“Then why didn’t I hear anything from you?”
“It was best, I felt, to remain incommunicado until we could see each other and talk in private.” His eyes flicked to the driver, and lowering his voice, he said, “I have so much to tell you.”
“So do I. But where are we going?”
“Whitehall.”
“The Admiralty?”
Wells showed her a telegram that said simply, “COME AT EARLIEST OPPORTUNITY. WINSTON,” and though it was unlikely the cabbie would have been able to hear much over the rumble of the engine, they whispered their news to each other. Rebecca went first, telling Wells about her discoveries at the flat above the penny arcade—even opening her purse to display the gold lighter with Graf’s initials on it—and her narrow, barefooted escape from the burning Crowley house. His jaw fell open at the bravery and resourcefulness she had displayed. Clutching her hands, he said, “I am in awe of you.”
Rebecca basked in his praise.
And then, with some evident trepidation, Wells sketched out for her the situation he had been attending to in Easton Glebe—an enemy flier, hidden in his own home—and Rebecca had to remind herself that she should never again jump to conclusions, or assume that she knew what was going on in someone else’s life; while she had been imagining him conducting a passionate reunion with his wife, and tormenting herself with visions of his domestic bliss, he was in fact entangled in subterfuge and confusion.
“And then, to top it all off,” he said, lowering his eyes as if unsure of what he was about to say, “I had another visitation.”
“Another attack?” she said, sympathetically. “Bad as the last one at the flat?”
“He simply showed up on a train.”
“The dead corporal again?” The next morning, he had divulged the details of what she had, at first, regarded as his hallucination.
“No. My old friend and guardian, Sergeant Stubb.”
He had spoken of him several times, and with great fondness. But judging from this encounter, Stubb was gone, too, now. The whole world seemed to be loitering in death’s anteroom these days, whether from bullets at the Front, or bombs from a zeppelin overhead, or mysterious ailments requiring the strictest quarantine. In yesterday’s paper, she had seen the names of two of her old classmates at the Royal Academy, who had joined up in the same unit, and been killed in action the same day.
“And he had a rather urgent message for me,” Wells confessed.
“Saying?”
“I’m not sure. It was all so veiled, in talk of Wellington and Nelson.”
“And you can’t summon him again?” It amazed Rebecca how easily she had fallen into acceptance of what Wells was telling her.
“No more than I could summon a breeze at will.”
By the time the cab arrived at the Admiralty building, where the driver gave Wells a wink to congratulate him on such a young and lovely companion, the morning sun had been eclipsed by a thin scrim of clouds.
To reach the offices of the First Sea Lord, Wells and Rebecca had to clear several checkpoints and pass through a number of doors and corridors and stairwells; along the way, Wells noticed that she was favoring her right leg, and asked what was wrong.
“In my escape from the debacle last night, I cut my foot on some broken glass. It’s nothing,” she said, with greater confidence than she felt. In truth, it was stinging.
He put a hand under her elbow, and as they finally approached Churchill’s inner sanctum, they could hear his gruff voice emanating from an open door, issuing an order to “make sure you get word back to me as quickly as possible.”
A tall man in a herringbone overcoat, his hat brim pulled down toward his eyes, was just exiting, but Rebecca, startled, grabbed him by the arm and said, “It’s you!”
The man looked at her with an even gaze, betraying nothing, but she knew he recognized her. How could he not? He had been trailing her for days.
“What’s this all about?” Churchill said from behind his desk.
And Rebecca, who had hoped to make a better and more composed impression, was left to make her claim, to which Churchill barked a laugh.
“Looks like you’ve been spotted, Donnelly,” he joshed, “and by an amateur, no less.”
“Sorry, sir.”
Wells, to whom she had yet to convey her suspicions on this score, looked baffled, too.
“Donnelly is normally one of our most invisible agents,” Churchill said.
“But why was he following me?”
The agent looked to his boss, who nodded for him to go ahead and answer. “I wasn’t planning on it, Miss. I was actually dispatched to keep an eye on Mr. Wells—”
“Me?” Wells burst in, glancing at Churchill.
“But when you came into his company,” Donnelly said, choosing his words carefully, “and he got on the train to Easton Glebe, I decided to let our agent there pick up the job, while I kept a watch over you.”
“You were protecting me?”
“If it had come to that.”
“We have borrowed Inspector Donnelly from Scotland Yard,” Churchill explained, “and he is given a fair amount of discretion in the field.”
Rebecca was nonplussed. She’d been apprehensive enough about this meeting, but now, here she was in the thick of it, and perhaps this little imbroglio had proved a blessing in disguise. She wasn’t nervous at all, and a smiling Churchill said, “We must let the inspector go on his way now,” and Donnelly wasted no time excusing himself.
“Why don’t you sit here, Miss West,” Churchill said, directing her to one of two spindly chairs facing his desk. Through the broad window she could see the parade grounds, still teeming with horses and mules. Wells sat beside her, his chair creaking, and said, “So your surveillance was strictly precautionary?”
“You’re a national treasure, H. G.”
“And a risk?”
Winston plainly took his meaning, but remained silent.
“Didn’t you trust me to get the job done at home?” Wells persisted.
“We couldn’t brook any delay, of any kind. The information he might have provided was too critical.” Then, glancing at Rebecca, he said, “But perhaps we should debate this at another time.”
“She already knows everything.”
Churchill scowled. “Was that wise? Miss West is, among other things, a member of the fourth estate.”
“You may rely utterly upon her intelligence and discretion.”
It was odd for Rebecca to find herself under discussion.
“Apparently, I shall have to,” Churchill said. “But I did wish to express my regrets—both practical and personal—on how it turned out. A bad business, all around.”
“Yes, it was that. Jane is still terribly distraught.”
“There was so much we could have gleaned from a German aviator. But I shall send her a note. In the meantime, please give her my apologies.”
Odder still, to be sitting there while the two men talked about Wells’s wife.
“And then, of course, there’s that affair at Guy’s Hospital,” Churchill said. “Another dreadful turn of events.” Addressing Rebecca, he said, “I understand that you were present for the poor man’s death.”
“I was. And I had interviewed him on the parade grounds.”
“At the risk of redundancy, may I repeat that what we are discussing here is not for publication?”
Rebecca chafed at the restriction, but acquiesced.
“Yesterday, I received the report from the chaps in the chemical weapons lab”—he touched a document lying on the desk between his humidor and a toy cannon—“so our worst suspicions have been confirmed. The brass box is from the Colonial Office, which has long served as a cover and a conduit for the Imperial war department, and now we know what was in the vials and syringes it contained.”
“Anthrax,” Rebecca interjected.
Churchill nodded, before adding, “Glanders, too.”
“And Miss West, throu
gh diligent investigation, has identified the culprit,” Wells said.
“You have?” Churchill exclaimed, grabbing a pen and turning over the lab report to write on its back.
“His name is Anton Graf. Dr. Anton Graf.”
“A medical man?”
“A veterinarian, German, and a friend of Aleister Crowley.”
“We have always doubted Crowley’s loyalty to this country,” Churchill said, scribbling furiously. “Apart from his occult mumbo jumbo, his past writings have betrayed a very pro-German slant.”
“Graf lives in the cellar of his house at 67 Chancery Lane.”
Churchill looked up. “Not anymore, I suspect. The morning papers report that a fire burned the place down.”
“I know, I was there,” Rebecca said, and Churchill regarded her with even greater interest.
“You were there? Miss West, I believe the intelligence services should have enlisted you long ago. Go on.”
And so she did, digging the notebook out of her purse to aid her memory and to make sure she was supplying all the correct details, including an account of the celebration of the Eleusinian rites and Arthur Machen’s part in it.
“Machen, too, eh?” Churchill said. “His tale of the bowmen at Mons was so helpful to the country and the cause. I hate to see him mixed up in this.”
Backtracking, she supplied the address of the penny arcade where Graf had once lived. “This is his lighter, engraved with his initials,” she said, handing it across the desk. Churchill examined it, before returning to his interrogation, and when Rebecca had exhausted her cache of information, he jumped on the intercom and summoned an adjutant and a secretary to the office.
“We will need to act on this immediately,” he said, and Rebecca and Wells knew enough to recognize that their meeting was being abruptly terminated. Coming around the desk, he took Rebecca’s hands in both of his own and looked deep into her eyes. “Although it may be impossible to acknowledge all you have done in a public manner, let me say here, in private, that the nation owes you a debt of gratitude. If there is ever anything you require, you have simply to ask.”
“The vote?” she said, and after a moment to register her cheek, Churchill guffawed. Clapping Wells on the shoulder, he said, “These suffragettes, they’ve got more backbone than many a guardsman. But keep alert, you two! Donnelly is off the case, and you’re on your own.”
The adjutant and secretary bustled into the room and before she had made it out the door with Wells, the two assistants were already perched on their chairs and taking a brisk series of orders, which began with the words, “We must start a manhunt throughout the city!”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
“Hold it still, for God’s sake,” Graf growled from under his face mask, and Schell, also masked, clamped his meaty paws down more firmly on the cylinder.
This was the especially tricky part of the process, transferring the fragile tubes that contained the live pathogens, painstakingly cultured and brewed, from their compartments in the packing box and in through the filling port. Any disturbance now could fracture a tube prematurely, and release a cloud of particles, refined and concentrated to a hitherto unheard of level, that would kill Graf, Schell, and anyone else unlucky enough to stumble across their dead bodies, or even breathe the air left permeating the Fairyland arcade. How long the fatal conditions would last, how swiftly the contagion would take to kill its victims, and how easily it might be transmitted from one human host to another, were all questions he would have liked to explore through further experiments; that was the way his gods, men like Koch and Ehrlich, had done it. But fate—in the shape of that awful, interfering termagant Rebecca West—had intervened, and now he had to improvise, and under rather adverse circumstances at that.
Still, the effects of his attack—striking to the very core of the kingdom—would be felt throughout the country. And whatever the immediate death toll—which he hoped would be quite high indeed—the repercussions to the national morale alone would be immense.
“Now the gas?” Schell said, and Graf nodded. He had debated which one would be the best to fill the canister and provide a pressurized, disseminating agent, as it were, for the deadly pathogens. The war had already given birth to several contenders, all of which had their relative virtues—tear gases, chlorine, phosgene, diphosgene, and the ubiquitous mustard gas, which clung stubbornly to the ground like a scurvy weed. That’s why he had chosen that last one. When his attack was over, the place would have to be quarantined for days, if not weeks, though in his heart he hoped that no one would ever again dare to set foot inside.
Using a heavy rubber tube connected to the gas cylinder, he pumped the bomb full and then hermetically sealed it. Once that was done, he pulled off the mask, which had made his breathing difficult and obscured even his vision. Schell did the same. By comparison, the stuffy odor of the flat came to him like a summer breeze.
“The detonator? Do you want me to set it?”
“Not yet,” Graf replied, “no point in risking an explosion before we get there.” The tip contained enough nitroglycerin to guarantee that when the bomb landed, the explosion of the pressurized gas would blanket the area with lethal bacteria, carried on a tide of choking, blinding gas. There would be no escape for anyone in range.
Leaning back from the table, Graf surveyed his handiwork—crude in its way (Schell was no Cellini), but powerful and resourceful, too, all things considered. And it would more than do the job.
“I’m hungry.”
No news there. “Eat whatever’s left,” Graf said. Glancing out the window at the waning afternoon light, he said, “We’ll leave in an hour.” No reason to expose themselves to the world sooner than they had to. “After Operation Ottershaw is complete, we won’t be coming back here.”
“Operation what?”
“Nothing you need to know.” It would hardly be worth explaining the reference to someone like Heinrich, who might not even know who H. G. Wells was. There were only two people in the world who knew the name of his mission—the other one was Wilhelm Solf, a secretary of state sitting behind a desk in Berlin, and even he was unaware of its full dimensions. That was the way Graf had wanted it.
He had been planning to launch the operation on St. George’s Day—while the British were celebrating their patron saint, whom they astonishingly believed could intercede on their behalf on the battlefield—but that was still weeks off and he could no longer delay. God was smiling on him, regardless—today was Ash Wednesday, and he would be sure to find a rich and variegated audience for his performance. Since these worshippers were going to give up something for Lent, anyway, why should it not be their lives?
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Once they had left the Admiralty and were out on the street again, Wells felt strangely depleted, like a sponge squeezed dry. He and Rebecca had shared their secrets and discoveries, and now found themselves relegated to the sidelines while Churchill and his emissaries took over the mad search for Dr. Anton Graf. Lost in thought, the two of them walked arm in arm, from Whitehall toward Trafalgar Square, passing people on the street who wore the smudged sign of Ash Wednesday on their foreheads. Wells was far too much the iconoclast for such things, and he guessed that Rebecca shared that sentiment. But if ever there was a time when people needed the consolations of religion, this was it.
Dusk would soon be falling, and the air was cold and raw. Rebecca’s limp was worse than before, and when they came to the four recumbent lions guarding the base of Nelson’s column—the statue of the great admiral, victor of the Battle of Trafalgar, towering over a hundred feet above them—Wells encouraged Rebecca to sit down for a moment so that he could examine her foot.
Reluctantly, she removed her boot; her hosiery, he was alarmed to see, was sticky with blood.
“Don’t look,” she said, overwhelmed with embarrassment, but he rolled the fabric away to view the cut on the sole of her foot. In the fading light, it was angry and striated with pink lines
connoting an infection of some kind.
“Does the lady need a hand?” a passerby asked, but Wells shook his head.
“What the lady needs is a doctor,” he said, quietly, to Rebecca. “And right away.” He did not like the look of that foot at all, especially given where and how it had been wounded.
“The lady needs to figure out where Anton Graf is planning to strike,” she said with some asperity, ignoring his advice. “I don’t think he can afford to wait any longer than he has. His safe haven has burnt to the ground. He knows that I escaped after seeing his laboratory, and that I have undoubtedly reported him to the authorities. No, he will do his worst tonight, I am sure of it, unless we can stop him.”
“The horse parade grounds are thoroughly well protected now. He would not dare go back.”
“H. G., do you really think he will confine himself to horses? Look what happened to Silas Drummond. Graf has bigger aims.”
Wells, without saying so, had been thinking along the very same lines, as, he was sure, Churchill and his staff were doing. In this war, nothing, it seemed, was forbidden, from poison gas to burning oil, and no one was safe, from the soldiers in the forward trenches to the helpless civilians whose towns and cities were destroyed by ever more powerful bombs.
“But how can we anticipate where, in the whole of London, he will choose to attack?” he asked, his eyes falling on the immense lions flanking the pedestal—created, he never failed to recall, by the famed Victorian sculptor Sir Edwin Landseer, now entombed in St. Paul’s Cathedral. As was, of course, the admiral, the nation’s greatest seaman, standing high atop the Corinthian column.
When Wells, in the train car, had asked about the prospects of victory, he remembered that the specter of Sergeant Stubb had told him to ask Lord Nelson. Or Wellington. Entombed, Stubb observed, as the sergeant himself had been.
The Haunting of H. G. Wells Page 28