Emerald Decision

by Craig Thomas

  It was evident that Goessler had another nugget of information that he wished to impart. His face became as impassive as a page of print. He wanted McBride to ask the right question. Claire Drummond frowned, watching McBride's facial reactions carefully. And McBride remembered his father, as if recalling some piece of information that had been of only tangential importance to his investigations.

  "What happened to my father?"

  Claire Drummond was moved by an obscure guilt, even pity— but at what or for whom she had little idea. "Don't tell him."

  Goessler looked at her, then ignored her. "Your father was killed by her father," he said bluntly. "Robert Drummond killed your father because your father discovered he was a traitor." Claire Drummond winced at the accusation, readopting long-abandoned sensitivities for a moment. "Oh, it wasn't unusual in Englishmen of his class and upbringing in the thirties. Many of them embraced the illusion of Russia under the benevolent government of Stalin, and others became sycophantic admirers of the Führer's New Order in Germany, the strength through joy which led to the work making free. Arbeit machtfrei. True, many of them would not have been so fascinated if they had known about Dachau and Auschwitz and the other places, but then so many of your poets would not have loved Stalin if they had known he was liquidating millions more even than Hitler. Beliefs are strange things — it is perhaps better to live without them." A trace of doubt flitted on Goessler's face for a moment, like a tiny cloud moving across the sun, then he nodded his head. "Robert Drummond worked for the Germans throughout the war, most especially during November 1940. He killed your father."

  McBride looked at Claire Drummond, who snapped, "Why did you tell him that? He'll never help us now!" There was something close to fear in her voice.

  "Of course he will. It is his only chance of life, is it not, Thomas?" He smiled at McBride. "Let him think it over for a time. Do not be in too much of a hurry to prompt him, and do not hurt him." He stood up, hands spread in front of him, shrugging off any harm he might have done. "That is my advice to you both." He sounded obscenely fatherly.

  Claire Drummond was puzzled. "Is that it? Is that all you came for?"

  "For now — yes. Rudi and I will be staying nearby, of course, and we will call on you again tomorrow." He smiled expansively. Moynihan writhed visibly on the sofa next to McBride. McBride realized, through a miasma of contradictory emotions, that both the woman and Moynihan were powerless to behave independently of the East German. He controlled them, they were his employees. Even the girl, stronger than her partner, was afraid of Goessler. They'd outrun him in kidnapping McBride, but now they'd stepped back into line.

  "Goodnight, Thomas," Goessler said from the door, even as McBride's skin was still registering the change in temperature from the open door. He did not reply, and Goessler shrugged, then went out.

  He had to escape. He knew that there had to be a moment, one chance, to get out and away. Otherwise he would talk, he would be working for Goessler, the man without beliefs. But the thought of escape daunted him, like a mountain he had to climb without oxygen or ropes or boots or courage. He let his head drop forward on his chest as he heard Goessler's car pull away from the cottage. He'd never make it, couldn't do it—

  November 1940

  The parachute troops pulled out at midday. The weather remained to their advantage, misty and drizzling persistently, the landscape grey and stifled and almost obscured. McBride and Maureen and Gilliatt were not questioned again by the Oberst. He merely dismissed them from his considerations and handed them over to Riordan and two other local IRA men — one of them Gilliatt was certain had been among their original pursuers, a short, red-headed man with a whey-coloured face that looked only half-shaped from its human clay.

  Gilliatt dismissed the image of the wasp on the windscreen. It hadn't worked. It was too late for second thoughts, for reconsiderations. The plans were made, orders given, strategy rigidly defined. The parachute troops would hold the beaches for the seaborne landings early the following morning. Gilliatt had been unable to make their grasp on the situation loosen even a fraction.

  Riordan seemed to take a pleasure in guarding McBride. He treated him warily, keeping a physical distance between them that admitted the danger McBride might represent, but satisfied with the docility, the unarmed innocuousness that Gilliatt knew McBride was deliberately presenting to his captors. Riordan's desultory, mindless baiting of McBride went unanswered.,McBride, to all appearances, was a beaten man.

  They were given bread and cheese and beer for lunch, soon after the Germans left. As the afternoon wore on, Maureen seemed least able to accept her captivity. She paced the barn continually with jerky, caged-animal steps, wearing a path in the strewn hay. McBride showed no interest in her, but Gilliatt was concerned. Her behaviour was irritating Riordan and the others, making them more edgy and watchful when they might otherwise have been lulled into carelessness. If McBride tried to escape, then he and Maureen would also have to go. At the moment, they were prisoners of war. He had no desire to become a hostage.

  McBride's suspicions of Drummond had become preposterous to Gilliatt. It was far easier to believe in bad luck, in accident, than in Drummond's treachery. But McBride was obsessed, almost doom-laden. He was set apart, not even concerned to involve Gilliatt and Maureen in any plan of escape.

  "Sit down, woman!" Riordan snapped out eventually, his rifle moving indecisively but dangerously on his lap. Gilliatt, as if newly aroused, looked at his watch. Four-thirty. It was getting dark outside. "For God's sake, sit down!"

  Maureen appeared stung, slapped across the face by his anger. She stood in front of him, fists clenched, her body visibly quivering with anger and the released strain of her captivity. She simply would not accept, nor exploit her situation. Gilliatt got to his feet — McBride hadn't even looked up at the scene from where he sat, which had to mean he was dangerously near making some move — and moved swiftly to Maureen's side. She shrugged off his hands on her upper arms, but he pulled her back against him in an embrace. Riordan laughed.

  "He's very friendly with your wife, McBride!" he roared, highly amused at Gilliatt's overacted concern and Maureen's reluctance to be mollified. "Just take her away," Riordan added to Gilliatt. "She'd wear out the patience of a saint!"

  "She doesn't like being, held prisoner," Gilliatt offered affably. "Come to that, neither do I." His words had a studied lightness, lack of menace. Riordan smiled confidently, seated on a hay-bale, the woman between him and the man, and her face becoming more docile, bovine as her anger spent itself through her working hands and her clenched jaws. Gilliatt was leaning his head against hers in a parody of comfort.

  "You'll just have to accept it, like he—"

  His eyes were moving across to McBride, and widening slowly as they did so. His words cut off, and Gilliatt wondered whether McBride had left it too late. He pushed himself and Maureen forward, toppling their combined weight onto Riordan. The rifle was coming to a bead on McBride, then he lost sight of it under Maureen's body. It discharged as he fell on top of her, and she screamed. Gilliatt felt a blank emptiness as he rolled aside, striking out with his fist at Riordan's head, which bobbed into his view. His fist connected with Riordan's temple. Maureen went on screaming and screaming and Gilliatt moved slowly — too slowly it seemed — away from her body, clambering up her frame to fasten his hands on Riordan's rifle as the Irishman disentangled the Remington Mk. 1R from World War I from beneath Maureen and tried to bring it to bear on Gilliatt.

  Gilliatt heard one shot, then the click of a bolt — the man Paddy's Lee Enfield Mk. - then a second shot and a third, punctuated by the noise of the bolt-action. He let Riordan pull the rifle towards him, and then pushed, smashing the stock into his face. Riordan howled, letting go of the rifle. Gilliatt hit him again, and whirled round, fumbling with the bolt.

  McBride was standing very still, the Lee Enfield in his hands. Just in front of him, Paddy lay unconscious, while across the barn the whey-faced
man with the half-formed features lay on his back, three holes in close grouping in his coat, an old Mauser C96 still in his hand, unfired. Maureen, unwounded but terrified and hysterical, went on screaming. McBride crossed the barn, turned her face to his and slapped her three times across the cheek. She subsided into sobbing which racked her body like unassuageable grief. McBride looked at the unconscious Riordan, then at Gilliatt.

  "I think we'd better be leaving, don't you?" he said with a grin. He was as tense as a wound spring, the pleasure of winning and killing running through his frame like electricity.

  "My God," Gilliatt muttered, feeling his legs give way. He sat down untidily alongside Riordan. "My God, I could have killed her," he added, looking blankly at Maureen.

  "You'll have enough time to make it up to her," McBride observed. "When you've dropped me off, you'll take care of her." It was like an order. Gilliatt looked up at him, bemused.

  "What the hell's the matter with you?" he shouted, looking from McBride to Maureen and back again. "We could have got your wife killed between us. Doesn't that matter to you at all?" McBride appeared unimpressed. "What the hell's the matter with you?" he asked again, more softly.

  McBride shook his head. "Don't confuse the issue with moral speculations, Peter. I'm going to kill Drummond and you're going to look after Maureen. Those are the assigned roles. You drop me off at Kilbrittain and take her on to Cork."

  "Don't you care about her at all?"

  "It isn't relevant at the moment," McBride said without emotion. Gilliatt saw him on an outcrop of egocentricity, not even bothering to signal to a vessel that might rescue him. McBride crossed to the body on the floor and re-moved the Mauser from its grasp. He weighed it in his hand and seemed satisfied with it. "Killing him with a German gun might be more than appropriate, don't you think?"

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Process of Elimination

  November

  Mcbride pulled Riordan's small Morris over to the side of the road, wrenched on the handbrake, and switched off the engine. To Gilliatt and Maureen, the silence was suddenly ominous and foreboding. McBride had skirted Clonakilty and then taken the road north before doubling back southwards towards Crosswinds Farm and Kilbrittain. They had encountered no German — or Irish — troops in the hour and a half's driving. The night was heavy and wet as a facecloth when McBride wound down the window, but it had stopped raining. The sky showed black and starless through appearing tears in the cloud cover.

  Crosswinds Farm was three miles away from them, across the fields that fell away from the hilltop where McBride had chosen to stop, and beyond the scattered few lights of Kilbrittain.

  "You can't attempt it," Gilliatt began, aware of the dangerous, heedless smile on McBride's face. It irritated him, and he changed his tactics. "You haven't a shred of proof against him, Michael!" McBride's smile faded.

  "Is that all you have to say, Peter? Fair play for Drummond? I'd forgotten — you're both in the Navy."

  "So are you — or supposed to be." McBride shook his head.

  "Drummond's broken the contract I had with him. God, you were there! What more proof do you need of his collaboration with the Germans?"

  "Those weren't Germans. They were your countrymen. Irish."

  "And that's your English answer to everything, is it? It's only the bloody stupid Irish — let them get on with it. Is that your solution? Drummond's working for the Germans, damn you!"

  Maureen interrupted them. "Michael, come with us. Whatever the truth of it, you can't do anything by yourself." McBride seemed abashed without being softened or dissuaded. He shook his head in a minute, determined movement.

  "I'm sorry, lovey, it just won't do, you see. Drummond tried to kill me, he's tried to have all of us killed. He's not getting away with that."

  "Stupid heroics—" she began.

  "No. It's much older than heroics. Revenge."

  "For God's sake, don't do it!" she wailed. "I'm going to have our baby. Do you think I want him to have to listen to tales about the father he never saw?" She clutched his hands convulsively, tears streaming down her face. McBride looked as if he had been cheated, that she had played to other rules than his and beaten him at the game. "For God's sake think of the child if you won't think of me."

  McBride's face was twisted and shaped by conflicting emotions. Gilliatt found their intensity almost unbearable. Then McBride climbed swiftly out of the car.

  "I'll be back," he said.

  "Damn you, Michael McBride, damn you!"

  "Maybe — maybe," he said, then nodded to Gilliatt and strode off into the night, dropping swiftly out of sight down the hillside towards the lights of the hamlet.

  "Damn you — damn you!" Maureen kept calling out after him while Gilliatt got out, and went round the Morris to the driver's seat. He slammed the door angrily, started the engine — over-revving, the tyres squealing out of the dirt at the side of the road — then headed north-east again, on the road towards Ballinadee and the main road to Cork. He was angry, his nerves were being shredded by the woman's ceaseless cries, magnified in the tin box of the car, and he wanted nothing more to do with Michael McBride and his wife and the Irish. His simple duty was to reach the authorities in Cork — preferably the British authorities — and tell them what, as far as he knew, was happening. It did not matter what then happened, it did not matter what was or was not being done — this was his job. If only the bloody woman behind him would stop wailing and screaming—

  He only realized that he had taken a wrong turning and was on the Kinsale road heading back towards the coast when he saw the signpost in the headlights and, almost at the same moment beyond the crossroads, a barrier of barrels across the road and grey uniforms passing to and fro just at the fringe of the glare of the lights. Then one soldier stepped into the spill of light, machine-pistol at the ready, and began walking towards the car.

  "Shut up, damn you!" Gilliatt barked, and the woman subsided sobbing into the back seat. Gilliatt cursed himself, watching the German approaching the car, joined by a second soldier. Both of them were fifteen yards from the Morris. Gilliatt shoved the gear-stick into reverse, revved, and backed away down the road, switching off his headlights as he did so. He could hear the shouting over the noise of the engine, and he swung the car round on the handbrake, accelerating recklessly with the back wheels in soft dirt at the side of the road; the car suddenly jerked free and careered away down the road. "Keep your head down!" he yelled with a dangerous elation bubbling up in his chest and a lightness, an invincibility enveloping his thoughts.

  He ducked, too, and the bullets thudded into the boot of the Morris, shattered the small back window over Maureen's cowering form, and pattered on the road behind them. He kept his foot pressed down, trying to remember the road and how long the straight stretch lasted, bounced the car suddenly off the bank as the road began to descend, and switched on the headlights. A bend in the road leapt at him, and he swung the wheel furiously, braking with a squeal of rubber, and went through it, the car immediately slowing on an uphill stretch.

  "You all right?" he said hoarsely.

  "Yes — yes, I think so," he heard in a child-like voice from the back seat.

  "Thank God for something!" Cork appeared a distant, infinitely desirable oasis in the chaos of the night. No more wrong turns, he thought. Straight through, no stops.

  * * *

  McBride squeezed through a gap in the hedge, and jumped the ditch. His trouser-legs were sodden with rain from the grass, and his boots were beginning to let in water. Kilbrittain was behind him now, and he could smell the sea on the light breeze that was moving the clouds sluggishly, opening up gaps of starlit darkness. He had avoided two German patrols, each time the effect of night and secrecy and silence leaking more dangerous adrenalin into his system. The old Lee Enfield was cold and potent in his hand and the Mauser a hard-edged shape in his waistband. He was less than half a mile from Crosswinds Farm, approaching it from the north. That last hedge might e
ven have marked the boundary of Drummond's land.

  McBride felt unfettered. The cramping, desolating noises of his wife's parting curse, the wild, hampering words she had yelled at him to stop him, had diminished. He had digested them, incorporated them within his single-minded purpose. Nothing was going to prevent him from killing Drummond. Revenge whirled up in him like dry bracken set alight, consuming reason and perspective and the future. His life was a succession of immediate, vivid moments — the setting of one foot in front of another, the recognition of slopes and lines of the land, the smell of the sea, the rifle in his hand, the wetness of his trouser-legs, the images of Drummond sitting in kitchen or study or sitting-room — through which he moved like a shadow, impervious to larger, vaguer experiences or imaginings. He had even lost the capacity to judge what he was doing, to see it in any moral light. His one certainty was that Drummond had tried to kill him, which had spilled a corrosive desire for vengeance over brain-cells and bodily organs that made him hunger for destruction.

  Drummond would expect him. Drummond was Irish enough to understand what he had started and how McBride would expect to end it. The farm would be under heavy guard. McBride bared his teeth, not with the effort of the slope but with anticipation. When he topped the gentle rise, the framework of hedges was suddenly clear in quick moonlight and in the centre of the maze-like pattern there was the white low farmhouse. And the patrols.

  He slid into a hollow, ignoring the wet grass soaking his buttocks and back, and watched. Before the moon disappeared behind more distressed cloud, he counted six guards, all Germans in uniform — in three pairs, moving like figures from some ornamental clock, round and round the garden and the vegetable plot and the drive that surrounded the house. They were contained, it seemed, by the pattern of hedges and small trees, as if they required the protection of the lights from the farmhouse and the proximity of its walls. They were small, ineffectual creatures, hardly any protection at all for Drummond. He slipped out of the hollow after checking the progress of the cloud across the moon's face, and made his way carefully down the slope to the shelter of another hedge. The nearest patrol was a hundred yards away, moving across his line of sight, skirting the fruit trees at the bottom of the garden. He clicked the bolt of the Lee Enfield as gently, lovingly as he could. It made the smallest noise, but he held his breath. He could hear, on the breeze, the quiet conversation of the patrol, even the sound of machine-pistol against bayonet once or twice, one of them clearing his throat, spitting.