The things Grace envied were the sort Pam Churchill took for granted.
What was it like, she wondered, to think only of yourself, instead of your duty?
“Are you ever far from that desk, Miss Cowles?”
Grace glanced up and smiled at the boyish figure leaning in the doorway, her heart accelerating. He wasn’t devastatingly handsome, like Ian, but Michael Hudson had only to enter a room for her self-possession to vanish.
“I’ll relax on the plane tomorrow,” she said, “but until then, Pug owns me.”
“Pug’s celebrating.” Michael strolled toward her, and Grace felt a flutter of nerves along her spine. “He got what he wanted. Bomber Harris stays in command of his flyboys—with a promotion to Air Marshal, too. I guess we Yanks’ll just have to learn to work with the guy.”
“Or work around him,” she suggested.
He grinned crookedly. “Always a possibility. You know your RAF calls Harris ‘Butcher’ behind his back? Not because of the way he bombs the Germans. Because he doesn’t give a damn how many British pilots he kills doing it.”
“That can’t be true,” she said swiftly. “We all know the debt we owe them—our poor boys . . .”
“I’m sorry.” His voice was suddenly gentle. “You lost someone.”
She hesitated, then dipped her head. “My brother.”
“Bomber or fighter?”
“His Spit went down over the Channel,” she said.
“Battle of Britain?”
She gave a brief nod. The glow Michael had given her had vanished. She was remembering her mother’s guttural sobbing in the middle of the night, and the way she had lain awake herself, imaging the spiral of smoke careening toward the flat gray sea. Will was nineteen. He’d been a pilot only three weeks.
“Are the photographers done at last?” She was good at steering conversations away from herself and back to neutral territory. It kept her from saying too much—and in her job, a tendency to talk was fatal.
“Just about,” Michael replied. He got up and strolled to the villa’s window, peering out toward the distant hotel. “The PM wants a shot with Madame Chiang—but she’s not back from the shopping trip yet. So the guys with the cameras are cooling their heels.”
It was after four o’clock, Grace noticed, and the dignitaries would be thinking of their drinks and dinner. “Poor Ian. Surrounded by so many women. He won’t know whom to seduce first.”
“He’s working, not playing, Grace.” Michael turned resolutely and studied her. It was the first time he’d called her by her name, and she registered the fact in one part of her mind while listening to him with another. “He drove off with the girls this morning because he wanted them out of Giza—and this villa empty. Nobody wandering in. Not the PM or his daughter or Mrs. Randolph. He asked me to search the two ladies’ rooms.”
“Whatever for?” She got to her feet, her back against the door to the hall, so that Michael could not act on his words. Not yet.
He shook his head. “I wish I could tell you. I really do. But Ian’s afraid to put you in danger. The less you know, he said . . .”
“Bloody fool.” Her voice was savage. “This is about his trunk call, isn’t it? To Bletchley?”
Michael nodded. “It’s vitally important. Life-or-death stuff. We’re on the trail of someone dangerous.”
“And you expect to find him in Sarah or Pam’s rooms? You do realize what you’re suggesting?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“You aren’t searching the men?”
“Not yet.”
Grace expelled an angry sigh. “What is it about Ian Bloody Fleming, anyway? He always assumes the worst. Particularly of women. Of course we’re the Enemy. Traitors, one and all.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Michael objected. “He’s crazy about you, Grace.”
She laughed out loud. “Tell me another, Mr. Hudson. The only person Ian cares about is himself.”
“That’s not what I hear.”
“Good God—has he been crying in his Scotch?”
“No,” Michael retorted. “But I can tell when a guy’s been punched in the gut. Why’d you do it, Grace?”
She hesitated. It was tempting to pour out her heart to Michael—his open, American face was as guileless as Jimmy Stewart’s. But anything she said would go right back to Ian. She refused to let him know he’d hurt her.
“He’s not to be trusted,” she said flatly, “with anything of value. I imagine that, as his friend, you’re not to be trusted, either. I won’t allow you into the ladies’ rooms.”
He sighed. “I promise I won’t finger their underwear.”
“That’s not the point,” she said. “It’s the principle of the thing. You’re not cleared for their underwear, Mr. Hudson.”
“Michael,” he said.
“You’re not a British subject,” she persisted. “I’d be committing a breach of security if I allowed you anywhere inside the private rooms of this villa.”
He moved closer to her. Reached tentatively for her arms, as though they were glass and might break. Grace felt his touch slide down her shoulders, warm and insistent, and knew an impulse to fold into him. She had carried so much for so long—
“Every room in the villa?” he asked softly. “You won’t let me into any of them, Grace?”
Pam Churchill never had to make these kinds of choices.
Grace stepped backward, away from his hands. “Not a single one, Mr. Hudson. Will you let me get back to my work, now—or must I summon a guard?”
CHAPTER 9
Eve was pregnant by her lover, the painter Augustus John, in the summer of 1925. She closed up her house and departed for the Continent to have the baby, whom she named Amaryllis. Both were back in London by December. Eve insisted the child was “adopted,” and that was the story eighteen-year-old Ian told Hudders, but there were sniggers behind cupped hands and derisive looks in Slater’s. Nobody would have dared to gossip in front of Peter, but Peter was gone to Oxford. Ian pretended he didn’t care, but his anger was savage. His grades plummeted. And then, abruptly, in April of his final year, Eve pulled him from Eton.
She had decided he wasn’t Oxford material. Ian was sent off to a Sandhurst crammer, a Colonel Trevor who lived in Bedfordshire. The general stupidity of his fellows at Trevor’s was staggering, but Eve was unmoved.
“If you can’t be bothered to learn,” she said, “you shall have to fight.”
Michael Hudson graduated from Eton and left for the foreign world of Yale. He arrived in New Haven with British affectations and an accent he quickly learned to lose. He was adept at rugby and cricket instead of baseball and football. He had no family in the United States—his father being posted at this point to Ankara. Michael wrote pathetically cheerful letters to Ian, who urged him to spend his Long Vac with Eve and Amaryllis and his brothers in Cheyne Walk. But Michael did not come.
He did not come the following year, or the year after that; and then the worldwide slump took hold, and there was no money in America for Atlantic passages.
Ian moved in and out of Sandhurst, under his proverbial cloud.
It was 1933 before he saw Hudders again.
—
IT WAS THE SOUND of a piano, oddly, that stopped him as he strolled through the lobby of the National Hotel. Confident and careless, like the Cole Porter tune being played. What is this thing called love? This funny thing called love . . .
He’d been thinking about a drink and the dubious food he’d had over the past six days. He’d flown from Croydon to Tempelhof, then caught the six o’clock Nord Express from Berlin to Moscow. Russian trains still operated on prewar rail fittings—a wider-gauge track than the rest of Europe—so at the border he detrained and took a seat in a different carriage, much colder than the last. In Moscow that night his Reuters contact drove h
im to the National because, he explained, the entire Western press corps stayed there. It had one of only two bars in Moscow that served gin.
Ian had been sent to Russia in a tearing hurry because six British engineers were about to be tried for espionage. Their firm, Metro-Vick, installed generators and turbines that provided electrical power to the country. Metro-Vick had operated in Soviet Russia for decades, but at the moment, the Soviet-British trade agreement was under renegotiation. Stalin didn’t like the terms he was getting. He felt himself and his country to be at a disadvantage before ruthless capitalist negotiators. So he accused a few Englishmen close at hand—the employees of Metro-Vick—of spying, and arrested them.
It was possible the engineers would be executed.
This was the hottest story Ian had followed at any time during his sketchy Reuters career. But after only a single day in a Soviet court, he suffered a quelling sense of boredom. It was purely a show trial, with a gravel-voiced judge and a handpicked if raucous crowd of spectators. Even Stalin wasn’t stupid enough to risk a trade embargo with England merely to pop a few guns at the British. Ian laid a bet with his cronies—chaps from the International News Service and the Associated Press—that Metro-Vick would get off with a wrist-slapping. Their Russian conspirators, of course, would get the gulag.
. . . just who can solve its mystery? Why should it make a fool of me?
The song tugged at his brain. Ian pushed through the glass doors into the bar, his eyes straining through clouds of cigarette smoke. Most of the tables were filled with Westerners in good suits; a few were held down by the local secret police, obvious in their ill-fitting clothes. Three women, all professional. One of them was leaning over the piano with a glass of gift Scotch in her hand.
The back of Hudders’s head was as instantly recognizable to Ian as Peter’s or Eve’s. The cords of the neck and the fragility of the skin where it met the brutal hairline. The imbecility of the ears, which resembled a monkey’s. He noticed, too, the thinness of the shoulder blades and the way they knifed backward as Michael Hudson played. He had not been eating well for some time.
“What are you doing in Moscow?”
The bottled blonde with the Scotch glanced up. Hudders swung around, his fingers trailing off the keys.
“Looking for you, Johnnie,” he said.
—
THEY WERE thrown out of the bar at two o’clock when the Communist Watchers decided it was time to go home. Hudders wasn’t staying at the National—incredibly, he had an apartment in Gorky Street. He lived in Moscow.
“You left America. And never told me.”
Michael studied the vodka in his glass. He’d introduced Ian to the Russian poison even though they were sitting in a Westerners’ bar. You can’t drink in Moscow, he’d said, without drinking vodka.
“My father died,” he said simply. “While he was posted in Ankara. Typhoid. I never told you that, either. It seemed so . . . tired a way out, after Mokie.”
The State Department would have sent his father’s body home in the hold of a cargo ship for Michael to pick up on the docks of New York, but he had no idea where to bury it. Hudson Senior had not set foot in his native country, really, for over thirty years. So Michael boarded a ship instead, and after several weeks of travel, reached the high and empty steppes of Asiatic Turkey. The new capital of Ankara had been peopled since the Bronze Age. Hittites built its streets, Phrygians dug its fountains. Lydians and Persians, Macedonians and Galatians, Byzantines, Seljuks and Ottomans succeeded one another down the millennia. Michael thought his father—that quiet and dusty bureaucrat of the world—should lay down his bones with the rest of them.
“And once that was done,” Michael shrugged, “I saw no reason to go back. The U.S. was never really my country, anyway.”
You should have come home, Ian thought.
He kept traveling east, by train and hired car, to Mount Ararat and the Transcaucasus. He reached the edge of the Caspian Sea and worked north through Astrakhan and Krgyzstan and the Urals. And then, as the winter of 1932 was coming on, he turned back toward Moscow.
“Siemens was looking for a fixer,” he said simply. “Somebody who could talk to both their engineers and the Sovs. Think about it, Johnnie! How many Fascists and Commies in a room does it take to change a lightbulb? But I can talk to anybody. It’s in my blood.”
The bitterness, Ian thought, was new. The collateral damage of age.
“So you do pretty much what the Metro-Vick people were arrested for,” he suggested.
Michael grinned. “I just do it better.”
“But doesn’t it grow tiresome?” Ian asked tentatively. “Never hearing a word of English?”
“That’s why I spend my nights in hotel bars,” Michael said. “For the conversation. But there’s nothing really for me in the U.S. No family. No jobs to speak of, with this damned Depression.”
“The Russians can’t possibly pay.”
“Well—” Michael tapped his glass on the counter and said a few words to the barkeep Ian didn’t understand. More vodka was poured. “You’ve heard about the famine?”
Ian nodded. Another reason Stalin was angry at the West—newspapers had blared the news that his people were starving. Communism didn’t work. Nothing grew in the vast wasted plains and there was nothing for sale in the shops. Stalin blamed saboteurs for the bad press and restricted the travel of Western journalists. If it wasn’t reported, it wasn’t happening.
“At least they’ve got light,” Michael said, “thanks to us.”
“Light isn’t free.”
“It’s pretty damn close.” Michael reached for Ian’s cigarette and took a deep draft. “General Electric and the Metro-Vick fellas and us boys over at Siemens have been price-fixing for the past couple of years. Pooling information, too. About everything, really. Stalin’s right to call us all spies. We had a nice little cartel going—nobody undercut anybody else, Russia got electricity, and we made a buck or two. But the Iron Man will probably seize our plants now and send us packing. It’s cheaper than paying for it.”
“Then what will you do?”
The familiar smile turned in on itself. “Sell what I know,” Michael said, “to the highest bidder.”
—
IAN WAS to remember that when war broke out six years later—and Roosevelt suddenly needed spies.
CHAPTER 10
The November dark had fallen by the time Ian reached Mena House. Golden light spilled from the windows staring out at Giza, but the Great Pyramid rose implacably cold in the desert night, its massive white blocks faintly luminous. He had found no official cars waiting at the Khan el-Khalili Bazaar when he’d taxied there from Shepheard’s, so he’d hired a driver to get him to Mena House. Concertina wire and checkpoints stopped them half a mile from the hotel. Ian showed his papers and set out to walk the rest of the way. He moved quickly, his head down.
Nazir’s warning had forced the only possible decision that afternoon: if the Fencer had orders to kill, Ian must tell Churchill what he knew. Then he and Hudders would talk to Roosevelt’s man, Sam Schwartz.
Marshal Stalin, Nazir had said, knows a killer is waiting in Tehran. The same man who snatched Mussolini from the sky. Our network has told him this. Stalin comes to Tehran with an army around him, and if our network cannot save him, we will all die, Fleming.
Ian had neglected to tell Nazir that his killer was right there in Giza. It would save a world of trouble if he could flush out the Fencer tonight.
He reached the end of the drive and hesitated. Strains of music filtered from the hotel: orchestral background, not dance tunes. That meant the delegations were still at dinner. There would be a number of ceremonial toasts, since the Chinese were parting from them tomorrow. The dinner would be protracted, which would give him time to compose his briefing.
He turned aside from the front entrance and follo
wed the line of the building as it descended the hillside. Mena House was laid out on several levels, with multiple entrances, following the terrain in such a way that at least three floors were technically at ground level. Ian took a path that brought him down to his floor, found the entrance, and made for his room.
This end of the hotel was far quieter. He shut the door behind him with a sense of relief. His bed had been turned down, his dressing gown laid out. He picked off his cuff links and undid his tie. While his bath was running, he poured himself a drink. To his disappointment, no pale blue official telegram had been shoved under his door in his absence. Alan Turing had no more information to offer. Ian would sound like a fool when he briefed Churchill. He had not a shred of proof to support what he meant to say.
The bathwater was scented with orange and clove. He sighed as he slid into it, reached for a writing tablet he’d left on the commode, and propped it on his knees.
You mean to tell me, 007, that you expect His Majesty’s Government to alter its whole course of action in the final hour—when the war hangs in the balance? Dammit, man, we’ve flown halfway around the world to meet Stalin tomorrow!
—I’m afraid it can’t be helped, sir. The Fencer expects you to walk into his trap. The surest way to foil his plan . . .
No pun intended. Ian crumpled his sheet of prose and began another, aware that the water was cooling and his Scotch was growing warm.
Dear Hudders,
Meet me at the PM’s villa as soon as you get this.
Johnnie
Fifteen minutes later, he was swinging down the sanded path in a fresh dress uniform, his dark hair slicked back behind his ears. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast, but his nerves were too raw to stomach food. At Eton he’d broken his nose on the playing field and an indifferent doctor had fused the cartilage with a metal plate. Whenever Ian was under stress, the plate let him know. Pain was flaring along the bridge of his nose and behind the sockets of his eyes. He closed them for an instant. With the shuttering of sight, sound was suddenly amplified.
Too Bad to Die Page 9
