by Mitch Silver
Even among the cold-blooded killers of his government’s security forces, Ramesh stood out for his varied skill set. He was a dead shot with any sort of weapon; he had an acrobat’s strength and wiry frame (the better to hang off the back of a speeding motorbike); and he had a head for whatever sort of high-tech toy came along, like his Luminox night-vision goggles and his SureFire light gun with its 460 beautiful lumens. Today’s job, though, would be very low-tech. Once Simon Pure secured the document that Briefing had assured them was in the Greenberg woman’s house, the rest would be up to Ramesh and his modified Remington. Nothing trendy, just a good American rifle. Small caliber, but deadly enough—dependable and common as dirt. He would make it sing, as he had on those other occasions. Poetic justice, he thought, that the singing should come from the choir loft.
A young man, possibly a student, was shuffling through sheet music at the organ. Ramesh couldn’t see them, but he could hear one or two wedding guests conversing as they took their seats beneath him. Were it a Church of England wedding, it would be nineteen minutes precisely to the first clear shot, with the opening hymns out of the way and the father having deposited the bride at the designated spot. As a boy, Ramesh had relieved the boredom in his father’s church by timing all the ceremonies with the same watch he was wearing now. The one his father had given him.
He sighed inwardly. Anglicans were nothing if not predictable. But these mix-and-match, thrown-
together American affairs—all à la carte, with people facing each other and reading their vows off pieces of paper and musicians breaking in at odd moments—threw timing right out the window. He’d have to be in the ready position the whole way; hence, the cushioned arm rest. Bring the gun up at the last moment. Ramesh had worn the unfashionable brown suit so the rifle and its wooden stock might rest, butt down, against his leg without contrasting with his clothing. He needn’t have bothered. No one ever gave him a second look. He sighed again, knowing his English father must have had the stronger genes to have given him such an un-Indian appearance. The upside was, it served him well in this line of work.
He looked at the phone again. Simon had been in the house for twelve minutes. It would take him no more than fifteen, twenty at the outside, no matter how well they thought they had hidden it. This one would be a good case study for the first-year trainees: go in when the targets were known to be occupied for a predictable amount of time away from the premises; locate and retrieve the package; communicate to the shooter when you were clear, and disappear.
He wondered what the trainees would make of Devlin’s death. It was incomprehensible, an experienced field agent neutralized by two amateurs. Had it been the woman, some scruple about killing her? No, that didn’t compute. Devlin had killed an unarmed woman and her boyfriend before. Ramesh could see him now, crouching there in that Paris tunnel and holding the joystick of a brake box as Ramesh and Simon Pure had sped past him on the motorbike. No, killing a woman had been no problem for Devlin.
The thought started him down the same old unpleasant byways in his mind. Why wasn’t he, Ramesh, more troubled about killing? Killing female civilians, at that? He had helped his employers “take out” a princess in Paris. Such a loaded expression. Most of the pros he knew drew the line at women. Was it something to do with his mother?
Of course, the Irish woman in the car…That had really been about the bloke sitting next to her, the government accountant with the crazy teeth. It was Ramesh’s incredibly good fortune that the bank manager had wanted to eliminate the woman at the same time that his Service had received the contract on the man. Ramesh had seen to it, freelance. Ramesh and his very popular photon-light gun.
The first chords of organ music startled him and made him lift his elbow just enough so the heavy newspaper started to slide to the left. Ramesh tried to catch it, but he couldn’t really turn his body because he had to keep his right leg pressed against the gun so it too wouldn’t fall. Several sections of the paper fluttered to the floor.
The music, reverberating up here in the loft, was loud enough to cover any sounds the falling newspapers were making, but he looked over the railing anyway. The gawky groom, Brown, was already standing in place next to his best man. Three bridesmaids, in three mismatched styles of dresses, were chatting together on the other side of the minister, who was signaling the organist to begin “Here Comes the Bride.” Ugh, Wagner.
Ramesh was careful to retrieve and fold each section before sliding it in among the others. First, the classified adverts, including a separate insert for cars and trucks. Then sports and the cinema listings. The last section Ramesh picked up was headed “Local.” He was about to restore it to the main body of the newspaper when his eye was caught by the lead article. “Yale Library Announces Major Find.” Well, they would lead with a Yale story in the local news. He turned his attention back to the scene in front of him. The groom was smiling as an older woman approached him and veered off to the left. And then there was the bride, tall, determined, moving deliberately into her predestined position. Apparently there was no father to give her away, to block—even temporarily—the execution of their plan.
The minister stepped forward. Until he stepped back again, Ramesh wouldn’t have the targets where he wanted them, side by side. He let his eyes drift back down to the paper. The organist was making a meal of the final fat Wagnerian chords as the bride finished her march. Ramesh debated bringing the gun up now, but he thought better of it. You don’t want to stay in the ready position overlong. Contracted muscles can freeze or twitch involuntarily. Bad for business. Something in the first paragraph…
“Yale University’s Beinecke Library announced today the acquisition of a previously unknown memoir by Ian Fleming, the popular novelist who served with British intelligence during World War II. The memoir is believed to have been written…”
Something was nagging at the edges of his consciousness. Ramesh was famous in the British Secret Service for his focus, his ability to block out everything, including the details of other team members’ assignments, so he could better concentrate on his task: the kicker teeing the ball up after a try, building his little mound of earth before putting the leather oval down. The crowd may yell, nerves may scream. Still, you “do your thing” and aim for the uprights to the exclusion of everything else. But…hadn’t there been something about a manuscript? What was the package Simon was after? And where was Simon, anyway?
No new messages. He didn’t like doubt. He didn’t like half of one thing and half another. Ramesh was an all-or-nothing man. That’s what was so satisfying about his profession. It was hit. Or miss. Life. Or death. Nothing relative, nothing subjective. A binary function, like a switch. On or off. Yes or no. Shame or glory.
“Dearly beloved, we are gathered together in the sight…”
At least the opening was conventional. It lifted Ramesh’s spirits a little. If this train would only stay on the rails, he could be out of here by half past at the latest. A filling on the bottom right was starting to give him trouble. He’d have to see Dr. Choudhry when he got back. The Congregational minister—odd choice for a woman named Greenberg, no?—seemed to be settling in for a while.
“…in the holy bonds of matrimony.”
He slid the Local pages back into the rest of the Register, but he must not have nested them properly into the other sections because about three inches of text stuck out the bottom. “Yale announced it had already begun circulating the memoir, for purposes of authentication, among other experts in the field, many of whom are based in Europe. In describing the find…”
His phone trembled in his pocket. Ramesh looked at the screen. “No sale.” It was shocking not to see the “Pkg received” he’d expected.
“Do you, Scott Harcourt Brown, take Amy Marcia Greenberg…”
Ramesh was pushing the buttons on his phone as fast as his fingers would allow, forwarding Simon’s message to Homing Pigeon. (The staff guys got code names. Even the assignments had code names
they made you memorize. Meanwhile the field men—who took all the risk—had to work in the clear. Was anyone else as irritated about it as he was?)
“…to be your lawfully wedded…”
Homing Pigeon’s response was immediate. “Proceed.” Ramesh had to admire the man’s decisiveness.
“…to have and to hold, from this day forward…”
Almost there. The moment they’d trained for. When he would put down the phone and pick up the gun. When the spheres came into alignment, when the man would lift the woman’s veil and kiss her. The moment for the kill.
“…as long as you both shall live.”
He put down the phone but he didn’t pick up the gun. Something wasn’t right. Reasonable doubt was all right for juries, but he had to be beyond all doubt. Want to be a robot? Join the regular army. Ramesh was thinking. The Service was the thinking man’s force, and the twenty or so G-9s saw themselves as entrepreneurs. Civil servants who were at the same time free agents of a kind. He was thinking about the piece in the paper. About Simon’s failure. About the mission, its code name, everything.
“The library’s Executive Director, Dr. Ralph Confessore, called it ‘Terribly well-documented. Though Fleming is popularly known as the creator of James Bond, we believe Provenance will have major repercussions within and beyond the fields of military and diplomatic scholarship, and…cont. on page three.”
It wasn’t doubt that made him pick up the phone again and dial 101-#. It was certainty. The voice on the tie-line said, “This is a priority call. It will be terminated in exactly forty-five seconds.”
Forty-six seconds later, Ramesh had aborted Operation James Bond. He sent a text message to Homing Pigeon, “No sale,” and put the safety back on the gun before returning it to its place under the loosened floorboard for Post-Ops to retrieve later. He rose and, before going, looked back at the happy scene.
“You may kiss the bride.”
Author’s Note
Some people who have read this book before publication have asked me how much of In Secret Service is fact and how much fiction. First off, it’s a novel and not a history. So I’ve felt perfectly free to start with the actual life stories of several dozen real people—among them King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, Winston Churchill, Anthony Blunt, Rudolf Hess, and, of course, Ian Fleming—and work around or extrapolate from the facts to create the tale I wish to tell.
For instance, Winston Churchill really did write that encomium to Valentine Fleming; Wallis really did have an Aunt Bessie and Uncle Sol; Anthony Blunt really was outed in Parliament by Margaret Thatcher; there really was a group of FDR’s friends that met in The Room, a furnished apartment in the house at 34 East Sixty-second Street in New York that made the front page of all the New York papers when it was blown up by its last owner in the summer of 2006.
On the other hand, all the modern characters are made up, as is Fleming’s entire, lengthy (I know, I know) letter to Amy. I have no idea if there ever was an entrance to the Yale Club directly from Grand Central Terminal. There ought to have been one. And I don’t have firsthand knowledge, nor do I have anyone else’s firsthand knowledge, of Wallis Simpson’s sexual equipment. Androgen insensitivity syndrome is merely one of the guesses people have made to account for Wallis’s stunning success with men, one I decided to go with, as I did the contents of Wallis’s China dossier.
I am greatly indebted to Martin Allen, whose book Hidden Agenda: How the Duke of Windsor Betrayed the Allies revealed the existence of a letter the Duke of Windsor wrote to Adolf Hitler in 1939. I reimagined the contents of the letter to make it more overtly sinister, so it might function as my MacGuffin, the Hitchcockian thing everyone is chasing after. I also benefited from Mr. Allen’s research into Charles Eugene Bedaux.
Then there are the things that are neither definitely factual nor fictional. Edward and Wallis might have bumped into Ian Fleming in Austria in the winter of 1935. They were all there at the time. King George VI really did authorize Anthony Blunt to retrieve a damaging letter from a German castle at the end of World War II. Possibly Fleming went along, though probably not. Guy Marcus Trundle really was a London car dealer who was romantically linked to Wallis. Perhaps he was helping Churchill. Prince Philip grew up in St. Cloud outside Paris. He might have been home on leave at Christmas in 1939.
How and why did Princess Diana really die? What was Rudolf Hess doing stumbling out of a burning plane in Scotland one night in May 1941? What kept Anthony Blunt safe and secure more than a dozen years after his cover was blown? In Secret Service is my Theory of Everything Mysterious, a connect-the-dots picture with hundreds of real dots and hundreds more of invented ones.
For the reader who is as much of a history geek as I am, I include a short bibliography:
Martin Allen, Hidden Agenda: How the Duke of Windsor Betrayed the Allies, New York: M. Evans & Co., 2002.
Andrew Boyle, The Fourth Man: The Definitive Account of Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, and Donald Maclean and Who Recruited Them to Spy for Russia, New York: Dial Press, 1979.
Charles Higham, The Duchess of Windsor: The Secret Life, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988.
Jon King and John Beveridge, Princess Diana, The Hidden Evidence: How MI6 and the CIA Were Involved in the Death of Princess Diana, New York: S.P.I. Books, 2001.
Andrew Lycett, Ian Fleming: The Man Behind James Bond, Atlanta: Turner Publishing, 1995.
Kirsty McLeod, Battle Royal: Edward VIII & George VI: Brother Against Brother, London: Constable and Co., 1999.
John Pearson, The Life of Ian Fleming, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966.
Joseph E. Persico, Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage, New York: Random House, 2001.
Susan A. Williams, The People’s King: The True Story of the Abdication, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Acknowledgments
First, thanks to my family, Ellen, Sloane, and Perry, for suffering through this book with me. Thanks to Robin and Peter Jovanovich, who graciously put up with my reading aloud to them; to Fred and Barbara Cummings, for their legal and literary help; to Dennis Soohoo; Tania Chamlian; Richard Butt; Steve Forcione; Davidson Gordon; Allen and Whitney Clark; Katie Brown; Bill Gedale; Steve Otis; Claire Tisne; Mary Charles Von Canon Sisk; Shelly Coon; Ed Lamance; and my brother Ken, the nonpareil art historian. Thanks to my editor, Trish Todd, and her assistant, Danielle Friedman; my publisher, Mark Gompertz; and everyone at Touchstone, including Sarah Bellgraph, Marcia Burch, John Del Gaizo, Joyce Galletta, Toby Greenberg, Jurgen Kleist, Cherlynne Li, Christine Lloreda, Jamie McDonald, Joy O’Meara, Jan Pisciotta, Joyce Ravid, Elisa Rivlin, Martha Schwartz, and Ellen Silberman. Thanks to Brad Meltzer for the nice words, and to Jim Patterson, Ted Bell, Dick Marek, and Jim Othmer for the helpful ones. A big thank-you to Larry Kirshbaum and everyone at LJK Literary. And, of course, a bouquet to the person who made that possible, Martha Otis. Cheers!