The Spy

by Marc Eden

  Credit to Churchill.

  “David Hamilton has worked damned hard for us,” Mountbatten said. “I should think it’s the very least we could do for him.”

  “GOLDILOCKS is not just any mission,” the Prime Minister reminded him. “Best that one hand not tell the other.” If the girl were to hear from them, Mountbatten would decide.

  “Anyone in mind?”

  “Why, yes,” Mountbatten said, “it’s Bridley, I’m thinking of. He’s about as personable as they come, and would leave just the right impression with the girl. He certainly has Edwina eating out of his hand. She insists on calling him James, you know.”

  “Yes, of course, one has to call them something,” Churchill shot back. He was thinking of Turing. Sarah brought him small bits of gossip now and then, like unexpected lumps of sugar, dropped into his tea. Clementine, too, had taken an interest. Relegated increasingly alone by war and its demands upon their men, or busy knitting socks, the ladies wanted to talk, and were demanding someone to talk to.

  “Bother and drat!” Churchill put it.

  Mountbatten, half a world away, agreed. Bridley, The Boffin—filling voids as mysterious as his own comings and goings, his Blackmail List, if not his heart, an open book for thirsty wives—proved an unexpected windfall for the husbands. Wives and daughters, when not in the services, in hospitals, or on bond-raising platforms, retreated into their own parlors, eager for news of the “child spy,” being a female like themselves. Excluded from the purposes of the mission, they had become anxious in recent weeks to know if Valerie Sinclair were being well-treated. It was Bridley, of course, who assured them that she was.

  “Listen to this,” Churchill said. He had just finished reading Blackstone’s Report containing David Hamilton’s Review of the Girl, an assessment he was looking forward to sharing with Clementine. The fact that it was important to the Prime Minister brought Mountbatten’s seasoned attention back to the specter of an outside interest. They discussed the press, centering on CBS and Paley. The American correspondents had treated Winston Churchill like royalty; Mountbatten, like a regular guy. Murrow and Seldes, for starters, might have a beef with Bletchley, or Blackstone perhaps; but their devotion to the British struggle was beyond dispute.

  “I understand, Winnie, but where there is smoke—”

  “—there is usually,” Churchill chimed, “a really good cigar. No, Louis, put it out of mind. Otherwise, next thing thing you know, one of our more enterprising writers will be describing you as paranoid.”

  Mountbatten blinked.

  Hanging onto a previous statement, and getting an unfamiliar picture, Lord Louis was thinking quickly. Of course, the Prime Minister didn’t say that GOLDILOCKS was being monitored by an outside Operative, known to Churchill but not to himself, which would have been an affront to their relationship. He merely said that the mission wasn’t as tight as it could be: it seemed to have widened. Their chances of pulling it off, for which he was sticking his neck out, were predicated on keeping it contained. Mountbatten would not relish any change in plan, were he not first consulted as to its direction. The inferred outside Operative, the fellow in the trench coat, didn’t register as a Gestapo profile. Hamilton would have said so: Winston would have known. The fact that they did not was troubling. Mountbatten frowned. Ike had called Churchill, not the other way around. It was looking like a narrow field. Could it be somebody on the inside talking?

  Bridley?

  But Bridley was here. Here, in Kandy, was he not? Of course he was! Lord Louis liked having him around. He was such a comfort to Edwina, especially when they traveled. His thoughts darkened. Trench coat, be damned! If counterespionage, which Bridley should have foreseen, had arisen in his absence, then...?

  It could be anyone!

  Thunder boomed, shaking glass. The clouds opened, making a racket; it was on the palace roof. Something inexplicable had entered on their phone line. Not being tapped, were they? Wouldn’t be Eisenhower, would it? Lord Louis listened.

  Vibration of some sort...

  Sounded like a ship’s bell. Mountbatten banged his receiver. No problem. All was right on the line. Both men were back on it.

  “You still there, are you?”

  Mountbatten said that he was. A weather phenomenon... So! The P.M. had them protected.

  “Work it out in England,” its Prime Minister was saying. “You do your part, we will complete ours, the mission will go off as planned. I sense worry, try to relax. What time may we expect you?”

  Lord Louis told him.

  The rain was louder. “I suspect David may have had enormous problems with Blackstone over his choice, for the girl.” Both men agreed. “He liked the other one, the Frenchman, though.”

  “Hamilton’s department,” pointed out the Navy man. He was thinking of Eisenhower... an unwelcome hand, tapping him on the shoulder. From the first mention of him, since that interruption, the clock seemed to have jumped. He would be anxious to get home, quartered at Beaulieu Abbey. “David Hamilton, you see, does what he does best. It’s unfortunate though that Dwight...”

  “Found out?”

  About his Weather Directive?

  Mountbatten said: “I don’t see how he could. If you would like me to...”

  Yes, he would like him to: That is why he’d called.

  “Well, Supremo, what are you going to tell Mm?”

  “That would depend on how nice he is, wouldn’t you think?” Churchill hadn’t missed a beat. Four hundred years of Windsors were in the tone.

  Cigar smoke billowed, touching the thick leaves of books. “Precisely. Between us, and GOLDILOCKS, is where one finds the paradigm, the conscience of the war. I wouldn’t call it negotiable, would you? Of course not! It is our neck, not De Gaulle’s, not Eisenhower’s!” Winston Churchill had no love for the French.

  An American intrusion, either.

  Mountbatten said it: one did not throw the Empire out, to throw an American in. De Gaulle’s position, on the other hand, was that of the man in the dark. In the Royal Navy’s production of Punch-and-Judy, the French clown entered last.

  Churchill had made an exception: Hamilton’s department, SOE. He might have to jiggle things a bit, rearrange their portmanteau, as it were, to insure a proper fit. Should it come to that, SOE’s inflexibility, fifteen previous failed missions, could be traced directly to the Chief French Occupant of the green Rolls Royce. The Prime Minister, rummaging through his pantry of political savoir-faire, would come up with just the right bone to toss to the French.

  “I understand,” Lord Louis assured him, removing Hamilton from his Blackmail List. In times of crisis, there could be no Middle; the Middle, personified by Hamilton, had just disappeared into the Top.

  As they talked, Mountbatten distant, Commodore Blackstone kept coming to mind. If Blackstone saw Mountbatten as competition, so much the better. For a man to serve as a goat, he should begin to smell like one. One mentioned it, the other answered. Churchill flicked his ash. “Aye?”

  “Thinking,” Mountbatten said.

  Aware that Blackstone’s office had conveniently, and stupidly, branded Eisenhower as England’s Number One Security Threat, an attempt to make something of Ike’s alleged affair with his personal driver, Kay Summersby, Mountbatten of Burma, sensing an alternative motive, was listening intently.

  The insult to Eisenhower threatened like a parang.

  Churchill was pressing. Whoever got nailed in the Middle, it was not going to be Winston. The words from the Prime Minister were coming slowly, intentionally: an intermixture of courtly references with soft courtesies. The velvet glove. Behind the oatmeal words, stood a man of impenetrable steel.

  “Are we in accord, Louis?”

  “By God, yes,” Mountbatten said.

  Ike’s Packard, the Irish girl installed at the wheel, could not be the issue now. Perhaps the Baker Street Irregulars, Bridley taking the heat, if necessary, could quite simply just back off. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister, one e
ye peeled for emergent justice, was having the entire mission closely monitored, including any sudden change in Valerie Sinclair. They would scrap her, if it came to that. It wouldn’t, of course. Important Mountbatten fly back at once. “You have seen worse, Louis.” Memories arose; he had put them away—explosions, the tilting deck of a destroyer.

  Corsica. He had known fear.

  Lord Louis agreed.

  Churchill, making the point, made it without smiling. While they must have the atomic information, it simply could not be had by splitting the Allies. The Prime Minister was making it clear to Mountbatten that the wheels of the gods, grinding slowly, were running out of men to grind. Lord Louis, obligingly, was thinking of candidates. Presuming Whitehall would be able to position General De Gaulle, it would be Mountbatten’s responsibility to find an honorable exoneration, after the mission of course, for key links in his chain-of-command. He remembered Grimes, easy that one, sought by Hamilton as a hedge against Parker. He was the one who’d had him transferred. Snatched from under Blackstone’s nose, he would make sure that Hamilton’s personal spy was quartered at Beaulieu. If Blackstone got wind, however, it would be Hamilton who would bite the bullet. “I will vouch for the integrity of my Staff,” Mountbatten reminded his caller. As head of the Commandos, Royal Marines were for the using.

  Quite dependable, actually: British, at least.

  England’s undisputed leader, who had called to determine the cast, was rising word by word above the cause of his own intrigue: as peachy clean, Lord Louis concluded, as a baby’s bottom. The Prime Minister’s exhortation of “blood, toil, tears and sweat,” was either efficiently understated, or generously overwhelming, depending on whose blood he had in mind. His message to the Commodore was as logical as two Aces over a Jack: Eisenhower’s oxfords were not the toes that they could afford to step on. Plenty of chaps yet, untapped for suspicion. There, but for the grace of God, would go somebody else. Accepting reality as a valid excuse, Churchill was writing their new axiom. It was life at the Bottom, at the Top.

  Club talk: new cards, please.

  “I cannot tell you how much I appreciate your making that clear,” Lord Louis acknowledged, “you had me worried there for a moment.”

  “Understandable,” said Churchill.

  After due deliberation then, accomplished in a flash, the Prime Minister was prepared to hand mission responsibility back to Mountbatten: correct it, he was saying. When Mountbatten started to object, some matter about his word to Blackstone, the P.M. rose to the occasion. For such an early hour in the morning, it was his finest. “I do not ask of history that you will have justified your allegiance to England by discretion at the proper time—I demand it.”

  Lord Louis had heard clearly: I do not ask of history...I demand it. At least he knew to whom he was talking; he began to consider whom he would call.

  Churchill again: “David is certain that she holds the key, and that she will surface satisfactorily from the mission. When she does, you won’t be wanting any loose ends. Submarine’s on Sunday, I understand. Hamilton has also assured me that she can’t be made to talk—absolutely topping girl! Safe as the Bank of England!”

  A shareholder, Mountbatten winced.

  That was not the issue. Lord Louis knew that Eisenhower had his own counterintelligence sources. If smarting over criticism of Kay Summersby, the Supreme Commander would not hesitate to use them. “Well, we’ll have to see what we can do about it, won’t we?”

  “Glad to hear it,” announced Churchill.

  “She drives for him.” Mountbatten pointed out.

  That Windsor voice again. “Morality and bosh!” boomed the Prime Minister. “Must this entire bloody war end up in the foul waters of rumor!” The rumors were true. It was what their American Commander might do, that bothered them.

  Mountbatten put it flatly: “We have to launch GOLDILOCKS as scheduled.” It was the opinion of his men. In the respect of those men, rested the honor of England. People like Eisenhower had come, but they would leave again. “Couldn’t we just explain it to him later? Surely, the interest of the Commonwealth...!”

  “No! You make your peace with Ike. You make that peace now. Grab it by the horns, sir! Decisions must not be set adrift.” The caller slipped the cigar from his mouth, and snuffed it. “I do not consider it politic, with Bradley’s present crisis, to have this come up later. With this new technology—pointing towards us out of hell!—it would be importune to extend an opportunity for others to level false charges against us, however ill-advised, that our interest in a major German breakthrough in physics is anything other than our own survival. Motives of self-aggrandisement, to the benefit of our Financial District, must never—never, sir!—find any safe harbor in our recorded histories, now being written!”

  “But we’re paying for it!” Mountbatten shot back.

  “Exactly, sir! And should events prove that we are entitled to any rewards that may arise as the consequence of nuclear peacetime use, then that will be time enough to clearly state, and for others to understand, how very dear that price will have been!”

  In the background, bankers reared like ghosts.

  “Finders keepers?” Lord Louis coughed, so as not to grin.

  “There, you see it? You have the picture faster than imagined. As you know, I was never in favor of this nuclear type of weaponry to begin with, but since we have had to attend to it or perish, we intend to keep what we buy—with our blood, on our beaches, and in the backwaters of Europe.”

  Heavy water, heavy price.

  In the Lewis Carroll coloring book, Dunkirk would not be colored black. They both knew the mission to be a winner. It was the losers, still essential, who might have to be accommodated. Later, words would match print, called history. At the moment, they were editing.

  “John Blackstone doing well, is he?” Mountbatten inquired.

  “About as well as Gladstone,” purred Churchill, speaking for Lord Randolph. The Prime Minister’s American mother, fond of Victorian mansions, had never cared much for amber waves of grain. Though the Code Center’s doors out at Bletchley had opened to American analysts six months ago, no Americans were currently in residence, nor any French either.

  “This ultimate weapon then,” said Mountbatten, “is destined for responsible hands?” It was not a question, it was a vote. Churchill nodded, he said, “yes,” but he wasn’t through. Mountbatten felt it, approaching yet invisible, the way he sensed ships on a shoal. At forty-four, his watch with the Prime Minister nearly ended, he had come to the dawn of his life. Over Peredynia, the rain had stopped and the sun was sinking. In England, it was just rising.

  It was the future, shaped like a mushroom cloud.

  “If, ultimately, our decision is to let the Americans have it—along with the advance judgment of the world—we will live with that also.”

  Lord Louis: “Are you saying then, you would have me steer Eisenhower left rudder? Sometime after Sunday, I presume.”

  “Too late for that. No, we need to attend to it now. I will be talking to Monty, later today. Bit of a strain between himself and Ike, you know.” A gifted understatement, it would have been lost on Bradley. Mountbatten nodded. To preserve the contents of the German labs, a few British army movements, under the direction of Montgomery, might have to be changed. Whitehall, not to be caught napping, had quietly provided for it. “Nothing set in stone, you understand.”

  Mountbatten could see it. He said, “Of course.”

  “The Boffins are already on top of it. Little touchy for Monty, but I think he’ll go along. Eisenhower’s law office is where it may get sticky—” static on the line, “—bloke named Bernstein. I’ll send you the whole report. Once we get her away from the possibility of Eisenhower’s lawyer—” news, for Mountbatten, “—and safely en route, we should be able to put a whole new face on it.”

  “Matter of hours,” Lord Louis pointed out.

  The less spread, the better. Mountbatten’s job, now defined, was
to pull the string on Bull Durham—he had once seen Eisenhower in a pair of cowboy boots—and to close off criticism while insuring that Sunday night’s launch proceeded smoothly. Lord Louis said, rather softly Churchill thought, “I will straighten it all out.”

  Mountbatten had a curious way of tacking—sometimes into trouble. This time, neither man could afford it. “Ike must not be compromised,” the P.M. repeated. “Do you have that?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Excellent! Well then! I expect you’ll do your best, Louis,” Churchill beamed. The red telephone was heading for its cradle. “That’s what the Crown pays you to do.”

  Mountbatten took it on the chin.

  The Prime Minister hung up.

  Footsteps were approaching....

  Commander Hamilton listened. It was through the spindle of rock. Crunching carefully on gravel, the footsteps stopped. The approacher was bending over, photographing a bug. The telephone number of Sergeant Blumensteel’s barracks still written on the inside of her thigh, Valerie Sinclair appeared in the entrance to the cave. Above the wild cliffs, the morning sun had just broken through. De Beck, nursing a headache, showed up a few moments later.

  “Now, the most important thing when you arrive in France,” said Hamilton, having begun the briefing, “is to act completely natural.” He looked at Sinclair, who was blinking at the walls. “Remember, the people you’ll encounter will have no knowledge of why you are there. You will be issued French identification cards, identical to those approved by the Gestapo, and French francs, most of them to Pierre. As a student, Valerie, you would not be carrying much money, you see.”