“How terrible that must’ve been for you.” He tried to infuse his tone with sympathy. Meg was silently clasping her grandmother’s hand.
Mary Snider narrowed her eyes at him. “Yes. It was.”
“Grandma,” Meg said, giving her grandmother’s shoulder a slight squeeze with her other hand, “I’m so sorry you lost your fiancé. But then you met Grandpa later that year, didn’t you? So things worked out.”
Sweet Meg, Jake thought, smiling at her. Always concerned about the other person’s feelings. Always finding the silver lining. His heart warmed at her kindness, her empathetic smile and warm gestures. Then he frowned. Back to business.
“Was that why you couldn’t reveal your engagement to Horst Eberhard, Mrs. Snider? Because he was a German soldier and if the War Office had found out, you would’ve been suspected of harboring Nazi sympathies?”
Her dark-blue eyes steady on his face, the elderly woman merely nodded.
Jake sat back and crossed his legs. He kept a poker face and schooled his voice to remain neutral.
“Good thing you kept that secret, Mrs. Snider. Don’t think the War Office would’ve understood that relationship. Did he, your German fiancé, ever conduct espionage activities inside England or Ireland? That you know of?”
Again Mary nodded.
Jake’s mouth dropped open. “And you didn’t report him?”
Mary’s eyes flickered down to her lap, where her gloved hands clasped together in a tense knot. She shook her head, then lifted her chin in a gesture of defiance.
“He was the man I loved and we never talked about politics. He never told me he was spying. I knew him as a German teacher, that’s all. I didn’t discover he was a spy until that communiqué from Italy. By then, he was dead. Now it’s water over the dam. So what?”
He looked over at Meg, who appeared to be processing all she’d just heard. She was frowning, knowing that what her grandmother had done—not exposing her fiancé as a spy operating within Britain during the war—had put her at risk. Although Ireland was still neutral, in essence she’d worked for the Allied cause in the British War Office. Although Ireland was still neutral, in essence she’d been working for the Allied cause. Her secret engagement to a possible enemy agent was at the very least foolhardy. At worst, treason.
Good, he felt, relief flooding him, at least Mary herself hadn’t spied. If what she just said was the truth, anyway.
The truth was gradually leaking out. Like a damned river that strains to break free, it finds the path of least resistance, and though it starts out as a rivulet, it becomes a steady current over time. He suspected Mary Snider’s burden of shameful secrets was wearing away at her defensive wall of silence.
But was her revelation the entire truth?
“Did your German fiancé ever ask you to spy for him? For the Third Reich?” There, he’d finally asked the all-important question. Meg shot him a look of panic—as if she was pleading with him, please don’t go there!
He had to ask and he had to know.
“Yes,” the old woman raised her chin and smiled, a granite-hard, all-knowing smile, “but I refused. He never asked again. We both knew our boundaries, young man. We had jobs to do. We were both soldiers and we knew what we had to do. I worked for England and he worked for Germany.”
Jake felt like a pinball machine was clanging around inside his head. He wasn’t sure he could believe the old lady. She sounded sincere just then, but she was also one good actress.
“Why are you so interested, Jake Bernstein?” Mary suddenly asked him. Her gray eyebrows were arched stiffly, her wrinkled mouth now screwed up in a moue of distaste.
The old gal was cagey. She’d given up something she knew was important. Now it was his turn. Jake knew it’d be so easy to confess the truth of his identity, right then and there. He should warn them about MI5’s investigation. But he couldn’t.
“It’s fascinating history. Like I said, World War II is a hobby of mine, partly because of my grandfather’s personal history. I’ve got the whole collection of the ‘World at War’ DVDs. When I was a teenager, I watched them with my father and grandfather. Every year for four or five years. In the lull between football and baseball season.” He added the last with a wry grin. It was all true; time well spent with the two most important men in his life.
Mary Snider said nothing but her look said it all. She didn’t believe him. Her antenna was up.
Jake stood up. “Excuse me, I need to walk around and get some fresh sea air. Meg, wanna come?”
Still bewildered and distressed by the turn of conversation, Meg glanced up at him and shook her head. She looked upset although Mary Snider appeared unruffled.
What a pair.
One a total innocent. The other, God only knew…
He needed to walk. And process it all, himself.
Chapter Seventeen
London, June 1941
For four months, Mary made her first Saturday of the month visit to her neighborhood park near Coventry Garden. No chalk marking on the bench leg meant no dead-drop. Continue on as instructed, which meant supervise Lady Sarah and radio in every week any relevant information Hummingbird and Black Widow had gleaned during the course of their work for the War Office.
Mary hadn’t received any visits from her cousin, Thomas McCoy, in that time period, but did receive two letters, all in code. One was to scold her for not discovering Churchill’s meeting place with Stalin—that secret had been well kept. In the second one, she and Sarah were to combine their reports for their Wednesday evening transmission and report any intelligence regarding the Third Reich’s buildup along its eastern border. Evidently, Thomas suspected Resistance cells in Poland were tipping off the British about the imminent German invasion of Soviet Russia. The Germans wanted to destroy those cells.
Mary couldn’t believe it. Surely, the Fuhrer wouldn’t risk everything the German military had accomplished—all the territory won and war booty confiscated—to embark on an eastern front. Why not concentrate on northern Europe? They’d already occupied Holland, Belgium, Denmark. Scandinavia would fall next and then Great Britain would surrender. The Germans would force the British to accept terms of compliance, allowing the Third Reich to rule over Europe. The way it should be.
One evening, as one of several dinner guests of Lady Sarah’s at her family’s town house in Mayfair, the possibility of an eastern front was discussed and just as quickly dismissed. During their weekly game of whist with a couple of English girls from work, Mary posed the possibility. The English women, excluding Lady Sarah, expressed their collective hope that Hitler and his cronies would be so foolish. Even the manservant had chimed in and bet all of the young ladies present his very last shilling that Hitler, the daft fool, would do just that—create a second front to his war. Stretch the German war machine to the breaking point. They knew the Russians. They would fight and die to the last man before they would give up their cities.
Mary had used this ladies’ game of cards once a week as her cover for her visits to Spencer House, and she’d been careful to agree aloud with the prevailing British opinion on the war. At the close of the evening, Mary hugged each one goodnight, encouraging them with silent gestures to show their affection to the socially backward Lady Sarah, whose hospitality, good liquor, and cigarettes they’d all enjoyed. Which they did, bowing to Mary’s dominant personality.
The single women of the War Office had quickly learned that, if they wanted to meet eligible, good-looking men, they had to stick with Mary McCoy. At the various clubs and dance halls in wartime London, wherever she went, men circled beautiful Mary and her entourage like knights around the ladies of the court. Eliza and Chelsea, both stenographers like their fellow noblewoman, were poor, plain, husband-hunters. A fact Mary exploited, as soon as she learned this. Already, one of Mary’s castoffs had begun to date Chelsea.
Lady Sarah, after seeing the two young women to the door, turned to Mary. Forbidden to discuss anything they’d lear
ned at work in the presence of servants, the women could nevertheless discuss what the man-on-the-street knew. The rumors were flying that Hitler and his damned Kraut armies would soon be finished off by the damned Russian Commies.
“What have you heard about an eastern front?” Lady Sarah asked, her bulging eyes flaring wide with alarm.
Mary put a forefinger to her mouth to hush her and pointed upstairs.
“Oh, Sarah, let me try on that new perfume you bought. The scent was divine,” Mary said, “I might want to wear it Saturday night.”
Together they left the foyer, passing the butler and footman on the way, and climbed the stairs to Lady Sarah’s room. The spacious, lushly appointed sitting room contained an alcove for reading. Seated, Mary drew a folded paper from her large, flat purse. On one side, she’d printed in code a message ready for the wireless.
“I intercepted a message in French but it came from Gdansk, Poland. Berlin will know what to do with it.” She took a few minutes to memorize it, then lit a match to it. It curled into a black rag before she tossed the carbon mess into the lighted fireplace. A small fire had been banked off but held steadily. If Lady Sarah had wanted the fire to rage, all she had to do was pull the cord by the door. One of the maids would show up and tend to it. Tonight, the small fire was sufficient.
Spencer House, built in the eighteenth century, had surprised Mary with all its hidden nooks and crannies that Sarah was happy to share with her. Remainders of a society once known for its closet affairs, there was a nook deep inside the paneled wall and hidden by a hutch. When opened, the concealed nook led to a narrow, steep stairway. They climbed up two flights to a small alcove in the attic, wedged under the tiled roof but just above the small garret attic. The alcove was wedged in a closed-off portion on the opposite side of the huge attic, where the servants’ quarters were located. The perfect place to hide a wireless radio and the reception, they imagined it was among the best in London.
For this secret storage space, Mary knew, Horst had sacrificed his marriage to Clare, had written her off as just one of his assets. For this, Horst had whored himself with Sarah. The poor deluded fool continued to write to her lover, the headmaster Thomas McCoy in Waterford, Ireland, thinking he cared for her and would seek her out at the end of the war. For Sarah’s act of stupidity, Mary vowed to herself that the woman—despite her privilege and wealth—would pay dearly.
As a result of her husband Horst’s betrayal, Mary’s heart had turned to stone. The automaton that she’d become went through the motions and did what she had to do. But whatever vestige of Clare that remained was well buried. And she had learned a vital lesson. Never again would she allow a man to seize her heart. After the war, Clare/Mary vowed everything would change. She would become captain of her own destiny.
At precisely ten o’clock on Wednesday evenings, a Luftwaffe cargo plane, doubling as a spy plane, began circling at a high altitude over London. It continued circling for fifteen minutes and not one minute longer. Accepting a certain frequency, the radio operator on board transmitted and received for its limited time, and then the pilot scurried out of there before London’s Civil Defense volunteers could spot it and turn on the sirens and spotlights.
The alcove’s tiny space was no larger than five-feet square. The slanted ceiling above their heads afforded the two women barely enough room to crouch. After Sarah turned up the kerosene lamp, Mary sat at the table on which stood the wireless, still cloaked in its sturdy suitcase and covered by a waterproof tarp. She took out a pencil, pad of paper and the cipher book. Sarah went down on her knees next to the table and waited anxiously.
Ready to transmit, Mary checked her watch and then dialed the exact frequency. She listened to the faint static that emitted from the wireless’s one speaker. Above the London rooftops at night, the faint drones of airplanes could be heard. Mary could never discern which droning sounds were British planes and which were the Luftwaffe, although many Civil Defense volunteers claimed they could. For at least one minute, both women crouched over the speaker and listened intently.
A burst of static and then a male’s voice, speaking in German, transmitted a coded message, which Mary rapidly wrote down on her pad. It made no sense to her, undeciphered, of course. When it was her turn to transmit, she spoke German, too, and conveyed her coded message. In addition to information she’d learned that week about the Polish Resistance in Gdansk, she told her Abwehr controllers in Hamburg that Churchill and his generals were gleeful about the rumor of Germany’s invasion of Russia. A not-so-subtle warning that the British perceived the invasion as a colossal mistake on the part of the Third Reich, but one whose consequences the Brits would happily benefit from. After receiving her coded message, the operator signed off with a “Viel gluck, fraulein!”
For the next ten minutes, Mary let Sarah use the cipher book to decode the transmitted message. With each participation in the weekly wireless transmissions, the young Nazi sympathizer was digging a deeper hole and sealing her fate. If Mary were caught, she’d have something valuable to bargain with, perhaps a way to spare her own life. If Sarah were caught, the British would be reluctant to pursue a scandal involving the nobility. At least, that’s what Mary was counting on. If necessary, it would be Mary’s job to permanently silence the woman—codenamed by Horst the Black Widow.
They both hunched over the decoded message for at least five minutes, squinting under the kerosene lamp, not quite believing their eyes. Mary translated from German into English. On Midsummer’s Eve of 1941, armies of the Third Reich had crossed the eastern border of Poland into Russian territory. The march to Stalingrad had begun.
“Scheisse,” whispered Mary. Shit. She felt a stab in her heart, and unconsciously she pounded her chest with one fist. Hadn’t Napoleon’s disastrous foray into Russia taught them anything? What was the Fuhrer thinking?
“Well, damn it to every bloody hell,” said Sarah. She turned off the kerosene lamp after Mary closed up the suitcase and covered it with the tarp. Careful to be silent, they exited the small crawl space and trudged down the narrow stairs.
“It’ll be fine, you’ll see,” Mary reassured Sarah at normal voice, once they were safely ensconced back in the sitting room. They shut the wall panel and pushed the hutch in front of it. “Our armies are strong, invincible. You’ll see.”
She mustn’t allow Sarah to become discouraged. Mary needed her full cooperation. Privately, however, she had gnawing doubts about the woman’s enduring loyalty. After tonight’s news, the noblewoman’s empathy for the German cause might falter. Mary studied the woman’s facial expression. She detected something that hadn’t been visible before. Uncertainty.
Mary knew that if Sarah ever showed signs of betrayal, she would have no choice but to kill her. Inside her hummingbird pin, given to her by Horst during her training at the Abwehr—within the tiny space under the bird’s body—there was a cyanide pill powerful enough to kill either herself or Mary within minutes.
Another worry plagued Mary.
Was it possible? Had the Fuhrer, the man who’d masterminded the conquest of all of Europe and to whom she had sworn undying allegiance, just made the biggest mistake of his life? For her own sake, she hoped not.
Chapter Eighteen
The Irish Sea, 2005
After thirty minutes of pacing the upper, outside deck, Deck 11, and getting windblown, Jake raked fingers through his thick, dark hair. The cold air had cleared his head. Mary Snider’s words had just supported his theory, that the German spy had somehow influenced her. What he hadn’t expected was her admission that this Horst Eberhard had tried to recruit her, but she’d declined. There was probably no proof that she’d declined, no proof that she hadn’t.
The hummingbird pin probably meant nothing. It was just a pricey gift. Perhaps originally meant for a spy, code named Hummingbird, that Horst Eberhard ultimately couldn’t deliver. He’d targeted an Irish lass who fell for him but refused to spy for him. Dead end there.
So
much for this investigation! Should he conclude it? Report to MI5 that their suspicions were groundless, pack up and go home?
It was tempting, but then he might never see Meg again. No, he’d find a way to keep the friendship going. But once she discovered his true identity, that he’d used her to get to her grandmother, she’d never speak to him again.
Not a happy thought…
He ambled down to the lounge area. Noises greeted him almost immediately. People were staring in the direction of the bench and tables area, where he’d left Meg and her grandmother.
He halted. A gray-haired man with a bald head and tonsure cut, dressed in a rumpled, dark green jacket, was bending over them, his hands gripping Mary Snider’s arms. Meg jumped to her feet and pulled at the man’s hands, trying to yank her grandmother free. She was hollering for him to go away. The husky-built man reached over and pushed her down to the bench. When Meg sprang to her feet again, the man slapped her, causing Meg’s head to jerk back from the blow. Mary screamed.
Instantly, Jake identified the man as the mentally unbalanced Mike McCoy, son of Mary McCoy’s cousin—the old man who’d started the whole investigation. Rage purged Jake’s mind of further hesitation, and he took off at a sprint.
In seconds, he sprang upon the intruder. Seizing the man in a headlock, Jake wrenched him around and away from the women. With the momentum, they both tumbled head first onto the carpeted floor. Jake’s shoulder caught the edge of a table; a stab of pain shot up through his arm and down his back. He applied more pressure to the man’s neck, causing him to gag and cough. Not enough to snap his windpipe, though. The guy was middle-aged and mentally ill. Jake eased off on his stranglehold. A mistake, as it turned out.
The older guy was feisty and strong. The bastard kept jabbing Jake in the ribs with his elbows. They rolled over each other and when Jake found himself underneath, the guy took advantage of the position and punched downward. Jake caught one on the chin before bucking upwards with all his might and rolling away.
A Bodyguard of Lies Page 15