Emerald Decision

goodbye. Let us meet just once more, in—?'

'Bognor Regis,' Claire Drummond said.

'Very well. In forty-eight hours. Goodbye.'

He hurried away, disappearing through the north door of the cloisters. He was mistrustful, edgy, reluctant. It should go well, it ought to—

It had to. Men crowded at his back. He was simply another Moynihan; a subordinate. It was very cold.

* * *

Sir Charles Walsingham looked up from the papers on his desk, switching off the cassette-player that had hummed for some minutes after Ryan's verbal report had ended. Ryan had questioned the man Blackshaw in Chatham, let himself into McBride's hotel room and heard the recording he had made of the two geriatric seamen.

Exton's face was expectant, across the desk from Walsingham.

'He — almost has it all, Exton.'

'Sir.'

Walsingham felt the progress of his thoughts and words was being wrung from him.

'He must be close to going over the top with this. He's almost finished checking his coupon, and he has seven score draws so far. One lucid account of the sufferings of those men—' Walsingham winced with imagination, ' — and he will boil over. Jackpot, a million or more. He won't be able to contain it!' Walsingham's hand clenched on the papers, a tight fist.

'Sir.'

'Very well. Get rid of him. Tomorrow.'

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Fallschirmjaeger

October 198-

Drummond awoke with a piercingly clear image of the young Peter Gilliatt, weary, dishevelled and grieving, standing before him in the study of the farmhouse. He sat up, groaning with the weight of sleep and memory, his limbs suddenly restless and fidgety. The image persisted, even though the grey shape of the curtained window informed him that his eyes were open. He tried to blink the picture away, then rubbed at it to dispel it. It was only when he switched on the bedside light, however, and the familiar wallpaper vied with the shadows in the corners and the contours of his old age established themselves, that he was able to dissolve the young man's face.

He threw back the bedclothes and got up, pulling himself arthritically into his thick dressing-gown. He padded downstairs in slippers to the study and the drinks cabinet. The taste of interrupted sleep was furry in his mouth, with an acid bile waiting at the back of his throat, like a prognostication. He poured himself a large brandy, and turned on the electric fire. It glowed on the walls like distant gunfire. He sat opposite it, staring into its grilled and blank flame-pictures.

It was not the first of his dreams, and Gilliatt was unimportant as an actor in most of them. Gilliatt had never believed McBride's story that he had been betrayed, preferring the more obvious explanation of the local IRA working in conjunction with the landed German agents. Drummond had not needed to persuade him of his innocence. But now his tall figure, leaning with tiredness against the door-frame, his eyes blank with grief, was omnipresent.

Drummond swallowed at the brandy. Was Gilliatt acting as a chorus to the procession of dead people that inhabited his sleep? They crowded on him now, making him fearful of the knocking of his old heart every time they caused him to wake up — fearful, too, of the drink that seemed to stimulate their efforts to upset him when he returned to bed and closed his eyes. Sleep ambushed him with his past like a determined and violent gang. Sleep the terrorist.

McBride, Britain, Gilliatt, others, even Irish and German. Now McBride's son, his own daughter, Moynihan, Britain again perhaps. Anybody and anything but himself. He swallowed again at the brandy, emptying the glass, irritatedly and guiltily pouring himself another large measure immediately.

Disillusion, he affirmed with a nod of his head. A young man's disillusion. The attractions of Fascism, the danger of Communism. He'd been ripe for recruitment by the Germans, Amt V, the SD-Ausland, at an embassy function in Berlin when he was attache. Soon after Hitler came to power, and was using a miraculous, strong hand to alter the destiny of Germany. It was the only way he could share, to join secretly. Britain hollow and wormy with the Depression, Germany climbing out of vaster ruins to greatness. By the outbreak of war, Drummond was ensconced in Ireland for the sake of Admiralty Intelligence and perfectly placed to assist German agents, to help co-ordinate Smaragdenhalskette.

Habits of thought—

By 1940 he was a German, in all but name and origin. He believed in the New Order, considered Churchill a damnable fool and warmonger not to accept the Fuhrer's offer of a peace treaty and turn against the Communist barbarians with Germany. He had never wanted to escape—

So why now, after this long, interminable safety, do the faces come?

Claire.

She was his Nemesis, his punishment; blackmailing him into helping her cause. He'd been forced to point the young American who was Michael's son in the direction of the Admiralty and Walsingham; his only protest the ambiguous telephone message to Walsingham, warning him. A feeble fist moving through deep water in an attempt to land a blow. He hated his daughter, hating what she had become and how she had come to treat him. She despised his Fascism of the past, his Anglicism of the present, and she used him to further her own ends by threatening to expose his wartime treachery. She was completely and utterly ruthless, and a Communist. She was uncontrollable, dedicated.

He finished the second brandy, studying the empty glass with the dedication of an alcoholic, reluctantly at last deciding that he should have no more. Brandy-strengthened dreams made him wake sweating, hands clawed near his own throat because he was being suffocated by the past. He got up from his chair, suddenly cold, and went out of the room.

Ideologues. An intellectual hatred is the worst. An Irish poet had said that too, he observed as he climbed the stairs like a very old and decrepit man. They'd both possessed it, that worst of things. He'd hated supine Britain and world Communism, and his only daughter hated all creeds other than her own and all the worshippers of other gods. He had only been the chrysalis stage — the small hatred, the small betrayal — she was the dark butterfly.

The bed looked cold and uninviting, an evident and threatening trap.

November 1940

McBride could not catch sight of Drummond, though he sensed with a wild, almost tangible certainty that he would be close at hand, that he would not trust either Irishman or German to finish off the only threat to his safety. He'd want to see, direct, order—

Gilliatt ran ahead with Maureen, holding her arm firmly as he might have done for an older woman. Maureen seemed thankful for the support. McBride halted at every street corner, giving them a chance to get well ahead while he watched for the pursuit. Then he sprinted to catch up with them before the next corner, yelling at them the direction they should take. If there was a pursuit, then it had not yet decided which way they'd gone and was still casting about for signs of them.

A muffled explosion reached him, and he saw Maureen's white face turn to him, and he yelled: 'Get on, get on!' He knew it was the shop. Quick search, and then the gutting of the lair. They'd not be able to go back. Now they'd follow in earnest.

They emerged onto the main road near the narrow stone bridge across the stream. The mud flats stretching away towards the bay seemed exposed, representative of their situation. The low hills to the north were treeless under a grey cold sky. Gilliatt was breathing hard and Maureen was slumped against him. There was something natural about their proximity that McBride consciously dismissed from his mind.

'Into the hills,' he said to Gilliatt, who seemed to be looking almost wistfully down the creek to the sea.