughts.
Consider the Fencer, now. Ian had been obsessed with the German agent for months, to little purpose. He did not know his name. He had never seen his face.
He was not even sure that the Fencer was male.
Alan Turing had stumbled across the code name in the course of parsing intercepts at Bletchley: der Fechter—the Fencer—recurred in the private correspondence between Adolf Hitler and Walter Schellenberg. Schellenberg was an SS brigadeführer in the foreign intelligence branch of the Sicherheitsdienst, the Nazi Party’s security service. The Fencer reported to Schellenberg, it seemed, but he was Hitler’s weapon of choice: the agent consulted in the direst circumstance, the eleventh hour, the last stand. Not simply an assassin, Fleming knew, but a singular intellect who commanded entire teams of operatives and killers.
It was the Fencer who planned the Venlo Incident in 1939, when the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were pressured to “defect” to the German Reich; but the royal failure to jump was blamed on Schellenberg, who’d served as Hitler’s courier. The Fencer survived to manipulate the Duquesne spy ring in New York two years later, which the FBI said they’d penetrated from the start. Thirty-three German agents were rounded up and convicted of treason a few days after the United States entered the war. But Ian knew what the FBI wasn’t telling: the Fencer had deliberately blown Duquesne and his spies. They were a necessary diversion from a far deadlier ring the Bureau had yet to pinpoint.
When German Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess parachuted wildly into Scotland, babbling about peace talks, it was the Fencer who shut him up: Hess refused to cooperate with MI5 because he was terrified the Fencer would kill his wife, Ilse, if he did. Ian figured Hess was right to worry. The Fencer was good at revenge. Take Prague, where Reinhard Heydrich had been assassinated a year and a half before. By the time Adolf Opálka and his Czech Resistance team threw a grenade in Heydrich’s car, the Fencer had already penetrated Opálka’s network. After he and his men shot themselves in a Prague church crypt and Opálka’s family were sent to their deaths at Mauthausen, it was the Fencer who suggested a broader example for the Czech Resistance. British intelligence estimated nearly five thousand Czechs were murdered as a result.
And just two months ago, he—or she, Fleming mentally conceded—had planned the daring rescue of Benito Mussolini from an Italian mountaintop. The Fencer had tracked the imprisoned dictator for two months as his captors moved him from hiding place to hiding place. Then a Nazi team snatched Mussolini without a shot being fired.
From an inaccessible peak. Reached only by cable car.
The Allies were still chattering about it.
The Fencer could plan. The Fencer could execute. And none of his enemies lived to breathe his name. That was power, and that was why Hitler used him. It wasn’t for his loyalty to the Reich—because nobody knew if the Fencer was even German.
Ian let a sip of coffee burn its way down his throat. The Fencer’s in town, and he’s brought a girlfriend with him. Hitler’s agent, man or woman, certainly got around. That suggested to Ian that the Fencer was no soldier. A soldier went where he was told. This agent was a law unto himself.
Among the few Allies who knew of the Fencer’s existence, rumor and speculation were rife. Some said he was not one man but several, with a fancy code name deliberately dangled before Western eyes as a red herring. Some said he was a German aristocrat descended from a military family, named for a fencing scar on his face. From stray references in the Enigma traffic, Turing suspected the Fencer was the same man who’d taken over the murdered Heydrich’s job: Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Hitler’s new Gestapo chief. Kaltenbrunner’s name turned up in the Fencer traffic—he did much of Walter Schellenberg’s dirty work for him. And, most significantly, a saber scar bisected his left cheek.
“Won’t wash,” Ian said impatiently. “They’d have no need for a code name if the agent’s Kaltenbrunner. Besides—you know the fellow’s too obvious, Prof. You don’t make your Gestapo chief your prize secret agent. How could he possibly run the shop in Albrechtstrasse if he’s pirouetting in a cable car with Mussolini?”
“Maybe it’s a kind of Nazi club,” Hudson suggested. He’d learned of the Fencer’s existence when the FBI rounded up the Duquesne spy ring. “You know, like the Death Head guys. Only this time it’s scars. Although I suppose it’s ridiculous to think that more than one guy is running around with a saber cut on his face.”
“I thought you knew Austrians!” Ian retorted.
Hudders had left Vienna too early. But for several summers during his Eton days, Ian’s mother had packed him off to Kitzbühel to prep with an old Oxonian who understood how to motivate boys. Eve had no idea that Ernan Forbes Dennis had once worked for MI6, in the dark days following the First World War; but he remained a canny intelligence talent spotter for life, his nearsighted gaze roaming shrewdly over the raw youths under his care. Forbes Dennis advocated bracing climbs to the top of the Kitzbühler Horn, icy plunges into the Schwarzsee, and tedious efforts at German translation. Unbeknownst to Eve, Ian had spent nearly as much time in Austria seducing the local Viennese girls who summered by the lake.
And he learned that fencing duels were primal rites of passage among Austrian college boys. They were waged with sabers, the old cavalry sword, and were strict affairs of honor. The duelists wore no masks. The point, indeed, was to cut each other—and bear the mark of combat for the rest of one’s life. Hudders and Turing might speculate about the Fe
ncer all they wished. Ian found their guesses vaguely amusing, but he dismissed them entirely. He didn’t care where the Fencer came from or if he’d ever held a sword. The agent might be scarred, but Ian doubted the wounds were visible. It was the Fencer’s mental game—his perfect calculation behind an impenetrable mask—that intrigued Ian. To operate as seamlessly as the Fencer did, he had to live completely outside the Nazi hierarchy. That was the only way that nobody—neither Axis nor Ally—could identify him. The Fencer accepted Hitler’s missions because Hitler expected the impossible—and the Fencer liked to deliver. Ian sensed a familiar arrogance in the cool cunning of the Fencer’s operations; it was similar to his own. The Fencer believed he was nobody’s lackey. He might do as Hitler asked, but the Führer existed for his purposes—not the other way around.
Ian knew the two communicated by way of Enigma signals—Turing’s intercepts proved that much—but Hitler had probably never met his top agent. Ian suspected that the bulk of those the Fencer employed—his crack teams—had never seen him, either. Otherwise, the agent would long since have been blown. No. The Fencer must assemble his people from a long chain of go-betweens, each of them strangers to the other, and abandon them once a job was done.
A Nazi outsider. Well and good. But a world war was on; nobody—nobody—could survive without choosing sides. A spy needed something to sell. Needed doors he could open. Facts he could use. A spy needed trust from the people he betrayed.
He needed Allied leaders and Allied secrets.
He needed to look like the Allies’ friend.
Completely trustworthy and completely above suspicion. Perfectly hidden in plain sight.
A spy like that, Ian thought, could do a world of damage.
He set down his coffee cup and reached again for his cigarettes. God, it’d make a great story—
When this war was over, he was going to write the thriller to end all thrillers. And make a bloody fortune doing it.
He glanced around for paper. He found some engraved with the villa’s address in the drawer of a table.
Too Bad to Die Page 4
