Bullet Beth
Page 24
But Noel Coward himself had been a spy. His fealty was to England above all. As Jay Cooper’s was to his country.
• • •
Jay was having lunch with the wife of a Dutch diplomat at the Goring Hotel in London. The woman was about forty, older than Jay, and she was wearing a skirt and blouse that flattered her slim figure. They were discussing an argument they had overheard at a party the night before. Not between diplomats, but between a man and his wife. The woman was laughing as she described the way the ambassador’s wife turned to someone else and said, “No one asked you.” Jay laughing along with the Dutch lady. She would make comments here and there about her own husband; mild insults, not too harsh, but letting Jay know she wasn’t altogether happy in her own marriage.
Jay’s cell phone rang.
He excused his bad manners and took the call.
Reinhardt said, “It’s me. I had to leave early.”
“I see,” Jay said. “Bad weather?”
They were on an unsecure line. Jay was asking him if he needed to get to a secure line to see if they had an emergency situation. But Reinhardt was out of Ireland now and had landed at Heathrow and he wasn’t seeing any IRA gunmen waiting to shoot him. Still, he needed to brief Jay before he met with Mercer.
“Fair,” Reinhardt said. “I’ll be in this afternoon.”
“Okay,” Jay said. He clicked off the phone.
The Dutch woman was smiling at him. “One of your mistresses?” she said.
Jay said, “You Europeans. You’re so parochial.”
The red double decker bus slowed to a stop and Reinhardt got off. He walked for about a half mile, into the green of St. James Park. Past a pond where English boys had placed their model boats. A child held out a piece of bread to a pigeon, saying, “Hello, hello” in the pleasant way that English children say such things. Reinhardt saw Jay sitting on a bench and went and sat next to him.
Jay said, “Well?”
“Bad,” Reinhardt said. “Didn’t find Donnie O’Sullivan. But I did manage to kill an IRA terrorist.”
“Well, I presume you had to.”
“Yeah. Wouldn’t have happened if not for this piece of shit named Tim Brogan. I wasn’t paying attention and they got me behind this pub. Took me out to a house in the countryside and they were going to kill me. I got out of it. Turns out Brogan was working for the British Secret Service.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, it checks out.”
Jay said, “You didn’t kill him, did you?”
“No. I wanted to though. He was going to kill me.” Reinhardt said, “You know why?”
“Why?”
“To protect his own cover. I checked with Derek Holiday at MI6. He didn’t know about it directly, but he later confirmed that Brogan was working for MI5. He apologized. But it wasn’t his fault. Didn’t hear anything from MI5.”
“You think you should?”
“Fuck, I don’t know. Derek said not to worry about it. Which was nice of him, being that I hadn’t done anything wrong.”
“Well,” Jay said, “maybe it was our bad.”
“How so?”
Jay said, “I should have known that might have happened before you went in.”
“It’s not your fault. Who could predict that the British had a policy, a de facto policy, of allowing their undercover agents to kill people to maintain their cover?” Reinhardt sighed. “I guess it’s okay if it’s Irish being murdered.”
Jay shook his head. “Don’t go getting sympathetic for the Irish, Charlie. Certainly not for the IRA. It’s not our fight.”
Derek Holiday was an agent for MI6 and Reinhardt considered him a friend. But earlier when Reinhardt had spoke of American money supporting IRA terrorism, it was Holiday who had supplied him that knowledge. Holiday had supported American policy in Afghanistan and, to a slight degree, in Iraq. But he said there were Englishmen, some of them retired soldiers, who had pointed out that if we were going to start declaring war on those who sponsored terrorism, it could become a tricky business. Even for Americans. Reinhardt had said, in a diplomatic way, that that was different. But then, he wasn’t English.
Reinhardt said to Jay, “Well, I’m not going back there.” He was still shaken up about it. Nearly murdered by someone working for the British.
“I don’t think the General will ask you to,” Jay said. “Besides, there’s something else they want you to look into.”
“What?”
“You ever hear of a writer named Peter Rathau?”
“An American?”
“Yeah. He wrote a book on the Balkans a couple of years ago. It was good.”
“Yeah, I read it. What about him?”
“He was found floating in the Spree River this morning.”