‘Are you seriously suggesting…?!’
‘Oh, absolutely. The order was sitting right here, waiting for my signature…’
He waved a hand at his desk blotter, his tone utterly unemotional.
‘…In this game one cannot afford to get too – how shall we say? – sentimental. Eyes always on the prize.’
‘But surely…?’ Finch spluttered. ‘A bloody war has just been averted…?!’
Melville went to the window again, staring out, hands clasped. He took his time.
‘Dr Finch, do you know what’s going on here? I mean really know what’s going on here?’
He turned back again. Finch shrugged.
‘You really have no idea, do you?’
Finch shook his head.
‘The British and French have already pledged themselves to each other as allies. The Entente Cordiale. A thousand years of enmity set aside for a free hand in each other’s colonies and a bulwark in Europe against Germany. The last thing we wanted – as you correctly deduced – was to get dragged into an unnecessary sideshow against Russia, be it in the Baltic, the Black Sea, the Pacific… or the bloody North-West Frontier.’
His cigarette had been wisping away, leaving a long stem of ash. He picked it up and resumed smoking.
‘As a result of preventing the Eaton Square assassination – which we would have stopped anyway, without your help – we are now, too, committed to propping up the King’s nephew, Tsar Nicholas II, a pathetic, vain man and his despicable regime, one with which we should have no truck were it not for the fact that befriending Russia provides us with a convenient second front against the Kaiser…
‘But he’ll not last,’ he added. ‘We are only staying the Tsar’s execution – quite literally. Soon, a mighty revolution will come in which the Communists – those Bolsheviks – will seize power. They will purge the past – daresay brutally – and a new Russia will rise from the ashes.’
‘Then why not let the Bolsheviks succeed in offing the Tsar?’ asked Finch. ‘Get it over and done with? From what I understand they shun “imperial wars”. They wouldn’t have wanted to fight us anyway.’
‘Because the timing is not yet right, Finch…’
He pondered over his words.
‘…We are merely managing the situation, biding our time, not for some premature insurrection – something that may happen soon, even within weeks – but for the full, unstoppable force of the genuine thing. And when that happens, the real revolution, it will come at a moment, and on terms, of our choosing.’
Finch put his glass down. He’d given up on it.
‘The Marxists have a saying – the “useful idiot”,’ Melville continued. ‘The evangelical politico, the zealot who espouses their cause, but who is enlisted purely as a means to an end – an expendable soul, there to be sacrificed like a chess player’s pawn. Well when the revolution’s been won, we will make them – the Bolsheviks – our useful idiots in a struggle against a greater evil.’
‘A greater evil?’
‘One way or another, war against Germany will come, Dr Finch. You know it. Everyone knows it. It’s just a matter of when. The strong will win, the weak will perish, the sick and decadent will be consumed. But our job here is to play the long game. It’s what happens when that show’s over that bothers us, Finch. After the chaos. A new order will be on its way – a grand clearing of the decks, a lust for the extermination of degeneracy, for punitive action, for the attribution of blame. It will swell. It will be a new Europe of states built on national vitality and order and discipline and vulgar, populist, vengeful strongmen…’
He let the pause hang.
‘…Our job is to keep Great Britain out of it, to steer her on her own path.’
He stared intently at Finch.
‘Do you know who I am?’
Finch felt ridiculous, standing there with his Boys’ Brigade gong hanging round his neck, being lectured by a superior.
‘I’ve heard about you, sir.’
‘Some nonsense about Houdini, no doubt?’
‘Well I—’
‘It’s like this, Finch. I was, until recently, the head of Special Branch. What had become patently clear, as this recent affair has just demonstrated, is that when it comes to matters of national security – Parliament, Foreign Office, War Office, Colonial Office, Scotland Yard, the Admiralty – the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. Too many cooks. There have been a number of plots against the Crown, against the Empire, that we’ve thwarted, some the public will never ever know about…’
Melville stubbed his cigarette out.
‘…As a result of which, I now find myself in a curious position – a desk at the War Office, in the employ of the Foreign Office, and, by the gift of the prime minister, somewhere around His Majesty’s secretary of state for foreign affairs in terms of rank and access to privileged information… intelligence, for want of a better word. I have been charged with bringing these strands together into one agency… what is provisionally known as MO3.’
‘I’m not really sure what you are saying.’
‘Here, you will never be free, never truly safe. There is no life for you in England, Finch. Not at the moment. I suggest you leave, and leave soon.’
‘Leave?… But where?’
Melville smiled to himself.
‘I suppose you could say my illusionist associations have borne some fruit… First we, MO3, will make you disappear, Finch. And then you can be our useful idiot… Somewhere.’
He drained his whisky and slammed the glass down.
‘You still carry the rank of captain…’
‘I did… I mean, in the Medical Corps…’
‘That was not a question, Captain Finch. Your commission has been renewed.’
‘But I—’
Melville extended his hand to shake.
‘We will be in touch. That will be all.’
He left the room by the side door. Finch’s time was up.
Outside, Finch stood in the corridor for a moment. He turned the worthless bauble on his chest, with its smug Latin inscription and its Ruritanian pomp and wondered, given all that had just been laid at his feet, what the hell it was all about.
He looped the medal over his head, then hung it on the doorknob. His heels clicked and echoed as he strutted off down the corridor…
First published in the United Kingdom in 2018 by Canelo
Canelo Digital Publishing Limited
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Copyright © Jeff Dawson, 2018
The moral right of Jeff Dawson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781788631914
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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