by Craig Thomas
"He won't listen to me," she almost wailed, her face a crumpled ball of dirty paper. Gilliatt wanted to say something soothing, knowing that she would reject any comfort from a stranger. "He won't listen to me." She sat down, leaning her head and arms on the table. McBride made no move to speak or to touch her, and Gilliatt disliked him suddenly.
He looked at McBride. "He can't stay here."
"Haven't you heard of free will, Peter? He might even be right — the boys may leave him alone."
Maureen looked up. "Damn you, Michael."
"Probably. Go and get your coat. Get some food from the shop — no, maybe not. Just get your coat."
Maureen went out of the kitchen. McBride heard her climbing the stairs, then her footsteps on the boards of the room above them.
"Will you save us?" Gilliatt asked with an evident irony.
"Oh, if I can," McBride replied with studied lightness. "Yes, I'll save you if I can." There was a combative, fierce light in his eyes that Gilliatt mistrusted and which disturbed him. McBride was a man obsessed and vengeful. Reckless. Gilliatt clamped down on a sense of panic, a feeling of the cosmic unfairness of his situation and a blind desire to blame, lash out. It was a question of staying alive in the company of a mad Irishman and his strange, tough wife.
McBride's head cocked, listening. Gilliatt was puzzled but even before that feeling seeped into his face he heard the car pulling up outside. McBride was on his feet, running through the narrow corridor even as the first bullets smashed the windows of the grocer's shop. Gilliatt went to the foot of the stairs, and blocked them against Maureen who came running from the upstairs room.
"Da!" he heard McBride shout. A sub-machine gun, spraying bullets, forced McBride back into the corridor. Maureen tried to push past Gilliatt, but he took hold of her. McBride ducked back towards them.
"The back way — come on!" Maureen was about to speak. "He's dead. The only damn covenant the boys have is with death, Maureen. Only with death." His eyes were wild, and there was spittle at the corners of his mouth. Maureen moaned. "Get her outside!" he ordered Gilliatt as he drew the heavy revolver from his waistband. "Get moving!"
Gilliatt dragged Maureen into the kitchen. Her head went back and a wail filled the corridor. Gilliatt clamped his hand over her mouth, heaved open the back door of the shop and dragged her out into the yard.
McBride watched them. Another burst of gunfire from in front of the shop, then silence. He wanted to wait, for the pleasurable outline in the shattered doorway, the first steps on the crunching glass, then the perfect target. He didn't. Reluctantly he turned and went back into the kitchen and out into the yard. Maureen was still in Gilliatt's grip, but didn't seem to be struggling. She was silent, appeared calmer.
They were running, and McBride was enjoying it.
October 198-
The relief and colours of the heraldic shields in the cloister roof were fading as the light failed. Goessler gave up studying them. Despite his overcoat, he was cold. There was a chill about all cloisters, and those at Canterbury cathedral were no different. Larger than some, more sombre than many, and perhaps colder than all. He regretted having had to agree to meet Moynihan and the woman, but he knew that unless he did their impatience might easily overreach itself, interfere with the operation that was proceeding so smoothly, and he therefore intended that they should now be fed a few morsels that would stave off their hunger a little longer. He began pacing because his feet were cold. For him there was no atmosphere of conspiracy seeping from the flagstones or lurking behind the pillars or in the arches. He was unaffected not so much by religion, which he rejected anyway, but by the past itself. His past was his own lifetime, the lifetime of his state and his rise within its security apparat. Canterbury cathedral had no weight for him. He had exorcized all the ghosts, rendered himself unable to sense or feel the past — any past — when he carefully buried and destroyed and burned and erased his own Nazi past. In 1946, he had been born. Nothing before that date had any meaning for him.
He saw Moynihan emerge into the cloisters on the east side, near the huge chapter house. He did not wave to him, but continued pacing, letting the Irishman walk round the cloisters to join him. The woman appeared from the door into the nave, closer to him. He enjoyed the fleeting impression that both she and Moynihan were engaged in an attempt to overtake him that would never succeed. Then he turned to wait for them at the north-west corner of the cloisters. Their footsteps were somehow chill and damp, echoing as they did. They reached him together.
"Good evening, my friends." Moynihan merely nodded, but the woman spoke. She had hurried and was impatient but Goessler, as formerly, found her formidable, though dangerously unreliable. She was to him that most dangerous of species, the individual self-interpreter of Marx and Lenin. She did not surrender to ideology; rather, she had absorbed it and made it something that increased her individuality, her recognition of self.
"Herr Goessler. We summoned you here—" Goessler smiled a tight little smile in the gloom, hardly showing his dentures. She was challenging him, " — because we're sick of being dragged around at your coat-tails. We want to know what evidence you already have to support a move against Guthrie." There was a weight on the final syllables that was quite deliberate. Evidently, nothing was being kept from the woman by McBride. Silently, he complimented her.
"Ah, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Indeed."
Moynihan spat on the flagstones, quite unnecessarily from Goessler's point of view. These Irish had so much wasteful, vengeful passion they were anathema to an intelligence operation. So many Pavlovian keys controlled their reactions and their behaviour — too many for one life or a dozen lives. "What evidence, my dear?"
"Yes, Herr Goessler. Guthrie commanded one of the minelayers, didn't he? He helped to commit an act of war against a British convoy — was it sanctioned by the British government? Who — Churchill?"
She was hungry, greedy. Ideological nymphomania. Neither of them could receive, take enough history, comment, action or belief to slake their hatred. Goessler realized that this was the crucial moment of the operation. The British would be too slow to catch McBride before he had all the material, but the Irish could move too greedily, too swiftly — and spoil everything. He'd always known they'd try. Perhaps — he hoped not — he'd underestimated the woman?
He studied his words, then: "Yes. Very well, my friends. Cards on the table. Just so long as you promise that you will not act precipitately, and without my consent—" He left the order hanging in the chill air. Moynihan shivered, probably because he was not wearing more than a thin sweater beneath his suede jacket. Perhaps, Goessler thought, for him the place does have ghosts. Then the Irishman spoke.
"People are beginning to disbelieve, Goessler. They're very impatient for results."
Goessler had no intention of telling them that McBride would be theirs in no more than two or three days. The operation required now only McBride's acquisition of sufficient evidence of the sinking of the convoy for him to react strongly enough to want to make his knowledge public. Goessler believed that McBride would go public, preview his book's revelations. If Moynihan and the woman moved against him, tried to force him, he would remain silent. He must not sense he was being used.
"He must not sense he is being used," he said aloud, almost involuntarily. Then he added: "He will make the first move, and must be allowed to. You must not attempt to force him into going public." Another order.
"The evidence is already available, he's seen it."
"I agree, my dear. But he is an historian. He must have witnesses, documentation—"
"Who stole his papers?" Claire Drummond immediately regretted her question.
"When?"
"Days ago, from the hotel."
"Everything?" She nodded. "MI5 are closer than I thought. Walsingham has himself to protect, of course." Goessler was thoughtful for a moment. "Is he being followed at the moment?"
"I don't think so."
"Then he may be." Moynihan looked furtively round the darkened cloisters, suspecting eavesdroppers. Goessler himself felt suddenly insecure. The operation was slipping towards the IRA's greedy hands, acquiring their passionate haste. Regrettable, but perhaps not disastrous. He went on: "Very well. Two more days. Then, my dear, you must persuade him he must publish. If not, then you will inform the newspapers yourself, and set those dogs on him. A cause celebre-vulgai but I'm afraid now unavoidable. Will that satisfy your friends in Belfast and Dublin?"
"I hope so," Moynihan said with a candour that Claire Drummond resented with a contemptuous glance.
"Ah, they are wolves, my friend. They eat anything." He studied them for a moment. The moment when he had resigned his operation to their tender mercies had come and gone, and left him deflated and anxious. "Now, goodbye. Let us meet just once more, in—?"
"Bognor Regis," Claire Drummond said.
"Very well. In forty-eight hours. Goodbye."
He hurried away, disappearing through the north door of the cloisters. He was mistrustful, edgy, reluctant. It should go well, it ought to—
It had to. Men crowded at his back. He was simply another Moynihan; a subordinate. It was very cold.
* * *
Sir Charles Walsingham looked up from the papers on his desk, switching off the cassette-player that had hummed for some minutes after Ryan's verbal report had ended. Ryan had questioned the man Blackshaw in Chatham, let himself into McBride's hotel room and heard the recording he had made of the two geriatric seamen.
Exton's face was expectant, across the desk from Walsingham.
"He — almost has it all, Exton."
"Sir."
Walsingham felt the progress of his thoughts and words was being wrung from him.
"He must be close to going over the top with this. He's almost finished checking his coupon, and he has seven score draws so far. One lucid account of the sufferings of those men—" Walsingham winced with imagination, " — and he will boil over. Jackpot, a million or more. He won't be able to contain it!" Walsingham's hand clenched on the papers, a tight fist.
"Sir."
"Very well. Get rid of him. Tomorrow."
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Fallschirmjaeger
October 198-
Drummond awoke with a piercingly clear image of the young Peter Gilliatt, weary, dishevelled and grieving, standing before him in the study of the farmhouse. He sat up, groaning with the weight of sleep and memory, his limbs suddenly restless and fidgety. The image persisted, even though the grey shape of the curtained window informed him that his eyes were open. He tried to blink the picture away, then rubbed at it to dispel it. It was only when he switched on the bedside light, however, and the familiar wallpaper vied with the shadows in the corners and the contours of his old age established themselves, that he was able to dissolve the young man's face.
He threw back the bedclothes and got up, pulling himself arthritically into his thick dressing-gown. He padded downstairs in slippers to the study and the drinks cabinet. The taste of interrupted sleep was furry in his mouth, with an acid bile waiting at the back of his throat, like a prognostication. He poured himself a large brandy, and turned on the electric fire. It glowed on the walls like distant gunfire. He sat opposite it, staring into its grilled and blank flame-pictures.
It was not the first of his dreams, and Gilliatt was unimportant as an actor in most of them. Gilliatt had never believed McBride's story that he had been betrayed, preferring the more obvious explanation of the local IRA working in conjunction with the landed German agents. Drummond had not needed to persuade him of his innocence. But now his tall figure, leaning with tiredness against the door-frame, his eyes blank with grief, was omnipresent.
Drummond swallowed at the brandy. Was Gilliatt acting as a chorus to the procession of dead people that inhabited his sleep? They crowded on him now, making him fearful of the knocking of his old heart every time they caused him to wake up — fearful, too, of the drink that seemed to stimulate their efforts to upset him when he returned to bed and closed his eyes. Sleep ambushed him with his past like a determined and violent gang. Sleep the terrorist.
McBride, Britain, Gilliatt, others, even Irish and German. Now McBride's son, his own daughter, Moynihan, Britain again perhaps. Anybody and anything but himself. He swallowed again at the brandy, emptying the glass, irritatedly and guiltily pouring himself another large measure immediately.
Disillusion, he affirmed with a nod of his head. A young man's disillusion. The attractions of Fascism, the danger of Communism. He'd been ripe for recruitment by the Germans, Amt V, the SD-Ausland, at an embassy function in Berlin when he was attache. Soon after Hitler came to power, and was using a miraculous, strong hand to alter the destiny of Germany. It was the only way he could share, to join secretly. Britain hollow and wormy with the Depression, Germany climbing out of vaster ruins to greatness. By the outbreak of war, Drummond was ensconced in Ireland for the sake of Admiralty Intelligence and perfectly placed to assist German agents, to help co-ordinate Smaragdenhalskette.
Habits of thought—
By 1940 he was a German, in all but name and origin. He believed in the New Order, considered Churchill a damnable fool and warmonger not to accept the Führer's offer of a peace treaty and turn against the Communist barbarians with Germany. He had never wanted to escape—
So why now, after this long, interminable safety, do the faces come?
Claire.
She was his Nemesis, his punishment; blackmailing him into helping her cause. He'd been forced to point the young American who was Michael's son in the direction of the Admiralty and Walsingham; his only protest the ambiguous telephone message to Walsingham, warning him. A feeble fist moving through deep water in an attempt to land a blow. He hated his daughter, hating what she had become and how she had come to treat him. She despised his Fascism of the past, his Anglicism of the present, and she used him to further her own ends by threatening to expose his wartime treachery. She was completely and utterly ruthless, and a Communist. She was uncontrollable, dedicated.
He finished the second brandy, studying the empty glass with the dedication of an alcoholic, reluctantly at last deciding that he should have no more. Brandy-strengthened dreams made him wake sweating, hands clawed near his own throat because he was being suffocated by the past. He got up from his chair, suddenly cold, and went out of the room.
Ideologues. An intellectual hatred is the worst. An Irish poet had said that too, he observed as he climbed the stairs like a very old and decrepit man. They'd both possessed it, that worst of things. He'd hated supine Britain and world Communism, and his only daughter hated all creeds other than her own and all the worshippers of other gods. He had only been the chrysalis stage — the small hatred, the small betrayal — she was the dark butterfly.
The bed looked cold and uninviting, an evident and threatening trap.
November 1940
McBride could not catch sight of Drummond, though he sensed with a wild, almost tangible certainty that he would be close at hand, that he would not trust either Irishman or German to finish off the only threat to his safety. He'd want to see, direct, order—
Gilliatt ran ahead with Maureen, holding her arm firmly as he might have done for an older woman. Maureen seemed thankful for the support. McBride halted at every street corner, giving them a chance to get well ahead while he watched for the pursuit. Then he sprinted to catch up with them before the next corner, yelling at them the direction they should take. If there was a pursuit, then it had not yet decided which way they'd gone and was still casting about for signs of them.
A muffled explosion reached him, and he saw Maureen's white face turn to him, and he yelled: "Get on, get on!" He knew it was the shop. Quick search, and then the gutting of the lair. They'd not be able to go back. Now they'd follow in earnest.
They emerged onto the main road near the narrow stone bridge across the stream. The mud flats stretching
away towards the bay seemed exposed, representative of their situation. The low hills to the north were treeless under a grey cold sky. Gilliatt was breathing hard and Maureen was slumped against him. There was something natural about their proximity that McBride consciously dismissed from his mind.
"Into the hills," he said to Gilliatt, who seemed to be looking almost wistfully down the creek to the sea. Gilliatt nodded, transferring his gaze to the narrow, cobbled street down which they had come. It was empty except for a thin dog relieving itself and an old woman in black framed by an open doorway. She might have been watching them. A vague boil of grey smoke hung a few streets away from them. Devlin's shop.
Maureen breathed in deeply but the breath became a sob. Gilliatt moved his arm around her shoulders but she shrugged it off violently.
"Why, Michael — why?"
"I don't know, Maureen." He studied her face, seeing the grief just below the tight mask of shock. There'd be no time for the grief to come out, he knew. She'd be too intent on survival. He almost regretted that she would have to become, emotionally, part of his secret, amputated world. Regretted it for her sake. "Come on, we've no time to spare on it now. We'll head northeast, then change direction and head for Carrigfadda. They won't be able to follow us by car, not even by bicycle." He was grinning again, and the sight of the expression angered Gilliatt unreasonably, or perhaps simply gave rise to misgivings about trusting his life to a man so evidently reckless. But he controlled his anger, and merely nodded. "Come on, then."
McBride began to run over the bridge, waving them to follow. The narrow road wound between two low lumps of higher ground, vanishing like a false trail. Gilliatt was aware how perilous everything was, how unlikely survival. Maureen moved away from him, aware of the shivering possessing his body. She began to run after McBride.
The first shot plucked stone chips from the bridge just as Gilliatt took his first few steps, and the bullet whined away harmlessly. Gilliatt became frozen, unable to move, as if the bullet had entered his body or was some shouted imperative. McBride, looking back to the bridge, saw the Englishman's fear possess him.