Emerald Decision

CHAPTER SIX The Combatants

McBride, suddenly aware of every corner and shadow of the single living-room of Rourke's cottage, was assailed not by a perception of his own danger, but a complete and entire sense of the links which bound together the German outside, the dead Rourke, the beaten-up thug in Clonakilty, Devlin, and Maureen. He felt her danger, and was as impotent against it as if he were tied in a chair and the German agent on his way to silence her.

The flames from the burning motorbike he had left down the track to the cottage flickered on the wallpaper, and he dismissed the sensation of threat to his wife. There was only the reality of the man outside and the threat to himself.

He listened, and the room and the night outside it were silent. McBride steadied himself with one hand on the deal table, absorbing the solidity of its wood, the lines of knife-marks. And listened.

Nothing. He had to move. The last light from the motorbike was dying down. He had not memorized the contours of the room's poor furniture, and it was slipping back into darkness. He crossed to the door pausing, breath held, as he caressed a stool with his shin, felt it move almost imperceptibly, bent and stilled it before it scraped on the stone floor — then he opened the door very slowly, anticipating the protest of its hinges. Silence. He breathed out in a controlled, choked way, then stepped out into the short passage to the front door. He closed his eyes because he could see nothing, and listened again. But he could hear only the beginnings of the blood moving in his head, like the rustle of the sea in a shell. He opened his eyes again, knowing he dare not open the door. A silenced Luger would end it in a moment.

Upstairs. He placed his foot on the first of the narrow steps, let it take his weight, then raised his other foot. One at a time, very slowly, he moved up the short flight, resting his weight gently on every one, anticipating the betraying squeak. At the head of the stairs, he listened. One bedroom upstairs, and a storeroom. He listened, the German more omnipresent now in his imagination, more skilled and deadly with every passing minute in which he remained hidden.

Noise—?

A mouse scurrying somewhere, over his head, the swift patter of its paws loud in the continuing silence of the cottage. He smiled dismissively and with relief, though the noise persisted after the mouse had presumably vanished. Could he dismiss the noise?

He cocked his head, listening back down the stairs, beginning to wonder whether he had not made an error in retreating upstairs. He had done the obvious. He listened for a window, or a door; knowing all the time that the German was using his imagination as a litmus of fear, a catalysing agent. The longer he stayed outside, hidden and silent, the more he was to be feared, the more unnerved his opponent would become.

McBride could not help the tremor that was starting in his left leg, or the nerveless sensation which had begun in his fingertips.

The mouse moved again over his head, startling him, his breath loud and ragged. He pushed open the first of the two doors at the head of the stairs — it creaked, and he scrabbled to stop it, the creak loudening and going on like an uncontrollable yawn. He felt drawn to follow it, into the bedroom. He'd forgotten the creak of the bedroom door, and cursed himself for his error.

His nose was beginning to run with tension, he wanted to sniff and dare not. He began to fumble for his handkerchief, and the emptiness of his pockets — his unarmed state — as he searched for it, further unnerved him. Gun, knife he had used on Rourke, throat-wire, unarmed combat — which?

The German suddenly possessed a hundred ways of killing him, and McBride remembered the clumsy, half-beaten way he had fended off the thug in the yard behind the hotel, and the tremor in his leg became more pronounced.

He backed into a corner of the small bedroom, next to the window, an instinctive retreat. The darkness of the rainy, moonless night was almost complete, but gradually the vague shapes of the bed, the chest, the mirror echoing the paler square of the window next to him, the basin and jug, the now open door, emerged. He pressed his back against the wall, feeling the dampness of his fear down his spine, round the waistband of his trousers. He was growing cold, forcing himself to remain still, to listen.

The house was humming in his ears now, the silence gone on too long for him to hear anything quieter than a whisper. The German was patient, patient enough to reduce his opponent to impotence before he made a move.

Cold air flowed from the slightly open window, sliding across his hand with the solidity of liquid. He could hear nothing.

His hand got colder.

The window had been closed when he entered the bedroom, not just now, earlier when he had made his search—

No, now, when he entered the room.

Mouse-feet above his head.

The window slid noiselessly up. The German had prepared an escape-route, easing the window on his arrival. Now he was coming back in.

McBride saw the arms, in the same grey mackintosh from the hotel, the white hands, as the window was pulled very slowly, very gently, upwards.

His first reaction was to run. The German was lying on the roof, easing up the window. Then he would drop into the room—

McBride felt the room, the rest of the cottage, close as a bandage around his head, a thong drying out and pressing the brain. He wanted to get out, get away. The bottom half of the sash-window was up almost as much as it would go.

He stepped away from the wall, saw the arms and hands stiffen in surprise, sensed the German's face only a couple of feet above his own.

His left leg quivered uncontrollably.

Below the window there was a rising bank of grass behind the cottage and a heap of rotting straw becoming manure along with the kitchen peelings. He'd almost tripped into it on his search, before he found Rourke.

Microseconds. The hands moving gently, slowly and aquatically, away from the window. The cold air reaching his skin like lava, creeping. The metronome in his left leg at a different tempo—

One breath, then he jumped through the window, head protected by his hands, body flung outwards, turning over, feet coming down to be caught by the manure-heap, sucking him in, the pieces of the shattered window-frame landing beside him, banging painfully against his left arm, glass clinging in his hair and clothing and his hands, a voice swearing in German a long way off, his first stumbling footstep out of the manure, lurching forward so that he fell against the bank of wet grass with the momentum of the jump still moving him.

The click above him, the shift of a body, someone standing up as he rolled onto his back and saw a figure outlined against the almost black of the clouds. He rolled to one side, flame at the corner of one retina like a thin pencil-mark, the absorption of the bullet by the ground something that he could feel through the cheek which rested against the bank. Then he pushed himself upright and ran to the shelter of the angle of the cottage wall.

He wanted to do nothing but breathe in, but he choked off the desire for air, listening now to the unguarded movements on the roof. The German thought he was panicked, would move into the open at the front of the house, running away—

He heard the German moving over the angle of the roof, his foot scraping on the slates, one shirting slightly. McBride's leg was still, his hands firm, his heart racing but under control.

A slate fell down the sloping roof, snapped with a hideously loud noise on the paved path between the cottage and the outhouse. Then silence from the roof, and McBride fed on the guessed-at mood of the German, suddenly unnerved in his turn. And he did not know McBride was unarmed.

Minutes. Then the first movement, a quick stutter of footsteps across the now treacherous slates, the drop to the path on the other side of the house, and the silence again — all advantage canceled. The German knew he had not run, but lurked in the shadow of the cottage, as he now did himself.

And he had a gun.

Which way? He knew the direction of McBride's dash for cover, knew his approximate location.

Which way?

McBride eased silently around the cottage until he reached the front door. He paused, listening again, then opened the door quickly, banging it back against the passage wall, then slamming it shut again.

He retreated then as quickly as he could, back to the angle of the building.

He'd seen the German's outline. His threat was compacted into a frame of medium build dressed in a grey mackintosh. He was the man called "cousin Mike" in Clonakilty, nobody more than that.

He listened as the German came round the corner of the cottage towards the front door. He heard his footsteps pause, undecided, trying to assess the element of bluff. He was less than ten feet away — nearer seven, maybe eight at most. The cottage shrank — it was three paces from McBride to the German.

Open the door, open it—

He had to look now.

The German, boot raised to kick open the door — as McBride had hoped, off-balance and gun on the far side in his right hand. McBride launched himself as the German kicked open the cottage door and regained his balance. He caught the German in a tackle, wrapping his arms around the man, reaching with his hands for the gun. The German tried to tear free as they fell to the ground — the gun fired, then again, and again, deafening McBride, before he could get his hands on it.

The German pulled his right arm free of the tackle, tried to roll over, attempted to strike McBride across the face with his left forearm. McBride shifted his concentration to the German's face, hit down with his fist and made contact, knuckles against bared teeth, so that he knew there was no power, no effect. The German heaved up at him, turning his body, and McBride felt himself rolling off the German. He raised his body, struck again across the German's face with his forearm, immediately groping in the darkness for the hand that held the gun. His hearing was returning, he could hear his own breath and that of the German, roaring as they struggled on the wet ground.

A blow across the side of his head stunned him, but he reached up, his hand sliding across the smear of blood, and grabbed the gun barrel. He wrenched down, then away, hurting the German, freeing the gun. The German threw the rest of his weight off him, and got to his feet, reckless with the knowledge that McBride had the gun, secure in that he would be unlikely to kill, needing to interrogate him.

McBride wiped at his eyes with his left hand, fumbled the gun around with his right. When he could see again, there was the noise of heavy running footsteps. He fired off two hopeful shots in their direction as he knelt by the front door of the cottage, the blood seeping into his left eye again from the cut across his forehead. The footsteps diminished with distance, with undiminished pace. The German had got away.

McBride rubbed at the trickling blood again, cursing.

HMS Bisley was signalled to anchor off Milford Haven, and her crew, with the exception of the captain and first lieutenant, were to remain aboard. Gilliatt and Ashe went ashore in the minesweeper's motorboat, the grey water choppy across the half-mile to the dock-side. Gilliatt was huddled in his duffel-coat, hood pulled over his cap, arms thrust down into the deep pockets. He felt peculiarly uneasy, almost disorientated, like some prisoner being transported from one confinement to another. It was a localized feeling, one he sensed he had deliberately though subconsciously induced. It alleviated the pressure of Ashe's presence, his mood of inward shrinking. Ashe had the Admiralty plague of looming defeat, picked up in Whitehall. And Gilliatt knew that was where he was to proceed.

On the jetty waiting for them, impatient to help them from the motorboat, anxious and desperate to hear their expansion of the one brief coded message they had radioed to Milford, were two commanders from NOIC's HQ at Milford, Western Approaches Command, together with a captain Gilliatt did not recognize, and an armed escort. The prisoner analogy struck Gilliatt even more forcibly, but deeper anxieties broke through that surface. He could not shake off Ashe's gloomiest prognostications.

"We'll go straight to NOIC," the captain informed them, assessing each of them swiftly then indicating the staff car with its driver. There was a jeep, too, for the escort. Gilliatt suddenly wanted to walk away from it all, get back in the motorboat and go on pretending that the war was winnable as long as he and others like him did their duty, carried out their allotted tasks.

He climbed into the back of the big Austin-next to Ashe, who smiled at him like an encouraging parent, as if Gilliatt were about to vanish round the dentist's door. The car pulled away immediately the captain got in next to the driver, hurrying out of the dock area as if towards some emergency. Milford was grey and drying after overnight rain, scoured by a cold wind that whistled outside the car windows. The captain in the front seat said nothing. The Austin pulled up the hill — Gilliatt resisted a valedictory look back at the low hull of Bisley slopping in the bay — and into the drive of the imposing house that had become NOIC's HQ for Milford.

The captain ushered them through the door, upstairs to what once had been a drawing-room but was now partitioned by board into three or four small offices with impossibly high ceilings and strips of green carpet that were off-cuts from other offices. Maps provided a temporary artwork, there was a paraffin heater for warmth, and a utility desk and chairs. One long window, which looked down towards the sound. Again, Gilliatt refused to acknowledge the image of Bisley. That, he knew with a sullen certainty, was part of the past already.

As if to confirm it, the captain's first words as he took their coats were to Gilliatt, and dropped heavy as stones.

"Admiralty Intelligence until a few years ago, Lieutenant?"

"Yes, sir." The captain studied the tone for insolence, almost tasting it with a movement of his lips, then nodded, recognizing it as disappointment.

"Captain Ashe, if you would describe exactly what you encountered during your sweep of the suspect area?" The Intelligence captain sat down behind the desk, his bulk threatening it, the braid of office folded like handcuffs in front of him. Ashe told him.

"What did you do, Commander, after the first profound shock?"

Ashe looked at Gilliatt almost resentfully, as if to protest the unfairness of Gilliatt not having to answer the questions. Ashe appeared to Gilliatt to be reliving the experience. Shadows, forebodings, hovered round him. His captain had grown older in the passage of hours.

"We — I ordered the sweep to continue—" The captain raised his eyebrows, but nodded — 'then carried out our orders. I detached Bisley and we proceeded to check the channel that had already been swept."

The captain's eyes seemed suddenly alert, demanding as those of an interrogator.

"Yes? How far did you proceed — what course?"

"An hour. The swept channel is at almost ninety degrees to the channel we were sweeping. I — did not think it necessary to proceed to the southern edge of the minefield to ascertain the full extent of the sweep that had been carried out—" Ashe was picking his way through a booby-trapped area of emotive words, smoothing all evocation from his voice.

"Go on." The captain was childishly impatient for the climax of the story.

"The channel is almost a mile wide, and we estimate it runs from the southern edge of the minefield—" he began to pull a chart from his inside breast-pocket, unfolding it so that it crackled in the warm, temporary room. Gilliatt listened to a typewriter in one of the other partitioned cells of the drawing-room, and a saucer rattled in a cup. Ashe spread the chart, the minefield on it, a peppering of little red crosses. The captain leaned forward, touched it almost reverentially. Then Gilliatt saw it was nervousness like their own that made him hesitant.

Ashe continued, clearing his throat, "Here it is — it runs north by east to south by west, from the coast at a point just east of Cork to the dog-leg here which marks the edge of the minefield—" Ashe's finger traced carefully, as if across the surface of a still-wet print. His finger moved down, and as if to stop him, the captain spoke.

"North to south — Ireland to France. Very well, gentlemen—" He looked at the chart again, at the hard black lines that denoted the discovered channel through Winston's Welcome Mat that Ashe had marked — a dotted line indicated the remaining area that Bisley had not searched. When Gilliatt studied his face, he saw that it was clenched tight around some indigestible fact or emotion. There was white along the line of the jaw, the lips were thinned and bloodless, the fine lines around the eyes had become creases. "Gentlemen — the sooner all three of us get this to London, the better."

As the D-class cruiser signalled each of the three merchantmen in turn to alter course on another leg of their zig-zag route, the noise of the U-boat spotter — a seaplane — overhead faded into the murk of the coming dusk and the rain-squall. It should have stayed with the convoy for another two hours, to the limit of its range, but the weather was already closing in on its Gander base, and unless it returned immediately it would be unable to land either at the airfield or on the lake. And it did not possess sufficient reserves of fuel to outfly the weather.

The noise of its engines disappeared behind the gale-force wind which flung great sheets of green-white spray against the superstructures of the four ships. They would be alone now, without escort or spotter planes, for fifteen hundred miles of the North Atlantic. Perversely, the bad weather was almost welcome. No U-boat could operate at periscope or torpedo depth in the troughs and peaks of the sea that was now running.

The three merchantmen altered course in turn, shepherded by the cruiser. Each man aboard assumed that, whatever his dreams demanded or envisaged, they were headed for the perilous North Channel and the Clyde or the Mersey, if they survived the wolfpacks that without doubt waited for them. Except the cruiser's captain and first officer, who had opened their sealed orders after they rendezvoused with the convoy, and knew that a passage was being swept for them at that moment through the St George's Channel minefield.

Those two officers also knew the nature of the special cargo carried on board the cruiser itself, more vital in its way than the grain and oil and machine-parts on board the merchantmen, more vital even than the experimental route of this special fast convoy.

Goessler and Lobke were shopping in Oxford Street, — the younger man with an almost child-like pleasure, sampling boutiques and department stores and record shops with the hurried inquisitiveness of a garden bird seeking food in winter. Goessler's attitude was parental, a mock reserve covering his own enjoyment. After a couple of hours, they abandoned the thudding rock music of the small boutiques for the encompassing, air-conditioned expanse of Marks & Spencer near Marble Arch. For Lobke, Oxford Street had already almost replaced the Kurfurstendamm as a place of dreams.

They had travelled to London as accredited personnel of the East German embassy the previous afternoon, registering at a modest but comfortable hotel in Bayswater. From their floor, there was a distant view of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens.

While they shopped with the habitual comprehensiveness of East European diplomats visiting the West, Goessler answered Lobke's questions concerning the operation that Goessler had termed Juwelier — jeweller. McBride was the merchant who would handle the gemstones of Smaragdenhalskette. Their deliberately casual and interrupted conversation provoked no interest in the shoppers around them.

Piling two Shetland pullovers onto the heap of shirts he carried in the crook of one arm, Lobke said, "Herr Goessler, I don't understand something—"

"Yes, Rudi?" Goessler replied pleasantly, the greater part of his attention taken up by a cellophane-wrapped pile of cardigans through which he was searching for his size. "What would that be?" He seemed to reject the fawn-coloured sample in his size, and began rooting under the piles again for another colour. When he did not find his size in navy-blue, he clucked his tongue against his teeth.

"Why the Wehrmacht ever attempted to invade Ireland in November?"

Goessler smiled. He had moved on to the sweaters, and held up one with a vivid green lightning-flash down its middle. He checked the size, nodded.

"Pride, more than anything else. The Pact with the Bolsheviks, the cancellation of Seelowe — an army of occupation sitting on the coast of France, doing nothing." He tucked the sweater under one arm, moving on to the underwear counter with a surprising eagerness. Lobke trailed after him, the racks of suits irritating the corner of his eye, making him impatient. He returned to his questions as to an anodyne against helpless covetousness. For a moment, he understood shoplifting.

"That's all, Herr Goessler?"

"Inertia — yes. The Wehrmacht had rolled over everyone except England — and that prize had been taken away because Goering could not subdue the RAF. They decided to enter through the back door. Sit in Ireland until the spring, threatening the mainland. A sort of second front which would also have the effect of dissuading the Americans from sending more convoys, increasing their aid to Britain—"

A woman with rinsed hair arranged to frame her narrow face looked up at the sound of Goessler's German, and Lobke wandered off towards the suits while Goessler answered her questions concerning the whereabouts of men's overcoats — a friend had bought a long leather trench-coat on her last visit for less than three hundred and fifty marks, were there any left? Goessler seemed amused by the conversation.

When he joined Lobke, the young man was already being instructed by a sales assistant not to leave his parcels unattended on the floor while he tried on a suit jacket. Goessler laughed, explained that he would stand by the heap of plastic bags. Lobke paraded in front of a full-length mirror, shy of Goessler's proprietorial smile.

"It was rather a good scheme—" Goessler explained, half to himself.

"Why did the Nazis try to hide all trace of it?" Lobke asked, shuffling through a rack of trousers to find his size.

"Another failure was not to be admitted, even remembered, Rudi — besides which, I think it was hidden deep in case it was to be used again in "41, or maybe even as late as "42."

"But it wasn't?"

"No — Barbarossa was on the road by then." Goessler seemed tempted by the racks of suits, studied a conservative brown one, held it out from the rack while Lobke guarded the parcels — aware, briefly, of the irony of the IRA bomb-panic that inspired the assistant's concern. Goessler swiftly selected jacket and trousers, and returned to Lobke without trying on the jacket. An Arab passed them, carrying four jackets, followed by his veiled wife. Both East Germans watched the couple, shaking their heads, smiling.

"Will McBride be of sufficient use to us?"

"The good Professor? Of course. He will be back in London within a couple of days. Then he will begin to look at Admiralty records, and we all know what he will discover there—" Goessler grinned in a way that was almost good-natured, kindly. He looked at his suit, nodded. "I believe the Americans would call it dirty for dirty. Oh yes, my dear Rudi — and how dirty it all is!"

Someone who spoke German looked at Goessler then at a nearby Oriental, and nodded in complicity.

A bell began ringing. Neither Goessler nor Lobke heeded it, Lobke already collecting his parcels and unbought clothes and heading for the topcoats next to the suits. Goessler shook his head as the younger man walked away, followed him clutching his own prospective purchases. The bell went on ringing. People moved past them.

Lobke was pulling himself into a leather topcoat when the assistant approached them, the young woman who had reminded Lobke not to leave his packages unattended.

I'm sorry, but the bell means you must leave the store," she announced calmly. Goessler seemed to attend to the bell for the first time, cocking his head as if to hear it more clearly. Lobke, one arm hitched into the topcoat, looked stunned.

"I am sorry—" Goessler said, watching the customers trooping towards the exits, canteen staff passing down one of the escalators, the blue overalls of the sales staff more evident than ever. The doors out into Oxford Street and Orchard Street were wide open.

"Would you please put down all the items you haven't paid for — just on the floor, and leave by the Orchard Street exit." She pointed across the shop. The bell insisted.

Lobke looked betrayed, mocked. He let his arm sag back out of the coat, studied the mound of cellophane-wrapped garments on the floor by his feet, and looked to Goessler as to a parent, who would somehow reverse the logic of events. Goessler laid down his own unpurchased items, picked up the bags that belonged to both of them, and simply nodded.

"Thank you," he said to the assistant. Their corner of the ground floor seemed suddenly empty. Lobke trailed after him, joining the orderly flow towards Orchard Street. He was sulking, pouting at Goessler.

"Damn," he muttered. "Shit and damn."

"There is an irony, my dear Rudi — perhaps it serves us right, you know?"

"Will we be able to come back in?" Lobke asked eagerly.

"Not for hours — the police will be here to search the store thoroughly. That will take the rest of the afternoon. I suppose it serves us right. Dear Herr Moynihan and his friends. We must look on the bright side, Rudi."

They came out into Orchard Street. Someone was holding a placard high, instructing the staff of M. & S. to congregate on the forecourt of the Selfridge Hotel, across the other side of Orchard Street. Customers drifted away towards Oxford Street.

"Come, Rudi," Goessler offered. "We will try Selfridge's." Lobke appeared unconsoled. "After all, if there is a bomb in the store, you may have arranged its shipment to Herr Moynihan yourself!" Goessler laughed, slapping Lobke on the back.

McBride was sitting in an armchair beside the fireplace when Drummond arrived. Maureen was sewing, looking up in occasional disapproval at the plaster adorning McBride's forehead. She had been gruffly solicitous when he returned the previous night after unsuccessfully scouting for the vanished German; then, when she thought him asleep, her hands had traced his face and shoulders and hair again and again in delicate butterfly-touches, something she would not do, feeling herself not permitted, when he was conscious. Waking was a barrier between them; he was never helpless enough when his eyes were open.

"You're all right?" Drummond asked while Maureen made tea for him. McBride nodded, seemed instantly to regret the motion of his head, and grinned tiredly.

"He wanted to kill me," McBride observed without emotion. "He could have run at first, but he wanted to kill me. And he was an expert." He had lowered his voice and kept his eyes on the door to the tiny kitchen. "Now, why do they send that kind of man, all of a sudden, do you suppose?"

"I wonder if the man they landed last night was of the same ilk?" Drummond murmured.

"Another one?" Drummond nodded.

"Oh, yes — becoming quite a popular holiday resort, the Cork coast. That's four we haven't traced, four in the last couple of weeks. Hardly a sniff of them, from Cork to Bantry, but they're all in the area somewhere."

"Are they working as a team?"

"I don't know. Your chap was on his own — before last night. Perhaps the others are, too?" He spread his hands as if warming them at the fire. "Whether they're here on the same job would be a more profitable speculation, perhaps."

Maureen McBride brought in the teacups on a tray, and poured out tea for the three of them. Drummond was polite, but made no attempt to engage her in conversation while he drank. For some obscure reason, Maureen McBride disturbed him. Her silences were not abstractions so much as vivid, careful attention. He felt as if he were being spied upon; and he felt that too little of the woman appeared on the surface, a sense of her withholding herself, to disarm his suspicions as to her opinion of him.

When he had finished his tea, he said: "If you're fit, I think we should have our own scout about, don't you?" He watched Maureen for signs of agitation, but she merely studied her sewing. Mending one of McBride's shirts, it appeared. McBride nodded in reply.

"You've checked out the cottage?"

"Oh, yes. I think he had a pushbike in one of the outhouses."

"Yes, I let the tyres down with a skewer."

"He came back for it. His puncture kit was on the floor, and the bowl of water to look for the bubbles." McBride looked crestfallen. "Don't worry. It just shows he wasn't going far, mm? He ran off, then came back after you'd left. Cool customer. He must intend staying on for a bit yet."

He stood up.

"Goodbye, Captain Drummond," Maureen said suddenly. Drummond nodded to her, and went out to wait for McBride in the car. McBride studied his wife as if he had just received a new and surprising insight into her character. He crossed to her, pulled her to her feet and kissed her quickly.

"Now, don't worry. Drummond will look after me."

"I'm not worried. But, take care, just for a bit of a change, will you?" She touched his face, once, with her right hand. He did not seem to resent the gesture, kissed her again.

"All right, I'll be careful, Maureen." He saw concern flicker in her eyes despite her control, and witnessed in that moment the small, important distance they had travelled back towards each other since the beginning of his work for Drummond and the British. He had acquired a mistress she could not rival, and she accepted that. To himself, he had emerged from some chrysalis state into a self his pre-war personality could not match. He kissed her again, more gently and in understanding, and squeezed her to him as if to erase all distance between them. Then he let her go as Drummond sounded his car-horn, and his attention, she could see, was instantly elsewhere. The moment had only a diminished and awkward meaning for him. "I'll be back tonight," he said almost guiltily, and went out. She watched him shut the door behind him, shutting her off.

She clenched her teeth, sniffed loudly once, then began to clear the tea things. If she ever apportioned blame — rather than standing beside her marriage staring dumbly at it as if into a new, unnerving bomb-crater — then she blamed Michael and not herself. She had remained still, it was he who had travelled in another, and unexpected, direction.

His parents" former cottage in the hamlet of Leap had crumbled by the side of the road. Nettles thrust through the remains of floorboards, infested empty windows, filled the open doorway, while heavy trees leaned towards the decaying, and partly missing, roof. It was impossible to enter the house without difficulty, and pointless to try. Nothing remained. Tinkers had used it as a staging-post for a while, but periodic storms and its habitual emptiness had made it uninhabitable. McBride was sorry he had suggested that Claire Drummond show him the place. There was nothing of his father there, except a sense that he might never have lived there, lived at all.

Their first awkward embrace in the front seat of the small MG — hood down on a day of fine, cool sunshine — had, however, more than compensated for the empty cottage that had lost its power to evoke even qualified melancholy. Claire Drummond had responded to his kiss lightly, but without reluctance, even perhaps with promise. McBride was enlivened, sensed himself at the beginning of something. Claire was desirable, and pliable in spite of her self-assurance.

After she had driven up into the hills behind Leap, they sat in the car looking down over the Skibbereen-Clonakilty road winding below them and towards Glandore Harbour, its sound dotted with the low humps of tiny islets. They shared cold chicken and a bottle of Moselle from the hamper she had packed, and McBride began to luxuriate in her proximity, the small airy space that enclosed them, and in the prospect of an affair with the woman. There were only the briefest moments where a sense of his lack of direction, his Pavlovian response to outside and immediate stimuli, disturbed his equanimity; they occurred only in the silences between their words.

"What will you do now?" she asked him, finishing her wine and smoking a cigarette. "What's the next step?"

It was as if she had awoken him to a less than perfect state of affairs.

"Go back to London, I suppose. Begin working on Admiralty records, and try to dig up some harder facts concerning Emerald Necklace. That guy Walsingham, if I can get to him—"

She was surprised at his diffidence. "You're still interested in it, then?"

He looked at her carefully. She seemed to be appraising him.

"I suppose I am. Look, it's like a light I can see in the distance, mm?" She nodded, prepared to follow the analogy. "It gets brighter and then it fades, and I seem to get closer then seem to be further away?" Again she nodded. "Well, I guess that's this book of mine. I can see it on the best-seller lists, I can feel the money— yet I wonder whether there's anything real out there, you know?"

"Do you want to write the book?"

"Maybe I should never have gotten out my doctoral thesis — should have started fresh on something else."

"But this is leading you to this Emerald Necklace thing, isn't it? That's new."

"You sound like my agent—" He grinned. "Sorry. Your interest is appreciated." He sighed, leaned back in his seat and stared at the clouds moving above him. "Yes — yes, your interest is appreciated. And maybe my interest ought to get off its butt and do some sniffing around!"

Claire Drummond seemed relieved, pleased. "Perhaps it should. For your sake."

"I guess my father — distracted me?" He nodded, agreeing his supposition. "Mm. Gilliatt and the old man may have been involved, but they're both as dead as that cottage down there—" He nodded in the direction of Leap. "I never knew him, and maybe I have to get used to never knowing him." He grinned disarmingly. "I have a big book to write. London calls—" He let a theatrical regret enter his features. Claire Drummond smiled.

"I'll come with you," she announced.

McBride and Drummond had explored the coastline between the western shore of Glandore Harbour down to Toe Head. The search had taken most of the day, especially because they had to wind north then south again around the inlet of Castle Haven. They were looking for some sign of the landing of a German agent, to give them a more precise area of search when they moved inland. Drummond had received a report of a landing the previous night which was no more than a sighting of lights on a stretch of beach between Horse Island and Scullane Point — and lights four miles further up the coast. Either or both of them could have been a little smuggling, even an IRA attempt to land guns and explosives, but Drummond could not afford to ignore any such report.

Drummond watched McBride from behind the wheel of his car as the Irishman walked along the beach below him towards Scullane Point. The tide was out and he would be able to round the headland to Toe Head Bay without leaving the beach. When he had done so, they would call it a day, and go back to the unrewarding task of pub-watching and shop-to-shop enquiries for strangers, for increased orders of food and supplies.

Drummond jogged in his seat with the slow, careful movement of the car along the narrow cliff-top track, his patience almost as exhausted as his physique. He was cold, and uncomfortable, and frustrated. He could scent, with certainty, a German preparation for something hitherto outside his range of experience and expertise. Yet still McBride had found nothing.

McBride was waving, yelling — was McBride waving? He tugged on the handbrake, leaned out of the window. They were past the few straggling cottages on the cliffs, almost at the point. Yes, McBride was waving—

Drummond got out of the car, cupped his hands to his mouth, and yelled down at McBride. The wind from the sea seemed to throw his words about like gulls, but McBride was nodding furiously, beckoning him down. He'd found something.

Drummond began running back along the cliff until he reached the nearest path down to the beach. He scrambled down it, his shoes scuffing, almost slipping on the loose gravel and rock. The cliffs were low, but he was out of breath and almost dizzy by the time he reached the soft sand. McBride was waiting for him right under the cliffs overhang, sitting on a large rock smoking a cigarette. He seemed, after his frantic semaphore, relaxed and unconcerned. Drummond approached him as if he suspected a joke, and he its object.

"Well?"

McBride gestured over his shoulder. "Behind me there, weighted down in a rock-pool. One very obviously German raft." McBride was studying Drummond as if he expected an immediate explanation. Drummond scrambled over the rocks. Just as McBride had described it, a grey inflatable raft — now deflated — lay at the bottom of the shallow pool, weighted down almost carelessly with a few heavy rocks so that it would not drift back out to sea with the next high tide. It seemed undamaged. Drummond scrambled back to McBride, and sat down, lighting his own Player's cigarette.

"Well?" he said again.

"You know, I'm thinking that we were meant to find that thing there."

"What?"

"It's never been so easy before. As if they wanted to tip us off they're here. Now, why would they want to do that? If we hadn't found it, someone who would have told us about it or might have done — we'd have come here anyway." McBride looked about him almost with a sense of threat. He continued in a murmur, clarifying something for himself. "There's a man in Castletownshend would help them, and there are more than a few in Skibbereen. He might have been met here — now, why didn't they take the raft if they met him?"

"It's really worrying you, isn't it?" Drummond's features were sharpened by cold rather than concentration.

"It is. They're landing more agents than before, and taking less care — at least on this occasion. Downright sloppy, if you ask me."

The sharp plop of something in the rock-pool behind them was clearly audible before the flat crack of the Lee Enfield rifle came to them, muffled by the wind. The second shot splintered rock near McBride, and he felt the patter of tiny pieces on the back of his left hand before he was able to absorb the sensory information, understand it, and begin to move.

"Get down!" he yelled at Drummond, who was far slower to react.

McBride began running, stepping from rock to rock with unbalanced speed, changing direction by instinct as he moved closer to the cliff-face, under its overhang. Two more shots, the bullets skipping like angry insects away from his feet.

Then, ahead of him, and with a clear view of his dodging, almost hysterical passage across the rocks, a second rifleman opened up at him from Scullane Point. There was no shelter beneath the cliff-face from the second man, whose vantage looked down the length of the beach towards Horse Island.

The first two bullets plucked through the tail of McBride's donkey-jacket as it flew in the wind.

CHAPTER SEVEN Weight of Evidence

McBride felt the tug of the bullets as they passed through the tail of his jacket as a momentary hand restraining him. Then he pitched, off-balance, across the rocks, scraping his shins and hands, but already adopting the momentum-of the fall and rolling with it, sliding down the face of a boulder, his cheek dragging painfully against its surface. He came to rest half-sitting in the shallow water of a rock-pool. He lay back as another shot splintered the grey rock, whined away towards the cliff-face.

He was out of sight — trapped, but temporarily safe.

"Drummond?" he called, and found his voice ragged and dry. "Drummond, are you all right!" A gap of time that the wind filled and the cry of a gull; but there was no shooting.

"Yes, where are you?"

"In the rocks. Are you hit?"

"No, thank God, are you?"

"No."

Then there was nothing more to say. McBride broke the contact that seemed as fragile as a long-distance telephone call. Drummond was, presumably, out of sight. McBride lifted his head, and began studying the cliff-face that leaned out over him, hiding him from either of the snipers who might walk along the cliff-top to that point. But as long as the second man remained on Scullane Point, McBride could not move.

A bullet screamed off the rock beside his head, and the flat crack of the rifle pursued it.

One of them would come down onto the beach — by the path Drummond had used — while the second man kept them pinned down. It was a simple task, like killing seals or seabirds. McBride felt infuriated at the helplessness of his situation, knowing even as he raged inwardly that he was wasting adrenalin, wasting rationality. But there seemed nothing he could do.

He raised his head again, in a different position further along the narrow pool. The water was chilly, seeping into him already, suggesting lethargy, insinuating inactivity. He was a hundred yards from the cliffs of Scullane Point, from their shelter. A hundred yards across outcrops of rock, fallen boulders, and loose sand. He could die a dozen times before he reached the shelter of the overhang. Again, his hands bunched into fists, and he hugged himself with the fury of impotence.

He had no other choice. Drummond receded in his awareness, as if he had begun clearing out the lumber of his life in preparation for dying. The man might already be coming down the cliff-path, might kill Drummond while he was still running for the cliff-face, but it could not be helped. He slipped out of his jacket, wondered for a moment about his boots but left them on, then began breathing deeply, easily. He lifted his head again, ducked back as the bullet whined across the rocks, waited a moment before turning onto his hands and knees — then thrust himself up and out of the shelter of the rock-pool.

The wind seemed to cut through his wet trousers, the noise of the sea was more ominous, omnipresent, a gull screamed as if to warn the sniper, he felt buffeted and unbalanced. He drove on, senses flooding with information, every inch of his skin alive with nerves that anticipated the impact, the dulling blow of the first bullet.

He jumped onto sand, a shot plucking up shells and sand near his boot, then began weaving in a broken run towards the point. A speeded-up drunk. He moved by instinct, the awareness of his body's paper-like fragility growing with each moment.

His mind chanted in chorus with each thudding footstep, come on, come on, come on — it chimed with the racing of his blood, the hideously loud heartbeat, even with the slowed-down breaths like an undertow. Each step was taking him closer, making the angle of the rifle more acute, more depressed. The sniper had fired only twice since he showed himself. He was waiting, lining up, had him now in the notch of the sight, his progress so much slower from that angle and height, his body bulky and unmissable—

He wanted to shout out, wave his arms, felt his nerve going finally as his sense of his own fragility all but overcame him. He knew his legs were going, slowing down, his breath catching up in pace. And the rifleman was waiting for that, waiting for the exposed fly to lose its nerve, crack. Anything else would be a waste of bullets. He was very close to screaming.

He stumbled into the overhang, felt the cliff at his fingertips, heard the rattle of rifle fire as the man on the cliff-top squeezed off four in rapid succession to express his frustration, the overconfidence outrun and baffled. McBride scuttled forward until he was sitting hunched into the rock, his back pressed against it, shaking, his arms hugging his knees, his breath roaring to drown every other sound. He could not believe that he had made it, even as he accepted that he had survived the gamble that the rifleman would wait just a moment too long for the optimum shot at a target moving towards him. McBride knew — an instructor somewhere had said it — that the first, second, even third man you killed could not be running towards you, could not be so easy a target, growing bigger in the sight-notch. It unnerved, but more than that it rendered complacent, expanded time until it ran out before you noticed.

McBride had never believed the instructor — not completely— until that moment. Now, he wanted to laugh, and vomit while he laughed. He kept his teeth pressed together.

The first man who had opened up on them was nowhere to be seen. Drummond's arm waved from behind some boulders, seemingly a huge distance away, then it went back out of sight. Drummond would have to take his chance.

Recovery time, recovery time—

He forced himself to his feet, and immediately felt light-headed and weak, his legs leaden and useless. He jogged a couple of yards, tried to feel better but didn't, then forced himself into an awkward, shambling run around the point, keeping drunkenly close to the cliff-face for shelter and support, his feet skittering and scrabbling in the loose shale.

He rounded the point, into a notch of rock with a pebbly beach which opened out further on into the cliffs of Toe Head. If he were simply running away now, he could keep on all the way round to Toe Head Bay, away from the two snipers. He moved along the bottom of the low cliff slowly now, eyes always flitting between the rock above him and the places where he carefully put his feet.

A split in the rocks, like a jagged knife-cut. His hand almost caressed it. He slid into it, back braced, boots wedged against the opposite side of the slit. Then he began moving up, using his back, his shoulders, his feet, his grasping hands — scuttling like a beetle or other insect as quickly as he could. The wind seemed to want to dislodge him. He did not look down. It was an easy climb, only difficult because he was climbing towards a rifle, he was already nervously exhausted, and because he was doing it in a hurry. His hands reached over two sharp lips of rock, and he heaved at the rest of his reluctant body — balanced — then raised himself by his arms until his head was just above the cliff-edge, his eyes level with the thin grass, with an old cigarette-end which lay right at the edge of the cliff.

The sniper was standing up, yelling to his companion a couple of hundred yards away — no, more than that, he corrected himself. Three, three-fifty even. He seemed to have temporarily lost interest in McBride, perhaps was even at a loss. His accent was Irish, and at the same time as that realization chilled McBride he understood that the local IRA were in the business of executions on German orders, and why the boy — he was little more than that from the back — was now puzzled. He was taking orders, and more orders were now required. Who was going down to the beach? When?

The boy had assumed that McBride — unarmed, insect-like McBride running brokenly, dementedly across the rocks and sand below — was evading him, not coming for him. He was confident his target huddled below him now, catching his breath and praying for rescue.

McBride balanced again, testing the strength of his arms and the toe-holds he would use.

The German voice was shouting something about making certain that McBride — he knew his name? — didn't escape by following the cliff-face around Toe Head, no, he couldn't see him against the cliff-face from where he was, and maybe the other one would take the same route, and he'd better get down onto the beach at once—

McBride heaved himself up onto the cliff-edge, scrabbling with his feet to push him beyond his centre of gravity then pulling with his arms, his legs swinging sideways and over, finally pushing himself upright. The German shouted and the boy began turning. The rifle came round, lifting towards him as he thrust forward, cannoning into the boy — who was impossibly thin and light as soon as he touched him — and knocking him down. He rolled over with him, the rifle sandwiched between them far harder than the boy's bones under him. He hit the boy once, hard across the jaw, felt the neck snap round as if it had broken as easily as a twig, and the boy's eyes closed, his head lolled. McBride solicitously joggled the head, knew the neck was not broken — then hefted the rifle into his own hands, taking aim while he still straddled the boy, wanting only the German now that he was armed, loosing off three shots, tearing his fingers on the bolt action of the Lee Enfield that might have come from the Rising, almost certainly from a Black-and-Tan and now a family heirloom.

The German ducked down, then began running, away beyond the car, down into a dip, then up again where McBride loosed off two more shots before the German disappeared again. Moments later, he heard the sound of an engine firing, held back and made distant by the wind from the sea but there, nevertheless, quite clearly.

McBride stood over the boy.

"Drummond, Drummond!" he yelled. "Get up here — quickly. Get up here!" Again, he wanted to vomit with exhaustion. Instead, he hauled the boy to his feet, held him against him tender as a lover, the rifle under his other arm.

They'd get the bastard now — if Drummond was bloody quick enough!

Room T was familiar to Gilliatt, though he had hoped never to return to it. It was in no way sinister — no part of the Admiralty was that — but it had a deadening, musty, arcane quality he had long ago rejected; finally, he had thought.

It had taken them hours to get this far, after the enervating train journey from Pembrokeshire. Swansea had been bombed again, and there had been a derailment that held them up. There was bomb rubble on the tracks just outside Paddington from the raid the previous night, and that had meant a further delay. Then the initial debriefing, then the waiting around while their reports were digested, then the summons to Room T, and a man called Walsingham and his superior officer, Rear Admiral March. The two men looked as if they had been quarrelling just before summoning Gilliatt and Ashe. Gilliatt had the uncomfortable feeling of someone intruding on a family dispute. Walsingham, Gilliatt noticed, was RNVR, and it was evident from his youth and rank that he was a former civilian intelligence officer drafted into the Admiralty. Gilliatt was silently amused at the idea that he might have taken his own place. The humour of the situation gave him a sense of superiority to the room and its occupants.

Ashe was tired, worn, drained. As if respecting an invalid, March concentrated his questions on Gilliatt. He snapped them out, primarily retracing the ground that lay tracked in the typed sheets in front of him on the table, supplementing with one or two riders to the initial debriefing. It took less than fifteen minutes, and nothing in March's voice or face indicated the weight he attached to what he asked or received in reply. Gilliatt was gradually assailed by a loss of reality surrounding what they had discovered in St George's Channel. Winnie's Welcome Mat was still out there, unbreached. March's strong, unmoving face suggested as much. The late afternoon sun behind his head haloed the white hair, tipped the ears with pink — an elderly rabbit. Nothing bad was going to happen—

Gilliatt jerked awake. The questioning had transferred to Ashe briefly, then back to him.

"Sir?" he fumbled.

"What are your conclusions, Mr Gilliatt? As a former intelligence officer?" March snapped, scowling at Gilliatt and the debriefing report in turn.

"It has to be — well, it has to be to land troops in Ireland, from the sea — I suppose."

Walsingham, who had said little, beamed and seemed suddenly much more aware. March looked at him, momentary puzzlement hardening into a more habitual authority.

"Very well, I'll leave Commander Walsingham to talk to you, while you and I, Captain Ashe, have our own discussion. You'll want tea sent in, Charles?" Walsingham seemed unconcerned.

"Please," Gilliatt said.

Ashe left like an old man being taken to a hospital ward, disturbed as to what his forthcoming tests might reveal. March was erect, and did not look back as he vacated the high-ceilinged room, its tall windows spilling light across the carpet and over Walsingham's head and shoulders, so that he squinted. A mock seafaring look, Gilliatt observed.

Walsingham wandered over to the fireplace, and seemed to study the dwarfed gas fire that squatted in it. He leaned on the high, cream-painted mantelpiece almost in a deliberate pose of abstraction. Then he turned to Gilliatt.

"I believe you," he said simply.

"Is it a question of belief?"

"It might be. No one here wants to believe it, of that you may be certain. To their Lordships, it would be the last straw. Tell me — how do you think the Germans would have swept the minefield?"

Gilliatt studied Walsingham across the room. There was something almost obsessive about him, a barely-restrained energy. Obscurely, Gilliatt didn't like him, aware at the same time that he might only be disliking a former self.

"Submarine, on the surface, probably."

"Yes, I have other opinions that would confirm that. How would they land troops, then?"

"Ship?" Gilliatt realized he was being led to ponder the darkest unpleasantries; invited to contemplate disaster by the bland voice. "No — submarine again. Their biggest U-boats could transport eighty to a hundred men — each."

"How many troops could they land in one night?" Walsingham was almost crouching towards him by the fireplace, demanding an answer that confirmed his worst suspicions.

Gilliatt considered. "Close to two thousand if they had the subs — and the weather."

"And what about the present weather, Lieutenant Gilliatt?"

After a long silence, Gilliatt, appalled, said, "I would — would consider the weather good enough, at present."

"Exactly!" Walsingham's glance at the ceiling was almost theatrical, his face slightly flushed, his body alert with nerves. "Exactly!" He studied Gilliatt for a moment, then nodded. "Lieutenant Gilliatt, I am familiar with your record, and you can be of use to me. You'll consider yourself re-assigned, pending confirmation."

Before Gilliatt could protest, Walsingham had gone, leaving Gilliatt to wander to the window and look morosely down at Horse Guards Parade and St James's Park. Walsingham's enthusiasm confirmed more dire prognostications than Ashe and March put together. He did not wish to become involved any closer with the fate of his country.

McBride bundled the IRA youth into the back of the Morris and climbed in after him. Drummond took the wheel, started the engine, and screeched off along the cliff-road looking for a junction with the track the German had taken inland.

"Come on, start explaining!" McBride snapped, his hand in the stuff of the youth's sweater, bunching it under his chin. "Where is our friend heading?"

The youth shook his head. Carroty hair, freckles, pale skin. Scared stiff, but stubborn. He'd taken oaths, belonged—

"Ask him which way — again," Drummond offered.

"Where are you from?" McBride asked, leaning against the youth. The leather of the bench-seat creaked. Drummond stopped the car, and turned in his seat.

"Which way?" he demanded.

"We are going to find out, you know," McBride said with a smile, letting go of the sweater, taking out cigarettes. "We'll all have a quiet smoke, and then we'll have a talk, mm?"

The youth took the cigarette, McBride lit it, the boy coughed, looked defiant, then dragged deeply. Suddenly, he appeared very vulnerable, and aware of the closeness of the car around him, the proximity of the two tall men much older — and wiser and more ruthless, no doubt — than he. He coughed again.

"English cigarettes, eh?" McBride said, his accent slightly broader than before. "Like everything else, they're not for the Irish, eh, lad?"

"Why are you working for them, McBride?" the lad snapped back, nodding at Drummond. "We know all about you, McBride—" He flinched as McBride's face hardened.

"Now, that's not the way to get out of here in one piece, lad. What's your name?"

A long hesitation, then: "Dermot."

Tearse, O" Connell, Yeats, Gonne, Casement — which is it?" The boy appeared puzzled, then realized he was being mocked. "You've joined then, have you?" The boy nodded. "So, Dermot, you've got a bloody great gun, and you're told to go and blow my head off — and you nearly did, mm? But it isn't quite the same as shooting pheasants or crows, is it?" The boy disliked the turn of the conversation. "How old are you, Dermot?"

"Twenty—"

"Grow a moustache, Dermot. If you're over eighteen, I'm a Black-and-Tan. And just say I am and I'll push all your teeth down your throat, Dermot."

The humour and the threats disturbed Dermot. Drummond turned away on cue, just as the boy began to look to him as a silent, and therefore rational, being.

"Piss off, you—" The flinch was just below the surface, the shudder one layer of skin too deep to show. But McBride knew Dermot was hanging onto his new identity in the IRA. The German probably meant nothing to him at that moment.

"That's a brave lad. They'll give you a martyr's funeral, no doubt of it. I'll tell them you were spitting defiance up to the last." He paused, smiling, then: "You little cunt, you tried to kill me! You're going to pay for that—" He opened the door, and pulled the boy bodily across the back seat and out of the car after him. Without hesitation, he dragged him to the cliff-edge, then held him at arms" length, teetering on the edge, body inclined so that if McBride released him he would be unable to regain his balance, would fall. "You've tried to kill your last Irishman, Dermot — your last anything!" The wind plucked at Dermot's grey mackintosh, at his red hair, His face was shining with a ghostly paleness. His eyes kept moving from the beach below to McBride's pitiless face. "You think it's like the Boy Scouts, do you, Dermot? It isn't lad, it isn't. You've joined the scum, the bombers and the assassins — the comedians of destruction! You're going over, Dermot. I'm going to save your soul, Dermot. Save you from yourself! There's time, Dermot — start saying your confession. Absolution follows!" He bellowed with laughter. Dermot screamed. McBride loosened his grip on the boy's arm, then jerked him backwards. Dermot collapsed on the grass in a faint. Vomit leaked thinly from the corner of his mouth. McBride turned him over so that he would not choke on it.

When Dermot regained consciousness, he found himself back in the car, a tartan rug wrapped round him.

Drummond pressed a flask of rum to his lips. He coughed as he swallowed, but the drink seemed to revive memories, and his eyes darted in his head. He was obviously looking for McBride.

"I've sent him for a walk, to calm down. But, you did try to kill us, Dermot. It did make him angry."

"He's mad," Dermot mumbled, swigging again at the rum. "McBride is as mad as a hatter, mister!"

"Tell me — why you, Dermot?"

A long silence in which Drummond could almost hear the fragile raft of Dermot's recent oaths strain and break against the rocks of immediate experience.

Dermot told Drummond everything — which wasn't much. He'd been available, had a gun — once his father's, his grandfather's originally — and the German had needed help. He'd been ordered to give it. The German hadn't joined up with any other Germans, as far as he knew. Yes, the Skibbereen Battalion was giving help to the Germans — how many? Three or four since Dermot joined. Yes, they were still about—

Eventually, the little cargo of information had diminished to nothing. Drummond was certain of it. He said, "Right-ho, Dermot, on your way." The boy was nonplussed and did not move. Drummond opened the rear door for him, waved his hand in a gesture of dismissal. "Go, and sin no more," he added, then: "Dermot, you're free to go — go and tell them you got away from us, you told us nothing, what the devil you like — but go!"

Dermot scrambled out of the Morris and away, soon disappearing behind a dip of the headland, coat-tails flying behind him. After a while, Drummond lit a cigarette, and McBride rolled out from underneath the car, stood up and brushed himself off, and joined Drummond.

"Fat lot of use he was, our Dermot," he observed. "Quite a good choice by our German friend. Young enough not to think of the consequences, and young enough, too, to know nothing."

"We'll not get anything out of the Skibbereen Battalion. A dead end, if they're protecting German agents."

"You know — I would have thrown him over if I thought that way I could have done him the favour of keeping him out of their hands — and if I could be ruthless enough."

"Michael — you mean it, don't you?"

"Yes. Oh, you didn't know they killed my father, did you? No wonder it came as a surprise to you." Drummond studied McBride, who was staring through the windscreen, memory racing. He could ask no more questions.

"What do you think?"

"If they want to get rid of us, then I think they must be very close to whatever they have planned. It's so out of character for those Skibbereen clowns, they're being hard-pressed by someone else. God, they think the Germans are going to help them unite Ireland! No, forget it—" McBride was talking almost to himself." They must be scared stiff of us — not because of who we are or what we know, but just because of what they're up to! We're a danger just because we're here — now, tell me what it might be."

Rear Admiral March was sufficiently alarmed by the debriefing of Gilliatt and Ashe that he allowed himself to be badgered into calling a consultative meeting in Room T which would consider QIC's response to the German sweeping of the St George's Channel minefield. The Admiralty's Operational Intelligence Centre had failed, during the first year of the war, to develop its resources of cryptanalysts and air reconnaissance to a degree which would provide the Intelligence Division and the Director of Naval Intelligence with an understanding of German naval intentions and planning. QIC had had to take its share of blame for the fiasco of the Norwegian operation in April of 1940, and had been among those most relieved by Hitler's cancellation of Sea Lion in October. Recent history made an uncomfortable extra presence in the room as Walsingham, with Ashe's chart pinned to an easel near his chair, rose to address the men he had been able to gather together for the early evening meeting. March sat at the head of the table, Walsingham at his right, a Wren stenographer on his left. A lieutenant from the Tracking Room — an ex-submarine navigator and an expert on German-swept channels — sat nearest the betraying chart, and had been studying it since his arrival. A commander from the office of the Director of Minesweeping was deputizing for his chief, and Walsingham had managed to persuade a lieutenant-commander from the Anti-Submarine Warfare Division of the Admiralty to delay his date with an actress.

Walsingham looked once at March, who studied the reports and pictures in front of him studiously. Each man in the room had a duplicated set. Walsingham, looking at the mostly young faces, at the insufficiency of gold braid around the uniform cuffs displayed on the table, felt a momentary qualm. This was most definitely the sixth-form debating society in terms of the Admiralty's hierarchy. How long would it take him to get from there to the headmaster's study?

The image daunted him, but it also amused and challenged him.

"Gentlemen, you've all had time to study the reports and photographs before you, albeit hurriedly. I think our first priority—" He glanced at March again — "is to establish that the St George's Channel minefield has been swept by the Germans. Barry, your opinion?"

The young lieutenant from the Tracking Room seemed startled out of his assiduous attention to Ashe's chart. He blinked.

"Yes, sir. There are no orders for a British sweep — sorry, only that carried out by the Bisley and her flotilla. No north-south sweep by us. And from Lieutenant Gilliatt's detailed description, I think it's certain the Germans swept this using submarines on the surface. At night. It has the marks of a German sweep, much like one of their own swept channels—" He glanced at the DMS's deputy, who nodded.

"Commander?" Walsingham asked.

"Yes, you've spoken to the DMS already. You know that it was swept by the German Navy, and how they did it."

"Thank you, Commander. It would seem to be our next priority to try to understand the movement of German naval vessels as they might be affected by this sweep. Chris?"

The lieutenant commander from ASW Division said immediately, "What you want to know is — did we spot those U-boats of yours on Guernsey, and where are they now?"

The Tracking Room lieutenant, Barry, chuckled. Walsingham nodded his head as if Chris had scored a neat point.

"Did you?"

"We did. That many heavy-duty submarines were tracked from Brest to Guernsey. But we didn't know they ever left Guernsey — this sweep was done at night, which would explain our oversight. Ask Tracking Room—"

"Barry?"

"We — don't know where they are now. When you came to see me the other day, I got onto it. If they've left Guernsey, then they did that at night, too. They haven't emerged from any other base — not as far as we can tell."

There was a sense in the room, Walsingham was aware, that those present had been carefully, cleverly orchestrated, and that they were reciting lines long prepared, like suggestions that Walsingham might have planted in them under hypnosis.

"I have information from Guernsey which suggests that the sheds are now empty. Would the U-boats return to normal wolfpack duty, Chris?"

"It seems likely. They must be back in Brest by now, then. Neither we nor Tracking Room have registered any of those designations at sea in the past four days."

Walsingham nodded. "We'll go on. What, gentlemen, was the object of converting those heavy-duty U-boats — which the German Navy cannot easily spare from North Atlantic duty — to sweep that channel?"

March said, "You're preparing your ground here, Charles. But we already know what you think. Do you want us to vote on it?" The sarcasm was abrasive, crude.

"Gentlemen, I had a suggestion earlier in the day which made me think. It was suggested — by Lieutenant Gilliatt — that perhaps two thousand front-line Wehrmacht troops could be transported in a single night from the coast of France to the coast of southern Ireland, by submarine. Is that feasible, do you think?"

Chris from ASW Division was first to speak. "Mm. It's a small force — but it's less noisy and a lot more efficient than dropping parachutists in large numbers. I'm not a military expert. Those subs you found in Guernsey could do the job—"

"Very well. When was any one of those U-boats last recorded on anti-convoy duty?"

Barry said, "I checked those numbers off. Two weeks ago, U-99 was seen returning to Brest, moving on the surface at dawn. Spotted by an unarmed Coastal Command Anson. It dived, but they got the number. The others are earlier sightings."

"And no one's seen them since then, until Guernsey, and not since then?" Heads were shaken, the commander from DMS was now intrigued, converted. March remained with his head bent over the papers on the table, unwilling to accede to the slowly mounting barometric excitement in the tall room. "Very well, where are they, and what are they doing? My man saw them in Guernsey stripped down — even the gun was missing — and rigged for sweeping duties. Those duties, we know, were completed. Now they are no longer in Guernsey — are they in Brest, and what are they doing there?" Walsingham held up two glossy prints. "Air reconnaissance pictures of Brest, taken yesterday. The weather was good enough—"

"These don't even show the harbour, certainly not the U-boat pens—" Barry objected. March nodded in agreement.

"No. But, if you look carefully, you will see an unusually large concentration of military equipment." He tapped at each picture in turn. "Other pictures record the same sort of movements — troop movements — in and around Brest. An expert in this sort of thing from Army Intelligence is prepared to bet that there are at least two new divisions in the immediate Brest area, just on the basis of the transport he can pick out on these pictures. Unfortunately, we don't have other pictures of the area behind Brest. At present. But we should have some by tomorrow." He smiled in March's direction, acknowledging a concession. "If those new troops in Brest have any connection with the submarines we suspect are back in Brest, what can we conclude from that?"

The question elicited only silence, until March spoke. He stood up, and spoke slowly and distinctly, his teeth almost closed together. The veins stood out on his neck. All the time, he continued to look at the table in front of him.

"Gentlemen, this meeting is closed. Thank you for your time. I do not need to remind you that these matters are to be discussed with no one outside this room. I apologize for any sense of anti-climax you may now feel." He glared at Walsingham. "Commander, if you'll come with me—"

He walked out of the room, followed by Walsingham. The Wren finished her shorthand, and the three naval officers stared at the door through which March and Walsingham had retreated, then at each other. They appeared like children robbed of the ending of a new, and absorbing, bedtime story.

When March had sat down at his desk, and Walsingham had closed the oak door behind them, he barked at the junior officer with an anger that Walsingham had never seen unleashed before. He had pressured, even embarrassed, the Rear Admiral in a deliberately cavalier manner. And the Admiral knew he was being pressured.

"Don't you ever try to do that to me again, young man!" March's eyes burned. He let Walsingham continue standing like a recalcitrant in front of his desk. "You tried to force me to side with you, fall in with whatever ridiculous scheme you have in mind! I will not be blackmailed into agreeing with you out of embarrassment! You arrogant young puppy!" Then March subsided into silence, staring broodingly at his blotter, at the papers he had carried with him from the conference room. Walsingham stood very still, staring at the portrait of the King that hung behind the Admiral's desk; George VI, King-Emperor, in full naval uniform. A little, thin gleam of patriotism came and went, ousting the arrogance of conviction, the personal quality of the course on which he had embarked. Then March spoke again, tiredly. "What did you attempt to persuade me to do, Charles?"

"Sir, I'd like to put someone into Brest, immediately, to recce for those U-boats, even to look at the troop dispositions."

March looked up as if slapped. "Beneath your absolute conviction of your own brilliance, Charles, are you equally convinced of the reality of this German invasion?"

"Sir, I am." Walsingham's cheek glowed at the accusation of arrogance. Its truth struck him as he went on staring at the portrait of the King-Emperor. "Yes. Admiral, I'm convinced that the Germans are planning an invasion of Ireland — as a beach-head to replace the foundered Sea Lion venture. A second front against the mainland United Kingdom. And a means of closing, finally, the convoy routes. Just imagine U-boat bases in Ireland—"

March, surprisingly, nodded. "We've been wrong, or behindhand, or short-sighted most of this year. We can't afford to be wrong again." His eyes were hard as he looked up into Walsingham's young face. "God, Charles, I hope you're wrong about this!" Then he seemed to shrug off such speculation as useless. "We'd better get something organized. You'll want experts, of course—"

"Sir, I'd like to use my man McBride, and Lieutenant Gilliatt, the officer who—"

"Yes, I know who Gilliatt is. Formerly of the Intelligence Division, yes." March pondered it. "You have a predilection for this man McBride — you obviously think him good." Walsingham nodded. "If you in your unbounded arrogance think him good, then he must live up to an impossible standard! You're ruthless in your assessment of people, Charles—" Walsingham's features remained an inexpressive mask, and March brushed his hand across the desk as if to dismiss the ineffectual reprimand. "Very well, get McBride here as soon as you can. Operation plan to be on my desk first thing in the morning!"

"I see. Very well. If Mr Walsingham is going to be absent for the next few days, perhaps you could give him a message when he returns — would you inform him that the son of Michael McBride — yes, that's right, Irish spelling — his son is making enquiries into Emerald Necklace—" Drummond chuckled. "Yes, it does sound mysterious. Please tell him that, would you. Goodbye."

Drummond replaced the receiver, and sat back in his chair, smiling up at the ceiling of his study. Outside, the evening was quiet except for a fresh little wind that had sprung up at sunset. The house, too, seemed silent, and empty. His face sagged into folds that mirrored his mental lethargy now he had delivered his message. Walsingham was Head of the Directorate of Security, and it had consequently taken Drummond a considerable time to get through even to his senior aide. As Head of the DS (MIS), Walsingham had an official civil service rank as a Permanent Under-Secretary at the Home Office, and was hedged about with the expected number of assistants, aides, secretaries, all of whom had needed placating before he could leave his cryptic message. A glimpse of Walsingham's face when he received it would have been worth having.

Drummond felt tired, and edgy, unrelaxed. He was disinclined to listen to the gramophone or Radio 3. Nothing attracted him to the television. On the ceiling, clear as pictures, his own past glimmered. McBride was roughly assisting him down a road he did not wish to follow. And the father lurked behind the son, the recollected smile a pain in his side. His stomach felt gaseous and empty, but he could not be bothered to cook a meal. He was nearly eighty, for heaven's sake, and these pictures bobbing unwilled out of the dark at the back of his mind were harsh and unwelcome.

He heard a small car approaching, and suddenly shuddered as if he had opened a window to the breeze. It stopped outside, and he heard the approaching footsteps with something like terror. The present wiped away the ceiling-images rudely, insisting with a contemporary nightmare of its own. The doorbell rang. Sighing, he got shakily to his feet and went to the front door. He switched on every light he passed.

It was Moynihan, as he had known it would be. He had recognized the car engine. Moynihan was grinning.

"You'll invite me in, then?" he said. Drummond reluctantly made way for him. Moynihan, familiar with the house, made for the study, warming his hands at the fire whose flames shimmered on the ceiling. He sat down in the easy chair opposite Drummond's own. With unwilling complicity, Drummond poured two whiskies and handed one to Moynihan. "I suppose your coming was inevitable," Drummond said, sitting heavily in his chair, swallowing at his drink.

"Naturally, Admiral." Drummond winced at the rank, his face pursing. "I made sure they got off all right from the airport." Drummond appeared startled. "Don't worry. McBride didn't see me. But, as I was saying to you, I saw them off, then came straight here — for a briefing." Moynihan laughed.

"Claire will be all right!"

"Come now, Admiral. We know they're not looking for her. She's your daughter, dear God — how safe could she be?" He laughed again. "No, just tell me what he'll be up to in London."

"Admiralty records, for the most part. He'll find the sort of thing you need there—" A swift passage of emotions across Drummond's face, to which Moynihan attended. Many of them puzzled him, and Drummond, he finally decided, was confused with age and senility. Fear, concern, sense of betrayal like repeating images. Claire had suggested her father was totally pliable, which he was. But she hadn't suggested an intense mental life surrounding what he had been forced to do with regard to McBride — point him back to London.

"Gilliatt—" Drummond began, then fell silent.

"Yes? Us, do you mean?" Drummond nodded. "No, I think he died naturally — old age. Unless it was — someone else?" Moynihan thought of Goessler, but remained silent. He didn't know.

"God, it's a mess!"

"Your daughter joining us, you mean?" Drummond nodded. "Ah, well, Admiral. Not your fault she's more Irish than a lot of the Irish are. She was born here." Regret again on Drummond's face. "I'll keep an eye on her in London, don't you fret, Admiral. She'll be quite safe. And you've played your part splendidly, haven't you now?"

Drummond, staring into the fire, regretted his call to Walsingham, regretted even mentioning his name to McBride. Claire had no idea that Walsingham was still in intelligence work; she thought of him as a civil servant. What had he done to her? Had he betrayed her?

He was horribly, inescapably caught in a trap. He saw that now. How could he save his daughter by betraying her? How would that get her out of Moynihan's hands? He'd led McBride on, played his part in McBride's betrayal, as she had wanted and demanded. But what had he done to her, telling Walsingham?

Even after Moynihan had left, indifferent to the old man's silence, he sat on staring into the fire, the empty glass still clenched in his hand. What had he done to Claire? What would happen to her?

Even when he occasionally glanced at the ceiling, it was only a screen for the past. McBride's father. All those years ago, what had he done to Michael McBride?

CHAPTER EIGHT French Leave

On the screen, the Irish Prime Minister — the bastard — was waving to the camera, smiling broadly yet with appropriate gravity at the little knot of reporters and their microphones closing in on him like an ambush. Nodding — giving away what he had to say even before he opened his bloody mouth — smiling like a child, beatifically… like a priest at a fund-raising. Beginning to answer the press of questions, the excited demands to know of the Cabinet's decision… would he go to London next week? Nod, nod — nod -

Guthrie had done it, he'd persuaded Dublin to talk, to take the first step in reaffirming that bloody, damned, bloody Agreement over Ulster and the Provisionals!

Moynihan crossed the room and switched off the television. The screen flared down to a white spot which he watched as if mesmerized. Then, when he seemed satisfied that the images from the BBC news would not reassert themselves on the screen, he returned to his chair. The hotel room was thick with cigarette smoke, there were opened and empty beer bottles on the small writing-desk and the low table by his chair. The bed was unmade. The hotel in Bloomsbury had been his London base on more than one occasion; one of those anonymous hotels used by commercial travellers or football supporters and by members of illegal organizations. Moynihan was not a man the Special Branch or MI5 put high on wanted lists or whose movements they assiduously watched, and the hotel was one remove from the seedier refuges of terrorists and illegal immigrants.

He lit another cigarette, glancing distastefully at the crowded ash-tray as he did so. He exhaled the smoke towards the ceiling. He knew — they all knew by now — that Guthrie and the British had gained a crucial advantage; they had outwitted and outdistanced the whole organization! A furious, angry frustration possessed him, making his free hand clench and unclench repeatedly as he sat waiting for his visitor. He was impotent, in the hands of others. He wanted to hit back, make assertions of his own. Claire was in London with McBride, but the thought brought no comfort or respite from his anger. McBride, fiddling in old records, could not, in Moynihan's imagination, successfully oppose this latest setback. People wanted results — he wanted results. This was no way to get them. Damn the British — they'd seized the advantage. He was left with McBride, a useless dummy. There was a knock at his door. He stubbed out the cigarette instantly, came out of the chair like a lithe animal, gun appearing in his hands from behind the cushion, and he moved silently to the door. Action, even this action, charged him with a subtle electricity. He almost wanted it to be Special Branch on the other side of the flimsy woodwork, flimsy as flesh and bone—

"Yes?"

"Lobke."

Carefully, he opened the door on its safety-chain. The young East German's face smiled at him, saw the gun, and smiled more broadly. Moynihan unlatched the chain and let Lobke in.

"You're late," he said, closing the door. Lobke seated himself almost primly in a chair opposite that bearing the impression of Moynihan's weight. He had shaken his head quickly at the unmade bed.

"I'm sorry, Herr Moynihan. Business, you know—" He raised his hands, let them drop, recollecting his purchases in Selfridge's and John Lewis's.

"Making sure McBride dots his i's and crosses his t's, I suppose?" Moynihan sneered.

"You seem on edge, Herr Moynihan?" Lobke was looking at the beer bottles. He waved towards them with one hand. "You have any that are full?"

Moynihan took two bottles of Guinness from the string bag under the bed, opened them and poured some of the black stout into a tooth-glass, almost deliberately letting the thick head overflow. He handed it to Lobke, who sipped, then said, "I prefer the dark beer they make in Prague — you've tried it, Herr Moynihan?" He sipped again. "It's very good — the Czech beer, I mean."

"Bloody connoisseur," Moynihan muttered, sitting down, lighting another cigarette. Lobke watched him.

"Count the stubs, Herr Lobke?" Moynihan invited. Lobke shook his head, smiling.

"I understand how you feel — like a caged animal." Moynihan nodded, disliking even that much agreement with Lobke's analysis. "Herr Goessler has sent me to tell you that we think McBride is making good progress — he is refining his researches just as we would wish."

"God, this bloody game you and fatty Goessler are playing!" Lobke's nose wrinkled in disgust. Moynihan leaned forward in his chair, drawing deeply on the cigarette. Stout slopped from his own glass onto the thin carpet between his feet. "You tied my bloody hands from the beginning, Lobke. I had no choice!" His fist clenched in front of him; the glass of stout appeared fragile and threatened in his other hand.

"You were like a greedy child," Lobke observed, speaking almost with Goessler's tones.

"Mother of God, you take some beating, Lobke. Goessler offers me the chance to create the biggest mess the Brits could find themselves in — what in hell do you think I'd have done for that? You can have my right arm, Lobke, but for God's sake get something done!" Moynihan's upper lip was shining with sweat. His eyes were intense, burning as if with a fever.

"Calm down, Herr Moynihan. McBride is now clearly on the right track. He will soon bring to the surface the elements of the situation that you require. Then — you can have him."

"Tell me—"

"No. Not yet. But it will ruin Guthrie, it will discredit the British Government in Ulster, poison the atmosphere for future talks for perhaps ten years, alienate world opinion, especially America, bring funds from NORAID and Libya flooding back into your pockets — what more could you ask, Herr Moynihan?" Lobke's smile was especially irritating at that moment. Moynihan wanted to hit him, but wanted more to remove from his own features the hungry eagerness he knew they displayed.

"So you say," he said.

"We know, Herr Moynihan. What we promise, we deliver. Guns, explosives, papers — and Guthrie's head on a plate. But, patience is a virtue—"

"All right, all right. What about Claire?"

"She is doing her job, I believe?"

"Has she been to bed with him yet?"

"Soon, I believe. Another little sacrifice, Herr Moynihan. In the expectation of great things, mm?"

"Just deliver, Lobke — or I'll have your balls, so help me I will. In a specimen jar, and labelled."

Thomas McBride considered, as he heard the key scraping in the lock of her hotel room next door to his, the last few days, since their meal in Kilbrittain. Moynihan had been a momentary irritation, having left after sharing a drink with them, walking out of their lives quite deliberately, it now seemed to him. She had explained him away as a friend, and he believed her. He listened intently, sitting at his desk, the day's notes in front of him, as she opened her door and entered her room. The kisses on the hill above Leap, and since, had promised without fulfilment. He did want her, yet more he attended to her noises in the next room as if to something loved through familiarity. He was prepared to wait for her.

He disregarded his recent sexual experiences, the few relationships with students of his — plus one brief affair with a feminist associate professor that had ended a year before — because Claire Drummond had placed them in an un-flattering, immature light. They displayed themselves to his memory as pointless affairs of self-flattery, affairs of taking rather than giving. By ignoring or despising them now he understood himself to be more than half in love with Claire already, and entirely acquiescent to the idea of loving her.

Tourist things, they'd done mainly tourist things. The shops, the sights, a lot of laughter that shaded into smiles of promise and acceptance. He was — this he was prepared to admit because he welcomed the sensation — besotted with her. He wanted to make love to her; more he wanted to love her and be loved. He felt his breathing shallow and quick as he waited for her to knock on the interconnecting door between rooms 402 and 404 of the Portman Hotel. And when she came in, he wanted her arms to be full of parcels purchased with the money he had given her for clothes — she had her own money, enough for Liberty's and all the expensive clothes she wanted, but he had given her the gift of a blank cheque as a declaration. No strings attached, he had said, and almost meant it.

She knocked, and walked in. Her arms were full of bags, above which she was smiling almost apologetically, and she suggested a past and a context to their relationship which had remained absent until that moment. He felt a rush of gratitude in his chest.

She was wearing new boots, and a new dress. She heaped the packages on his bed, taking a winter coat from one of the larger bags, which she put on and paraded before him. She did not make the fashion show an occasion for titillation, nor did he regard her as an object of immediate desire. She seemed closer to him, better known, than that.

"You like them, then? You approve?" He nodded. She draped the coat over a chair, then sat down. "Pour me a drink — shopping in London is murder."

He poured whisky for them both, toasted her, then she came and stood by his side, looking down at his notes.

"Busy day?"

"It must be easier than shopping in London," he observed, his hand wiping across his notebooks, the arranged scraps of paper.

"Are you getting anywhere?" she asked. He was aware of her thigh against his shoulder; aware too, of another mood suggested. He watched her parading her purchases now in a different way, replaying the images to himself — turn of the body, line of the thigh and hip he could sense through his shirt-sleeve, breasts only emphasized by the new dress.

"I — yes, I think I am. I'm looking at naval activity around that period, near the Irish coast and the French coast."

"What have you found?" Her thigh pressed with an emphasis — he was sure of it — against him. He heard the rustle of the dress against her tights.

"I'm not quite sure, yet. There are some important factors I know already, of course. The St George's Channel minefield, for example—" He looked up at her. She seemed almost brooding, not looking at him but at his papers.

"What—?"

"The minefield protecting the channel between Cornwall and Ireland. The Germans would have had to deal with it if they wanted to land between Cork and Waterford."

"And—?" Her hand on his shoulder was an almost absent gesture. He shivered, barely perceptibly, and she seemed not to register the reaction she had created.

"I haven't found any evidence of the minefield having been swept by the Germans. But a British minesweeping flotilla left Milford Haven — in Pembrokeshire — under sealed orders at just about the right time. I'm trying to follow their progress. I'd like to know where they went, and what they did."

"Why?"

"I don't know — maybe it's just a hunch? I have some reports from Admiralty Intelligence about troop movements in the Brest area of Brittany about the time—" He looked up at her. "I know I'm close to it!"

She smiled with a peculiar intensity, transferring her gaze to her hand on his shoulder, then swallowing some of the whisky. She seemed intensely alert, expectant, and for a moment McBride thought her concentration had nothing to do with their physical proximity.

"Good," she said, and it was obvious she had lost interest. Her hand rubbed the hair at the nape of his neck.

"That minesweeping flotilla lay at anchor on its return for three days — the flotilla captain was ordered to London—" Then he added, his voice thick and his concentration elsewhere: "There's something about the time of return, and the sailing date — I almost realized what it was just as you walked in—" Then he gave up the small, and quite uninteresting, spark of enquiry, putting his arm around her thighs, squeezing her against him. She moved slightly closer, then bent in front of him, putting down her glass on his notes. Normally fastidious, the wet ring created on his notebook did not irritate him.

He lifted his head, kissed her. Her mouth rubbed against his, her tongue prised open his teeth. There was something diametrically opposed to their earlier selves between them now, something uncomfortable, vivid, almost violent. She had retreated as a person, become merely physical. He stood up, pressing against her, moving her towards the bed. She stepped back for a moment, smiling, and undid the tie-belt of the dress, and the buttons, stepping out of it as it dropped to the carpet. Then she pressed against him again, moving her hips, her arms pressing his sides, fingers splayed and slightly clawed against his back.

He moved her slightly sideways, then they declined on the bed slowly, statuesquely, their limbs interweaving with a slow, rubbing passion, as if the skin of one savoured that of the other. He unhooked her brassiere, tugged at the restraining tights and panties with the same half-frozen, intense slowness, while she unbuttoned his shirt, unzipped his trousers.

She caught sight of their splayed, intertwined bodies in the mirror of the dressing-table, just once as they neared a mutual climax. His trousers were comically round his ankles. Then she lost all objective awareness for a time, even the awareness of engineering their love-making, of confirming her control of him. He thrust into her eagerly even as she decided that in his case sexual passion was a sufficient substitute for love — he would, at least temporarily, believe himself in love with her, be malleable — and she gave herself to replying to his eagerness, lifting her hips so that her legs gripped his sides. The necessity of performance became an imperative she could not quite cold-bloodedly control.

Moynihan picked up the telephone with a lover's eagerness. He had sat on in the darkening Bloomsbury room long after Lobke had departed, waiting for one call, suffering the unwilled images coming out of the dark of her body twisted about McBride's white torso.

"Yes?"

"Claire—" He caught his breath. He hated, now that she had diminished his imaginations by calling him, the delight that had leapt under his heart just as she spoke; hated the sharp jealous pain the first ringing of the telephone had recalled; hated the dependence her body, her attention forced upon him; hated the superiority she seemed to acquire over him.

"Well?" He tried to sound casual.

"He's asleep."

"You wore him out, I suppose?" The sarcasm didn't seem to have any ability either to hurt her or restore his self-satisfaction.

"Naturally. But I didn't ring you to tell you that." He could sense the laughter, like a cold chill against his skin. He had no recollection of his own love-making with her, no physical identification with her. Even her voice was thin and distant.

"No?" Better. Lighter, surer tones now.

"Don't be stupid, Sean. Just listen. He might wake up, and come in."

"Yes," he snapped.

"He's interested in a minefield, in the St George's Channel, and in a minesweeping flotilla — he seemed to think it's leading somewhere. Are you any the wiser?"

"No, I don't know a damn thing. That pig Lobke was here earlier — you've seen the news. Those bastards in Dublin are coming to London — they're going to sell us down the—"

"I've no time — he's awake. As soon as I have anything concrete, I'll call."

"Take care—" he began, even as the connection, broken, purred in his ear. Another moment, and he would have added something more revealing, more committed. I love you—

Stupid. He slammed down his receiver, the anger bubbling like nauseous indigestion or heartburn.

The three men walked abreast along the glass-littered pavement, stepping carefully over the trailing hosepipes, averting their gaze from the occasional blanketed forms, preferring the grim neutrality of ruined buildings and the gaping dark interiors of shops. A naked tailor's dummy lay sprawled through the glassless window of one shop, grotesque and mocking. McBride, alone of the three of them, seemed distracted from Walsingham's conversation by the rubble, the drawn and haggard faces, the lumps under the grey blankets, the stench of burning, the wet pavements. A stranger from a distant country, he felt out of place, disturbed and obscurely angry.

A typing pool sat in chairs arranged behind desks like a class of children. Behind them, their offices had crumbled in upon themselves, with grotesque diffidence and good manners only spilling a few crumbs of masonry and brick into the street. A balding, self-important man with half-glasses and a small, yellowed moustache was checking their work fussily between bouts of dictation to his secretary. His desk was larger than those of the typists, and virtually undamaged. The clatter of typewriters, the droning of the man's voice and the occasional rumble of traffic beyond seemed to satisfy Walsingham, and the three of them became a tight little group in animated discussion.

"Charlie, you're greedy, you want everything," McBride said, his voice belying the grin on his face.

"Michael, my boy, you're the one to get it from the Germans, if anyone can—" Gilliatt felt an outsider in the conversation, a visitor observing the verbal and facial games of a married couple; a semaphore he barely understood. He was taller than the other two, and this seemed a further distance.

"Hell, Charlie. Brest is tight as a virgin. Guernsey was easy — but not this. You want army and navy stuff, and you want it in twenty-four hours. It's not on, Charlie."

"I think it is. You'll be picked up at the drop, ferried to the Plabennec area. All I want is proof that new divisions have been moved in there — in Brest, all I need is proof that the U-boats from Guernsey are sitting there, awaiting their passengers."

A telephone rang, startling all three of them. The man in the half-glasses picked it up from his desk. He seemed suddenly aware of them, and turned his back as he answered his call. The telephone lead snaked away from his desk along the street, Gilliatt noticed for the first time. He felt the little incident to be quite unreal, and realized also that the dialogue between McBride and Walsingham was similarly lacking in reality. He had anaesthetized himself against it, unwilling to accept his situation.

"Charlie, you just haven't got the contacts in France to pull it off. This isn't a two-man bob rushing down the Cresta run. I need a team."

"I have the contacts—"

"You trust them? You've tested them, tried them out?" Walsingham shook his head. "Your honesty does you no credit at all, Charlie!" McBride grinned again. Gilliatt almost felt the man's facial muscles were completely beyond his control. Or perhaps it was mockery? Certainly, Gilliatt's impression of Walsingham was that he disposed of questions of human safety very easily if they came between him and his objective. Yet he knew that McBride was going to accept his orders, whatever qualifications he felt. He had not, as yet, entirely expended his gratitude at not being put back behind a desk in OIC.

"I get good intelligence from them," Walsingham asserted.

"Then ask them to find out for you."

"I need your assurance—"

"So much for the reliability of these Frogs, Charlie. You don't trust them to be right this time, mm?"

Walsingham shrugged. "I want you to go tonight," he said.

"You piss off, Charlie. Peter here and me, we'll discuss it, and see you back at the office. How about that?" Walsingham appeared to Gilliatt to be nonplussed for once. Then he nodded, almost curtly, turned on his heel and walked away. Gilliatt and McBride watched his determined stride until he turned a corner into the Strand. Then McBride looked up at Gilliatt, studying him with a suddenly intense look.

"Well, Lieutenant Peter Gilliatt—" Gilliatt suddenly looked down at his civilian jacket and trousers as if they belied his rank. "And what do you think to that?" McBride nodded in the direction taken by Walsingham. Gilliatt smiled. There was a charm, possibly specious, about McBride that was irresistible at that moment. Dark, medium build, good-looking in a slightly untrustworthy way, McBride was a strange and perhaps unreliable species. But Gilliatt found himself warming to the man, found within himself a penchant for future recklessness that he suspected was transmitted from the Irishman.

"I — don't know. You're the expert on Lieutenant-Commander Walsingham — what do you say?"

"Charlie is scared bloody stiff, young fellow, I know that much."

"How come?"

"He never panics, always prepares. You think he's reckless with lives, mm?" Gilliatt, surprised at McBride's perceptiveness, nodded. He noticed that the fussy little office manager was doing his rounds of the typing pool once more. A rather blowsy young blonde caught Gilliatt's eye. "Charlie's never been reckless with my life before, Peter — if he's started now, then he's very worried about something, that I know for certain."

Gilliatt ignored the blonde, who by now had smiled at him, much to the irritation of the man with the nicotine-stained moustache and the half-glasses. Gilliatt saw a girl bringing out a tray full of mugs and cups of tea from the shattered interior of the offices.

"Stove's still working, Mr Hubank," she called out.

"Thank you, Gloria." He seemed displeased that the routine of his office-in-the-street would now be interrupted. As in a classroom, work was already dissolving into chatter.

Gilliatt looked at McBride. "You don't think we could survive this little jaunt, then?"

He saw McBride weigh him, confirm something to himself.

"Gloria's stove is still working, and it's business as usual here. How long would that last, do you think, if the Germans had a second front in Ireland?" Gilliatt shook his head. "Not long. There's plenty of people in Ireland who'd help the Germans, and a lot more who'd accept them. And there's nothing the British could do about it. Now, operatives are not supposed to think about things like that. That's Charlie's job, and he's scared stiff. You know it could happen tomorrow!"

"So, you'll go?"

McBride looked around him. An ambulance passed, bell noisily demanding attention, but he seemed more drawn by the typing pool chattering in their tea-break.

"They had bananas yesterday, but by the time Mum got there, he'd sold out, the miserable old Jew. She says she won't go there again."

"Got a cigarette, Sandra?"

"Smoked your ration, now you want to smoke mine. Bloody cheek!"

"He said he was doing hush-hush work, abroad and that. He might not come back, see—"

"And you let "im? You are stupid, Norma!"

McBride turned back to Gilliatt.

"Not a lot there you'd consider dying for, is there?" He laughed. "But then, I don't do it for anyone but myself, do I now?" He rubbed a hand through his hair. "I'll be on the plane tonight, parachute strapped on tight. Why don't you come along for the ride? I'll look after the two of us, sure I will!" The comic brogue, the evident recklessness made McBride a stereotype for a moment.

Gilliatt shrugged. "Why not?"

Admiralty records were stored in half a dozen places around London still awaiting transfer to the Public Records Office at Kew. McBride had gained, via the office of the Secretary to the Admiralty, access to each one of the records offices as an historian whose latest project was a study of naval warfare in the North Atlantic and the Western Approaches during 1940 and 1941. His academic background was impeccable, his best-selling status in America no handicap. He had a different coloured pass for each of the various offices, but he had returned to the converted primary school in Hackney where he had worked the previous day and which housed minesweeping, anti U-boat, and convoy duty records for the duration of the war as well as the offices of some signals branch of the navy. McBride did not bother himself with considering this department's function or legitimacy, beyond a certain comparative amusement at a converted primary school's claims to security over the massive CIA complex at 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.

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."

"Number?" It was given. "Unit?"

Another long silence, during which time the soldier huddled in the corner of the lamp-lit room which smelled of stored meal and cooking, McBride squatted next to him on his haunches, stone-like and unmoving, and Gilliatt leaned against the door as if to keep out the rabid Frenchmen who had hurt the boy.

"Rifle Regiment, Third Fallschirmjaeger Division." Very quiet. McBride made him repeat it, then his head swung towards Gilliatt, his eyes wide in surprise. The boy was responding to the German language, to nothing else. He'd never envisaged this, that his life could end in a dirty French cottage after they had pulled out his fingernails with a pliers and beaten him into a semi-coma. For him, the German words came out of a pain-filled void, and he wanted the voice to go on speaking, and he would answer, make the voice go on speaking.

"Billet?" The boy replied slowly. Gilliatt looked at the fair hair plastered close to the pink skull with sweat. He was impatient to be gone, blamed McBride because he had to go on looking at the suffering German. "Other units in the area?" McBride asked next, his accent clipped, military, officer-like. Another long silence, as if the boy hesitated or savoured the words like ointments.

"Forty-fifth Division — Fourteenth Panzers, their grenadier and reconnaissance units—" Silence again, then, and the growing sense of the boy slipping away from them and wanting to hear them without interruption. And the sense in both of them that Lampau waited outside the door, eager to finish what he had started.

"Thank you, Unteroffizier Hoffer," McBride said quietly, patting the boy lightly on the shoulder, and standing up. "Well done. You may rest now." Then, as if he divined the boy's need, he added, "We will come back and check on you later. Heil Hitler!"

Gilliatt grimaced at the violent, black farce. McBride tried to usher him from the room, but he pulled away from the Irishman.

"No—" he hissed.

"Don't be a bloody fool, Peter!" McBride snarled almost under his breath. "Those French would kill us if we tried to stop them killing this boy. Forget it—"

"How can I?"

"By considering what you've just heard, man!" McBride had his hand firmly on the door handle. "These troops have been in the Plabennec area for less than two weeks, most of them. Lampau told us that — Hoffer is in the rifle regiment of a parachute division — a whole crack infantry division here, and Panzer experts. What does it sound like to you? Well, what does it sound like?" McBride, shorter than Gilliatt, had grabbed the other man's chin in his hand, turning his face towards him, averting his gaze from the crouching, semi-conscious Hoffer.

"I suppose—"

"Yes?"

"A small, specialized invasion force — I agree with you, damn it!" Gilliatt wrenched open the door, passed Lampau who grinned mirthlessly, and went out of the cottage. McBride nodded to Lampau, who entered the room, while McBride, forgetting Hoffer almost at once, followed Gilliatt outside. Gilliatt was leaning against the wall of the cottage in the narrow passage between the house and the rickety barn, hugging himself, shivering helplessly. McBride could smell the vomit in the chill night air.

"Peter?"

"What do you want?" Hurt mistress or child.

"Forget it — or think about the people you've known who've died. Anything, but not about one Wehrmacht Unteroffizier killed for invading France—" He put his hand on Gilliatt's shoulder, but it was shrugged away. "Peter, Peter, I don't like it any more than you do, but I'm not going to argue with Lampau for the sake of a German."

"You're as bad as they are!" Gilliatt accused, turning on McBride.

"I hope not, Peter," McBride whispered. Then he lit two cigarettes and offered one to Gilliatt, who coughed on the first inhalation of smoke, then seemed not to shiver so uncontrollably. McBride saw one white hand wipe across Gilliatt's mouth, eyes. "OK?"

"Yes. Thanks."

"There'll be a lot more of it. This is only the beginning, Peter, the cleanest bit of it—"

"God, not really a Richard Hannay adventure, is it?" He laughed mirthlessly.

"Maybe not, but it's the only adventure we've got right now."

"Is that why you do it — adventure?"

"Isn't it why you ran away to sea? Remember?" Both of them recalled their conversation on the bridge of the Bisley. "Well, maybe I do do it for the sake of the adventure, at that. But now, we have to get into Brest and have a look for those submarines. That'll be the final bit of proof that Charlie wants."

"An invasion of Ireland?" McBride nodded. "What'll they do when they know for sure?"

McBride shrugged. "God knows, Peter. Fill up the hole in the minefield for one, I should think. Maybe they'll send troops to Ireland — who knows?"

"Fill up—?"

"Come on. Lampau will have cleared away the remains by now. He has to get us into Brest before first light. The rest will be up to us."

A dog barked suddenly, startling them. Neither of them had heard a dog on the smallholding before. Sound carrying from the farm, Gilliatt wondered—

Then torchlight, wobbling before it was flicked off. Across the field, a hundred yards away. Nothing else to be seen in the black, moonless dark. McBride was quicker than Gilliatt to realize the danger, because Gilliatt was struggling to recall why they dare not re-sow the St George's Channel minefield, not yet—

"God, it's the Germans. Peter, Peter, come on, damn you — the Germans have come looking for Hoffer!"

Walsingham was working late in his office at the Admiralty — no more spacious than a large cupboard, as if to remind him of his temporary commission with the Royal Navy — preparing his report for the First Sea Lord. He was drafting it in the certain knowledge that his conclusions were the right and only permissible ones, and drafting it, too, in the light of possibly making his case after McBride's death. Walsingham regretted that he had had to send McBride — Gilliatt as a virtual stranger he cared far less about — but he had been near panic, desperate for proof that would be irrefutable. He was aware that a massive inertia, compounded by a nerveless fear that had grown since the cancellation of Sea Lion, conspired to blind the Admiralty, the War Office, possibly even the Cabinet to any version of reality that might prove catastrophic. He had to convince men who did not want to contemplate disaster or envisage any threat that might overwhelm them.

He shuffled the handwritten sheets in front of him, then leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. He wondered briefly about McBride, then excised him from his mind, realizing as he did so that he was behaving with the same bunkered disregard for realities which so angered him in their Lordships. Even March, who should have been convinced by now.

He yawned.

Another reality insisted, came to light and to a sudden prominence in his mind so that he could not ignore it. The convoy. What could they do about the convoy?

And, with a colder insistence, something stirred like a nightmare he had not relived since childhood but which was now coming back with all its old force; an idea that had the terror of a shambling, nameless creature, an idea he knew, finally, would be adopted.

A war crime — would they call it that?

Yes.

Sir Charles Walsingham, Head of the Directorate of Security, MI5, sat in his spacious civil servant's office in the Home Office, where his official rank was Permanent Under-Secretary, his fingers splayed upon the green blotter in the middle of his oak desk. He seemed possessed by an old dream or nightmare, his lips compressed to a single thin line, his forehead deeply trenched with creases, his eyes vacant yet inwardly intent and mesmerized. It was late in the evening, and outside in Parliament Street the lamps bloomed in soft, insinuating rain. His room was lit by his table-lamp and by an ornate standard lamp in one corner. He preferred the shadows at that moment.

He had called at the Home Office before returning to his flat in Chesham Place. Drummond's cryptic, almost insolent telephone message was waiting for him in his aide's neat, womanish handwriting — a large question mark beneath the final words.

Drummond he had never liked, forty years before at the height of the affair. McBride's control — and yet Walsingham had possessed a deep affection for the rootless, uncaring Irishman and nothing more than civility towards the Englishman, Drummond. He remembered at one time, possibly in "41 or "42, they'd suspected Drummond of assisting German agents in Ireland — which had been patent nonsense, and nothing more than the hare-brained guesswork of one of the reckless young men who succeeded McBride…

Why had he remembered that about Drummond?

He would call Drummond in the morning, expecting to get no more than that out of him. But the son — McBride's son, of all people in the world. Now, at this critical time—

For a moment, he suspected an elaborate and devious plot — then dismissed the idea as ridiculous. It was nothing more than the externalizing of his own selfish fears. What the devil could young McBride drag up? Anything — everything? If he did, then Walsingham himself was finished, Guthrie was certainly finished — perhaps Ulster itself, even this government…

The ripples spread on the ruffled pond of his imagination. McBride was a heavy stone, and he had already been thrown, apparently. He would have to be watched. There ought to be nothing — no clues — for him to discover, but after forty years who could any longer be sure that there were no scraps of paper, no old memories, no loose tongues lying around. McBride — Walsingham had read Gates of Hell and disliked it — was looking for an angle, for something sensational. The Emerald business would be just what he would be looking for.

In that office, it was hard for Walsingham to feel genuinely fearful. Forty years of power, privilege and ascent were a barrier against fear. But, he still could not control his imagination, even though nothing of its images transferred to nerves or sweat-glands. He wasn't twitching, or getting damp, but he knew, with a kind of cold fear that went on thinking clearly, envisaging the consequences, that everything was at the hazard, that McBride could, with the right information, ruin everything.

Then the small selfish thought — war crime. He'd be finished, buried by an avalanche of contumely, national and international. Most of the other decision-makers and decision-takers were dead. He would retire next year. He was already beyond official retirement age for his rank in the civil service. Now, he'd be the one — he and Guthrie, of course, the obedient instrument — who'd be blamed for the Emerald Decision.

He picked up one of the telephones on his desk. McBride, and quickly — whereabouts, recent enquiries, state of knowledge.

Possible solutions.

He'd ring Guthrie later, before the Minister retired for the night—

But of all people, McBride's son — now of all possible times…

CHAPTER NINE According to the Record

Gilliatt had a hurried, confused impression of the smells of dung, butter, then warm hay as he followed McBride along a lightless path between cottage and barn and into the silent, dark interior of the latter. A horse whinnied softly, disturbed by the creaking of the door.

"Michael?" he called, losing sight of McBride's shadowy form almost at once when the door was shut behind them.

"Over here," came the reply. Gilliatt moved gingerly across the uneven floor of the barn-cum-stable, catching his shin against a sharp-edged implement and swearing softly, shuffling his feet in the strewn hay. McBride's hand grabbed him, pulled him down behind a mound of hay, pressing him close to it, almost making him sneeze.

"What are they looking for?" he whispered, hearing distantly the bark of the dog, and the rapping of a fist or boot against the door of the cottage.

"With the dog — Hoffer is my guess," McBride whispered back, irritated by his companion as by a slow-learning pupil. "He's been reported missing. Perhaps Lampau and his goons nabbed him a couple of hours earlier than they need. Walsingham wouldn't be pleased at that. Listen!"

Gilliatt strained his hearing. Voices being raised, one French — but he couldn't pick out the words — and the other German. Then the slamming of a door. A few moments later, the fractured, eager barking of the dog.

"The scent—" Gilliatt whispered.

"They've given it Hoffer's scent all right. I wonder where the body is?"

As if in reply or confirmation, the dog's barking became almost frantic, and had moved out of the house again, presumably behind the cottage.

"What about us?"

"Wait!"

Gilliatt was aware of the hay beneath and around him, its rich, stored smell heady, almost nauseous to the stomach he had so violently emptied. He listened, sensed McBride beside him alert and motionless. The dog went on barking, and behind its noise orders were being shouted. A French voice, raised in protest, but they could clearly hear the strained, high-pitched fear in it. Where had Lampau, Foret, Venec been when they heard the knock on the door? McBride had had no time to warn them, perhaps not even the inclination. They had run immediately for the shelter of the barn.

They each heard the running footsteps, distinctly, in the moment before the first shots from a machine-pistol on automatic. The bullets thudded into the wall of the barn behind them, then something else, something heavier, collided with the same wall, slithered down in a grotesque aural impersonation of reptilian movement. Gilliatt, swallowing bile, wondered which one of them it was. He almost hoped that it was Lampau. Then he heard the revolver firing.

"What—?" he began.

"It couldn't work out better for us, Peter. They'll get themselves killed, all three of them." A burst from a machine-gun, the answering chatter of the Schmeissers. The horse whinnied more loudly, shuffled nervously in its stall. Gilliatt couldn't even see it as a shape in the lightless barn. Revolver again, then machine-pistols, then the machine-gun cut off in mid-sentence. The revolver three, four times, then a drowning chorus from the German machine-pistols.

Then silence, into which dripped like water the sound of boots moving about the yard, grunts of satisfaction, the noises of someone wounded who was lifted up and carried — the boot-noises became slower, heavier — and a single pistol shot as someone dying was finished off. A tidiness about the sounds of the aftermath. The dog had ceased to bark.

It might even have been dead.

Gilliatt and McBride waited for fifteen minutes, and then there were no other noises. McBride nudged Gilliatt and rose to his knees.

"Come on — our chance now."

Gilliatt stood up, fastidiously clearing stalks of hay from his clothing. Then what McBride had said struck him.

"You wanted them to die, didn't you?"

"Not at all. But they can't talk now, can they? And, Peter, you'd have killed them all half an hour ago, just for hurting the German lad. Mm?"

McBride moved to the door of the barn, and opened it slowly and as silently as he could. It creaked with the slowness, the mounting noise of a yawn. McBride stepped outside. A minute later, he called to Gilliatt to join him.

"What do we do now?"

"Use the van they collected us in. Drive to Brest, of course."

Gilliatt sensed the excitement in McBride. They were perhaps fifteen or twenty kilometres from the centre of the port, and from Lampau's cousin, a fisherman.

"Lampau — he was to vouch for us."

"We'll explain — don't make difficulties, Peter. Don't give in to the sense of doom."

"You knew—?"

"Ah, it happens every time. One of the things you have to put to the back of your mind, every time. Come on."

The van was waiting at the back of the cottage, where Foret had parked it. One of its doors was open. McBride touched the door and then inspected his hand, sniffing the dark blood. He nodded, then began to examine the bodywork of the van, near the engine. He found no bullet-holes, and lifted the bonnet.

"Get in," he said to Gilliatt, and the engine fired as he wired the ignition. Then the torches and the single searchlight came on, flooding the yard, picking out the van and McBride in a cold clear light.

All McBride could think of was that he hadn't heard the truck arrive, that its noise had been shielded from them by the cottage and by the shooting. He hadn't heard the truck with the mobile searchlight—

Then the voice, speaking in German through the megaphone.

McBride stared into the box-file labelled MILFORD HAVEN, and his hands hovered over the mass of material it contained. Yesterday had brought nothing of any significance, and he was almost superstitious now about beginning again. If he touched it in the same way, in a different way—

The papers were cards. He needed to be dealt another hand. He discarded immediately the material he had checked the day before, lifting it out in the solid wedge he had held together with an elastic band, putting it aside. Outside, rain ran down the window of the reading room, and he felt cold. The small electric fire did not work.

He flicked through the uppermost scraps of paper, discarding everything dated later than January 1941. The mound of rejected paper and notebooks and official forms and dockets grew on his left, while the scratched and doodled deal table remained bare near his right hand.

By lunchtime, he was in a fury of irritation and the first of the box-files had been re-filled and dumped on the floor by his briefcase. The second one, with an identical gummed label, was open, but he had no heart to begin it on an empty stomach and in his present defeatist mood. He had lost sight of the pattern of his researches again, and wondered whether he might not have been sidetracked once more. What could this have to do with Smaragdenhakkette, linked as it was only by the supposition that the St George's Channel minefield would have to be breached by the Germans?

He had no evidence of that — had he been confused by the appearance of Gilliatt's name, by his father's shadowy proximity to events? He wasn't sure any longer.

The seedy pub he found was unprepossessing, but he didn't want to walk any more in the rain and opened the door to the Saloon Bar. One or two faces looked up at him, a blowsy laugh faded as he was inspected by the landlady, and he saw in one corner, by the fireplace where a tiny fire clung to life, the male clerk from the records repository. Wispy greying hair damply wiped over a bald head, dentures making much of a cheese roll. A half-pint of beer in front of him on the table. He seemed to plead silently to be joined by McBride. And McBride was aware of the style and cost of his raincoat and slacks, and the red sweater he was wearing — and the wallet he took from his back pocket. He might have stepped back into an earlier time through the door of the bar.

"Beer," he said. "And the same for my friend—" He indicated the clerk — Mr Hoskins, was it? He'd been introduced. The landlady nodded, pulled at the lever on the bar. The beer swished into a glass with a chip in it.

"Haven't had many of your lot down this way since the war," the landlady observed. "Lot of "em here then, eh, Bert?" She addressed the last remark to a shrivelled man sitting at the far end of the cramped bar, reading Sporting Life. He merely tossed his head. The landlady's fonder memories of the Americans remained unshared. "He didn't like "em," she confided. "Always got on well with "em meself," she added with a wink, her preening of herself rusty, almost grotesque. McBride smiled. "I'm glad," he said. He picked up the beer. "Have you anything to eat?"

"A pie, maybe." Even the woman looked dubious. Bert snorted in his beer.

"Potato chips — sorry, crisps?" The landlady nodded, visibly brightening. "Two bags."

He carried the beer over to Hoskins" table, who finished his own half-pint quickly and sipped at the new glass after raising it to McBride's health.

"She makes my cheese roll for me," he observed. "Special order. I have to bring my own fruit." He brought an orange from a coat pocket, and proceeded to peel it. The imagined mingled flavours of beer and orange upset McBride's palate as he opened the bag of crisps. He smiled tentatively at Hoskins, his thoughts reaching back to the second MILFORD HAVEN/DMS box-file and the hours he would have to spend sifting through its disorganized, patchwork image of minesweeping operations. Even records of disciplinary action taken against drunken sailors—

He tossed his head. Hoskins looked at him questioningly.

"Professor? Something the matter?" He sucked on a segment of the orange. The weak fire was still too warm for McBride, and he slipped his arms out of his raincoat. Hoskins studied the coat with unmasked envy.

"No. Just routine, is all. Dull, mm?"

"Fascinating, some of that material, Professor. What is it you're looking for, by the way?" His face was ingenuous, grateful for conversation.

"Oh, this and that."

"Minesweeping, eh?"

"That and other things."

"November 1940, I gather, from some of the files you've requested?"

"Yes—" McBride hid his hesitancy behind his glass, sipping at the cold thin beer.

"Ah — merchant navy myself, during the war, that is."

"I see."

"Atlantic convoys."

"You've worked here a long time, Mr Hoskins?"

"Just over a year, Professor. Used to work at the Admiralty itself, but I'm just about to retire. Easy job. I was only a boy when I did my first convoy, in 1940." He smiled mysteriously. "We had shoreleave in New York before we set out—" He was being deliberately mysterious. "Three ships and a cruiser escort. Special fast run, going by the southern route round Ireland—"

McBride hardly heard him.

"Sure," he said. Hoskins seemed about to repeat himself, then took a pocket-watch from his waistcoat and consulted it. "Must get back, late already. See you later, Professor."

Hoskins went out swiftly, pressing his trilby firmly down on his head, putting up his umbrella almost before he was through the door.

McBride sat until he had finished both packets of crisps and his beer, and only as he got up to leave did Hoskins" last words register. And they puzzled him. But he couldn't remember the date that Hoskins had supplied, and he rejected the coincidence. The file loomed more distinctly in his imagination, and he tried to work up some enthusiasm for his task as he walked back to the repository, its parking area still marked out as a netball court.

McBride slammed down the bonnet of the van, and moved to the door. Gilliatt was in the passenger seat, immobile and blinded by the light. McBride slipped the.38 № 2 revolver from beneath his jacket then turned on his heel, arm out straight like a duellist, and fired twice. Glass shattered, tinkled in the sudden darkness over by the silhouette of the truck.

McBride clambered into the driving seat, revved the engine wildly, and let off the handbrake. The Citroen heaved off the mark, careering as McBride swung the wheel.

"Get down, get down!" he yelled at Gilliatt, immobile as a stunned animal in the seat next to him.

An instant later, the windscreen shattered and emptied its fragments over the shoulder and back of Gilliatt's jacket as he crouched, head covered by his arms, below the dashboard. McBride swung the wheel again, hearing the thud and tear of heavy bullets along the offside flank of the van. He was in darkness, but he knew the direction of the barn and the narrow passage between it and the cottage.

A grey shape loomed, bounced off the offside wheel arch, and McBride spun the wheel again, feeling the rear wheels bite on some lump beneath them, then rush free, skidding hideously.

"What's happening?" Gilliatt yelled.

The van's nearside struck the wooden wall of the barn, more bullets ripped through the rear doors, angling out again through the driver's side above McBride's head — tyres still good, he thought, swinging the wheel, tearing off the nearside running-board, the van sliding with a groaning wobble into the narrow space. Starlight, then blackness, a heavy thump, a scream, and something rolling wildly across the roof over McBride's head and sliding off behind the van. More bullets, and one of the double doors at the back of the van began flapping open, magnifying the shouts, the noise of engines behind them, the shots. McBride punched out the remainder of the windscreen, cutting his hand, cursing and elated.

The Citroen lurched lamely out of the narrow gap between cottage and barn, engine screeching, wheels gripping the gravel of the track to the road.

"Christ, what's happening!"

"Don't worry, Peter, we're on our way!" McBride shouted, almost gaily. Lights dazzled in the rear-view mirror for a moment, then he had turned onto the road. The village lay ahead, a few poor lights defying the black-out. He pressed the accelerator, demanding more from the protesting engine. "Don't worry — you all right?"

Gilliatt climbed awkwardly up out of the footwell, very carefully brushed glass from the seat, and slumped next to McBride as he was overbalanced by the van's cornering speed.

"You're all right?"

"Ah, hell — I'm always like this!"

The first houses of the village. Lights behind them, spilling like ignited fuel up the road to engulf them.

"I'll try to shut the doors," Gilliatt grinned. He accepted the adrenalin madness, felt it coursing through him like a transfusion from the Irishman. It wasn't a sane world any longer. "Try not to shoot me out onto the road, there's a good chap."

McBride looked at him, then nodded, sensing a transformation in Gilliatt. He might now run almost as far, almost as fast as himself.

"Hurry back, I need a navigator."

The Citroen slowed slightly until McBride heard the doors slam, the road noise diminishing in his ears, then he accelerated again as Gilliatt clambered back over the seat. The map was in his hand. He flicked on a small torch.

"They'll know we're heading for Brest," Gilliatt observed.

"Sure they will. How did they know we were there — did they follow us, or were they told?"

"Told? Left here!"

The van swerved noisily, bumping into a lane overhung with leafless trees, rutted and puddled. McBride gripped the wheel like a rally driver, stiff-armed, ready to wrestle with its vagaries. "I don't know what I mean, either!" The noises in the van sounded as if it was tearing itself to pieces. "Hold on, you brave tyres!" he yelled, surrendering to Gilliatt's navigation and to the stupid, senseless excitement of the chase. Lights in the mirror, dipping and swinging into the lane. McBride felt the van lurch against the bank, tear at roots and earth, then pull free.

"Another turn on the right, in maybe fifty — there it is!"

McBride heaved on the wheel, the van slid in the opposite direction like an unwilling animal. McBride spun the wheel, evening out the skid, then he stamped on the accelerator as he met the slope of the new track and the Citroen almost refused.

"All I know, Peter, is that they get closer to me every time I come for a visit — and they're not that clever!" Gilliatt listened but kept his eyes on the map. "But, what the hell! They must have heard the Wellington, wondered about it, then found Hoffer and put two and two—"

The Citroen bounced off a low wall surrounding an isolated church. Gilliatt saw McBride cross himself with one hand, steering with the other, the grin never disappearing for a moment from his lips. Then they were over a rise, swinging down. McBride switched on the headlights for a moment to orient himself, then doused them again. He turned left into thicker trees that had thrown back the headlight beams in twisted, skeletal whiteness. McBride then drove totally on reaction, concentrating grimly, swerving innumerable times, hitting the boles of trees glancing blows twice, stalling the engine once, skidding frequently.

Then they were out of the trees.

"Nearest track?" he snapped.

"Keep ahead. We may have to open a gate or two, but eventually we'll find the road!"

McBride looked at him, and winked.

"That we will — we will." He laughed.

Behind them, the first of the pursuing vehicles, an open Einheits-programme VW Type 82, entered the trees, headlights on full, followed more cautiously by an Opel Blitz three-ton truck with a platoon aboard and the dead, glassless searchlight for which there were no spare bulbs. They were a little more than a quarter of a mile behind the Citroen van, fifteen kilometres from the outskirts of Brest.

He'd found two items by the time the records office was due to close, and he was tempted to take them with him, knowing they would be unlikely to be missed, perhaps for years. The first was a notification from the Admiralty that Lieutenant Gilliatt had been temporarily reassigned to shore duties, and that his replacement, Sub-Lieutenant Thomas, would be arriving in forty-eight hours. There were no other details. He could not find a later reassignment of Gilliatt to the Bisley, or any ship at Milford Haven.

The second item was the deposition of a Leading Seaman Campbell who was charged with being drunk and disorderly while on shore leave from Bisley in Milford Haven. He was also accused of discussing, in a manner prejudicial to security and the safety of his ship, the sweep from which Bisley had just returned. After three days on board twiddling his thumbs, Campbell explained that he was disgruntled and resentful, but had not intended to breach the strict security under which he had carried out his recent duties. He claimed to be unaware of the level of security.

He referred, in his deposition, to the breach that had been found in Winnie's Welcome Mat — McBride had been puzzled by the soubriquet until Campbell had referred to it more properly later in his statement. And then he had indulged his delight. A German sweep of the minefield, recently carried out, running north-south between Ireland and France.

McBride, the evening closing in, cloudy and rain-threatening outside the windows, the unshaded lamp throwing a hard, dusty light on the papers and the table, wanted to leave at once, be with Claire as his just reward for successful industry. Evidence of Emerald Necklace — he could open up the whole can of worms with it. He looked around him, and swiftly pocketed the deposition, then closed the file. Hoskins could return it. Hoskins, something about Hoskins—

He grinned. He was seeing links everywhere. It was a popular history, a best-seller he was writing, not the scheme of some mystic philosophy. He laughed, picked up his briefcase, and left.

Outside, Hoskins was watching for him. When McBride headed for the station at London Fields and disappeared from sight in the rainy evening, Hoskins entered the telephone booth beside which he had been sheltering. He arranged his ten pence pieces on the directory, wrinkled his nose at the graffiti scrawled on the small mirror in felt pen, and dialled a number. The hotel switchboard put him through to the room he requested.

"Yes?" It was Goessler.

"He's found something — probably Campbell's deposition, or something like it. Pleased as Punch, he is."

"Good. You've made an approach?"

"Yes. He didn't seem to hear me, though."

"Never mind. Tomorrow will do, Hoskins. Tell him in plainer terms, eh?" Goessler laughed. "Well done, Hoskins. Report on any further progress at the same time tomorrow."

The connection was broken. The telephone purred in Hoskins" ear, and despite his umbrella and trilby, a thin dribble of water which must have lodged in his hair ran down his collar, much to his annoyance.

Gilliatt was dog-tired, the adrenalin having seemingly vanished from his bloodstream, taking energy, willpower, consciousness with it. He watched the map, in the mesmeric pool of torchlight, move in and out of focus, taunting his eyes. Villages, hamlets, no more than spots in front of his eyes—

He rubbed his eyes.

"You OK?"

"Mm, what? Oh, sure," Gilliatt replied, stretching his eyes, stifling a yawn. McBride smiled at him. They had crossed the river Penfeld north of Brest half an hour earlier. It was four in the morning and his own energy reserves seemed dangerously consumed. The weaving, backtracking course he had almost whimsically followed for two hours had thrown off all pursuit — they'd hidden in a stand of trees while their immediate pursuers had flashed by, headlights ablaze, the steel helmets of the platoon in the back of the Opel truck clearly visible. Then, back roads, tracks, lanes, moving north for some time away from Brest and any search or road-blocks, then cutting west. Now, McBride estimated they were no more than a few kilometres north of the fishing village of Ste Anne-du-Portzic, where Lampau's relative, a fisherman, lived. It was time to abandon the van. Gilliatt looked all but finished, out on his feet. But McBride was satisfied with his companion, and this caused him to nudge the other man's arm, and grin.

"Come on, Christopher Robin, almost time for bed."

Gilliatt smiled tiredly. "Where are we?"

"On a very minor road — why am I telling you, you've got the map?" McBride laughed. "Marshy country. We get rid of the van here."

Gilliatt concentrated afresh on the map. "We're some where off the D105, I think." McBride's finger tapped at the map on Gilliatt's knee.

"Just there."

He jolted the van on down the narrow, hedged track for a time, then slowed and tugged on the handbrake. The hedge had given way to open, dyke-like country, almost Dutch. The track was slightly above the level of the fields. McBride got out of the van, and was chilled immediately by the cold, searching wind. Dead reeds rattled eerily below the road. Gilliatt joined him, rubbing his hands together.

"Great country."

"For us, yes. Just tip the old wagon over the side of the road — have to use the headlights for a bit. Shame, that—"

They got back in the van, and McBride switched on the lights. A pale wash of light showed dead reeds, a few spindly trees lining the road at intervals, and the flat marshland smoothly sliding away into darkness. In another minute, McBride stopped again, the van turned so that its nose was at the edge of the road. Below the lights were reeds and bushes, and a dull gleam of water.

"Right, over the side with the old lady."

They got behind the van, and heaved against it. Slowly, with a dignified reluctance, the Citroen toppled nose first down the embankment, tearing through the bushes and reeds, splashing into the water, then settling. McBride shone a torch down the embankment. The Citroen seemed impossibly small, toy-like. It was half-concealed by the bushes, and buried up to the windscreen in marshy water.

"Just some cosmetic work, I think," McBride murmured. "You stay here."

McBride eased himself down the embankment until he could rest his weight against the branch of a bush. Then, removing his clasp-knife from his pocket, he proceeded to cut handfuls of reeds, and scatter them across the rear of the Citroen which now pointed up the embankment. Then he broke a large overhanging branch of the bush, pulling at it until it also helped to conceal the van. Breathing heavily, he clambered back to join Gilliatt.

"Will that do?"

"Have to. Probably no one but a local would find it anyway. And in twenty-four hours, we should be well on our way. Either that, or the discovery of the van won't matter all that much. Come on, we've got a nice walk before you climb into your own little bed again." McBride laughed, thumping Gilliatt on the back.

"Proper caution you are," Gilliatt said in stage-Cockney.

"I am that. You have to admit, with me there's never a dull moment, eh?"

"Too many dull moments would finish you off, would they?"

The wind whistled across the marsh, the reeds argued volubly in the silence before McBride answered.

"That question might be a little too close to the mark, Peter. I think we'll pass on that one, eh?" He increased his pace. "Come on, otherwise we'll have the local cowmen out for early milking and wondering who we are!"

Gilliatt trotted to catch up with him.

McBride was having a shower, whistling tunelessly and happily to himself. Claire Drummond could hear him through the open door between their rooms as she liberally applied talcum powder to herself after her bath. Her hair was tied up with a ribbon, her face devoid of make-up. Her high cheekbones and slanting eyes seemed peculiarly suited to her look of concentration and suppressed anger. Her pale skin was further whitened by powder. She looked, even to herself, curiously dead, marbled, in the dressing-table mirror. She slipped on her robe, feeling suddenly cold. The sexual bout with McBride after he had shown her what he had filched from Hackney had taken a tiring, wearing concentration to achieve the calculated, simulated abandon which seemed required. McBride's rutting was thoughtless, self-satisfied, and he had noticed no reluctance — she was cautiously certain of that.

But, she wanted to talk to Moynihan, now before they went out to dinner. It was obviously of importance in Goessler's scheme that this minefield business be exposed — or McBride was on the wrong trail altogether. If he was, then they were all wasting their time and Moynihan would have to make demands of Goessler, get out of him the stuff that would dynamite the meetings between Dublin and London.

It didn't seem like much, a drunken Scotsman's deposition before a disciplinary hearing, but that was their trouble — they didn't know what was important and what was not. Goessler had offered them a scheme he said was foolproof, had been more than a year in the making, and could not fail. They'd been greedy for it on both sides of the border, especially when Guthrie was the big prize. Guthrie was a winner, and he had to go — especially now, when he looked like keeping Dublin in that bloody Anglo-Irish Agreement. That had to be stopped.

She plucked the receiver off the rest as McBride went into an off-key version of a Neil Diamond song. She hesitated, listening, then dialled rapidly, tugging the cord she held in her left hand in time to each ring of the receiver at the other end. Seven, eight, nine — she was about to put it down when Moynihan answered.

"Listen, I haven't much time. He's found something that might or might not be important. Has it anything to do with a minefield, for God's sake?"

"Minefield? Goessler just called me, told me everything was satisfactory, fat bastard—"

"Never mind that!" she whispered fiercely. "Listen. The Germans opened a channel through the British minefield in November 1940 — it must have something to do with the invasion plan. Where does that put us?" There was an exclusive, secretive emphasis on the last word.

"Christ, Claire, I don't know—"

"We have to get one up on Goessler. We can't afford for McBride to be following the wrong scent, that bloody bastard Guthrie has everyone dancing to his tune—!" She realized her hoarse, fierce whisper had grown louder, more intense, and glanced at the open door, paused to listen to McBride's whistling. Beethoven now. McBride the musical eclectic—

"What do you want me to do?" Moynihan was resignedly subordinate.

"How does Goessler know what McBride is doing? He must have someone inside—"

"Could be."

"Find out, then. For God's sake, Sean, go over there tomorrow and find out how Goessler is keeping his eye on McBride—" And then McBride was standing in the doorway, towelling his hair, another big towel draped round him. He was grinning perplexedly. That's right, McBride — eight-thirty. Thank you." She turned to him. "The restaurant — I was just checking the reservation," she explained.

He crossed to her, kissed her. She eased her lips into softness, responsiveness, as their mouths met.

"You'll have to learn, my darling, that I can organize dinner, if we're going anywhere with this affair—" The statement became almost a question. She kissed him again, moving her open mouth against his. His hand slipped inside her robe, kneading her breast.

She laughed, pushed him playfully away. "I'm hungry."

"Not as hungry as I am," he said with evident meaning, looking for something in her face, her eyes. She blenched inwardly at the intensity of his gaze. Then, even as she smiled, she dismissed him, removed him to a distance in her imagination where he was merely the instrument of her purpose.

Sir Charles Walsingham was studying papers at home. He was seated on a green-covered sofa, legs crossed, malt whisky at his elbow on a leather-inset table, subdued lighting from the standard lamps and the wall-lighting falling yellowly on the material on his lap. The hands which sifted the reports and transcripts seemed little to do with him, operating robotically. The big room, richly carpeted, elegantly appointed — Walsingham had inherited the bulk of his mother's estate some years before, and purchased the lease of this flat and a country cottage — was close as a bandage around him. He felt a pressure round his temple like the onset of a migraine. He knew that unless he drank a great deal more of the Glenmorangie he would not sleep much.

McBride had worked first from the German end, turning up clues in the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz — so said the rushed report of an SIS agent in West Germany, via a contact in the BfV. The head of the intelligence branch of the British security machine had agreed to carry out the investigation for Walsingham without question. He would expect the same co-operation from the DS, counter-intelligence. Unlike many former heads of the two branches of the service, Walsingham worked smoothly and closely with his opposite number.

Then McBride had come to England, to find that Gilliatt had died of a heart attack — no doubt about that, apparently, from the report of one of his own men who had interviewed the doctor who had signed the death certificate. Then to Ireland, and Drummond—

Walsingham shifted his body on the sofa in discomfoit. McBride was homing like an arrow. What had he been doing in East Berlin, whom had he met, what discovered? That report would take a lot longer to prepare, and might never be satisfactory, though SIS were attempting the task.

Drummond sent him back to England with the daughter, who once — falsely? — had some connection with known IRA men. Another Dugdale, they'd thought, but not so, Irish Special Branch had confirmed a couple of years before. Drummond had refused to amplify his telephone call, claiming when interviewed that morning by a Special Branch man from London that he merely wished Walsingham — who had been concerned in the Emerald affair — to know that McBride was digging into a past that might "create certain local difficulties".

And McBride was now at Admiralty Records, Hackney; and had been reading the MILFORD HAVEN/DMS files. Close, but how close?

Walsingham went on sitting, sipping his whisky, and staring at the papers in front of him. He arrived at his decision close to midnight. He had not spoken to Guthrie as yet, reversing his decision of the previous day. He would again postpone that conversation. Instead, clumsy and obvious though it was, he would remove temptation from McBride.

He got up heavily and crossed to the telephone. He dialled the number of the duty operations room in Curzon Street House, and spoke to Clarke, the Surveillance Director.

"John — the McBride matter. I want the records removed from Hackney tonight, and McBride's notebooks must be recovered. And I want McBride watched from now on. All contacts, everything." He paused while Clarke suggested the operatives he would deploy. "Good. Oh, and the East Germans. I want to know whether there are any unaccounted for, or who've just moved onto the patch. No, I don't think anything, but I want to be sure. Oh, and watch the girl, too — just in case."

He stood by the telephone for some moments after ending the call, remembering his one trip on a submarine, to pick up McBride's father and Gilliatt off Brest. A nasty business. He was going to wipe all trace of Emerald from the records, for the second time. He felt as if he were wiping out McBride — dear Michael — betraying the best field-agent he had ever known and one of his few friends.

But, better that than what he might have to do to the son if he went on with it, turned up some of the real dirt. That he could hardly bear to consider, even though it was there at the back of his mind, waiting for a summons to the fore-brain. He had hated sending the father to Brest, dangerously underbriefed and underprotected, but the son—

Let him stop, he told himself almost in a prayer. Let Michael's son stop now.

CHAPTER TEN Ministerial Responsibility

Professor Thomas Sean McBride of the University of Oregon in Portland walked through the communicating door between his hotel room and that of Claire Drummond, where they had spent the night, and created for himself the conceit that he was moving between the sensual and the intellectual life. His nakedness prevented him from sustaining or elaborating the image.

His notebooks were missing. He had tidied them the previous night, before making love and after returning from the restaurant — he had dwelt on them for a few moments of self-satisfaction, a vicarious and cerebral excitement deliberately indulged. Now, realization spread through his frame as slowly as that excitement had done. Passion was a sharp, shuddering, instantaneous reaction of skin and muscle to Claire's lightly brushing fingertips. This was different, but he began to shake with it, with anger and fear. Then he moved to the wardrobe, and found that the deposition of Campbell had been taken from his wallet. He tugged open his briefcase, and found it empty of the photocopying done in Berlin and Koblenz, the notes he had made of his interviews with Menschler and Kohl.

Furiously, hands almost out of his control, he switched on his cassette recorder. A hiss of empty tape. He played back, and again the hiss of a clean tape. His prognostications of the previous evening had been removed. Every particle of evidence concerning Smaragdenhalskette and the minefield and the German invasion of Ireland had been stolen.

Why?

He was still shaking, as if cold water poured from some shower-rose just above his head. He could not stop asking the question, again and again, and being frightened of the answer. He kept looking back at the communicating door as if Claire, still sleeping, might have an answer or might provide something to take away the subtly, insidiously growing sense of insecurity. Corridors, silent reading rooms, dusty files, unshaded cellar lights, small, insignificant librarians and clerks, shadows — all now possessed a patina of menace. He had been watched, followed, robbed—

Of something that had happened over forty years ago, and could have little significance for anyone except a popular historian with an eye on the New York Times bestseller lists.

And then he was angry, very angry. They'd stolen a million dollars, maybe more. Hackney. The evidence still at Hackney — maybe more of it, waiting. He'd steal it this time.

Who? Why?

The questions now became tossed and overturned by his rising anger. Someone was trying to screw him. Some bastard. Hackney.

"I'm sorry, Professor, those files have been requisitioned for reclassification." The naval officer with the damaged leg and the sour disposition seemed to take pleasure from McBride's shock and surprise.

"What in hell?"

"Sorry, Professor. Collected this morning by Admiralty messenger. They might end up at Kew, if you'd like to wait ten or twenty years."

"They've been transferred somewhere else, right?"

"Sorry, Professor. Reclassified." He leaned confidentially over his desk. "You weren't working on anything sensitive, were you, Professor?"

"Sensitive — no. Forty years old, dead as the dodo. Look, you're sure about this, uh?" McBride's anger was still there — he'd nursed it on the train like a secret passion for an unattainable woman — but he was winded now, confused and again the fear was bubbling under his heart, acid and sharp. Official interference, he kept repeating to himself in a bemused, unenlightened way.

"Sorry, Professor. I know it's annoying for you, but they treat us here as nothing more than clerks." His thin face twisted, it seemed, from hair to chin to adopt the bitter line of his lips. "Stuff lies here for years, collecting dust — when it's being of use at last, or we're just about to get round to refiling and properly documenting, they come and remove it." McBride saw that he presumed the sudden requisition to be a comment on the running of the records repository and nothing more. A creeping, invidious sense of danger gradually assailed McBride as he sat in the man's office, the electric fire which warmed it seeming not to radiate in his direction. He felt alone, cut off by thick, almost soundproof glass from the other man.

"I see — they do it often, then?" A straw. The navy man, usually insensitive to any but his own responses, was puzzled by the thick, clogged voice that issued from McBride. McBride looked pale, too—

"You all right, Professor?"

McBride nodded. "Yes, yes I'm OK. Just — infuriating, them taking all the stuff away just when I was working on it." He stood up. "Well, I guess you can't do anything, neither can I. I'll keep on looking—"

"If you could tell us what you want—"

McBride shook his head. "I'll know it when I see it. Thanks."

When he was back in the cold staff room that was now a reading room, he could no longer control the shake that had developed like a palsy in his hands and spread through his frame. He felt very cold, and very, very alone. He clasped his hands together, to still them, but his body went on shivering beneath his topcoat. He sat down, cold perspiration down his back when he felt his shirt pressed against him by the chair, and cold patches under his arms. He rubbed his face with his hands.

Everything was gone. Someone wanted to stop him, right there. Someone with official contacts, official powers. That was it. There was something he shouldn't find. The past had to stay underground, nice and buried like radioactivity. Who was going to get burned if he dug it up — apart from himself?

For a long time he sat there unmoving, his body gradually growing warmer, the shaking subsiding. And, as with a storm that has passed, there was damage and the topography of his mind and body was not quite the same, but the violence of the storm itself could no longer impinge so forcibly. The weak sun of his curiosity came out from the clouds. He wanted to know what there was to know. He wanted to know what might be left here in Hackney, overlooked in the rush to remove the evidence.

He didn't know where the bodies were buried, but he knew they hadn't died by accident. The epithet amused, calmed him. The sense of menace began to evaporate like floodwater.

Walsingham indicated McBride's notebooks and papers with his hand. Exton, his senior aide in the Executive Branch of MI5, adopted a more attentive look and sat slightly straighter in his chair in Walsingham's office.

"He was close, Exton, very close." Exton nodded, as if silence was all that was required. "These German papers and interviews on the one side, then our own records. He had most of it—" Exton tried to look interested, but the old man had not put him fully in the picture, just issued orders to Clarke the previous night and had the stuff delivered direct to him. Exton, the perfect functionary, was not insulted or offended by the lack of a briefing or Walsingham's failure to consult him before they lifted this American's notebooks and raided the dust-heap at Hackney, but neither could he take the matter seriously. Which, he supposed, was what came of being only ten when the war ended. 1940 was the year he was five, and not significant for much other than that fact.

"Sir," he murmured.

Walsingham always treated Exton, whom he disliked, with excessive formality. Noting the stiffly returned politesse now, he remembered Michael McBride, and a spasm passed across his mouth, lifting one corner into a crooked, ironical smile. Exton was puzzled.

"Exton, I want this German historian, Goessler, checked out. And all the other names in his notebooks. And I want Hackney gone over with a fine-tooth comb after he's got tired of mooching around there. This isn't going to happen again. And, while you're at it, get rid of all references to Guthrie in anything connected with 1940."

Exton nodded, and stood up. "I'll get straight on with it."

"Take this stuff with you— have it all broken down and properly sifted. Then, start daily reports on McBride, direct to me."

When Exton had gone, Walsingham kept repeating to himself a single phrase, much as if he might have been invoking some god or protective spirit. A dose-run thing. Eventually, he was able to smile, with relief.

The fishing smack owned by Jean Perros and his sons put out from Ste Anne-du-Portzic in a sudden and unexpected snowstorm, and on an incoming tide. McBride and Gilliatt, dressed in blue jerseys and oilskins, assiduously checked the nets and gear with Perros's two sons, Jean-Marie and Claude. The wind-driven sleet half-obscured the shoreline and the straggling suburb that joined Brest to the fishing village. To the east, they could not see — yet — the long, low, grey line that marked the harbour wall of Lanilon where the Germans had constructed their submarine pens.

The engine of the smack was running rough, doctored by the engineer, a cousin of Perros, coughing and chugging with a worrying irregularity had the crew not expected it. McBride's hands became stiff and frozen as he fumblingly worked at checking the heavy, tangled nets, and he concentrated on what he had to do when they reached Lanilon. Occasionally, he looked up as the grey shape of a warship or submarine slid past them in the murk. Perros's boat was unlikely to be challenged, at least not until they neared the breakwater. He welcomed the weather. Gilliatt, seemingly absorbed in his task, appeared oblivious of weather or danger.

The engine cut out, dying throatily like an asthmatic old man. The boat suddenly wallowed in the tide. McBride looked beyond the bow, seeing the grey harbour wall loom in the sleet, then disappear, then re-emerge. They had rounded the Pointe de Portzic, and were drifting towards the western end of the huge harbour. At the western end were the U-boat pens.

The smack drifted under the shadow of the wall, which stretched over them like a great dam. The tide chopped whitely against its base. The minutes limped by. Perros, in the wheelhouse, used the rudder as best he could against the tide and wind, turning the boat portside-on to the harbour wall. The swell caused the boat to lurch repeatedly. Through the squalling snow, McBride could see no other vessels, and no guards on top of the breakwater. The nearest steps down to the water were also obscured.

He touched Gilliatt on the arm, startling him out of a fixed attention to the nets, and nodded. Then he went forward to the wheelhouse. Perros, hands whitened with effort on the wheel, glanced at him.

"The steps are a hundred metres or more ahead of us," he said. Beside him, a nephew scanned the water ceaselessly for other vessels, swinging his glasses in an arc across the wheelhouse screen.

"Can you make it?"

"Maybe. This tide is doing its best to stop me!" He grinned. He'd taken Lampau's death without emotion earlier that morning, almost without comment. He evidently did not blame the two Englishmen, rather seemed to admire them, and to be flattered that they required and needed his assistance. "If we have to start the engine, so be it. It can always cut out again!" McBride nodded, collected his own binoculars from the rear of the cramped, fuggy, fish-stenched wheelhouse — engine-oil smells seeping through the deck planking from the tiny engine-room below. "Good luck," Perros called after him as he went out again.

McBride looked up at the threatening wall, now only yards from the ship's deck. Ahead of them, he could see the steps. He heard the ringing of the wheelhouse telegraph as Perros called for the engine's power. A cough, stutter to life, and the smack pushed forward. The engine throbbed through the deck planking. McBride waited as the steps neared, aware that Gilliatt and the two sons were watching him intently. The engine died suddenly, and McBride wondered whether it had really broken down. Then the boat lurched with the tide against the harbour wall, planks straining, crying out, then the boat began to move away. He jumped, glasses banging against his chest. His hands grappled with the slimy seaweed of the bottom step, water splashed over the tops of his sea-boots, then a wave drenched him up to the waist as he began to slip, his grasp loosened.

He scrabbled for a hold, catching an iron mooring-ring set in the concrete of the lowest exposed step, pushing at the same time with his feet against a seaweed-slippery step beneath the water. Then he pulled himself up, resting only when he was above the reach of the tide.

He sat down. Gilliatt gave him a thumbs-up signal from the stern of the fishing-boat, and Perros's two sons were smiling. The smack had lurched away from the breakwater, wallowing helplessly. Then Claude Perros held up the mooring-rope at the stern, and McBride, suddenly frightened by the insecurity of his perch on the steps and chilled by the wind blowing against the soaking trousers beneath his oilskins, climbed to the top of the harbour wall where the wind heaved at him, trying to throw him back into the water. He waved his arms, and the rope snaked out towards him from the stern of the smack. He caught it, but his frozen fingers could not close on it before its weight dragged it over the edge of the wall. He waited, freezing, while Claude hauled it in, looped it, then threw again. The rope landed like a heavy, arresting hand across McBride's shoulder and he grabbed it tightly, then dragged it to the nearest mooring-ring, looping it through and making it fast.

When they had bow and stern lines fast the smack wallowed only gently in the lee of the wall, the line of old car-tyres down its port side rhythmically rubbing against the concrete of the wall. Perros looked up at him through the screen of the wheelhouse, and waved him to hurry. Engine repairs was the fiction of their need to tie up, but any patrol vessel that found them would tow them away from the sensitive area of the U-boat pens.

McBride crossed to the inner lip of the breakwater, looking into the streaming sleet blowing the length of the massive harbour. The huge breakwater had been built at the end of the century parallel with the beach to enclose a huge harbour, and the port of Lanilon on the western outskirts of Brest was developed. When France had fallen in the middle of 1940, the Germans had almost immediately begun the building of the concrete submarine pens for their U-boats, from which the raiders put out into the North Atlantic to intercept the convoys from neutral America and Canada to a desperate Britain.

McBride could see, away to his left as he stood on the final section of the breakwater wall and almost a couple of hundred yards from the shoreline and the port, the crude concrete bunkers under which huddled, as if against the storm rather than an air raid, the lines of U-boats. He could dimly make out the stern-on shapes of perhaps a dozen vessels undergoing refuelling, refits, repairs, rearming. The tunnels of the separate pens offered themselves to the view through his binoculars like open mouths containing the squat cigars of the U-boats.

He would have to get closer, changing the angle at which he could see them. Numbers alone interested him, designations in white on the conning-towers. The wind howled at him, making him lean into it to preserve his balance, but he felt gratitude towards it now that he was moving along the breakwater towards the guard-post, a grey concrete blockhouse astride the wall where it met the shoreline. Here it scanned the harbour wall and controlled traffic into the pens. If he were spotted—

Slowly, the angle of perception changed until the conning-towers of the two closest submarines began to betray tall white numbers. He could not make them out. The blockhouse was less than a hundred yards away, and he felt naked and exposed, and almost at the mercy of the storm. A gull screamed near his head, then was flung away by the wind, and he shuddered. He had to look as if he was heading for the blockhouse, in case they spotted him, and yet he had to incriminatingly use the glasses. He hunched a shoulder to the shore, raised the glasses, and looked. He could see the white stick of the figure 1, nothing more. The blockhouse was sixty yards ahead of him, and unless they were all blind or dead in there he must be spotted at any moment. He moved on slowly, hunched and leaning against the wind, glasses clenched against his chest in one frozen hand. The figure 1 was accompanied by the half-crescent that might have been the figure 0. His heart jumped almost painfully. A little closer, just a little — if it was a nought, then there had to be a 1 in front as well as behind.

He could see the numbers on the boats in Guernsey. He did not need to match them. QIC knew that U-99 to U-108 were all large boats like the two of the series he had seen. Any one in the series would be the proof he needed.

Forty yards — come on, come on, they must have seen me. He could not make out the numerals without the aid of the glasses, not through the murk of sleet and wind. Was it a nought, a zero — just 0?

Come on, come on—

He could see 01, he could see the two distinct numerals, 0 and 1. U-101. One of the series of boats that had been used for minesweeping duties in the St George's Channel. He was oblivious to his surroundings for a moment, enjoying a sense of triumph which was rare and selfish and self-congratulatory. They knew, they knew—

At the same instant that he recognized the numerals, he also sensed the deserted nature of the pens. No noise above the wind, no flare of acetylene, no hammer of riveting, no sign of any human being near the seaward ends of the two pens he could see most clearly. Waiting. The U-boats were waiting—

He caught the flash of welding from a distance along the pens. But here, with these nearest two, then others, there was nothing.

He felt newly chilled by the wind against his side.

"You there!" the voice called. Put up your hands! Come here!" The German spoke reasonable French. McBride, as he raised his hands, letting the glasses dangle from their strap against his chest, guessed he might have come from Alsace. "Who are you?" There were two of them, each armed with a machine-pistol, coming towards him from the blockhouse.

"Charles, is indifference to human life a form of madness?" March was seated in his office, and the slim buff folder with the single stencilled word Emerald lay before him on the desk. He had been reading the typed sheets — one copy only — and now he sat back, rubbed his eyes with strain or disbelief, and asked his question of Walsingham, who let no answering emotion appear on his face; a face that was wan, chalky with sleeplessness, dark stains beneath the eyes that met March's gaze levelly.

"This is simply a projection, Admiral." All his anger, even his premonition of guilt, was squeezed into the excessive formality of his reply. He had known how it would be, had understood in advance as he worked on the draft of Emerald through the night and morning, that it would brand him. He would be regarded in the Admiralty corridors as a strange and dangerous species, a disease-carrier. The images whereby he presented himself to himself were melodramatic, but he did not consider them overstated or false. He could already see the glazed, suspicious look in March's eyes.

"Naturally. You couldn't murder this many people without the permission of your seniors, could you, Charles?" The irony sat like an undigested meal on both of them. March wanted to disregard what he had read, even make light of it, thereby restoring a former impression of Walsingham. But this — what was he to make of it? Overwork, black humour, plain lunacy?

"Sir, you've assumed that I'm somehow working towards that final outcome — I'm not. What I have projected is a possible sequence of events which would produce a desirable result at a great cost. I understand the morality of it, Admiral, but I also understand the possible necessity—" He stopped himself, drawing tight the strings on the bag of his temper. Coolness was his only ally, and would be in the days ahead. There was a long way to go.

"Are you suggesting this, or not?" His hand brushed fiercely towards the open file as if it was infested with cobwebs.

"I'm suggesting that it might become our only feasible alternative, Admiral. If it achieves that status, then that is the operational plan we would, or might, follow."

"My God, you know who's on board the cruiser, don't you?"

"I do."

"We'd divert it, of course."

"Not yet."

"Of course not yet."

"We must consider the effect on the Germans, though — surely?"

The dialogue snapped between them now, electrical sparks. Both men were tense, stiff in their chairs. Walsingham found himself defending the appalling logical outcome of Emerald even though he felt a profound loathing for it, and sensed he had begun a process in himself the end of which he could not envisage. What might he begin now to consider as no more than a necessity of war? Emerald was an idea that had been waiting for someone to think it. Why had it lodged in his mind?

"Of your plan?"

"Yes — my plan." The reluctance was simply the slightest hesitation. "It would be a significant, perhaps crucial, propaganda victory."

"Or it might, even if it remained secret, have a profound effect on German military morale?" Walsingham nodded. "And— the convoy to have been sunk by U-boats in the North Channel?" Again, Walsingham nodded. March seemed to wish to reiterate his ideas aloud, as if to make them the objects of a cool, rational analysis, and he had no objection to not voicing them himself. "And if it came out, the Americans would never enter the war, might even sign a non-aggression pact with Hitler. We'd be finished."

"Its secrecy would have to be maintained," Walsingham commented. "But we might only stop this invasion by 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 know you have, Charles. You've been very clever all the way through this — thing." His distaste was evident, undisguised.

"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 realpolitik advanced by the President and which he knew lay in himself. He agreed with Roosevelt. If Britain was a lost cause then America must write her off as a bad debt, and turn to the Pacific.

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 Bisley's flotilla was in Milford Haven sound from three days before it set out until its next sailing, the mines across Swansea harbour, when Gilliatt had already left the ship.

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.

"They couldn't have done the job, could they? We got sunk!" Hoskins said with sudden bitterness.

"Tell me—"

Hoskins glanced theatrically round the room. "Not here." He took a card from his pocket, on which an insurance salesman's name and address had been crossed out, and Hoskins" own address written neatly on the reverse of the card. "Come and see me this evening. I'll tell you everything I know."

"But—"

"Later." And Hoskins went out, closing the door behind him. McBride got to his feet, pacing the room, staring at the two box-files with renewed excitement. A special convoy — couldn't have done the job properly— What the hell did it mean?

He crossed to the table, wanting to close the ledger with a final loud noise and get on with sifting the new box-files, the word convoy lurid with possibilities in his imagination, when he read the last entry of the page he had reached.

Two minelayers arrived in Milford. November twenty-eighth. He flicked over the page, mistaking minelayer for minesweeper for a moment, then correcting himself even as he read that the minelayers had sailed the following day, and found their return as his finger slid down the ledger entries—

Minelayers.

An intuition of such force as to weaken him, make him sit down to rest suddenly untrustworthy limbs, assailed him. He had seen something, somewhere—

Why was it in a different handwriting in the ledger? A new clerk, one not instructed? He flicked over pages. No — God, no! He'd been so bored, so inattentive, so stupid— This was the normal handwriting, the pages containing the references to Bisley were written in a hand that was very like but not identical. God—

He flicked through other pages, saw where a new clerk took over the harbour records — then he flicked to the front of the ledger, and discovered more confusion. He had been reading, dully and mule-like and damn stupidly, the harbourmaster's ledger of shipping movements—

Handwriting, handwriting? No, Jesus but he was dumb, it was the same handwriting. Bisley's flotilla was omitted, but nothing had been changed. He giggled aloud. It was stupid, suspecting a cover-up. But, someone had been instructed not to make an entry concerning Bisley, presumably for security. But the minelayers?

The men who had removed the Milford files had left this, if they'd found it at all, because it wasn't Admiralty records, it had belonged to the harbourmaster. During the war, all shipping had become the responsibility of the Admiralty. But the harbourmaster had gone on keeping his own log of shipping movements, apparently, separately from NOIC at Milford. And someone keeping his log failed to ignore the sailing of two minelayers from Milford to St George's Channel and their return — having resown the passage swept by Bisley's flotilla, and that swept by the Germans for their proposed invasion. God—

Hoskins, he had to talk to Hoskins immediately.

It was getting dark outside. Hoskins would already have left. He plucked the card from his pocket as if fearful someone might already have stolen it. Sansom Street, Clerkenwell. He'd need his tape-recorder from the hotel. Hoskins was on a British ship that went down in the St George's Channel because—

He could not, with any precision, form the conclusion. He was almost afraid of so doing, because it explained everything. The secrecy, Drummond's silence, the theft ot his notes. The British had—

Again, a mental impediment prevented him forming the thought in precise verbal symbols. He didn't know, he told himself. He did not — he did. He did. It explained everything.

He stared at the ledger again. The names of the two minelayers, their tonnage, their captains. Jamieson and Guthrie. He closed the ledger as if doing so might contain its secret. He hugged the leather in his hands.

Guthrie. David Guthrie? On TV. Northern Ireland. The British minister responsible for Northern Ireland. Another David Guthrie, he told himself. He opened the ledger again, flicking the pages feverishly, rumpling the corners of many of them. Bisley, and the minelayers. He barely glanced at the door, then tore hurriedly and crudely at the pages until he had roughly detached them. He stuffed them into his briefcase, paused to breathe deeply once, and then went out.

He felt the tensions, the premonitions beginning almost as soon as he felt the cold air of the early evening on his face.

From inside the telephone booth, Hoskins watched him go, then made a call to Goessler. He did not notice the Vauxhall start up further down the street and pull slowly into the traffic, on McBride's trail.

Moynihan kept McBride in sight until he entered the station, and assumed that he was heading back to the hotel. Hoskins was an anonymous, mousy man he had disregarded. He was not similarly able, however, to ignore the fawn Escort with a driver and passenger who had been following McBride four cars ahead of himself. His suspicions became confirmed when the passenger alighted and followed McBride into the station. As the Escort pulled away, Moynihan looked around him for a telephone box.

McBride put his hands above his head, and adopted a posture that he hoped was suitably cowed, frightened. In the bad weather, he had approached nearer the blockhouse than he could have hoped, and confirmed the presence in Brest of the ocean-going U-boats he had seen on Guernsey. Had the sun been shining, he would have had to march openly down the breakwater to report that the smack had broken down, and would not have been able to use the binoculars.

His satisfaction was, however, unimportant at that moment. The two German guards were angry with him because he had not been spotted earlier, and perhaps they should have been on patrol but had huddled instead round a fire, drinking coffee. Perhaps their officer had seen him first. The binoculars dangled innocently, yet betrayingly, from his neck.

"My boat," he began in rapid French, pointing back down the breakwater towards the sea. "Engine trouble. I came to report it. We had to tie up alongside the wall — pardon, pardon."

The Germans were suspicious, and disarmed at the same time. Their machine-pistols were held more slackly, barrels angled to the ground. Just a Frenchman — McBride could see the contempt of familiarity and conquest glazing their attentiveness. An Unterfeldwebel and a Pioner from an engineer unit. The Unterfeldwebel was wearing on his uniform lemon-yellow waffenfarben, which meant he was from a signals regiment. And McBride knew that these men had replaced the normal infantry or police blockhouse guards. Close, it was close now—

He tried to ingratiate himself further.

"Come and see, please come—" he babbled, even reaching a hand out for one greatcoat sleeve. A sapper and a signals NCO guarding U-boats, his mind kept repeating. "Please, we do not mean to be here, our engine broke down—" A machine-pistol thrust McBride's flapping hand away, but without animosity. A controlled, confident contempt seemed to animate both men. They betrayed their elite unit background by stance, smile or grimace, ease. Then the idea struck McBride — he could almost sense it growing in a smaller calculating self inside the shell that was impersonating a French fisherman — that he, and he alone, knew for certain that the Wehrmacht intended invading Ireland, and in the immediate future. And if they shot him, the surprise attack might succeed. There was no self-dramatization in the thought, no self-aggrandizement. He was terrified of the responsibility.

"What's the matter?" the Unterfeldwebel snapped in his Alsatian French as McBride stumbled over his words.

"The guns, the guns—" he managed to say. He expelled some of the fear they would expect from a fisherman facing guns. The two Germans were alert, their eyes and stance hardly altered by his supplicatory tone.

"Engine trouble?" the Alsatian asked. The machine-pistol came up again, levelled at McBride's stomach. As if prompted by some cue, the Pioner glanced over his shoulder towards the nearest U-boat pens, then back at the binoculars round McBride's neck. "What engine trouble?"

"I don't know — it cut out," McBride protested, feeling the chill of the wind go away, and the sleet pattering against his cheek become distant. His body temperature began rising beneath his jersey and oilskins. "Please, come and see for yourselves—"

They had shaken off the lethargic, welcome warmth of the blockhouse, the reluctance of coming out into the blowing sleet to investigate a mad Frenchman walking along the breakwater in full view of them. They had readopted their responsibilities.

"Move," the Unterfeldwebel snapped, pointing with the gun. McBride hesitated, knowing that the direction they now took meant everything. The enormous consequences of going on towards the blockhouse, of the arrest of Perros, Gilliatt and the crew which would follow, the investigation of their papers, the questions — all trying to break through the mental barriers erected to help him operate on the thin surface of these successive moments. He shrugged. The Unterfeldwebel poked the barrel of the gun in his stomach, then turned him round with a slap from the machine-pistol against his side. They were going to look at the fishing smack.

"What do you think?" the Pioner asked in German as the two soldiers walked behind him, a couple of feet back, hunching into the suddenly stronger wind.

"Who knows? He doesn't look like much, does he?"

"I'll look at the engine," the Pioner said confidently, and McBride prayed that Perros's cousin below decks would be able to bluff it out.

"Jean! Jean!" McBride called out, waving his arms as he caught sight of the ropes and the smack bobbing slowly, grindingly against the breakwater.

"Shut up, you!" the Unterfeldwebel snapped.

McBride saw Gilliatt in the stern, his face white and watchful — too watchful and not frightened enough, McBride told himself. Claude was with him, the others not in sight. Claude crossed to the hatch, and yelled down it to his father. By the time the two Germans were standing on the edge of the wall, looking down, Perros was emerging through the hatch, wiping oily hands on a filthy rag and smoking the last inch of a cigarette. McBride was grateful for his nonchalance. Gilliatt kept on watching the two soldiers, one hand close to his pocket where the gun nestled. McBride realized he did not know whether Gilliatt could bluff it out, or would panic and start firing.

"You there, you the captain of this tub?"

"It is my family's boat," Perros replied, riding with the awkward swell, bobbing up towards them and away. He kept rubbing his hands.

"What's wrong with your engine? Why are you fishing at this time of day?"

Perros shrugged. "We're not fishing, sergeant. We came out to test the engine, and — phut!" Perros raised his arms in the air, dissipating the engine's power. "We tied up — I sent Henri there to inform you. Don't want trouble—" He grinned.

"We'll go down," the Unterfeldwebel said, nudging McBride with the machine-pistol. Then he raised his voice. "We're coming aboard." Perros shrugged.

They went down the steps, and McBride sensed the two Germans were suddenly hesitant, whether because of the water or the fact they were outnumbered on the boat he could not tell. They prodded McBride to jump first. He waited until the smack's bow swung up towards him, then jumped the gap of grey water, skidding on the wet deck, then standing upright.

One of the Germans, the Pioner, stumbled badly, but recovered, but the sergeant landed easily and confidently. The guns were immediately emphatic, dominant as soon as they were sure of their footing.

"Show him the engine," the sergeant ordered Perros when they had moved to the stern of the smack. Again, Perros shrugged. The sapper ducked his head, disappearing behind Perros into the tiny engine-room. "You — papers!"

McBride reached in his pocket, pulled out his forged ID card, radon book, worker-registration document and his demobilization docket. The Unterfeldwebel studied them. McBride watched Gilliatt carefully, trying to assess his mood. His face was very pale, his hand closer to his pocket. The sergeant handed back McBride's papers, then held out his hand to Gilliatt. McBride watched, saw the flicker of one eyelid, the grimace of Gilliatt's mouth — then he was handing his papers to the German.

Then Claude's papers were checked. The sergeant seemed frustrated, but perhaps he was only angry with them for wasting his time, making him cold. Suddenly, the engine coughed into life. Claude cheered. The Pioner emerged, wiping his hands on Perros's rag, a smear of oil on his cheek.

"The bloody French don't understand engines," he said in German. "Filthy. Fuel-feed was blocked with muck!" He slapped the rag into Perros's hand, who had followed him up from the engine-room. He tossed his head in mock-disgust.

"Thank you," Perros said. The engine was running smoothly. "May we cast off now?"

"Very well, and keep clear in future."

"Henri—" Perros indicated, and McBride went forward again with the two soldiers. They jumped clumsily, but safely, to the steps, and McBride followed them up onto the breakwater. Here, they left him immediately, as if he might ask them to assist him.

He cast off the ropes, trotted down the steps, and jumped again for the deck. As he landed, he felt his legs go, and he sat down heavily. He was unable to move for a while, and Gilliatt came forward to check on him.

"You all right?" McBride nodded. The two Germans were thirty yards along the breakwater, watching the smack chug away towards the point." Thank God for that!" All Gilliatt's suppressed fears were in the words.

"It's all right, Peter. OK."

"What?"

"The U-boats are there — and those guards are from elite units, guarding them." McBride grinned. "We know now. It's on, and it's soon—"

"How long?"

"Two or three days, I estimate."

"My God—"

"Ask Him to keep the weather bad — it might slow them down, or make the U-boats travel below the surface."

"You're sure, aren't you?" McBride nodded. "Hell."

"You might be right there — give me a hand up." Gilliatt pulled McBride to his feet. "What worries me is the Fallschirmjaeger. What the hell is their timetable?"

Sansom Street was old, narrow and dark. It lurked off the Farringdon Road in Clerkenwell. McBride had taken a taxi from the Portman Hotel after collecting his cassette-recorder. Claire Drummond had not been in her room, and he was almost thankful not to be further delayed by talking to her, explaining why he was going out again. He booked a table for eight-thirty in the hotel restaurant, scribbled her a note, and left. It was seven-thirty now, and the weather was damply chill, misty around the streetlamps. McBride paid off the taxi, and studied the house that was number twenty-two.

He felt the faint tremor of a tube train passing beneath the street on the Piccadilly Line. The house had three steps up to a dilapidated porch, rusty iron railings protecting scrubby remnants of grass and a few overgrown plant-pots. It looked singularly uninviting, and McBride checked Hoskins" card again, nodding reluctantly to himself to confirm the address. Sansom Street was a narrow cut-through to Saffron Hill, something to be driven through as a shortcut or used as a car park. McBride went up to the steps.

Three apartments — flats, he corrected himself. Probably no larger than what the British called bed-sits. He studied the names inserted on weathered card no longer white — Hoskins, the Mister placed assertively before it. Initials, I.T. The other cards bore only surnames, one of them written in by the present tenant over the deleted name of a former occupier — Paid. He could smell the curry through the door. He rang Hoskins" bell.

McBride felt that sadness that assails the well-off or the successful when confronted with the complete and utter ordinariness of other people's lives. Tears pricked behind his eyes at the seediness of Sansom Street, the darkness behind the cracked, dirty ornamental glass in the front door, the quarry tiles of the porch, the dulled brass doorstep. He almost felt cold assailing him from the house's interior. He dismissed the emotion, knowing it was entirely patronizing, secretly self-congratulatory, and rang the bell again.

He was getting cold. He rang more impatiently, keeping his thumb on the bell, all his impatience now emerging as irritation with Hoskins.

Come on, come on—

A light on in the hallway, a shadow behind the glass. The door opened, and McBride was confronted by a short, thin Indian in shirt-sleeves and a patterned pullover. And a turban.

"Yes? Mr Hoskins" bell, yes?" McBride nodded. "Sita — my wife — she heard Mr Hoskins come in, with a visitor. The visitor has now left, I am certain. I cannot understand where Mr Hoskins can be—" The Indian seemed to be addressing a point just to the left of McBride's waist, and holding one hand in the other in front of his chest. McBride's impatience suddenly became fear.

"May I go up?" he said, pushing through the door. The Indian seemed flustered, yet attempted to stand on his dignity.

"I am the landlord here, sir. I will decide—"

"Look, it's important. I have an appointment with Mr Hoskins—" He showed the card, and the Indian examined it carefully, carrying it to the unshaded bulb in the hall.

McBride followed him in, closing the door behind him.

"Just a moment, please — I am landlord here—"

"First floor, right?" McBride said, taking the stairs two at a time, his immediate breathlessness a result of fear not effort. "Hoskins!" he yelled.

"Just a moment, my good fellow — I am landlord here!" The Indian's voice had become a cry almost of despair.

"Hoskins!" McBride banged on the door. It swung open, and he knew what he would find inside the room. "Hoskins?" he whispered, pleading for a reply.

Hoskins was in the bedroom, a pillow over his face, hands buried deep in it, claw-like, as if he had suffocated himself rather than been murdered.

"Oh, terrible, terrible—" the Indian wailed behind McBride when he saw the body. McBride felt weak, could not move the pillow from Hoskins" face. Murder.