by Ed Ruggero
“Is that why—I mean, why are you dressed like that?”
“I’m ready to get back to work, sir. Back to the field. Getting those newcomers out in the hallway trained up, if that’s what you need.”
“No, that’s not it. I just need someone to interview these people. Weed out the certifiable crazies from the ones who are just crazy enough.”
“What about going over?” Sinnott asked. “I’d like very much to get back there.”
“And I’d like eight uninterrupted hours of sleep,” Haskell said. “But that ain’t working out, either.”
Sinnott’s disappointment must have showed on his face.
“Look, I’m sorry, Sinnott. I’d love to send you back into the action; I really would. But you’re still on the shit list with the brass hats because of what happened last time. I can bring your name up again, but for now I need help doing this. Interviewing the new folks.”
“Sir, there were extenuating circumstances around that business in France.”
“I’m sure there were,” Haskell said, maybe losing a little of his patience. “I read your report. It’s just that right now you’re not in the lineup, and I can make good use of your knowledge right here.”
Sinnott felt like a fool, standing there with his weathered cap in his hands, his pistol tucked into a shoulder harness, like some leftover from the Spanish civil war. Still, he tried to sound sincere when he said, “Yes, sir. Certainly, sir. Happy to serve where I’m needed.”
“That’s the spirit,” Haskell said. “Let’s go over what we’re looking for in these new people before you bring them in.”
* * *
Sinnott spent the afternoon and evening in another small conference room, talking to twelve field officers newly arrived from the States. He interviewed them in French and crossed two off the list immediately because they sounded like C students from some high school French club. Another one who claimed to have a cold probably had pneumonia, and Sinnott packed him off to the infirmary. Of the remaining nine, the most impressive were two women, one of whom had grown up on a ranch in Montana and the other in Manhattan society circles. They were about as different as they could be, except for their raw intelligence and a certain physical energy. Sinnott asked each of them, in turn, to meet him for a drink that evening. They both turned him down.
“Well, if that ain’t the cherry on the cake of my fucking day,” he muttered after the last woman left the room. He tidied his notes and left them for Colonel Haskell, secured his pistol in his office safe, and left the building. He had not eaten all day and was hungry, but in no mood for the collegial chitchat he’d have to endure if he ate in the officers’ mess. All it would take to set him off would be for one person to ask what he’d been up to lately. Instead he walked south, crossing Piccadilly above St. James Palace. He kept glancing down the side alleys, looking for a pub he’d visited a few weeks earlier, a place where he didn’t owe any money.
He first noticed the tail when he turned around to get his bearings. A man in a short jacket, dirty black pants, a hat pulled low across his brow. He was thirty or forty yards back, and when Sinnott stopped the man didn’t react, didn’t break stride, but crossed the street as if it had been his plan all along. If it was a tail, the guy was a pro.
Sinnott waited for thirty seconds to see if the guy would emerge from the same alley. When he didn’t show, Sinnott turned back toward the river. He found the pub—The Footman’s Holiday—after another few minutes of searching. He pulled the door handle and, just as he was stepping inside, he saw the tail again, about a block away.
Sinnott stepped inside, felt his pulse hammering his ears. He scanned the narrow room quickly; there were just a few patrons and what looked like a single exit out to an alley. If the tail was any good, he would not follow Sinnott into the front; that was too obvious. He’d use the back door.
Sinnott hurried down a tiny hallway and squeezed by stacked boxes, the space barely wider than his shoulders. He turned the dead bolt to unlock the back door, then flattened himself against the wall. He wrapped one hand in his handkerchief to unscrew the single light bulb above the entryway, then leaned back into shadow. He reached into a pocket he’d had sewn along the seam of his trousers and found his straight razor, his weapon of choice for close quarters fighting.
He did not have to wait long.
The guy he’d made as a tail pushed the door in slowly. When he had a foot and his head across the threshold Sinnott threw all of his weight into the door, slamming the man’s skull. He pulled the door back, then smashed it again, three times rapidly. The man tried to get his leg free but fell backward, and Sinnott followed him out into the alley, swiping with the razor as the man held his arm up in defense. Sinnott felt the give as the blade bit through cloth and, he was sure, the man’s right arm, even though his attacker did not make a sound.
Sinnott jumped and swung the razor at the face below him, but the man caught Sinnott’s wrist and bucked his hips, nearly sending Sinnott flying. The guy was bigger than Sinnott first thought, and in a flash he held a long knife, pulled from a sheath on his left arm. He stabbed the point through the back of Sinnott’s hand.
“Gavno, blyad,” the man spat, cursing in Russian.
Sinnott was not going to win on the ground; the man was too strong, too heavy, too quick. He scrambled to his feet, backed up into some trash cans. The Russian stood, grabbed a length of board from the ground and swung it like a cop’s nightstick. Sinnott jumped backward, but the board stung his arm as if he’d been shocked. The razor clattered to the ground.
And at that moment, just when Sinnott thought he’d be London’s next stabbing victim, a policeman appeared just behind the Russian.
“What’s this now?” he said. “Break it up or I’ll have both of you hauled off.”
The police officer grabbed the Russian by the collar, but the big man kicked backward, catching the cop just below the knee. Sinnott heard a loud crack; the policeman said, “Ohhh,” as he crumpled. Instead of letting the copper alone and facing Sinnott again, the Russian took a second to make sure the threat had been neutralized, and that’s when Sinnott jumped on his back, grabbed the man’s face with his left hand, and jammed his right thumb deep into the Russian’s eye socket. He made a hook with his thumb and pushed his hand forward, felt the eyeball give. The Russian stabbed wildly with the long knife, but he was already going down. When his enemy hit the ground, Sinnott snatched the man’s knife and stabbed him in the neck once, twice, three times. Blood geysered onto the policeman, who lay on his side, his right leg below the knee bent at a terrible angle.
Sinnott got to his feet, chest heaving. He picked up his straight razor and said to the policeman, “Vse u tebya budet khorosho,” before walking out of the alley.
31
1 May 1944
1900 hours
“You have made great sacrifices, comrade,” Colonel Yury Sechin said, nodding toward the mangled stump of Novikov’s left arm. The two men were in a sauna in the basement of a boarding house for Soviet embassy staffers. Sechin sprawled naked on a wooden bench, his great, hairy belly resting on his lap.
“Others have made greater sacrifices,” Novikov said. “I am alive, at least.”
“I was thinking of your family.”
Novikov’s wife and two young sons died in the siege of Leningrad, probably in April 1942. Novikov had feared but could not confirm their deaths until January 1943, when the Red Army finally established a corridor to the encircled city. His loved ones—these pieces of his very heart—were just three out of the million Soviet citizens who perished there.
Novikov’s soldiers thought him a brave commander, but the truth was that he fought like a man who was already dead.
Sechin did not try to hide the fact that he was studying Novikov’s face, the missing left eye usually covered by a patch. “We cannot hide anything in here, right?” Sechin said.
Perhaps his idea of a joke, Novikov thought.
“So thi
s is a metaphor for the openness you want to promote?” Novikov said. “Two naked colonels?”
“You and I can be open with each other,” Sechin said. “We must be guarded with everyone else.”
“Where shall we start?”
“Why are you meeting with this American investigator?”
“I will use him to deliver some intelligence to the American and British planners, something that will help the invasion succeed.”
Novikov gave his NKVD colleague the briefest of summaries of the failures of the Allied bombing command.
“This came out of your work with that American woman, the one who got killed?”
Novikov nodded. “Her death set back my timetable,” he said.
“She was a threat to my recruiting,” Sechin said. “Though I am sorry she had to die.”
Novikov doubted that was true. “Are your efforts bearing fruit?”
Sechin used a snow-white towel to mop his face. “Not as much as I’d like,” he said. “I have one asset in place. Very weak. A second who has outlived his usefulness and is now a threat. There is a third, much more valuable asset that I know only by a code name, but I am working on making contact. In the meantime, there is the problem of this investigator sticking his nose into every corner.”
“He is really only interested in the murder,” Novikov said. “I think if he could solve that, he would stop looking for these other problems.”
“Suppose I was in a position to deliver the killer?”
Novikov waited a beat before answering, running through a list of the many things Sechin might want in return—the things he might ask for outright, the things that would remain hidden until the bill came due.
“Then he might be satisfied. Even to the point where he stops looking for our friends in the British and American missions.”
Sechin grunted. He rang a hand bell and a female attendant brought in a tray with a bottle of water and two glasses. She poured the water and left without looking up. Sechin had not bothered to cover himself.
“We are in the same business, you and I,” Sechin said. He leaned back on the wood slat wall, his shoulders and the back of his head leaving a large wet mark.
“Oh?”
“You are working for the short-term success of the Allied invasion, which will help our country, and I am focused on the long term, getting us ready for the postwar struggle with the capitalists.”
“We have slightly different methods,” Novikov said. He resented the comparison, but knew that at some level Sechin was right.
“We are both loyal Soviet officers,” Sechin said, turning his head slowly. He moved, Novikov thought, like a lizard.
“I will help you preserve your network to the extent that I can, of course,” Novikov said.
Sechin turned his gaze to the front, took a long drink of water from one of the glasses, offered the second to Novikov, who drank it down.
“An American major named Sinnott killed the woman, killed the Batcheller woman, on my orders.”
“I see,” Novikov said.
Novikov wanted to protest that it was a terrible idea to use violence against one’s allies, but he just said, “And this was because she threatened to identify some of your assets?”
“That was the report that reached me,” Sechin said. “I had to be careful, you see.”
“And you no longer need this Sinnott?”
Sechin shrugged, just a tiny movement of his shoulders.
“And if I identify him as the killer and Harkins—that’s the investigator’s name—if Harkins can make the case, then all you want in return is for them to stop looking for other assets.”
“Exactly.”
32
2 May 1944
1900 hours
Annie Stowe found Harkins and Wickman walking back from the officers’ mess.
“I’ve been looking for you,” she said as she approached them on the street. “I think tonight might be the night.”
“Kerr?” Harkins asked.
“He’s taking me to some school outside the city. Said we’re going to meet people there who will clear up some things about the real nature of our relationship with our allies.”
“Is that what he said?” Harkins asked. “Allies? Not Soviets?”
“He said allies, but if we were talking about the Brits there’d be no need for sneaking around outside the city. I think you should come and see who’s there.”
“If he shows up with a contact from the Soviet mission,” Harkins said, “that would certainly be enough reason to bring him in for questioning. It would be even better if you let the meeting go on for a while, see exactly what Kerr wants from you. See who else shows up.”
“You want her to meet with these people?” Wickman asked. “We don’t even know who’s going to be there. This could be dangerous.”
“You guys can position yourself nearby,” Stowe said. “If I get into trouble I’ll find you.” She handed Harkins a slip of paper with the name of the school.
“What time are you meeting Kerr?”
“We’re meeting at Grosvenor House at nine. He and I are going out together.”
“Okay,” Harkins said. “No heroics. You’re just along to gather information, enough so that we understand how badly Kerr has been compromised.”
“We need to leave a message for Major Sinnott,” Wickman said. “Let him know where we’re going.”
“I’d rather not,” Harkins said.
“I know you’d rather not,” Wickman said. “But this time we’re not just nosing around. There’s a chance we’ll run into someone from the Soviet mission; there’s a chance we might haul an American diplomat—low ranking, but a diplomat—in for questioning. I don’t think we should do this cowboy style.”
Harkins watched Wickman for a moment, then said, “Okay. We’ll let Sinnott know where we’re going and why.”
“Should we get Lowell back here?”
“No,” Harkins said. “Too dangerous. In fact, I want to take some MPs with us for extra firepower.”
“You think there’s going to be a shootout?”
“I think that having four or five guns along makes it less likely that there’ll be a shootout, which would be fine with me,” Harkins said.
“Lowell is going to be pissed,” Wickman said.
“She can get pissed all she wants,” Harkins said. “As long as she doesn’t get shot.”
* * *
Major Richard Sinnott wrapped his wounded right hand in a kerchief and stuck it in his jacket pocket when he entered OSS headquarters on Grosvenor Street.
“You’re Major Sinnott, aren’t you?” the duty sergeant called when he stepped into the lobby.
Sinnott glanced around. The big space was unnerving; there were too many places for someone to hide. “I am,” he answered.
“Message here for you, sir.” The sergeant offered an envelope with a time and date written in the corner. The staff tracked incoming messages.
“Can you sign here?” The GI held up a clipboard. “For the message.”
Sinnott, who was right-handed, considered using his left to sign, but instead he pulled out the bandaged hand. The kerchief was soaked through with blood, but it looked like it had dried, which meant the bleeding had stopped.
“Jesus,” the sergeant said. “What the hell happened? You need me to call a medic or something?”
“No,” Sinnott said, a little too sharply. The man pulled back a bit.
“No. I mean, it’s just a normal Monday in the OSS.” He tried to smile. “I’ll be fine, thanks.” He took the pen the sergeant offered and signed his name, leaving behind a bloody spot on the paper.
He went upstairs and into the supply closet, where he pulled out two large burn bags, used for the controlled destruction of classified material. In the latrine—where he’d been so full of hope about a promotion just that morning—he stripped off the civilian clothes and stuffed them in the bags, then washed himself at one of the big utility sink
s. Once his hand was clean he saw that it was a puncture wound, rather than a slash. He’d been stabbed in the palm, the point of the man’s knife going all the way through. Looking at the wound, now washed free of blood, he felt a bit dizzy. He steadied himself for a moment, then dressed in his service uniform and considered how everything was unraveling.
He was sure Sechin was behind the attempt on his life; apparently the Soviet spymaster had decided that he was no longer useful, maybe even a threat. His key to survival was to gain some leverage, which he planned to do by identifying Kerr as a Soviet asset. Sinnott would threaten to expose him unless Sechin backed off. Better yet, backed off and provided a regular stipend.
Sinnott opened his safe and removed his forty-five, checked the load and action. He would need more than a sidearm to protect himself, and he wondered if he could arrange some sort of MP escort for when he left the building. He could always sleep here, maybe figure out a way to have meals brought over from the officers’ mess. There was a large planning and map room in the basement, and the staff downstairs was nearly quarantined. As the invasion got closer and they learned more details, their movements would be further curtailed. No one who knew anything worthwhile would be allowed to leave the building until after the fighting started. Sinnott could become just another vampire who didn’t go outside, maybe for a month or two, then he’d skedaddle to the continent. Colonel Haskell could find something for him to do.
By now Sechin probably knew the assassination attempt had failed. Thanks to a few phrases he’d learned, London police were most likely looking for a Russian speaker who left the murder scene. That ought to keep them busy for a while.
What would Sechin’s next move be?
There was a bottle of bourbon in the safe, one-third full. Sinnott yanked the cork and took a long drink, which made his eyes water. When he cleared his vision with the back of his left hand, he saw the envelope on the desk, where he’d dropped it. He opened it and pulled out a single folded sheet of typing paper. At the top, the time and date indicated the note was written at 1915 hours.
