The British Cross

by Bill Granger

  “Well, you know something more.”

  “I do?”

  “Tomas Crohan. What was it about?”

  “I told you that George—”

  “Yes. But why was George so interested?” Ely spoke gently, almost diffidently. George was the code counterpart of Q who ran the electronics retrieval division of Auntie. Q was nominal superior to George but because Q didn’t understand in the slightest what electronics were and how computers operated, George ran his division with some measure of independence.

  Q frowned again. “I don’t think I can tell you that right now, Ely. The point is not merely that Wickham has disappeared but that this morning we picked up a routine message from our Dublin station keeper. Same name pops in.”

  “Tomas Crohan? In what context?”

  “I don’t know. Damned Parker.”

  “Penny Parker?”

  “Yes, him. Run across him?”

  “We were in Czechoslovakia doing a black job ten years ago. Penny Parker is in Dublin?”

  “Yes. Listening post. A week ago he justified an expense accounting by sighting a Soviet T-class submarine off the Blaskets.”

  “Island?”

  “Yes. About five miles from Great Blasket.”

  “Justified his expenses?”

  “Talking out of shop, I suppose. The trouble with agents in the field is that they become so accustomed to pulling the wool over the eyes of the Opposition that they come to think we are the Opposition as well.”

  “You don’t believe him.” Again, gently.

  “It doesn’t matter what I believe. There’s hardly any secret that the Soviet Navy is operating in the northern Atlantic, even off our dear cousins’ island. What matters is why Parker was in Blasket in some godforsaken part of that country when he should have been attending to duties in Dublin.”

  “And what connection is there between his sighting and Tomas Crohan.”

  Q swiveled in his chair and regarded the weak, hissing fire behind him. With his back to Ely—a characteristic act of rudeness—he continued in his thin voice.

  “It would appear none at all. But there are coincidences inside coincidences. Wickham picked up his name through a test of penetration of American radio traffic. In Scandinavia.”

  Ely understood suddenly, understood that a great problem was looming and understood that Q wanted to wash his hands of it. Q did him no favor now; Q wanted something swept under a rug in a room far away.

  Still Q ruminated aloud, facing the fireplace, avoiding both the necessity of seeing Ely’s reactions to his words and hiding his face from the agent.

  “Our station keeper in Stockholm is looking into the matter there, has been since we first got notice that the Yanks have sent someone special to Helsinki.”

  “I don’t quite understand the connections,” Ely said, raising his voice slightly in the event that lack of visual contact between the men had rendered them both somewhat deaf.

  “No. Neither does anyone. Even George is puzzled. Imagine puzzling George.” He paused as though he had not considered it before. “This is all a load of rubbish about some… some name out of the past and—”

  “Who is Tomas Crohan?”

  “Who was Tomas Crohan is more likely.”

  “Who was he, then?”

  “Irish national, fiercely pro-Nazi before the war. The Americans somehow got to him, used his country’s neutrality, which was really pro-Nazi, sent him into Vienna. Your old bailiwick.”

  Q turned rapidly and faced Ely again. He wanted to see if he had scored by mentioning Vienna.

  Ely did not respond. If he felt pain over the failure, the pain had burrowed its way inside him. It lived like a tapeworm in his body; it fed on him and wasted his features. But outwardly, Ely was still the professional, still the Fixer. His eyes did not waver. His fierce mustache seemed fiercer still.

  “What happened?” Ely inquired in the same even, soft voice.

  “Red Army marched into Vienna before Crohan got out. They arrested him, hinting he was an anti-Soviet American spy. Well, he was an American agent of some sort, that’s clear. But the Americans kept saying he was on a humanitarian mission—”

  “Like Wallenberg.”

  “Yes. Like Wallenberg. There were similarities, I suppose. In any event, he died in Soviet captivity. Nineteen forty-six.”

  “And now his name comes up again.”

  “Yes. American agents in Helsinki, Penny Parker blathering in Dublin, and this damnable business with Wickham. He was positively vetted just six months ago.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing. No mistress in Pimlico, no penchants to become a raging queen in Soho. Just a good, dull, sober chap, the sort the service could use more of.”

  Again, the implied reprimand; again, Ely did not respond. His blue eyes fixed themselves on the glare of the rimless spectacles that framed the old man’s cold glare. Outside, it began to snow, a brittle, mean snow of mixed sleet and rain, a snow that knocked on windows like a cat scratching its way inside a house.

  “I understand the Crohan name in the context of Wickham. But how did Penny Parker send his?”

  “Very mysterious, which is typical of Parker, which is the reason I had him posted to Dublin in the first place. The Irish love a conspirator and Parker is one of them. He wasn’t completely clear but it involved a priest, someone who had information on this Crohan fellow.”

  “Q?”

  “What is it?”

  “What do you want done?”

  “Information. I don’t know, but we need information.”

  “Can I see our files on Crohan? I mean, this was the request Wickham made, wasn’t it?”

  “George has charge of them—”

  “Will he show me the files?”

  There was a long silence which implied the answer. Ely waited, nonetheless.

  “They are under fifty-year seal.”

  “I am hardly a representative of the Daily Express,” Ely replied.

  “I’ve given you the essential story. You can get the rest from our routine reference-and-search.”

  “Q, why are we interested?”

  “Is this necessary? Suffice we are interested. Terribly. Not so much in Crohan but in why his name suddenly pops up with alarming frequency and why the Yanks are so bloody interested all of a sudden. And just why the hell did Wickham disappear after he made his inquiry.”

  “I’ll go to Dublin first. To see Parker,” Ely said.

  “Yes.” The director of Auntie leaned forward with his hands folded on his desk in front of him in a gesture of sincerity. The gesture was so obvious that Ely was certain the old man intended to lie to him.

  “We are not terribly interested in this Crohan fellow. It’s history. We are interested in attempting to discover who is playing a game with us. Americans? The Opposition? Even the Irish, though I should doubt strongly they have the requisite intelligence to penetrate our system.”

  “Penetration of our security hasn’t been so very difficult in the past few years,” Ely said. Again, said gently but with some of the razor’s edge his words used to carry before the business in Vienna had shipwrecked him.

  “Ely, I’m giving you a chance. I won’t bring up the Vienna business again. You have your friend Tompkins to thank for saving your hide when that blew up. I’m convinced my confidence will not be misplaced.”

  Ely said nothing.

  “Good luck, then.”

  Ely got up. He stared at the old man who was Q for a moment and then decided to speak. “You want silence, isn’t that it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you really don’t want to get to the bottom of anything. You merely want this matter brushed away.”

  Q regarded him through the rimless glasses and placed the tips of his fingers together in a tent in front of his lips. He thought a long moment before he replied.

  “You’ve put it crudely, Ely.”

  “Yes. I’m afraid I have to be blunt
. I have to know.”

  “Of course you do. The fixer has to know what the job is.” Another pause. “Fix it, Ely. Something is broken. Fix it, make it quiet again.”

  “And if it can’t be fixed.”

  Q managed a frosty smile. “Then sweep it away into the dustbin. Broken things are always thrown away in the end, aren’t they?”

  5

  DUBLIN

  The Aer Lingus 747 named St. Brendan swept low over the brown winter fields of County Wicklow and began the final approach to Dublin airport. The transatlantic flight had been typically tiring and Rita Macklin yawned now and stretched as the gray morning light of Ireland coated the windows of the immense, half-empty plane.

  The night had been restless though the journey in the darkness had been smooth as usual. Because the plane was half-empty, she had slept across three seats but she had awakened again and again with fragments of bad dreams prodding her conscious mind.

  Rita Macklin rubbed her green eyes and shook out her medium-length red hair and rubbed color into her cheeks. She looked younger than she was—she would be thirty in the fall—but there was a curious tough quality to her strong, angled face that made the judgment of her actual age not very important to most people. She was not beautiful by any common convention because her jaw was too strong and the slight overbite of her teeth made her seem too aggressive to be conventionally attractive; all the defects in her face and lean figure combined to make her seem quite beautiful to men who were not afraid of such women.

  Like Devereaux.

  “Damn,” she said to herself in a whisper and she reached for her purse tucked beneath the seat and fumbled it open for a brush.

  Devereaux had been part of the bad dreams of the long night’s journey for no reason at all. He was not remotely involved in her present assignment; she had not seen him for nearly three years since he had brushed her off.

  “Damn,” she said again for no reason, and a passing green-clad stewardess with a motherly figure and the face of a nun stopped and asked Rita if anything was wrong.

  “No, I’m just thinking aloud,” she said and the stewardess went down the aisle to the back of the plane.

  Why had she dreamed about Devereaux a half-dozen times? In one dream, she had slept with him as she had slept with him the first time in the motel room in Clearwater Beach, Florida, three years ago. She had thought he was a fellow journalist; before the dreadful night she was chased across the beach by two killers and she found out Devereaux was an intelligence agent using her to get the secret journal of an old priest named Leo Tunney.

  That was it.

  Spies and priests and it was all tied in intricate memory to the present assignment—to interview an old Irish priest in Dublin who might know something about a man named Tomas Crohan.

  Devereaux. Damn him.

  She realized she was angry. She pushed the brush roughly through her hair until she made tears in her eyes.

  In the end, after she had known what Devereaux was, it had not mattered to her. But he wouldn’t speak to her, even though she was certain he had fallen in love with her. He had pushed her away at the last minute and she had cured herself of him in three years by working hard and by not mooning over him and by avoiding the temptation to wonder about him. After all, she worked in the same town he worked in and she was a magazine reporter with a lot of resources; she could have discovered his whereabouts anytime she wanted.

  And he could have discovered hers as well. If he had wanted her. Priests and spies, she thought, dropping the brush back into her purse. The plane’s wheels locked down and tiny Dublin airport stretched into view on the north side of the old city below. Priests and spies and bad dreams on a long night’s crossing.

  As soon as she passed through customs at Dublin airport, Rita Macklin changed money and found a pay telephone and put in a call to the priest she had come three thousand miles to interview.

  Father Cunningham was retired now and lived in a room in St. Adrian’s rectory on the south side of Dublin, beyond the Ring Road.

  A housekeeper answered and gave the telephone receiver to another priest who had a suspicious voice. No one ever called old Father Cunningham, he explained; was she a relative from America?

  “Yes,” Rita lied easily. The phone was put down with a thump and there were background noises and then an old, quarrelsome Irish voice came on the line.

  “Who be ye then?”

  “Rita Macklin.”

  “I’ve no such relation.”

  “But Mrs. Fitzroy from Chicago wrote to you.”

  “She did, did she?”

  “She wanted me to come to see you.”

  “She did, did she? And why d’ye come from America in the dead of winter to see an old man?”

  “Because of her cousin. She says you can help her find her cousin.”

  “Find Tomas Crohan, is it? Ye’ll find him with the angels. Or the devil.”

  “Do you think he’s dead?” Rita asked calmly. Mrs. Fitzroy had said he would be difficult to get around.

  “I’m an old man, Miss Macklin, and I don’t know a thing anymore and that’s the truth. Alive or dead it don’t matter; in a little while, I’ll be able to tell for meself.”

  Rita bit her underlip and stared hard at the green telephone box in front of her. She wouldn’t take no from the old man; there was no question of that, but she hoped it would be easier to get to him. The story had grown and grown in her own mind since the day Mrs. Fitzroy sat down with her in the interview room at the magazine in Washington and began to tell her the long and fantastic story about her Irish cousin, Tomas Crohan.

  “Father,” she began, softening the word like a respectful Catholic girl, “I’m a journalist in America. In Washington. You know Mrs. Fitzroy came to see me. She wrote you a letter, I have a copy of it. I tried to reach you a dozen times by phone but you wouldn’t speak to me.”

  “And why do you suppose I’ll speak to ye now?”

  “Because I’m here. I’ve come across an ocean to see you.”

  “Is it that important to ye, Miss Macklin?”

  “Yes. Important enough. Important to Mrs. Fitzroy—”

  “Ah, Catherine Guilhoolie—that’s Mrs. Fitzroy to ye. A stubborn girl, always was, stubborn as a donkey blocking the creamery road and ye with a full load to get in before noon.” The pastoral reference went past Rita but she understood the sentiment.

  “Miss Macklin, ye must be able to find all ye want to know about Tomas Crohan from ye own resources in yer own country. I don’t want to be bothered—”

  “But you wrote Mrs. Fitzroy a half-dozen times in the past six months about Tomas, about what happened to him—”

  “I’m getting old, Miss Macklin; the past is more comfortable to me than the thought of the present. Even a priest is terrified of eternity when he stands close enough to touch it, as it were. Are ye Catholic?”

  “I am,” she said.

  “Ah, American Catholics aren’t all the same, not at all. I’ve met them in my time, I can tell ye.” His voice trailed off. “Where was I? Ah. Ye can learn all ye need to know about Tomas Crohan from yer own people—”

  “You mean the Central Intelligence Agency.”

  “I do indeed. Didn’t I say that to Mrs. Fitzroy?”

  “I went to the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act to find the files on Tomas Crohan and they wouldn’t show them to me. Files that are forty years old—”

  The old voice laughed on the line. “And why d’ye suppose that might be?”

  “Because the CIA is hiding something.”

  “Bright girl, ye are.”

  “If you’d let me talk to you.”

  “There’s nothing to be talking about.”

  “You said in your last letter an Englishman in Dublin had been after you to tell him about Tomas Crohan.”

  “I said that, did I?”

  “I’ve got a copy of the letter.”

  “So Mrs. Fitzroy has told ye everything the
n?”

  “An Englishman named Parker. He sounds like a spy.”

  “Does he now, girl? And ye no doubt have had wide experience of spies?”

  “I know spies,” she said.

  “And ye are a brave journalist after this story to make it a sensation in yer newspaper or on the telly.”

  “I want to know what happened to Tomas Crohan and I have to start somewhere. I want to start with you.” Her voice rose slightly; her cheeks flushed; her green eyes grew deeper in color as her anger rose. “I’m going to find out what happened to him whether you tell me or not. If this is a wild goose chase, then I’ll go to square one and start over but I’m going to find out, you just bet on that.”

  There was a long silence so that Rita thought Father Cunningham might have severed the connection.

  “God rest his soul,” the old man said at last.

  “You think he’s dead.”

  “I’m nearly certain of it. During the war… It was so long ago and yet to me it was yesterday. That’s the problem of age, Miss Macklin, when the long ago is closer than what ye did an hour before breakfast.”

  She waited. She felt the door opening. She pushed now slowly, with softer words, for fear of cracking the door.

  “What happened during the war?”

  “Terrible things, Miss Macklin. Terrible and dreadful acts and not just on the field of battle. Tomas Crohan was not loved by the English, I can tell ye; but I tell ye true few would weep at his wake in the old De Valera government either. A firebrand, he was, a bloody atheist, but that was to be accounted for by his age… we all pass through a period of not believing. Ah, but a patriot true and not a public-house singer, either; if he had been old enough at the rising in ’sixteen, he would have led them into the bloody post office himself, he would,” the priest said with some pride, recalling the Easter rebellion against British rule in Ireland. “Mark me, he was no fool, but he was blinded by his own ambition and impatience. The Devil might have feared dealing with him for fear of losing Hell; shrewd, he was, and ruthless, too, and the Americans were no different. They couldn’t leave us alone all during the war, never saw the sense of Ireland stayin’ neutral. Never saw the English had used us too long to fight their bloody wars for them; sure, hadn’t we bled enough in our red coats for the British? Aye. But Tomas was a boyo.… I never knew how he had dealt with everyone until now.…”