Emerald Decision

Langley.

The records were kept in classrooms which had been expanded by knocking down interior walls, then filled with shelving, metal and wooden. A complex filing system, an officer close to retirement and two civilian clerks, a small reading room that might once have been the staff room of the school, and a kettle with which he could make coffee for himself comprised his surroundings.

He was allowed free access to the files, since it had been decided years earlier that all still-classified material should receive priority removal, then this repository could be opened to researchers. McBride was not looking for classified material, merely for the indications, the half-obscured footprints, of something classified; the legitimate fingers and toes of a secret body.

He put down his copy of the Daily Telegraph without reluctance. He'd glanced at it on the tube train — another IRA bomb in the Midlands which had caused him to idly wonder whether he might not even have met or passed or spoken to someone in the IRA while he was in Ireland, and two IRA arrests in London. A front-page picture of the Ulster Minister, Guthrie, waving to the cameras, accompanied by a crowd of people. He could not take an interest. He was American, not Irish.

As he hefted the first of the chosen files into the tiny reading room — a male clerk looked in, nodded and wished him a good morning — he was thinking of Claire Drummond. Now, he thought with a self-satisfied amusement, his lover. The second time, after dinner when they'd had more to drink and the food had been good and they'd talked round and round it, it had been even better. He felt himself harden now as he recaptured the image of her face above his, her slow lowering of herself onto him, her breasts just out of reach of his mouth until she wanted him to kiss them—

McBride was, he admitted to himself, besotted with the woman. He wanted to be with her now, not here with the long-dead past, the musty-smelling files and the limping footsteps of the disgruntled naval officer echoing along the corridors from time to time. Yes, he wanted her again. He'd always thought of himself as a man of limited, even minimal appetite. But he wanted her now, he'd wanted her when he awoke but she'd dismissed the idea with a laugh—

He deliberately rid himself of the thought of her, and the pleasant sensation in his genitals, and opened his notebooks, matching his previous day's notes to the relevant section of the file. Movement orders for November 1940, Western Approaches Command. A stiff card prefaced the clipped-in flimsies of the orders, on which ruled card was a digest of the orders in strict chronology. He pressed open the unyielding file at the orders concerning the minesweeping flotilla led by HMS Bisley, Gilliatt's ship. He remembered for a moment Gilliatt's grieving daughter, then recalled the thought that had been on the lip of his consciousness as Claire had walked into his room.

What was it? Time, time—

The sealed orders that had governed the sailing of the flotilla were not available to him, but a hand had scrawled St George's Channel — sweep, probably unofficially, in the margin of the record. Added by someone with a tidiness of mind that defeated security. Bisley and her flotilla had been absent from Milford Haven for—?

No, he couldn't quite—

He got up, filled the kettle from the cold water tap over an old enamel sink in the corner of the former staff room, plugged it in, and spooned instant coffee granules into a chipped mug. Something, something—

He tried to recollect his naval history, a short paper he had written perhaps eight years before on submarine activity in the Western Approaches. It had been an attempt to debunk an official British naval history he had received for review. Time, time?

The kettle boiled as he wondered. Absently, he poured the water into the mug, stirred and sipped at the scalding coffee, then carried the mug back to the table. The room was cold, didn't get the sun until afternoon. He put down his mug, rubbed his hands, and took a map from his briefcase. It was not an Admiralty chart, but he measured off distances with a ruler knowing it was sufficient. The minefield to protect the St George's Channel and the Bristol Channel was—

He marked it in roughly, then found Milford Haven. He estimated the flotilla's speed, the duration of the sweep, the return to Milford.

And then he had it. A small, vivid excitement that became swallowed almost immediately by a sense of the work still to do, but still apparent.

Bisley's flotilla could not have carried out any kind of sweep and have returned to Milford within the times recorded in the file. Sailing time, and time of return were both recorded, and were much too close together. He flipped over flimsies eagerly, almost tearing them. Yes, Bisley and the rest of the flotilla — no, no! Bisley had returned to Milford, the rest of the flotilla had returned later. The flotilla would have had time to sweep St George's Channel, but Bisley would not. And there was no record of damage or fault that would account for her sudden return.

He thumbed through the movement orders, searching for the docket he had found the previous day. Yes, there it was. Bisley at anchor for three days before her captain returned. Then— yes, a week later the flotilla was ordered to a sweep of Swansea Bay, where German aircraft had dropped mines across the harbour mouth under cover of an air raid.

He picked up his coffee, sipping at it, making brief, hurried darts around the room, circling the table. St George's Channel swept — it was a British minefield, a defence? Why? Bisley returning early, alone—

He put down the coffee, and left the room.

It took him an hour to find the appropriate files, with the assistance of one of the civilian clerks, a grey- haired woman who seemed to regard him malevolently because he wanted access to files that had not been thoroughly reorganized and cross-referenced. Eventually, she found him two bulging, dusty box-files, and he took them back to the reading room. She huffily shrugged off his profuse thanks.

His hands were dirty, his clothes dusty, but immediately he cleared a space on the table and opened the first of the box-files. A mess of scraps of paper, notebooks, personnel forms, promotions, reassignments, casualties — the uncollated material from the office of the Department of Minesweeping filed under MILFORD HAVEN in faded type on a grubby gummed label on the front of the box-file.

He wanted two things from it — had the flotilla swept the British minefield, and had Gilliatt returned to Bisley with the captain?

A small excitement was growing in his stomach. There had to be, had to be a link with Emerald Necklace.

November 1940

It was a cottage near Kersaint-Plabennec, a small village five kilometres from Plabennec. Gilliatt — and he suspected McBride shared the instinct, though they both remained silent on the subject — sensed a pall over their mission a mere two hours after they had parachuted from the Wellington into wooded country north of Tremaouezan. The cottage where the three members of the Resistance held their Wehrmacht prisoner was half a mile from a farm where German soldiers were billeted. Gilliatt wondered whether the man's screams had carried to his comrades, and shuddered.

Lampau, the leader of the Resistance cell in the area, evidently still bore the mental scars of the summer, including a sense of having been betrayed by the British at Dunkirk. Yet, somehow, Walsingham had transformed him into a reliable source of intelligence regarding army and navy movements and dispositions in the area north of Brest and the port itself. Lampau's cell were saboteurs, and more recently assistants in escape for shot-down British airmen or torpedoed seamen. Gilliatt regarded Lampau, Foret, and the younger Venec as undisciplined, dangerous allies, even on such a temporary basis.

McBride and he were now alone with the German prisoner they both knew would be executed as soon as he had surrendered what information he possessed. He was almost delirious, clutching his hands under his armpits because they had pulled out his fingernails; his face was swollen, reddened and cut where he had been beaten. None of the Frenchmen could speak German, the soldier could not speak English or French. The torture had been gratuitous, pointless. It sickened Gilliatt.

'Name?' McBride rapped out in German.

A long silence, ragged breathing, quiet groans, then: 'Hoffer. Johannes Hoffer.'