The British Cross

by Bill Granger

  “What does Sims say?”

  “Sims does not speak anymore. He was murdered in a sauna three days ago. For some reason, the Finns have decided not to press the investigation. They were onto the American agent but pulled back.”

  “That smells, doesn’t it?”

  “Stinks like a Liverpool whore, Sparrow. Everything about this stinks of trap, of frame, of setup. But what is the trap? And who is it for? And who is setting it?”

  “The American in Helsinki?”

  “Very tidy. The Dublin stationmaster has been following this female agent from the States named Macklin. She went into American Express on Grafton Street last week and inquired about trips into Leningrad. From Helsinki, of all places.”

  Sparrow made a face. “I don’t like it, George. It gets very curious.”

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” said George. “Seems pretty blatant, doesn’t it? As though she’s inviting us to follow her along.”

  “And what about Ely?”

  “He’s a fool, should have been sacked after he cracked up in Vienna two years ago. He had some pull inside Q’s Section, got a file clerk’s job. Q put him on the business to keep him out of the way, to draw flies to the honey as it were. We wanted to know what the American game was and we thought someone like Ely was just the man for the job. No one expected the American agent to be bait as well. Two of them out there, each setting a trap that the other is likely to fall into. It has gotten too convoluted, too involved. Q went to the minister last night; we have authorization for maximum silence. That’s you, Sparrow.”

  “Ely?” Sparrow’s voice was soft.

  George sighed. “He’s in the way, isn’t he? If you can think of a way to keep him out of it, by all means. But if he becomes part of the accident, then it will have to be.”

  Sparrow narrowed his eyes, hooding them like a bird of prey working in a sunlit field. “The American girl?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “The one in Helsinki?”

  “Yes. That should be an easier business in any case. They’ll figure the Russians double-crossed them—”

  “I can take them both out in Helsinki. I don’t know about Ely.”

  “If Ely doesn’t follow—”

  “Can’t you people pull him back?”

  “No. He’s part of our bait offering to the Americans.”

  “But what is the trap, George?”

  “Tomas Crohan.”

  “But how can the Americans be using him if he’s bloody prisoner in the Soviet Union?”

  “That’s part of their trap,” George said simply.

  Sparrow felt disoriented. “But what is he but a bloody Mick and an American agent to boot? Why are we involved?”

  For the first time since the interview at Wickham’s country house, George glared again, fixing Sparrow with blue eyes that burned in the dim light of the parking lot at Heathrow. Planes boomed overhead into the dense fog of the night sky.

  “That is the last question, Sparrow, the one that I cannot answer,” George said.

  “Cannot? Or will not?”

  George blinked. “Either reply would be too much of an answer. There’s a plane at five to Dublin, in case you can take care of the matter there. I don’t think the Irish authorities will interfere.”

  Sparrow realized the answer in George’s refusal to speak. The answer was “Will not.”

  Sparrow felt uncomfortable and did not move for a moment. The car was warm but the wind was rising and it was a cold walk to the terminal from the car. Maximum silence. Well, it didn’t matter about the Americans but he felt a kinship with Ely. Just another poor beggar in the field. Maybe he could shove Ely out of the way before it was too late.

  As an act of mercy in the bloody business to come.

  14

  DUBLIN

  When the driver made the first wrong turn, Rita Macklin had spoken sharply to him in the voice of a woman who has corrected cab drivers in big cities before. The man with the ginger mustache had merely smiled at her and that had annoyed her all the more. When he made the second wrong turn and actually headed south toward the Ring Road and away from the city center, she spoke again, but with a note of fear in her voice this time.

  This time, he produced a small pistol and pointed it at her and then turned it away from her and apologized for it.

  “Who are you?”

  “You are Rita Macklin, a journalist from the United States.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to know what you’ve found out from Father Cunningham.”

  “But he’s dead—”

  “Not silent, however. Otherwise, you would scarcely have spent all this time going through his things. And why do you want to go to Helsinki?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Well, we can talk about all this in a little bit,” Ely said in a gentle voice tinged with sadness. He wore a driver’s cap.

  Rita Macklin reached for the door handle and gave it a pull.

  “I’m afraid those won’t work from the inside,” Ely said. “Please sit still. We’re almost there.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Get information, Miss Macklin.”

  “I don’t have any information—”

  “You want to go to Leningrad. Why? To see Tomas Crohan?”

  Now she could not speak. She rattled the door again.

  “What I want to know is what the American game is, actually. You’re a journalist? Is it usual for a journalist to lie to acquire information from a dead man’s effects?”

  “You do what you have to.”

  “Is that correct? We have very good information, Miss Macklin, to indicate that you are an operative from Central Intelligence Agency. What we wish to know is what it is that you intend to do with Tomas Crohan.”

  The cab stopped in front of a three-story building in a broken-down section of the city. Some of the windows were boarded up. No one was on the dark street; the lamps had been vandalized and they were enveloped in nearly total darkness.

  Ely turned on his flashlight and splashed the light on the stairs of the old building. He opened the rear door and grasped Rita’s arm firmly. She struck him across the face, and he was so startled that he dropped the flashlight. Rita began to run down the street.

  “My God, what a wallop,” Ely said softly and felt blood on his lips. He tasted the salty liquid for a moment, wiped again, and then closed the door of the car carefully. He picked up the flashlight and went to the driver’s door and got in. He started the car and flicked on the headlights. He could see Rita running half a block ahead.

  He sped up suddenly and pulled the car ahead of her, and then jumped out and crossed the sidewalk.

  Rita screamed the only word she could think of: “Rape! Rape!”

  A light flashed on in a house down the street and a woman’s head peered through a yellow-lit pane of glass.

  Ely had the pistol in one hand and the flashlight in the other.

  “Miss Macklin, I don’t want to do you harm.”

  “You wouldn’t shoot me.”

  “Of course I would.” The voice was utterly calm.

  She came close to him and saw the lazy calm in his eyes. She had known one man like that, a man with calm eyes and a quiet voice who could utterly convince her of the violence he was capable of.

  She opened the rear door.

  “What the hell is going on?” cried a voice from some window in some building somewhere. All the rest was silence in the bitter cold.

  He led her up the stairs of the dark abandoned building. There was a flat on the second floor with a table, chairs, and a small lamp. He turned on the lamp—it was an oil lamp because the electricity had long been shut off in these houses—and they sat down. The lamp was warm, the only warmth in the place. A large gray rat watched them without curiosity from a ledge that ran along the wall between the boarded windows. Roaches covered the walls in the light of the flickering lamp.

  Rita Macklin
saw these things but turned her eyes away from them. She forced herself to stare directly into the blue eyes of the man who had kidnapped her.

  “Well, Miss Macklin, I apologize for the surroundings but I’m a stranger to this city myself.”

  “Who are you?”

  “That’s not important. Let us say I am Ely.”

  “It sounds made up.”

  He blinked and stared sadly at her. He spoke with a gentle, calm voice. “I suppose it is in a way. You are with the Central Intelligence Agency and I—”

  “I am not a goddamn spook for the CIA,” she said harshly.

  Ely smiled. “You say. With, I note, some vehemence. Perhaps we were misinformed.”

  “Why is British Intelligence interested in this?”

  Ely looked surprised. “Who spoke of British Intelligence?”

  “Who are you then? You don’t look Irish.”

  “And you don’t look like an agent for the Americans. But appearances are deceiving at times. We snapped your photograph the first day you arrived—in time for the funeral of the priest.”

  “You work for Auntie,” Rita Macklin said.

  “So you do know the little secrets,” Ely said with a smile. “Now, the sooner we get this over with, the sooner we can get out of this wretched slum and back to our rooms. I’m quite willing to drop you at your hotel.”

  “I thought that was your intention from the beginning.”

  “First, the fare, Miss Macklin.”

  “Or what?”

  Ely stared at Rita for a moment and then smiled sadly.

  He still held the pistol in his hand. He looked at it for a moment.

  “You’re a British agent. Are you going to shoot me?” Rita said defiantly but with a nervous rapidity.

  “Would that be absurd?” Ely asked.

  “I’m an American.”

  “Yes. An American agent. And you have some information that I wish to have. So what am I asked to do? Merely to get it, Miss Macklin. Without regard for you.”

  “So you’re threatening me again?”

  The smile was gone. Ely’s voice was cold. “If you can’t help me, I’m afraid I’ll turn you in.”

  “To whom?”

  “The Irish authorities. You’re a wanted woman, Miss Macklin.”

  “I’ve never been in Ireland in my life.”

  “You’re wanted for questioning in connection with a murder that involved a terrorist attack in a Liverpool public house two weeks ago.”

  She stared at him as though he had suddenly gone mad.

  Ely went on, calmly. “You are the suspected liaison between the IRA, which was responsible for the bombing in Liverpool, and the Northern Aid Society front in Washington.”

  “This is so stupid,” she said. “You won’t be able to get away with that, I—”

  “You’ll be held incommunicado in Dublin and transferred to our facilities in Liverpool where you shall be questioned.” He stared sadly at her. “Strenuous questioning, I should imagine. I won’t have anything to do with that.”

  “You can’t do this to me,” Rita said. “Goddamnit, I am a newspaperman.”

  “Yes. A journalist. So you say. I can assure you that you will tell the people in Liverpool everything they want to know. Which would make it so much better for both of us if you would tell me now.”

  “We’re not in Russia—”

  “And not in the United States,” Ely said. He slipped his pistol in his coat pocket.

  Rita did not hesitate. She turned suddenly and ran to the door.

  Surprisingly, Ely moved with equal agility. She was a step ahead of him but the door was stuck. He grabbed her thin shoulder and pulled her around. He did not expect her to be swinging as she turned.

  The blow caught him on the temple and momentarily staggered him. A second blow fell on his right cheekbone.

  Rita turned again to the door but this time he hit her very hard on the side of the head.

  The blow made her feel sick for a moment. Again, he turned her toward him. This time he slapped her across her face. And again. And a third time.

  “I’ll kill you,” she said, her face stinging with pain and tears.

  “No, you will not, Miss Macklin,” Ely said. “You will sit down and you will tell me exactly what I wish to know.”

  “Then you don’t have a fallback position,” she said. She smiled. “You either get the information from me or you let me go.”

  “No, Miss Macklin, not at all,” Ely said. “I get what I need to know or I do not let you go. I cannot afford failure.”

  “My God, you can’t—”

  “Miss Macklin, I have grown gray in the service and I have no wish to be prematurely retired now because I have failed a rather straightforward operation to obtain rather unimportant information—”

  “So unimportant that you kidnap me and now you threaten to kill me.”

  Ely stared at her, at the involuntary tears in her green eyes, at her flushed face that bore marks of his hands. He was completely calm, completely without expression.

  “All this because of someone who might be dead,” she said.

  “Our permanent stationmaster at Dublin was a friend of the old priest,” Ely began.

  “I know that. Parker.”

  Ely was surprised. “How did you know?”

  “More important, how did Father Cunningham know,” Rita Macklin said. “He knew Parker was a British agent. The priest wasn’t a fool.”

  “It sounds as though Parker was,” Ely said.

  “Did you—did your people kill Father Cunningham?”

  “Of course not. Why would we want to do that?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know anything about this—”

  “His… demise surprised our people,” Ely said.

  “You know I’m not a spy, that I’m not a terrorist—”

  “I know nothing, Miss Macklin. You protest your innocence, which can mean that you are all the more guilty. I don’t know.”

  “Damn you,” she said at last. “You hurt me.”

  Ely said nothing for a moment. Then: “Why do you want to go to Leningrad, Miss Macklin.” Softly, insistently.

  “Because I think Tomas Crohan is alive. And that he’s in Kresty Prison there.”

  “How brave of you. Will you break him out of prison?”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I have to go there first.”

  “Why is Tomas Crohan alive?”

  “I just think he is. Instinct.”

  “No, Miss Macklin. Instinct will take you across the street, not halfway around the world. Let us get down to the matter now, Miss Macklin, so I can let you go home.”

  For a moment, Rita did not speak. She felt defeated and terrified at the same time. Ely was gentle, almost innocuous. And yet there was some truth in his voice when he said he would not permit himself to fail at this little mission. Even at the expense of her life.

  “How do I know you will let me go?”

  “Because I would have no reason to hurt you.”

  “You have no reason now.”

  “Tell me about the old priest,” Ely said softly.

  She hesitated.

  “And Tomas Crohan,” Ely said. “Tell me about him as well.”

  15

  LENINGRAD

  They had given him a suit of clothes and he had been examined once again by the doctors. He had shaved closely and he had placed the razor in the little leather packet they provided for him. The last part had involved the private interview with the man called Tartakoff.

  He had stood during the interview.

  At the beginning, Tartakoff had watched the prisoner in silence with an edge of amusement on his lips. His eyes sparkled in the harsh light. Tomas Crohan felt tired, as though his seventy-one years had become a weight at two in the morning that dragged at him and made him shrink before the gaze of Tartakoff.

  “Do you know why you have been given a suit of clothing?”

  “No,
Commander.”

  “You are being transferred to the workforce at Gorki. I have discovered that you have an ability with languages.”

  “Yes. I am not as good as I was, Commander.”

  “Your Russian is very good. Can you speak English?”

  “It is my native tongue, sir. But I do not speak it often.” Tomas said in English.

  “Good. Continue in English for a moment,” the Russian said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Have you been badly treated here at Kresty?”

  “No, sir. I shall be sorry to leave here, sir.”

  “Yes. Perhaps you shall be sorry,” Tartakoff said and again he smiled.

  “What shall I do at Gorki?”

  “I’m not certain. But it might involve work with languages. We have many prisoners at Gorki, many nationalities.”

  “The Americans—”

  Tartakoff looked sharply at him; his face, genial a moment before, was transformed to ice. “What about the Americans?”

  “I’m sorry, sir. There was talk. In the wards. That the Americans were kept in the camp at Gorki.”

  “Talk is dangerous at times,” Tartakoff said. Magically, the mellowness returned to his features as his scowl faded. “In one hour, you will be taken from here and you are to obey all instructions, do you understand?”

  “Yes, Commander.”

  “And you are to speak Russian only.”

  “Yes, Commander.”

  “You speak with a Polish accent. I thought that was useful.”

  “I learned very early from the Poles in my first camp.”

  “Did you? Well, it is useful. Remember. Only Russian. And one other matter.”

  He stood still.

  “You are Ivan Tiomkin.”

  Tomas Crohan blinked. He remembered the mad commandant in Siberia. He remembered the men freezing to death because they worked naked in the snow. He stared at Tartakoff but he did not see madness in his eyes. “Yes, Commander.” In any case, he must obey the lawful orders of the State. It was a matter of survival; one did not resist the law and one was not punished. It was quite simple.

  “Now you will wait in this room.” Tartakoff rose. He smiled again and patted Tomas Crohan on one bony shoulder like a child petting a broken bird. “You will wait, Ivan Tiomkin. And then you shall go.”