“Looking for something?” Schwartz yelled.
“Caracal,” Hudson said.
“What?”
“A caracal. Type of cat. Like a lynx or a cougar. They’re native to this place.”
“Ah,” Schwartz said. They were coming up on a bend in the road, and he knew Gale Morghe wasn’t far now—a matter of a mile and a half. There was no one ahead and no one behind. A hundred yards up ahead there was a turnout from the road. He had just seen it when he caught the flash of Hudson’s hand reaching into his breast pocket.
He had almost turned to look at him when he felt the steel cylinder against his right temple.
“Pull over,” Hudson shouted.
Schwartz hesitated. “You really want to do that, Mike?”
“I said, Pull over.”
“Okay. If that’s how you want this to go,” Schwartz bellowed. He pulled the wheel hard and fast to the right. The car squealed and spun in a tight three hundred and sixty degrees, the movement so sudden and vicious Hudson was unprepared. His gun wavered toward the roof, and Schwartz abandoned the wheel, allowing the tires to follow their ordained momentum. He grasped Hudson’s wrist with both hands and slammed it hard against the car’s dashboard. The gun flew out of Hudson’s grip.
Schwartz jammed on the brakes and felt the car skid sideways. They were facing the wrong way on the road. Correction: he’d spun roughly five hundred degrees.
Hudson sprang for his neck.
“Mike,” Schwartz gasped as the hands closed around his throat. “You don’t want to do this.”
“Let him go,” Roosevelt said. “Let him go, or I’ll shoot.”
He had pulled his personal revolver from his coat and had it jammed, now, in Hudson’s neck. Never mind that he was clinging to the back of the front seat as a climber clings to a cliff edge, using all the strength of his fingertips to pull his body forward; his paralyzed lower half had not cost him much. He was grinning ferociously at Sam, and there was such a look of elation in his eyes that Schwartz merely reached for Hudson’s slack hands and removed them from his windpipe.
“Thanks, Mr. President,” he said. “How about I take care of that thing for you now?”
—
0850 HOURS.
“This woman begged to see you in person, Iosif Vissarionovich,” Beria said. He was standing before the great desk in Stalin’s embassy office. There were papers scattered all over it—he recognized his son’s handwriting. Translations. Transcriptions. Nothing really worth reading. Abuse of himself, of course—it amused the Americans to ridicule him in his own hearing. Toward Stalin they were respectful. He wondered how Sergo felt, writing down the insults leveled at his father. Conjugating them in two languages.
“Why?” Stalin asked. His flat, hard gaze traveled indolently from Beria to the girl standing two yards behind him. She was stiff and expressionless, the gun she had carried in her coat pocket held steadily to her own head. Sergo’s finger was on the trigger. He and the girl were roughly the same age, and it would be interesting, Beria thought, if he told his son to kill her. A demonstration for the Marshal of what family loyalty could do.
“She says—”
“I am an officer of SMERSH, Excellency,” the girl interrupted.
Beria glanced at her. Two spots of color were burning now in her cheeks.
“So?” Stalin offered indifferently.
“I worked with Colonel Zadiq before his murder last night.”
“Zadiq is dead?” Beria asked tonelessly.
“He was tortured by Nazi commandos he was attempting to intercept. His son also was killed. A useless woman, I was left behind in the NKVD headquarters.”
“How do you know this?”
“Zadiq told me the location of his safe house. When he did not return, I went to the place. I found him dying.”
“Beria,” Stalin interrupted. “Do I give a shit about the death of an NKVD officer?”
“No, Excellency.”
“Then why do you bore me with this bitch?”
Beria glanced at the girl. Then at his son. Sergo’s hand was trembling. The weight of the gun held aloft, perhaps, for so long a time. Or the weight of what it could do.
“You are boring us, bitch,” Beria said.
The girl had the stones to smile faintly. She looked straight at Stalin, and it seemed to Beria that if looks were a knife, Iosif Vissarionovich would be bleeding by now.
“Zadiq had only enough breath for a few words,” she said. “‘Long Jump. 0900 hours. The embassy gate.’ I do not know, of course, what it means. But I know, from his blood, that it is a matter of life and death.”
There was a short silence.
Stalin grunted. “The time?”
“Five minutes to nine.” Beria was looking at his son. Sweat had settled like mist on Sergo’s forehead. Anxiety for the girl? He should tell him to kill her. It would be good for the boy. Put some steel in his veins. He was too much his mother’s son.
Stalin slapped his desk. “Then we go. You first, Beria. You can shield me with your body, eh?”
“It would be my honor, Iosif Vissarionovich.” Beria inclined his head.
“Cocksucker,” Stalin said genially. “I’ll ask Churchill to drive through the gate first. With his little Sarah, who refused to eat at my table. No loss if they’re blown to bits, eh?”
He stopped short as he passed the girl. She was staring at the place where he’d been, her lip bitten between her teeth. Sergo still held the gun to her head. But his hand was shaking so badly, now, that if he’d actually cocked the thing, it might have gone off.
Stalin stroked his finger down the girl’s cheek. “You did well, bitch. Spread your legs once or twice and you’ll go far in SMERSH.”
Her head turned as swift as an adder’s, and Beria saw, then, the hatred in them. Her lips parted, and for an instant he thought she would curse. Or spit.
“Fortune preserve you, Iosif Vissarionovich,” she whispered, “because your friends never will.”
Stalin threw back his head and laughed.
—
GRACE COWLES had been unable to eat that morning. She had risen early and sent a coded cable to Alan Turing. Fleming missing. Believed taken or killed by Fencer.
It wasn’t as though Turing could do anything to help. Grace simply needed to tell someone who understood the few words. By the time Turing replied, she would already be in the air. Clutching her knees in Lord Leathers’s plane—which still smelled of Ian’s Laphroaig. Gazing down at the hills and forests of Iran as they sped away from her, wondering if he was alive.
Ten minutes before they were scheduled to load up in cars and brave the compound’s gate—all but a few of them utterly unaware that an attack was coming—Grace slipped by the porter at the embassy entrance and hurried down the drive. The British military police manned one side of the compound entrance, the NKVD officers the other. Two guardhouses flanked the gate itself, and visitors to the embassies reported to one or the other before being admitted. Identities and appointments were verified via phone lines connected to the embassies themselves. It was all very modern.
Grace rapped on the guardhouse’s rear door. A cautious face appeared around the edge of it—wearing a helmet and battle gear instead of the usual uniform.
“Yes, miss?” the guard said impatiently.
“I . . . I wanted to . . .” Why had she come, indeed? To reassure herself that everything was normal? That Turing was inventing things? That Michael had been right all along—not a traitor but a true friend, who knew Ian Fleming was lost in his own fiction?
“You’ve been warned,” she said to the guard. “About the possibility of attack.”
“Mr. Thompson sent down a message an hour ago,” the guard explained. “We’re double-staffed and on the alert. There’s a couple of jeeps full of snipers, too, s
tationed both directions along the road.”
Thompson was Churchill’s bodyguard. Of course he would have informed the gate staff. Grace was useless here.
“I’m glad to hear it. Good luck.”
She glanced at her watch—five minutes to nine, and nearly time for the first cars to depart. She must hurry. Her luggage—
Then the sound of a lorry horn, wildly blowing, assaulted her ears.
She turned and peered through the bars of the gate at the street outside. Impossible to detect the military jeeps full of snipers in the crowd that had gathered—both sides of the road were lined with colorful groups of people, men and women and children, clapping their hands and shouting in various dialects, in Arabic and Farsi and even French. There were music and small pops as children tossed lighted firecrackers in the air. Any excuse for a celebration.
How horrible, she thought suddenly, if they’re hurt by this—
The horn blared again. She looked to the left, where an ordinary lorry approached. Behind it, careening out of control, was another vehicle, probably headed for market. Its lorry bed was filled with goats.
And a man.
He was in torn and filthy clothes, but Grace saw immediately that they were Western, not Persian. And he was hanging over the side of the lorry’s cab.
Grace’s pulse quickened. Even upside down and from the rear, she recognized those shoulders. That head.
The guards ran pell-mell out of the gate, rifles leveled. The NKVD soldiers, too, were moving.
“Don’t shoot!” she screamed. “He’s a British officer!”
—
THE GOATS had done their work. When the last frayed edges of the rope parted from his wrists, Ian reached for the knife hidden in his sock and slashed at the bindings on his ankles. The fact of his fever and his wounds could not be ignored. His hands shook, and his vision was blurred. His body from the waist down throbbed relentlessly, and the friction of his trousers on his raw backside was both maddening and banal in its familiar pain. But he would not lie down and take the death Otto had planned for him. He would not die a traitor.
Ian lurched forward through the forgiving goats and grasped the edge of the cab. He could see the former NKVD lorry ahead of them—they would not yet have noticed he was standing with his hands free. There were only two men in the cab below. The point was to keep the lorry from arriving at its destination—he felt sure it must be the British Embassy, because they were rolling through a tony section of Tehran, the preserve of the wealthy and the foreign. There were people lining the sides of the road now, and up ahead he could see what looked like a massive stone gate.
He should try to take out the driver first. By the time the passenger reacted, the lorry would be out of control. It might crash, and if there was a bomb hidden somewhere it might explode and kill them all. But it would not kill Churchill.
He peered over the side of the cab and realized that it was not a British lorry—the driver of this one sat on the left. Fortunate; Ian’s left hand was the only one he could trust. He edged in that direction, swaying with the movement of the vehicle. The driver’s window was open, and his arm rested casually on the edge. Summoning his giddy body, Ian leaned over the lorry’s bed, knife raised. He plunged it as forcefully as he could into the man’s left biceps.
The arm was flung upward with a howl. Ian pulled out the knife blade and plunged it again, this time into the cab—and into the man’s neck.
The lorry swerved and the horn blared; the driver had fallen forward onto the steering wheel. Then the lorry turned violently in the opposite direction. For an instant it was possible it would somehow find balance. But the tires were old. Ian was thrown back among the goats and huddled there on his hands and knees, feeling the slow-motion whirl of the lorry as it began to overturn. The animals were bleating with terror, scrabbling on their cloven hooves as the world upended. A horn grazed his temple. Then they were all tossed like garbage into the air. The last thing Ian saw was the ground coming up to meet him.
—
“DON’T SHOOT!” Grace cried again, but the NKVD troops did not understand her, and as the lorry overturned and slid, metal groaning under the impact of the road, a rifle shot rang out.
There was a muffled crump. A millisecond’s hesitation. Then the engine of the still-sliding truck exploded in a ball of flame. As Grace dove for the withered grass behind the guardhouse, a single lorry door arced upward and struck the iron bars of the compound gate with a resounding clang.
—
“SO WHAT WAS supposed to happen here, Mike?” Sam Schwartz inquired as he stood by the President’s car in the turnout of the Gale Morghe road. “Were you going to shoot us both? Did I die first, then Mr. Roosevelt?”
Hudson said nothing. His hands were cuffed behind his back and his legs were bound securely with Schwartz’s necktie. He was sitting in the dirt by the side of the road, staring at his knees.
“Or did you plan to make it look like I’d pulled the whole stunt?” Schwartz persisted. “Murdered the President and then killed myself?”
Hudson glanced up.
Schwartz nodded, sure of himself. He was suddenly insanely angry. “You calculating bastard. You didn’t figure on an old Secret Service guy outsmarting the Ivy League, didya? OSS asshole. Wheels within wheels. But I saw the truck.”
“You were warned about me,” Hudson said.
“Gil Winant told me all about it last night. But he needed proof. So I explained the deal to Mr. Roosevelt and he was game. It’s a big risk, shooting craps with a president’s life—but Mr. Roosevelt hates a traitor, Mike. He wasn’t about to skip town early and let you scuttle back to Berlin with the dirt on D-day. He put his gun in his pocket and his smile on his face. And we both let you into our car.”
“What now?” Hudson asked.
Schwartz squinted at the horizon. The faint sound of an engine drifted out of the distance on the morning air. “We wait and see who shows up. I figure you didn’t plan to walk out of here after that murder-suicide. Got a ride coming?”
Silence.
Schwartz strolled over to the car and thrust his head into the back. “How we doing, Mr. President?”
“Just grand, Sam. Just grand.”
“I think we’ll be pulling out of here in a minute or two.”
“Wouldn’t want to keep the Sacred Cow waiting.”
“No, sir. You just sit tight and keep your head down, all right?”
Schwartz slapped the roof of the car and straightened. His eyes narrowed again as he peered back down the road. A truck was coming. He pulled his Thompson submachine gun from the floor near Roosevelt’s feet and propped it on the roof. The entire body of the car was between him and the approaching vehicle, and Roosevelt was lying flat on his back on the car seat.
The truck was slowing as it approached the turnout. The driver wore Persian tribal dress, but his face was a Westerner’s; a livid scar ran crudely from his left temple to his jaw. Schwartz watched the man take in Hudson’s figure huddled by the side of the road. Then the truck started to accelerate again.
“Germans?” FDR asked softly from below.
At that moment, the driver raised his left hand from the wheel and aimed a pistol at them. A second gun snaked from the passenger window and a shot rang out. Schwartz squeezed his trigger and let the Thompson dance.
The truck veered and swayed under his concentrated fire, but as he watched, the driver pulled back his arm and put his head down. The truck sped up. Schwartz kept it in his sights. He fired another round.
“Sam.”
He glanced down.
Roosevelt was sitting upright, staring through the back windshield at Michael Hudson.
He was sprawled like a dummy in the dirt, killed by a single bullet to the head. That would have been from Scarface’s pistol, Schwartz thought. He let him go—the truck was to
o far to reach now, anyway—and walked over to Hudson.
He was staring up at the sky, his face in death more than ever like a hawk’s.
“With friends like these . . .” Schwartz said softly.
After an instant, he bent down and closed Michael’s eyes.
EPILOGUE
GIZA
SATURDAY,
DECEMBER 4, 1943
He was resting earlier,” the nurse said, “but I think he may be awake now. Remarkable how a few days in that wretched Persia can wreak such havoc! The poor Prime Minister is in a very bad way, what with pneumonia taking hold, and as for this fellow . . .” She leaned closer to Grace’s ear. “Doctor is very worried he’ll turn septic. Blood poisoning.”
“But the damage . . . if he survives . . . will he . . . ?”
“Be able to have children?” The nurse shook her head doubtfully. “Who knows? Doctor says he’s never seen such a terrible set of lacerations. And he served in the first war. Afraid he’d have to amputate, he was. But it hasn’t come to that yet, and I’m sure I hope it never does. If it turns gangrenous, of course . . .”
“May I see him?”
The nurse wheeled abruptly and led her down the hallway of Churchill’s villa to Ian’s bedroom. It was next to the Prime Minister’s, whose door was closed. Lord Moran had been dancing attendance on his Great Man’s lungs now that the Tripartite Conference was over. It wasn’t the first time Churchill had contracted pneumonia, but Moran was frank in saying it was the worst case he’d yet had. He was having difficulty breathing. Off his feed and off his sleep. It was uncertain whether Churchill could be moved in the next few days, and his return to Britain had been postponed. Even low-altitude flight would strain his lungs. Moran would not be answerable for the consequences. He had cabled Downing Street and Chequers and Whitehall with the news. Pamela was flying home the next morning, but Sarah was spending long hours in her father’s room.
Ian’s door was ajar.
The nurse grimaced at Grace and left her.
Too Bad to Die Page 30
