Too Bad to Die

by Francine Mathews

  “My sister-in-law has been taken ill,” Sarah Oliver said steadily. “Those people are known to the embassy. Some sort of private clinic Dr. Moran located. I wonder, Miss Cowles, if you could help me? I should like to place a trunk call—only I’m uncertain how, in this wretched place.”

  “Of course,” Grace murmured. She led Sarah through the scattered groups of people, all muttering in subdued voices, to the Signals Room. This was a dreary cubby stashed behind a trompe l’oeil door off the grand staircase’s lower landing—a windowless mezzanine, quite undetectable from the exterior of the building. It had probably been a service cupboard when the embassy was a private palace. Now, in anticipation of the conference, it had been augmented with three additional lines and the mint-green Bakelite of the Secraphone.

  She offered Sarah a chair. “I expect you’d like to call Home.”

  The actress gave her a strange look. “Not just Home, but home, Miss Cowles. I must speak to my mother.”

  Grace took down the number Sarah dictated. “This will require at least an hour. Shall I fetch you when the call is put through?”

  “You’re very kind. Someone will know where to find me.”

  Sarah rose and turned toward the door.

  “I hope Mrs. Churchill is soon better.”

  Sarah stopped short, her hand on the knob. “The silly little fool tried to kill herself,” she said.

  CHAPTER 24

  They have made contact.” Siranoush grasped Ian’s coat sleeve and pulled him determinedly down a narrow passage in the heart of the NKVD warren. There was little light here in the stone tunnel, and he was pressed close to the girl’s body. It felt too whipcord thin to be believed. He grazed her hip and imagined spanning her waist with his hands. Instead he raised his left palm—it was still painful to lift the right—and smoothed it down her back. He felt her skin shiver.

  She twitched her hair as though annoyed. “Bond. Arev tells me your woman is beautiful, though her clothes are ugly. Me, I think English girls are cold.”

  Of course Arev had watched him at Golestan. Trust only went so far. “So are English men,” Ian observed.

  “That is not what I hear. In your public schools, you have great passion for one another, no?”

  Again, that Siranoush smile. She was hoping for a reaction.

  “God give me strength,” he said, then pulled her close with his one good arm and kissed her.

  For an instant, it was like drowning. No air. No possibility of surfacing. He had dropped off Dancing Ledge into the shock of the Channel, like the boy he’d once been.

  Then she broke away and stared at him, her breath coming in gasps. He could just see the gleam of her eyes in the dimly lit passage.

  “Bastard,” she said through her teeth. And whipped around the passage’s next turn.

  He followed, sirens singing in his ears.

  The tunnel ended in bars.

  The cell was lit by an iron lamp filled with coals from Zadiq’s brazier. Four men were inside—two sitting at a table and two standing over them with guns pointed at their heads.

  On the table was a wireless transmitter.

  Ian came up with Siranoush, his mouth close to her ear. “They can transmit in this place?”

  “You forget,” she said. “We are very near the bazaar roof here. The ceiling is wood.”

  The two men at the table were, Ian guessed, the turned German agents. He had imagined them going about their lives in Tehran, ostensibly normal citizens, with occasional offerings of intelligence to Zadiq. This was naïve, of course. Ian knew from his work with the Doublecross Committee—the British group that handled turned Nazi agents in Britain—that the Enemy could never be trusted, even if they cooperated. It was enough that they had bought their lives with their treason; freedom could come after the war.

  He wondered if freedom was even a concept Zadiq understood.

  The commander was holding a gun. His son held another. Their weapon of choice, Ian noticed, was the old Czarist service revolver, the Nagant M1895. Standard issue for the NKVD. It was a 7.62mm double-action model that fired seven bullets. The great thing about the Nagant, Ian had heard, was that its breech was gas-sealed, making it far more powerful than anything the West had. This also meant that the Nagant could be effectively silenced. He would not like it leveled at his skull.

  As the commander’s eyes slid toward Siranoush, one of the men at the table—Ian could not see his face, but his hair was gray and his hands were trembling slightly—spoke up wearily in German. A language Ian immediately understood.

  “They are coming,” the prisoner said. “To Tehran tonight. They ask for shelter.”

  The Nagant wavered. Zadiq, Ian saw, was motioning to Arev. The boy must also speak German.

  “Shelter?” he repeated. “Not tactical support?”

  “Then the attack is not to be tonight,” Siranoush broke in.

  The second prisoner swiveled a birdlike head. “They wait for instructions.” His voice was unctuous, oily, difficult to place. Neither Iranian nor German; an East European, Ian thought, in Hitler’s service. “They wish to lie low. To be ready when the time comes. It will be any day now. What do we tell them?”

  Zadiq did not reply. He motioned with the gun to Arev. The boy lifted the transmitter from the table and backed toward the door of the cell. His father followed him with the lamp. The two Germans were left in darkness.

  “We must plan,” Zadiq said in English as he turned the bolts of his cage and joined the others. “It will be a delicate business.”

  A delicate business. There would be directions to transmit—to a safe house the NKVD controlled. Bona fides to exchange. The German radio operators would have to be taken to the safe house and guarded, so that the place looked plausible when the paratroopers arrived that night. And the NKVD presence would have to be considerable—although totally hidden. Otherwise, the turned agents might seize the moment to make a break for it, rather than betray the Nazi soldiers.

  A delicate business indeed.

  “What do you want most, Zadiq?” Ian asked.

  Siranoush turned and stared at him. They were walking briskly behind the commander toward his conference room.

  Zadiq snorted. “What you want, Bond. To stop this madness. Before my leader dies.”

  “That’s not all I want,” Ian replied. “Capture these men, torture them if you like—kill them, even. But the real player is still out there. I want the Fencer.”

  “You’ll take what you can get.” Zadiq placed the lamp on his conference table; Arev set the transmitter down beside it. Siranoush was speaking low and fast in Armenian to the boy, who was staring in his unfriendly way at Ian. “You’re lucky I include you.”

  “I think we can do better. I think we must.”

  “Nothing is better than saving the Marshal’s life.”

  “There’s something you don’t know.” They were all standing in the center of the room, unwilling to be the first to take a chair. Even Siranoush looked taut as a wire. Her fists were slightly clenched by her sides. Had he really kissed her? What had he been thinking?

  “The Fencer is one of us,” Ian said.

  Zadiq’s head shot around, as though a killer were somewhere in the shadows of the room.

  “He’s a member of the Allied delegation,” Ian amended. “We’re fairly certain. Our Signals intelligence intercepted traffic that suggests he was right in the middle of our counsels in Cairo. We have to assume he traveled here with us.”

  “One of you British,” Zadiq said slowly.

  “Or Americans.”

  “You let him near Stalin?” The NKVD chief lunged for him, his Nagant lifted high. He was going to smash Ian’s skull.

  Arev grabbed Ian’s arms and pinned them behind his back. He ducked his face instinctively to avoid Zadiq’s gun, and felt Siranoush’s hair aga
inst his skin. She had slid between him and the NKVD commander.

  Like a fury, she thrust out her arms and shoved Zadiq backward. She was shrieking in Armenian. Ian had no idea what she was saying, but it stopped Zadiq cold.

  He set his gun shakily on the table. Then he pulled out a chair, sank into it, and put his head in his hands.

  Arev released Ian, who tentatively rubbed his right arm. He still had too little strength in it. He would never be able to throw a punch or fire a gun and hit his target—in the next few days, at least. He was a sitting duck if he met the Fencer alone.

  “You say this killer is one of us,” Zadiq said. He lifted his head and stared at Ian. “That he meets with our leaders every day. Churchill. Roosevelt. Iosif Vissarionovich. He could murder them right now.”

  “He won’t.” Ian took a chair at the table. After an instant, Arev and Siranoush sat down. It felt safer—more controlled—to say these things with a table between them. “He wants it to look right. It must happen in public. Hence the paratroopers. He wants an obvious attack and victory for Nazi power. Or maybe he plans to blame it on the Iranians, and give Hitler an excuse to invade the oil fields. I don’t know. Either way, he wins.”

  Zadiq shot to his feet. “We must tell Stalin. Beria.”

  “We can’t,” Ian said gently.

  Zadiq reached for his gun and leveled it at Ian’s face. “If I say nothing, my life is forfeit, Bond.”

  “And I have Churchill to save.” With effort, Ian ignored the Nagant. “Listen to me, Zadiq.”

  The gun’s firing pin was unusually long. The Armenian cocked it.

  Siranoush said something quickly under her breath. Arev answered her. Ian kept his eyes on the trigger.

  “Capture the paratroopers,” he said calmly, “and the Fencer will know. We’ll bugger his plans. But he won’t stand down. He won’t give up and go home. His targets are here.”

  “So? Beria has three thousand men in this city.”

  “The Fencer’s inside the conference. Sitting next to Stalin. With his hands on Roosevelt’s wheelchair. He’ll find a way to kill them, Zadiq, even if we take his paratroopers away.”

  “Then we have already failed.”

  “Not if we bag them both. The Fencer and his men.”

  Arev muttered something under his breath.

  “Let the paratroopers feel safe,” Ian persisted. “Let Long Jump go forward. Track the signals between the Fencer and his team, and shut them down at the last possible second. Once we know who the Fencer is.”

  Zadiq smiled at him ferociously. “You forget, Bond. We cannot track the signals. We do not have the Fencer’s radio frequency.”

  Ian pushed the Nagant’s barrel aside. “We have something better. A woman named Grace Cowles.”

  —

  “—DASHED UNFORTUNATE,” Lord Leathers mourned as he sipped his cocktail. “Such a charming gel. Still, I daresay the nursing home will put her right.”

  Michael Hudson murmured a commonplace and began to edge toward the British Embassy’s foyer. He had stopped in for lunch at the invitation of Sarah Oliver—she’d asked most of the American delegation, since they, like so many of Churchill’s entourage, were cooling their heels while the principals talked. It was Gil Winant who met him at the door, however—with the news that Sarah would not be joining them. She had gone with Churchill to the clinic where Pam’s life hung in the balance.

  Very little was being said about the incident. Even Winant had no details to share. Hudson got the impression a scandal was being contained.

  He caught sight of Gracie mounting the staircase in her neat uniform and immediately excused himself to Leathers.

  “Miss Cowles!” he called.

  She turned on the landing and peered toward the voice in the crowd. “Mr. Hudson.”

  He hurried up the stairs. “What happened here today?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  Her voice was deliberately neutral. Hudson shook his head slightly and said, “Because I saw Pamela last night. Christ, I was probably the last person to see her. It was nearly one a.m. when she left me.”

  Grace knit her brows and glanced over her shoulder. There was still a crowd of people milling about the foyer, talking and laughing among themselves. “Come,” she said, and led him to a door on the landing, set seamlessly into the woodwork. “We can be private here.”

  It was the Signals Room, Hudson saw. She closed the door behind him and offered him a chair. “Did you arrange to meet her last night?”

  “God, no.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “I went looking for a nightcap at my hotel—the Park; most of us Americans are staying there—and ran smack into Pam in the Casino. She’d picked up the hotel owner somewhere. She was high as a kite.”

  Grace pursed her lips. “I gather she and Mrs. Oliver had a bit of a row last evening. Mrs. Oliver blames herself—but everyone’s on edge. It’s the atmosphere. All these Russian soldiers looking over one’s shoulder.”

  “Yeah,” Hudson agreed. “But tell me. What happened to Pam? She was fine when I put her into a taxi. Tight, but then, she’s almost always tight. I told her to get to bed.”

  “We think she took chloral,” Grace said. “There was a bottle by her bedside. She often has trouble sleeping. But she must have taken—a stronger dose last night.”

  He whistled. “And Mrs. Oliver thinks it was deliberate?”

  “That’s nonsense, of course,” Grace said briskly. “Mrs. Randolph must have mistaken the amount. You say she was drunk. Perhaps she dosed herself twice.”

  Hudson did not immediately reply. He was studying Grace’s face with a troubled expression.

  “There’s no reason on earth for Mrs. Randolph to make away with herself,” she said.

  “I hope like hell it wasn’t because of me.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” Grace said harshly. “Do you really think she would end it all, for love of you?”

  He felt himself flush. “Of course not. I meant—I hope I didn’t . . . drive her to it.”

  Grace raised an eyebrow and waited.

  “She just asked me straight out,” Hudson explained. “What I’d found in her room. And I told her, you see.”

  “You searched her room,” Grace said. “After I forbade you to do it?”

  “I had to, Grace.”

  “No, you didn’t. You just couldn’t help yourself.” She moved quickly for the door, clearly done with him. “You’re nothing but a spy.”

  “Of course I’m a spy,” he retorted, angry now. “Half the delegation are spooks of one stripe or another. What war are you fighting, anyway?”

  She stopped short and took a deep breath. “And you think you found something she’d kill herself over?”

  “Well—I found this.”

  He reached into his coat and pulled out a German codebook.

  CHAPTER 25

  When Michael left her, Grace went in search of Pug Ismay. The Military Chief of Staff was closeted with Churchill, however—as he ought to be, she thought with irritation. They had, after all, come to Tehran to negotiate the timing and location of the Allied invasion of Europe. That night’s dinner at the Soviet Embassy would be a strategic minefield. Pug was not invited to attend, any more than he had been last night; Roosevelt’s military advisors were similarly in exile. Which meant the PM and the President would have to face the wily Marshal Stalin on their own. Pug would naturally want to coach his man.

  What would she have said to General Lord Ismay, in any case?

  It has come to my attention that the Prime Minister’s daughter-in-law is a traitor to the Allied cause.

  Oh—and by the way—Commander Fleming has deserted.

  Damn these personal complications! What the hell was Pamela thinking? Was cold hard cash so irresistible, even at the expense of her father-in-law’s ca
reer—Good God, his standing in history?

  Traitors were shot in time of war. But Pamela would be cosseted and sheltered because she’d tried to do away with herself, Grace thought cynically. After a long period of contrition in a quiet nursing home in Devon or Cornwall, she’d sally back into town with a clutch of new evening gowns and a string of men willing to pay for them.

  Did she think of no one but herself?

  Grace’s footsteps slowed. She was giving vent to something deeper than indignation at the betrayals of Pamela Churchill, and much more personal. She was feeling rage. The woman got endless chances at love and happiness—and she squandered them all. Without the slightest regard for the people who cared about her.

  Like Michael.

  Grace had seen it in his face. He’d hated what he’d found in Pamela’s bedroom. Probably because he’d enjoyed his time there so much. The woman had no right to toy with hearts as carelessly as she did. Destroying the integrity of good, honest fellows—

  Who searched through women’s lingerie at the dead of night, Grace thought wryly. Enough. There was no way to make a hero of Michael Hudson.

  The man she really needed to talk to was infuriatingly out of reach. She glanced at her wristwatch and calculated the time in England. Two o’clock in the afternoon here, eleven-thirty in the morning there. Alan Turing ought to have received her message by now. She had to make a decision about Ian Fleming. Keep his secret—or turn him in to Pug.

  She almost ran back to the Signals Room, hoping for a few stuttered words from the Prof.

  —

  “SO AFTER I got sick last night,” Roosevelt said, “Churchill and Stalin decided the future of Poland?”

  “I wouldn’t go so far as that,” Harriman amended. “They were talking about borders. Recognizing that the Germans have completely swallowed the country, including the Free City of Danzig, and that the situation will have to be put right.”