Brady soon confirmed as much: “We’re going for a walk. A short one.” He handed his gun to Tiernan, put on the long coat that McColl remembered from Paterson, and took the weapon back. “This way,” Brady said, inviting him through an open door at the side of a bar and into the passage beyond. McColl walked slowly down it, supremely aware of the gun in his back, trying to steel himself. If he did nothing, he was a dead man—he had no doubts on that score. Doing something would probably end the same way, but there was always a chance. And it was better to die fighting back than just let the bastard gun him down.
Which was all very well in theory. He felt almost frozen by fear and oh, so eager to heed those voices advising him to wait for the perfect opportunity.
“Stop,” Brady told him as they reached a door to the outside world. “You’d better take a look,” he told Tiernan, increasing the pressure of the barrel in McColl’s back as the Irishman squeezed by.
The door opened, and rain blew in. Cursing, Tiernan stepped out into what looked like an alley between buildings. “All clear!” he shouted back after glancing both ways.
“Out,” Brady ordered.
Now, McColl thought. It wasn’t much of a chance, but it had to be better than none at all. He stepped away from the gun faster than Brady expected and levered himself around the jamb with one hand. Tiernan was momentarily in the way, but the force of McColl’s onslaught knocked the Irishman down, and the dark, rainswept alley lay open before him. Twenty feet to run, he told himself, and not in a straight line. Who was he kidding?
He heard Brady’s first shot scrape along a wall a split second ahead of the booming gun. He felt the force of the second, was aware of his sprint turning into a stagger as he passed through the mouth of the alley. He didn’t know where he’d been hit, but it took every ounce of will to keep his legs moving across the cobbled quay, toward the only possible place of safety. It seemed to get no nearer, and his body was almost at the point of giving up on him when another blow in the back provided the propulsion he couldn’t provide for himself, throwing him over the edge of the quay and into the side of the ship that was berthed alongside, to drop through the dark well between them.
Even in July the water was cold enough to jerk him back from unconsciousness. He experienced one brief moment of panic as he bumped into the harbor bottom, but growing up beside the sea had cured any fear of water, and he had the presence of mind to seek out the faintest strip of light above and rise painfully up between ship and dock. He knew he’d been hit at least twice, but it was difficult to tell how serious the wounds were, and for the moment it hardly seemed to matter—if those shots hadn’t killed him, his enemies still might.
They would be looking down, he thought, but they wouldn’t be able to see him. And the rain on the water would mask any sounds.
He was right, but the next few moments were still terrifying. When his head broke surface, it took forever to clear his eyes, and the night sky above seemed so much brighter than he’d expected. And there were two silhouetted heads up above, leaning over the lip of the dock. He waited for gunfire, but none came. They couldn’t see him.
He edged closer in among the pilings in search of something to grab. When he found it, the pain of seizing hold almost made him cry out, and he had to use the other arm. He wondered how long it would be before he lost consciousness—he had to be losing blood, and he still wasn’t sure where he was wounded. The second bullet had hit him in the shoulder, uncomfortably close to the neck, but the first was lower down, and the only organ he was sure it had missed was his heart.
He heard a voice above—Brady’s, he thought, but he couldn’t make out what the American had said.
“He must be dead,” Tiernan said, loudly enough for him to hear. “You put two bullets in him.”
The American said something McColl couldn’t catch.
“And we have a boat that’s waiting,” Tiernan reminded him.
If Brady replied, McColl didn’t hear it. For the next five minutes, all he heard was the rain and the water lapping against the pilings. He was feeling weaker with each passing second. He had to do something.
Leaning out, he could see no other heads up above. He felt sure they were gone, but if they weren’t, they weren’t. He couldn’t stay where he was.
Half swimming, half clinging, he worked his way down the quayside wall until he found a ladder of rusted iron rings. He had no idea how long it took to pull himself up, but the last thing he remembered was slumping forward onto the cobbles, straining to roll himself free of the edge, and lying stretched out on his back with raindrops tap-tap-tapping on his face.
For the second time that year, he woke up in a hospital ward. According to the blue-eyed nurse on duty, he’d been discovered by a passing constable and brought into the hospital on a collier’s cart. Her smile as she tucked in his sheet reminded him a little of Caitlin, and he felt his heart tighten. Now that Colm knew, so would she.
A passing sense of relief, which he ascribed to the end of pretense, quickly gave way to a much more lasting sense of loss. It was over; it had to be.
His body felt strangely unimpaired until he tried to move. Then pain kicked in with a vengeance, as if he were being stabbed in several different places. After a few minutes, he was sufficiently recovered to call the nurse, who told him a doctor would soon be around to explain his condition.
But it was Dunwood who arrived first. McColl told him all he could, which wasn’t much—there were nine of them, including one German and at least two Americans, and most if not all had been about to take ship. “You might still be able to intercept them,” he added, noticing for the first time that it was still dark outside.
Dunwood shook his head. “Too good a start,” he said.
The penny dropped. “What day is this?”
“It’s Tuesday evening. You’ve been out for nearly forty-eight hours—they’re in England by now.”
“Shit.”
“Which probably means you’re safe enough here,” Dunwood continued as he got up to leave. “But just in case, there’s an armed constable outside the door.”
An hour or so later, the doctor turned up. McColl had lost a great deal of blood from the two wounds, and for a while on the Sunday they’d been “a trifle concerned.” But now it was only a matter of time and healing. The wound in his shoulder wasn’t serious, but he wouldn’t be able to do much with his left arm for a couple of weeks. Hold a cigarette perhaps, but not much more. The other bullet had passed between his right lung and his liver, narrowly missing both but creating “a bit of a mess.” That, too, would need time to heal, and he could expect a fair amount of stiffness and pain.
“How long before I’m out of here?”
“Ten days if you’re lucky, but then you’ll need some convalescence.”
It wasn’t a rosy prospect, given how fast things seemed to be moving in the world outside. When she came to empty his bedpan next morning, the staff nurse was full of the news that Madame Caillaux had been acquitted in the sensational French murder trial, but she was less up to date on Balkan affairs. It was only when he got hold of a newspaper that McColl discovered Serbia’s less fortunate fate. The Austrians had declared war the previous day, and fighting had already begun.
Over the following days, he lay there in the crowded ward with nothing to do but watch and listen to the other patients, pick at the dreadful food, and stare at the bare gray walls. In truth, he didn’t have much to be proud of. In the unlikely event he would ever get to offer one, he rehearsed a defense of his conduct toward Caitlin and found it far from convincing. When he caught himself hoping that Colm wouldn’t live to tell her, the sense of self-disgust was almost overwhelming.
He wondered where Colm and his comrades-in-arms were now and what they were doing. Each day he scanned the papers the nurses brought him for news of an outrage in London or some other city, but thus far in vain. If they’d been caught, Dunwood would have told him, so they had to be out there somewhere, wa
iting for their chosen moment to strike.
By Friday he was able to walk to the toilet and to sit at other bedsides and talk to his fellow patients. Ever since the Austrian declaration, the main topic of conversation was the possibility of British involvement if the conflict started to spread. The consensus was no—why should Britain involve itself in a Continental squabble over a murdered archduke? No one even knew where Bosnia was, and the whole business seemed like a comic opera.
Dunwood, when he came again on the Saturday evening, offered rather a different slant. Germany had just declared war on Russia, he told McColl in a whisper, as he plunked some grapes on the bedside table. Which meant that Germany would also declare war on France in the next couple of days.
“Why?” McColl wanted to know.
“Because they have only one strategic plan, and that involves defeating France before Russia has time to mobilize.”
McColl could hardly believe it. “They’ve been that stupid?”
“It looks like it. And attacking France will bring us in.”
“Definitely?”
“I think so. The French moved their whole fleet to the Mediterranean because we promised to cover the Channel, so we can hardly abandon them now.”
“Will people really accept that as a reason for war?”
“Who knows? The government are hoping the Germans invade Belgium and let them off the hook.”
“And will they?”
Dunwood shrugged and helped himself to a grape. “Everything we know suggests they will. They’ve given themselves only six weeks to beat France, and their plan involves swinging round the left end of the French line and enveloping them from the rear. The wider the swing, the better, and the more likely they’ll go through Belgium.”
“But if we know this, so must the French.”
Dunwood smiled. “According to our people in France, it doesn’t fit in with the French generals’ plans, so they’ve decided not to believe it.”
“You’re kidding me.” The older McColl got, the more stupid those in authority seemed.
“The worst thing is—guess who’ll be taking up position on the French army’s left, plumb in front of the German charge?”
“Us.”
“Exactly. According to the plans our generals have drawn up with the French, the British Expeditionary Force is supposed to set sail four days after war is declared and take its place in the line eight days after that. The way it looks at the moment, they’ll arrive in northern France about the same time as the Germans.”
McColl clutched at a straw. “But someone could still stick a spoke in a wheel and stop the whole damn thing in its tracks.”
“It’s too late,” Dunwood said. “Nothing’ll stop it now.”
He was right. Two days later the German army moved into Belgium. McColl was discharged the next day, but not to a place of convalescence. Despite the best efforts of Cumming, Kell, and the regular police, Tiernan and his team were still at large, and McColl was wanted back in London. Only he had clapped eyes on the nine wanted men.
The Arun Bridge
It was only after his ship docked at Holyhead that McColl discovered his country was now at war. His gloomy reaction to this news was not shared by his fellow passengers on the London express, most of whom seemed unreasonably excited by the prospect. He sat there listening to two young men exchanging heroic fantasies and knew that Jed would embrace the same delusions. What better excuse to leave Glasgow?
“Express” proved something of a misnomer. The journey across North Wales seemed to last forever, and every stop-start offered painful reminders of the damage Brady’s gun had inflicted. There were no obvious reasons for the delays, and he could only surmise that the needs of the military were already beginning to gum up the system. The platforms at Crewe were certainly crowded with uniforms, and joining the main line did little to improve their timekeeping—it was midafternoon by the time the train reached Euston.
The terminus was crowded, the atmosphere more febrile than usual. He thought about going straight to Cumming, but his flat was more or less on the way—a quick bath and fresh clothes might raise him from the dead. The taxi ride to Windmill Street took a couple of minutes, and he managed the several flights of stairs with rather more ease than he expected. Among the small pile of mail waiting on the carpet were two ominous letters, one from his mother and one from Caitlin. Which, he wondered, would be the unhappier read?
Before reading them, he picked up the telephone. There was no reason it shouldn’t be working, but he still felt slightly surprised that it was. He rang Cumming’s office, ascertained from the secretary that the man himself was there, and arranged to see him in an hour or so.
His mother’s letter had been posted on Saturday evening, which confirmed his worst suspicions. He sliced the envelope open with the paper knife and extracted the single sheet of paper. Jed had taken the train to London so that he and Mac could enlist together. The letter, he knew, was a plea for help, but she hadn’t managed to put that in words. Asking things of others wasn’t something she did anymore.
Caitlin’s letter could hardly have been more different. She was coming to England to see him, after stopping off in Ireland to tell Colm “a few home truths.” Her brother’s letters home were worrying them all, and she felt she had to spare the time. But she wouldn’t stay long in Dublin and was really looking forward to seeing him in London. Her letter was dated July 15; he had, he now remembered, assured her he would be back in England by the end of that month.
Maybe the war had changed her plans, he thought. Maybe she was already in London. She would probably have reached Dublin before her brother left; if so, she now knew who McColl worked for and might even think he was dead. If she turned up here, it would only be to shoot him.
He placed her letter on top of his mother’s and stood there for several moments, hands on the table, head bowed down. “No time for regrets,” he eventually murmured, and went to run a bath. Half an hour later, his suit smelling faintly of mothballs, he was hailing a taxi on Tottenham Court Road.
Cumming was waiting in his aerie, where a space had been made for a camp bed—the Service had gone to war. “You look exhausted,” were his first words, which he might equally well have applied to himself. “But I take it you’re sufficiently recovered to lend a hand.” It was a statement, not a query.
McColl had nothing to add to what he’d told Dunwood about the fateful evening, and Cumming had no fresh news of the week-old manhunt. “Special Branch have turned all the Irish neighborhoods upside down, and big rewards have been posted, but not a glimmer.”
“If they have any sense, they’ll avoid the Irish neighborhoods,” McColl thought out loud.
“Perhaps,” Cumming conceded, “but won’t they be conspicuous anywhere else? There are eight of them.”
“Eight?” McColl asked.
“The German turned up at their embassy a week ago—he’s on his way home, with all the other diplomats. He was identified from the pictures Kell’s man took—his real name’s von Busch, and he’s a major in the German army. An explosives expert.”
“That makes sense.”
“And it’s not the worst of it. A huge amount of dynamite was stolen from a quarry in Surrey four nights ago. The night watchman had his throat cut.”
“Oh, Jesus. So what do you want me to do?”
“Get a good night’s sleep. Then tomorrow morning start going over the same ground again. You’re the only one who’s seen them all, and you might see a face you recognize. I know it’s a long shot, but there’s nothing else. Bar the waiting. I’ll send an automobile to pick you up—the police have loaned us half a dozen.”
McColl took another taxi home and summoned up the energy to call Tim Athelbury. It was Evelyn who answered.
“So you’re back at last,” she drawled, friendly in her usual cold way. She showed no interest in where he had been, simply called her brother to the phone.
As Mac had suggested, Tim Athe
lbury felt no real resentment at being left in the lurch, by either McColl or his chosen replacement. “Mac quit this morning,” he said. “He and your brother went down to the enlisting office together.”
They talked for a few minutes more, but McColl was hardly listening, and his first port of call after hanging up was a dust-covered bottle of whiskey. He poured himself a generous shot, stared at it awhile, then carefully poured it back. In the bedroom he tore the blankets off the bed, gingerly undressed, and stretched himself out on the sheet. Tomorrow was another day, and it could hardly be worse than the one he’d just had.
Next morning he had just finished shaving and dressing when someone knocked on the door. Cumming’s lift, he assumed, but the face that confronted him was hers. She looked lovely as ever, but the frozen expression told him she knew.
“Jack,” she said coldly, and walked past him into the flat. “Once upon a time, I was looking forward to seeing this.”
He could think of no response.
She continued on into his living room, then turned to face him, anger glittering in her green eyes. “When I got to Dublin, there was a letter waiting for me. From Colm. He said you’re a British agent and that you used me to infiltrate my family. Are you? Did you?”
“I do work for the British government.”
“As a spy.”
“Other countries have spies—we have agents.”
The joke fell predictably flat. “And you used me?”
“Yes, but …” He fell silent. The buts had felt real at the time, but now they seemed utterly spurious.
“Is that all you’ve got to say?”
He shook his head. “I fell in love with you long before that.” He hesitated. How much could he tell her? Why not everything? “In China I was spying on the Germans. In San Francisco I was investigating the links between the Germans and their Indian revolutionary friends when I found out that both had links to the local Irish republicans. It was pure coincidence that your chaperone turned out to be one of the couriers they use, but once I’d found a letter in his suitcase containing details of an Irish-German plot … well, my boss already knew that I was involved with you”—McColl couldn’t bring himself to admit that he had asked London to check up on her—“and once he found out who your father was …”
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