by Joel N. Ross
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FIVE
NIGHT, DECEMBER 5, 1941
THE SKY WAS TWO SHADES DARKER. Tom’s legs were numb. He rolled Rugg’s body off and tried to stand. His feet wouldn’t stay under him. He lay on the floor and lighted a cigarette. Finally, he dragged himself upright, almost tripping over his bandage. He tore it from his hand and left it behind. He found the stairs, wide and muddy, like a riverbank. He was done standing, so he sat.
Time passed. There was noise outside, traffic and men. Tom swung the front door open and was on the steps of a gutted church building. There was a delivery van across the street. Men were running; one spotted him and shouted.
He tried blowing a smoke ring, but his cigarette was dead.
Highcastle stepped around the van. He came close and his face loomed hugely in Tom’s vision. He asked something, Tom replied, and Highcastle’s bullet head disappeared. Then he was back, smiling. He said, “You bastard. You great bloody bastard.” His face was shining and there were tears in his yellow eyes. “Sergeant Wall. Good show.”
Tom heard Harriet’s voice, and said her name.
By magic, she was there, ranting about her car. She’d had a call; her MG had been abandoned in the middle of the road. She’d been at home with the police, waiting for— “Oh, Tom!” she cried, spotting him. “Good Lord. An ambulance! Highcastle, where’s a bloody ambulance?” She was in front of him. Her hands were soft and warm. “Oh, God—Tommy—you look like death.”
“I’m swell,” he said. “Never better.”
“Oh no. Not you, too. I won’t have it.” She clutched him as he swayed, and then he was on a stretcher, with her leaning over him and the night sky whirling past. “Tommy? Can you hear me?”
“The microfilm,” he told Highcastle, his voice a mumble. “We found proof.”
“You famous bastard—you did what?”
“Confirmation proof.” He felt his lips moving, couldn’t hear a sound. “Harriet has it.”
“The second microfilm?” Highcastle said. “Proof of the Japanese attack?”
“I believe that’s what he’s saying.” Harriet’s voice was clear and bright and wrong. “You found something, Thomas? I’m not sure what he’s trying to tell us. . . .”
“In my hand—the message.”
“I can’t quite make him out,” she told Highcastle.
“The proof! Harriet, tell him. . . .”
“He’s not talking sense.” She squeezed his hand. “Let him rest. Poor man. It takes him this way, since Crete. . . .”
She wasn’t going to warn the Americans. “Harriet,” he said. “Please.”
“Poor Tommy, done to death . . .”
The fog rolled in.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-SIX
MORNING, DECEMBER 8, 1941
TOM WOKE FROM A DREAM, a memory of laughing. The room smelled of jasmine. They’d been at Café Society in Greenwich, with Benny Goodman blowing the clarinet. She’d been spinning around him with her outrageous laugh and her devil-may-care eyes. He said, “Audrey?”
“No.” Harriet was standing by the bed. “It’s me.”
He waited, but she didn’t speak. “I woke before,” he said. “They wouldn’t tell me anything.”
“I brought today’s news.” She handed him the paper, folded in half.
“What’s today?”
“Monday.”
Two days gone. He didn’t want to look at the newspaper. He didn’t want to know. “Earl? Have you . . .”
“I spoke to your mother.” She sat in the slatted chair. “They’ll bury him in the States.”
Tom felt the hollow of loss for the first time. Good-bye, Earl. May the fish always bite and the women always nibble. “To a volley of rifles.”
“He’d have liked that.”
“He wanted cannons.”
She smiled softly, and her gray eyes lost their film of sadness. “They found Duckblind, a block from my house. Her neck had been broken.”
“They found— Duckblind is a woman?”
“She was. Mr. Highcastle imagines it’s more of your work.”
“Me?”
“So I told him. It was a blessing from above, whoever is responsible.”
There was another silence and the sadness returned, like a seep of cold air. He had to know. “Will you be at the funeral?”
She brushed her hair behind her ear. “I won’t. Tell your mother I’m sorry.”
So it was true. She hadn’t informed the embassy, hadn’t warned of the strike force. The Japanese had attacked, and the ambush had succeeded. She’d not visit the States after having cost his country so many lives.
“Father’s been arrested,” she said. “I offered testimony.”
Testimony. Her husband was dead, her father had been arrested, and she’d done nothing to stop the slaughter in Hawaii. What was she saying, that she’d lost enough?
She sat straight and fragile. “You’ve no reason to believe me, Tom, but I love you. Earl is— Earl was . . . Well. I came to tell you. And because I shan’t hide from what I’ve done.” She lowered her head and watched the play of light over her fingers. “I’ll dirty my hands, Tom, because we fight the war America won’t—because as Europe falls, as my girls die, America will not fight. How many more would’ve died while you watched from across the sea? Fifty thousand British civilians killed, and you want me to weep for three thousand American soldiers?”
He said nothing. There was nothing to say.
She stood. “Will you wish me well?”
Silence.
She walked to the door. Her heels echoed on the floor for a long time after she was gone. When the echoes faded, he said her name.
JAPAN AT WAR WITH U.S. AND BRITAIN
Hostilities Begun in the Pacific
Several Naval Bases Bombed
MOBILIZATION ORDER IN AMERICA
The Japanese, without any formal declaration of war, yesterday attacked American bases in the Pacific. While the White House has officially announced Japanese attacks on bases in Hawaii and Manila, news of the operations remains fragmentary.
The enemy forces, which were all apparently based on one or more aircraft carriers, began their attack at 7:55 A.M. and continued it until 9:25 A.M. (Hawaiian time).
Reports to be received with reserve say that 3,000 American servicemen and civilians were killed, and that “untold damage” has been done to the naval base and the city of Honolulu.
President Roosevelt has ordered the United States Army and Navy to take the necessary action and has mobilized all forces throughout his country. . . .
Tom closed the paper and set it aside.
He would heal. He would mend. There was a war to be fought, and he was a soldier. He closed his right hand into a loose fist. The pain was fading. There was a war to be fought, and an old uniform to be worn again.
But first, he’d stop at a nightclub for a beer and a floodlight show. Maybe do some dancing. There was this funny little girl with open hands and an open heart. She was some kind of woman—with laughter and love and maybe forgiveness. He’d like to swing out with her on his arm, teach her the Sky Dive and the Mess Around. Yeah. Nothing he’d like better.
The only answer to the past was the future.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-SEVEN
AUDREY WAS AT THE MIRROR, arranging her hair into the right sort of disarray. Imogene was beside her, but the Three Annes were gone. They’d refused to share the undressing room since Audrey accidentally upset a dustbin on them. A dustbin and a mop bucket.
Rodolfo opened the door and clapped. “Three minutes!”
Audrey slipped into her heels as Genie drifted toward the corridor, wearing a transparent shift and an impish smile.
“What?” Audrey said.
“I’m that eag
er to be onstage,” Genie said, and slipped from the room.
Audrey turned and saw Tom in the doorway. His suit fit, for once. His shoulders were broad and his eyes were warm and worried. He was holding a dozen red roses and a pair of peep-toed shoes.
He closed the door and her breath caught. He’d come.
“I’ve been sleeping,” he said, “and I’ve been dreaming. And all I’ve been dreaming of is you.”
“You brought me shoes,” she said.
He tossed them on the counter and touched her cheek.
“I don’t want to be alone anymore,” she said.
“You aren’t.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ON DECEMBER 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
On December 8, 1941, the United States declared war on Japan.
On December 11, 1941, Germany declared war on the United States.
Over the next three years, the XX Committee maintained complete control of the Nazi spy network in England. The Twenty Committee, using agents of the Double-Cross System, kept 3,500 square miles of ocean clear of U-boats. It undermined the accuracy of the German V-weapons, and persuaded the Germans that the Allies would strike at either the Balkans or Sardinia after the liberation of North Africa, instead of the real target—Sicily.
And in 1944, it convinced the Germans that the Allied invasion force was poised to merely feint at Normandy in preparation for a massive attack elsewhere. The Germans, acting on tips from Double-Cross agents, moved huge numbers of troops first to Norway, then to the Mediterranean, then to Pas-de-Calais—and back again.
After midnight on June 6, 1944, British and U.S. paratroopers landed on the beaches of Normandy. D-Day had begun. Within three weeks, the paratroopers were followed by almost a million more men. The Allies shattered the walls of Hitler’s Fortress Europe—and the XX Committee misinformation was so convincing that even well after D-Day, the Germans still expected the “real” attack in Norway.
On May 8, 1945, Germany surrendered.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THANKS TO Henry Morrison, Phyllis Grann, Kevin Morrissey, Kara Kugelmeyer, Chris Wagoner, Peter Prictoe, Lynn Nichols, and Mark and Helen Ross.
ANCHOR BOOKS
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2005.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ross, Joel N., 1968–
Double cross blind / by Joel N. Ross.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Traitors—Family relationships—Fiction. 2. Military intelligence—Fiction. 3. World War, 1939–1945—Fiction. 4. Americans—England—Fiction. 5. Espionage, German—Fiction. 6. London (England)—Fiction. 7. Sibling rivalry—Fiction. 8. War neuroses—Fiction. 9. Brothers—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3618.O8455D68 2004
813'.6—dc22
2004049435
Ebook ISBN 9780307278517
Copyright © 2005 by Joel N. Ross
www.anchorbooks.com
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