So instead I played on his fears. Which, of course, I knew intimately. “Milkweed has been compromised. As amply demonstrated by tonight’s farce at the Admiralty. We don’t know how, but we do know the Schutzstaffel is well-informed about our efforts. They know we’re watching von Westarp.” I skated past the thinnest ice quickly.
“Isn’t this a bit baroque for an entrapment operation?”
“Playing prisoner was Gretel’s idea. She has a particular way of doing things.” Lord knew that was the truth. Now to salt it with another falsehood: “We knew that if Milkweed had been compromised, the SS would immediately send somebody to retrieve her. Which they did. His name is Klaus, by the way.”
“And you want me to root out the mole,” he said.
“No.” That caught him by surprise. “Milkweed is a lost cause.”
Again, he bristled. I’d always known I had a short fuse, but I don’t think I fully appreciated just how irritable I could be until I witnessed it firsthand. My younger self, I realized, was something of a thug. I hoped he could keep the anger in check, but knew he probably couldn’t.
He asked, “Did she tell you that?”
I ignored his objection and kept to my script. Kept spinning my lies. “Milkweed does, however, have value. As long as the mole is in place and funneling information back to Germany, the SS will be focused on Milkweed’s efforts to counter von Westarp’s brood. Meanwhile, you and I are going to run a second operation. The real operation.”
“How do you know I’m not the mole?”
“You aren’t.”
“You don’t think it’s Will, do you?”
“Beauclerk is a silly toff and an exasperating fool, but he’s no traitor.” I hoped I managed to keep the note of irony from my voice.
“Does Stephenson know about this?”
We’d be in seven shades of shit if he breathed even a hint of this to anybody. “Don’t be daft.”
He rubbed a hand over his face. But I could see that he had bought my story. His mind turned to business. “I’m only one man. What do you expect me to do?” But he answered his own question. He sighed. “You’re sending me to the Continent.”
“Yes.”
“I just returned! I’ve barely met my daughter!” He pounded the bench with his fist. Pieces of a half-built trellis tumbled to the floor.
“This is our only chance.”
“My wife will kill you for this.”
I said, “She’ll understand.”
“You don’t know Liv.”
I thought, Better than you do, mate. But I said, “If we don’t do this, and von Westarp is allowed to refine his techniques, Britain will be overrun with people like Klaus and the rest of those monsters on the Tarragona filmstrip. Or worse.” I remembered how quickly and easily Soviet sleeper agents from Arzamas-16 had reduced swaths of London to smoking rubble. The rest of the city, the rest of Britain, would have followed if not for the Eidolons … The ultimate case of a cure worse than the disease.
I laid out everything he had to do. It was a long list; he didn’t look happy. And I shared everything I remembered about the REGP and the Götterelektrongruppe. How they were organized, how they were run. Told him what I knew of von Westarp and the others. Names, powers, loyalties, petty rivalries. And like a sponge, he soaked it all up. He had an intense focus to him. Strange to say, but my younger self reminded me of a coiled spring.
When I finished, he looked at me as though I’d asked him to flap his wings and fly to the moon. Perhaps that wasn’t far off.
“This is impossible,” he said. “It can’t be done.”
“You’ll have help.”
“Gretel.”
I nodded. “Having access to her power will give you a tremendous advantage. Use it. As long as her interests align with yours, she will be an invaluable resource. But I want to make something very, very clear.” I moved closer. As close as I dared. “Never trust Gretel. Never. She’s the most powerful, and she’s by far the most dangerous. They’re all a little frightened of her, even if they don’t admit it. And they should be. Even von Westarp doesn’t understand what he created when he made her.”
“And yet you expect me to place my life in her safekeeping?”
“Gretel likes you.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
I told him the truth, of sorts: “Gretel and I have a complicated relationship.”
“Oh, that’s just bloody wonderful. Very reassuring.” He shook his head. “How do I contact her once I arrive?”
“No need.” I nodded to indicate the street beyond the hedge. “She’s waiting in the car.”
A pause while he processed this. Then: “You are fucking unbelievable, mate. Do you know that?”
“We need to move,” I said, glancing at my watch. “Say your good-byes. And bring me your Identity Card.” He wouldn’t need it in Germany. But, suitably altered, it might just save me from another night in the clink.
“Now?”
“There’s a U-boat in the Channel, waiting to take you to Bremerhaven.”
He shook his head again. “Fucking unbelievable.”
*
Marsh entered the kitchen on his way to break the bad news to Liv, his mind still wrestling with all the contradictions posed by the batty old duffer in the shed. There was something queer about him. But he seemed to know his business. He obviously knew Milkweed, and SIS. And he knew a damn sight more about von Westarp’s outfit than anybody else on this side of the Channel.
But Commander Liddell-Stewart had appeared virtually out of nowhere. Marsh had never heard of him. Milkweed’s autonomy meant Stephenson reported directly to the Prime Minister. Marsh would have sworn there was nobody in the chain between Stephenson and Churchill. Nor between Stephenson and Menzies, the head of MI6. Yet the stranger held such detailed knowledge … Who was he?
There weren’t many possibilities. Perhaps he was political, somebody in the confidence of Churchill, or Menzies, or both. But that would be a superb position for a double agent. Was he the mole?
Marsh sure as hell didn’t trust him. But he must have known that coming to Marsh in this fashion would earn suspicion. Hard to imagine a Jerry mole acting so brazenly. Meanwhile, everything the stranger said fit the facts. His claims about a mole meshed with the conclusions to which Marsh himself had been reluctantly drawn; his explanation of Gretel’s prescience was unexpected, but again, it was consistent with everything Marsh had seen.
If the stranger were part of Jerry’s infiltration of Milkweed, sending Marsh to Germany was a rather byzantine double cross. On the other hand, it would put him safely out of the way. What did the stranger have planned while Marsh was out of the picture?
Marsh let the stairs creak when he returned upstairs. He’d have to wake Liv, one way or another. Part of him loathed himself for doing this to her so soon after he’d returned. What kind of husband did this make him? What kind of father? A damn poor one.
He stopped at Agnes’s crib again, and this time he took his sleeping daughter into his arms. Her yawn turned into a mewl. He rocked her against his shoulder, kissed the fine silken hair atop her head, inhaled her scent.
Would his baby girl grow up hearing stories about her absent father who hadn’t been there for her birth and then abandoned her again a few days later? What if he never made it back? Would she grow up bitter and resentful? That thought frightened him more than infiltrating the REGP. It made him want to sick up.
“Papa loves you,” he whispered. “He’ll protect you.”
And that was the crux of it. More than anything else, he’d been swayed by the stranger’s warning about what would happen if von Westarp’s work continued unimpeded. The stranger had precisely reiterated Marsh’s own deep-seated fears. The stranger might have been feeding him a line, but he also offered the chance to take down the REGP. And Marsh had to act on that. For Agnes’s sake, and Liv’s.
Just two of von Westarp’s people had made a mockery of MI-5, MI-6, an
d the Admiralty. What could twenty accomplish? Two thousand? The commander offered perhaps the only chance to stop this.
Liv shuffled in behind him. She slipped an arm around his waist and rested her head against his free shoulder. “Are you protecting her from sleep?”
Marsh kissed his daughter again, then laid her gently back in the crib. He pulled the pink elephant blanket over her. Marsh took Liv’s hand, led her out of Agnes’s room to where light from a bedside lamp spilled into the hall. He found it difficult to meet her eyes. She noticed.
Liv said, “What is it?”
Marsh took her free hand. He squeezed both, staring at the floor and wishing he didn’t have to do this. Wishing he didn’t have to leave, wishing life didn’t demand he wound her so deeply. She pulled away.
“Raybould, you’re scaring me. What’s wrong?”
“I have to go. They’re sending me off again.”
Confusion flashed across her face, followed by disbelief. “Now?”
“They’ve sent a car. It’s waiting.”
“Tell them you can’t go.” Her voice cracked. “You’ve only just returned.”
He shook his head. “I can’t do that. They need me.”
“In the middle of the night?” Now Liv’s voice dripped with disdain for the Foreign Office. “Don’t they know you have a baby at home? And a wife?”
“They do. But they don’t care. They…” He faltered. There was nothing he could say to make this right. “… need me,” he repeated.
“Your family needs you, too.” She drew her robe tighter and glared at him. “Is this how it will be? Agnes growing up without any idea of her father?”
That hurt. Liv’s dart flew true and landed where he felt most sensitive, most guilty. She knew him so well. But he took what she hurled at him. He deserved it, and so much worse. He felt like shit.
“No. Of course not. But the war…”
“You said you wouldn’t leave again!”
The outburst woke Agnes. She began to wail.
Marsh would have taken to his knees if he thought it would help. He hated the war, but he hated Liddell-Stewart far more at that moment. “I meant every word, Liv. Every word. I can’t read the bloody future. How was I to know…” He trailed off, waving vaguely toward the street. He wished, for the hundredth time if not the first, that Stephenson had allowed him to share the truth with Liv when they’d first married. “It’s an extraordinary situation,” he said. “I swear to you.”
That, at least, was true.
She frowned. This had cut deeply. He could see it in her stance, the sense of betrayal. Betrayal by her own government, which owed her time with her husband. But in the end, she was a British housewife in time of war. She had a duty, too.
Liv threw her arms around him and kissed him fiercely. Though he couldn’t afford it, he waited while she took up Agnes. “We’ll make a cup of tea for you while you pack,” she said. “Your kidnappers can wait a few more minutes.”
More awkwardness. Liv picked up on it at once. Marsh could feel the cracks zigzagging across the thin ice of his cover story. “I’m not packing,” he said.
“No?” Up went the eyebrow. Crack, crack. “Well, isn’t the Foreign Office a truly fascinating place.”
Marsh started to object, but she waved it off. After that, he retrieved his Identity Card, and then it was time to leave. Liv, with Agnes on her shoulder, led him toward the front door. He shook his head. “Garden.”
He kissed Agnes. “Be good to your mother. Remember Papa loves you.”
Liv kissed him twice, on the lips and on the ear. “Go. Go save the world,” she whispered.
*
It was a relief when my younger self went inside, and I found Gretel and her brother hadn’t left us behind. I waited in the shadows outside the gate, where I could see both the garden and the car. The second car hadn’t moved while I argued with myself in the shed. It was too dark to see the occupants, if it had any.
Again, I wrestled with the temptation to find out. Probably would have in my youth. But I’d learned a small bit of discretion over the years.
“You said you wouldn’t leave again!” Liv’s voice, equal parts anguish and anger, carried to me in the garden. I could hear Agnes crying, too.
Agnes’s cries ripped my heart out. But, I’m ashamed to say, the sense of betrayal in Liv’s voice filled me with guilty, greedy hope. The Jerries have a word for what I felt: schadenfreude. He didn’t deserve her more than I did.
After that they fell silent again. He emerged from the house. Liv stood in the door to watch him go, and pity the poor ARP warden who might have tried to shut her back inside. I tried not to stare. But the kitchen light silhouetted her robed figure in the doorway, and I would have recognized that body even if it wore a ghillie suit. I’d never forgotten how beautiful she was.
Liv held our daughter. I recognized the blanket.
Like me, he knew how to open the garden gate silently. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I truly thought I’d picked that up later.
He held out his Identity Card. “I’ll need this when I return, you know.”
“It’ll be waiting for you.” I reached for it, but he yanked it away.
“Why do you need this?”
I nodded toward the house. My house. “It’s for them,” I lied. “If anything unfortunate should happen. They’ll be looked after.”
But this wasn’t his first time into the field. He knew better. “That’s not how—”
I grabbed his elbow and used my leverage to force his weight onto his weak knee. He stumbled into the hedge. A bit unfair of me, and unwise if he decided to tussle, but I had to distract him quickly before the doubts ate through the thin sheen of plausibility in the story I’d spun.
“This is deep cover,” I hissed. “Not poncing about on a Spanish milk run.” He hadn’t yet been on a deep cover mission. I had.
He shoved back. He was stronger. I retreated.
“This is a farce. You’re sending me off without a cover identity and putting my life in the hands of that German bint. The one you warned me not to trust.”
“Your identity is Raybould Phillip Marsh,” I said. “And the bint is your cover.”
I could see him weighing it over one last time. But I’d offered him a chance to infiltrate the greatest threat to his family and his country, plus an unbeatable advantage in doing so. He came round. Though it took a moment, the stubborn bastard.
He handed over the Card. He thought for a moment, then emptied his pockets. So I also took his billfold, spare change, and keys. Anything that could be used to identify him. Anything that would peg him as a Briton, should he get separated from Gretel’s aegis.
We walked to the car together. Klaus had woken. Gretel watched our approach, though I could not see her eyes. She leaned forward in the open window.
“Hello, Raybould. I did say we’d meet again.”
“Fucking unbelievable,” he muttered.
“I know him,” said Klaus, still in German. “He chased us tonight. What is this about, Gretel?”
“All in good time, brother.” She winked at me.
I asked my younger self, “Remember the protocols?”
“Yes.”
I wanted confirmation when he arrived in Germany. Finding an unattended transmitter at the farm would be child’s play with Gretel at his side. I knew, roughly, when to expect his arrival confirmation signal; I could arrange to be in a pub, near a wireless, for that.
I squinted at the other car, trying to make out its occupants. Something about this didn’t feel right. To Gretel, I whispered, “Our friends up the street haven’t moved.”
“Of course not. They’re here to watch over Olivia.”
“I had Stephenson put a team watching the house,” said the younger me, sotto voce. He gave Gretel a hard look. “As a precaution against them.”
Oh, bloody wonderful. I’d forgotten all about that. The old man’s watchers had already seen suspicious
activity at the home of Raybould Marsh: a strange visit in the middle of the night followed by a sudden departure. This wasn’t ideal, but it wasn’t yet a catastrophe—the young agent Marsh’s disappearance wouldn’t be secret after he failed to appear at the Admiralty tomorrow morning. What worried me was the possibility the watchers might identify the visitors. If Stephenson learned his fair-haired boy had entertained two Jerry agents …
Our only saving grace was the blackout, which made it damn near impossible to count and identify the occupants of a car parked halfway up the street. I couldn’t see the watchers, but they couldn’t see our faces either. They’d only seen my silhouette coming and going, and I doubted they knew if there was anybody else in my car. So it seemed likely they hadn’t yet made Gretel and Klaus.
My counterpart climbed in, taking the driver’s seat that I had vacated earlier. “Good luck.” I offered my hand through the open window. We shook. I had a strong grip.
“Don’t worry,” Gretel said while he reached for the loose ignition wires. She handed me the briefcase. “I’ll look after him.”
“You might have a shadow,” I said, tilting my head toward the car up the street. “Best if you lose them quickly.” He rolled his eyes. Then he started the stolen car, more skillfully than I had, and they were off. As they pulled away, I heard Gretel saying, “Three streets, then turn right…”
They disappeared into the night, that strange trio. I limped through a sleeping city and wondered what fate held in store for us.
*
Apparently Stephenson’s watchers sensed something big afoot, because they pulled out before Marsh could get too far ahead. They ran without any lights at all, not even a slitted headlamp. That meant either careless drunks or trained professionals: driving in the blackout was bloody dangerous even with headlamps. The SIS men must have been confident in their decision: if they returned empty-handed after abandoning their post, they’d be chewed out good and proper. And probably spend the rest of the war scrubbing the loos at Fort Monckton.
Marsh reviewed his mental map of the neighborhood. Losing the tail at high speed wasn’t wise; it was likely to attract more attention than it lost. At least one ARP warden was sure to witness the chase.
Necessary Evil (Milkweed Triptych) Page 10
