destroying it. And we could lose the convoy anyway.' His face darkened further. He stared at the open file. 'We both know what cannot be done. We cannot contact the convoy. The Germans would intercept the message. We don't know their state of knowledge of our codes, but we suspect the worst — and the convoy would be doomed anyway if it was diverted by a signal from the Admiralty.'
'There are other ways — signal them by lamp from an Anson,' March said quickly.
Walsingham said, 'As long as they're not spotted first. I have mentioned that possibility on page five.'
'I
'Sir. This is a projection only. Many of the factors that would make it likely, or inevitable, have not yet occurred or appeared. Will you lock it away as a projected course of action, and only as that?'
'Very well. This is the only copy?' Walsingham nodded. March seemed momentarily obsessed with the idea of destroying the file. Then he said, 'It mustn't come to this, Charles.'
'No, sir. It mustn't. Unfortunately, it might.' March was unprepared to reply, dismissing Walsingham with a curt nod of his head.
Patrick Terence Fitzgerald was walking on the quarter deck of the cruiser, the wind clutching at the hat he had jammed on his head, and chilling him. Yet he accepted his coldness as a relief from the days he had spent in his cramped cabin, and the noisy wind as a refreshing agent. He was alone, and most grateful for that. The sun gleamed fitfully through cloud, and the sea was grey and moving like the smooth backs of hundreds of whales, great long swells barely flecked with white, oily and somehow alive and sentient. He had gained what the British captain had called his sea-legs, he supposed, and his body rolled and angled expertly with the movement of the big ship. He had been slightly nauseous during the bad weather of the first couple of days, but not since. He was still, however, alien and a non-aquatic life-form on the ship, isolated and depressed; his state of mind an intellectual limbo in which endless recollection of his last meetings with the President only dimmed and dulled the importance of his mission, the significance it gave a friend of Roosevelt who had been a full-time banker and a part-time special adviser.
He took off his hat, irritated with the effort to keep it in place, as if such effort were beneath his dignity. His grey hair was clipped close to his head and remained unruffled. The cold had outlined the face more sharply — the square, stiff jaw, the long lines from cheekbones to mouth and chin, the prow of a nose and the narrowed blue eyes. He strode more quickly for a few minutes as if narrowing the distance between himself and an island off Europe that he knew well.
Fitzgerald's mission was to act as Roosevelt's special envoy to Great Britain — nothing more and certainly nothing less. He was to co-ordinate the efforts and observations and advice of other Americans working inside and outside the embassy, and to assess for the eyes of the President alone the ability of Britain to go on fighting. Roosevelt could not commit the US to more than Lease-Lend; Congress would have destroyed any such effort, and Roosevelt's position would soon have become untenable. Fitzgerald he trusted, perhaps absolutely. And Fitzgerald had three months in which to assess Britain's position — to help Roosevelt decide whether Lease-Lend should be maintained, increased, or ended.
For, contrary to public opinion and the belief of the British Government, Roosevelt was beginning to regret his involvement in Lease-Lend and the possibility of the US being sucked into a European war when the Japanese had begun threatening the Pacific. That would be America's war. Fitzgerald knew that at least part of Roosevelt wanted Britain to fall, and fall quickly, so that he could turn his attention to the Japanese, this time with the full stupport of Congress. Fitzgerald knew that he was, in part, designed to be a hatchet-man.
Fitzgerald had spent a great deal of time during the past two decades in England. He possessed for the country the affection mingled with mistrust of a sophisticated Bostonian whose family had originated in Ireland and who had fled to America from the horrors of the potato famines. He enjoyed England's landscape and its culture. Part of him could never forgive its rulers and its people. He always thought of himself as an Irish-American. And perhaps it was the tinge of jaundice to his affection that had caused Roosevelt to employ him. The President had certainly put the alternatives bluntly to him. If Britain is going to win, then America must continue, even increase her support. If Britain is going down, then—
He moved more quickly, this time perhaps to escape the bald, unfeeling
He had chosen to travel in this experimental convoy rather than fly to Britain because he wanted first-hand encounters with British fighting-men, and the opportunity to observe their morale at his leisure.
And he was beginning to believe that Britain was beaten. Worn-down, worn-out, finished. Kept going by stubbornness, sheer bloody-mindedness, and inability to accept the defeat that loomed ahead of her. The Japanese were poised to take Burma after Indo-China, then maybe India. The Germans had Britain by the throat and Europe and North Africa under their heel. The British were finished — a sad, undeniable fact. Roosevelt, three weeks after being elected for his third term of office, was similarly saddened and similarly certain.
Patrick Terence Fitzgerald's mission gave him no pleasure, and little sense of importance. He was a gravedigger, a priest officiating at the last rites of a great and doomed empire.
Suddenly, he turned on his heel, back to his cabin. He was weary of fresh air and the empty, heaving perspective of the Atlantic.
It was late afternoon, and McBride was alternately hot and cold in the small, dusty reading room as he feverishly continued his search for corroborative evidence of the material stolen from him. He had driven himself without rest or food all day, so that he need think about nothing else — especially the consequences of the theft and the identity of the thieves. His search was fruitless, wearying, and frustrating. Whenever he paused for a moment, the chill of the room struck him forcibly, and as soon as be began poring over ledgers or sorting through box-files or ring-binders his temperature climbed again until he was sweating and agitated and flushed. He was like someone with an approaching fever-climax, distraught and barely-rational.
On a wall-shelf which might once have held a teacher's books or the daily post he had collected a pitiful little heap of papers by four in the afternoon. In a new notebook there were perhaps two dozen speculative entries. Confronted by the mass of data he had extracted, with Hoskins' help, from the repository, he convinced himself that there was an answer, that a seam of gold ran through this mine of records, because he could not bear to think that what was now lost to him was the whole and entire basis of the available evidence for the German invasion of Ireland in 1940.
Hoskins carried in another two box-files, blowing dust from them as he entered, just as McBride, rubbing a dirty hand down his face and smearing his cheek, looked up from the ledger which contained the record of ships' movements in and out of Milford Haven. The flotilla of minesweepers did not appear in the ledger, leaving or returning. The record — he could not be certain that it had been amended — indicated that
McBride felt a flush of anger, but refrained from directing it against Hoskins, who smiled over the box-files before putting them down on the edge of the table.
'Any luck, Professor?'
'No, dammit!' He tried to grin away his anger, but failed. His face adopted nothing more genial than a grimace. 'Sorry, Hoskins. What are these?'
'Convoys.' He made the word heavy with significance. McBride studied his face.
'Important?' he asked unhopefully.
'Could be, Professor — but it won't have anything on the convoy I was on.' Bright beads of perspiration stood out on Hoskins' pale, furrowed brow. McBride, tired now, was prepared to listen. He remembered the subject being broached the previous day.
'Your convoy?'
'Remember I told you yesterday, Professor?' Hoskins seemed to steel himself, then blurted out: 'Must be interesting to you. We were routed south of Ireland, and I heard they'd swept a special channel for us—' McBride's mouth slackened in surprise, even as his body snapped to attention in his chair.
'Go on,' he said shakily.
