Too Bad to Die

by Francine Mathews

  “I was robbed?”

  “Your papers and money are missing. Even though the place had more guards last night than Fort Knox. I figure you were rolled by an enlisted guy. Nobody else could get in or out of this place. But that’s why you’re alive, Ian. Nobody’d kill a man for his passport and spare change.”

  Ian did not argue with the ambassador. He said nothing about Nazi agents or a plot to assassinate the Big Three. Bletchley’s decoded traffic was classified as ULTRA, and only a handful of people were allowed to see it. Kirk wasn’t one of them.

  Ian’s head throbbed. He wanted to cut it off and lie down again in peace. It was tempting to accept that he was sidelined, out of combat, done with this.

  Do you mean to say, 007, that you allowed yourself to convalesce in comfort while Hitler murdered the only hope for victory in this dreadful war?

  You lay back and let the Nazis win?

  “I appreciate all you’ve done, sir.” He turned the wretched granite of his skull carefully toward the ambassador. “But I have a few more favors to ask, I’m afraid.”

  “Shoot.”

  “I need my passport replaced as soon as possible. I need some cash. And I absolutely must send a cable.”

  —

  FOUR HOURS LATER he had managed to stand, swallow some morphia for the pain, vomit it immediately, and keep down a plate full of English breakfast. Eggs, broiled tomatoes, some sort of fish. Flatbread and blood oranges. Black coffee. It was the coffee that helped more than anything. Kirk had put brandy in it.

  “I don’t know how I’m gonna explain this to your folks,” the ambassador said gravely, staring through the louvered shutters of his villa. “Folks,” apparently, stood in for His Majesty’s Government. Kirk was late for a luncheon he was hosting for some Egyptian ministers aboard his Nile houseboat, but he was wasting time talking to Ian. “I think you’re nuts. I’ll tell anybody who asks.”

  “If I die honorably in the line of duty,” Ian said, “no one will blame you.”

  The ambassador tossed a wallet full of money and a passport on the bed.

  Ian glanced at the passport picture—his own—and the name on the papers.

  “Who in bloody hell is James Bond?” he demanded.

  Kirk shrugged. “Search me. Probably some poor guy who died chasing Rommel. It’s the weekend, Fleming. Your embassy can’t just gin up a passport on short notice. The official seals on that thing have to say London. They cobbled something together from your delegation snapshot and some old docs in their files. Be grateful. They did you a favor. Your ambassador, Lord Killearn, made a point of saying he knows your brother.”

  “Everyone does,” Ian said.

  “Yeah, well—he can’t be any tougher than you are. There’s not much money in that wallet, by the way. Banks are closed on the weekend, too. I think you got the sum total of the British embassy’s petty cash.”

  “Go to your party, Mr. Ambassador.”

  “Most guys in your shoes would jump at a vacation.” Kirk turned in the doorway. “Particularly if they think they oughta be dead.”

  He was shrewder than he looked. But Alex Kirk hadn’t grown up with the ghost of a hero in his pocket. He didn’t know what it was like to ask for commando training and get a briefcase instead. He’d never carried a secret bigger than himself. Every hour Ian wasted in Giza brought Winston Churchill and Roosevelt closer to death. Sick leave, on those terms, was treason.

  Ian thanked the ambassador for his kindness, pocketed the wallet, the passport, and the rest of the morphia. Then he set about composing his cable.

  By three o’clock Kirk’s Signals people had sent it on to the American embassy, Tehran. It was addressed to Sam Schwartz. Roosevelt had told Ian to remember the name. It seemed like the right time to do it.

  —

  THE BRITISH and the Americans had left from the desert airstrip in Giza, with their cars and their bodyguards and their chiefs following behind in separate transports. But Ian needed to hire a pilot: a lone fellow in a small plane capable of crossing fifteen hundred miles of Arabian Desert and the Persian Gulf. He might find him in Cairo, but first he must find Nazir.

  The Fencer had tried to silence Ian. But he had not killed him. Unconscious, bleeding, alone in the dark—Ian ought to have been finished off. Instead, he was alive.

  He found this troubling and strange. It was one of Alan Turing’s much-vaunted contradictions, but so far it failed to explain anything.

  Did Hitler’s prize agent hate to kill with his own hands? Or was he keeping Ian alive out of vanity—to prolong a secret contest? Ian thought perhaps Nazir would know.

  The Russian had given him a card engraved in beautiful flowing Arabic with a French translation beneath; the address of his antiquities shop was on the reverse. The Mena House driver who’d agreed to take Ian to Cairo grunted when he saw it. He glanced at Ian assessingly. Was he familiar with the NKVD chief’s name? Part of Nazir’s intelligence network?

  They drove north through the late afternoon, the sun setting over the desert on Ian’s left hand. Within half an hour they had reached the Nile. Wooden feluccas with their heavy centerboards were anchoring for the night, furling patched sails of Egyptian cotton. Brown boys with wide trousers hitched above the knees waded with fishing nets in the shallows, calling like birds across the water. Ian’s driver crossed the ancient river and Gezira Island, where the six-furlong track and the golf course were oases of green in the fading light. Then into the narrow streets and clustered houses of Old Cairo. Prostitutes, remarkable because unveiled, lingered in the doorways behind the old train station.

  The driver jogged left, jogged right. Slowed to a crawl as donkey carts struggled for position ahead and behind. The driver leaned on his horn. There was a camel. Another camel. An official car with a siren parked askew on the narrow paving, and three men in uniform with their arms outstretched.

  “This is the shop, effendi,” the driver said with a gesture. “But I do not think we should stop. See, trouble. The gendarmes.”

  “Wait for me,” Ian said, and handed him a British pound. In war, hard currency was treasure. The man would wait.

  He eased himself painfully out of the backseat and made his way to the police. He was as weak as Alex Kirk said he would be. Stars burst before his eyes. He would find a pilot in the bar at Shepheard’s and drink on the deal. Then he would take morphia and sleep most of the night while they crossed the Arabian Peninsula.

  One of the police—he had a square-jawed face and pronounced nose over a full bottlebrush mustache—said something in Arabic and held up his hand. This was universal for “Halt,” and Ian halted. He tried English; Egypt had been in British hands long enough that the police must speak it.

  “The shop. My friend owns it. What has happened?”

  “The shop is closed.”

  “But I must speak to my friend. It is urgent.” Ian drew some piastres from his pocket and placed them in the policeman’s open palm. “War business. Will you send him out to me?”

  “What is your friend’s name?”

  “Nazir.”

  Mirth bubbled faintly in the policeman’s dark brown eyes. He pocketed Ian’s offering. “I regret to say your friend cannot speak to you this afternoon.”

  “Is he being detained?”

  “He is dead, effendi.”

  Ian took a step backward. “When?”

  The man shrugged. “He was found three hours ago.”

  “How did he die?”

  The policeman’s eyes were already moving past Ian to the crowd that refused to disperse. Ian dug in his pocket for more piastres.

  “His throat was cut,” the man said. “This Nazir dealt in many beautiful things. Many stolen things, you understand. From the tombs in the desert. It is not surprising someone killed him.”

  No. Not entirely surprising. But Ian foun
d himself remembering the urbane chuckle of the gray-haired man with the saffron pocket square, who had taken his vodka martini shaken, not stirred. He had been so thoroughly alive twenty-four hours ago. So thoroughly at home in Shepheard’s bar.

  “The girl,” Ian said. “His granddaughter. What happened to her?”

  The policeman studied Ian with contempt. “I know nothing of any girl. Your driver is blocking the street. You will move along, effendi?”

  CHAPTER 13

  The President’s DC-4 was nicknamed the Sacred Cow, and at the recommendation of the President’s doctor, it flew a low-altitude route from Cairo to Tehran. Roosevelt was not entirely well. The idea that he might be ailing was a closely guarded secret. Of his staff, only Sam Schwartz knew. He’d flown the same low-altitude route the day before Roosevelt, and radioed approval.

  He was waiting at Gale Morghe Airport outside of Tehran at three o’clock that afternoon when the Sacred Cow touched down. Gale Morghe was an air base held by the Soviets and it was in good condition. Schwartz had fifty American troops standing at attention, ready to roll into Army jeeps for Roosevelt’s escort into the city.

  When the cabin door opened, he raced up the steps to help with the President’s ramp. He would roll the wheelchair down himself, walking backward, so that his body shielded FDR’s at every step. The President’s armored car had arrived an hour earlier. It was already waiting beside the plane.

  “Hello there, Sam.”

  Roosevelt lifted his hand. He was still sitting with a blanket over his knees beside one of the cabin windows. Cadaverous Harry Hopkins was opposite, stubbing out a cigarette. Elliott and John Boettiger held down the back of the plane, while General Marshall was up front, close to the Special Air Mission pilots who manned Roosevelt’s craft. He’d been amusing himself during the eight-hour flight with navigation.

  “Mr. President,” Schwartz said. “Good trip?”

  “We’re here in one piece. Whaddya think of this place, Sam? Is it crawling with Germans?”

  So the President had talked about the alleged threat with his closest aides and family. Schwartz felt a ripple of misgiving. Roosevelt was following his own agenda.

  “Not so’s you’d notice,” he temporized. “I thought I might brief you on the ride into town.”

  The plane’s propellers were slowing to silence; the copilot came aft to help Schwartz position the ramp. Everyone waited until both men had lifted FDR into his wheelchair, and laid the lap robe across his knees. Tehran was surrounded by mountains—capped with snow this last weekend in November—and the air was far colder than Cairo. Schwartz backed carefully down the ramp, his feet finding position from long practice, and halted in the lee of the open car door. It was a relief to see the President screened by something stronger than Schwartz’s back. Marshall and Hopkins joined them; Elliott and Boettiger got into the car behind. Doors slammed and the first of the Army jeeps moved off, ahead of Roosevelt’s car.

  “Where are we going, Sam?”

  “The American legation, Mr. President. Louis Dreyfus has moved into a hotel, and it’s entirely at our disposal.” Schwartz had inspected the whole place yesterday, extending the security cordon and doubling the number of men on guard. Part of his Secret Service detail was working its way through the occupied city, on the hunt for German agents. He hoped none of them got a bullet through the brain. “I’ve deployed a hundred American troops in pitched tents on the embassy grounds. Just in case.”

  Roosevelt whistled. “You’re not fooling around.”

  “When I got here yesterday,” Schwartz said, “this Russian general named Arkadiev was waiting for me. He’s a big cheese in Transport, I guess. Anyway—he took me through his embassy and managed to drop some hints on the tour. Says a bunch of Nazi paratroopers landed in the hills outside the city a few weeks back. The Sovs rounded most of ’em up, but a few slipped through the net.”

  “Paratroopers.” Roosevelt flashed his shark’s smile. “What are they doing here, Sam?”

  “Nobody’d give me a straight answer, sir. But the Russians seem to think they’re gunning for all of us.”

  “From what little I know of Uncle Joe,” Roosevelt mused, “he wouldn’t leave Moscow if he truly thought he was at risk. Too much of a homebody. And too superstitious.”

  “Just say he’s a coward and have done,” George Marshall barked from the front seat. “Stalin is sure he’s going to be shot one of these days. He’s shot everybody else. Wouldn’t be surprised if he fails to show up at this circus.”

  “He’s already here, General,” Schwartz said. “A day earlier than planned. So I think we can say this Nazi threat isn’t half as bad as the Russkies would like us to think.”

  —

  CHURCHILL’S ENTOURAGE touched down at Tehran’s Doshan Tappeh complex—where the young Imperial Iranian Air Force had once trained and flown. British airmen now ruled the runway. Since the joint Anglo-Soviet invasion of the country two years before, the Iranian pilot school had been shut down, the pilots decommissioned, and the fleet of Imperial fighter planes sawn in half. Sarah Oliver knew all this, but few others in her father’s orbit understood anything about the country they had just entered.

  Sarah had spent months working in aerial reconnaissance, and she was a practical woman. She understood that the Russians had seized northern Iraq to control its oil fields, and that the British Army had taken the south to secure their land route to India. But it was an uneasy partnership. Both Stalin and Churchill mistrusted the deposed shah because he was a Nazi sympathizer. His son, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, was new to power. They trusted each other even less.

  Sarah was wearing her WAAF uniform and riding in the backseat of an open car with her father. His bowker—a homburg without the usual depressed crown—was in his lap. He was fiddling the brim with his hands. A cold breeze ruffled his white hair. An airman from Doshan Tappeh was driving, with Walter Thompson—her father’s devoted bodyguard—seated next to him. Still, Sarah felt exposed. There were so many checkpoints on the way into the city. They were drawing up to another one now—and a crowd had gathered. As the official car with the fluttering flags slowed to present its papers, she saw it was a Soviet-manned checkpoint. They would not be simply waved through this one.

  The car stopped and the crowd surged forward. It was entirely male. Tribesmen from the provinces, in every kind of native dress.

  Hands touched Sarah’s shoulder. Her arm. Hands probed her legs and lap. She gripped her handbag firmly between her ankles and glanced desperately at her father. Winston was reaching out of the car, shaking hands, smiling his broad smile and snorting in English, “Good show! Good show!” while the Russian soldier took his time with the papers. Anyone might shoot Father through the heart. Or toss a bomb into the open backseat. That was how the German Gestapo chief—Reinhard Heydrich—had died in Prague last year. Sarah slipped her hand under Winston’s arm, protective, seeking comfort from the solid wool sleeve of his Chesterfield coat. Mother will never forgive me if—

  Panic rose in her throat.

  “Fatal to show fear,” Winston growled sidelong.

  Her heart skipped a beat. Then she turned resolutely to her side of the car and reached out with both gloved hands, greeting the Persians with a blinding smile.

  —

  “SORRY TO DISTURB YOU, Mr. President.”

  Schwartz hesitated on the fringe of the legation’s main reception room. What passed for the U.S. foothold in Tehran was a cramped and slightly shabby building in a small compound in the northern part of the city, where the wealthiest Iranians lived in beautifully designed mansions behind walled gardens. The Shah’s summer palace was here, and many of the government ministers’ homes; farther north, beyond the wooded grounds of the Russian and British Embassies, the mountains rose massive and sheer against the bluest of skies.

  The Russians had been sending ambassadors to Persia
since the 1580s. England had maintained diplomatic relations almost as long. The two powers struggled for influence and control over Persia throughout the centuries, a violent contest of espionage known as the Great Game, in which scores on both sides died. The current Anglo-Soviet Occupation was a rare moment of coordinated effort in a long history of murder between rivals. The Russian and British embassies, side by side in a walled compound, were palatial and imposing. At times it felt as though the real center of power was here, not in the orbit of young Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.

  The United States was renting a far less impressive place a mile away, and their official representative, Louis Dreyfus, was an envoy, not an ambassador. Diplomatic relations had only existed between Persia and America for about eighty years. To each other, they were both remote and fabled lands that just might not exist.

  Schwartz saw immediately that Roosevelt had company. Averell Harriman looked like a movie star—Gary Cooper, perhaps, although he was a good decade older than the actor. Both men shared a rugged American style that suggested the wide-open spaces of the West. Harriman’s jaw was more pugnacious than Cooper’s, and at fifty-two years of age, he was uninterested in sharing the limelight with anyone besides the President of the United States or Joseph Stalin. The considerable power and fortune he’d inherited were less interesting to Harriman than what they could buy: influence.

  “Sam!” Roosevelt grinned at him; it was an invitation to enter. “You remember Ave Harriman.”

  “Ambassador,” Schwartz said. “I understand you flew in on Marshal Stalin’s plane.”

  “Along with the Kremlin guard.” Harriman glanced sidelong at Roosevelt. “He’s surrounded by generals and NKVD people and he’s got his Foreign Minister, Molotov, to talk dirty for him. His security chief, Lavrentiy Beria, is walking about two feet behind him wherever he goes. Two feet behind Beria is his personal bodyguard—although some say he’s Beria’s personal assassin. Lavrentiy brought his kid along, too. I guess it’s never too early to start the son off in the family business. And don’t get me started on the three thousand NKVD troops Stalin’s shipped into the city. We’re calling it the Second Occupation.”