Weapons of Peace

by Johnston, Peter D. ;

  He laughed, pulling a cigarette from his bathrobe. “When I teach at Harvard and Georgetown, Nurse Doyle, I pose most of the questions, especially to begin.”

  “Right, sorry, I understand.” She folded her hands in her lap. “Go ahead and ask your questions.”

  “How in King George’s name did I steal that gorgeous coin from you?”

  She laughed, throwing her head back. “If I knew the answer, the coin would be mine, wouldn’t it?”

  “I’m asking you to analyze the game after having played it, Nurse Doyle.”

  She shrugged, then fell silent, watching patients stroll by at a distance.

  “Well, it’s a game I’ve never played before and one you’re quite good at, obviously, so I was at a disadvantage as soon as I agreed to play it.”

  “Good, what else?”

  “I’m tired from rising early this morning, and you know it,” she said, “so you not only picked the right game but the right context for playing it, when I might be a little slower. Also, you put me in a defensive role. You could attack if I blinked, looked away, or my mind strayed for even a moment.”

  “Keep going.”

  “You allowed me to believe I held all the power—quite slyly, I’d add—so even though I was very focused, I might have felt a tad overconfident, maybe not paying enough attention to how the game could best be won.”

  “Very good,” he said. “And how did I pluck the coin from you so cleanly?”

  She searched her memory, remembering the touch of his hand while never being able to stop his fingers from reaching their target. “I have no idea,” she admitted.

  “That’s because I never went after the coin, Nurse Doyle.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He took her hand gently in his, opening her palm again. “On offense, my strategy is to go after the soft flesh surrounding my target, pressing down with my fingers as they encircle the coin,” Nash said, showing her the technique he used. “The downward pressure pops the coin up and into my hand. With this approach, the coin comes to me because of what’s around it—a softer, larger area that’s easier to access, requiring less precision and fewer risks than going after the coin itself.”

  Emma nodded as the analogy dawned on her.

  “Even experienced negotiators are taken aback at discovering that they’re usually better served by negotiating around their target, avoiding direct talks until the time is right—if a face-to-face discussion is ever required.”

  Emma was still nodding, her white cap bobbing up and down. “What’s the soft flesh in a real negotiation?”

  “People,” Nash said. “I call them helpers.”

  “Examples, please, Mr. Nash.” She straightened her back to stay alert.

  “Your helpers might be moles—maybe a wife, a secretary, or a disgruntled insider who leaks information to you. Helpers can also come in the form of a group that lends you money, resources, or clout—including when dozens, hundreds, or millions unite as a coalition to support you. A helper could be a person of influence who has your target’s ear or can twist an arm. Or maybe a lawyer who knows the rules. I’ve used journalists to publish useful articles, librarians to dig up history, and expert advisers for guidance on specific people or issues. The list of helpers is unlimited.”

  “Where do you start, then?” She leaned over to adjust his footrest when he shifted in his seat. He thanked her. She blushed, unsure why.

  “You start, Nurse Doyle, by knowing that you cannot succeed on your own in the most difficult situations.” He paused to light a cigarette. “To think otherwise would be like trying to win at chess with a single piece taking on all sixteen of your opponent’s pieces.”

  “On offense, then, I can draw on helpers to maximize my knowledge and influence so it’s more likely that my target will do what I want—if or when I need to speak with them.”

  “Correct,” he said, tapping his ashes onto the ground and inhaling again.

  “What about on defense? How do I keep the coin in my hand?” Emma could see him drooping a bit, then gathering his energy before responding. A reminder of how frail he was.

  “First, think through the game from the other person’s perspective on offense and defend yourself accordingly. Second, if you can’t win their game, change the game. If you and I had played tennis, not the coin game, you’d have thrashed me, based on what I’ve heard from several nurses about your forehand,” he said, smiling. “And if I refuse to play your game, maybe you walk away and play tennis with someone else as your backup plan. Always have a backup plan, even after you reach a deal.”

  His last words hung in the air, as intended, immersed in a cloud of smoke. “And why didn’t closing my fist repeatedly work as a defense? Wasn’t that clever?” she asked.

  “So clever,” he said, laughing. “The problem is that, once you revealed how you’d defend yourself, I gained important information for planning my next attack. Being too predictable on offense or defense can lead to trouble.”

  “I have to say, Mr. Nash, this sounds a lot like war.”

  “Make no mistake, Nurse Doyle, war is negotiation,” he said. He leaned in. “People are using influence to get what they want: Hitler wants more resources, more power, a return to past German glory, and payback for the humiliations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. The Allies want an end to Hitler’s tyranny and Germany’s expansion—a return to the rule of law. The sides started by talking but moved to the battlefield, because Hitler thought he could better influence the Allies that way. In the end, an agreement will be signed in person, but only after the fighting is over. War may be an extreme form of negotiation, but that’s exactly what it is.”

  “And what about extreme negotiations where you choose not to fight? I heard that you once freed a senator’s son without paying a ransom or firing a shot. How did you do that?”

  “You and your cousin have done your homework,” he said.

  She smiled. “Did you use any helpers to gain the boy’s release?”

  “I don’t like to talk about my past work, but that story fits with our first lesson,” he said. “The situation involved a midday kidnapping in a park. After speaking with the toddler’s young Irish nanny, who’d always been highly diligent until the boy’s abduction, I surmised that it was an inside job involving her. The police believed otherwise, but the nanny soon confessed to me. She’d been pressured by a local Irish gang into ‘looking the other way.’ ”

  “My Lord! I can’t believe anyone would do that! Did the police arrest her?”

  “Actually, Nurse Doyle, I told her the police never had to know what she’d done if she agreed to give me what I needed: descriptions of the two gang members she’d been exposed to. After that, I knew which gang to go after and, specifically, which members represented the soft flesh around the boy’s captors.”

  “How did you identify those softer targets?”

  “Through contacts I keep on the streets of Washington. You see, the gang hadn’t planned on playing defense, just offense. Ignorance and arrogance often breed this kind of sloppiness.”

  “So what did you do?” she asked, leaning toward him.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” he said, releasing smoke again. She shook her head and waited for him to continue. It was not at all obvious to her.

  “The gang’s helper, this Irish nanny,” he said, “became my helper instead, allowing her to stay out of jail and return to Ireland, where she’d be safer and find a tiny pot of gold waiting for her so that she could make a fresh start. All I requested was that she use her Irish charm to go from one gang member’s door to another, telling trusting wives that their husbands wanted her to collect their children to keep them safe against any possible police retaliation for the kidnapping of the senator’s boy.”

  “Wait a minute! You kidnapped the kidnappers’ children?” Her mouth dropp
ed open.

  “I certainly didn’t think of it as kidnapping, Nurse Doyle. I simply needed to level the playing field a little before talking to the gang’s leaders directly. It’s not like the nanny and I were ever going to hurt a dozen small children.”

  “A dozen!” Her hand flew to her mouth, embarrassed at her outburst. A nearby patient glanced in her direction but kept walking.

  “Well, Nurse Doyle,” Nash explained, “the Irish often have a lot of children and it was a large gang. We even sent two back unprompted, one who was acting up and the other in return for information on where the gang was keeping the senator’s child.”

  “And where had the fiends stashed the poor boy?”

  “At a warehouse near the docks,” Nash replied. “I chose to go unarmed, knowing that I already had the ultimate defense in place, but I seem to recall that they pointed a lot of guns at me anyway. I informed them that their children obviously hadn’t read The Pied Piper, because they’d fallen into a similar trap. Sure enough, the senator’s boy popped up and into his parents’ waiting arms an hour later, with the Irish kids arriving home soon after.”

  “Remarkable! That’s the kind of story you’d see played out in a movie!”

  “I’m not so sure about that, Emma.” She started at hearing her first name. “My apologies—Nurse Doyle. Most movies glorify heroes who solve crimes and beat the bad guys with their guns blazing; my own experience is that those who use their guns first tend to die first.” Nash tossed his spent cigarette under his left foot and extinguished it.

  “So what do you do when people are trying to kill you?” she asked. He had closed his eyes. She watched him, shooing away the unbidden thought of the sweethearts he must have at home.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” he said, opening his eyes. “I’ll use my gun as needed, as I did on that beach at Folkestone. But I’d much rather lead with weapons of influence—they raise my odds of success and survival far more than a gun ever could.” He looked down at his watch. “Any more questions from our first lesson together?”

  Emma fell back in her seat, lost in thought. If she’d known five years ago what she’d just learned in less than an hour, she likely could have protected what she truly cared about and avoided the anguish that had defined her life ever since.

  She had dozens of questions but restrained herself for the sake of her patient. She took a last sip of tea, which was now cold, before speaking again. “Just two questions,” she said. “How do I apply what you’ve taught me to convince cranky Nurse Fraser—who already doesn’t like me because she thinks I’m always breaking rules—that I need a private room for one of my patients?”

  “An impressive first challenge,” he said, wincing briefly as his small chuckle poked at one of his bruised ribs. “And your final question?” he asked, managing a smile.

  She paused, trying to return his smile, but unable to. “What else can I do to keep you safe and defend our castle from the people hunting you down?”

  Chapter 6

  Sunday, September 3, 1944

  9:00 a.m.

  The ball bounced just inside the baseline, catching Emma off guard. It moved with extra speed, the slick grass having been blunted by summer play. She dropped down and with a partial, slicing swing sent the ball low and hard along the right side of the court. Pauline plunged toward the net, volleying Emma’s ball mid-trajectory, executing a near-perfect drop shot. Anticipating this, Emma launched her body forward, extending her racquet as far as it would go, barely making contact but lifting a soft lob high into the air. Not high enough, though. Pauline backpedaled and started to swing downward.

  “Let!” Pauline yelled.

  “What?” Emma said, walking toward her. “You had match point on your racquet! Why stop play?”

  Lady Baillie’s eldest daughter laughed, pointing behind Emma. “I don’t know the specific rule, but I’m guessing that calls for the point to be replayed!”

  Emma turned, taken aback at seeing a large zebra behind her. Lady Baillie’s beloved Kenyan pet had strayed from its grazing area, mistaking the grass court for breakfast. Emma shrieked with laughter, making her way off the court. “The match is yours, Pauline.”

  They’d been friends for two years—ever since, late one night, Emma had rushed to Pauline’s side to help her as she fought a potentially fatal viral fever that left her unable to walk for weeks. After that experience, the gap between their backgrounds hadn’t mattered.

  “Pauline, I have a favor to ask,” Emma said as she undid her ponytail and shook her head, allowing her hair to fall around her shoulders.

  “Anything. It’s thanks to you that I’m even here to beat you at tennis!”

  “I need to talk to your mother confidentially as soon as possible. I have a patient I think she’ll be very interested in knowing about.”

  —

  Nash lifted his heavy left arm, bringing it slowly toward his face, holding it upright for a count of 1-2-3, then uncurling his arm so that it lay flat on the bed. He then did the same exercise with his weighted right arm. This would be his thirtieth repetition.

  Beads of sweat dripped from his forehead. He liked that. It made him feel that he was accomplishing something. First, he would work on his arms, and then, in a week to ten days, begin with his legs, once he was more mobile. He didn’t believe that sitting in bed would allow him to keep to his schedule. He had only four weeks.

  He knew that Emma Doyle wasn’t working on this day or the following day, her only time off for the entire month. He also knew that she would be miffed that he had hobbled into the hallway from his bed to borrow the pair of thick steel gloves that now adorned his arms up to the elbow. But he figured that if the four-hundred-year-old knight whose suit of armor he had borrowed gloves from didn’t seem to mind, why should she?

  As he continued to pump his arms, he thought about Nurse Doyle. She was agile in mind and body, and very eager to learn, almost obsessive. As he watched her, she had shown the kind of focus and determination that, in his experience, sprang from intense emotional pain, possibly a desire for revenge but more likely something else. Yet she didn’t wear any ring that would tie her to someone fighting—a husband or a beau—as was true of so many young women during wartime. Nor did she talk about her parents or any siblings, just her cousins. She didn’t seem materialistic, either, so while it was possible that something worth a lot of money had been taken from her, and she wanted it back, that didn’t seem probable.

  Whoever trained her had done a good job. She was competent and appropriately guarded, any trouble apparent only because of the deal she had made with him.

  When she asked how she might persuade Nurse Fraser to give him a private room, he had employed his father’s teaching technique—he had simply asked questions. Don’t tell them, let them tell you.

  Emma Doyle had quickly developed a plan for targeting the soft flesh around her superior. She had also started to think about defending herself from Fraser’s wrath—and defending Nash in an orchestrated manner from anyone who might attack his vulnerable position in the castle. He hadn’t told her how to do anything. She was figuring out this influence puzzle and its interconnecting pieces all on her own.

  A good start, he thought, but it’s all in the execution.

  —

  The unlikely trio stood in a distant corner of the small, makeshift graveyard, not too far from where Emma had played tennis that morning.

  Reverend Thomas Lewis—borrowed whenever necessary from the local parish—stood under an oak tree, all six feet six of him draped in his black-and-white garb, the Book of Common Prayer in hand, reading eloquently from its pages.

  Emma knew that she should be listening attentively, as she always enjoyed the vicar’s reflections and had come to know him quite well, having taken it upon herself to organize every burial for Leeds Castle. But at this particular moment she could only thin
k about her three sins.

  Reverend Lewis didn’t know the deceased pilot, Gordon Bradley, who had suffered facial burns and a broken back during an ill-conceived bombing mission, ultimately dying of a heart attack the previous Friday, the very morning she had struck her deal with Nash.

  She had filled the priest in on the handful of things she’d learned about Bradley in the weeks during which she looked after him. He was single, fifty years old, loved milk chocolate, smoked like a diesel train, and received his pilot’s license at eighteen, allowing him to fight in the Great War. Emma also relayed to Reverend Lewis that Bradley had told her he wanted to be buried “at one with the earth,” saying that he didn’t want to lie in a coffin but preferred to be wrapped in a white sheet.

  This was her first sin.

  Emma then made it clear that, unfortunately, the hot weather had accelerated the decomposition of the patient’s body, leading her to suggest that the entire corpse remain shrouded without the standard viewing prior to interment. Reverend Lewis agreed, nodding his assent as his nostrils flared, the putrid scent of a dead pilot in the air.

  This was her second sin.

  Finally, she apologized to Reverend Lewis, because the simple slate nameplate for the grave would not be ready until the following day—owing to a backlog at the local mason.

  This was her third sin.

  At 2:15 p.m., the short, bowlegged gardener from Leeds Castle who’d volunteered to help with the pilot’s burial leaned over his rusty shovel, lifting and tossing the first pile of loose earth onto the white shroud below.

  —

  “Are you sure he can’t tell us anything about the details of his mission?” Lady Baillie asked Emma, almost breathlessly. She had hung on Emma’s every word for the past half hour.

  “He won’t tell me, Lady Baillie, but perhaps he’ll be able to share more with you when you meet him. He did say that anyone who learned too much about his assignment would also be at risk.”

  The owner of Leeds Castle nodded and leaned back in her chair. Few things fazed Lady Olive Baillie, including the fact that she was about to file for her third divorce.