Too Bad to Die

by Francine Mathews

  “Probably for the best.” Ian ignored the grief for both of them that was turning his heart over. “I’m not fit to live in your world.”

  “No. I’ve known that for years.” Hudson’s eyes roamed over the sleeping Nazi commandos. “What happened here? Chloral?”

  “Barbiturates,” Siranoush said crisply. “Much more effective.”

  Hudson inclined his head. “I’ll have to take some lessons from you, sweetheart. Come here and give me a kiss.”

  She did not let go of Ian, but he felt her stiffen beside him.

  “Siranoush,” he said slowly. “She’s the Kitten?”

  “Of course.” Hudson smiled faintly. “She was right there on the inside of the NKVD operation. And along the way, she’d picked up you. She kept me informed. But I didn’t know Commander Bond was my old friend, Ian.”

  “Yet she couldn’t let me die, either,” Ian said. His grip tightened on her rib cage.

  “She’s a woman. Emotion’s her weakness.”

  “Don’t be so bloody patronizing. She’s worth ten of you.”

  Hudson set down his gun and lifted Skorzeny’s head. He pulled back one eyelid. “How much of that stuff did you give them?”

  “I don’t know,” Siranoush said woodenly. “Perhaps too much. It had to be . . . enough.”

  Hudson allowed the colonel to slide to the floor. Then he pulled out Otto’s chair and sat in it. He sighed. “Christ, what a day. We’ll have to make coffee and start getting it into them, or they’ll be no use at all. Put Ian down and get working on it.”

  “I can’t sit, old thing,” Ian said, before Siranoush could move. He was swaying as he leaned on her, and he doubted she could support him much longer. He summoned his ebbing strength to face Hudders; he would not appear weak. “My arse is out of commission. Which reminds me—did you kill Zadiq, too?”

  “If you mean the bloody corpse in the taxi, I didn’t bother. He won’t last till midnight. What did they do to you, Johnnie?”

  For a second, Ian almost thought Michael cared. “If you’re a very good boy, I’ll let you have a look,” he said.

  “He needs a doctor,” Siranoush burst out. “He has lost too much blood. There will be infection—fever—”

  Hudson frowned. “That’s not possible tonight. The last conference dinner is about to start, with kisses and fanfare and bullshit no one will read in the morning. We need to sit tight and get our rest. Stir up the troops and push through to the end.”

  “Long Jump?” Ian asked.

  “Sure. Everybody says ta-ta tomorrow.” Hudson grinned—his old, familiar look of mischief. “Gonna be quite a send-off, Flem.”

  —

  SARAH OLIVER and Gil Winant were pacing the floor of a private dining room in the Park Hotel with Grace Cowles between them. Abolhassan Diba had informed the Tehran police—because, as he explained to Winant, he could not allow the Park’s guests to be drugged in his bar. Winant had called the British and Soviet Embassies, asking for Hudson, and had been unable to locate the man anywhere. He was not in his room at the Park Hotel. He seemed to have left Grace Cowles in the lobby and vanished into thin air.

  The Signals officer’s head was lolling like a broken doll’s, and her eyes were closed, but she was no longer a dead weight, and from time to time she made a faint moaning sound that suggested she was doing more than dreaming.

  “She got less than Pamela, didn’t she,” Sarah said.

  “Probably just the one dose. Pamela took a second in her bedroom. Which raises a question,” Gil replied. “Was Grace just meant to sleep—and was Pamela meant to die?”

  Sarah shook her head. She had kicked off her high heels and was walking the carpet in her stockings, aware of both increasing tiredness and panic. She and Gil were supposed to attend the final Tripartite Dinner tonight. Their absence from the Soviet Embassy would be noticed. Hers could be put down to a headache. Gil’s was a diplomatic breach that bordered on a political insult.

  “Either, probably,” she said. “It’s the coward’s murder weapon—let God choose. The chloral is just a passive agent. It sets off a chain of events that may or may not end in death. Like the man who administers it.”

  “I wouldn’t call that cowardice.”

  “No?”

  “It’s a supreme act of egotism. Any man who believes he’s an agent of Fate is convinced he controls the future.”

  “Does that sound like Michael Hudson?”

  Winant pursed his lips. “I wouldn’t have thought so yesterday.”

  “Then he’s very plausible,” Sarah suggested. “Which means he’s clever enough to subdue his egotism to a greater end. But what’s the point, Gil? Why poison these women?”

  He did not immediately answer. He was convinced that Pamela’s drugging had been attempted murder—because she had caught Michael Hudson spying. Had he really found a codebook in Pamela’s drawer in Giza? Or was the whole story a lie?

  What Winant could not explain was the decision to drug Grace. What did she know—or what was she capable of doing—that threatened Michael Hudson?

  “You say she works for Pug Ismay?” he asked Sarah.

  “His personal assistant.”

  “So she must know a good deal about the PM’s plans.”

  “Absolutely. Lives in Pug’s back pocket. Sends out all his intelligence. She’s worked Signals most of the conference—it was she who connected me to Mummy when I was forced to call home with the bad news about Pamela.”

  “Signals,” Winant said thoughtfully. “Any idea how she came to know Hudson?”

  “She’s an old flame of Ian Fleming’s. He and Hudson were always palling around.”

  The girl stumbling between them suddenly lifted her head. Her lips parted. In a slurred voice that was almost unintelligible, she said, “Ian.”

  Sarah and Winant stopped walking. Grace’s eyelids were fluttering.

  “Quickly,” Sarah said. “More coffee.”

  “It’s stone cold.”

  “Does it matter?”

  They eased Grace onto a sofa. She was definitely awake—staring blearily before her, dazed at the strangeness of her surroundings. “My head,” she moaned.

  Sarah cupped one hand behind the girl’s neck, and with the other held a cup of coffee to her lips. Grace tasted it and grimaced. But she held on to the cup with one hand and helped Sarah guide it.

  A few seconds later she said, “Where am I?”

  “The Park Hotel,” Winant said.

  Grace closed her eyes. “Am I drunk?”

  “You had a drink. We think it was drugged.”

  “That’s mad.”

  Gil met Sarah’s eyes. Sarah shook Grace gently and said, “Who bought you the drink?”

  “Michael.” Her eyes opened. “Michael. He was with Pamela, too.”

  “Good girl,” Winant said. “You’re thinking again.”

  “Oh, God!” Grace gestured away the cup and tried to force herself upright from the sofa. “Ian. I told him everything about Ian.”

  “Fleming should be back in England by now,” Sarah soothed.

  “What time is it?” Grace was still struggling to rise.

  On impulse, Winant reached out and helped her to her feet. “It’s nearly seven o’clock.”

  “Which means it’s four-thirty in England.”

  “Thereabouts,” Sarah said.

  Grace’s eyes were wide open now. She began to walk unsteadily toward the dining room door, her arm clinging to Winant’s. “He wanted me out of the way. In case Turing cabled.”

  “Who?” Winant asked, bewildered.

  “The Fencer. Michael.” She clutched at his arm. “I’ve got to get back to the embassy.”

  —

  THEY LAID Ian on his stomach across a couple of chairs. Hudson began to rouse the uncons
cious paratroopers while Siranoush attempted to bathe Ian’s wounds. She used hot water and gauze she took from a dressing kit she had found in one of the Nazis’ packs. There were iodine tablets in the kit, too, and she dissolved one of these in a teaspoon of hot water and painted it on Ian’s torn flesh. She gave him a knife with a wooden handle she discovered in a kitchen drawer, and he put this between his jaws like a dog. When she touched him, he left deep tooth marks in the wood.

  “You should have listened,” she whispered. “You should have stayed out of all this.”

  “But then we should never have met,” he gasped. “Only think how tragic that would be, Kitten.”

  “My name is Siranoush.”

  “Ah. So something you told me was true.”

  He could feel her tense as she worked above him, and for an instant he was afraid she would deliberately hurt him. But she governed her temper. The searing pain of the iodine dissipated and he was able to breathe again.

  “How did you meet Hudders?” he asked.

  “Years ago. Before the war. He knew Nazir.”

  “Nazir being the sort of man to play both sides.”

  “Nazir played only his own. He was a Soviet, remember.”

  “And you? What are you playing at, Siranoush?”

  The gauze moved with deliberate pressure, regardless of the cost. Gentleness would never have got the job done. She was that kind of woman. Despite everything, he could admire her. The inner certainty that kept her alive.

  “I want revenge.”

  “Against us? The Allies?”

  “No, no.” She shook her head; he glimpsed a fall of blond hair. “I like the Allies! Someday I will live with Hudson in America.”

  “So that’s the lie he told you.”

  “But first I must revenge my parents. My mother died in the Gulag. My father—God knows where. We were left, my brother and I, in the NKVD camp. Stefan was shot for stealing bread. He was only eleven years old. I could not save him. I could not . . . And I . . .”

  “Grew up angry.”

  “I was sold to Nazir. When I was fourteen. That was six years ago.”

  Ian considered this. Not her grandfather, then. The exchange of money for the life of a girl suggested something far beyond repugnant.

  “You want to kill,” he said. “And Nazir is already dead.”

  “I made sure of that. It was many years in coming.”

  The knife blade to the carotid artery. What had she said? Her market basket rolling to the floor. Vegetables smeared with blood.

  “And now? Who do you kill now, Siranoush?”

  She was silent. Her fingers probed at his exquisite agony.

  He did not repeat the question. He already knew her answer.

  CHAPTER 38

  The final dinner was over, Churchill thought with a sigh, and what had they accomplished tonight—or any night, after all? The Allied invasion would go forward in May, too early and in the wrong place. Stalin had grudgingly agreed to discuss elections in the Baltic states, but he’d gone on and on about the right kind of Poles in postwar Poland. Meaning, of course, Communist partisans—not Sikorski’s Government-in-Exile Churchill was supporting in London. Eden had proposed the Curzon Line as a Polish frontier, without gaining much of a reaction. Stalin talked instead about Germany—how it must be completely dismembered when the war was over. It was a personal grudge, Churchill thought. Hitler had stabbed Stalin in the back. And in return, Stalin would wipe every last German from the face of the earth.

  It had all gone very much as Uncle Joe wanted. Germany would be atomized, France stripped of her colonies, and the rest of Europe prevented from forming an alliance or federation. The Soviet Union would be the sole power on the Continent.

  And Britain, Churchill thought, would remain an island on the edge of darkness.

  Winston was frustrated and distraught. Stalin’s dream would never bring peace to Europe. It would merely give Europeans a grudge. A reason to hate. A battle cry for the next millennium.

  He hoped Franklin knew it.

  Roosevelt had listened, indeed, more than he’d talked. Winston guessed he was reserving judgment until he decided whether Russia or England would win the argument. But he seemed to be betting on Stalin. Winston was feeling more beaten and ill than he had since leaving England, as though the bronchitis was devouring his lungs. Tomorrow, his plane would fly back to Giza and he would sit in the Egyptian sun for a few more days, hoping his aging body would mend.

  There was a tap at his bedroom door.

  He downed the last of his whiskey neat and hunched himself forward in his chair. When he exhaled there was a wheeze deep in his chest like the deflation of a tire. He remembered that sound from his wretched father’s final days. The death rattle.

  He rose and surged toward the door, wrapping his depression around him with his dressing gown. If he were fortunate, it would be Pamela standing there: Pamela, with her winsome face and her daring frocks, with a bottle of Pol Roger waggling in her hand. But no: Pamela was greatly changed since her brush with scandal. She seemed to be avoiding him.

  He pulled open the door.

  “Father.”

  “Sarah.” She was white-faced and exhausted; this trip had taken the stuffing out of her.

  “You were missed at dinner, my dear,” he growled. “Marshal Stalin had made a place especially for you at his table. He’s a dull dog at the best of times and you’d have had heavy work of it, but—”

  “Can you spare a moment?”

  He frowned at her heavily. “I’m on my way to bed.”

  “Only, there’s been rather an important communication. In the Signals Room.”

  “Of course,” he said. “I’m just coming.”

  —

  GRACE COWLES was seated in a small conference room on the embassy’s ground floor. She had traded stale coffee for ice water and had changed her uniform; the fuddled look of a few hours ago was gone. Gil Winant had taken another chair at the table. He was still wearing his overcoat. There was no fireplace, and the room was freezing. Churchill had traded his dressing gown for one of his famous jumpsuits—his preferred form of battle dress.

  “Alan Turing attempted a Secraphone trunk call while I was absent this afternoon, Prime Minister,” Grace began. “A colleague in the embassy tried to take down the message, but Turing preferred to speak directly to me. Unfortunately, it was over three hours before we successfully made contact.”

  “Deserting your post, Cowles? Not bloody like you.”

  “I am aware of that, sir,” she said. “I take full responsibility for my dereliction of duty.”

  “Nonsense,” Sarah Oliver interjected. “She was drugged, Father—rather like Pamela.”

  “Had I remained at my post,” Grace countered, “rather than allowing myself to be carried off to the Park Hotel, I should have avoided the entire incident—and received Turing’s call.”

  “But instead, your experience has allowed us to pinpoint a pattern,” Winant said. “Which is immensely valuable.”

  “I was told you’d received an important communication!” Churchill exploded. “I left my bed on the strength of it. Get to the point, Cowles, if you please!”

  “Yes, sir.” She glanced at a sheet of notes. “Professor Turing has been intercepting and decoding German Enigma signals exchanged over a specific frequency, which he believes to be used by an agent known only by his code name, the Fencer.”

  “Chap who’s supposed to be gunning for all of us.”

  “Yes, sir. As you are aware, Turing contacted Commander Fleming of Naval Intelligence with the news that the Fencer appeared to be a member of our Allied delegation. Fleming asked Turing to track the Fencer’s signals. Today Turing intercepted a communication with Berlin. It stipulates that simultaneous attacks against Mr. Roosevelt, Marshal Stalin, and you, sir, will be
attempted tomorrow, at approximately 0900 hours.”

  “Bloody cheek.” Churchill looked from Cowles to Winant and Sarah. “We’re all scheduled to depart from this compound at that hour, and make for the airstrips. I suppose the fellow means to bottle us up at the compound gate. Toss a bomb or two into the cars. He shan’t get far—Stalin will see to that! Three thousand of those ruddy NKVD soldiers the Marshal’s got, just straining at the leash.”

  “Father.” Sarah reached for his arm. “Gil says—and I do believe he’s right—that under no circumstances must you be here in the morning. You should pack up and leave for the airstrip now. Even if the plane waits until dawn to take off, you’ll be among British forces. You’ll be splendidly safe.”

  “Turn tail and run, like a thief in the night? What would Roosevelt think? I don’t have to ask about Stalin—the man would regard it as an insult.”

  “I would like permission, sir, to inform President Roosevelt of the threat myself,” Winant said. “I intend to urge him and his Secret Service chief, Sam Schwartz, to take similar precautions—depart tonight for the American legation or the Park Hotel. If each of you leave from a different spot, a joint attack should be impossible.”

  “Franklin’s not likely to bolt, Gil,” Churchill retorted. “Won’t want to lose face in front of his precious host. Won’t want to embarrass Uncle Joe. Even if we shared the details of ULTRA with Franklin—and I should like nothing better—he’s got no reason to trust in Turing. Don’t suppose the Prof has any idea who this Fencer is? Now, that would decode something!”

  For the first time in several minutes, Grace Cowles spoke up. “He’s beginning to have an idea. We all are. But there’s no hard proof.”

  Churchill scowled as he looked at their faces. “Proof, eh? What was that you said earlier—about Cowles being drugged? At the bloody hotel? Had a drink in the bar, I suppose, like poor little Pammie. Who bought you the drink, Cowles?”

  Her color was heightened. “I regret, sir, that I cannot tell you that.”

  “Can’t—or won’t?”

  “I have no proof of guilt, sir. Only strong suspicion.”