Emerald Decision

and Gilliatt pulled him to his feet. Then he sat down and began to take off his boots. The understanding between them was almost instinctive, one on watch while the other was off-guard, easily surprised. McBride hardly remarked it, except that a sense of Gilliatt's dependability lurked at the back of his mind. McBride scanned the empty beach in another gleam of moonlight, the wind almost visible as a stream of silver. Sand pattered against his trouser-legs and the ungloved hands at his sides. 'This will be one of their beaches.'

Gilliatt looked up from chafing his feet and calves. 'What?'

'They'll land here.' He stretched his arms out to encompass the wide stretch of flat beach.

'If they have as much trouble as we did, then everybody's safe. They can be picked up while they're drying their socks.' Gilliatt looked up and down the beach. 'I agree. Flat and open.'

'How many beaches do you reckon?'

'Four or five. What do you think Walsingham wants, after we identify the most likely landing beaches?'

'God knows.' McBride was slapping his arms against his sides. 'He'll be lucky to persuade Dublin to repel boarders.'

'He can't use British troops.'

'He might. He would, but will Churchill?'

Gilliatt stood up. 'I could do with some of Drummond's rum.'

'Drummond's usually early himself. Come on, let's leg it up to the track and meet him. What's the time?'

'Five to.'

'I wonder where he is? Flat tyre while we freeze to death!'

They climbed a bank up off the beach onto the narrow track that ran down to the strand from the Kinsale- Clonakilty road. McBride halted and listened, but there was no engine-noise. The wind seemed colder still as it ground and snarled through hedges and bent the few stunted trees.

'How far to your place?'

'We're not going to walk that, Peter my lad. Drummond's house is only a couple of miles from here.'

He was certain that Gilliatt was going to reply. He even framed his lips in preparation for a smile in response to any witticism. But he did not hear any words because of the sudden explosion only yards from him. Gilliatt's figure was outlined in orange flame, a heavy black shape nothing more, then it was flung on its back into the ditch alongside the track and he, too, was lifted, clouted around the body by the pressure-wave from the grenade, and deposited in a muddy pool. He was aware of a trickle of stagnant water into his mouth, the trickle of something warmer down the side of his face which made his left eye blink furiously, and of being totally deaf and removed by that deafness from the scene around him, from himself and from any real sense of danger.

More than anything, however, he was aware that only Drummond knew where they were supposed to land that night. Only Drummond in the whole of the world outside the Admiralty.

The first of the dark shapes rose from the grass thirty yards from him, moving onto the track even as the last dirt flung up by the grenade was still pattering down on the back of his jacket. McBride felt the hard shape of his gun against his hip, and tried to move his arm down. The arm seemed frozen, then was shot through with excruciating pain so that he yelped, startling the approaching figure and making him more cautious. His arm wouldn't move.

Only Drummond, he kept on thinking. He did not even consider whether Gilliatt was dead or alive. Only Drummond.

CHAPTER TWELVE Survivors

October 198-

The Rt Hon. David Guthrie'S PPS, a man Walsingham hardly knew, informed him that the Secretary of State was unable to see him at the moment because he was receiving representatives of the Dublin government in an attempt to finalize the initial meeting with the Irish Prime Minister and Foreign Minister. Fingers crossed, things are looking quite hopeful, the PPS confided to Walsingham as he was conducted to a small, comfortable sitting room to await Guthrie.

Walsingham set the small cassette-recorder down on the low table, and slipped the single cassette he had brought with him out of his coat pocket. It was in a buff envelope which he left beside the recorder. The tape was a transfer from reel-to-reel of the call McBride had made to the minister's office that afternoon. The envelope's innocence in the room's gathering dusk was false and uncomfortable to Walsingham. McBride was an angry man, had resented being deflected and turned away by a secretary, had spoken of the minister's wartime experiences with a cunning masked by ingenuousness. McBride was somehow no longer the straightforward academic or his effrontery merely that of a gauche American. It would be interesting to watch Guthrie's face as he heard McBride's words for the first time. There was, at the same time, a pressure in Walsingham to go on thinking of McBride as an historian, even as an American. Both ideas made something objective and unknown of him, effectively severing him from Michael McBride in his mind.

Walsingham glanced round the room, then got up and poured himself a whisky at the cocktail cabinet. Then he moved to the tall window and looked down at Whitehall splashed by the last of the sun. The very familiarity of the scene threw his mental landscape into greater relief. How dangerous was McBride? What would they have to do about him?

McBride was angry that his notebooks had been stolen from him. Walsingham now felt that move had been precipitate, an over-reaction. And he had discovered the body of the man Hoskins — would he believe that to have been some kind of official interference? Who was Hoskins, anyway, and what part was he to have played, or had he played? The questions lit his mind garishly, detonations along the hillside he had to assault.

He returned to the sofa, sitting down heavily like a fat old man. Special Branch had no leads on Hoskins' killer. Was it connected? Wasn't it all too accidental, too convenient, that McBride and the events seemingly attendant on him should appear at the precise moment of this crisis of relations between London and Dublin? Was McBride being used? But if he was, then by whom?

The door opened, and Guthrie entered smiling, his hand extended to Walsingham. Walsingham studied him as they shook hands. Guthrie was tired, but there was also a combative light in his eyes, and a suggestion that his reserves of energy and patience remained almost unimpaired.

He poured himself a drink, refilled Walsingham's glass, then said: 'I apologize for keeping you waiting, Charles. Bloody obstructive people—' The smile did not go away. Infighting seemed to tone Guthrie like a cold shower. 'Your call sounded urgent, even by the time it got to me. Something the matter?'

Walsingham indicated chairs, reseated himself on the sofa, and Guthrie sat casually opposite him in an armchair, crossing his long legs, cradling his drink in both hands as if to protect the crystal glass. He was attentive, unperturbed, curious. Walsingham, with some sense of the theatrical, took the cassette from the envelope and inserted it into the recorder.

'This call was made to your office yesterday—'

'A tape?' Guthrie asked quickly. Walsingham nodded. It was evident the minister expected some death- threat from a crank with an Irish accent that might have been real or assumed.

'Listen to it, please.'

Walsingham played the tape. When he had done so, Guthrie indicated that it should be replayed. After a second hearing, the minister said: 'McBride? Is there an Irish connection?'

'His father was Irish. I knew him during the war.'

Guthrie was puzzled. 'What's going on, Charles?'

'This man McBride is a bona fide historian, but he's also had some success with a sensational account of Hitler's last days in the Berlin bunker. His current project concerns the proposed German invasion of Ireland in 1940—' There was still no reaction from Guthrie, except that he nodded his head to punctuate Walsingham's narrative. 'He — has come into possession of certain information concerning the British response to that threat, including your name.'

Guthrie replied, in a chilly voice that gathered force from the dusky gloom: 'How did that happen,