‘The American submarine knows we’re here?’ Natalia asked quietly.
‘Yes. They’ve been wondering what the hell’s going on, too.’
‘How do you contact them?’ Natalia asked.
‘We’ve a radio. Not here, in the town.’ He looked at each of them in turn. ‘It’s fixed now, you all travel to Rottingdean tonight, after dark. The sub will be waiting out at sea. You get picked up at one a.m. The weather forecast’s good, it’s going to stay cold and dry with a calm sea.’ He stepped over to the map lying on the bed. ‘Come and look here.’ David and Natalia went and stood at the foot of the bed. He glanced at her; she looked composed and concentrated again.
Bert asked, ‘Does anyone know this coast at all? No? Well, see those grey areas? That’s the cliffs, a sheer drop to the sea, there’s just a path between them and the water at high tide, it’s called the Undercliff Walk. The cliffs start just east of Brighton, here, and carry on to this gap in the cliffs – see, there? That’s Rottingdean village, three miles east. There’s a bay there, a cove, Rottingdean Gap. Then the cliffs rise again on the other side.’
‘What sort of place is this Rottingdean?’ Ben asked.
‘Small, an old fishing village, tourists come in the summer and there are people who’ve retired there. Posh, some of them; Rudyard Kipling lived there. It’ll be very quiet late on a Monday night. You get down to the cove, where there’s a small beach between the cliffs, a little before midnight. There’ll be a boat ready to row you out to sea.’
David said, ‘And then they take us away.’
Bert nodded. ‘It’s a spy sub, the Americans are often nosing around the Channel, seeing what messages they can pick up. They don’t usually risk taking any of our people off, though, in case something goes wrong and there’s a diplomatic incident.’ He looked at Frank, his face puzzled. ‘But they seem to want him very badly.’
‘Yes.’ Frank’s voice sounded composed. ‘They do.’
Ben asked, ‘Do you know where we’re goin’ tae, in America?’
Bert shook his head. ‘No idea. Somewhere along the East Coast, I suppose, to start with.’
‘What if there’s patrol vessels?’ Ben pressed.
‘We’ll have people watching the sea from the cliffs either side of Rottingdean. We haven’t noticed any increased naval activity in the Channel – in any case, the Germans wouldn’t tell the British authorities about this one. The waters off the coast are quite shallow, so the sub will have to come in on the surface and wait for you about a mile offshore. It’ll be risky for them, and it means it’s important you row out and reach them on time. Anyway, our people should be able to see any boats out at sea. If that happens, the mission gets called off and you come back here.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Everyone understand?’
‘All clear,’ Ben said. The others nodded. Bert took the map and folded it.
‘Right. We’ll have another briefing later; my contact in town will have some more details this afternoon. Thank God it’s getting too near Christmas for the shops to bother with reps, the last one’s gone home now. All the same, I want you all to stay in the hotel. Keep to your cover stories. We do get casual visitors occasionally even at this time of year and we don’t want anyone noticing anything unusual. All right? Now, I’ve got to go and help Jane get lunch.’ He smiled awkwardly. ‘It’s best to keep to normal routines so far as we can. Lunch will be ready in an hour.’
Natalia asked him, ‘Have you done this many times before?’
‘We’ve put people up for a few days. Some Jews, week before last. Nothing as big as this though.’
Natalia looked at David, took a deep breath. She said. ‘I didn’t sleep last night. I wouldn’t mind getting some rest now. David, perhaps you could go to the lounge for a couple of hours. Then you can meet your wife when she returns.’
‘Yes,’ Ben said. ‘Good idea.’ He spoke lightly but gave David a determined nod. Frank too was looking at him, a concentrated stare.
‘I’ll show you where the lounge is,’ Bert said. ‘You can see the street from there.’ He smiled. ‘You can watch for her.’
Bert took David downstairs. At the bottom he glanced back up, then said quietly, ‘That Muncaster, he was in a loony bin, wasn’t he? Will he be able to go through with this? He won’t go nuts or anything? This is very important for some reason, to us and the Yanks.’
‘No,’ David said. ‘I think he’s all right.’
‘I hope so.’ Bert raised the flap in the desk and headed through to the back room.
David went into the lounge. There were several armchairs, well worn, the arms greasy, a writing desk, a television, and a bookcase with an assortment of pulp novels. He went and looked out of the window, trying to calm himself, to think.
He heard the door open quietly behind him. He wondered if it was Natalia, if she had changed her mind, but it was Frank who entered. He closed the door and stood uncertainly against it.
He said, ‘I wanted to thank you for what you offered to do, yesterday. If – if it had gone differently, with Churchill.’
David smiled awkwardly. ‘I wouldn’t have let them break their promise.’
‘You might have had a problem, reaching me with the pill.’
‘I’d have done it, or Ben would.’
‘We’ve made it to Brighton,’ Frank said.
‘Yes. Yes, we have.’
‘I’ve always loved the sea, ever since I went to the seaside on holiday when I was small. You used to swim in competitions, didn’t you?’
‘When I was at school. I gave it up at Oxford, took up rowing, remember? But I still go to the pool sometimes – well, I did.’ He sighed. ‘I always used to like diving down into the deep water, into the silence.’
‘Yes. Silent, peaceful. Another world. Maybe I’ll learn to swim in America.’ Frank looked down for a moment, then back up at David. ‘Your wife should be back soon.’
‘Yes.’
Frank shifted nervously from foot to foot, then said, ‘Natalia – she’s a good woman. A very good woman.’
‘I know.’
‘I won’t say anything, about what I saw the night of the raid. But Sarah is your wife—’
‘It’s not your business, Frank,’ David said, quietly.
He sighed. ‘No. No, I suppose it isn’t.’ He paused. ‘I keep thinking about Geoff.’
‘I know.’
‘He paid the biggest price.’
They were silent a moment, then David said, ‘The secret, the nuclear secret your brother told you—’
‘I shouldn’t have told you it was that. I’m sorry—’
‘No,’ David said. ‘I’ve been thinking – what is it? What is this thing that’s cost us all so much? It’s just that –’ he groped for words – ‘I feel it would help me now, to deal with everything, with Geoff’s death, if I knew. After all, after tonight either we’ll be with people who know it all already, or—’
‘Or we’ll be dead. I know.’
David said, ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked. I’m not thinking straight today—’
‘Edgar was very drunk that night,’ Frank said, very quietly. ‘I didn’t want him in my flat, I didn’t want to see him again. But he had to show he was better than me, he always did. I remember he said, “Do you know what I do, what my work is?” Then he told me, leaning right in so I couldn’t avoid hearing. He said it was the atom bomb. I never believed they’d actually built it, you see, despite that film of the mushroom cloud. I thought for once our government and the Germans were right to say it had been faked. Because the uranium, the explosive material inside the bomb, the amount of ore you’d need would be colossal, unimaginable.’
David said, ‘The ore the Americans get from Canada.’
Frank looked startled. ‘How do you know about that?’
‘It was an issue that came up at the Dominions Office. It was one of the subjects I stole papers on, for the Resistance.’
Frank said, ‘Everyone who worked in science in the academic world had been talking about the atom bomb since they found it was theoretically possible, back in 1938. But Edgar told me the Americans have been experimenting for years, for most of the forties, and they’d actually refined a new type of uranium, an isotope, as
