Mr. Churchill's Secretary

by Susan Elia MacNeal

  “Who are you?” he asked, eyes darting from Claire’s face to Maggie’s.

  “Claire Kelly,” she responded.

  The name sounds so strange from her, Maggie thought.

  “Who?”

  “Claire Kelly. I’m a friend. I know Michael Murphy. He’s been compromised.”

  McCormack’s eyes widened, and his nostrils flared. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said finally, closing the door.

  Claire stopped it with her hand. “I need to speak to Devlin.”

  “I don’t know anyone named Devlin.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Go away,” McCormack said. “Before I call the police.”

  Claire took a step forward into the apartment. “You won’t call the police. And we both know why.”

  McCormack tensed for a moment. “What do you want?”

  “I have a hostage,” she said, indicating the gun in her coat pocket, pointed at Maggie. “Someone Devlin will want. Her name is Margaret Hope. She works with Churchill at Number Ten. Now, please, let me in before someone sees me.”

  McCormack stepped aside and let the two girls in. The flat was neat and tidy. Stacks of student papers covered the rickety wooden kitchen table next to a mug of steaming tea and a plate of half-eaten toast and jam. A pair of vivid green budgies preened in an antique Victorian birdcage near the window.

  He closed the door. “How did you find me?”

  “Michael. Michael Murphy.”

  “I don’t know any Michael Murphy.”

  “He knows you.” Claire took a breath. “Michael and I were working together. I was supposed to take out Churchill. But I was arrested. They were transporting me to a holding cell, and there was a car accident. Everyone was killed or injured. I managed to get a gun and then decided to take this one as a hostage. She’s Churchill’s secretary—too valuable to kill—at least without pumping her for information first.”

  McCormack’s forehead creased with thought. “The accident I heard about on the wireless.” He said abruptly, “Don’t move.”

  He went to the telephone, picked up the heavy receiver, and dialed some numbers.

  “This is McCormack. A woman named Claire Kelly is at my flat.”

  There was a short silence. “She claims a man named Michael Murphy told her.”

  Another silence. “She has an asset. Someone who works for Churchill.”

  Maggie held her breath, waiting.

  “Yes, I understand,” he said finally. He hung up the receiver.

  “Devlin will see you.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  IN MCCORMACK’S CAR, a black Vauxhall, there was an uneasy silence. Ambulances from the staged accident keened in the background. Claire was driving, and McCormack and Maggie were in the backseat. He had the gun poking into her ribs.

  “How far are we going?” Claire asked.

  “Not far,” he said.

  Claire looked at McCormack’s reflection in the rearview mirror. “You seem nervous.”

  “What do you expect?”

  “Look,” she said, “I wouldn’t have contacted you if I felt I had a choice.”

  “And as a result, I have no choice.”

  “We do whatever we need to for the cause, so what’s the problem?”

  “There is no problem.”

  In the backseat, Maggie kept going over the plan. This was their only chance to stop the bomb, she knew. And something, a number of things—anything—could go wrong. Too many variables …

  The car made its way through the rubble and debris of the East End—until the war, it had been the largest and most important port on the face of the earth—and pulled up, finally, in front of a large gray warehouse. It stood intact amid the surrounding destruction, arrogant and alone. Large lorries rumbled in and out, and a few men in dirt-stained sweaters loaded heavy-looking boxes into an unmarked truck.

  McCormack pointed. “Go through those doors and to the right. He’s expecting you.” Maggie and Claire got out of the car. As they walked toward the entrance, they suddenly heard the car’s engine rev behind them. They turned to see McCormack speeding away.

  Claire looked at Maggie. Maggie looked at Claire.

  They knew there had to be MI-5 agents getting into place—behind mountains of rubble, hidden by the few brick-and-mortar walls still left standing—but she couldn’t see them. Were they really there?

  “This is it, I guess,” Maggie said finally.

  Claire gave a quick nod.

  There was a black gate with an electronic buzzer for deliveries. Claire pressed the button, and a shrill ring reverberated throughout the building.

  Nothing.

  She pressed it again, longer this time.

  After an interminable pause, the door clicked open. They walked through and took a small freight elevator to the second floor.

  Eammon Devlin was sitting behind a teak desk, flanked by two muscled flunkies. He was in the early part of middle age and remarkably pleasant-looking, with regular, even features and light brown hair parted neatly on the side and glossed with Brylcreem. He was dressed in an innocuous brown twill suit and looked like an accountant or perhaps a librarian. Behind him, the blackout curtains were raised, giving him a view of the boats working on the leaden Thames in the morning light.

  He looked at Claire and Maggie, and smiled pleasantly. Despite his warm affect, Maggie felt a shudder of fear run through her. She thought, “O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain! / My tables—meet it is I set it down / That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.”

  “Look at what the Germans have done to this place,” he said, indicating all of the East End. “Used to be one of the glories of England. And now? Destroyed. Pity.” He smiled once again, like a kind uncle.

  “You’ve caused me a lot of trouble,” he said mildly to the two young women. “Miss Kelly …”

  “I didn’t have a choice!” Claire cried. “They had me in custody and were taking me to be hanged. The accident was my only chance—and I didn’t know where else to go—”

  Devlin poured some coffee into a cup. “We’ve received word that Murphy was picked up and is now in custody. He’s a good man.” A pause, as he put the pot back down. “They’ll hang him, you know.”

  “Yes,” Claire said. Her face was impenetrable.

  “You’re a good liar, Claire Kelly,” he said, adding a sugar cube with tiny silver tongs.

  Claire looked up sharply. “What?”

  Devlin stirred the sugar into the coffee. Then he picked up the cup and saucer, took a sip, and sighed with pleasure. “Nothing like a good cup of coffee.”

  “Mr. Devlin, please believe me. I did not betray you.”

  Devlin looked at Claire, then at Maggie.

  He went around to the desk’s drawers, pulled out a small gun with a delicate ivory inlay from the top drawer, and then handed it to Claire.

  “Prove it to me,” he said, with the same pleasant expression.

  This scenario had not been part of the plan. Maggie could feel her armpits dampen and sweat bead on her top lip and lower back.

  Claire took an endless moment and looked at Maggie. A muscle in her jaw twitched.

  This is it, Maggie thought. This is really it. That was all she had time to process.

  Then Claire said, “This is a waste.”

  “What?” Devlin said, surprised.

  “She’s one of Churchill’s key secretaries,” Claire said. “The information she knows could be invaluable to us. To you.”

  “I asked you to kill her,” Devlin said pleasantly. “Now, do it.”

  Claire lowered the gun and checked to see if it was loaded.

  That brief act of delay provoked an avuncular look of disappointment on Devlin’s face. “Oh, Miss Kelly,” he said, sighing and shaking his head, “I expected so much more from you.”

  Then, to the other two men, “Please show our guests downstairs. I’ll see them again after Saint Paul’s.”

&nbs
p; “They’ve been in there too long,” Snodgrass said, drumming his short, bony fingers on the Cabinet Room table. Edmund, John, and David looked on, tense and pale. Frain was on the phone, standing with his back to the other men.

  There was a tap at the door. “Excuse me?” It was Mrs. Tinsley.

  “What!” Snodgrass exclaimed, rising to his feet.

  “May I—may I be of any assistance?”

  “You may be of assistance, Mrs. Tinsley, by carrying on with your duties,” he said sharply.

  Mrs. Tinsley took a step backward, hands to her pearls. “Of course, Mr. Snodgrass,” she said. “I only meant …”

  “As far as we know, she’s all right,” he said, his voice softer now. “We’ll let you know when there’s news.”

  “Thank you,” Mrs. Tinsley said. She turned and closed the door behind her.

  “What’s going on at Saint Paul’s?” Edmund asked Snodgrass. “Has the bomb squad made any progress?”

  “Some,” Snodgrass said. “But not enough. Not with only an hour left.” He ran his hands through what was left of his hair. “We need the damn override key.”

  Frain replaced the receiver and turned around. “MI-Five has lost visual confirmation on both Miss Hope and Miss Kelly. But they also state that no shots have been fired.”

  “What now?” John asked, his face gray.

  “Now we wait.”

  “You can wait,” Edmund said. “I have an idea.”

  Devlin’s men tied Maggie and Claire to a water pipe in the basement. They stood, back to back, their hands bound with wide adhesive tape and attached to the pole in the oily gloom from slatted windows high up near the ground. The large room was filled with towers and towers of cardboard boxes, and the air smelled of dampness, mildew, and mouse droppings.

  Without speaking, the men left, their footsteps on the stained cement floor fading into the darkness.

  “Well, you must be happy now,” Maggie said when the footsteps died away. She pulled away as much as she could in her bond, not wanting to touch. Her arm burned and throbbed.

  “Hardly,” Claire muttered.

  “Let’s see if I got all this straight—you fooled all of us, you were a secret IRA agent conspiring with Nazis, you killed Sarah, you took my identity, you tried to assassinate the Prime Minister.”

  “Michael killed Sarah,” she said in a quiet voice. “Not me.”

  “Well, that makes it all better, now, doesn’t it?” Maggie snapped. “I’m sure it was a great comfort to Sarah.”

  Claire was silent for a moment. “I don’t suppose you can appreciate what I did back there. I could have killed you—should have killed you—when Devlin handed me that gun.”

  “And why didn’t you?”

  Claire gave a deep sigh. Just when Maggie thought she’d never speak, she said in a small voice, “Because I can’t kill anymore. I didn’t—I didn’t know what it would be like. The toll it would take.”

  “ ‘The toll’?”

  “I killed one man. And he deserved to die. But I’ve been part of other plots, Diana Snyder, now …” She could barely bring herself to say the name.

  “… Sarah.…”

  “Ah,” Maggie said. “It’s different when it’s someone you know, is it?”

  “I didn’t do it—but I was there.”

  “And then you were going to kill the P.M.? Mr. Churchill?”

  Claire squirmed in the darkness. “John—John got to me first. And again, I couldn’t pull the damned trigger. I know John—knew him—I just couldn’t shoot him point-blank. I couldn’t make my hand do it.”

  Maggie took a moment to absorb what Claire had told her. Then she snorted in the darkness. “So your hand’s your conscience? Good for your hand, then.”

  “It saved you back there, so don’t be snippy about it.”

  But Maggie wasn’t through. “And now—if we live—since you cooperated with Frain, you and your boyfriend will probably just get extradited to Ireland, where they’ll no doubt celebrate you as heroes.”

  “No. They won’t,” Claire said in a low voice. “Most Irish don’t condone the actions of the IRA.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really. Think of the Irish flag—green, white, and orange stripes, yes? The green is for Gaelic tradition. The orange represents the supporters of William of Orange—in other words, the Protestants. The white in the center is supposed to signify peace between the two.”

  “Sounds promising—peace, that is.”

  “There can be no truce,” Claire spit out, “not while they want to wipe out the Catholics.”

  “Still,” Maggie said, “you’ll have it better there than you would here.”

  Claire was very still.

  Maggie tried to hold back, but she couldn’t. It had been a very long, very bad day. “Were you laughing at us the whole time? I mean, when you pretended to be Paige … Were you just thinking what idiots we all are and how easy we were to fool with your charming-blonde act?”

  Claire was silent for a moment. “I don’t expect you to understand, Maggie.”

  “Well, do enlighten me. We’re not going anywhere soon. And you owe me that much.”

  She sighed. “Paige isn’t a lie—at least, not in the way you think. Paige is who I’d be if I grew up in Virginia, an all-American girl, blissfully ignorant of what’s really happening in the world.”

  Maggie wasn’t expecting this.

  “But that’s not what happened. I spent my summers in Ireland. And there I saw the most horrible forms of injustice. There was the Home Rule Act. Have you ever even heard of it?”

  She hadn’t. “No.”

  “The Irish wanted to rule themselves. The Brits didn’t agree. It’s—say, the Irish are the American colonists in the 1700s and the British are, well, the British. Imposing heavy taxes and arbitrary rules.”

  “I’m still not seeing why you’d get involved.”

  “The British executed the leaders of the IRA after the Great War. One person described it as ‘watching blood seep from behind a closed door.’ It was guerrilla warfare from then on. We were fighting to preserve our language, our culture, and our freedom.”

  Claire drew in a ragged breath. “In Belfast, where we lived in the summers, there was horrifying violence. The Protestants were vicious. They’d pull people out of their homes and execute them on their front steps, and then they’d burn the houses down. Then the British sent their Great War vets—Black and Tans we called them, because of their uniforms—and they were even worse. I can’t—I can’t tell you how bad it was,” she said. “But I can tell you that it continued—continues—to this day. I—saw my mother raped. By a British officer. And my father, who wasn’t doing anything except trying to keep the Celtic language from falling into oblivion, was shot.”

  Well. That certainly explained a lot. “But even so,” Maggie said, not wanting to give too much, “why bomb London? Why try to assassinate Winston Churchill? There’s a much bigger war going on right now.”

  “Depends on how you look at it.”

  “And you really believe that? I mean, the Blitz? Sarah and John and David … Are they really the enemy? Am I?”

  “You’re not the enemy, but you support the enemy. With your taxes, with your ignorance, your passivity …” There was a pause. “You can’t help but be who you are. But neither can I. I don’t expect you to understand.”

  What was there to say? “I still don’t understand, I admit,” Maggie said slowly. “And I can’t—ever—forgive you.” But. “But I can see that you’ve gone through a lot. Unspeakable things.”

  And so they stood, back to back, in the darkness, until Claire started singing, her soprano voice thick and trembling but then gaining strength:

  “In Mountjoy jail one Monday morning

  High upon the gallows tree,

  Kevin Barry gave his young life

  For the cause of liberty.

  But a lad of eighteen summers,

  Still there’s no on
e can deny,

  As he walked to death that morning,

  He proudly held his head on high.

  Just before he faced the hangman

  In his dreary prison cell

  The Black and Tans tortured Barry

  Just because he wouldn’t tell

  The names of his brave comrades,

  And other things they wished to know.

  ‘Turn informer and we’ll free you!’

  Kevin Barry answered, ‘No.’

  Shoot me like a soldier.

  Do not hang me like a dog,

  For I fought to free old Ireland.…”

  THIRTY

  ST. PAUL’S AND the surrounding area had been evacuated. “Gas leak!” undercover MI-5 agents in coveralls told churchgoers and clergy. “Sorry! Everyone must evacuate. So sorry. We’ll take care of it as soon as possible. Sorry—so sorry.”

  Frain and Edmund pulled in front of the church and sprinted up the marble steps to the soaring Corinthian columns and the huge doors. The lanky, boyish agent keeping watch said, “Go right in, sir.”

  They made their way down the nave and past the altar, then down one narrow staircase and another and another, into the stuffy dimness of the crypts. The air was chill.

  The bomb squad worked on dismantling the explosive with quiet efficiency. Frain looked to Arthur Hurley, the agent in charge. “What news?” he asked.

  “Not much, sir,” Hurley admitted, rubbing the gray stubble on his chin. That and the black circles under his eyes were testament to the amount of time he’d been working on the bomb. “If we take her apart, she’ll blow. If we don’t take her apart, she’ll blow.” He gave a nearly imperceptible shrug. “And we can’t move her without taking her apart.” Only the tension in his jaw belied his light tone.

  “Would it be possible for me to take a look?” Edmund said.

  “Suit yourself, sir,” Hurley replied. “We’ve got our best men on it, but maybe a fresh set of eyes …”

  Frain and Edmund walked into the crypt where the bomb was. It was larger than Edmund had expected. The two agents working on it rose when they saw them. “We’re working on it, sir,” the taller one said. “But so far, she’s unbreachable.”