‘Why an assassin?’
‘To kill Danby and relieve him of his treasures, presumably.’
‘You’re saying that the assassin was hired by the Nazis, as some sort of double cross?’
‘No. We know exactly who hired him, as a matter of fact. A man named Anatoli Borisovich Gorsky. He works for a branch of the Soviet Service called SMERSH. ‘Death to Spies’ or something appropriately melodramatic. Gorsky was your man on the train, according to your description. He used to be called ‘The Pianist’ by the way: his father was a piano tuner in St Petersburg before the revolution, hence his love of Mendelssohn. He killed Moneypenny and saved you from Occleshaw. He had to give Danby enough time to get the papers out of here. He had to keep interest focused on you and Lucas.’
‘Are you saying Danby was communist?’ asked Jane.
‘We think Danby was working for anyone who’d hire him, playing one off against the other. The Soviets found out about Turing and Tube Alloys through a man MI5 has been watching named Cairncross, who works at the Foreign Office. He and a little group of Cambridge students are all involved with the plight of the working man, apparently, although God knows what a bunch of upper-class dandies like that would know about it; at any rate, the Reds decided they wanted first crack. Presumably Bond was supposed to pick him up, carry him out into the Irish Sea, then, when he wasn’t looking, blow his bloody brains out, saving everybody else the trouble.’
‘So now nobody gets the information,’ said Dundee.
‘Too bad we had to lose the crown jewels in the process,’ said Fleming.
‘Don’t be so sure of that,’ said Dundee. ‘That’s one piece of the puzzle that never really fit.’
They reached the door to cell 17 and Johnson silently turned his key in the lock. He swung the door open and flipped on the light. Everything was exactly as it had been before. The room was still packed from floor to ceiling with cardboard boxes, each with a pencilled number on the side. 1790 and 1791 were still missing, the rest of the boxes sagging around the hole.
‘I hope there’s some point to all of this,’ said Johnson, a note of petulance in his voice.
‘There’s a point,’ said Dundee. He stepped forward and, using one hand, manhandled box 1789 until he’d turned it back to front. On the rear of the box was the pencilled number 1790.
‘Good lord,’ said Johnson. He blinked, not understanding. Neither did Jane.
‘Open it,’ said Dundee.
The small man from the PRO did just that, taking a small penknife out of his vest pocket and carefully slitting open the top. He tipped the box forward and peered inside.
‘Dear God,’ he whispered. Inside was a black leather box with a brass handle on the top and a hinged door on the side. Johnson rested the container on one of the surrounding boxes and pulled open the small door. Inside, encased in white satin, was an immense crown of pearls, rubies, emeralds and sapphires. In the centre was the famous 317.4 carat stone cut from the Cullinan diamond.
‘Look around,’ said Dundee. ‘You’ll find the sword somewhere in here too. I guarantee it.’ At that, Johnson began to scuttle among the boxes, muttering to himself.
‘I don’t get it,’ said Jane, her fingers itching for a camera. Her eyes stayed glued to the Imperial Crown.
‘I said it at the time.’ Dundee smiled. ‘Danby couldn’t have done it, not with all the guards and everything else. So if he couldn’t have done it, that meant he’d done something else. He only needed to make it look as though they were gone anyway, to distract us. All these cardboard boxes look alike; he just switched them back to front. He needed a way in and out so he gave us a tunnel.’ Dundee paused. ‘It never really made sense; you only make a copy if you mean to put it in place of the thing it’s copying; he never made the slightest attempt to make it look as though the jewels hadn’t been stolen because that’s exactly what he meant us to think. The real purpose of the copy was to impress Hitler and various other people along the way, I suppose, like Chambers-Hunter and his Scottish Fascist friends. Striking a blow against England sounds a lot better than stealing secret papers and auctioning them off to the highest bidder.’
Jane straightened, looking away from the crown. She rubbed the surface of the silver cigarette case in her pocket. The inscription inside had been revealed when she smoked the last cigarette and now she knew who Tweedsmuir really was:
To Governor General, Baron Lord Tweedsmuir of Elsfield ‘John Buchan’
From a Grateful Nation
February, 1940
She turned to Dundee. ‘I think,’ she said quietly, ‘that it’s time to go fishing and think about absent friends.’
Author’s Note
An American Spy is, in terms of factual detail and description, a true story. During the Second World War, the Crown Jewels of England were removed from the Jewel House of the Tower of London and distributed to various hiding places for safekeeping early in the war. The Imperial Crown and the Sword of State, among other pieces, were sent to Shepton Mallet Prison along with a number of valuable and important documents including the Domesday Book and Magna Carta. Also included among the documents were all the transcripts of Alan Turing’s work on the Ultra code-breaking equipment used to decrypt the German Military Codes at Bletchley Park, as well as all information on file in the Public Records Office concerning Tube Alloys, the code name for the British development of the atomic bomb, which began in 1940 in cooperation with the Manhattan Project. The joint aspects of Tube Alloys were broken off in 1943, due to what the United States felt were glaring security problems with the British effort. The Imperial Crown and the Sword of State were mysteriously ‘misplaced’ for several weeks during 1942 and then just as mysteriously reappeared. No official explanation was ever given for this.
Shepton Mallet Prison existed, and in fact exists today, as and where it is described. Shepton Mallet was the prison on which The Dirty Dozen is based. Every American GI executed in the European Theatre of Operations was hung there, with the exception of Private Eddie Slovik, executed by firing squad in France for desertion.
All the information regarding Lord Tweedsmuir is accurate, including the description of his ‘shooting box’ and fishing lodge in Scotland. It is much the same as his description of the bald archaeologist’s farmhouse in his novel, The Thirty-Nine Steps. Some facts about Tweedsmuir–Buchan have been altered slightly to suit the plot of An American Spy, particularly Tweedsmuir’s death: he died suddenly and unexpectedly in Montreal, Canada, in February of 1940, at which time he was Governor General of that country. He was sixty-five years old. The pearl-handled automatic is accurate and was generally kept in the glove compartment of his car.
The Scottish Fascist Party existed and was investigated by MI5 on several occasions during the war as a possible source of sabotage and espionage. William Wier Gilmour and William Chambers-Hunter (the one-armed man) were real people. In addition to being an ardent Nazi, Chambers-Hunter also owned the Scottish Trader shipping company, including the Hebrides Trader.
The Isle of Mull, Salen, the Tangle of the Islands and Loch na Keal are accurately described.
Tommy Connery is Sean Connery’s real name and he was inordinately fond of both the novel and later the film version of Shane. He was very large for his age, worked for a dairy in Edinburgh as a milkman’s assistant and has a tattoo of a leaping tiger on his right forearm. As far as I know he had no uncle on Mull but the chance of having the real Sean Connery meet the real Ian Fleming, not to mention the real James Bond, was simply too good to pass up!
Fleming really was a naval commander and Intelligence officer during the war and his older and (then) more famous brother Peter, a well-known travel writer, actually did work for SOE and at one time was head of a strange and short-lived organisation that was to act as a British Resistance in the event that Germany invaded.
James Bond really was an ornithologist and he really did inspire Fleming, at least in the use of his name. The two met in the late fift
ies. Interestingly, there may be considerably more to the story, especially when you consider what perfect cover being a birdwatcher is. Of the six major political assassinations from 1939 to 1961, including various attempts on Charles de Gaulle, the successful assassination of General Sikorski, head of the Polish Government in Exile during the war, and the successful killing of Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, James Bond the ornithologist was always nearby. Frederick Forsyth, the well-known thriller writer and one-time spy in his own right, tips his hat to this odd coincidence on two occasions: his assassin, the Jackal (Charles Calthrop) is described as being a birdwatcher and is also credited with the killing of Trujillo. In his later book The Dogs of War, when his unnamed mercenary character goes to the small African country in question, the cover he uses is an ornithologist.
Anatoli Borisovich Gorsky, the KGB chief of station in London at the time the book is written, really did have a weakness for ties with birds on them, particularly the silk Hardy Amies brand, which he purchased (once again coincidentally) at a shop in London’s Burlington Arcade directly beside Morlands, the tobacconist where Ian Fleming purchased his Russian Samokish cigarettes.
You never know…
Acknowledgements
First and foremost I would like to gratefully acknowledge the help and understanding of my editor, Doug Grad, who helped me through an extremely difficult time. My apologies for the lack of apostrophes. I’d also like to thank the long, nameless list of librarians in England, Scotland and Canada who helped with detailed information about the life and times of Governor General John Buchan, Lord Tweedsmuir. I would also like to thank Michael Feeney Callan for his excellent biography of Sean Connery, John Cork of the Ian Fleming Foundation, John Pearson for his biography The Life of Ian Fleming and the Reverend Alfred Weston, Bungay, Suffolk, for digging through the parish records to discover what he could about the mysterious author of Birds of the West Indies, James Bond. Bond’s book, by the way, is now in its fifth edition. Last, but not least, I would like to thank Mariea – wife, nurse, mother and unheralded saint.
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First published in the USA in 2005 by Signet, an imprint of New American Library, New York
This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by
Canelo Digital Publishing Limited
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Copyright © Paul Christopher, 2005
The moral right of Paul Christopher to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781788636278
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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