‘ – and while we’re proud of our track record so far, we’re willing to admit that compared to the British Secret Intelligence Service, we’re pretty raw meat.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Compared to your organization, Lieutenant Colonel, OSS is badly lacking in real know-how. I’ve therefore come here for two purposes: the first is to learn all you can teach me; the next is to make use of that learning for a particular mission.’
Pleased with the compliments, Wentworth-King smiled, inhaled on his cigarette, then blew a cloud of smoke. ‘Exactly what would you like us to teach you that you don’t know already?’
‘I’ve already had basic intelligence training by your fellow Brits at a COI training school on a farm in Toronto. It was tough, but not enough. I’d now like to be trained in code-breaking by one of your signals intelligence units at Bletchley Park. I’d also like to be briefed on British propaganda and psychological warfare methods, including the so-called Doublecross or XX system in which, I’m informed, you use captured German spies as counteragents and playbacks.’
‘Informed by whom, Colonel Bradley?’
‘By your intelligence man in the White House.’
‘I am reassured to hear that. Anything else?’
Bradley shrugged and spread his hands in the air. ‘Anything you can give me. I’m hoping to parachute into Europe, so obviously I’ll need extensive training in that. I also need to perfect my otherwise excellent French and German – and I need to know what to watch out for when I’m in Nazi-occupied territory. You get the picture, I’m sure.’
‘Are you sure you’re up for this, Colonel?’
‘I’m an exceptionally fit forty-nine, Lieutenant Colonel, recently trained by the US Marines and some of your own boys. I think I can handle it.’
Wentworth-King nodded and offered a half smile. ‘And what exactly is your mission, Colonel Bradley? Do we help you with that as well?’
‘You already have,’ Bradley said. ‘We’re after an American rocket scientist named John Wilson, who is, according to your reports, working under a false passport at a Nazi research establishment at Kummersdorf, near Berlin.’
‘Ah, yes,’ Wentworth-King said. ‘I remember him well. An interesting chap, your Mr Wilson. Not exactly patriotic, but bright, and well looked after by Jerry.’
‘We think he may be contributing more than rocket research to the Nazis.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes. In the States, as far back as the early 1900s, Wilson was already experimenting with a crude form of atomic propulsion. When, after the Tunguska explosion of 1908, the US government attempted to take over his project, he ruthlessly destroyed most of the evidence of his work, then went underground. After working anonymously in America for a good thirty years, he fled the country and went to work just as ruthlessly for the Nazis. Since it’s also believed that he’s contributed to the Peenemünde rocket program, we’re seriously concerned about what else he’s up to and think he has to be stopped. That’s why I have to be parachuted in as soon as humanly possible.’
The lieutenant colonel sighed, tapped his teeth with a pencil, and looked decidedly sceptical. ‘Germany?’ he queried. ‘Berlin? You actually think that’s possible, Colonel? And how far do you think you would get if you didn't get captured? Kummersdorf is an SS research establishment – top secret, well guarded. You wouldn’t stand a hope in hell, old son. It’s just not in the cards.’
‘It has to be,’ Bradley said.
The lieutenant colonel sighed again, as if dealing with a child, then dropped the pencil and raised his hands in the air in mock defeat.
‘I am here to serve,’ he said. ‘I’ll do all I can. In the meantime, let me take you to your lodgings and then, while you’re waiting for decisions, I’ll ensure that you learn all you need to know. Okay?’
‘Okay,’ Bradley said.
He was pleasantly surprised to find himself located nearby in a small but cosy private apartment in Shepherd Market, Mayfair. After unpacking, he lay fully clothed on the bed and tried to sleep, but instead, as he often did these days, fell in and out of troubled reveries, in which he vividly relived his happier days with Joan, then their mutual pleasures and triumphs, and finally that ghastly day at Pearl Harbour, when she had died in his arms.
He still cried at remembering that.
Bradley wept. The tears rolled down his cheeks. Lying there on his back, he was consumed by a dreadful anguish, a grief that was mixed up with guilt because he, who had been with Joan at the time, had actually survived. He knew to think that way was senseless, an aberration of wounded emotions, but the thought that he hadn’t deserved to live when Joan had died was one that never quite left him. It also brought back the memories, waves of love, pits of guilt, making him see the good and bad in their marriage dreadfully magnified... Yes, the two years since her death would have been hell had it not been for OSS.
General Taylor had rescued him, inviting him into the organization, ensuring that throughout the year immediately following Joan’s death, Bradley was worked to exhaustion and distracted relentlessly. He’d been reacquainted with marine training, introduced to new weapons, taught espionage, self-defence, and guerilla operations, turned into the kind of fighting machine that murders quietly in darkness. He had become someone else, someone busy, never alone, and when it was finished, when he was fit and highly skilled, Taylor had put him to work. He had spent another year in America, tying up the loose ends on Wilson, and only then had he been shipped out to London... to find himself in this comfortable, private apartment, weeping tears for the dead.
Thank God, he had work to do.
He slept through the afternoon and awakened in darkness, when he remembered to pull his blackout curtains across before turning the lights on. Then he had a bath, put on his army uniform, poured a drink, and took Gladys Kinder’s letters out of his kit bag. There were a great many of them – she was a prolific writer – and he spread them out in separate years on the bed and then started reading them.
She was part of his guilt.
Her letters formed a vivid picture of the life she had led over the past decade: the Spanish civil war, then Czechoslovakia and Italy, then the fearsome days of the Blitz and London as a city at war, at once defiant and tragic. The letters had told him about all that, but also about her private life – the numerous men she had known, her good and bad affairs, her fear of losing her independence combined with the fear of growing old alone – and they had told him, in racy jokes with a serious subtext, that she had fallen in love with him the minute she met him, had never quite forgotten him, and even now cherished the memory of him and wrote to him to touch him.
They were extraordinary letters.
It wasn’t surprising that his throat became dry when he picked up the telephone.
She answered immediately.
‘In my letter I told you to call me at eight-thirty p.m.,’ she said, ‘and you called on the dot. It can only be Mike Bradley calling. Welcome to London, Mike.’
He was smiling already.
They agreed to meet an hour later in a famous pub in Soho, in the West End, and when Bradley left his apartment, he felt like a nervous schoolboy going on his first date.
With the blackout in force, he found himself in moonlit darkness, walking along with the aid of a torch beamed down at the pavement. He went along Half Moon Street, turned into Piccadilly, and walked toward the Circus, passing the Ritz Hotel and the elegant facade of Fortnum & Mason, passing inky black doorways surrounded by sandbags and often filled with the shadowy figures of men and women in intimate contact. He heard chuckling and ecstatic groaning, voices calling invitingly to him, and saw cigarettes glowing in that darkness where other women were waiting.
At first he was disbelieving, then shocked, then amused and touched, and soon accepted that a city at war was a place like no other.
This was more evident in Piccadilly Circus, where cars, taxis, tramcars, and buses, all with their hea
dlights dimmed, crawled through a flood of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and their women, as they poured around Eros, mostly drunk and in good cheer, then swept along Shaftesbury Avenue, to tumble, with much shouting and laughing and giggling, between piled-up sandbags and through blackout curtains, into the countless pubs and clubs that were spread liberally, noisily, around the network of packed side streets that led into Soho.
Bradley too eventually slipped between piled-up sandbags and through blackout curtains to find himself in a smoky, old-fashioned pub jam-packed with servicemen of every nationality. Having been warned about this by Gladys, he tried to find her in the jostling mass of noisy revellers, failed to recognize her, so fought his way through to the bar and tried to order a whiskey. He failed at that also, because the barman was too busy, but then a hand fell on his shoulder and squeezed it affectionately as a woman's voice called out to the barman, ‘John! Get my friend here a Scotch! And be quick about it!’
Mike turned and saw Gladys Kinder smiling at him in that vividly remembered, still laconic manner. She was ten years older and had gray in her auburn hair, but otherwise she seemed just the same and he was instantly drawn to her.
‘Well, well,’ he said, finding himself bereft of better words. Then, feeling ridiculously formal, he offered his hand.
Gladys looked down at his hand, grinned in amusement, then took hold of it and vigorously shook it.
‘You’re too much,’ she said. ‘You’re more formal than the English. I didn’t expect to find you tearing my clothes off, but to not even get a kiss on the cheek – ’
‘You’re right,’ Bradley said. ‘Sorry.’ He leaned forward and kissed her cheek, feeling childishly embarrassed. Then he was given his glass of whiskey by the barman and raised it to Gladys. She touched her glass to his and they both drank, then smiled at one another in a silence that was awkward only on Bradley’s side.
‘God,’ Gladys finally said, ‘it’s good to see you again after all these years. You’re still the most attractive man on earth, though I know you’ll hate me for saying it.’
‘No, I won’t,’ Bradley said, even though he was blushing. ‘I’m embarrassed, but I can’t help feeling pleased. All men are boys in the end.’
‘How right you are, Mike.’
‘You’re looking good.’
‘That’s a pleasing white lie. I’m forty-eight this year and I don’t like it, though I’m learning to live with it. In London, in this war, that’s much easier to do, since there’s nothing like the constant threat of death to make you appreciate life, regardless of age and a spinster’s traumas.’
‘I can’t imagine you suffering such traumas.’
She grinned and shrugged. ‘Well, not really. Reporting this war keeps me busy, as well as giving me the chance to meet a lot of people. As for men, since I’m always interviewing those fighting the war, I know more men than I can count, and in that sense have a pretty good time. Still, I needed to write to you, Mike. I only met you twice, but I really missed you and that’s something I can’t ignore. I hope you missed me a little bit.’
‘Yes, Gladys, I did. And that took me by surprise. I didn’t know how much I’d miss you until you left and then I couldn’t believe it. I mean, after only two meetings...’ He shrugged. ‘It seemed stupid.’
‘Romantic?’
Bradley blushed again. ‘Yeah, I guess it was, in a way. And I really loved getting your letters, and that seemed odd as well.’
‘Love at first sight, Mike.’
‘I can’t believe in that, Gladys. Some people, they just meet and hit it off – and I guess we were two of them. It’s a rare kind of friendship.’
‘Can men and women be friends that way?’
‘Yes,’ Mike said doubtfully, ‘I think so.’
‘Nothing sexual? Not even a little bit?’
‘You’re teasing me, Gladys.’
She chuckled at that, finished her drink, ordered two more. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry about your wife. That must have been hard on you.’
‘It was. I even stopped reading your letters for a while. They just made me feel guilty.’
‘I teased you a lot in those letters.’
‘That's right, Gladys, you did.’
‘And you never knew when I was joking or not?’
‘No.’
She chuckled again, this time in a throaty, sensual manner. ‘I’m a regular bitch that way.’
‘I used to get disturbed.’
‘And now?’
‘We’re here as two old friends.’
‘Anything you say, pal.’
Yet her broad grin got to him, drawing him into her warmth, and he knew that he was lying and was not just her friend: that he had been attracted to her from the start and felt that way right now. It was ridiculous (they were too old for such nonsense) but there it was, plain as day. There was something lasting between him and Gladys Kinder, and he couldn’t deny it.
He felt that he’d known her forever.
‘So what are you actually in London for?’ she asked him as they sipped at their fresh drinks.
He glanced around the crowded pub, saw sweaty faces through clouds of smoke, the uniforms of many different nationalities; heard a piano pounding in the far corner, voices singing a bawdy song.
‘Are you asking as a friend or as a journalist?’
‘Take your pick,’ she replied.
Bradley grinned at that. ‘It’s too noisy to talk in here,’ he said. ‘Can we go for a walk?’
‘Sure, Mike. Let’s go.’
They finished their drinks and left the pub, wandered through Soho, which was packed, then crossed Charing Cross Road, took some dark side streets, and ended up in Covent Garden Market. They kept their torches turned down, making their way through moonlit darkness, passing the empty vendors’ carts, which were covered in canvas for the night, and then crossing the much busier Strand and on down to the Embankment, where the moonlight and stars shone on the River Thames and streaked the water with silver. There were whores along the Embankment as well, negotiating with the servicemen, and Bradley felt a little embarrassed when he passed them with Gladys.
‘I love it,’ she told him, as if sensing his embarrassment. ‘The less violent, more human commerce of war: a pound of flesh for some silver. You can’t keep human nature down. So,’ she added, getting back to her last question, ‘why are you in London?’
‘I’m a member of OSS,’ he said. ‘Have you heard about it?’
‘Of course, Mike. The Office of Strategic Services. A fairly new intelligence agency. Are you somehow linked up with the invasion?’
‘No. I’m still after Wilson. That’s why I’m here.’
Taken by surprise, she stopped walking and stared at him, then she shook her head and gazed across the river, to where the warehouses of the docks were silhouetted against the clear, starlit sky.
‘I’d forgotten all about him,’ she said. ‘That old man who was great in the sack. Good God, he must be over seventy by now! Is he still alive?’
‘We think so,’ Bradley said, standing beside her, shoulder to shoulder. 'We receive reports from European resistance groups and he still features in them. At least an American scientist does, so we assume that he’s Wilson. We think he helped the rocket scientists and is working at a research establishment near Berlin. The Brits aren’t concerned about him – they’re willing to wait until the invasion – but our government still wants to talk to him about a few things, notably the Tunguska explosion that you told me about and, even more worrying, about what he’s creating for the Nazis. We have reason to think he’s creating an extremely powerful weapon that could be turned against us when we attempt the invasion. That’s why I want to go now.’
‘Go now? You mean parachute into Germany?’
‘Right.’
‘Goddammit, Mike, that’s crazy. It’s plain suicidal.’
‘I think I can make it.’
‘You think wrong, believe me.’
> ‘I still want to go.’
‘Why not wait until the invasion and follow the troops into Germany?’
‘They may not get there.’
‘They will. And in the meantime you could have a good time in London, the world’s finest city.’
‘I can’t wait that long.’
‘It won’t be long.’
‘You don’t know that.’
‘I know it’s going to be this year. Everybody knows that.’
‘I don’t care. I want to go as soon as possible. I’m frightened that he’s going to create something unbeatable before we get there to stop him. If he can invent something more powerful than the rumoured rockets, he could prevent us from winning the war.’
‘The secret weapons are only rumours.’
‘I’m not too sure about that.’
‘And that’s why you can’t wait to get to Wilson?’
‘Yeah, right.’
‘I’m sorry, Mike, but I don’t believe that. I think it’s something much more than that.’
‘Such as?’
‘You tell me.’
Bradley sighed. ‘I’ve got a bee in my bonnet about this Wilson. He’s haunted me for years. I have to meet him, face to face, and find out exactly what makes him tick. He appears to have few normal feelings – you confirmed that when we first met – but he’s clearly a genius, he wants anonymity, and his ruthlessness appears to know no bounds. The man’s like a ghost: he exists and yet he doesn’t. I dream about, or imagine, the things he’s invented and they keep me awake at night. I know all about him, yet know nothing. I have to study his face.’
‘You’ll see nothing but the face of pure logic: a void that transcends morality. You’ll see the end of the world.’
‘Maybe that’s what I’m after.’
Gladys was just about to reply when a distant siren wailed, then another, and another, until the very air seemed to vibrate with that terrible sound: a high, nerve-shattering wailing.
‘What the hell?’
‘Those are the air-raid sirens,’ Gladys said. ‘That means the Germans are coming. Have you ever seen an air raid, Mike?’
INCEPTION (Projekt Saucer, Book 1) Page 29