Too Bad to Die

by Francine Mathews

  MUCH AS SHE disliked the Soviet Embassy, Grace went looking for Michael Hudson there a little after three o’clock in the afternoon Wednesday. They had unaccountably missed each other yesterday and Grace had never been able to ask what he’d discussed with Ian. Whether there were plans. She had visited the bazaar herself twenty-four hours ago, dawdling among the perfumes until she suffered a sick headache, in the hope of telling Ian about the Prof’s call. About the Fencer’s channel going silent. About how they were all buggered and she kept flinching at the sound of backfiring cars on the Tehran streets, certain it meant the murder of Churchill.

  But Ian hadn’t surfaced yesterday. Grace was worried.

  She found Hudson standing in a smoke-filled salon with perhaps a dozen other members of the delegations, nursing a whiskey and a cigarette.

  “Miss Cowles,” he said formally, and murmured a word of apology to one of Anthony Eden’s sub-secretaries, a fellow Grace knew by sight but not by name. “Were you looking for me?”

  “Yes, Mr. Hudson,” she returned in her most professional manner. “I have a message for you from the Prime Minister.”

  He bent his head toward her as they strolled placidly from the salon.

  “The air is far fresher outside,” she observed. “I’m sure a quick jog along the drive would do you good.”

  “I was just about to suggest the same thing.”

  They nodded to the uniformed NKVD guards at the front entrance and received an unsmiling stare in return. Outside, the cold slapped Grace’s face.

  “Brisk,” Hudson said.

  “Winter,” she replied. “I went back to the bazaar both yesterday and today. There’s no sign of Ian.”

  He glanced at her sidelong. “I thought I told you to leave Ian to me. I don’t want you mixed up in this, Grace. It could be damaging.”

  “I had a message for him.”

  “I’d have taken it.”

  “Never mind!” she said impatiently. “Aren’t you afraid something’s happened to him?”

  “He’s probably out playing spies with his new friends.”

  “Michael—this is serious. Ian was waiting for my news. He wouldn’t have missed our meeting.”

  His footsteps slowed. “What was so important?”

  She bit her lip, hesitated. “You mentioned Alan Turing once. Said he wasn’t very reliable.”

  “I said he was odd. I could have said crazy.”

  “So you know Turing has been intercepting the Fencer’s coded messages?”

  Hudson nodded.

  “Damn Ian,” Grace muttered. “You’re not cleared for it. But I suppose at this point . . . I spoke to Turing last night. He says the Fencer’s gone silent. Right when we expect him to strike. Ian needs to know who the man is, where he is—and the whole show has shut down.”

  “Including Ian. No wonder you’re worried.” Hudson stopped short. They had almost reached the British Embassy. “Look, Grace—I have a pretty good idea where Ian is, and I’m pretty sure he’s safe.”

  She took a step toward him. “You’re joking. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because you’re not cleared for it.” He managed a wry smile. It would now be their joke. All the white lies they told each other. “I talked to my NKVD liaison last night. Ian was harboring with one of their splinter groups. Rogue operators. They took him to a safe house. Beria’s people will keep him there for the duration of the conference. They don’t want a guy like Ian popping out of the woodwork right before this show is over.”

  “Why not?” she said. “Doesn’t Ian’s story about the Nazis tally with the Russians’?”

  “A little too much,” Hudson said drily. “Did you know they’ve been running the surviving paratroopers all along, through some turned radio operators of theirs? Knew exactly where they were. Could have picked ’em up at any time. But they’ve been holding them in reserve. Probably plan to unleash them at the last moment, so they can gun them down in public and have the glory of saving Churchill and Roosevelt.”

  “That’s . . . that’s abominable.”

  “That’s Communist Russia.”

  “And you think Ian mistook this plan for a serious German plot?”

  “Sure. With a little help from Turing. Of course the Fencer has gone silent—he’s probably just Sergo Beria sending messages from the basement! The NKVD orchestrated this whole sham from beginning to end. Only they didn’t count on Ian surfacing in Tehran. The loose cannon. Beyond their control.”

  “So they bagged him.” Grace glanced back at the Soviet Embassy. “Bastards.”

  “Uncle Joe doesn’t play nice.”

  She tried to follow his train of thought. It made overwhelming sense. But there was a snag somewhere—a problem . . .

  “What about Pamela?” she said.

  “Pamela?”

  “The codebook. That you found in her things. If the Fencer’s nothing more than Beria’s son, why does Pamela have a German codebook? And not even an Enigma one?”

  Michael lifted his arms in a gesture of futility. “Search me. But I’m sure Ian could invent an explanation. Come on, Grace—let’s get out of here. Can I buy you a drink at the Park Hotel bar?”

  CHAPTER 36

  The first thought that penetrated Ian’s mind was that he must have died. Death was the only explanation for the surreal blend of pain and Siranoush’s voice. The pain was real, but the voice must be a hallucination. The fact that Siranoush was speaking German deepened his conviction. She spoke too many languages as it was. There ought to be one she hadn’t mastered.

  His mouth suddenly watered as the tantalizing smell of lamb stew from the bazaar hit his nostrils. The warmth of it filled his mind. He struggled to lift his head and open his eyes. Tried to croak her name. Siranoush. His mouth and tongue were swollen. His arms were still bound, the limbs deadened from lack of blood, and he could not touch his face. He sensed, however, that his eyes were swollen, too. The slight movement he made in his effort to lift his eyelids awakened the excruciating wounds in his scrotum and penis, and he whimpered aloud.

  No one answered.

  He forced his eyes open, one at a time.

  The light in this back room was dim. The door to the front was firmly closed. Next to him, Zadiq was breathing like a man whose lungs were filling slowly with fluid. Otto was nowhere to be seen.

  Then he heard the Nazi colonel’s voice, raised in flirtatious laughter. Siranoush. She was laughing, too, and it came to Ian with sickening despair that he had been duped by all of them—by everyone he’d trusted—and that the girl was a liar and a bitch. Otto had forbidden all contact with the outside because Otto knew Siranoush would come to help them. It was prearranged. She’d brought dinner.

  She would feed Ian’s enemies and watch him die.

  Cutlery scraped earthenware plates. Men sighed with satisfaction after a long pull at a bottle. Someone gave forth a belch. The pain in Ian’s groin was maddening. He would scream until he blew himself out like a candle.

  Not in front of that girl.

  “Danke, Fraülein.” Erich’s voice. He was still there, then. He yawned audibly. Yawned again. Tomàš said something Ian couldn’t catch, and the rest of the Germans roared.

  He thought suddenly of Mokie: his father’s face, blurred in memory and gradually replaced by the set image of a photograph. It captured nothing of his soul. Mokie had known exactly what death was like. Not glorious. Balls torn to shreds. Please, dear God, he thought, in a variation on the old theme, help me to face death more like Mokie.

  There was a crash from the front room. A chair had toppled over. None of the Germans was speaking anymore. The only sound was a persistent snoring.

  The door to his death chamber eased open. She was standing there. Staring at him. A look of horror and pity on her face.

  “Bond,” she whispered. Then she
came swiftly to his side. She had a knife in her hands. She cut the ropes at his arms. He tried to move them while she freed his legs, but they fell to his sides like planks of wood.

  “Otto,” he ground out.

  “Drugged. They’re all drugged. I put it in the food.”

  “Erich. He didn’t . . .”

  “Betray me to them? No. Maybe even he wants out.”

  She glanced over her shoulder as a man’s shadow filled the doorway.

  God help us, Ian thought. Then he saw who it was.

  “Dutch,” he gasped.

  “I’ll help you get your shirt on.” The Polish pilot was sweating profusely, and his hands shook. “Skurwysyn—what have they done to you?”

  More Polish obscenities as he saw Zadiq.

  “Kurwa! We’ll never get trousers on these two.” He glanced around the storeroom. “Blankets. There must be blankets.”

  “Out there.” Siranoush tossed her head toward the front room.

  Dutch disappeared from Ian’s view. He closed his eyes for an instant; Siranoush was cutting the bonds on Zadiq’s arms.

  “We’ll have to carry them out one at a time,” Dutch said.

  “Arev?” Ian asked.

  “Dead,” Siranoush said brusquely.

  She’d freed Ian’s legs. He tried to move his feet. The mere twitch of his thigh muscles sent agony spiking through his abdomen. He had to stand up and free himself from the chair, but his mind skittered away from the pain.

  Dutch lifted one arm, then the other, as he eased Ian’s shirt onto his back. Ian was still weak; but sensation was returning. From his shoulders to his fingertips, he throbbed with blood.

  Dutch gripped him beneath the armpits. “Swear if it helps,” he said. “Now. On the count of three—”

  “No,” Ian said clearly. “Get Zadiq out first.”

  —

  “AMBASSADOR WINANT?”

  “Yes?” He poked his head out of the conference room. He and Anthony Eden, Churchill’s Foreign Secretary, were fine-tuning the proposal for postwar Poland’s borders. Stalin demanded the frontiers respect the Molotov-Ribbentrop Line of 1939—which had been guaranteed by Hitler—because it returned Ukraine and White Russia to the Soviet Union. The British government preferred something called the Curzon Line, which dated from World War One and gave a bit more land to the Poles. Roosevelt wanted the Poles to gain territory to the West, land taken from Eastern Germany. He’d ordered Gil Winant to talk to the Brits. If anybody could broker compromise, Winant could.

  Gil lifted his brows at the uniformed NKVD officer standing before him. The man inclined his head. “You are requested on the telephone line.”

  He followed the soldier to the embassy switchboard—the obvious nerve center for communication, as opposed to the secret one below stairs that Michael Hudson had found. A young woman offered him a receiver. He put it to his ear. The woman remained standing, staring at him, as did the NKVD officer. Both were probably ordered to listen to his conversation. He turned his back.

  “Winant speaking.”

  “Good evening, Mr. Ambassador.”

  “Mr. Diba! What a very great pleasure, sir.”

  “As it is for me.” Diba switched immediately to French. “I regret to disturb your conferences, Mr. Winant, but I have encountered a slight problem at the Park Hotel. There is a young British woman in uniform sound asleep in a chair in the lobby. We do not believe she is one of our guests.”

  Winant frowned. “Is she a member of the Occupation Forces?”

  “I do not think so. When I arrived here for my usual luncheon, I observed her in the hotel bar. I will add that I noted her particularly, because she was in the company of your American friend. The one named for the river.”

  “Where is Mr. Hudson now?”

  “Certainly not in the Park Hotel.” Diba hesitated; Winant could almost feel him thinking down the telephone wire. “We have tried to rouse the young lady. She remains quite insensible. In view of that—and a similar incident involving another young Englishwoman—I decided to call you, sir, rather than the British Embassy.”

  “I see.” Winant thought quickly. He would find Sarah and take an embassy car. “Get some coffee into her, Mr. Diba. I’ll be there as fast as I can.”

  —

  ZADIQ HAD NOT regained consciousness, and his breathing was labored. Ian guessed he was in a coma and envied his near-death state. It allowed Dutch to throw a blanket over Zadiq’s body and lift him like a large sack of potatoes. He turned carefully and made his way through the room full of snoring commandos.

  “Water?” Siranoush said.

  Ian lifted his head.

  She held a cup to his mouth and he felt the liquid seep between his lips. It dribbled over his chin. He tried to raise a hand to wipe his mouth—and found that he could. He grasped the cup and drank by himself.

  Then he looked at her. “Is there a car?”

  “A taxi. We paid it to wait.”

  “Where do we go?”

  “Back to the bazaar.”

  Ian shook his head. “Zadiq needs a doctor. So do I. We go to our embassies this time. You, too—and Dutch. You’ll be safer there.”

  “Can you stand?”

  Ian met her eyes. No tears of pity there—just ice-cold determination. “I can try. Let me hold on to you.”

  He grasped her shoulders and clenched his teeth. The blood from his torn genitals had congealed on the wood frame of the gutted chair. Like a bandage, he thought. Tear it free in one go. He bore down with his hands on the girl’s frail shoulders and forced his thighs to lift him.

  The dancing dots of pain swam again in his vision. Siranoush, unbalanced, took a step backward. He swayed and moaned but did not scream. The blackness cleared. He stood upright by himself.

  He swaddled himself in the blanket she gave him and said, “Let’s go.”

  They shuffled slowly into the front room. The time it took seemed endless. They were horribly noisy. Exposed. At any moment, Ian thought, one of the men would wake and with the reflex born of years would reach instantly for his gun.

  Otto was sprawled across the table, his head in his arms. Ian was tempted to take the knife Siranoush had used to cut his bonds and plunge it into the man’s back, but she was guiding him carefully along the wall, well away from any of them, and he did not have the strength to fight her. Or the strength to plunge a knife.

  The house’s front door eased slowly open. Dutch’s head peered around it, and he seemed about to speak. But there was a small pop! as though one of Pamela’s Pol Roger bottles had blown its cork, and Dutch forgot whatever it was he had intended to say. With an expression of astonishment, he crumpled suddenly to his knees. Then fell face forward to the floor.

  A neat black hole was burned through his back.

  Ian looked from the dead Pole to the man in the doorway.

  “Hudders,” he said. “I’ve been wondering when you’d get here.”

  CHAPTER 37

  Michael Hudson had a gun trained on them—a High Standard HD .22 caliber pistol, the usual OSS issue. It had an integral sound suppressor—a silencer. Wonderfully effective for killing a man in broad daylight.

  He shoved Dutch’s body farther into the room with his foot and closed the door. The Polish pilot lay like a bundle of old clothes in the entryway. “How long have you known?” he asked.

  “Since I heard about Pam Churchill’s German one-time pad,” Ian said. “You and I both know the Fencer uses Enigma codes.”

  “My mistake.”

  Ian drew breath. It hurt to expand his lungs. “Pammie knew you’d searched her things back in Giza. You were afraid she’d tell Churchill. So you spiked her champagne in the hope she’d die. When she survived, you were forced to frame her—and produce a plausible reason for a suicide attempt. But it was the wrong evidence, Hud
ders. You couldn’t produce an Enigma encoding machine. I’m sure you’ve got one in your hotel room at the Park—but you needed it for this operation. So you showed Grace the one-time pad.”

  He shrugged slightly, his head down. “I didn’t know you were here in Tehran, Johnnie. Or that Grace would tell you about Pamela. I tried to get you out of this. Why didn’t you go home?”

  “Because I never do what I’m told.”

  Michael stepped deliberately over Dutch’s body and set his gun down on the table with a sigh. “No. You don’t, do you? It’s the pin-striped pants all over again.”

  Ian closed his eyes. He was still leaning heavily on Siranoush. “I wish it were. I wish there were some reason to stand with you, Michael. But we have different loyalties now.”

  Michael shoved his fingers through his hair. “Stand with me! Nobody stands with me. That’s what those pants were all about, Johnnie. You made a fool of yourself then, and it’s exactly the same now. You think you’ve betrayed me—but I’m the one who’s going to walk out of here alive.”

  “You betrayed yourself,” Ian retorted harshly. “Quite early in the game. You allowed me to live, that night you coshed and stabbed me in Giza. The Fencer ought to have killed me. It was a contradiction I couldn’t figure out. Alan Turing’s basic rule of code-breaking. The contradiction that holds the key to everything.”

  “I guess I never wanted you hurt.”

  “Because it would have been killing a bit of yourself,” Ian said implacably. “I know. Stupid of you, Hudders, to hold on to any kind of feeling. It’s a luxury your sort can’t afford.”

  Hudson’s face twisted briefly. Regret? Grief? “My sort. The ones who are really running this war,” he said. “As opposed to the Ian Flemings—who just think they do. You live in a fucking fantasy world, Johnnie. You always have. You like to think you break the rules, but you’ve never broken any that matter. You’ve never killed a man just because you could or watched the best hope of a nation explode in flames. You don’t have that kind of power. You’re a hero of the old school. And you’re going to die a ridiculous death. Do you know what a waste I think that is?”