sidestreet. She'd heard that from a fellow-student in the Sorbonne on a student exchange to Belfast. And she'd wanted, if not the death, certainly some of the scars, the halo of violent light.
McBride looked round the door. He appeared completely sober now, and was grinning, intruding crassly on her memories. 'I have an appointment this afternoon with the attache,' he said.
She nodded. 'Good,' she answered abstractedly. 'Good.'
Captain Brooks Gillis, USN, the Naval Attache at the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, was mildly puzzled by the historian, Thomas McBride, who had made and kept an appointment to consult him on some matters of naval history. McBride, seated facing the light through the open Venetian blinds, appeared intense, tightly within himself as if afraid of spilling some secret from his pockets, but capable of being reduced in importance by the fact that he was an academic. Gillis had done his share of lecturing, and he felt he understood the American academic, the almost Wall Street hustling, the secretiveness applied to academic papers and researches that would not have been out of place in Standard Oil or the CIA. However, he had an easy day before a cocktail party for a Russian trade delegation at the embassy, where he would fulfill his function of psyching out any possible recruits for the Company, and so he did not resent giving his time to McBride.
'1940?' he said, standing at the window, half his attention on Blackburnes Mews below him. A girl got out of a Ferrari, and he studied her with the detachment of a connoisseur. The fur coat was a little ostentatious on a fine October day, but striking nonetheless. He wished his father, who'd seen action in the Pacific and the North Atlantic in that long-ago war, had been there with McBride. The old man would have loosened his tongue, and they'd have been rolling all night. The girl disappeared into Upper Grosvenor Street. 'A long time ago, Professor. How can I help?'
'British records are very sketchy for the period, and
Gillis turned to him. He preferred American cars, American girls. That one had looked Arabic, maybe. 'I guess there are records — maybe even here.' He smiled. He'd had one of his junior staff hunt them down. A lot of the records from Eisenhower's headquarters across at no. 20 on the square had been dumped in the cellars of the embassy after it was completed in 1960. A lot of it had never got passage across to the States and lay still mouldering down there. Andrews had got dirty, but he seemed to have had fun.
'Have you had a chance to check—' McBride let the question hang.
'This is just local colour, right?' Gillis asked sharply. McBride appeared confused, impatient even, then nodded. 'OK — we'll get credit, naturally?' Again, McBride nodded. 'Man, but there's some stuff down there. Eisenhower had as much material as he could stored in his headquarters after 1943. Maybe he was going to write a book?' He grinned. 'All the paperwork from the clearing-houses, a lot of OSS stuff, early intelligence reports, you know the kind of thing.' He paused. 'I had one of my men go over some of the material after you called. I'll have him bring it in.' McBride's eyes blazed. Gillis spoke into the intercom, and a navy lieutenant came in, deposited some still grimy files on the desk, and left.
Gillis saw McBride's anxiety, and dismissed it as merely professional. He had a dismissive respect for college teachers, and an anxiety to be an intelligent man of action. He considered himself superior to most of the graduate kids the CIA sent to liaise with him in London, and disliked the new
'I have to stay here, naturally,' he said, 'and you can't take any of this away. But you can quote from it, take notes. Help yourself, Professor. It's called open government.'
McBride shunted his chair closer to Gillis's desk, picked up the top file fastidiously as if nervous of its grime, and opened it. Gillis walked to the percolator, poured two cups of coffee and, placing one for the unnoticing McBride, returned to the window. He was never bored with his own thoughts.
McBride read through the files as swiftly as his concentration allowed, but not so quickly that Gillis would think he was searching for just one item of information. It took him an hour or more, and the coffee cooled undrunk and Gillis occasionally scratched his head or shuffled over by the window but remained silent and somehow completely composed — like machinery switched off until again required. There was some arbitrary documentation of convoys, mostly of the invoice kind for goods received. A check-list of shipping lost, more detail regarding their cargoes than their crews. He sensed Britain hanging by a thread three thousand miles long and the Germans trying to cut it in a dozen places. Especially the North Channel, around the coast of Northern Ireland.
Eventually, he found what he was seeking. An invoice which checked off what had been lost — precise tonnages — when a three-ship convoy went down late in November, together with its cruiser escort. It was clipped to a report from the Admiralty that stated the convoy was sunk still two days out from Liverpool. At the bottom of the Admiralty note, someone with an illegible signature had scribbled '
'Captain Gillis?' Gillis turned slowly from the window as if coming to life.
'Yes?'
'Could you explain this?' He held out the two clipped-together sheets. He tapped the bottom of the page. Gillis mused silently.
'No.
'I don't know. It's a mystery, and mysteries intrigue me. Why should someone here issue an order like that, eyes only for the President? Convoys were going down every day, and most of them were reported routinely to the Navy Department, weren't they?'
'They were. Mm. Hang on, Professor. I'll check it out.' He picked up the telephone extension, and asked for a Washington number. To hide his growing excitement, McBride pretended to study the files he had earlier discarded. It was Hoskins' convoy, heading for the southern approach to Britain, through the minefield — and expecting that minefield to be swept for them. It hadn't been, and minelayers had sailed from Milford—
Gillis was talking to a friend in the Navy Department, apparently, mincing through the social niceties of silicone cocktail waitresses and the permissive London scene and families — a sudden moralistic tone invading Gillis's voice — and old times, then Gillis asked about Fitzgerald.
'Old buddy, you were hot on the period at Annapolis. Who was Fitzgerald?' He listened. McBride caught himself straining for the repJy, which was long and voluble. Then niceties again, after the explanation, then the connection severed with a chuckle by Gillis. 'That guy, I could tell you—' He was struck by the intense, burning look in McBride's eyes. 'I got you an answer. Boston banker thick with the President. Sent over on some fact-finding mission, maybe. Anyway, he was what they started calling a 'Special Envoy' around that time.' He shrugged. 'Poor guy — seasick all the way, I bet, then he gets his ass blown off two days out from England.'
'Yes,' McBride said strangely. 'Poor guy.'
Minesweepers, minelayers, St George's Channel, an American envoy, a cover-up—
It had to be worth a million, maybe more.
The man's name was Treacey. Moynihan had met him only three or four times in the last year, to receive instructions on policy initiation or to make reports on tactical progress. Treacey spent much of his time on the mainland as Operations Commandant. Ulster was not, officially, his concern or under his jurisdiction. Nevertheless, he represented Moynihan's superiors as he sat opposite him in the Bloomsbury hotel room, and Moynihan had to abide the man's anger, however much he inwardly squirmed and however unjustified he felt it to be. He concentrated on keeping his face inexpressive, neutral as Treacey's accusations stung him.
'Then Goessler had this man Hoskins killed in case you got to him — that's what you're suggesting, is it, Sean?' There was a weighted, clumsy irony, and the broad, loose face opened beneath the pudgy nose in what might have been a smile. It appeared to Moynihan as nothing more than a vehicle of threat; Treacey's smiles always did. He nodded. 'Ah, Sean, the General Staff are concerned to gain control of this business.' He paused, but not for any reply. His body and face impressed a tangible weight on the much smaller-framed Moynihan. 'You've done very well up to now—' There was a lightness of tone that denied the truth of the compliment, ' — but you're
