Launch Code

by Michael Ridpath

  There was no tail. But we sat on the bench, looking up at the eastern end of Notre-Dame. Donna leaned in to me, nestling into my shoulder.

  Neither of us spoke.

  After the excitement of the afternoon, I found myself enveloped by a warm embrace of deep happiness. Love does that to you. Paris does that to you. While I had enjoyed the Navy and been good at my job, I had always had doubts about a life spent under the ocean. It was unhealthy. It made having a wife and children extremely difficult. And while I had genuinely believed that the threat of launching our missiles had kept the world safe for democracy, the knowledge that I might be involved in firing them had always made that a heavy burden.

  Now we had come so close, the burden had become intolerable.

  So I had no regrets about leaving the Navy. I had no idea where my business degree would lead me, but it sounded like a challenge, and one I was eager to meet. It would give me a chance to make something of myself in the world. The outside world: the real world.

  And I wouldn’t be doing it alone. I would be doing it with someone I loved. The woman resting her fair hair on my shoulder. The future belonged to us both.

  Staring at the black water shot through with the shaky yellow reflections of the Paris streetlights and the illumination of the cathedral above us, I was sure the future belonged to us both.

  I needed to make that happen.

  ‘Donna?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Will you marry me?’

  Forty-Four

  Sunday 1 December 2019, Norfolk

  Toby opened his eyes. His wife was staring at him. Her eyes and then her lips smiled when she saw he was awake, and she leaned forward to kiss his nose.

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Good morning,’ he mumbled in reply. He had woken up confused by a vivid dream involving running around Barnholt beach naked in the rain, and then trying to climb into a locked car that was parked on the sand. At least it hadn’t involved Lars’s death in front of him – or not directly.

  ‘What is it?’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You winced.’

  ‘I was thinking about Lars.’

  ‘Oh.’ She shuffled closer to him under the covers, and kissed his lips. ‘Would you like breakfast? Sausages?’

  ‘You don’t have to get breakfast,’ Toby said. ‘We can fend for ourselves.’

  Alice’s brows knitted in a mock frown. ‘Did I hear you just turn down sausages?’

  Toby smiled. ‘No, you didn’t. And yes, I would love some sausages.’

  ‘And baked beans?’ Initially, Alice had disapproved of Toby’s fondness for baked beans as part of a morning fry-up, considering it weird, but in time he had persuaded her that it was, in fact, perfectly natural.

  ‘Yes please.’

  Alice swung her legs out of bed and looked for her dressing gown, which was draped over a chair.

  ‘Alice?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘There was quite a lot of discussion after you were arrested yesterday, about Craig’s death. Justin got upset; he didn’t believe it was an accident.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Alice was feigning indifference, but I could tell she was listening closely.

  ‘Lars claimed he had killed Craig.’

  ‘Really?’ A little more interest.

  ‘And then later your father told us about Craig’s death. And that it was him, not Lars who had killed Craig.’

  Alice froze, her back to Toby. ‘He told you that?’

  ‘He did.’

  Alice turned to Toby, her voice cold. ‘And by “us” you mean . . .’

  ‘Me and Megan. And then he told Brooke later on. After Lars was shot.’

  ‘I’m surprised.’

  ‘And then he told us about Pat Greenwald.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘About your mother’s peace activist friend. And the FBI’s suspicion that she had been in touch with the KGB. And Commander Driscoll had been in touch with her.’

  ‘Jesus! Why did Dad do that?’

  ‘We asked him to. We demanded that he tell us. You knew about it?’

  ‘Yeah. Mom told me. But she told me not to tell anyone else and definitely not let Dad know I knew.’

  ‘But why all these secrets?’ Toby said, letting his frustration show. ‘Wouldn’t it have been better all along if you or your father had told your sisters? And me?’

  ‘Toby! These are real, honest-to-goodness-secrets involving my parents and the KGB.’

  ‘Yes. And two people are dead.’

  ‘Because this stuff leaked out.’

  ‘Is that why?’ said Toby. ‘Do you know why Sam Bowen died? Why Lars was shot?’

  ‘No, Toby, I have no idea. Hey, I’m the one who has been locked up for two days.’

  Toby paused. He didn’t want to start a shouting match with his wife. ‘I know,’ he said.

  ‘You haven’t told the police any of this, have you?’ Alice asked.

  ‘No. I can’t. Some guy was here from MI5 yesterday morning, with Admiral Robinson who was on the submarine with Bill. He made me sign the Official Secrets Act.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘But after Lars was shot yesterday, I told the police I wanted to speak to MI5. Tell them what I know, and then they can tell the police.’

  ‘Why would you do that?’

  ‘Because you are a suspect, Alice. I want to get you off.’

  Alice snorted in frustration. ‘My lawyer has a strategy for that! None of us says anything. Not me, not Dad, and certainly not you. That way the police have to prove I killed Sam Bowen. Talking to them will just help them find that proof.’

  ‘You see, that’s what I don’t get,’ said Toby. ‘If you didn’t kill Sam Bowen, why wouldn’t you or your hotshot lawyer want the police to know the truth?’

  Alice glared at him. Frustration had turned to anger. ‘If?’

  Toby stared back.

  ‘You said “if”, Toby. Why did you say “if”?’

  ‘I . . . I didn’t mean “if”. I meant . . . “since”. I meant “since”.

  ‘Well, you didn’t say “since”, did you?’

  Toby hadn’t.

  ‘You think I killed Sam Bowen, don’t you, Toby?’

  ‘Of course I don’t,’ said Toby. ‘I would never think that.’

  ‘All right. If you genuinely don’t think I killed that poor guy, trust me. Do as I ask. You can tell MI5 about Dad killing Craig on the submarine – Admiral Robinson will know that anyway. But don’t tell them anything about Pat Greenwald. Anything. Do you understand?’

  ‘Won’t Admiral Robinson know about that too?’

  ‘He may or may not, I don’t know. That’s up to him to tell the police about if he does know. It’s not up to you. Now, will you promise me?’

  Would he promise her? Didn’t he have a duty to tell the authorities what he knew? Maybe. But his wife was in big trouble. She was asking him for proof that he trusted her.

  He had to trust her.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I promise.’

  Alice went downstairs to make breakfast, and Toby followed her ten minutes later. As he reached the top of the stairs he heard an urgent whisper.

  ‘Toby!’

  It was Megan, dressed in checked pyjama bottoms and a light grey T-shirt, beckoning him to her room.

  He hesitated.

  Her beckoning became more urgent. ‘I’ve got something to tell you. It’s to do with Pat Greenwald.’ She mouthed the last two words.

  Toby joined her in her room. Which was tiny, and most of the floor space was covered in clothes from an open suitcase.

  She flopped on to her unmade bed. He remained standing.

  ‘Pat Greenwald is dead.’ Megan quickly described what she had discovered from her Internet searches of the previous evening.

  ‘So you think Henry Greenwald might know something about his mother’s activities?’

  ‘Maybe. She might have left him papers. Or he might have seen
something as a child.’

  ‘It’s worth a shot, I suppose. How are we going to contact him?’

  ‘Not we. Maya. I messaged her last night in New York, and she agreed to go and see him. Maya can be persuasive if she wants to be. Especially with men.’

  ‘Bill won’t like it if he finds out. And neither will Alice.’

  ‘If they find out,’ said Megan, with a mischievous smile.

  Forty-Five

  After a satisfying plate of sausages, fried egg and baked beans for breakfast, Toby’s presence was requested at the police station in King’s Lynn to meet the MI5 officer, Prestwitch.

  Having dutifully guarded Pear Tree Cottage overnight, the police had accepted breakfast from Alice and then left. Toby was on his own. He still had no idea how badly the man who had shot Lars wanted to kill him too, and it disturbed him, as it disturbed Alice.

  He appreciated the drive alone in his car on the empty Sunday morning roads. It gave him time to think. He checked his mirror regularly, and was relieved that there was no would-be assassin following him.

  His initial reaction to Lars’s death was to repeat to MI5 all he had been told by Bill, in the hope that they would pass the information on to the police who would use it to solve the two killings, and throw whoever was responsible behind bars before he could murder anyone else. Like Toby. Or Bill, or any of the Guth sisters.

  But now things were not so simple.

  Firstly, most of what Bill had told him would be known by Admiral Robinson. He was there in the control room on the submarine when Lars had attacked Commander Driscoll. He had arrested Bill for assaulting Craig. And he would almost certainly have been informed about the leak to the KGB, if only to answer questions from the FBI about it in 1996.

  Had Robinson told MI5 any of this? And had Prestwitch told the police? These were questions Toby was curious to know the answers to.

  That left the obvious point that very little of the information Toby could give Prestwitch was new, or at least new to Robinson.

  And then of course there was Alice’s demand that he trust her. In particular that he not tell them about Pat Greenwald. He wasn’t sure what to do about that.

  As soon as he arrived at the station, he was met by Prestwitch, who ushered him into an interview room where Admiral Robinson was waiting for him. Prestwitch seemed a little more agitated than he had been the previous morning: the tip of one of his prominent teeth peeked out beneath his pursed lips. Robinson looked much cooler.

  ‘Thank you for coming in, Toby,’ said Prestwitch. ‘And thank you also for not talking to the police yesterday. You did the right thing by asking to speak to us.’

  ‘I hope so,’ Toby said. He glanced up at a camera pointed right at him.

  ‘The recording equipment is off,’ said Prestwitch. ‘No one else will hear whatever you say to us.’

  ‘I’m not sure I am concerned about that,’ I said.

  ‘We are,’ said the admiral.

  I bet they are, Toby thought.

  ‘OK,’ Toby said. ‘There had been some discussion over Thanksgiving about the death of Lieutenant Craig Naylor, who, it turns out, is Justin Opizzi’s natural father.’

  ‘Tell us about it,’ Prestwitch said.

  So he told them about Lars claiming he had killed Craig on the submarine, and about how Bill had subsequently told him and Megan that he had been the one to incapacitate the weapons officer. He tried to gauge their reaction as he did so, especially Prestwitch’s. Was this new information to him? Prestwitch showed no surprise, but he was listening carefully.

  Admiral Robinson was just watching him.

  ‘Was there anything else?’ Prestwitch asked when Toby had finished.

  Was there? Should Toby mention Pat Greenwald? He wasn’t yet sure.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Now, can I tell the police this? Or have you already told them?’

  Prestwitch glanced at Robinson. ‘We haven’t, but we will. With two murders, there is no doubt that it is relevant, especially since Justin was Craig’s son.’

  ‘Didn’t you think it relevant yesterday?’

  ‘That’s a good question. You now know what happened on board the Alexander Hamilton in 1983, and I am sure you appreciate why we need to keep that secret, even now. But we should tell the police that Craig Naylor was killed on the submarine, and you should tell them about Justin Opizzi believing Lars da Silva killed his biological father. But on no account describe the circumstances of Lieutenant Naylor’s death. That is and will remain Classified.’

  ‘All right,’ Toby said. ‘But won’t the police need to know why Craig died?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Prestwitch. ‘MI5 will keep a close watch on this investigation, and we will advise the police as necessary.’

  That didn’t sound ideal to Toby, and he was willing to bet it didn’t sound ideal to the police either.

  He turned to the admiral. ‘Have you told Mr Prestwitch everything that went on on board that submarine?’

  Robinson’s face remained impassive. ‘Everything that could conceivably be of use to the investigation.’

  ‘Not everything, then,’ Toby said, looking at Prestwitch.

  But Prestwitch didn’t seem bothered by Admiral Robinson’s answer. ‘I only know in broad terms what happened on the Hamilton. I don’t know the details, and I don’t need to. That’s why we are fortunate the admiral has flown here to help us.’

  ‘To keep things covered up?’ Toby said.

  ‘Absolutely,’ said the admiral. ‘That’s a lot of what intelligence services do. Preserve national secrets.’

  Things became just a little bit clearer to Toby. He believed MI5 wanted to find out who had killed Sam Bowen and Lars da Silva, but they wanted to keep the near-launch quiet even more.

  There was even a chance that they had been involved in the murders, although Toby couldn’t really believe that.

  But repeating what Bill had told him about Pat Greenwald would serve no purpose. They almost certainly knew about it already – or at least Robinson did. Plus Alice had made him promise not to. Toby decided it was better to trust his wife than MI5.

  Prestwitch asked Toby to wait while he and the admiral briefed the police. Toby fled the station to a small park nearby, and sat on a bench staring at the town’s war memorial, still adorned with the armistice wreaths from a couple of weeks before, and the old medieval tower of a long dismantled friary. He tried to make sense of what he knew and what he didn’t know, and to decide how much of that to tell the police.

  After half an hour, he returned to the station, where DC Atkinson met him and led him back to a different interview room. Inspector Creswell showed up and the recording equipment was switched on.

  ‘Thank you for coming in, Toby,’ the inspector began. ‘It’s a shame you couldn’t talk to us yesterday, but I do understand why. We’ve just spoken to MI5, who have briefed us on what happened on the submarine back in 1983, but I would be grateful if you could tell us all you know in your own words.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Toby said. ‘I can’t tell you everything. Only what Mr Prestwitch has cleared me to say.’

  Creswell pursed her lips. ‘All right. I understand that too. Tell me what you know about Craig Naylor’s death.’

  Toby told them as much as he thought he could, and probably a bit more. He also told them about Justin’s anger at Craig’s death, and Lars’s false admission that he was responsible. He felt guilty when he recounted Brooke’s visit the evening before – he was quite sure Brooke would not have expected what she said to her family to be repeated to the police.

  But whoever had shot at Lars had tried to kill Toby too, and if that was Justin then the police needed to find the proof and lock him up.

  It was clear from Creswell’s questions that Justin was already partially in the frame and Toby had just nudged him further in. Creswell asked detailed questions about Justin, and about his whereabouts over the previous three days, questions that Toby answered truthfully
but unhelpfully. He couldn’t add much that they didn’t know already.

  But their next question surprised him. ‘Can you tell us something about the relationship between Justin and your wife?’

  ‘What relationship?’ he blurted out.

  Creswell raised her eyebrows. ‘What relationship do you think we are asking about?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Was there an intimate relationship between Justin and your wife?’

  Toby thought the inspector was just guessing. For a moment, his mind followed hers. Was there? Then he told himself to get a grip.

  ‘No,’ he said. He didn’t say ‘not that I’m aware of’. He said ‘No’.

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. Justin is Alice’s brother-in-law. I believe that Justin used to stay with the Guth family when they were all kids, but then they lost touch until Brooke met him in Chicago.’

  ‘I see. So has Alice seen him much since then?’

  ‘No. Just family get-togethers, when we are all there. Like this Thanksgiving. Christmas, although last year Justin and Brooke went to his mother’s place.’

  ‘So your wife and Justin never met alone, as far as you are aware?’

  Toby didn’t like that last bit. ‘No.’ Then he thought of something.

  ‘Toby?’

  Toby decided he should never take up poker. ‘A couple of months ago it turned out they were both scheduled to go to San Francisco on business at the same time. They went out to dinner together; Alice told me all about it.’

  ‘And that’s it?’

  ‘That’s it. Look, I trust Alice. I know she wouldn’t cheat on me, just like I wouldn’t cheat on her.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Creswell, with a seen-it-all-before smile.

  Toby was angry and she could see it. He did trust Alice and he was glad he hadn’t told her or Prestwitch about Pat Greenwald, just as Alice had asked him.

  ‘How is the investigation going?’ Toby asked.

  ‘A man was seen walking rapidly through the pine woods right after the shooting. Similarly vague description to the one you gave: above-average height, woolly hat, rucksack, which was probably carrying the weapon. We think he may have been driving the silver car you saw in the car park. Otherwise, nothing.’