Emerald Decision

CHAPTER ELEVEN Open Ground

Patrick Terence Fitzgerald lay on his narrow bunk, staring at the ceiling of his cabin aboard the British cruiser. The long Atlantic swell reached him as a swaying, restful motion in contrast to the dreams that had visited and eventually woken him. A cold blue light above the door of the cabin dimly illuminated the cramped space. Its chilly, submarine light gave him an increased, sharper sense of the sweat on his face and brow, as if he looked down on his own face and saw its fears, its clear registration of what had become his burden.

You're my second thoughts, Pat—

Roosevelt's words, accompanied by that famous easy smile, the big hands slapping the arms of his wheelchair. My second thoughts. He'd repeated the phrase, the eyes behind the spectacles suddenly sombre, seeking assent and understanding in Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald had nodded, swallowing drily.

Forget Donovan and OSS, forget Lease-Lend—

He was to concentrate solely on estimating Britain's ability to fight through the rest of the winter into 1941, then to carry the fight to Hitler. If there was no way that was possible, then he had to tell his President so. Write Britain off.

In the wardroom that evening, as he dined with the ship's officers, he found himself studying their faces, as if he had asked them a serious, crucial question and was silently prompting them to give him the correct answer. Children — he wanted to prompt, give them clues, hint at the answer. But their faces answered without their knowing the question. Defeat. He knew already the answer he would give Roosevelt in three months" time. No. They can't make it, Mr President. Europe's finished.

Roosevelt's ambitions, Fitzgerald was sure, included making America the pre-eminent world power when this war was through. To do that, Japan would have to be defeated. Roosevelt wanted the survival of Europe, sure—

But, America first. Europe had to be savable before the President would make the attempt. Otherwise, he'd cut the umbilical with the Old World.

Fitzgerald, turning the dreams and images over in his conscious mind and feeling his heart still and the sweat on his body dry, became gradually unsurprised that his dreams were bad ones. The dreams lost their edge, their painful, black sharpness. He rolled out of the bunk, drank some water, then lay down again. He didn't want to do it, but he would. From him, Roosevelt would learn the unpleasant truth. Europe was lost. It was only a matter of time. These men on this British ship, they knew it as completely as if they could smell it in the air or taste it in their food.

Just a matter of time—

After a while, he was able to sleep, and his dreams did not come back that night.

Walsingham and Admiral March, out of uniform, were enjoying Dover sole at Prunier's in St James's Street. They were dining early so that their meal would not be interrupted, even terminated, by that night's air raid. Walsingham had no desire to seek the shelter of the nearest tube station — Green Park — and perhaps spend the night huddled against strangers, inhaling the mingled body odours that ripened in the darkness, overpowering the dry, charged air that wrinkled the nose with dust when the trains were running. He did not examine the fastidiousness of his wartime life, preferring to ignore what it hinted of his personality. At times, London pressed against him with a raucous, unwashed, grinning weight and he detested it.

Madame Prunier had given them a table near the rear of the restaurant where they could converse without interruption or the fear of being overheard. March ate his sole as if he resisted any intrusion by Walsingham, but the younger man understood that his superior merely wished to postpone discussion of the debriefing of McBride and Gilliatt — and Emerald. Suddenly, he was irritated by March.

"We have to face facts, sooner or later," he observed waspishly. Then placed a morsel of fish in his mouth, swallowed and picked up his glass. A good Chablis. March, disturbed, watched his actions studiously.

"We have an appointment with the First Sea Lord first thing in the morning, Charles," he reminded Walsingham heavily, as if suggesting the discussion should not proceed.

"Yes." Walsingham felt light-headed. It wasn't the wine, or the gin beforehand, merely some deep and surprising elation that had emerged during the debriefing and which had remained with him. He did not ask its cause, nor did he observe it in any moral light. He was, simply, right and had been all along. McBride had brought back the proof he required — no, not he but the others, people like March and the whole Admiralty crew. They'd needed categorical proof of what was staring them in the face. The egotism of his being right predominated among his feelings, fuelled his well-being and his attitude to March. "But what are we going to tell the First Sea Lord?"

March looked up suddenly, stung and humiliated by the insolent edge of Walsingham's tone. "You want to know whether we're going to take in with us that abomination I have locked in my safe?" He studied Walsingham, then shook his head. "You're a strange person, Charles. I wonder if you're a new breed, or just an evolutionary freak—" March broke off as someone emerged from the kitchens behind them. Walsingham smiled easily at the tall, bespectacled young industrial chemist who manufactured much of Madame Prunier's wartime vinegar for her. The chemist nodded at him. He wore his helmet and gas-mask over his shoulder, and presumably he was off fire-watching after his dinner in the kitchens. When Walsingham looked back at March, the old man seemed angry at Walsingham's distraction. "A freak?" he added sourly, twisting his mouth to give the words emphasis.

Walsingham was angry. "Emerald is the only feasible plan, Admiral. You don't want to think about it, fair enough. But before long someone is going to have to. It becomes more and more inevitable with every passing day. Are we going to submit the operation to the First Sea Lord's scrutiny?" Perhaps it was the wine, he thought. He felt reckless, yet in control. March, he sensed, was frightened of him, felt some vague moral repulsion that rendered him impotent. "Are we?" He sipped again at the wine.

"Very well. Emerald will be submitted."

"Then you agree with me — McBride's debriefing is sufficient proof?" Walsingham sought something that would do as a substitute for approval or approbation — justification, vindication of his ideas. March nodded.

"I don't find the satisfaction in it that you do," he observed tiredly. "Yes, the Germans intend invading Ireland and opening up a second front against us."

Walsingham smiled behind his wine glass. He anticipated the meeting with the First Sea Lord in the morning with a heightened, undiluted excitement.

McBride was tired, but his head spun and buzzed with the police questions that had taken much of the night and the early morning before they had let him return to the hotel. And when he lay down he suffered a choking, asphyxiating sense of a pillow over his face and strong hands which could not be torn or pushed away pressing it down. He could physically smell the down, the linen, an imagined hair-oil on the pillow filling his nostrils.

By mid-morning, he was drunk on scotch and an empty stomach and tiredness. Claire Drummond, at first sympathetic and almost strangely approximating to his own fear and disappointment, became irritated with him when he ceased to talk about it and had gone down to the cocktail bar. However, she reappeared after a quarter of an hour, angry and belligerent. She seemed to have decided to quarrel with him.

"Are you going to sit there all day and feel sorry for yourself?" she stormed, kicking off her elegant shoes then savagely shunting them around the carpet with her feet. "Is that your answer to your problems?" McBride looked at her rather muzzily, unable to understand her reaction except as some tactic to lessen his burdensome reflections. The primary fear had died down with the drink, and he did not shiver with the realization that Hoskins had been killed for the simple fact that he was about to talk to him. McBride had no idea who might have done it, but his mind had forged an insoluble link between Hoskins" death and the removal of the files from Hackney. But that had gone to the back of his mind. Now, all he dwelt on was his next, unguessable step. "What's the matter with you? I thought Americans were all balls and bullshit! You've run out of steam pretty quickly."

He looked up at her in amazement. "What the hell is the matter with you? What have I done to you?"

"Nothing. But you're behaving like the world has come to an end. Get up off your backside and do something!"

"What, for Christ's sake?"

"What were you going to see Hoskins about? Why was he so special?"

McBride fumbled for the precise information. Hoskins certainly wasn't very special. "A convoy he says he sailed on, in 1940, which was supposed to pass through the south channel — the minefield," he added when she looked puzzled. When he had finished, her face became concentrated, then inwardly illuminated. He did not understand the succession of emotions and felt he did not understand her at all with the easy dismissiveness of the half-drunk. But, her eyes were intent on some spot on the carpet that was her screen for an inward drama. He could not understand how she could batten so intently on his concerns.

Claire Drummond snapped out of her abstraction, aware of the next words and how they should sound. She placed her hand at her throat as if to massage away the tightness she felt there. "A British convoy — from the States, you mean?" McBride shrugged and she wanted to hit him.

"I guess so," he admitted, looking from his empty glass to the bottle on the writing-table. It was almost empty. She wondered whether he ought to be given another drink, or forbidden it. She was aware of every extremity of her body, aware of the fine net of nerves that might produce a tic or a twitch and give her away as she crossed the room, picked up the scotch, and poured him a large measure. He raised his glass with a grouchy kind of gratitude, as if he had expected remonstration.

"Can't you find this information anywhere else?" she asked, sitting down opposite him, her posture and voice those of a faithful assistant.

"I don't know." He choked slightly on the neat spirit. Shook his head emphatically. "He's dead."

"My God, you think it was something to do with you?" He looked at her as if he had never considered coincidence before. "Look, I know someone stole your notes, and they took away the material you were studying — but you can't think — can you?" He seemed reluctant to admit it. "Perhaps there is something to be hidden — but no one could have thought Hoskins dangerous. Don't be so melodramatic, Tom." He softened at the use of his first name. She smiled, then suddenly she wondered what to say next. Then it came to her. "If they won't help you here, why not try your side of the Atlantic? Your Embassy, the Naval Attache or whatever he's called? They'd have records of a convoy sunk off the south coast of Ireland, wouldn't they?"

McBride seemed re-boned by the idea. He sat up more, shrugged off the slouch of weariness and self-pity and his eyes seemed to clear of the myopia of the drink. He even put down the glass, slopping some of the scotch on the carpet, tutting at his clumsiness.

"They would, sure. At least, they could lay hands on the records. OK, OK—" He stood up, swaying just once before taking a firm control of himself, squaring his shoulders. "Look, I'll call the embassy, get an appointment to see the guy." She nodded, and he crossed to the telephone. She picked up her shoes and went into her own room, careful to leave the door open. She threw the shoes on the bed and held herself, squeezing her arms tightly across her breasts, clutching her upper arms with claw-like hands, almost bruising herself. She felt nauseous with excitement, weak in the legs, as if all her strength were in her hands and arms. She sat down on the bed.

She had made the intuitive leap, the connection between Hoskins, Goessler and the convoy. Hoskins had been intended to do no more than whet McBride's appetite. He would have pointed himself in the right direction when he sobered up, she knew that. She was very careful not to underestimate McBride. He had considerable intuitive gifts, an energy of mind for patiently following a line of enquiry, and — but she only suspected this — he might prove physically brave, tough to overcome, wear down. Which could be costly, even bloody, later on. From what her father had told her of his father, she considered there was something of Michael McBride in his son, overlaid at the present with academic soft living, sedentary barnacles.

She dismissed him, his voice on the telephone went away. She congratulated herself. They were a step ahead of Goessler now, knew more than he guessed or thought they did. A British convoy had been sunk off the Cork coast in 1940 when a path should have been swept for it by the Royal Navy. That was the crucial fact. She trembled with the plain verbalized idea. A scandal the British had buried, now about to blow up in their faces. If they could only use McBride and get the proof before Goessler—

It was, of course — she admitted it to herself — what she had waited for. Bombs, guns, the hardware of terrorism had hardly attracted her. Control of people, strategy, tactics, orders — she craved them, the opportunity to employ her clear, detached, lucid mind on them. A woman in the Provisional IRA, however, was not allowed. Messenger, venus-trap, bomb-planter, secretary, was what they wanted. Sean Moynihan was considered an outstanding strategic mind in Belfast and Dublin, and she considered him a fool. There was a plain sheen to his thinking, no Byzantine chiaroscuro the like of her own. She appreciated Goessler's operation because it was so involved, so brilliantly complex — and because she had now seen through it. How did Guthrie fit? She dismissed the qualification on her enjoyment.

Ever since university she had waited for a moment like this, this intensity of self-congratulation. Ever since university and her timorous involvement with, then later recruitment by the IRA, then the transfer to the Provisional; the Marxism almost preceded university, gathered first from the French industrialist's daughter — Claudine — at-finishing school in Switzerland. What was Tom McBride doing then? she wondered. Screwing his first girl student? She wanted to giggle, to outwardly express her pleasure.

She wanted to outwit Goessler not for the Provisionals but for her own standing inside the organization. Her Marxism — which she supposed Goessler might share — required less obedience and loyalty than her ambition and her intellect. She was brilliant, and her talents had been wasted up to that moment. But, no longer. She remembered the summer and the Alpine meadows where Marx and Trotsky and Marcuse and hatred and impotent, passionate revulsion at class-inequalities and exploitation had not seemed out of place, but as natural and right as reading Wordsworth or Shelley in those surroundings. Vividly she remembered Claudine, and the hot days and the hotter nights of talk and feeling and growing determination.

Claudine had died in a Paris riot, beaten to death by the flics in some dark sidestreet. She'd heard that from a fellow-student in the Sorbonne on a student exchange to Belfast. And she'd wanted, if not the death, certainly some of the scars, the halo of violent light.

McBride looked round the door. He appeared completely sober now, and was grinning, intruding crassly on her memories. "I have an appointment this afternoon with the attache," he said.

She nodded. "Good," she answered abstractedly. "Good."

Captain Brooks Gillis, USN, the Naval Attache at the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, was mildly puzzled by the historian, Thomas McBride, who had made and kept an appointment to consult him on some matters of naval history. McBride, seated facing the light through the open Venetian blinds, appeared intense, tightly within himself as if afraid of spilling some secret from his pockets, but capable of being reduced in importance by the fact that he was an academic. Gillis had done his share of lecturing, and he felt he understood the American academic, the almost Wall Street hustling, the secretiveness applied to academic papers and researches that would not have been out of place in Standard Oil or the CIA. However, he had an easy day before a cocktail party for a Russian trade delegation at the embassy, where he would fulfill his function of psyching out any possible recruits for the Company, and so he did not resent giving his time to McBride.

"1940?" he said, standing at the window, half his attention on Blackburnes Mews below him. A girl got out of a Ferrari, and he studied her with the detachment of a connoisseur. The fur coat was a little ostentatious on a fine October day, but striking nonetheless. He wished his father, who'd seen action in the Pacific and the North Atlantic in that long-ago war, had been there with McBride. The old man would have loosened his tongue, and they'd have been rolling all night. The girl disappeared into Upper Grosvenor Street. "A long time ago, Professor. How can I help?"

"British records are very sketchy for the period, and very disorganized." Gillis smiled at the attempt to ingratiate. "I thought you might have access to records of convoys that sailed during November of that year. Just the sailing dates and arrival dates in this country would be enough for the moment."

Gillis turned to him. He preferred American cars, American girls. That one had looked Arabic, maybe. "I guess there are records — maybe even here." He smiled. He'd had one of his junior staff hunt them down. A lot of the records from Eisenhower's headquarters across at no. 20 on the square had been dumped in the cellars of the embassy after it was completed in 1960. A lot of it had never got passage across to the States and lay still mouldering down there. Andrews had got dirty, but he seemed to have had fun.

"Have you had a chance to check—" McBride let the question hang.

"This is just local colour, right?" Gillis asked sharply. McBride appeared confused, impatient even, then nodded. "OK — we'll get credit, naturally?" Again, McBride nodded. "Man, but there's some stuff down there. Eisenhower had as much material as he could stored in his headquarters after 1943. Maybe he was going to write a book?" He grinned. "All the paperwork from the clearing-houses, a lot of OSS stuff, early intelligence reports, you know the kind of thing." He paused. "I had one of my men go over some of the material after you called. I'll have him bring it in." McBride's eyes blazed. Gillis spoke into the intercom, and a navy lieutenant came in, deposited some still grimy files on the desk, and left.

Gillis saw McBride's anxiety, and dismissed it as merely professional. He had a dismissive respect for college teachers, and an anxiety to be an intelligent man of action. He considered himself superior to most of the graduate kids the CIA sent to liaise with him in London, and disliked the new rapprochement with the CIA embarked upon by the Office of Navy Intelligence.

"I have to stay here, naturally," he said, "and you can't take any of this away. But you can quote from it, take notes. Help yourself, Professor. It's called open government."

McBride shunted his chair closer to Gillis's desk, picked up the top file fastidiously as if nervous of its grime, and opened it. Gillis walked to the percolator, poured two cups of coffee and, placing one for the unnoticing McBride, returned to the window. He was never bored with his own thoughts.

McBride read through the files as swiftly as his concentration allowed, but not so quickly that Gillis would think he was searching for just one item of information. It took him an hour or more, and the coffee cooled undrunk and Gillis occasionally scratched his head or shuffled over by the window but remained silent and somehow completely composed — like machinery switched off until again required. There was some arbitrary documentation of convoys, mostly of the invoice kind for goods received. A check-list of shipping lost, more detail regarding their cargoes than their crews. He sensed Britain hanging by a thread three thousand miles long and the Germans trying to cut it in a dozen places. Especially the North Channel, around the coast of Northern Ireland. All the convoys went that way round, because of the minefield.

Eventually, he found what he was seeking. An invoice which checked off what had been lost — precise tonnages — when a three-ship convoy went down late in November, together with its cruiser escort. It was clipped to a report from the Admiralty that stated the convoy was sunk still two days out from Liverpool. At the bottom of the Admiralty note, someone with an illegible signature had scribbled "Fitzgerald lost — inform eyes only R." Roosevelt? he wondered.

"Captain Gillis?" Gillis turned slowly from the window as if coming to life.

"Yes?"

"Could you explain this?" He held out the two clipped-together sheets. He tapped the bottom of the page. Gillis mused silently.

"No. R. was the President, of course. Fitzgerald? Not a name I know. British convoy, British warship escort — no, I don't know Fitzgerald's name. Is it important?" McBride tried to appear ingenuous.

"I don't know. It's a mystery, and mysteries intrigue me. Why should someone here issue an order like that, eyes only for the President? Convoys were going down every day, and most of them were reported routinely to the Navy Department, weren't they?"

"They were. Mm. Hang on, Professor. I'll check it out." He picked up the telephone extension, and asked for a Washington number. To hide his growing excitement, McBride pretended to study the files he had earlier discarded. It was Hoskins" convoy, heading for the southern approach to Britain, through the minefield — and expecting that minefield to be swept for them. It hadn't been, and minelayers had sailed from Milford—

Gillis was talking to a friend in the Navy Department, apparently, mincing through the social niceties of silicone cocktail waitresses and the permissive London scene and families — a sudden moralistic tone invading Gillis's voice — and old times, then Gillis asked about Fitzgerald.

"Old buddy, you were hot on the period at Annapolis. Who was Fitzgerald?" He listened. McBride caught himself straining for the repJy, which was long and voluble. Then niceties again, after the explanation, then the connection severed with a chuckle by Gillis. "That guy, I could tell you—" He was struck by the intense, burning look in McBride's eyes. "I got you an answer. Boston banker thick with the President. Sent over on some fact-finding mission, maybe. Anyway, he was what they started calling a "Special Envoy" around that time." He shrugged. "Poor guy — seasick all the way, I bet, then he gets his ass blown off two days out from England."

"Yes," McBride said strangely. "Poor guy."

Minesweepers, minelayers, St George's Channel, an American envoy, a cover-up—

It had to be worth a million, maybe more. It had to be—

The man's name was Treacey. Moynihan had met him only three or four times in the last year, to receive instructions on policy initiation or to make reports on tactical progress. Treacey spent much of his time on the mainland as Operations Commandant. Ulster was not, officially, his concern or under his jurisdiction. Nevertheless, he represented Moynihan's superiors as he sat opposite him in the Bloomsbury hotel room, and Moynihan had to abide the man's anger, however much he inwardly squirmed and however unjustified he felt it to be. He concentrated on keeping his face inexpressive, neutral as Treacey's accusations stung him.

"Then Goessler had this man Hoskins killed in case you got to him — that's what you're suggesting, is it, Sean?" There was a weighted, clumsy irony, and the broad, loose face opened beneath the pudgy nose in what might have been a smile. It appeared to Moynihan as nothing more than a vehicle of threat; Treacey's smiles always did. He nodded. "Ah, Sean, the General Staff are concerned to gain control of this business." He paused, but not for any reply. His body and face impressed a tangible weight on the much smaller-framed Moynihan. "You've done very well up to now—" There was a lightness of tone that denied the truth of the compliment, " — but you're not in control here, Goessler is. Now, we may owe Herr Goessler and the organization he represents—" Moynihan was aware once more of the affection Treacey had for his own voice, his own ideas, " — and we're grateful to him for his present scheme. But he doesn't seem to want us to get hold of it. Time is getting short, as you well know, and if anything is to be done, then it will have to be done by us. We have to know the details of Goessler's scheme and put it into action ourselves. You understand me?"

Again, Moynihan nodded, despising the dryness he felt at the back of his throat. He did not want to swallow; his prominent Adam's apple would betray him if he did so. He could not even clear his throat without an admission of subordination.

"Yes, I understand." He was grateful for the ease and volume with which the words emerged. He sat more forward in his chair, matching the hunched posture of Treacey opposite him. "I agree with you. Goessler thinks we can't handle the operation. He's going to hand us the result like a sweet for a kid!"

"The indications are that the bloody meetings next week will reach an agreement. They'll agree to go on helping the British from Dublin — time's very short. What do you intend to do?"

"Hoskins obviously gave some indication to McBride, to lead him on. McBride's next move should be to act on what he knows or suspects. We have to go on watching him—"

"That might not be enough. What about the girl?" His face twisted in mistrust and contempt. Treacey loathed the Marxism which tinged the girl's attitudes. She was, for him, little different from Goessler and the East Germans and the PLO and the Russians — anyone who helped them for their own ends. The girl was English, anyway, even if she had been born in County Cork. Privilege, education, money enough to make her comfortable. Like Dugdale, an intellectual convert, or perhaps just a fanatical dilettante. He mistrusted her anyway. She should belong to the INLA, not the Provisional, with her ideology. "What about her? She's getting into bed with McBride. What does she know about his investigations?"

"She didn't see the notebooks before they were stolen."

"And who stole them?"

"It must have been Goessler — it was Goessler. Like removing Hoskins, to drive McBride along the right path." Treacey looked doubtful, disbelieving. "I'm certain it had to be Goessler," he added hurriedly, angry with himself for showing even that much weakness.

"So you may be, Sean. I hope to God you're right. The girl had better start going everywhere with McBride, instead of spending her time in department stores. Tell her that, from the General Staff." Treacey suddenly looked as if there were others behind him, physical presences who had impressed, disturbed him. He added: "If we bomb or shoot Guthrie, then we make a martyr of him, like Neave. He's got to be disgraced. But, they're getting impatient. They've given us — you, a week and no more. Then they're threatening to pick up Goessler themselves and squeeze it out of him."

"They can't—"

"I know. They shouldn't, but they will unless there's an alternative. Which means, you've created a Frankenstein. You were responsible for the adoption of this plan of Goessler's, and now you've got them so hooked on it they can't think of anything else except running it themselves. If it doesn't work, you'll be to blame, Sean." Treacey's upper lip was damp. His own standing with the General Staff in Belfast had evidently dropped. He wasn't speaking from strength and the realization of his weakness came as no comfort to Moynihan. They were hungry for a decisive blow against the Agreement, and very afraid of the following week's meetings. They had to have results, even if they invoked the wrath of the East Germans. They evidently saw Goessler's operation as the hammer-blow, the war-winning tactic, the final solution. Moynihan was afraid.

It was evident that Treacey blamed him exactly as he would have blamed the carrier of a disease that had infected him..He said, "I — they've just got to be patient. Goessler is someone we have to trust—"

"Is he someone we can trust?"

Moynihan nodded, then opened his hands. "I think so."

"Belfast is desperate for results. The feedback is worrying them. Guthrie may well carry the day. That's why you only have a week. Get something by then."

He stood up, as if anxious now to depart. Moynihan, busy with his own thoughts, did not bother to see him out. When Treacey had gone, however, he poured himself a large whiskey, swallowing it greedily, a suppressed tremor running through his body as if he had taken some unpalatable medicine or a poison. The room depressed and diminished him. It was no scene for grand designs, for solutions to problems. He wanted to go out, walk off his mood, but decided against it.

The General Staff- Mulligan, O" Hare, Quinn, Lennon, all of them — had indeed become his Frankenstein. They'd abandoned other plans, even slowed the mainland bombing campaign, in order to adopt Goessler's scheme to ruin Guthrie. They'd taken it on trust, like greedy children a promise of cake. Taken his word, because he was convinced and his was the best tactical mind in Belfast. Now they wanted results.

He had to deliver. Inside a week. Claire Drummond had to come up with something—

He swallowed again at the whiskey, coughing on its harshness as if it did indeed contain some poison.

McBride was about to tell Claire Drummond what he had discovered at the embassy — she could see his excitement like the halo of a St Elmo's Fire, animating and enveloping his frame with electricity — when the telephone rang in his room. Her face darkened with anger.

It was Goessler.

"Professor Goessler, good to hear from you!" McBride yelled into the telephone. Bad line, he mouthed to Claire, grinning and hardly noticing how pale she had become. "Yes, I'm well, and back from Ireland safely." He chuckled at some joke of Goessler's, and Claire Drummond turned in her chair so that her back was to him. She could hardly control the tension nagging her hands and feet into helpless movement. Goessler — why?

McBride listened as Goessler launched into a long, apologetic explanation. Goessler had rung him once in Cork, to report only minimal progress in collating supporting evidence of the documents they had unearthed. No one else like Kohl had appeared. Now, he seemed to be trying to explain, with excessive bonhomie, that he had stopped working. McBride suspected a demand for a greater share of the potential profits, but he wasn't going to agree, bearing in mind what he had unearthed since leaving East Berlin. Goessler was out, except for the agreed percentage. Maybe not even that.

"You see," Goessler was explaining, 'they do not have to say why, or for what reason, my friend. All they say is, stop doing this, stop helping this man or that man, don't ask those questions. And, we agree with them. We stop."

"With who, Professor? Who are we talking about?" He had one finger in his ear to shut out all extraneous sound and was trying to hear through the excessive mush on the line. "What?"

"The police, of course. Oh, they have many names, and ranks and jobs — but, the police. You would call them the secret police."

McBride was puzzled rather than chilled, not taking Goessler more seriously at first than as another historian prying into his researches; then he went cold, and the missing files and then the pillow shutting out Hoskins" face were omnipresent.

"Why — why would they be interested, Professor?"

"Oh, they're not interested, my friend, not in your researches. It's me they keep an eye on. Too many contacts with Westerners, and they suspect my motives. Don't worry — I am ringing only to apologize for not being able to continue our work. A lengthy pause, into which it seemed McBride was to pour some unobtrusive but satisfying balm.

"Our arrangement stands, Professor," he said finally. Goessler's relief was almost audible.

"I knew I could rely upon you, my friend. Good luck with your work."

And then the connection was cut with chilling suddenness. McBride put down the receiver slowly.

"What is it?" Claire asked.

"Mm? Oh, Goessler's backing out — some trouble with the police, or something."

"Hag-ridden with police, those eastern European countries," she observed, seemingly indifferent. "Neurotic about contact with the West. Do you need him?"

"He could have been useful — but, no, I don't need him now." He smiled. Her answering smile invited confidentiality, and he seemed to see her more seriously. She could help him. He put aside the reluctance that bubbled up, and sat down next to her. Quickly, he told her what

Gillis had found, and the explanation. Then he back-tracked, beginning with Menschler — she'd heard some of it before, but he pedantically ignored the state of her knowledge, as if a confessional necessity had overcome all reluctance — going on to her father, to Hackney and Hoskins.

When he had finished, he appeared drained. She poured him a drink, aware again of the fine net of nerves lying just below her skin and which threatened to betray her excitement, her weakness in the grip of personal and ideological passions. McBride had been pointed ahead by Goessler's withdrawal, prompted into quicker, more intense enquiry by an increased sense of being alone. Venal motive, but appealing to the ego, too. Goessler was a clever man. She handed McBride the drink, and he took it with a smile as he might have done from a wife. She had succeeded. She was now the ally, the amanuensis.

"Trinity House," she said firmly.

"What?"

"Merchant Navy records in Trinity House. You could check there on this convoy, and whether Hoskins served on one of the ships. If he survived, then—"

"You're right!" He was animated again, and proud of her, she saw. Clever girl. She swallowed an irritation she had felt often with Moynihan when he was patronizing her intelligence. "By God, girl, you're right. Witnesses are what we need. If that convoy went down in the minefield, then they'd know it. My God—" He was galvanized now, and she enjoyed the control she had just exercised over him.

"You'd better look up their number," she said as he embraced her. Allies.

She'd call Moynihan later, and set up a meeting. He'd have to hear it in person, what she chose to tell him. She'd make him bring Treacey. She nibbled at McBride's ear as she felt with a crawling sensation his breath on her neck.

Walsingham's duty surveillance team watched McBride enter Trinity House on Tower Hill, then parked their Vauxhall near Tower Hill Station, from which point they could observe the main portico and steps of Trinity House. To be certain they did not miss McBride when he came out again, one of them, Ryan, took a newspaper and sat on a bench in Trinity Square gardens. When McBride left, he would signal the car, then go in and discover what McBride was doing there. To elicit the information would require no more than his CID card, one of the many organizations of security to which he was accredited.

McBride came out again near lunchtime. The woman that the man on the park bench had been observing waved to McBride, then joined him on the pavement opposite the gardens. They embraced. The watcher stood up, could almost hear the starting of the Vauxhall's engine though he knew that was impossible in the lunch hour traffic. He watched McBride and the woman — Drummond's daughter from his briefing — talking animatedly as they walked away towards Tower Hill, saw the Vauxhall tailing them down Savage Gardens, then he crossed the road to the main steps of Trinity House. In the imposing Front Hall with its numerous models of ships, he showed his CID card to the security guard, who put through a call to the Assistant Keeper of Records. In five minutes, Ryan was closeted with the Assistant Keeper, being shown the material that McBride had requested.

No, the Assistant Keeper had no way of knowing which names McBride had been concerned to check. Were there specific names? Professor McBride from the University of Oregon was interested in the kind of records, their history and comprehensiveness. Something for a paper he was to deliver to the American History of the Sea and Seafarers Society in Boston on his return to the United States. Ryan almost laughed, inwardly applauding the smokescreen McBride was capable of creating, his pulse quickening at the implications of such an elaborate subterfuge.

Records — just lists of names, sailors and the ships on which they had served. Period 1940 to "45. Trinity House, as Ryan well knew, was and is responsible for the relief of distressed and aged master mariners, but it also keeps records of all merchant seamen in distress or requiring any kind of help — all the old men with a life at sea behind them and nothing in front — together with its work in erecting and maintaining all lightships and lighthouses and being the chief pilotage authority in Britain.

Ryan clenched down on his drifting thoughts as the Assistant Keeper rambled on, repeating the information he had passed to McBride before leaving him alone with the records. Names of old sailors? Would it mean anything to Walsingham, who'd get his report direct from Exton?

As soon as politeness allowed, Ryan left Trinity House and called in his findings. The duty officer assured him that Exton would make sense of a visit to Trinity House. Meanwhile, a requisition for the Trinity House records would be issued. Would Ryan like to hang about and help carry them to the van when it arrived?

Ryan put down the phone before his expletive could be topped, and stepped out of the telephone box into the warm lunchtime sunshine, feeling hungry.

The motor launch came close inshore, off Garrettstown Strand in Courtmacsharry Bay, but against the tide and they had to lower a raft to put McBride and Gilliatt ashore. There was a high wind that streamed water over the sides of the raft like a heavy, driving rain, and the sea was choppy and cantankerous. Two ratings rowed inshore, but McBride and Gilliatt still had to wade to the beach out of waist-deep water because the raft almost overturned and its crew could hardly hold it against the retreating tide. McBride felt his legs go from under him the moment his feet touched the bottom and then, as he spluttered and splashed about with his arms, Gilliatt's hand grip his collar and drag him upright. Gilliatt was laughing. The raft bobbed away from them, sudden moonlight from behind ragged cloud silhouetting it and the slim, graceful shape of the ML beyond it.

"Come on, McBride, you really are no bloody sailor!"

"Tressed man, sir," McBride answered in an adopted brogue, coughing out seawater in the wake of the remark. They hurried through the shallows onto the smooth wet sand. Turning, they could see the raft being hoisted aboard the ML, then the engines moved up from idle and the launch seemed to do no more than ease away from them in silent apology as it turned out to sea, heading back to England.

McBride jogged Gilliatt's arm. "Wistful?"

"What? Oh, sorry."

"Just rather be there than here, eh?"

"Working for Walsingham is what I can't take," Gilliatt replied with unexpected vehemence.

They walked on up the beach towards the dry sand above the tide-line, McBride systematically wringing his sleeves and trouser-legs and jacket as they went.

"My socks are drenched. I'm surprised you feel that strongly about him. Charlie's all right."

Gilliatt halted, and waited until McBride was looking at him. McBride stopped wringing the last moisture from a sleeve, and stilled his chattering teeth with an effort. "Just watch out for him, Michael. Don't let him put your head in too many lions" mouths, that's all."

"God, I'm cold." McBride attempted to avert the too-direct remark.

"Listen to me, Michael. I've met a lot of people like Charles Walsingham—"

"Are you going to lecture me, Uncle?" McBride sat down like a disgruntled child and pulled off his boots, then his socks. He twisted them in his hands and the water streamed onto the sand, darkening it like blood. McBride wondered why the image had invaded his mind. He looked up at Gilliatt standing over him.

"I'm just trying to warn you—"

"You'll give me a lecture on Drummond when you've met him, I suppose?" McBride's temper was completely under control, though he did resent Gilliatt's interference in his affairs.

"I might well do that." Gilliatt obviously thought what he had to impart was important. There was an evident attempt to remain calm and not to antagonize McBride or be antagonized by him. "My old school was full of people like him, wearing their charm like the grass they use to cover lion-traps—"

"I like that," McBride said mischievously.

"He does. Walsingham resents being in the navy at all, and is prepared only to use this war to advance his career in intelligence. You remember that I've worked in intelligence before. I met people like him, every week!"

"All right. I'll watch out for myself." McBride was abstractedly rubbing his feet warm again before putting on his socks. When he finished talking, his teeth went on chattering. "God, I'm cold. What's the time?"

"Ten minutes to two."

"Bloody early! No wonder Drummond isn't here with his little car and his rum ration." He held out his hand and Gilliatt pulled him to his feet. Then he sat down and began to take off his boots. The understanding between them was almost instinctive, one on watch while the other was off-guard, easily surprised. McBride hardly remarked it, except that a sense of Gilliatt's dependability lurked at the back of his mind. McBride scanned the empty beach in another gleam of moonlight, the wind almost visible as a stream of silver. Sand pattered against his trouser-legs and the ungloved hands at his sides. "This will be one of their beaches."

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

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

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

"How many beaches do you reckon?"

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

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

"He can't use British troops."

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

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

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

"Five to."

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

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

"How far to your place?"

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER TWELVE Survivors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"This call was made to your office yesterday—"

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

"Listen to it, please."

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

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

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

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

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

"Admiralty records."

"What?" Disbelief rather than anxiety.

"There is still material in existence, material that has been overlooked up to now."

"My name, Charles. How did he get my name?"

"I'm not certain. I'm having that checked. However, he has it."

Guthrie went on nodding periodically in the silence that followed, punctuating some internal debate. Walsingham was being made to feel at fault, incompetent. All the while, however, Guthrie's face remained a smooth, inexpressive mask; unless the gloom disguised tiny flickers of emotion. Walsingham wanted a light to study him by. Eventually, Guthrie spoke. "It would be far better than shooting me, wouldn't it?" He grinned. "Much better."

"Yes."

"Is there an IRA connection?" He seemed to be asking himself, going back over his recent meeting, perhaps re-examining it in another, colder light.

"I don't know. I've checked with his agents over here. They don't have much idea of what he's working on, but they do know he's aiming for a very big sale, and a lot of money."

"Simple cupidity?"

"It could be."

"Any connection through the father?"

"No. He was an agent of mine, that is true. But there was nothing to give rise to a motive there." Walsingham rubbed his forehead, inspected his hand. "Rather the reverse. He'd not like the IRA because of his father."

"Then is it as sinister as it seems?" Guthrie held up his hand. "I fully realize the consequences for myself and for future relations between ourselves and Dublin — the dreadful consequences for the whole of Ulster — should this matter become public. But, does it need to become public? Can't you talk to this man McBride?"

"We could, but I'm not certain that I want to do that. Oh, we are having him watched, and we know more or less how much he knows." He paused, but did not elaborate. "But, we know very little about him as yet, and I do not want to make any precipitate moves."

"I understand that. There are no Irish hands in this pie, you suggest?"

"Not that we know. As far as we can be certain, McBride has no connection, even in the United States, with any Irish organization, and since our surveillance began there has been no contact with any suspected person." The statement sounded dry, official as it was meant to. Walsingham now almost regretted making this personal appearance, as if he had run to Guthrie to apologize or confess. "If we obtain evidence of any — organized plot against you or next week's meetings, then we shall act. In any case, McBride can never be allowed to publish."

"Then it might come to the same thing, might it not, whether he's alone or part of a conspiracy?" Guthrie's voice was similarly dry, official. He steepled his hands in front of his shadowed face.

Reluctantly, Walsingham nodded. He could see Michael McBride's face, imposed upon the white, featureless mask across the table from him. Hallucinatory, and unsettling.

"Yes, it might." McBride might well have to die. He saw Guthrie nod, satisfied it seemed with the monosyllable. Walsingham wanted to tell Guthrie about Hoskins" murder, suddenly, to unsettle and disturb him, show him that events might have run away from them already. Who was Hoskins? Who had just smothered him as they might have done a Christmas puppy they had tired of amusing and feeding? Who had killed Hoskins, and was the killing connected?

The thoughts seemed to ally him more closely, even indissolubly, with Guthrie. Common interest, common enemy. He nodded, then repeated himself more strongly.

"Yes," he said, and now the processes involved were not too covert, too removed from moral precepts to be voiced. "McBride will, in all probability, have to be removed."

The dark shape of the man came steadily towards him. All his attention was focused on the shape which he could see clearly, sharply even against the night sky. He hovered on the edge of unconsciousness, fighting back the black surges that ran through his body and enveloped his thoughts in order to keep the image of the approaching man clear and unaffected. He had given up trying to move his arm, and his left eye had closed against the trickle of blood from his scalp. But he wanted to see the man's face, in the last moment. He had come to believe he would see Drummond's long, sardonic face, cheeks drawn in as against the flavour of a lemon, before he was finished off. That imperative, that his leap of suspicion should be proven, dominated his wavering awareness.

Ten yards, five. A coat against the cold, a cap. The gun hidden against the form. McBride did not see the other two figures, behind the shadow over himself. The figure paused. McBride stared up, and hopelessly tried to make out the man's face. Then, in a dislocated sequence, overlapping on his senses and understanding like a distressed sea in which he was drowning, the man above him pitched forward as if he had tripped over McBride's body and did not even put out his hands to break his fall. McBride rolled his head to watch what the man would do next even as the noise of Gilliatt's gun reached him, reverberating as if it had been fired in a small room, then he rolled his head back when the man in the coat and cap did not move, attracted by two further shots. Something whistled shrilly and angrily in the air above him but he could not focus on the nearest shapes — a man and a stunted tree — nor on the more distant shape that seemed to be running. His arm hurt too much now, and he turned his head lollingly once more to study the body on the ground near him, which did not move, then he felt everything going a long way away as the pain shuddered through him, followed by utter blackness in which the flames from Gilliatt's gun pricked on the retinae like fireflies for a moment before they, too, faded.

When he responded to the gentle slaps of Gilliatt's hand, he felt his arm quarrel with movement and consciousness immediately. Gilliatt — he was close enough for his face not to be a blank — was kneeling over him, cradling his head in one hand, slapping him lightly with the other.

"Sorry," he said, "but I thought you'd prefer it to ditch water."

"I–I'm all right."

"I know. I've had a look at you. Arm sliced open, forehead with a three-inch gash back into your hair, but otherwise OK."

"How long—?"

"No more than three or four minutes. I'm afraid we'd better move—"

"Yes, they'll be back. You?"

"Just stunned. The grenade exploded nearer you than me. I fell in the ditch and kept quiet until I could see how many there were. Three — one dead, another wounded I think, but two of the three have scarpered." Gilliatt appeared suddenly reflective, and a spasm of disgust crossed his face, white in the moonlight coming suddenly from behind a cloud. McBride's teeth were chattering in the suddenly sensed cold wind, but he managed to say:

"We're all the bloody same when threatened, Peter. All the bloody same."

"Doesn't help, finding out, does it? I enjoyed it, for God's sake. Shooting him in the back—"

"Help me up. They'll be back."

McBride groaned as Gilliatt hauled him to his feet, then leant against the taller man, breathing raggedly, trying to control the lightheadedness that made the moonlit scene swirl and dip. He concentrated on his last rational thought as he lay on the ground, the shadowy figure whose face he half-expected moving towards him.

"Drummond," he said through clenched teeth.

"You think they got him?"

"No!" McBride gripped Gilliatt's supporting arm fiercely. "It's Drummond — he set the dogs on us."

"You're delirious. Can you walk?"

"Listen to me!" McBride began a coughing fit. His arm throbbed intolerably. When his breathing was loud but steady again, he went on: "Only Drummond knew — only Drummond. Don't you understand?"

Gilliatt felt he wanted to physically separate himself from McBride. The accent, the anger and hatred made him understand something beyond McBride, some spurious vision of Ireland. He tried to dismiss it, but it clung like a cold mist to muscle and bone and mind.

"Accident," he replied without conviction.

"No. No accident. Drummond wants us dead." Again the accent. Gilliatt wanted to side with Drummond, a man he had never met but who was a naval officer working undercover in that alien country. Hatred. It chilled him.

"Let's get out of here. Which way — to where?" Gilliatt felt alone, exposed and vulnerable as if he had walked into some disputed territory.

"Drummond—"

"No, God damn you! Your place — how far is it from here?"

"Twenty miles."

Gilliatt looked out to sea, towards the direction in which the ML had disappeared. Vulnerability soughed against him like the chilly wind, and McBride's shaking transmitted itself like fear.

"We'll have to make it, then, won't we?" he said abruptly.

McBride studied his hanging arm. He could feel, through the pain, the binding Gilliatt had applied, realizing at the same moment that it was part of his shirt. He touched his head, felt the blood congealing at the hairline, then dismissed the wound.

"OK, skipper. My place—" He broke off, distracted, then he murmured: "Maureen—"

"What did you say?"

"My wife."

"You think she's—?"

"Drummond's not such a fool. Waste of effort. Come on, then." McBride had dismissed any fears on behalf of his wife, but he could not disguise the determination that fear had lent him. Gilliatt let go of his arm. "We're going to be running from this moment, Peter."

Gilliatt hesitated, as if the first step might be the most dangerous.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean you can forget the job we're supposed to do, forget the mission—" He almost spat out the word. "Forget anything except staying alive."

"Don't be hysterical."

"Hysterical?" McBride moved the couple of paces that separated them. "Drummond must have been helping our friends across the Channel for a long time. If he had — and he has — then he's in with the IRA as well. Don't you understand? Drummond set up this ambush. Where is he, eh? Waiting at his bloody farm for news of our tragic demise, Peter! He'll want to finish us off now not because of the Germans, but because we know about him. He's been sitting in Ireland for the last few years with plenty of time to despise Chamberlain and plenty of time to be impressed by the Fuhrer. Perhaps you can't live in this God-forsaken country without hating the British! Look, I know Drummond wants us dead. If you don't believe it, then just act as if you do. It might save your life. What's that?"

"A car?"

Both men strained to listen. The wind whipped the sound away from them, then lulled so that they could hear the almost-silence of a car engine just turning over, then being switched off.

The silence menaced them.

"The track is over there," McBride whispered, pointing north to a line of pencilled blackness. A hedge, Gilliatt supposed. The moon disappeared behind more blown cloud. "Cut across this way."

McBride moved off the path they had been following up from the beach, climbing heavily into then out of the ditch, breathing stertorously. Gilliatt jumped the ditch, caught up with him. McBride dragged himself stubbornly, angrily through a gap in the thorny hedge, and Gilliatt followed him more cautiously, snagging his coat and hands. Then they heard Drummond's call from no more than thirty yards away.

"Michael? Michael, are you all right?"

Gilliatt was about to comment when McBride pulled him roughly down beside him into the shadow of the hedge.

"Shut up!" McBride whispered savagely, glaring into Gilliatt's face.

"But—"

"Shut up, damn you!"

Again, Gilliatt sensed the distance between them like an uncrossable gulf, aware of nationalities which dictated their individuality, governed it. Drummond's English tones again, then, a further assertion that Gilliatt was somehow on the wrong side in a war not of his choosing.

"Michael?" They could hear his footsteps now, coming down the track to the beach. "Michael — where are you?" There was no hesitation and no fear in the footsteps. Gilliatt saw Drummond's form through the hedge, passing them. He listened until the footsteps stopped by the dead body. A low whistle of surprise, a grunt as Drummond got to his feet again. "Michael?"

Gilliatt realized that McBride had his revolver in his good hand, saw his implacable face.

Gilliatt grabbed McBride's gun hand, and the Irishman looked at him with unconcealed hatred in his eyes. Gilliatt looked back at Drummond, who was casting about for any sign of them. He wanted to stand up, call out to Drummond and disprove McBride's wild suspicions. But he felt the quiver of hate running through McBride's frame, and Drummond was little more than a dark upright shadow and there was a dead IRA man on the ground only yards from them, and the impression of danger was so omnipresent that he remained silent.

Drummond hurried away, back up the track. McBride immediately got to his feet, as if to pursue him. Gilliatt stood up.

"Are we going after him?"

McBride seemed to debate the matter, then shook his head. "No. Not yet. He's got too many helpers."

Drummond's treachery seemed improbable, McBride's suspicions delirious. "What do we do, then?"

"No night for us to be walking the countryside," McBride said, grinning, leaning into Gilliatt's face. "We'll try the beach. The tide's out, we can cross the inlet to Harbour View, maybe walk all the way to Timoleague before we join the Clonakilty road."

"Can you make it?" Gilliatt already knew the answer.

"Oh, don't worry about me. I'm not going to die just yet. I have to see a man about a coffin and a funeral service. Come on, let's get back down to the beach before the moon comes out again."

McBride squeezed roughly back through the hedge, and Gilliatt hesitated for a moment, in the grip of a momentous, undeniable reluctance. Then fear came with a sudden chill blast of wind, and he hurried after McBride.

The First Sea Lord Turned from the tall window of his spacious office in the Admiralty, hands still behind his back. He had been looking across St James's Park to a smudge on the grey horizon which was the last sky-writing of the previous evening's Luftwaffe raid. The smoke over Battersea worked powerfully upon his imagination, suggesting the necessity of the man Walsingham's proposal, Emerald, while it also seemed some kind of prophetic warning, a commandment rather than a sign to follow. He unclenched his hands, then attended to March and Walsingham, who sat on the other side of his massive desk. The long room that was his office seemed to press around him once he turned from the window, almost threatening in the dull gleam of morning light from the polished dark wood and the book-shelves. The high light ceiling seemed lower. Conspiracy had entered the room. The ranks of portraits on the walls seemed to frown with disturbing unanimity. The First Sea Lord consciously did not glance in the direction of Nelson's portrait, above the fireplace.

"Commander Walsingham, while I accept the evidence you have so assiduously amassed, and believe that the Germans plan to mount an invasion of the Irish Republic—" He glanced swiftly and keenly at Walsingham, seeing the quick passage of emotion on the man's face before he gained control of his features and they reassumed their non-committal tightness. Then his eyes, as he continued speaking, wandered again over the dark wood in the room. The light often made the wood translucent and alive, but now only depths were suggested, the absorption of light. "But I cannot recommend to the War Cabinet the suggestion contained in your Emerald file. I shall, however, request a meeting with the Prime Minister later today, and I am certain the evidence you have presented will be discussed in full Cabinet either today or tomorrow."

The hour-long meeting was suddenly over. The First Sea Lord felt no relief, for immediately he finished speaking the full weight of Walsingham's evidence seemed to settle on his shoulders. The man's solution was unthinkable—

Yet he sensed a battered city beyond his office, and a country beleaguered beyond that. Britain was powerless to prevent the invasion of Ireland and the opening up of a second front. He hoped March and Walsingham would leave his office quickly. He needed to sit down.

The thin grey trail of smoke was apparent to them as they cycled down the last half-mile of the road to Leap. McBride had borrowed two ancient and unsafe cycles in Clonakilty from his wife's cousin, and they had made good time through the last hours of the night and the slow grey dawn. Gilliatt was weary, yet the relief of having encountered none of Drummond's men remained with him until they saw the smoke beyond the last slope. He glanced at McBride, who at once began to ride furiously up the slope. His face was chalk-white, strained, tired and afraid. The hours making good time along the still wet shoreline to Timoleague seemed to have taken little out of him, even wounded — even the jarring of his arm as he guided the cycle seemed to leave him with reserves of purpose and a kind of wild, determined pleasure in outrunning Drummond. Now, however, he appeared drained and fearful.

McBride was twenty yards ahead as Gilliatt topped the rise, pedalling furiously towards the shell of a burned-out cottage that Gilliatt knew must be McBride's home. Gilliatt paused, as if not to intrude upon an evident grief. Another, more selfish emotion occupied him gradually. The IRA had committed an atrocity, whether McBride's wife was amid the ruins of the cottage or not. Gilliatt was afraid for himself. He could hear McBride calling his wife's name as he flung down the bicycle and clambered into the smouldering ruins of the cottage — white distemper scarred and blackened, the roof fallen in, smoke wreathing the small, demented figure of McBride. Gilliatt pedalled down the slope, pulling up in front of the cottage just as McBride emerged. His hands and face were blackened, and he was sweating so that rivulets of white appeared down his cheeks. His eyes were feverishly bright.

"Is she—?" Gilliatt began, letting his cycle fall to the ground.

"No. I can't find her." There was no relief.

"Where could she be?"

McBride seemed not to have considered any hopeful explanation, and to be nonplussed. He rubbed the dirt on his good hand into his face, making a wilder figure of himself. The hand then flapped loosely at the air as if trying to gain some grip or purchase.

"Her father's—"

"Where, man?"

"Ross Carbery. She might be there — sometimes when I'm away she goes, sometimes not. I don't know—"

Gilliatt interrupted the leaky tap of McBride's thoughts, stopped the dribble of rusty ideas. "Let's go there. You're sure?" He indicated the ruined cottage with a nod of his head. McBride shook his head like a wounded animal. As if to complement the image, he seemed made aware of his arm, and clutched it to stop it hurting.

"No. She's not there."

"Come on, then."

McBride turned to look at the remains of his home. He felt the blackened timbers, the charred walls and burst, scorched furniture wrench at him. He understood the house as a destination rather than a home, but that did not weaken its impact upon him. Broken china, charred books similarly now seemed to bear a weight of significance never previously possessed. The sight of the cottage distracted him from thoughts of his wife for some moments. Then he turned his back on it, picked up his bicycle — stifling a groan as pain shot through his damaged arm — and mounted it.

"Come on, Peter." He saw Gilliatt's expression of bemused, anxious fear. "It's all right," he added gently. "I think she'll be with her father. This—" He tossed his head to indicate the cottage at his back, " — is just to tell me the game is up, there's nowhere to hide. Quite the little Nazi, isn't he?" He grinned brokenly, swallowing as something of Gilliatt's fear reached him. He shrugged it off. "I don't believe it could be Drummond—"

McBride studied Gilliatt in scornful silence. "We'll have to ask him when we meet him again, won't we?" He hesitated, then some urgency seemed to press on him. "Come on. I'm hungry."

The Trinity House records had supplied the present whereabouts of seamen listed as sailing on the three ships of the convoy lost in November 1940, where and if they had entered homes administered by Trinity House or an affiliated organization. McBride had a small handful of names of men still living, scattered across the country in seamen's homes. His eagerness had selected the home in Chatham, less than thirty miles from London.

The day was bright, clear and warm and he was grateful for the company of Claire Drummond. He intended to go on from Chatham to Hastings and the third name on his short list, and to spend the night with her possibly, in Canterbury. He had never seen the cathedral city, and the lightness of tourism seemed appropriate — or desirous at the least. As they left Lewisham behind and crossed the river Darent, McBride felt the weight of recent events diminish. Hoskins" murder, the theft of his notebooks and files, receded.

He was not aware of the tail car at any point in their journey along the A2, and they arrived in Chatham just before lunch. McBride was enjoying merely the pleasure of driving and the woman's company. As they turned into the car park of the Red Dog Inn in the centre of the town, he anticipated pickle and bread and cheese as fiercely as he might have done something of much more significance. Claire Drummond was aware of the mercurial changes of mood of which McBride was capable. He seemed able to shed past experience almost at will, leaving it neatly packaged against some vague time when he might need it and return to it. She had been surprised at his easiness in the aftermath of Hoskins" death, his lack of curiosity concerning the perpetrator, even his lack of fear concerning his own safety. For herself, she could not share his enthusiasm for seeking out derelict sailors who might or might not have something of interest to say. But she and Moynihan had determined that she must accompany him everywhere while they followed his trail, because he was their only chance of circumventing Goessler.

The tail car parked in the pub car park a minute after they had done so, and Ryan followed McBride into the lounge bar. He waited until McBride had ordered, then went to the bar. He sat reading the Daily Mail until the couple left. Then he followed them out into the car park. His driver started the engine of the Sierra as McBride's Nissan pulled out into Chatham's town-centre traffic.

McBride spent some time locating the seamen's home on a new, almost treeless estate on the outskirts of the town, near the M2. Its former building in the dockyard area had been demolished almost ten years previously. The new low building with its large picture windows looking towards the motorway and the North Downs in one direction and the estate's shopping centre in the other, huddled close to a new, ugly Catholic church and an already grimy and graffiti-bearing Leisure Centre. The car park of the Leisure Centre ran behind the seamen's home, almost overlapping its trim grass verges like a frozen concrete sea. Claire Drummond elected to remain in the car, listening to the radio. She fumed silently but knew she could not intrude upon his conversations with the men he sought without stepping out of character. She relied on her influence to prevent McBride keeping anything from her.

The tail car parked near the small supermarket across the road.

McBride had spoken over the telephone with the Warden of the home, and he was ushered into his office immediately he announced his arrival to the receptionist. He was evidently a small surprise in a deep and rutted routine. Mr Blackshaw was not discontented, but he had through the years of his work with the elderly and the dying and the past-livers lost something of his own vitality, even individuality. The inmates of the home seemed to have lived on him like vampires, or simply worn him out with their combined weight of years and extreme experiences. After he had drawn from McBride an account of the book he was researching, he reluctantly conducted him to one of the home's two television rooms where, he said, the two friends he wished to interview would be watching the afternoon racing.

"You will have to be patient," Blackshaw offered as they clicked down a block-floored corridor, clean, neat and aseptic. None of the untidiness of a real home, McBride observed. Mr Blackshaw's recommendation of patience was that of one who had tired of the virtue, or who saw himself in some impossibly heroic alternative reality shrugging it off like a set of chains. McBride nodded in reply.

"Are they pretty cognitive?"

Blackshaw appeared puzzled, then tapped his forehead questioningly, to which McBride nodded again.

"Oh, I'm afraid not very. They are very old." Blackshaw shook his head, and McBride was tempted to ask him his opinion on euthanasia.

"Ga-ga, uh?"

"Not quite. But their nuggets of wisdom are buried rather deeply these days." Blackshaw appeared surprised at his own epithet, but, emboldened, added, "We have begun to disbelieve the existence of the gold, Professor McBride." He smiled, letting his lips have an unaccustomed freedom to form the expression. McBride responded with an open, easy grin.

"Thanks for the warning. How long may I have with them?"

Blackshaw looked at his watch. "Between races, you mean? Tea will be coming round to them in half an hour. You'll not have their attention for some time after that. Here we are."

The television room was darkened because the colour set was facing the window and the reflections of the day had to be shut out so that they did not interpose themselves between rheumy eyes and the racing. Blackshaw stood beside McBride in the doorway for a moment, as if at a loss. Then he whispered, "The two sitting watching the TV."

There was a third old man, impeccably tidy and wearing a collar and tie, asleep in the darkest corner of the room, apparently at ease with and unconscious of the excessive volume of the set. The commentator's voice was approaching a climax, stringing together the names of the leading horses in a meaningless gabble which did not seem to impinge on the fixed and still attention of the two old men Blackshaw had pointed out.

"I'll leave you," he said. "That one's Mills, and the other one's name is Laker. They've forgotten their seamen's ranks, so I shouldn't worry."

McBride watched Blackshaw scuttle away down the corridor, then entered the television room. The race had finished. The old man pointed out as Mills shifted in his chair, but his companion continued to stare at the screen with all the attention he might once have given to a personal crisis. McBride approached them.

"Good afternoon — Mr Mills and Mr Laker?" Both heads moved suddenly, in accord, and four preternaturally bright eyes watched him. He represented some obscure threat, the eyes exclaimed. The third old man slept on. McBride sat down, dragging a chair near them, then leaned forward towards them, displaying the cassette-recorder he removed from his briefcase. The television had given him a means of impressing himself on them. "I'm from the BBC," he announced.

"American," one old man said to the other, who merely nodded, mouth open as if to catch the information like an insect on the wing. "Bloody American." The face puckered to an imitation of vehemence, but there was no emotion left to hold the expression and it loosened into senility almost at once.

"That's right," McBride said brightly. "I'm working for the BBC for a time."

"Know that Sylvia Peters, do you?" Laker asked. "On the news."

"I've met her."

There was silence. Jaws worked, masticating the morsel of information, tasting the suggested proximity to celebrity. "And Alvar Liddell?" Mills asked. McBride was nonplussed, regretting he had adopted the role he had. He merely nodded while both pairs of eyes watching him gleamed interrogatively behind the lenses of their National Health spectacles. Mills, McBride decided, was even older than Laker. They were twinned in old age; once they might have been different in build or colouring or feature, but now they were almost identical — hairless, wrinkled, grey-skinned. Strangely, however, their hands recollected youth, and suppleness and strength, lying curled like small, sharp-toothed animals in their laps.

McBride switched on the recorder, drawing their attention immediately. Mills nudged Laker, who nudged him in return.

"I'd like to interview you two gentlemen, if I may," he said. "About your wartime experiences. You were both serving on the SS Ashford in 1940, weren't you?" Both of them looked guilty immediately, and their eyes cast about on the floor as if for identity documents or lost memories.

"Mm," Mills offered, committed to nothing. His companion made a similar noise at the back of his throat.

"You were on convoys across the North Atlantic, I believe?" The tape numbers rolled on into the thirties. The microphone he held towards them picked up the gentle snores of the sleeping man. Play School began on the television, and Mills and Laker immediately attended afresh to the set, hands stirring, clasping each other in both laps, backs more erect. Cartoon figures flashed on the screen to accompany a nonsense song. McBride bit back impatience, thrusting the microphone nearer. "Your ship was sunk by Germans in November 1940, two days out from Liverpool." He pronounced each word precisely, but without immediate effect.

Then Mills turned his head slowly like a compass unsure of magnetic north, and looked at McBride. Then he cackled. "Nowhere near Liverpool." He nudged Laker. "Was it?"

"Was what?"

"Liverpool."

"Near where?"

"Cork."

McBride hesitated a moment too long, expecting an elaboration that didn't come or simply indulging the small prickle of excitement in his stomach. When he was ready to prompt them, they were watching two enlarged hands folding paper.

"You said Cork." There was a distinct lack of interest. "Cork is in southern Ireland. Were you in Cork?" Laker turned his head, irritated that the intruder had not yet left. The tape numbers rolled mutely into three figures. Laker appeared about to add something, then his attention was directed towards the set by another nudge from Mills. The folded paper had become a boat which was launched upon a bowl of water. Mills looked across at McBride.

"We were in the water for hours, just waiting for the Jerries to surface and machine-gun us. Oil in the lungs, a lot of "em." Even his voice was clearer, sharper, insistent with momentarily recaptured emotion.

"Yes?"

The camera had cut from the boat to a glove puppet. A rather supercilious sheep's head which minced its words. McBride recognized an import from his own country.

"Mint sauce," Laker said, cackling and leaving McBride bemused.

Mills, however, seemed to dislike the puppet, or was now burdened with a memory he wished to be rid of.

"A fishing boat picked up a few of us, only because we'd been swimming all night and taken inshore by the current. Irish buggers, but all right. Saved our lives."

"You landed in Cork?" Already McBride could envisage a journey to Cork to seek traces of British sailors brought ashore in late November 1940. Mills merely nodded in reply.

"Most of them dead," he added. A story with pictures was being narrated by the television, and his attention slowly returned to it. McBride could sense the exact moment when he lost him, his attention slipping beneath age's dark water and drowning in an almost-life. He did not know whether a lot of men died in 1940, or had been claimed since. Reluctantly, he switched off the recorder and stood up.

Neither old man saw him leave. Mr Blackshaw, too, perhaps guilty at abandoning him to two of his charges, was nowhere in evidence. McBride emerged into the bright sunshine, waving to Claire across the car park.

Something. Not much, but enough to encourage him. Somewhere, maybe in Hastings or Great Yarmouth or Bognor Regis there would be someone who wasn't senile and who remembered exactly how the British convoy had been sunk — by British mines.

Maureen McBride was washing up in the small downstairs kitchen at the rear of Devlin's grocery shop. Her father's assistant was serving in the shop while Devlin himself was out making deliveries. She seemed unsurprised to see her husband, Gilliatt thought, until she became fully aware of his blackened and dishevelled appearance.

"You look as if you've been dragged through a hedge backwards, Michael McBride," she said, soap bubbles wreathing her forearms, a gleaming, willow-patterned plate in her hands. It fell and smashed on the stone floor of the kitchen as McBride grabbed hold of her and squeezed her against him. Maureen saw the tall stranger watching in relief and amusement, and was embarrassed; surprised, too, at the sudden display of affection by her husband.

"Thank God you're safe," he murmured in her ear as she pushed out of his embrace. He, too, was suddenly aware of Gilliatt's presence.

"Safe? And why shouldn't I be safe?" She sniffed loudly, scenting the burned cottage on his clothes. "What is it?"

"They burned the cottage down — gutted it," he said savagely, unwilling to soften the blow. Her hand went to her mouth, her eyes widened. Then she clenched both hands at her sides and looked at McBride levelly. "Who?"

"I don't know — some of your father's friends, Germans — who knows? But Drummond was behind it."

"What?"

"Drummond. He's working for the other side, must have been all the time. He tried to kill us last night—" He indicated Gilliatt. "Oh, Peter Gilliatt. He's English but not bad." He grinned. Maureen wiped her right hand, shook Gilliatt's gravely. He saw a kind of emotional bruising behind her eyes but her face remained calm. She brushed at a wisp of hair fallen from its grip, then seemed aware of her appearance — but only slowly and unimportantly.

"What will you do?"

"Kill him," McBride said abruptly. Maureen seemed to consider his words for a moment, then she nodded her head. "Before he kills us," McBride added. "Sorry about the home."

"Not as sorry as I am," she returned in a way that made Gilliatt aware of his intrusion, presenting an image of a wound opening. As if to apologize, Maureen grabbed McBride's arm. He groaned and she was immediately the solicitous wife again.

"You're hurt—"

"And hungry."

"Injuries first."

"Yes, Mother Maureen." She tossed her head, made him sit and then roughly pulled his sweater over his head. The strip of shirt was darkened with some dried blood, but not a great deal. Maureen looked gratefully at Gilliatt as she inspected the bandage.

"I'll cook," Gilliatt offered. "Where is everything?"

"Go into the shop. Seamus'll cut you some bacon, give you some eggs. Bread's in the cupboard there."

Gilliatt disappeared back into the narrow, box-lined corridor between the living accommodation and the shop. Maureen's face immediately dissolved into a tragic mask, mouth widened and eyes narrowed.

"All right, don't take on now."

"Everything?" McBride nodded. "God damn them."

She sniffed loudly and proceeded to undo the bandage on his arm, touching the stiff crusted blood on his forehead at the same time, seemingly satisfied that it could be attended to later.

"We won't be safe here," McBride said as she washed the gash. A little streak of new blood appeared, "Drummond wants all eight pints or more of it, and he'd use you to get hold of me."

"What do you want, then?"

"We have to run."

"Where?"

"We've all of Ireland, woman."

Gilliatt reappeared with slices of bacon and eggs on a sheet of waxed paper held against his chest. Behind him, as if their conversation had summoned him, was Devlin himself, out of breath and red-faced. But his small eyes darted as if some enemy might have overtaken him even though he had hurried and be lying in wait for him in his own kitchen.

"Da!" McBride sensed the fear, the urgency at once. "What is it, Da?"

"Michael? You're all right? There's — why are you here? They're after you, damn you, and you'll bring them here, down on my head!" Devlin glanced at each of their faces, then around the cramped kitchen. He seemed to sense impermanence wherever he looked.

"Da, I'm sorry—" McBride began.

"Maureen, they've burned the cottage!"

"I know."

"How did you know?" McBride asked, anticipating Gilliatt's question.

Devlin immediately became cunning, his eyes narrowing further; habits of thought and behaviour were automatically reasserted. The present, however, pressed on him.

"I was told. Someone tipped me off, for Maureen's sake."

"So, the boys are in on it, are they?" Devlin appeared reluctant to reply. Maureen, sensing the future, quickly finished re-binding McBride's arm with a clean strip of cloth. "Are they, Da?" Devlin merely nodded.

"You'll have to get out," he said, almost as a plea.

"We're going. The three of us."

"What are we up against, Michael?" Gilliatt asked, a sense of superiority given him by the nationality the others shared. He knew his mood was illusory and irrelevant, but there was a coolness of mind that assisted him even as he began frying the bacon and breaking the eggs into the pan.

"Drummond, whatever Germans are here, and the local IRA," McBride said with a grin.

"They'll not harm us, Maureen—" Devlin began, but the look she gave him made him quail into silence.

"What are we going to do, Michael?" she asked.

"Eat breakfast, dress for the outdoors — and run," he replied, clutching her hand, pressing it. "Don't worry."

"I won't. I don't know why, but I won't." She brushed his hair aside from the scalp wound, inspected it, nodded, and went to the stove, brushing Gilliatt to one side as casually as she had parted McBride's hair. Gilliatt looked at McBride, who winked.

"Who's he?" Devlin asked, fully aware of Gilliatt for the first time, it seemed.

"No one you know, Da. Now, are you coming with us, or not?"

Devlin's face adopted a look of outraged protest, which was swiftly followed by fear, then dismissal of a slow but certain kind as he looked around the kitchen again, then at McBride and Gilliatt — marking them off from himself. He shook his head.

"They'll not harm me. And Maureen would be safe here."

"They'll use her to get me, Da. Look, I know that Drummond is a traitor. He won't want me gossiping to London about it, now will he? Maureen comes with us — she'll be safe." McBride's face went bleak. "Da, they'll use you, but I won't come back for you. There's not enough leverage, you see." He did not look at Maureen, simply concentrated on the dissolving and reforming features of her father. It was as if he looked at him through a curtain of rain or tears, so vivid were the facial movements, so flurried the quick wash and movement of emotions.

"You promised!" was all Devlin could manage. McBride nodded.

"I know I did," he said softly. "Come with us. I'll look after you. But not here—"

Gilliatt turned away from the scene between the two men. It was too oppressively real, too naked yet private so that it made him a voyeur, an intruder. Then Devlin went out of the kitchen, banging against some of the crates and boxes in the corridor in his hurry and disbelief. McBride had disorientated him, turned around his sign-posts, ripped up his maps.

"You didn't have to do that to him," Maureen said softly, sliding bacon and eggs onto two plates she had warmed. She brought the plates to the table, stood looking down at McBride, her face a narrow, tight mask of displeasure. "Why did you tell him that, Michael?"

"Because it's true, Maureen. He'll be used to get to me, and I won't give myself and you up for Da's life."

"Then why do you play God in the first place, if you haven't His determination? Oh, Michael, you make people believe in you when really their belief doesn't make a blind bit of difference to you! Why?"

He looked up at her, his face dark, slapped by her words.

"I don't know how or why I do it, Maureen. I don't know."

Maureen moved past him, following her father into the shop. McBride began eating the breakfast in silence, and Gilliatt kept his eyes on his plate until he had finished eating. As if on cue, Maureen entered the kitchen just as McBride swallowed his last mouthful.

"He won't listen to me," she almost wailed, her face a crumpled ball of dirty paper. Gilliatt wanted to say something soothing, knowing that she would reject any comfort from a stranger. "He won't listen to me." She sat down, leaning her head and arms on the table. McBride made no move to speak or to touch her, and Gilliatt disliked him suddenly.

He looked at McBride. "He can't stay here."

"Haven't you heard of free will, Peter? He might even be right — the boys may leave him alone."

Maureen looked up. "Damn you, Michael."

"Probably. Go and get your coat. Get some food from the shop — no, maybe not. Just get your coat."

Maureen went out of the kitchen. McBride heard her climbing the stairs, then her footsteps on the boards of the room above them.

"Will you save us?" Gilliatt asked with an evident irony.

"Oh, if I can," McBride replied with studied lightness. "Yes, I'll save you if I can." There was a combative, fierce light in his eyes that Gilliatt mistrusted and which disturbed him. McBride was a man obsessed and vengeful. Reckless. Gilliatt clamped down on a sense of panic, a feeling of the cosmic unfairness of his situation and a blind desire to blame, lash out. It was a question of staying alive in the company of a mad Irishman and his strange, tough wife.

McBride's head cocked, listening. Gilliatt was puzzled but even before that feeling seeped into his face he heard the car pulling up outside. McBride was on his feet, running through the narrow corridor even as the first bullets smashed the windows of the grocer's shop. Gilliatt went to the foot of the stairs, and blocked them against Maureen who came running from the upstairs room.

"Da!" he heard McBride shout. A sub-machine gun, spraying bullets, forced McBride back into the corridor. Maureen tried to push past Gilliatt, but he took hold of her. McBride ducked back towards them.

"The back way — come on!" Maureen was about to speak. "He's dead. The only damn covenant the boys have is with death, Maureen. Only with death." His eyes were wild, and there was spittle at the corners of his mouth. Maureen moaned. "Get her outside!" he ordered Gilliatt as he drew the heavy revolver from his waistband. "Get moving!"

Gilliatt dragged Maureen into the kitchen. Her head went back and a wail filled the corridor. Gilliatt clamped his hand over her mouth, heaved open the back door of the shop and dragged her out into the yard.

McBride watched them. Another burst of gunfire from in front of the shop, then silence. He wanted to wait, for the pleasurable outline in the shattered doorway, the first steps on the crunching glass, then the perfect target. He didn't. Reluctantly he turned and went back into the kitchen and out into the yard. Maureen was still in Gilliatt's grip, but didn't seem to be struggling. She was silent, appeared calmer.

They were running, and McBride was enjoying it.

The relief and colours of the heraldic shields in the cloister roof were fading as the light failed. Goessler gave up studying them. Despite his overcoat, he was cold. There was a chill about all cloisters, and those at Canterbury cathedral were no different. Larger than some, more sombre than many, and perhaps colder than all. He regretted having had to agree to meet Moynihan and the woman, but he knew that unless he did their impatience might easily overreach itself, interfere with the operation that was proceeding so smoothly, and he therefore intended that they should now be fed a few morsels that would stave off their hunger a little longer. He began pacing because his feet were cold. For him there was no atmosphere of conspiracy seeping from the flagstones or lurking behind the pillars or in the arches. He was unaffected not so much by religion, which he rejected anyway, but by the past itself. His past was his own lifetime, the lifetime of his state and his rise within its security apparat. Canterbury cathedral had no weight for him. He had exorcized all the ghosts, rendered himself unable to sense or feel the past — any past — when he carefully buried and destroyed and burned and erased his own Nazi past. In 1946, he had been born. Nothing before that date had any meaning for him.

He saw Moynihan emerge into the cloisters on the east side, near the huge chapter house. He did not wave to him, but continued pacing, letting the Irishman walk round the cloisters to join him. The woman appeared from the door into the nave, closer to him. He enjoyed the fleeting impression that both she and Moynihan were engaged in an attempt to overtake him that would never succeed. Then he turned to wait for them at the north-west corner of the cloisters. Their footsteps were somehow chill and damp, echoing as they did. They reached him together.

"Good evening, my friends." Moynihan merely nodded, but the woman spoke. She had hurried and was impatient but Goessler, as formerly, found her formidable, though dangerously unreliable. She was to him that most dangerous of species, the individual self-interpreter of Marx and Lenin. She did not surrender to ideology; rather, she had absorbed it and made it something that increased her individuality, her recognition of self.

"Herr Goessler. We summoned you here—" Goessler smiled a tight little smile in the gloom, hardly showing his dentures. She was challenging him, " — because we're sick of being dragged around at your coat-tails. We want to know what evidence you already have to support a move against Guthrie." There was a weight on the final syllables that was quite deliberate. Evidently, nothing was being kept from the woman by McBride. Silently, he complimented her.

"Ah, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Indeed."

Moynihan spat on the flagstones, quite unnecessarily from Goessler's point of view. These Irish had so much wasteful, vengeful passion they were anathema to an intelligence operation. So many Pavlovian keys controlled their reactions and their behaviour — too many for one life or a dozen lives. "What evidence, my dear?"

"Yes, Herr Goessler. Guthrie commanded one of the minelayers, didn't he? He helped to commit an act of war against a British convoy — was it sanctioned by the British government? Who — Churchill?"

She was hungry, greedy. Ideological nymphomania. Neither of them could receive, take enough history, comment, action or belief to slake their hatred. Goessler realized that this was the crucial moment of the operation. The British would be too slow to catch McBride before he had all the material, but the Irish could move too greedily, too swiftly — and spoil everything. He'd always known they'd try. Perhaps — he hoped not — he'd underestimated the woman?

He studied his words, then: "Yes. Very well, my friends. Cards on the table. Just so long as you promise that you will not act precipitately, and without my consent—" He left the order hanging in the chill air. Moynihan shivered, probably because he was not wearing more than a thin sweater beneath his suede jacket. Perhaps, Goessler thought, for him the place does have ghosts. Then the Irishman spoke.

"People are beginning to disbelieve, Goessler. They're very impatient for results."

Goessler had no intention of telling them that McBride would be theirs in no more than two or three days. The operation required now only McBride's acquisition of sufficient evidence of the sinking of the convoy for him to react strongly enough to want to make his knowledge public. Goessler believed that McBride would go public, preview his book's revelations. If Moynihan and the woman moved against him, tried to force him, he would remain silent. He must not sense he was being used.

"He must not sense he is being used," he said aloud, almost involuntarily. Then he added: "He will make the first move, and must be allowed to. You must not attempt to force him into going public." Another order.

"The evidence is already available, he's seen it."

"I agree, my dear. But he is an historian. He must have witnesses, documentation—"

"Who stole his papers?" Claire Drummond immediately regretted her question.

"When?"

"Days ago, from the hotel."

"Everything?" She nodded. "MI5 are closer than I thought. Walsingham has himself to protect, of course." Goessler was thoughtful for a moment. "Is he being followed at the moment?"

"I don't think so."

"Then he may be." Moynihan looked furtively round the darkened cloisters, suspecting eavesdroppers. Goessler himself felt suddenly insecure. The operation was slipping towards the IRA's greedy hands, acquiring their passionate haste. Regrettable, but perhaps not disastrous. He went on: "Very well. Two more days. Then, my dear, you must persuade him he must publish. If not, then you will inform the newspapers yourself, and set those dogs on him. A cause celebre-vulgai but I'm afraid now unavoidable. Will that satisfy your friends in Belfast and Dublin?"

"I hope so," Moynihan said with a candour that Claire Drummond resented with a contemptuous glance.

"Ah, they are wolves, my friend. They eat anything." He studied them for a moment. The moment when he had resigned his operation to their tender mercies had come and gone, and left him deflated and anxious. "Now, goodbye. Let us meet just once more, in—?"

"Bognor Regis," Claire Drummond said.

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

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

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

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

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

"He — almost has it all, Exton."

"Sir."

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

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

"Sir."

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

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Fallschirmjaeger

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

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

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

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

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

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

Habits of thought—

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

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

Claire.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Into the hills," he said to Gilliatt, who seemed to be looking almost wistfully down the creek to the sea. Gilliatt nodded, transferring his gaze to the narrow, cobbled street down which they had come. It was empty except for a thin dog relieving itself and an old woman in black framed by an open doorway. She might have been watching them. A vague boil of grey smoke hung a few streets away from them. Devlin's shop.

Maureen breathed in deeply but the breath became a sob. Gilliatt moved his arm around her shoulders but she shrugged it off violently.

"Why, Michael — why?"

"I don't know, Maureen." He studied her face, seeing the grief just below the tight mask of shock. There'd be no time for the grief to come out, he knew. She'd be too intent on survival. He almost regretted that she would have to become, emotionally, part of his secret, amputated world. Regretted it for her sake. "Come on, we've no time to spare on it now. We'll head northeast, then change direction and head for Carrigfadda. They won't be able to follow us by car, not even by bicycle." He was grinning again, and the sight of the expression angered Gilliatt unreasonably, or perhaps simply gave rise to misgivings about trusting his life to a man so evidently reckless. But he controlled his anger, and merely nodded. "Come on, then."

McBride began to run over the bridge, waving them to follow. The narrow road wound between two low lumps of higher ground, vanishing like a false trail. Gilliatt was aware how perilous everything was, how unlikely survival. Maureen moved away from him, aware of the shivering possessing his body. She began to run after McBride.

The first shot plucked stone chips from the bridge just as Gilliatt took his first few steps, and the bullet whined away harmlessly. Gilliatt became frozen, unable to move, as if the bullet had entered his body or was some shouted imperative. McBride, looking back to the bridge, saw the Englishman's fear possess him.

"Peter, come on!" There were two men with rifles at the edge of the village. Small puffs of smoke appeared even as bullets buzzed near them. Gilliatt still did not move. Stone spattered on his jacket as another bullet ricocheted from the parapet of the bridge. "Get down!" he snapped at Maureen, and she sank into the shallow ditch at the side of the road in an attitude of prayer. McBride, head down, ran back to the bridge, moving as swiftly as he could, bent almost double below the level of the stonework. He grabbed Gilliatt's jacket, heaving him off-balance — the man was as stiff as a wooden crate — pulling him down beside him. The angle of the road to the bridge hid them momentarily from the riflemen. Gilliatt seemed shaken out of a trance.

"Thanks."

"Come on, keep low and move fast."

McBride scuttled ahead of Gilliatt. Three shots nipped through the air above the bridge as McBride paused, then straightened and ran. Gilliatt followed him. McBride's arm ached intolerably from the damage of the grenade fragment and the effort of dragging Gilliatt down into the cover of the bridge. Maureen clambered out of the ditch as they heard the noise of a small car accelerating. McBride grabbed Maureen's arm, hurrying her up the road. The car's engine idled, presumably while their two closest pursuers climbed on board, then they heard it accelerate again.

They laboured up the slope of the road. A field fell away from them towards the stream.

"Down there!" McBride yelled, pointing towards the stream through a gate in the high hedge. "Come on!" There was a desperation close to enjoyment in his voice.

Maureen swiftly opened the white gate. A grazing cow confronted her fearfully, great brown eyes puzzled and nervous. As she began running, it turned and lumbered away towards the rest of the small dairy herd shuffling away to her left. She felt her heart struggling for space with her ragged breaths in her chest cavity, felt herself choking but pushed on, leaning backwards as the slope of the field threatened her. Gilliatt caught up with her, his face grim. She did not worry about Michael behind them. She invested him with an expertise that approximated to omniscience. She could just hear the labouring car above the pound of her feet and blood. The herd was scampering in a dozen startled directions.

Shots rang out, and bullets buzzed around her. There was an ignorant confidence about her body. She had never seen a bullet or a bullet wound. Gilliatt flinched at each report, each passage of a bullet through the air near them. Then, closer, a heavy revolver sounded twice, and there was a distant, insect cry. Then, almost immediately, McBride was running alongside them, yelling.

"Spread out, spread out!" He veered off to the right himself, and Maureen went to her left. "Run zig-zag!" McBride gave the instructions without panic, with no sense of danger. If bullets hit them, his voice suggested, it would be like drowning in a shallow stream or swimming pool. Maureen tried to run first to left then to right, watching for betraying tussocks of grass that would trip her, sprain something.

Then she lost her balance, and the stream was cold up to her knees, and her hands plunged into the water as she tried to keep upright. She felt smooth, slimy stones, twisted around, and Gilliatt grabbed her and stopped her from falling headlong. She felt herself shivering against him, his own body shaking with effort, his heart pounding. She looked behind her, following his gaze. McBride was alongside them in the water. Three men were coming down the slope of the field, leaving something in a fawn raincoat lying near the tall hedge, perhaps blown there by the wind, brown paper or something. She felt her thoughts slipping in and out of self-deception. Michael had killed one of them — brown paper—

"Where now?" Gilliatt asked, his voice thick with phlegm. He spat to clear his mouth, and Maureen watched the phlegm move away and dissipate on the surface of the stream. McBride looked around him.

Two more men — both of them dressed in reefer jackets and carrying machine-pistols — entered the field at its southern corner, back by the bridge. For the moment they were out of range and he discounted them except as a direction in which he could not go.

"Up there," he said, pointing towards the rising ground to the north-west of the village. The sweep of his arm took in the pencil of smoke still rising from Ross Carbery in the still grey air. Rainspots, as if occasioned by the fire and the necessity of water, splashed on the back of his hand, spattered gently against the faces of all three of them. "Some bloody mist is what we need," McBride muttered. "Get going!"

Gilliatt hauled Maureen out of the stream, and they began running again. She grabbed hold of his hand as she almost lost balance, and held onto it as they began labouring up the slope again towards another tall hedge marking the field's northern boundary. The noises of the rifles seemed distant and harmless. The rain fell more steadily, dampening their hair and faces. Neither of them gave any thought to McBride, except when the reports of the revolver impinged unwelcomely on them.

Gilliatt pushed her through the gate, and she huddled into the ditch, her breathing stertorous and always threatening not to come at all. Gilliatt touched her shoulder, and she nodded because her mouth was too full for words. Then Gilliatt stood up, and she remembered with a moan that Michael was still behind them; the realization sprang on her like guilt. Gilliatt, prompted by her cry, sensed the revolver stuck uselessly into his waistband, a hard cancerous lump against his stomach. The drizzle soaked him, but refreshed him at the same time. He climbed out of the ditch, and saw McBride perhaps thirty or forty yards from him, arm out like a duellist, firing two shots back at the men who had reached the stream. One of them held his left arm limply at his side, as if he had no further use for it. A second man was kneeling, taking aim, and the third was crouching against the near bank of the stream. A tableau that he seemed to bring to life as he drew the revolver and took aim. It was an impossible distance, even in the windless conditions, but he squeezed the trigger more as a distraction. He was aware of the box of shells misshaping his left pocket, and confidently fired three more shots towards the stream. The pursuers were sufficiently distracted to seek the shelter of the stream's bank. McBride was toiling up the last of the slope to the hedge. The two men in reefer jackets were cutting the angle of the field towards them, but warily keeping out of range.

"Master race, eh?" McBride said as he leaned against him for a moment, controlling his breathing. "Take no chances, let the local lads get themselves killed."

"You think they're German?"

"With those guns, yes." But McBride had lost interest already. He looked behind them, northwards. The land sloped down again towards the trees of a wood. The outliers were mere hundreds of yards from them. "Come on, then. No rest for the wicked."

Maureen climbed out of the ditch, shaking off their aid, and they ran together towards the dark trees. The main road beyond the wood gleamed grey and wet like a boundary.

McBride remembered the first time he and Maureen had made love in the insect-clamorous wood, one summer afternoon, her body cool only for a moment before he pressed down upon her, her face white and wondering and nervous. He wondered whether she remembered the occasion.

They were into the trees before the pursuit achieved the hedge and any clear sight of them.

The First Sea Lord sat opposite the Prime Minister in the small office Churchill used habitually for his solitary moments of thought and decision. Few Cabinet colleagues were invited to join him here, but service chiefs had done, on certain dire occasions through the summer and autumn. The camp bed the Prime Minister rested on — when he could bring himself to rest— was unmade in one corner of the office. The room was thick with cigar smoke, and Churchill was in his shirt-sleeves, still unshaven and red-eyed with the consequences of a restless night. The First Sea Lord, having finished his briefing, was left fearing a reckless, even desperate decision from this tired old man whose pugnacious features seemed the solitary mask left to him, his country backed into the last corner.

Churchill paced the room, cigar clamped into his tight lips, heavy jowls bristling as if he were parading before an audience that must be impressed. The First Sea Lord wondered how Churchill would go to his death before an SS firing squad, and regretted the thought as sharply and immediately as treachery. Yet in this small office how could Churchill gain any perspective other than a hopeless one?

As he silently asked the question, he was cognizant of the gulf between himself and the Prime Minister. He did not understand Churchill, and that lack of understanding could not be quite despised or disregarded.

Churchill paused before the First Sea Lord's chair, his blue eyes alight. He said, round the cigar, "Your opinion?"

"Of what, Prune Minister?" The First Sea Lord had to clear his throat before he spoke. The light immediately died in Churchill's eyes, and he moved away to look out of the single small window over the garden of No. 10. He seemed to dislike the sight of the ugly brick and concrete air-raid shelter for the staff, and turned back to confront the First Sea Lord.

"This counter-measure." He indicated Walsingham's open file on his desk. Cigar smoke lifted to the ceiling.

"We — cannot replace the missing section of the minefield without diverting the convoy."

Churchill's eyes flared again, as if he could see the cruiser and the three merchant ships.

"Fitzgerald—" he murmured softly.

"Prime Minister?"

"Nothing." He turned away again, then back. "We must have that convoy, at all costs, Admiral. If we can get it through, Congress will go on turning a blind eye to Lease-Lend and Roosevelt will send us more. It's our main artery." He paused, then, as if weighing some obscurer alternative, muttered again, "Fitzgerald—" He articulated carefully, loudly. "Order two minelayers to Milford Haven— as a stand-by. This requires more thought. I can't see the convoy go down in the North Channel, neither can I allow the Nazis—" He cut himself off. "Thank you, Admiral. Leave the Emerald file with me for the moment."

Patrick Terence Fitzgerald enjoyed the fierce wind much as he might have done had he been aboard a yacht or an old sailing ship. The westerly was sweeping spray across the quarter deck and gave the impression of driving the cruiser forward towards the Irish coast. That in itself might have made heavy, gloomy imagery, but the wind seemed to clean him, blow inside his head and remove the cluttered reflections which had afflicted him throughout the crossing. He wore no hat, let his grey hair be distressed, his ears and jaw go cold.

Churchill. His image persisted. Churchill would know why he was coming, know what was at stake, want to stop him. Churchill, like a schoolboy, would want to fudge his examination because he had not mastered the syllabus. He would be lost, abandoned.

Spray, whipped off the whitecaps, dashed in Fitzgerald's face and was saltily chilled by the wind at once, drying onto him. Churchill's image faded. The merchant ships astern were the first of their kind, and Fitzgerald knew they would be the last, after he made his report to Roosevelt. The wind and spray went on with their cleaning, numbing work, and a scattered, sudden sunlight splashed on the quarter deck like another good omen.

The bright afternoon spread itself easily as a cat over the sofa and the carpet and the other furniture of the old, slightly dilapidated house on the Hastings seafront that had been converted into a seamen's home. The worn carpet was more evidently exposed by the sun's intrusion, the loose covers rendered more tasteless and chintzy, but McBride felt the room took on the character of the man to whom he was talking. Browned and worn and honourable with age. To be kept, not thrown away.

The old man rolled himself another cigarette from dark tobacco, coughed his way through the first inhalations, and shook his head, his blue eyes folded into the contour marks of age around them. Abbott's face was a mass of wrinkles, and was easy to romanticize. He looked like an old explorer, an adventurer — embayed and dragged out of the water at some high tide and stranded here, hull stripped and re-caulked but never relaunched. McBride liked him, warmed to the man. And anticipated clarity of revelation.

"No," Abbott said. "German submarines — U-boats for certain." Abbott had been Third Mate aboard Southwark Rose, and on the bridge when what he believed was a U-boat attack had commenced, and commanding one of the boat stations when the order to abandon ship had been given. According to his narrative, Southwark Rose had been hit for" ard and amidships by torpedoes. The boat he had managed to board in the last minutes of the ship's existence had been sighted the next day by a Coastal Command Anson and they'd been taken aboard a Royal Navy frigate in the evening.

"You're certain of that, Mr Abbott?" McBride asked softly. The old man studied him as if the question insulted his memory. But he continued smiling with all the superiority of age and greater experience. An American historian could be forgiven a great deal, apparently.

The cassette-recorder wound on silently. Occasionally, cars passing along the seafront disturbed the room's autumnal calm. McBride felt himself afloat on a slow calm sea, close to his home port. Claire Drummond's passion in their Canterbury hotel room had seemed equivalent to his own as if she, too, sensed the proximity of their destination. He felt relaxed, and the memory of Hoskins" death remained below the surface of the gleaming water.

"Two torpedoes, Mr McBride. Ripped the old girl apart like a couple of tin-openers." He shook his head, horror transmuted to something harmless by time and survival.

"What about the other ships?"

"They went for the cruiser first — terrible." Something threatened to break through like a suddenly broken bone, but he went on in the same warm, mellowed voice: "They picked us off in turn."

"You were in a minefield, Mr Abbott," McBride prompted.

"Ah — that'd been swept, especially for us," the old man said knowingly, shaking his head slightly. "One or two of the lads joked about it, but the job had been done. They told us that."

"Where did you go down, Mr Abbott. You were on the bridge, you'd know?"

"Off the Old Head of Kinsale, southwest of Cork Harbour." The old man prided himself on his memory, and held this nugget of it up to his inspection, gleaming and undimmed by time.

McBride exhaled slowly. He had it all now. Everything else would be merely corroborative. He said thickly, "And where exactly were you picked up, Mr Abbott?"

"Ah. The boat was taking on water, and the rudder was useless. We drifted out into the channel, more or less southwest. We were a bit worried about the minefield, but our shallow draught must've kept us safe enough. The sea was kind to us. Spotted by an Anson out from one of the Cornish airfields, and picked up the same day. Weather worsened the very next day."

"What was the name of the ship that picked you up?"

"Ah." The old man dredged along the reef of memory. His eyes brightened again. "HMS Saundersfoot. Frigate."

"Thank you, Mr Abbott, thank you."

The old man seemed content now just to sit, and McBride shared his silence for a little time longer. The explosions, the screams, the shattered or detached limbs, the drowning, oil searing the lungs, the frenzy to launch the boats and pull away from the stricken Southwark Rose— all idled to the bottom of the gleaming water of his satisfaction. Nothing existed outside this sunlit room which contained the physical form that experienced nothing beyond a complete, egoistical satisfaction. The outline of his book lay in his thoughts like an unfolded map or a precise, graphed medical chart. He had it all. The German preparations, the sweeping of the minefield, the relaying of the mines, the murder by British mines of an American special envoy. An atrocity. He was made.

It was the last, and most complete, time that he was to think of money in connection with the knowledge he possessed.

Ryan watched McBride and Claire Drummond go into a cafe with a mock-Tudor frontage just off the Promenade, then walked to the nearest telephone box and called Walsingham.

"You're secure," Walsingham told him, his voice becoming slightly more distant as the scrambler was switched on. "Go ahead."

"He's in Eastbourne, sir. With the girl." He laid some slight emphasis on the latter phrase.

"I'm afraid she is not to be considered separately from your assigned target," Walsingham replied. Ryan winced silently. He disliked his superiors when they began using jargon to disguise their proposed wet operations. Blood was going to be let out, breath stopped, physical shape altered irredeemably, but they always wanted to talk about operations and targets and necessities. Ryan had no compunction about murder on the orders of his superiors, but no liking for euphemisms as applied to the job he did.

"Very good, sir. It would seem, from what we could pick up and his manner and the like, he knows most of it now, sir. He's like the cat who's had the cream."

"Very well. Then the girl has to go. He may have confided in her."

"Very good, sir. I'll have an operational report for you by this evening — eight at the latest." He reprimanded himself for his own euphemism. I'll have killed them by eight, sir.

Walsingham broke the connection. Ryan stepped out of the call-box, letting the door swing shut behind him. The car was parked down the street, almost opposite the cafe. Walsingham, behind the induced blandness of the secure line and behind his almost imperturbable calm, was worried. Ryan sensed it like an odour in the call-box. Ripples moved out from the dropped stone that was Ryan's job and his limited view of the operation. Guthrie, Ulster, Washington—

He would not be forgiven any mistakes.

He returned to the car and nodded to the driver. Then, in order to settle the details of McBride's death in his mind, he took an OS map from the glove compartment — when the explosion ripped out the front of the Tesco supermarket three doors further down from the cafe where McBride and the girl were taking afternoon tea. Ryan, head snapping up even before the noise of the explosion followed the disturbance of the air and the alteration of the street's quiet perspective, saw the glass bulge in slow-motion then break into a million shards, flying across the street. Windows emptied. He ducked as the pressure-wave struck the car, rattling doors and windows then pushing in the windscreen so that it emptied over his neck and shoulders, prickling in the backs of his hands where they covered his head. Something warm and sudden spattered against him. In the moment he had ducked, he had seen two bodies lifted and flung outwards into the street, other people subsiding in hideous slow motion.

The driver's face was lacerated, deep gashes from the shattered windscreen across his left cheek and forehead. Ryan was already assuming he would survive when he noticed the red ring like a clerical collar round the driver's neck, staining his shirt. Then the body slumped against him, and Ryan pushed it away in revulsion. He opened the passenger door and the screaming loudened immediately. The Tesco store was on fire, smoke and flame billowing from the wrecked facade. There were perhaps two dozen bodies on the pavements. A bus had run over one form, and then stopped. There was no driver visible behind the wheel. Someone staggered against the wing of the car, blinded with blood, hands pressed against the face — he could not be sure of the sex — as if preventing the features being dissolved by the flow of blood from the scalp. The high scream did not belong either to a man or a woman, not even an afflicted child or animal.

Ryan was dazed by the occurrence of the explosion and not its force, and by the destruction through which he now had to move. All that concerned him was that he had to regain contact with McBride, must not lose him.

Moynihan pressed his handkerchief against his cheek to staunch the surprising flow of blood. He imagined the gash in his cheek was longer and deeper than it could possibly be. There was no window in which he could inspect it. He was standing drunkenly where he had been when the bomb exploded, in a shop doorway well past Tesco's, watching the front of the cafe. Now, all he could do was curse silently the Provisional cell which had planted a bomb in an Eastbourne supermarket when McBride was in the same town, the same street, and know he would have to move before the police and ambulances arrived. Yet he wanted to know that McBride and the woman were safe, unhurt. Some growing sense in him had indicated, as he watched the cafe before the explosion, that the woman had something to tell him, that perhaps the time was close when Goessler would give them McBride or they would take him. He needed to know.

But, as he heard the first high wails of the sirens, he forced himself to move, hurrying up the street past the rows of empty shop windows, clothes and food and tailors" dummies heaped and disarranged and shattered and glass-stabbed.

Ryan shook his head, feeling glass prickling the back of his neck and his hands. He was trying to organize his thinking, reject earlier possibilities and form a fresh course of action. McBride would have to be killed now. He rejected that, but it reformed behind the qualification of the woman. Ryan could do little without the driver, and somehow the carnage thrust upon this afternoon street by the Provisional IRA made him deeply angry, made him require action — soon and sudden.

A woman lurched against him as he crossed the street, her face wide and empty with terror. There seemed nothing wrong with her, until he pushed her away and saw the blood running down her leg like helpless urine, into her shoe. The heel had snapped from the shoe, the stocking was torn on the reddened leg, and there was a gash in her skirt. Smart, young, assured. Glass in her belly. Ryan was enraged even as he was sickened. He tripped over a still form, outstretched hand holding a plastic shopping bag with the blazon of the ruined store on it. Glass had cut madly at the back of the dead woman's head, a tonsure of violence. The back of the coat she wore was opened, violated. Ryan regained his feet, his shoes crunching along the glass beach of the pavement, the heat from the frontage of the store flushing his drawn face. A legless torso wailed from the gutter where it had been blown by the bomb, wrapped in the rags of a shop assistant's uniform. A cash register had spilled on the pavement, meaninglessly. Screams and wailing howled like fire-noises from inside the store, before they were drowned by the approaching sirens.

Ryan moved out into the street again, recognizing that he was dazed, unsteady — the situation overwhelming him — and passed the ruined store. Something like butane gas or paraffin exploded at the rear of the store, and flame gushed into the sky, smoke boiling out in pursuit of it. There were few people moving on the street — a lot of bodies, but few people moving. The bus was empty of passengers, or their bodies had slid down below the level of the window-frames. He crunched on through the glass.

He stood beside an open Mercedes that had halted against a streetlamp, and saw people begin to emerge, slowly as into an altered world, from the cafe. Ryan saw at the edge of his vision a child nestling in an imitation-death in the back seat of the Mercedes. Her mother's head was in an impossible position, her body only kept upright by the seatbelt. Glass from across the street had almost decapitated the woman. But he could not understand the child's stillness until he saw the dribble of blood from the back of her head winding slowly round her neck, reaching like a small pet snake into her blouse. He thought the child might still be alive, only stunned, and that made him more angry. He felt the emotion boiling through him, wave after wave; more accurately like a kettle continuing to boil because it could not be switched off or removed from the heat.

He saw McBride mistily, staring around him at the carnage, as the first police cars screamed to a standstill only yards away. The lights of an ambulance flickered up the street, and the wail of the fire-appliances impinged on him. But McBride was the focus of his attention. The woman was hurrying him away, towards the car park where McBride's hire car had been left. Ryan went after them, everything narrowed down to the figures of McBride and the woman. Ryan patted the gun in his shoulder holster. He knew he was acting under stress, that rationality had dissipated in the flood of emotion, but the overriding irrationality of the explosion and the deaths — which might total more than a hundred if the store had been crowded — possessed him. If the IRA could get hold of McBride, if they knew what he knew—

Anger fused the circuitry there, the identification of McBride and the perpetrators of the atrocity. He saw McBride turn into the entrance of the multi-storey car park, and hurried across the street after him. His knee pained him. He must have bruised it without realizing, perhaps against the bodywork of the silver-grey Mercedes.

The images of the car brought a nauseous bile to the back of his throat as he went up the first flight of the musty-smelling concrete steps. He paused, hearing footsteps above him, then the sighing open and shut again of a door. Next level. He hobbled up the steps, holding onto the iron rail, pausing while an elderly couple negotiated the turn in the stairs, squeezed past him, walking-sticks and old thin legs suddenly untrustworthy, betraying. A shopping-basket on wheels bounced down each step behind them, hurrying them rather than under their control.

AIDS rules — OK? sprayed in blue paint on the grey wall, and the CND symbol. MUFC, followed by the comment are cunts. Clapton is God as he went on up the steps, then in red above Gloria does and What? and takes 14 inches, the letters that blinded him, caused him to pause, clench his fists, reach for the 9mm Sig-Sauer P230 and feel the comfort of the butt — Provos, and IRA rules. A mindless youth with a spray-can, non-political, half-literate, meaning nothing.

And the dead in the street, the glass like a flung-down beach, the perspective changed, the town changed.

He heard as he opened the door a car engine fire, and without thought he yelled McBride's name with all the force of his lungs and throat. Red lights flicked on. The Nissan was backing out from behind a concrete pillar, and he could see the woman in the passenger seat. He ran towards the car, yelling for McBride to stop, the Sig-Sauer in his hand now, but not levelled. The woman was in the way. The Nissan had stopped, and he ran round to the driver's window. McBride was already winding it down. The man's face looked dazed and innocent, and infuriated Ryan. He raised the gun—

The woman had removed the small Astra 300 from her shoulder-bag, pointed it quickly, and fired twice into Ryan's face. He felt each of the bullets, sensed flesh opening and dissolving round the lead, sensed teeth being smashed, almost the exit of each bullet as his head lifted away from the car and he saw the grey concrete roof above him become fuzzy and unformed and dark.

By nightfall they had reached the outskirts of Skibbereen without further contact with the pursuit. A cottage just on the edge of the village provided food and water — cheese and rough-hewn bread sticking to their palates, washed off and down into empty stomachs by the water. McBride knew the cottager, a slight acquaintance which would not prevent the old man answering any questions put to him by their pursuers. To prevent any useless bravery, he gave the man permission to answer any questions — time, condition, even direction.

They left the cottage under a cloudy night sky that suggested a moonlit night to come. The rain had petered out before darkness. McBride took them half a mile north of the village, up the bank of the River Hen, then doubled back, skirting Skibbereen to the west and taking footpaths and bridleways through the easy farming country to the southwest of the village. The moon emerged from the last rags of cloud around ten o" clock, and the landscape was lumpy with clumps of trees and small copses, horizoned by hedges, rendered amusing and safe by the occasional disturbed lumps of sleeping cattle.

They left the lights of a hamlet behind them, navigating by the bulk of Lick Hill a mile or so ahead of them, black and humped against the stars. They walked close together as if to re-establish some community that had been lost in the grey daylight. McBride walked with his arm round Maureen, and she held Gilliatt's hand on her other side.

McBride was heading for a farm that lay snugly beneath Lick Hill, where they could sleep an undisturbed sleep in one of the barns. The farmer would know nothing of their presence. At least, that was how McBride envisaged it. Holding the farmer hostage at gunpoint might become necessary if they were disturbed, but in that event there was nothing to consider. Guns required no forward planning.

Gilliatt heard the approaching planes first — the higher, lighter feminine note of the fighter escort above the deeper rumbling of the three-engined Junkers Ju52s. The Messerschmitts he knew by sound, the other aircraft he only recognized from their blacker silhouettes against the stars when they were almost overhead. All three of them stood, heads upraised as if in supplication or wonder, immobile as the lumbering Junkers laid strings of blooming white eggs from their bellies and the paratroopers — the Fallschirmjaeger — swung and straightened and descended all round them. A stream of blown dandelion clocks, closing on them, dropping into the fields on every side of them. Hundreds of them.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN Decision

The deception of a summer night dissipated. The swinging, weighted parachutes were being jostled by a cold November wind, and the winter stars were hard and frosty. Each of them was chilled, fixed to the spot, compelled to remain in the middle of the landing ground. The Junkers and Messerschmitts droned away northwards, then banked away to the west, returning a threatening, rustling silence to the wind-soughed darkness.

The first Fallschirmjaeger landed perhaps a couple of hundred yards from them, rolling, getting up and hauling back the "chutes that billowed and tugged them into a trot. Then others were swinging directly above their heads, and a canister thumped into the earth twenty feet away, rolling ominously towards them. It seemed to galvanize McBride. He grabbed Maureen's hand, pulling her off-balance away to their left, towards a straggling copse where already one parachutist had become entangled in a gaunt tree and was not straining to free himself but hanging limply from his harness.

"Come on!" McBride whispered fiercely, and Gilliatt broke into a run behind them.

They were running through a field of ghosts, through strange, marsh-lit spirits that appeared and rolled and moved on every side. McBride caught one parachutist in the back, bowling him over as the man dropped directly in front of him. He stumbled on the treacherous footing of the silk, skipped a few steps, almost catching his feet in the cords, all the time with one arm steering Maureen away from the billowing white mass in their path. For a moment, whiteness seemed all around them and over them, then the bustling wind whipped the "chute into a thin, deflated fold and away from them. The small, leafless copse seemed farther away than before.

Gilliatt cried out, muffled. McBride whirled around, his hurried glimpse of the field behind them one of puffs of white mist rising and boiling from the ground and the last few dandelion clocks floating down to earth. Gilliatt was caught in the folds of a parachute that had descended on him, around him. The parachutist was regaining his feet, becoming quickly aware and dangerous. They postured, still for a half-second, like two gladiators. The net-and-trident man had his opponent enmeshed and at his mercy.

McBride avoided the embrace of the shroud, drawing his pocket knife and opening the blade. The German soldier was punching at the harness lock in the middle of his chest while his other hand brought the MP40 machine-pistol to bear on the wriggling, entangled figure on the ground who was not in uniform under the hard moonlight. Then the German saw McBride approaching, perhaps even the gleam of the knife-blade, and the harness drifted away from his shoulders and chest but caught on the MP40 as it swung towards McBride. McBride elbowed the man off-balance clumsily and as hard as he could, then knelt on top of him. The face was very young, dazed and not yet frightened. He clamped his hand over the man's mouth, and drove up beneath the breastbone with the knife. The body went rigid in its coitus with death, then suddenly limp and sack-like. McBride wiped the blade, then began chopping at the cords of the "chute, freeing Gilliatt.

They stood up together. McBride slipped the strap of the machine-pistol from the dead man's arm and passed the MP40 to Gilliatt.

"Come on."

Figures were moving now, all around them. The last pleasantry of falling parachutes had vanished. Only the heavy, bulky images of troops rising from the ground, of folded silk, of guns and men collecting into units. They were fifty yards from the trees, and there were Germans rolling up their white parachutes between them and cover. The cut "chute billowed and ghosted away with the wind, attracting attention.

"It's no good—" Gilliatt whispered.

"Don't be stupid." McBride took Maureen's hand, and squeezed it. "Come on."

He began running for the trees, and Gilliatt, the MP40 cold and lumpy and uncomforting in his hand, followed them after a moment's hesitation. A cow lumbered into his path, and he ducked alongside it. The animal was disturbed rather than terrified, and was moving aimlessly wherever clear ground presented itself. While it moved towards the trees, Gilliatt moved with it, watching McBride and Maureen and waiting for them to be challenged.

"Halt!" The word was English, almost unaccented. "Who are you?" The cow tried to shake Gilliatt's arm from its flank, its stubby horns waving just in front of his face. McBride and Maureen were just in front of two soldiers, both of whom were unencumbered and whose guns were level on the man and woman.

"I could ask you the same thing!" McBride bellowed in an outrageous brogue, putting his arm around his wife. "This is my farm — what are you doing dropping out of the sky on my dairy herd?" Gilliatt wanted to laugh in admiration of the bluff — which he knew would not work. The cow, startled by the voices, swerved away from the trees, exposing Gilliatt.

"Down!" he yelled, waited for the second which stretched out into danger-induced images of flame and bullets emerging from the two German machine-pistols — he could almost see the bullets in slow-motion, feel his leaden limbs transfixed — then McBride had dragged Maureen below chest-level and he sprayed the two Germans with the MP40 on automatic. They were flicked aside, leaving a gap of ground and the trees where the one dead parachutist hung like an admonition. He ran to McBride even as he heard shouted orders less than fifty yards away for men to spread out, get down, locate the source of the firing—

Panic was on their side now, driving them forward while it dislocated German thinking. Ambush? The Irish army? He hardly paused to haul Maureen to her feet, running on with her arm held in a tight grip into the cover of the trees.

"Where now?" he whispered, his head moving like a clockwork toy, swivelling for sight of danger. There was a crashing through the trees and bushes away to the right, but then a mottled, startled Friesian burst out near them like a pantomime cow, head up, legs comically uncertain. It crashed through bushes and down into a ditch on the other side. McBride pointed.

"Down there."

"Where then?"

"Towards Liss Ard — a mile, no more. Get on with it!" McBride ushered Gilliatt on his way with the MP38 he had picked up from one of the two newly dead. A thin chattering forestalled the humorous remark that would have followed. Wood chips dusted down on them from the lowest branches. "They know where we are — get on, Peter."

Gilliatt pressed through the bushes, and dropped surprised into the deep ditch, rolling over but saving his ankles. Then he waited until Maureen dropped, catching her and holding her on balance. Then he helped her clamber out of the ditch on the other side. Across the fields from them the few lights of Liss Ard seemed to beckon at one moment, then float unsubstantial the next. There was more firing behind them, then the noises of McBride scrabbling to the lip of the ditch.

"I hope to God they've got something better to do than chase us!" he observed, coughing with effort, as they began running across the first field between them and the lights of the hamlet.

Drummond sat opposite the German officer who had come ashore from a small U-boat earlier in the evening, wishing that he would now go and consult with the company commanders who had dropped between Timoleague and Kilbrittain, one of the five designated drop-areas for the Fallschirmjaeger which he had originally selected months before.

Drummond had met Menschler, a staff officer for Sealowe and then for Smaragdenhakkette, on a number of previous occasions, in Berlin before the war and three times when he had visited the Irish Republic as an accredited embassy official. His real purpose had been to consult with Drummond on the proposed invasion beaches and the parachute landing areas for Emerald Necklace. But Drummond had never found himself warming to the stiff, chilly Prussian with the Iron Cross always wrapped in a handkerchief in his civilian pocket. Drummond was almost certain that it was the man he disliked; only occasionally would the sense of the man's German-ness remind him of the stark light that nationality played upon his own treachery.

Now, he wanted Menschler out of the way so that he could contact London.

Drummond felt himself diminished by his anxiety, by a pressing, enlarging sense of his duplicity. He was aware of it making the skin he was interested in saving crawl as Menschler, sitting opposite him in the study of the farmhouse, continued to discuss the movement of the airborne troops to the coast, and the possibility of counter-measures by the Irish government or Churchill. He knew now that he did not possess the commitment, that he did not wish to cast aside his mask, declare his hand. Drummond wanted to insure himself by warning the Admiralty of the landings. He assumed that the twenty-four hours before the seaborne landings was insufficient time for the British to mount any effective counter-attack — the Irish would not move, he was certain, as was the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht in Berlin — but if he reported the parachute landings he would retain the appearance of still working for the Admiralty. Then, in the event of some disaster, he would be in the clear—

And he had a great desire to be in the clear. There was this growing sense of being alone, of being in personal danger, that could not be alleviated by news of the success of the parachute landings or the suggested might of the Wehrmacht, even the genius of the Führer. McBride worked at the corner of his mind like an irritating mote. Him, or someone like him — one to one — was all that was needed, and he would be dead. The craven surrender to a sense of personal danger disappointed him, but he could not any longer ignore it.

"Very well, Drummond, now I will talk to the company commanders, then we will make our little tour, yes?" Menschler stood up with a nod, dismissive and superior, and went out of the room. Drummond, appalled at himself, strained to hear the closing of the door, even the footsteps across the yard to the barn where Menschler's staff had set up their HQ. Then, when only the wind's sound reached him from outside, he scurried to the kitchen and the cellar door, heading for the radio equipment by means of which he would warn the Admiralty of the reported landings of German parachutists in County Cork. A simple message that he was now certain would save his life.

Churchill paced the tiny, cigar-fouled office, the file labelled Emerald open on the desk between him and Walsingham, sitting silent and stiff on a hard upright chair. Even as he had sat there, Drummond's message from Kilbrittain had been conveyed to Churchill, interrupting their conversation. Churchill now seemed possessed of almost demonic energy, none of which he could satisfy or express or exude. It remained within him, galvanizing and bullying his frame like a seizure.

The dawn outside the one window combined with the overhead light to create starkness, even the sordid. A time for quarrels and for machinations.

Churchill picked up the telephone and in clipped, precise tones that still would not allow the captive energy to escape, ordered an emergency meeting of the Cabinet and the Chiefs of Staff for nine that morning. When he put down the receiver again, he was staring at Walsingham with glowing eyes.

"So, it's begun, young man?" he said, hands on his wide hips, belly protruding from his unbuttoned waistcoat, hardly contained by the thin gold chain of his pocket watch. Then the big cigar was waving at him, pressed between two fat fingers. "What d" you think the Irish PM will do about it?"

"I–I don't know, Prime Minister."

"My bet is he'll do nothing, crafty as he is, and not without courage." Churchill's eyes misted for a moment. "Fait accompli, I think about covers it, don't you? Oh, they might join in if we did something—" He looked down at his desk. "This scheme of yours. I think it's time to put the first stages of it into operation, don't you?"

Churchill picked up the telephone, and was connected almost at once with the First Sea Lord. He ordered the two minelayers to put to sea, and to relay the breached channel in the St George's Channel field. Then, he put down the telephone. Walsingham was breathless with the ease with which part of Emerald had become reality, and with the responsibility suddenly thrust upon him. Emerald was his scheme. It was now his Siamese twin, indivisible from him for the remainder of his life. He almost wanted to tear up the last few pages of the file. Churchill seemed to guess his feelings.

"Nervous, Commander?" he asked, almost slyly.

"I—"

"You wonder how much of Emerald will be put into effect, eh?" Walsingham, with a dry throat, merely nodded. "Not your concern, young man. Thank you for coming."

Walsingham, summarily dismissed, obediently made his way to the door. As he glanced back, he saw that Churchill was idly flicking over the pages of the Emerald file.

Lt Commander David Guthrie watched the slow dawn crawling across the sound and the low hills behind Milford Haven, innocent and with the promise of a fine day. Yet a greyness not entirely created by the seeping of the day into the landscape lingered across the waters of the sound, and the two minelayers, his own Palmerston and HMS Gladstone to port, seemed to be sailing towards the night which lingered out beyond St Anne's Head. He had opened the sealed envelope delivered the previous night by Admiralty guard, and pondered his orders to undo the work of the minesweeping flotilla the previous week.

The thoughtfulness, the guesswork had now, for some inexplicable reason, become foreboding. Perhaps only for the convoy which would now be rerouted through the much more dangerous North Channel to the Mersey—

Yet that seemed insufficient to account for his chilliness, for the persistent greyness of the dawn, for the sense of quiet almost unbroken by gulls" cries that seemed to hang over the sound as heavily as a blanket.

Through the remainder of the night and the early morning — which came with a grey clinging mist full of winter and a seeping drizzle that soaked them — they moved at first east until they skirted the tiny hamlet of Liss Ard, then McBride took them south, into the hills and towards the coast at Toe Head, where he had now decided they must acquire a boat of some kind. His thinking was imprecise, instinctive. Dominating everything was his betrayal by Drummond — he studiously ignored all Gilliatt's doubts and hesitations on the matter — and the need now to stay free long enough to get back to Crosswinds Farm in Kilbrittain. Both Maureen and Gilliatt receded in importance to him, considered only as encumbrances. Whenever a cooler perception of himself arose from looking at his wife, or from the workings of memory aroused by the familiar landscape, he crushed it beneath his hatred of Drummond. He was on a pinnacle of egocentricity.

The hills were draped in thick mist and Gilliatt and Maureen were tired and dispirited with little or nothing to drive them. Gilliatt, like McBride, assumed that the Germans could not have landed without attracting the attention of agents — British or Irish — and the Admiralty would know within hours. Gilliatt worried about the outcome of events, but accepted his powerlessness in the face of them. More and more, he fell into step and feeling with Maureen.

They came down from the hills, where there was no sign of German troops. McBride moved through the landscape like an angry dreamer, as if he exuded the mist that blotted it out, while Maureen leaned against Gilliatt with chill and weariness. Gilliatt felt diminished by his role, and angry with McBride, yet he felt the growth of some obscure responsibility for the woman, even as he recognized that his image of her and her marriage was based on the briefest acquaintance and was probably worthless. She seemed to accept and use him like a coat or a fire.

Lickowen, the tiny scattering of cottages overlooking Toe Head Bay, where McBride expected to find a boat, had already been occupied by Germans. The mist betrayed them, allowing them a sense of unchanged calm in the hamlet until it was too late to run. One startled young soldier on guard raised one shout before they saw him at the crossroads, which brought without seeming delay three more soldiers on the run from behind a white-painted, blind-windowed cottage. McBride raised the machine-pistol, but Gilliatt knocked it from his grasp with his MP40, then threw down his gun. McBride looked at him in hatred, but Gilliatt merely shrugged and raised his arms tiredly above his head. The sleepless night, the gnawing emptiness of his stomach, Maureen's flagging body, the suddenness of the surprise — all conspired to drain him of resistance. Even as he raised his hands, he had an image of Ashe, telling him of the defeatism riddling the Admiralty. He'd thrown down his own gun in a similar mood. The Germans were here, everywhere. There was no point to it—

An Unteroffizier inspected the two machine-pistols, then stepped back, a grin on his face. He was younger than either of them, and he was enjoying their capture without thinking of the Germans they had killed to get the guns. He spoke in a thick Bavarian accent, but both McBride and Gilliatt understood him.

"We've got them. Well done, Willi. These are the bastards who turned up in the middle of the landing—" He seemed to remember something then, and stepped half a pace towards McBride, whose face showed more defiance.

McBride tensed, almost inviting some suicidal encounter. Then the Unteroffizier said in bad English, his pleasure at their easy capture unalloyed: "We invite you to breakfast," and laughed. He directed them, with, his own MP38, towards the cottage from which they had appeared.

There was one other soldier in the cottage, already devouring bacon and eggs, cooked by an old woman with wispy grey hair trailing the shoulders of her black dress. She hardly looked up from the stove and the frying pan as they entered, merely seemed to register, waitress-like, the arrival of extra mouths to be fed, and the Unteroffizier motioned them to chairs round the table. As he sat down, Gilliatt accepted the weariness that sidled up from his feet and ankles and calves, encasing him like shroud. Maureen laid her head on the table, closing her eyes with relief. She was simply glad to stop running. The instant she laid down her head, she felt something loosen from her body and mind, received the sensation that she was physically dissolving. She hated Michael for making them run, for the night and the killings and for her tiredness and hunger and the cottage that was burned and the death of her father. Images seemed to unwind her like a mummy, peel her like the layers of an onion.

McBride sat staring at the Unteroffizier, who placed himself opposite the Irishman.

"What do we do with them?" the young guard asked him.

"Officer's business that," the Bavarian replied.

"We're moving on in an hour—"

Then our Irish friends will have to look after these." He studied McBride intently, his head slightly on one side, as if mentally fitting him with various items of clothing. He nodded, eventually. "You're not a farmer," he observed in English.

"Drummond," McBride replied, "where is Drummond?" He asked the question in German, which seemed only to confirm something to the Bavarian. He shook his head.

"Who is this Drummond? You are the ones in the field last night, nicht so?" Slowly, he leaned forward. "But you are not a farmer, my friend. You are Irish, uh?"

"I'm Irish." McBride added no more, returning to an inward contemplation of Drummond where he could not be distracted by the trivialities of his capture. Nevertheless, when breakfast came he fell upon it hungrily, as if restoring necessary strength.

As soon as he had finished, and Maureen and Gilliatt, too, were drinking tea from chipped mugs, the Bavarian said to the guard at the door whose MP40 had been on them all the time, "Go and tell the Herr Hauptmann we have some guests for him to entertain." The guard ducked out of the low door.

"It's tonight, is it?" Gilliatt suddenly asked in German, lighting a cigarette he had cautiously taken from an inside pocket. The Unteroffizier was surprised, then he smiled.

"It is tonight."

"This will be one of the beaches, will it?" Gilliatt continued. "The U-boats will off-load onto Toe Head Bay. How many other beaches are there — can't be more than two thousand men, surely?" He puffed smoke at the ceiling. The Bavarian looked puzzled and angry, but snapped his mouth into a steel line without replying, almost feeling that he had given something valuable to the man who already knew so much about Smaragdenhalskette. "What's the operation called, by the way?" Gilliatt added.

"Smaragdenhalskette," the Hauptmann said from the door. "I obviously do not need to translate into English, or Gaelic. You are neither Irish nor innocent bystanders, I see."

"Emerald Necklace — yes, it would be," Gilliatt observed. "And the boys from Brest come ashore tonight, mm?"

The Hauptmann appeared startled. His young face under the peaked cap seemed white and worried. "How do you—? You're guessing, of course."

"What I know, the British government knows," Gilliatt observed, marvelling at the courage transmitted by three rashers of bacon, two fried eggs and a thick slice of white bread. He was helpless, just a wasp on a windscreen at whom the driver would occasionally flick, but on whom his mind might become increasingly, dangerously concentrated.

"And what have they done with this so-called knowledge?" the captain sneered, moving closer. The old woman seemed to have melted into the flagstones.

"Ah, now I couldn't possibly tell you that. I've been on holiday in Ireland for the last few days. But, I was on the minesweeper that found your precious channel through our minefield—" Gilliatt left the revelation floating on the air until it descended by its own weight. He smiled, and drawing on his cigarette leaned further back in his chair. McBride was watching him carefully. Maureen touched his arm as she saw the captain's face darken.

"When, eh? When did you find it?" the captain asked, dispensing with any pretence, hungry for the information.

"Oh, one day last week," Gilliatt observed blithely.

"Get the Herr Oberst on the radio," the captain snapped at the Bavarian sergeant, who immediately stood up. "Tell the Herr Oberst what this Englishman knows, and ask what is to be done with him." The second half of the sentence seemed to come as relief and inspiration to both the captain and his sergeant. Confidence returned at once.

Gilliatt quailed inwardly, as if from some electricity that might have passed from Maureen to himself through the hand that still lay on his arm. He was a wasp, and he had just buzzed against the windscreen again. He wondered what they would do with him, and prayed that the British government was doing something. A pressing futility was as physical as a pain behind his eyes, but he rubbed at his forehead to rid himself of it. Be a wasp, he thought. Just do your little bit—

Walsingham had reluctantly agreed to accept Guthrie's invitation to lunch at his Georgian house set in three acres of gardens and paddock, through which a trout stream ran, on the Wiltshire-Hampshire border. Guthrie had decided to spend the weekend with his wife, Marian, at his country home rather than in London. Walsingham was driven down in time for lunch on the Saturday and, as the Daimler turned into the drive of Guthrie's home, he was aware at once of the overt security that surrounded the Minister's person, family, and house. Soldiers, supplemented by police dog-handlers, were evident through the trees across the sunlit paddock and lawns, moving in pairs.

Guthrie, casual in sweater and slacks and looking ten years younger than his age, was waiting for him on the steps of the house as the Daimler came to a noisy halt on the gravel drive. Guthrie came towards him, hand extended. The warmth of the handshake seemed to require response, seek comfort. Guthrie's eyes, as if scales of confidence had dropped from them, been surgically removed by the bright autumnal sunlight, were darting, nervous, worried. Walsingham, as he was ushered into the spacious hall of the house and his light overcoat taken from him by the assiduous Guthrie, merely confirmed with a nod that McBride was to be removed from the board. Guthrie, at the desired signal, appeared instantly more affable, relaxed. He took Walsingham into the drawing-room and introduced hmi to his younger, still-beautiful Eurasian wife. He'd married her before he'd entered politics in the election of 1951, while he was still serving with the Royal Navy in the Far East. She was lithe, gracious, able to put men at their ease without ever inviting more than their conversation. Guthrie poured the drinks.

The telephone call from Walsingham's office came while they were still eating the hors d" oeuvre, smoked chicken served with an avocado mousse and a slightly chilled white Burgundy. Walsingham took the call in Guthrie's study, which overlooked the extensive gardens at the back of the house. Two soldiers were talking to a police dog-handler on the terrace outside, but they disturbed Walsingham rather than reassured him. But the feeling was vague and obscure, and was dismissed as soon as Exton started speaking.

"Ryan is dead? Walsingham repeated bemusedly. The sun obviously did not enter this room until late afternoon, and the study felt chilly. Walsingham lowered himself gingerly onto the edge of Guthrie's walnut desk and fiddled immediately with the gold pen resting near the blotter. He did not, however, make any notes. "How?"

"Shot twice at point-blank range, through the head—"

"Wait, when was this?" Walsingham felt an urgency pluck at him.

"His body was found a couple of hours ago."

"Where?"

"Behind a multi-storey car park in Eastbourne. It had been thrown from one of the upper floors, but he was dead before that. The pathologist's report suggests yesterday afternoon or early evening — which is why we didn't hear from him last night."

"My God—" Walsingham breathed. His sleepless night assailed him now with a new weariness, and the confident assertion of McBride's imminent demise he had given Guthrie seemed hollow and laughable. When they learned Ryan's driver was dead, and Ryan not accounted for among the bombed bodies, they'd been forced to assume that Ryan was on McBride's tail on his own. A foolish assumption.

But — shot to death? And where was McBride now?

"You think he—?" he began, but Exton appeared to have been waiting for the question.

"No, I think it was the girl."

"Drummond's daughter? Why?"

"McBride has no history of marksmanship, didn't have a gun. It had to be the girl. Trouble is, we don't know anything about her."

"I–I'll talk to her father. Where is McBride now?"

"We don't know, sir." Formality masked failure, and it angered Walsingham.

"Find him — quickly." Then, realizations overpowered him in a gang of hot, swift sensations. "Quickly. I'll — get back to you."

Walsingham put down the telephone. It clattered into its rest. It was damp with his palm's perspiration. He pressed his quivering hand to the blotter, leaving a pale imprint on its clear green surface. The girl, the girl—

Organization?

He was as physically aware of Guthrie as if the man had entered the room. Organization. McBride the pawn, digging up the dirt, the Provisional IRA's own shovel. Who? Organization—

It was all part of a plan. Guthrie opened the door, after knocking.

"Everything all right, Charles? Your wine's getting warm—"

"Yes, yes — just give me a few minutes!" Guthrie appeared pale and startled. "I'll talk to you then," Walsingham added, dismissing and mollifying him. Guthrie's face was frowned with thought and dark expectation as he went out. Walsingham picked up the telephone, dialled the operator, and requested Drummond's number in Kilbrittain, County Cork.

Drummond? Rear-Admiral Sir Robert Drummond's daughter? It was sufficiently preposterous to be true. And they knew nothing about her. Guthrie was a dead man, next week's crucial meetings were a dead duck — he was dead. Emerald. His idea—

He tapped nervously on the desk, drum-rolling with his stiff, crooked fingers, until the noise was the flight of horses. Then he was told his call was through. Drummond sounded close as the next room, but wary in tone.

"Yes, Charles? What can I do for you?"

Walsingham wanted no other option than to go for the throat.

"Is your daughter a member of the Provisional IRA, Robert?" Silence, or perhaps a click in the back of Drummond's throat like fingers tapping out morse. "Is she?" Silence, complete except for the humming of the connection. "Robert, I think she's just killed one of my men. He was watching McBride — just keeping a friendly eye, on your advice — and now he's dead. Shot dead at point-blank range. McBride doesn't have a gun. Does she?"

The smaller admission seemed easier. "Yes — yes, I taught her to shoot as a girl."

"Is she a member of the IRA?"

"Yes—" The word seemed part of a forgotten language, dredged up from deep memory. Drummond, Walsingham sensed, was going to pieces on the other end of the line, collapsing. A worm-eaten, hollow deception so old it was ready to fall down. "Yes, she is. I–I don't know what to say—"

"Who else? Do you know anyone else in her — cell?"

"A man called Moynihan." Neutral tones, blind to persons and consequences. "Moynihan is in England now."

"For God's,sake!" Walsingham began, then cut off his blame. "Anything else?"

"No, I don't know anything else!" The voice was plaintive and broken. Then the connection was severed and the receiver buzzed in Walsingham's ear. He slammed it down. He had no doubt, immediately, that Claire Drummond and the man Moynihan already had McBride. He picked up the receiver again to dial London, and recollected, with a chill, personal feeling of anxiety that created no outward-moving ripples, his first meeting with Churchill concerning Emerald in late November 1940.

McBride lay on the crumpled, unmade bed in the small double room of the private hotel in Haywards Heath, Sussex, his eyes still bandaged with a wet cloth, apparently asleep at last. Claire Drummond, rubbing her strained arm, watched him intently, as if feeding off his helplessness. She had turned inland from the coast, gone to earth in Haywards Heath instinctively, and summoned Moynihan to follow her from Eastbourne. Now, it was early afternoon and he still had not arrived.

Her arms and shoulders still ached from the frantic effort needed to drag the body across the car park, lift it and tip it over the wall down into an enclosed, unfrequented courtyard behind the multi-storey car park. Then the additional effort of moving the blinded, stunned McBride over to the passenger seat of the Nissan so that she could drive.

When they arrived at the hotel the previous evening and she parked the car behind the converted private house in a quiet residential street built at the turn of the century, McBride was still in the identical, retreated state; as if time had stopped for him, or he was suffering some catatonic epilepsy. She fitted him with her sunglasses, walked him to the stairs, and locked the door of their room thankfully behind them. Now she was worried, hungry, and frightened — though she would not admit any recognition of the last sensation. McBride's eyesight should have returned to normal by now, he should be awake. Like this, he was useless—

Where was Moynihan? Where?

When he knocked on the door, a little after two-thirty, and called her name softly, she pounced to the door like an animal, afraid of her own nerves, and let him in. She took in immediately the evidence of his sleepless night, and the healing scar on his cheek.

"Making sure I wasn't going to be picked up?" she asked with mustered contempt, looking at her watch. He nodded.

"No point in us both going down, is there? I'm not wanted for murder. You are."

"What?" Her hand fluttered round her mouth like a wounded bird.

"Don't worry, there's nothing in the papers yet. But they'll guess you did it, darling, won't they now?" His eyes moved to take in McBride for the first time. "What's the matter with him?"

"His eyes — he was blinded by the shots. And he's in shock—" Moynihan appeared disturbed by the information. "Don't worry. He'll come out of it."

"He'd better."

"Where do we take him, now we've got him?" She glanced at the bed again. McBride still appeared to be asleep, but she lowered her voice. McBride, stretched on the bed, shoeless but otherwise fully dressed, was an object, an implement. She did not even recollect their sexual encounters. She felt weary, afraid, and yet cleaner, more honest in the daylight.

"Chelmsford, Braintree, Brentwood — they're all out." Moynihan ticked them off on his fingers. He wanted to keep the woman on edge, not in full control. "We'll take him straight to the Cheltenham place."

"No!"

"Yes. We'll have to risk the long drive. There's more chance of the pigs picking us up if we try to head back into London, or along the coast. Cheltenham."

"Very well." The woman seemed subdued to Moynihan, worn down beyond anything other than token resistance. He luxuriated in his new superiority. "When will he be ready to travel?"

"In the boot? Any time." She smiled. "You watch him while I go and get something to eat." She glanced at the closed window of the room. "I could smell fish and chips two hours ago — I closed it. It was driving me up the wall." Moynihan smiled even though he suspected she was ingratiating herself before some further attempt to take command of the situation. "You've had food, I take it?" He nodded. "Watch him carefully — and hire a new car. One with a big boot."

She went out, tugging on her coat as she did so. Moynihan watched the door for a time after it had slammed behind her, then went to inspect the sleeping McBride, lifting the wet bandage. Black scorch marks, and ingrained powder in the skin round the eyes and across the cheeks like black pepper or the stubble of a beard. It was unlikely McBride was blind, but it wasn't his eyes they wanted anyway. He strolled over to the window, and watched the quiet street until he was certain there was no one interested in his parked car or the walking woman. A Volvo, he thought, should satisfy her demand for a large boot to stow McBride for the journey. Stupid woman — there was no telephone in the room. He'd have to wait until her return.

Behind him as he looked out of the window, McBride could see his shadow against the light from the window. The image was wet and underwater and indistinct, but he was profoundly grateful that he wasn't blind. He went on watching Moynihan from the corner of the wet bandage that the Irishman had not properly replaced until his turning from the window caused McBride to close his eyes again. The returning darkness terrified him. Like a recent nightmare, he could not shake it off or diminish its impact.

"Rudi, my dear fellow, do stop fidgeting and sit down," Goessler said with an affability that was half-assumed. "Our good fortune in the sudden death of Mr Gilliatt has now been balanced by your misfortune in losing Moynihan and the Herr Professor and his mistress."

Lobke resented the implicit blame with a pout, and an insolent slumping of his frame into the hotel room's other armchair. The room seemed to have been partially commandeered by their mutual shopping, piled in one corner and in front of the wardrobe and on the second bed. Goessler was drinking a cold beer from the room's icebox, and masking his irritation and fears behind the rim of the glass. Outside, it was raining as evening came on. Lobke's arm was still in a sling. Flying glass from the Eastbourne explosion had sliced through his jacket and sweater and his flesh. He'd spent hours in hospital casualty before Goessler was able to take him back to London. He'd sat on the pavement clutching his bleeding arm while McBride and the Drummond woman headed for the car park, helpless and angry and in pain.

"But what do we do?" he asked plaintively.

"When you have recovered your strength and your temper, Rudi, we will take a trip to Cheltenham. That is where they will take him now, I'm certain. We must meet Professor McBride just once more, I think, to ensure that Moynihan and that damned woman have not jumped the gun." He waved his arms expansively round the room. "I'm certain there is nothing to worry about. McBride should be quite ready to talk to the newspapers about his discoveries—" He broke off to finish the glass of lager. He smacked his full lips loudly. "I do not think even the Provisional IRA can now make a mess of our scheme, Rudi. At least, I hope not. Guthrie will have resigned by the end of next week, and American pressure on Britain will raise an outcry that could even lead to demands for the total withdrawal of troops from the province. American pressure could be sustained for years. And where America leads, many follow. Ulster will be more of a running sore than it has ever been." He inspected his empty glass like a jewel or fine crystal, holding it delicately. "A quite satisfactory conclusion, I think — don't you, Rudi?"

He'd had to appear awake eventually, to avoid suspicion. As soon as he stirred, he registered that Moynihan ducked back out of his vision. The woman gave him two sleeping pills almost immediately, and he groggily accepted them, pretending to swallow both of them but keeping one under his tongue until she and Moynihan were satisfied that he had gone to sleep once more, and left the room together to order and sign for the hire car, locking him in.

He sat up, and spat out the second tablet. His head ached dully and his neck was stiff. His eyeballs still felt peeled and bald and naked, but he could see clearly now and they no longer ached intolerably. His face felt gritty and raw with the powder burns. He groaned, stifling the sound, as he stood up and his whole body protested. Slowly, each step a new and uncertain quest for balance, he crossed to the window and looked down into the street. Some passing traffic but not much, and only a few people about. Some children playing shrill, unskilled football, in bright cagoules and yellow and red plastic boots. He leaned against the window, the cold glass cooling his head. The room was on the first floor. He unlatched the window, and raised it.

Leaning out, he could see a narrow flower-bed like a margin along the fasade of the house. He had no plan, no idea of his whereabouts, and a desire to escape from Moynihan and the woman that came and went like a distant, illusory mirage. Weakness and betrayal unnerved him like an anaesthetic. He could not imagine who had been using him beyond Moynihan and the woman; so keen was the sense of betrayal he felt emanating from Claire Drummond that it bounded his horizon. She had used him. They wanted his researches to put at the disposal of the IRA — which meant Guthrie was the real target.

He teetered in the window frame, and grabbed the sill, steadying himself. He lifted one leg tiredly over the sill, and sat astride it, looking down and registering the flower-bed winking larger and smaller, undulating in width like a moving snake. He swung his other leg out, then turned to look back into the room as if he had forgotten something. His hands gripped the sill, his arms taking his weight while his legs dangled free. Then he dropped, his feet almost immediately striking the wet earth that resisted his impact, causing him to double over and fall sideways into a sitting position. The thorns of a blown rose stabbed through his trousers, keeping his attention fixed on his immediate circumstances. He felt as if he had been sleepless for days.

Slowly, cautiously he stood up, aware of the body that might default on him rather than any danger from Moynihan and the woman. He felt chilly now that the rain was soaking through his shirt. He stepped out of the flowerbed suddenly angry, a spurt of self-pity acting like adrenalin. He was going to get away from them, he'd see the bitch in hell before—

Moynihan was standing right beside him, his automatic drawn and thrust into McBride's side. The Irishman was angry and malevolent but already McBride didn't care, the last energy draining from him so that he slumped against Moynihan who had to strain to hold him upright.

"You bastard," Moynihan breathed in his ear, but McBride's head had slumped forward and he had regained unconsciousness.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN Prisoners of Circumstance

Walsingham felt caged and hampered by his room at the Home Office, sensed the heavy furnishings and dark panelling press upon his immediate concerns and make incongruous Exton's reports and his very presence. Exton, the complete functionary, was out of place there, too modern, too mechanical. Yet what he brought with him into the room promised some scarcely expected solution. At least it was a map with the names of places added, and footpaths clearly marked.

Walsingham was crippled in will by the sense of Nemesis that had assailed him all the way back from Guthrie's house — Guthrie left small and vulnerable and ridiculously youngly dressed on the steps, waving feebly — and would not leave him even here, on home ground. McBride was in the hands of the IRA, Emerald would come out and he would be finished. The justice of it impressed him.

"You can't trace this East German on your list — Goessler, you say?" he murmured, standing at the window watching legged umbrellas hunch down Birdcage Walk and across the Park. The sun of the early afternoon — how chilly it had been in Guthrie's study — had vanished like an omen, and the soaking, persistent drizzle had taken its place, seemingly for good.

The German connection — origin?

"No, sir. He hasn't flown out again, so he must still be in the UK. He hasn't booked out of his hotel room."

"That doesn't mean he'll go back there."

"No, sir."

"We have nothing on him — SIS has nothing on him?" Someone slipped on wet leaves at the corner of the Walk and Horse Guards, splaying onto his back. An old man who had to be helped to his feet. To his dismay, Walsingham was appalled by the minor accident, suffered it psychosomatically.

"No, sir. He's never been in the field, he's always been what he pretended to be — an academic. SIS understanding of the home-birds in the HVA isn't what it might be, sir."

"I appreciate that, Exton. Now, where is he?" The old man down on the wet pavement started on his way again, leaving those who had assisted him as if he had been cast adrift. His progress was painfully slow. "We have to know where he is. He introduced McBride to the whole business of—" He was about to say Emerald, and clamped his mouth round the word, stifling it, " — this German invasion plan. It must have been his inspiration, this operation. There's no other explanation. Would you say?"

He turned suddenly to face the impassive Exton.

"No, sir," Exton commented without expression.

"The object of the exercise has been achieved, Exton — the IRA now has the man with the proof it needs. But, Goessler wouldn't want to miss the end. He's not going to leave the cinema early on this occasion, just to dodge the anthem—" Walsingham smiled, his lips curling round the metaphor. "It's such a devious plan, he'll be incautiously delighted with its success. Hire cars?"

"The Branch have got men on it, sir. They're still checking. The hotel switchboard can't help, and he didn't hire one through the desk."

"You think he's in London, don't you?"

"Most likely, sir."

"No. I think he's somewhere out of the way, a long way away from the point of the explosion—" His face narrowed, grew older and more cunning. An old man with a feverish grip on life. "Find the car and we'll find him, Exton."

"Yes, sir. What about McBride, when we find him?"

"I have — an idea for McBride, Exton. Let's find him first."

He dismissed Exton with a gesture of his hand, then returned to the window. The build-up of traffic splashed a red tail-light glow on the wet street, and rain sparkled in headlights. The slow movement of the traffic was appropriate to some solemn occasion, a funeral. He remembered Churchill's state funeral. Emerald might even have been necessary. Churchill had thought it so.

Goessler. Clever Professor Goessler of the university, and of the HVA. It might still not be too late—

Walsingham felt weary, and oppressed by a sense of justice moving large and blind against him, blundering down his castles of deception. He hated the need for some kind of expiation in himself. He would win, had to win.

And he knew, once he had Goessler, how to — castrate McBride, pull out his tongue. Eunuch and mute, never to speak of the secrets he knew. The violence of the images satisfied him, replaced the lingering fragility of the old man who had slipped on the wet pavement.

The garden was quiet, almost unreal as it slipped into night. Robert Drummond walked in it, regretting the blown roses and the drifting leaves. The house was at his back like a last line of defence, but indeed he had been driven out of its empty rooms by their heaviness of association, by the manner in which they were now only stage backcloths for the events of November forty years before. And he suspected he dwelt on those because he could not bear to consider the present, in which Claire moved like an alien life-form, entirely separate from himself yet vividly identical.

Fanatic.

She had the strength he had not been able to find in himself, when he came into contact with Menschler and the parachute troops and the invasion. The field-grey was too close, the swastika too vivid to be saluted like a distant love. He had been afraid, and had wanted to escape. And the thought of Michael McBride had tormented him, assumed the proportions of a vengeful god. He somehow knew that McBride had seen him with the Germans, had certainly guessed he had betrayed him to them. He was afraid of McBride, even after he learned from Menschler that the three people they'd picked up had to be McBride, his wife, and Gilliatt.

Now, what had seemed so long ago, so unconnected with himself as the war progressed then peace followed and he was promoted, be-medalled, retired, grew prosperous — now, it was so omnipresent and so inescapable.

He increased his pace, as if thereby he might leave the past whispering like a group of guests he could abandon, there on the paved path by the sticks of the pruned hydrangeas. Nevertheless, the past pursued him, because Claire waited for him in the most shadowy parts of the garden and he could not bring himself to face her. What was she doing to McBride, just at that moment—?

He felt himself breathing shallowly and rapidly, but the noise was amplified in his ears, an aged roaring of protest at effort and emotional state. He turned back from the dark hedge at the bottom of the garden, ducking under the lowest branches of the apple trees he had planted soon after the death of his wife — the brief quiet guest in the house who had left him his daughter in his own image and then subsided into a harmless non-being — and feeling his old heart strain at that slight evocation of physical health and suppleness. When he straightened, the white house shimmered in the gloom and seemed very distant. He began to hurry towards it, feeling his chest constrict like an iron band about his lungs, and the old heart bump and shudder.

He looked around him, turning to and fro as if in a strange place, and the darkness of the garden pressed upon him, sidling closer, embracing him. His foot slipped on the edge of the paved path and his heel sank into soft dark earth. He even registered the crushing of next year's bulbs beneath the soil. Then his heart seemed to tear open, then collapse on itself like a dwarf star, drawing him into blackness. He teetered off-balance and slid sideways to the ground, his hands clutching air as if fighting off the approach of night.

The Oberst had had them removed to a barn on the edge of Lickowen and placed under guard — the Bavarian sergeant and the young Schutze who had first spotted them at the crossroads — while he contacted Menschler at Crosswinds Farm, his co-ordination HQ. The colonel seemed at a loss as to what to do with, or to them. He was a soldier, and when Menschler ordered him to interrogate the prisoners he felt a reluctance and incompetence grow in him all the way back to the shadowy barn in the misty drizzle. He felt cold and wet and full of forebodings.

Gilliatt watched the Oberst return and made an effort to smoke his cigarette in an unconcerned manner. The German parachute colonel seemed uncertain of himself or his task, and Gilliatt drew a quiet, sedative strength from the way in which the German approached him, adopted a swagger, tried to enforce himself upon his prisoner. He ignored McBride and Maureen, sitting side by side on a hay-bale a little apart from Gilliatt.

"How much do you know about our operations?" the Oberst asked.

Gilliatt smiled. "A great deal, Colonel." He spoke deliberately in German. "The British government and the Admiralty have known about Emerald Necklace for some time. I myself was aboard one of the minesweepers when your channel was detected. We knew immediately what it was, what was intended—"

"So, where are your troops, where is the Irish army?" the colonel asked, regaining confidence.

Gilliatt shrugged. "I'm not the military planner for this operation."

"Who are you?"

"Lt Peter Gilliatt, Royal Naval Reserve." The colonel seemed puzzled. "Who are you, Colonel?"

"Why is a sailor here, dressed in civilian clothes?"

"Fishing holiday." Gilliatt was amazed at his own confidence, born entirely out of their exchange. The Oberst struck him across the face, and Gilliatt's confidence crumbled because he had been too clever and the German officer was getting angry at his own impotence. Blood was warm and salty in his mouth. He wiped his lips, spat out the blood and saliva. The colonel seemed satisfied with the badge of his hurt.

"Don't be stupid. You're spying on us, mm? Who are these others?"

"Irish citizens — friends of mine. Guides.

"Spies?"

"In their own country — don't be stupid." The colonel struck Gilliatt again, snapping his head up, tipping him backwards against stacked bales of hay where he lay drunkenly looking up at the German colonel. One of his back teeth felt loose, amid the blood from inside his cheek and from the dulled impressions of his bitten, swollen tongue. It angered him unreasoningly. The whole scene was a farce, anyway, comic-book Hun interrogating a prisoner, lots of master-race face-slapping — a charade whose reality he could not accept. He was telling the stupid Kraut everything — it was the reverse of the usual prisoner-interrogator scene anyway — and the silly man wanted to beat him up because his nice secret plan was up the spout. Gilliatt sat up, nursing his cheek and mouth.

"Listen, you stupid bloody Hun! I'm telling you what you want to know, can't you understand that? You've been rumbled, your lovely secret plan isn't a secret any more. I don't know what the British government is doing about it, but by now you can be sure they know you've landed. So, I should get down to the beaches and wait for tonight and see what turns up!"

He fell back against the bales, exhausted by his outburst. The parachute colonel stood in front of him, mouth agape and hands at his sides, for a long time. Then he turned on his heel and stamped out of the barn. Gilliatt shook his head, probing at the back tooth. Definitely loose. Damn. He looked up, to find the Bavarian sergeant laughing. When Gilliatt looked at him, he closed up his face again.

Maureen moved across to him, touching his face gently, staring into his eyes regretfully and with admonition behind that. In a moment, she might be scolding him like a child.

"I'm all right," he said thickly, turning his head aside to spit out more blood.

"Open your mouth," she ordered. He did so. She inspected it, then nodded. "You'll live." Her eyes, however, were more tender than her voice. McBride stood behind her.

"How am I doing?" Gilliatt asked softly.

"Brilliantly, if you want to get us all shot," McBride replied. Gilliatt smiled painfully. His lips were puffing out now from the colonel's blows. "I can see your point, but will it do any good?"

"It might. Have you any ideas?" Gilliatt watched the Bavarian sergeant, moving slowly closer now that their voices were quiet and they were speaking in English.

"I'm going to get out of here, fairly soon. Tonight at the latest," McBride remarked, squatting next to his wife and staring abstractedly at the strewn, crushed hay between his feet. Maureen looked viperously at him.

"You're mad, the pair of you," she breathed angrily. "You'll get yourselves killed, why not accept it? You are out of the stupid, dangerous game." She stood up, looking the Bavarian sergeant up and down. "Men!" she snorted contemptuously. "Little boys playing soldiers!"

The German was nonplussed. She walked away from him, arms folded across her breasts, her steps strutting and angry. Gilliatt watched her, grateful for her angry solicitousness. When he looked into McBride's eyes, there was a recognition between them. McBride's face narrowed in anger.

"You want Drummond, don't you? That's all you want, isn't it?" McBride grinned savagely, and nodded. "You don't even know he had anything to do with the Germans, dammit! What's the matter with you?"

McBride seemed compelled to consider the question that was only intended as an insult. After a moment, he said, "I don't know. I wonder at what I'm finding out about myself — you know that? I'm not too fond of it."

"Stop it, then."

McBride shook his head. "No, I won't do that, Peter. I find it strangely satisfying." He saw Gilliatt looking beyond him, at Maureen. "Strange," he said, as if he had been asked another question. "I don't even regret Maureen all that much. I feel — under the anaesthetic, maybe."

Gilliatt was puzzled, and appalled. Then the mood was broken by the sound of a small car approaching the barn. They listened, McBride's face contracting and expanding almost as if the muscles beneath the skin were breathing heavily. Gilliatt looked up as the car door slammed and there were footsteps across the yard outside. McBride evidently expected Drummond.

The man who stepped through the door had the raincoat and cap of one of their pursuers. It might have been another man, but he was certainly Irish. IRA. He grinned as McBride turned and looked at him. The two men recognized each other.

When McBride turned away again, Gilliatt said, "Who is he?"

"Riordan — he runs the Ross Carbery and district chapter. He probably shot Maureen's Da, or had him shot. If he's left to guard us, then God help him." McBride's hands clenched and unclenched. Gilliatt felt distanced from him, further than ever before. Beneath the smiling, almost boyish adventurer's exterior there was something cold and dangerous that this situation had force-fed. He was a film star whose screen image masked a filthy or perverted private character. Gilliatt could find no more appropriate an analogy. He couldn't understand McBride and wanted a view of him that explained him in stark monochrome and not in shades of grey. He was more than a little mad, perhaps, and certainly a killer.

McBride moved away, as if sensing the bent of Gilliatt's reflections, and Gilliatt went on caricaturing him for the sake of his own mental comfort.

Churchill entered one of the small operations rooms in the command bunker beneath the Admiralty building set aside for the select team he had assembled to deal with what he now officially termed Emerald. He had taken personal command of the operation, and its classification for security was the highest possible. On the wall immediately in front of him was a map of the British Isles, to which a It commander from the Tracking Room was attaching pins to show the position of the channel that the Germans had swept. Churchill allowed himself a gruff, barking laugh at the handwriting which described the minefield by its nickname. He saw Walsingham in consultation with two officers, a major and a colonel, from the War Office's Co-ordination of Intelligence Branch, and signalled him to join him. Two armchairs and a cocktail cabinet had incongruously been added to the linoleum-floored, concrete-walled room. Churchill slumped into one of these, noticing the patch of striped shirt that had pushed itself from beneath his waistcoat, tucked it back into his waistband, and placed his hat on the small table beside his chair.

Walsingham waited, and the Prime Minister indicated the drinks cabinet. Walsingham poured the old man a large brandy which Churchill swiftly demolished. Then he indicated that Walsingham should sit. Around them, the work of the room continued like the soft and constant hum of machinery. The two minelayers were indicated on the map, already well into the British-swept channel and approaching the German sweep. For its part, the army intelligence unit the War Office had assigned to Emerald was working at a papier-mache relief-model on a table, the Brittany coast divided by a strip of board from the Irish coast from Cork to Mizzen Head. The relief-models had been hastily painted green, brown and blue, and around the sea inlets and the beaches were marker flags and along the coast were model soldiers in field-grey.

Churchill studied Walsingham. The younger man felt uncomfortable under his gaze, while at the same moment he was aware of some intense inward debate, as if the old man looked inward with one eye, towards him with the other. Churchill's proximity unnerved him. The man emanated will, ruthlessness, energy. He was unsparing and unforgiving, perhaps most evidently with himself. The blue eyes were intent, dissatisfied with the corpulent, flagging body which the mind inhabited. The eyes and their gaze seemed totally an instrument of the man's intellect and nothing to do with the ageing sack of the flesh. Churchill puffed at his cigar.

"What do we know, Commander? How many troops have the Nazis dropped into County Cork?"

"The weather has been too bad for any aerial reconnaissance of the area, Prime Minister." Churchill's face creased in irritation. "But we have reports which suggest the number of planes they used was very small. We don't think they could have landed anything like a division in one drop."

"How many?"

Two or three rifle regiments, signals unit, perhaps — not much more than that."

"A holding operation."

"Would you like to see our guesswork as to their dispositions?"

"In a moment. What are the reports from France?"

"Sir, we can explain it better if you'd look at the models," Walsingham persisted. Churchill looked across the room as if reluctant. Then he heaved himself out of the deep armchair, teetered for a moment but shrugged away Walsingham's supporting hand, and then crossed the room with a conscious determination in his step. The colonel from the Army Intelligence Unit snapped to attention. Walsingham noticed the way in which Churchill seemed to enjoy the subordination of the people around him, their punctilious awareness of his importance. A commander-in-chief rather than a Prime Minister. Had he painted at Chartwell all those years just for moments like this?

"Now, Colonel. Explain." Churchill dabbed at the Brittany model. Cigar ash dropped into the blue-painted sea off Brest, and the colonel delicately blew it away, dispersing it over the flat painted paper of the Atlantic. The colonel then dabbed towards the model with a pointer. A grey toy soldier with a rifle.

"Yesterday, according to aerial reconnaissance, these units of parachute troops were moved from here down to the airfields here—" He picked out the marked airfields one by one. "There were a number of transport planes at each which had arrived the previous night. These units—" He picked out two other toy soldiers, standing above Plabennec, " — were moved down to the harbour area. As definitely as we can tell from photographs and from what the man McBride brought back with him, they are two infantry divisions. Also, we have vague reports from the local network that engineer units — Panzers — have also been on the move towards Brest. That's more or less it."

Churchill was silent for a while then: "What are the latest weather reports?"

"They'll sail tonight."

"Who will come first?"

"One of the divisions will send in infantry, there'll be signals — at least a couple of abteilungen — recce units, engineers. They'll want a bridgehead—" Already, it was evident that Churchill's eyes had strayed towards the Irish coast model, via the wall map which revealed that the two minelayers had moved into the gap of the German-swept channel. He pointed with the cigar.

"What do we know about the dispositions here?" He waggled the cigar along the coast of County Cork.

"Difficult, sir," the colonel offered apologetically. "We've very few reports from Drummond's rather poor intelligence network, and we've no aerial reconnaissance."

"But—?"

"We estimate there were four landings at least, possibly five or six. To secure the beaches, since they landed so close to the coast in each case." He pointed towards the field-grey toy soldiers. "We know they landed here—" Near Kilbrittain and the Old Head of Kinsale. "And here." Rosscarbery Bay. "On that basis, we've selected the likeliest beaches for landings, and the easiest to hold — here, here and here." Toe Head Bay, Clonakilty Bay, Glandore Harbour. Churchill nodded. A toy soldier loomed over each shallow inlet of the sea, carrying a rifle across his body. Churchill turned to Walsingham.

"What do you hear of the Republic's army?"

"Our intelligence sources in Dublin are indicating that the Irish are sitting tight, sir." Churchill nodded. "They're still gathering their own intelligence. There's an alert, all leave canceled, a lot of meetings and consultations between the army and the government—"

"And it doesn't amount to more than piss and wind," Churchill snapped. "They won't want to go up against crack parachute troops. God, they saw what happened to us at Dunkirk! Who could blame them?" He rubbed his nose. "They need our help, but they're not asking for it. Strict neutrality. I know they've been in touch with Berlin—" He smiled at the sharing of one of his secrets. "Apparently, the Fuhrer is denying all knowledge of such troop landings and is assuring the Irish government he continues to recognize their neutrality. Gentlemen, it's up to us, I'm afraid. We must look out for ourselves. Now, what can we do?"

The intelligence colonel cleared his throat. "We could land a couple of regiments today. The Dorsets and the Herefords are on full alert. They've not been told why."

"Colonel, you know it would take today to get them to the coast and aboard suitable vessels, even if we had them. By tomorrow night, they might have begun to disembark in Cork harbour, if we were very lucky." He paused while the colonel flushed slightly. "Very well, get them to the coast, Bristol or Cardiff, as quickly as possible. Just bodies — forget heavy equipment. I will talk to the Prime Minister of the Irish Republic and inform him that dockside facilities will be required in Cobh or Cork tomorrow. You have a list of vessels in Bristol and Cardiff—" Walsingham looked into Churchill's eyes, and shook his head. "Get one!"

Walsingham crossed to the telephones ranged alongside each other on a fold-away table. Churchill watched his retreating back for a moment, then said, "Get them onto anything, let them sail as soon as possible." Again, he pointed with his cigar. "They'll require Cork airport. I presume they'll try to take it tomorrow, and land equipment and the Panzergrenadiers then. Then Cork harbour, and it would be all over." The colonel looked as if Churchill had touched a hidden nightmare or shame. "Very well. Then our relaid minefield had better work effectively, to give us time to round up the parachutists, on behalf of the sovereign republic of Eire." He emitted his gruff, barking laugh. The colonel realized, looking into his face, that there was a confidence that bordered on fanaticism in Churchill. The atmosphere of the War Office was cynical, depressed — even before Emerald — but it was as if Churchill were fighting personally, in some medieval combat with Hitler and knew his own superiority to the German leader. If he had no doubts, then Britain could not lose. Or was it a public-relations act, a pretence and nothing more? The colonel could not answer his own question. Churchill was speaking again.

"We have to defend Cork airport and the harbour. If we can do that—" It was not a doubt — 'then the Nazis cannot land more troops except by parachute. And tanks are not dropped by parachute. Good. Walsingham—" He called across the room. Walsingham placed his hand over the mouthpiece.

"Prime Minister?"

"I want the First Sea Lord as soon as you've ordered your list of shipping. This transport of two regiments to Ireland must have absolute priority. They must be there by tomorrow at the latest."

Churchill turned back to the wall map. Someone had added the position of the convoy carrying Patrick Terence Fitzgerald, now only a few hours" sailing from Valentia Island on the west coast of Ireland. The four pins for the cruiser and the three merchant ships were livid spots before his eyes and an interference with his thinking. Those four coloured pins were something he would have to deal with before the end of the afternoon.

He inwardly saw his own hand resting on the final pages of Walsingham's Emerald file. Cigar ash scattered like dandruff over its typed, double-spaced lines. Walsingham had been prepared to sacrifice the convoy for the sake of complete surprise and to ensure the destruction of the U-boat convoy that was coming that night. He'd got the wrong end of the stick. The convoy from America might have to be destroyed, but not for that reason.

There was another reason that burned at the back of Churchill's mind like a dark light, or a spillage of acid. Before that evening, he would have to allow it into the forebrain, dissect it, and act upon it.

David Guthrie watched the grey, choppy sea close over the last batch of mines from the deck of Palmerston. Nothing disturbed the water other than the wind which stirred and made ragged the sea-mist, and the wake of the minelayer. He felt cold inside his duffel-coat and thick sweater and uniform jacket. The sea looked forbidding, rubbed and abrased by the wind into a treacherous, insecure surface. There was no mood of satisfaction at the completion of their task, and he did not understand its absence. Nor did he comprehend the reason for his chill sense of foreboding, which lingered like the staleness of guilt in his mind.

Patrick Terence Fitzgerald thanked the officer who brought him the information that they were four hours" sailing from Valentia Island. He'd not see the coast, of course, because of the mist through which the drizzle squalled on the buffeting wind. The quarter deck was wet and treacherous, and he gripped the railing fiercely as if the sea suggested some siren call to him. He was cold, and dispirited and alone, and thankful that his journey was almost over. About the task confronting him, he was not prepared to think. He was almost ready for it, but not quite. By tomorrow, he told himself, he would be ready to go to work. By tomorrow.

Jean Perros watched from the harbour wall of St Anne-du-Portzic as the large U-boats, moving in line astern, slipped out of Brest down the Goulet de Brest towards the sea. Through the dusk and the drizzling mist he could make out their low, spectral shapes as they emerged and disappeared through the palpable, chilly air. There had been no fishing allowed by the Germans for the last two days. He'd been unable to make any accurate reports to London, via the radio set in St Pierre-Quilbignon. Now, he would be able to send the message they waited for—

And he believed, so deeply that it rendered him weak and old, that his message would be too late to make any difference.

He watched until the U-boats had finally vanished westwards, then hurried from the harbour wall to collect his bicycle to ride the mile and a half to send his signal.

"You're going to talk to us, McBride, and not only to us. You're going to talk to the newspapers. You'll even get paid for it. We're making money for you — just look at it that way."

Moynihan chuckled. He was sitting opposite McBride, whose hands were tied in front of him, resting on his lap. Claire Drummond was seated on an upright chair, taller than the prisoner on the battered sofa and the Irishman in the armchair by the fire, and suggesting by her posture and her silence that she was in command of the circumstances of that room. McBride, truculently silent, was still grateful for the light from the bulb above his head and for the warmth of the fire after the hours in the stifling, nightmarish boot of the car.

Gagged and bound, he had thought himself slipping into insanity. Cramp was like the gradual onset of decay, even death. The gag in his mouth seemed to be sliding down his throat, into his nostrils to suffocate him. The smell of petrol and the road noise of the tyres sickened him. Then they'd stopped, finally, and dragged him out — he'd fallen over with the cramp in his body and had lain in the long wet grass, sobbing until they'd bundled him indoors. He'd caught a brief glimpse of fields dropping away, dark copses and grazing cattle, and of a dilapidated cottage directly ahead of him. When they'd got him inside, their satisfaction made them abandon any pretence to security. He was in the

Cotswolds, just outside Andoversford. Claire Drummond had laughed at his bemusement, shouting into his face that he was near Cheltenham and hadn't he ever heard of the Cotswolds, the dumb stupid Yank that he was—

Claire Drummond frightened him. The woman was high on success, on the weapon she believed he would become for her. He saw how much she hated the British, how much she despised him. She paced the room continually, until she finally settled in front of him on the hard chair. Neither the journey nor the lateness of the hour seemed to have tired her, or made her aware of any physical limitations on her driving hatred. McBride quailed inwardly. He could see no way in which he could resist them. They were determined he should talk — not to them but to the press.

"Go to hell," he mumbled in reply to Moynihan. Moynihan crossed the room and struck him across the face. The woman seemed to enjoy the act, to anticipate a second or third blow and be disappointed when they did not come. Moynihan laughed, threatened with his open hand so that McBride flinched, and then returned to his seat.

"Don't be bloody stupid, McBride," he said, picking up his glass of whisky from the rug beside his chair. "You're all on your own, in this delightful weekend cottage, no one knows you're here. You'll get yourself buried in the garden if you don't co-operate."

"Then who'll believe your story?"

"It'll still make good reading, cause quite a stir."

"You need me — and not too knocked about, either, you dumb bunny," McBride sneered. He didn't know where the energy, the defiance had come from. Perhaps only from the woman's silence, her withdrawal from the verbal baiting. Moynihan made as if to rise again, slopping his whisky over his trousers. "Little wet-pants," McBride added, laughing.

The woman suddenly stood up, and crossed to McBride. The gun in her hand, the little Astra she'd used in the car park, was close to his head. She grinned, pressing the hole of the barrel against his temple. She squeezed the trigger, very slowly and in plain sight. Her eyes were mad — she was going to kill him.

The hammer clicked, and she laughed. She showed him the magazine in her other hand. Then she leaned close to him. He could smell the grease of their flsh-and-chip supper on her breath — he'd been able, with terrible hunger, to smell the fish and chips in the boot as they sat in a lay-by and ate them — and he could see tiny fragments of white fish between her bottom front teeth. She leaned to his ear, and began whispering to him. He heard the magazine click back into the gun. She pressed the barrel against his groin, moving it in a rubbing motion as if it was a part of her body, her own crotch touching his. She pressed harder and harder.

"I promise you, darling," she whispered in a grotesque parody of seductive tones, her breath quick and shallow and obscene in his ear, "I promise I'll let my gun make love to you, but not just yet, not just yet—" The gun hurt now, pressing into him. He winced. "You want it to love you, but not yet, darling, not just yet—"

He screamed as she dug the barrel of the gun deeper, then drew back from him. Her eyes were alight, possessed. He clutched his bound hands over his groin, sobbing despite himself.

He heard Claire Drummond saying: "He knows now I could do it, just as easily as anything. Blow off that thing he's had inside me. He knows his life isn't really worth a light!"

McBride looked up. "You're mad."_ " -

"Yes," she said, sitting down again, putting the gun back in her shoulder-bag as primly as if it were her make-up or cigarettes. "Oh, yes. The awful thing for you is — you know I'm aware of it, that I can use it, turn it on like a tap. You'll never know when I'll do it, or what effect it might have on you. Terrible, aren't I?" She lit a cigarette, exhaling the first smoke at the stained ceiling with its cracking plaster between smoke-blackened beams.

"See?" Moynihan said as if he had planned the demonstration. "You'll co-operate." McBride blinked back his tears of pain and fear. "We want you to make a statement first of all, just a trailer for the main film, so to speak. On tape, and we can play it over the telephone or send it to one of the newspapers. You mention Guthrie's name, and the war, and a couple of other little items of interest, and we'll set up the meetings and make the financial arrangements. Oh, you won't be left out of it, darling. You'll stand to make — oh, fifty thousand. At least. That's about the going rate for serialization. You ought to make twice that. You can't prove Guthrie was queer as well, can you now? That'd be even better." Moynihan was speaking through his own laughter, enjoying his joke enormously.

Then McBride was laughing, too, so that Moynihan fell silent. McBride shook his head. His voice was old and weak and tired and bereft of resistance. He said, "You dumb bastard — I was thinking of millions, not thousands. Millions! Now, isn't that the funniest part of the whole thing, uh? Isn't that a real belly-laugh?"

The noise of the approaching car cut off his laughter. Claire Drummond rose swiftly from her chair.

"Put the light out!" she snapped, moving to the window.

Walsingham put down the telephone with a quivering hand, rattling it in its cradle. Against all hope, against all hope—

He couldn't help it. Of course, they'd temporarily lost the car again, after they'd spotted it in a pub car park outside Cirencester, but it had been seen. They knew the area. If it moved on any road in the Cotswolds that night, they would pick it up.

But, his satisfaction and relief were almost overpowering. They'd traced the car-hire firm Goessler had used — a small one, not one of the giants — late in the afternoon, just before closing, then sent out a general alert to all police forces. By ten in the evening, a constable in a Panda patrol car of the Gloucestershire Constabulary had spotted the white Ford Escort in the pub car park. Goessler in his overconfidence had left it bathed in the white illumination of the country pub's floodlighting, unsuspicious that he was even "wanted for questioning". Goessler's unconcern, his illusory sense of safety, bolstered Walsingham's nerve more than any other factor. Goessler's unawareness of him put him at a disadvantage. It made him more stupid than Walsingham, slower and capable of being outwitted. He had Goessler in the palm of his hand now. He could, and would, crush him.

The hatred was pure and deep and uplifting. Goessler had been out to get him. Now, he would finish Goessler, the author and onlie true begetter — he smiled at the quotation — of this operation. Finish him and stalemate McBride. A stand-off.

Of course, for Goessler and for the Drummond woman and anyone else who knew, it was an end-game. That was another of the certainties he felt able to allow himself after Exton's telephone call.

He looked around his sitting-room, at the high, corniced, shadowy ceiling then at the rich carpet. The substance of the room seemed to have returned. He seemed more substantial, heavier, sitting in his favourite armchair. All would be well.

He raised his glass.

"To a gallant loser — Herr Goessler," he mouthed, smiling, his lips seeming too thin and small to contain the vivid dentures.

He would meet Goessler just the once, when they picked him up and before—

He stopped the thought there, like breaking off chocolate to keep for later.

"Please don't be inhospitable, my friends!" the voice called from outside the door of the cottage. "I am not a stern parent come to spoil your happiness or invade your tree-house. Open the door. We are surely still friends!"

McBride lifted his head. He couldn't believe that he recognized the voice and shook his head as if to clear it of deception. His groin ached and he was frightened and the voice seemed to belong to a calmer past. But, incredibly, Goessler went on speaking outside, addressing Claire Drummond and Moynihan. McBride, hunched over his bound wrists and aching groin, watched from under slitted lids; a physical approximation to cunning that had no inward reality. The woman opened the door, and Moynihan turned on the light as it closed again. It was Goessler, and Lobke, the so-called embassy official. The light seemed hard and dirty, making Goessler look older, fatter but with somehow hollower cheeks, stubbled and with the cheekbones emphasized like reminders of distant youth. Lobke looked wary, concentrating on Claire Drummond and Moynihan, both of whom still held their guns level on the two Germans.

"Come, come," Goessler said with a bonhomie that made McBride's flesh creep. He was listening to the tones of someone it was easy to take for granted, even regard with a mild contempt — Goessler's academic mask that had deceived him completely. Then Goessler was standing in front of him. His pudgy hand lifted McBride's chin, inspected his face like a surgeon considering alterations. "You look tired, Thomas." There was no sense of irony in his words, but a kind of feminine condolence which made McBride shudder.

"Get lost, Goessler," he said. Moynihan laughed.

"I'm sorry if they've been rough with you, Thomas — they are animals." He turned on Claire Drummond and Moynihan. "Don't wave those stupid guns at me. I'm your paymaster, your arms dealer, your banker, your insurance. You can't kill me. Besides, I have come merely to congratulate you on your success, and to make certain that you find Professor McBride co-operative."

"Were you followed?" Moynihan asked. Goessler merely looked at him with contempt and sat himself in the chair Moynihan had occupied. Lobke placed himself against the wall where he could watch the room and its occupants. Claire Drummond put her gun away, and sat down. Moynihan was forced to sit on the narrow sofa, next to McBride, who shuffled into a corner of the seat, hunched up, frightened and sullen. Goessler studied him intently for a long time, then spread his hands.

"I'm sorry, Thomas — Professor. You should not have to endure this. Indeed, I am sorry—" Moynihan shuffled uncomfortably on the sofa. It was evident he hated and feared Goessler, the man's physical presence and voice disturbing him. "But I'm afraid it was all very necessary. As our friends here have told you — unless they are being even more secretive than usual — they belong to the Provisional IRA, though Miss Drummond is really a very Left-wing Trotsky disciple, mixed in with a little PLO and Italian terrorist ideology—" Claire Drummond's face was white, her nostrils pinched into pinpricks, her mouth a bloodless single line. She was staring at Goessler, who ignored her, her eyes wide. "A very uncomfortable mixture, and highly volatile." Goessler smiled. "Sean is much less complicated — he simply hates the English. Both of them have a burning desire to see the forthcoming meetings between the British and Irish governments fail disastrously. You know what part the present Secretary of State, the Right Honourable David Guthrie, played in the prevention of the German invasion of Ireland. Our friends want you to tell that, to tell also what you know of the British atrocity that followed, and what you know of the death of a prominent American in the sinking of the special convoy—"

Goessler unrolled the facts of McBride's investigations one by one, ticking them off on the pudgy fingers of his left hand. A ruby ring glowed on the same hand. McBride sat, his mouth hanging stupidly open, sensing a gulf opening up beneath him and his mind spinning. Goessler knew everything, everything—

He could not stop the thought repeating and echoing, like something dreamed on the edge of sleep where the mind is uncontrolled and the body twists and turns to rid itself of the persistent, maddening images. Goessler knew everything— had always known.

Goessler recognized the process going on in his head, and waited until McBride looked balefully, defeatedly up at him again.

"Thomas," he said softly, "of course we've always known. There was no way we could not know. Menschler and people like him gave us everything, and we knew what must have happened to the convoy, and to the invasion, even who was involved. The present director of what they used to call MI5 evolved the plan that Churchill used—" He smiled. "You are the guarantor, the mask of accident, the facade of honour we sinister and untrustworthy people require. Of course, it would have been better had you gone ahead and published in your own time, but we could not afford to wait that long. You are the most welcome accident of all, being your father's son."

It was evident that Goessler had another nugget of information that he wished to impart. His face became as impassive as a page of print. He wanted McBride to ask the right question. Claire Drummond frowned, watching McBride's facial reactions carefully. And McBride remembered his father, as if recalling some piece of information that had been of only tangential importance to his investigations.

"What happened to my father?"

Claire Drummond was moved by an obscure guilt, even pity— but at what or for whom she had little idea. "Don't tell him."

Goessler looked at her, then ignored her. "Your father was killed by her father," he said bluntly. "Robert Drummond killed your father because your father discovered he was a traitor." Claire Drummond winced at the accusation, readopting long-abandoned sensitivities for a moment. "Oh, it wasn't unusual in Englishmen of his class and upbringing in the thirties. Many of them embraced the illusion of Russia under the benevolent government of Stalin, and others became sycophantic admirers of the Führer's New Order in Germany, the strength through joy which led to the work making free. Arbeit machtfrei. True, many of them would not have been so fascinated if they had known about Dachau and Auschwitz and the other places, but then so many of your poets would not have loved Stalin if they had known he was liquidating millions more even than Hitler. Beliefs are strange things — it is perhaps better to live without them." A trace of doubt flitted on Goessler's face for a moment, like a tiny cloud moving across the sun, then he nodded his head. "Robert Drummond worked for the Germans throughout the war, most especially during November 1940. He killed your father."

McBride looked at Claire Drummond, who snapped, "Why did you tell him that? He'll never help us now!" There was something close to fear in her voice.

"Of course he will. It is his only chance of life, is it not, Thomas?" He smiled at McBride. "Let him think it over for a time. Do not be in too much of a hurry to prompt him, and do not hurt him." He stood up, hands spread in front of him, shrugging off any harm he might have done. "That is my advice to you both." He sounded obscenely fatherly.

Claire Drummond was puzzled. "Is that it? Is that all you came for?"

"For now — yes. Rudi and I will be staying nearby, of course, and we will call on you again tomorrow." He smiled expansively. Moynihan writhed visibly on the sofa next to McBride. McBride realized, through a miasma of contradictory emotions, that both the woman and Moynihan were powerless to behave independently of the East German. He controlled them, they were his employees. Even the girl, stronger than her partner, was afraid of Goessler. They'd outrun him in kidnapping McBride, but now they'd stepped back into line.

"Goodnight, Thomas," Goessler said from the door, even as McBride's skin was still registering the change in temperature from the open door. He did not reply, and Goessler shrugged, then went out.

He had to escape. He knew that there had to be a moment, one chance, to get out and away. Otherwise he would talk, he would be working for Goessler, the man without beliefs. But the thought of escape daunted him, like a mountain he had to climb without oxygen or ropes or boots or courage. He let his head drop forward on his chest as he heard Goessler's car pull away from the cottage. He'd never make it, couldn't do it—

The parachute troops pulled out at midday. The weather remained to their advantage, misty and drizzling persistently, the landscape grey and stifled and almost obscured. McBride and Maureen and Gilliatt were not questioned again by the Oberst. He merely dismissed them from his considerations and handed them over to Riordan and two other local IRA men — one of them Gilliatt was certain had been among their original pursuers, a short, red-headed man with a whey-coloured face that looked only half-shaped from its human clay.

Gilliatt dismissed the image of the wasp on the windscreen. It hadn't worked. It was too late for second thoughts, for reconsiderations. The plans were made, orders given, strategy rigidly defined. The parachute troops would hold the beaches for the seaborne landings early the following morning. Gilliatt had been unable to make their grasp on the situation loosen even a fraction.

Riordan seemed to take a pleasure in guarding McBride. He treated him warily, keeping a physical distance between them that admitted the danger McBride might represent, but satisfied with the docility, the unarmed innocuousness that Gilliatt knew McBride was deliberately presenting to his captors. Riordan's desultory, mindless baiting of McBride went unanswered.,McBride, to all appearances, was a beaten man.

They were given bread and cheese and beer for lunch, soon after the Germans left. As the afternoon wore on, Maureen seemed least able to accept her captivity. She paced the barn continually with jerky, caged-animal steps, wearing a path in the strewn hay. McBride showed no interest in her, but Gilliatt was concerned. Her behaviour was irritating Riordan and the others, making them more edgy and watchful when they might otherwise have been lulled into carelessness. If McBride tried to escape, then he and Maureen would also have to go. At the moment, they were prisoners of war. He had no desire to become a hostage.

McBride's suspicions of Drummond had become preposterous to Gilliatt. It was far easier to believe in bad luck, in accident, than in Drummond's treachery. But McBride was obsessed, almost doom-laden. He was set apart, not even concerned to involve Gilliatt and Maureen in any plan of escape.

"Sit down, woman!" Riordan snapped out eventually, his rifle moving indecisively but dangerously on his lap. Gilliatt, as if newly aroused, looked at his watch. Four-thirty. It was getting dark outside. "For God's sake, sit down!"

Maureen appeared stung, slapped across the face by his anger. She stood in front of him, fists clenched, her body visibly quivering with anger and the released strain of her captivity. She simply would not accept, nor exploit her situation. Gilliatt got to his feet — McBride hadn't even looked up at the scene from where he sat, which had to mean he was dangerously near making some move — and moved swiftly to Maureen's side. She shrugged off his hands on her upper arms, but he pulled her back against him in an embrace. Riordan laughed.

"He's very friendly with your wife, McBride!" he roared, highly amused at Gilliatt's overacted concern and Maureen's reluctance to be mollified. "Just take her away," Riordan added to Gilliatt. "She'd wear out the patience of a saint!"

"She doesn't like being, held prisoner," Gilliatt offered affably. "Come to that, neither do I." His words had a studied lightness, lack of menace. Riordan smiled confidently, seated on a hay-bale, the woman between him and the man, and her face becoming more docile, bovine as her anger spent itself through her working hands and her clenched jaws. Gilliatt was leaning his head against hers in a parody of comfort.

"You'll just have to accept it, like he—"

His eyes were moving across to McBride, and widening slowly as they did so. His words cut off, and Gilliatt wondered whether McBride had left it too late. He pushed himself and Maureen forward, toppling their combined weight onto Riordan. The rifle was coming to a bead on McBride, then he lost sight of it under Maureen's body. It discharged as he fell on top of her, and she screamed. Gilliatt felt a blank emptiness as he rolled aside, striking out with his fist at Riordan's head, which bobbed into his view. His fist connected with Riordan's temple. Maureen went on screaming and screaming and Gilliatt moved slowly — too slowly it seemed — away from her body, clambering up her frame to fasten his hands on Riordan's rifle as the Irishman disentangled the Remington Mk. 1R from World War I from beneath Maureen and tried to bring it to bear on Gilliatt.

Gilliatt heard one shot, then the click of a bolt — the man Paddy's Lee Enfield Mk. - then a second shot and a third, punctuated by the noise of the bolt-action. He let Riordan pull the rifle towards him, and then pushed, smashing the stock into his face. Riordan howled, letting go of the rifle. Gilliatt hit him again, and whirled round, fumbling with the bolt.

McBride was standing very still, the Lee Enfield in his hands. Just in front of him, Paddy lay unconscious, while across the barn the whey-faced man with the half-formed features lay on his back, three holes in close grouping in his coat, an old Mauser C96 still in his hand, unfired. Maureen, unwounded but terrified and hysterical, went on screaming. McBride crossed the barn, turned her face to his and slapped her three times across the cheek. She subsided into sobbing which racked her body like unassuageable grief. McBride looked at the unconscious Riordan, then at Gilliatt.

"I think we'd better be leaving, don't you?" he said with a grin. He was as tense as a wound spring, the pleasure of winning and killing running through his frame like electricity.

"My God," Gilliatt muttered, feeling his legs give way. He sat down untidily alongside Riordan. "My God, I could have killed her," he added, looking blankly at Maureen.

"You'll have enough time to make it up to her," McBride observed. "When you've dropped me off, you'll take care of her." It was like an order. Gilliatt looked up at him, bemused.

"What the hell's the matter with you?" he shouted, looking from McBride to Maureen and back again. "We could have got your wife killed between us. Doesn't that matter to you at all?" McBride appeared unimpressed. "What the hell's the matter with you?" he asked again, more softly.

McBride shook his head. "Don't confuse the issue with moral speculations, Peter. I'm going to kill Drummond and you're going to look after Maureen. Those are the assigned roles. You drop me off at Kilbrittain and take her on to Cork."

"Don't you care about her at all?"

"It isn't relevant at the moment," McBride said without emotion. Gilliatt saw him on an outcrop of egocentricity, not even bothering to signal to a vessel that might rescue him. McBride crossed to the body on the floor and re-moved the Mauser from its grasp. He weighed it in his hand and seemed satisfied with it. "Killing him with a German gun might be more than appropriate, don't you think?"

CHAPTER SIXTEEN Process of Elimination

Mcbride pulled Riordan's small Morris over to the side of the road, wrenched on the handbrake, and switched off the engine. To Gilliatt and Maureen, the silence was suddenly ominous and foreboding. McBride had skirted Clonakilty and then taken the road north before doubling back southwards towards Crosswinds Farm and Kilbrittain. They had encountered no German — or Irish — troops in the hour and a half's driving. The night was heavy and wet as a facecloth when McBride wound down the window, but it had stopped raining. The sky showed black and starless through appearing tears in the cloud cover.

Crosswinds Farm was three miles away from them, across the fields that fell away from the hilltop where McBride had chosen to stop, and beyond the scattered few lights of Kilbrittain.

"You can't attempt it," Gilliatt began, aware of the dangerous, heedless smile on McBride's face. It irritated him, and he changed his tactics. "You haven't a shred of proof against him, Michael!" McBride's smile faded.

"Is that all you have to say, Peter? Fair play for Drummond? I'd forgotten — you're both in the Navy."

"So are you — or supposed to be." McBride shook his head.

"Drummond's broken the contract I had with him. God, you were there! What more proof do you need of his collaboration with the Germans?"

"Those weren't Germans. They were your countrymen. Irish."

"And that's your English answer to everything, is it? It's only the bloody stupid Irish — let them get on with it. Is that your solution? Drummond's working for the Germans, damn you!"

Maureen interrupted them. "Michael, come with us. Whatever the truth of it, you can't do anything by yourself." McBride seemed abashed without being softened or dissuaded. He shook his head in a minute, determined movement.

"I'm sorry, lovey, it just won't do, you see. Drummond tried to kill me, he's tried to have all of us killed. He's not getting away with that."

"Stupid heroics—" she began.

"No. It's much older than heroics. Revenge."

"For God's sake, don't do it!" she wailed. "I'm going to have our baby. Do you think I want him to have to listen to tales about the father he never saw?" She clutched his hands convulsively, tears streaming down her face. McBride looked as if he had been cheated, that she had played to other rules than his and beaten him at the game. "For God's sake think of the child if you won't think of me."

McBride's face was twisted and shaped by conflicting emotions. Gilliatt found their intensity almost unbearable. Then McBride climbed swiftly out of the car.

"I'll be back," he said.

"Damn you, Michael McBride, damn you!"

"Maybe — maybe," he said, then nodded to Gilliatt and strode off into the night, dropping swiftly out of sight down the hillside towards the lights of the hamlet.

"Damn you — damn you!" Maureen kept calling out after him while Gilliatt got out, and went round the Morris to the driver's seat. He slammed the door angrily, started the engine — over-revving, the tyres squealing out of the dirt at the side of the road — then headed north-east again, on the road towards Ballinadee and the main road to Cork. He was angry, his nerves were being shredded by the woman's ceaseless cries, magnified in the tin box of the car, and he wanted nothing more to do with Michael McBride and his wife and the Irish. His simple duty was to reach the authorities in Cork — preferably the British authorities — and tell them what, as far as he knew, was happening. It did not matter what then happened, it did not matter what was or was not being done — this was his job. If only the bloody woman behind him would stop wailing and screaming—

He only realized that he had taken a wrong turning and was on the Kinsale road heading back towards the coast when he saw the signpost in the headlights and, almost at the same moment beyond the crossroads, a barrier of barrels across the road and grey uniforms passing to and fro just at the fringe of the glare of the lights. Then one soldier stepped into the spill of light, machine-pistol at the ready, and began walking towards the car.

"Shut up, damn you!" Gilliatt barked, and the woman subsided sobbing into the back seat. Gilliatt cursed himself, watching the German approaching the car, joined by a second soldier. Both of them were fifteen yards from the Morris. Gilliatt shoved the gear-stick into reverse, revved, and backed away down the road, switching off his headlights as he did so. He could hear the shouting over the noise of the engine, and he swung the car round on the handbrake, accelerating recklessly with the back wheels in soft dirt at the side of the road; the car suddenly jerked free and careered away down the road. "Keep your head down!" he yelled with a dangerous elation bubbling up in his chest and a lightness, an invincibility enveloping his thoughts.

He ducked, too, and the bullets thudded into the boot of the Morris, shattered the small back window over Maureen's cowering form, and pattered on the road behind them. He kept his foot pressed down, trying to remember the road and how long the straight stretch lasted, bounced the car suddenly off the bank as the road began to descend, and switched on the headlights. A bend in the road leapt at him, and he swung the wheel furiously, braking with a squeal of rubber, and went through it, the car immediately slowing on an uphill stretch.

"You all right?" he said hoarsely.

"Yes — yes, I think so," he heard in a child-like voice from the back seat.

"Thank God for something!" Cork appeared a distant, infinitely desirable oasis in the chaos of the night. No more wrong turns, he thought. Straight through, no stops.

McBride squeezed through a gap in the hedge, and jumped the ditch. His trouser-legs were sodden with rain from the grass, and his boots were beginning to let in water. Kilbrittain was behind him now, and he could smell the sea on the light breeze that was moving the clouds sluggishly, opening up gaps of starlit darkness. He had avoided two German patrols, each time the effect of night and secrecy and silence leaking more dangerous adrenalin into his system. The old Lee Enfield was cold and potent in his hand and the Mauser a hard-edged shape in his waistband. He was less than half a mile from Crosswinds Farm, approaching it from the north. That last hedge might even have marked the boundary of Drummond's land.

McBride felt unfettered. The cramping, desolating noises of his wife's parting curse, the wild, hampering words she had yelled at him to stop him, had diminished. He had digested them, incorporated them within his single-minded purpose. Nothing was going to prevent him from killing Drummond. Revenge whirled up in him like dry bracken set alight, consuming reason and perspective and the future. His life was a succession of immediate, vivid moments — the setting of one foot in front of another, the recognition of slopes and lines of the land, the smell of the sea, the rifle in his hand, the wetness of his trouser-legs, the images of Drummond sitting in kitchen or study or sitting-room — through which he moved like a shadow, impervious to larger, vaguer experiences or imaginings. He had even lost the capacity to judge what he was doing, to see it in any moral light. His one certainty was that Drummond had tried to kill him, which had spilled a corrosive desire for vengeance over brain-cells and bodily organs that made him hunger for destruction.

Drummond would expect him. Drummond was Irish enough to understand what he had started and how McBride would expect to end it. The farm would be under heavy guard. McBride bared his teeth, not with the effort of the slope but with anticipation. When he topped the gentle rise, the framework of hedges was suddenly clear in quick moonlight and in the centre of the maze-like pattern there was the white low farmhouse. And the patrols.

He slid into a hollow, ignoring the wet grass soaking his buttocks and back, and watched. Before the moon disappeared behind more distressed cloud, he counted six guards, all Germans in uniform — in three pairs, moving like figures from some ornamental clock, round and round the garden and the vegetable plot and the drive that surrounded the house. They were contained, it seemed, by the pattern of hedges and small trees, as if they required the protection of the lights from the farmhouse and the proximity of its walls. They were small, ineffectual creatures, hardly any protection at all for Drummond. He slipped out of the hollow after checking the progress of the cloud across the moon's face, and made his way carefully down the slope to the shelter of another hedge. The nearest patrol was a hundred yards away, moving across his line of sight, skirting the fruit trees at the bottom of the garden. He clicked the bolt of the Lee Enfield as gently, lovingly as he could. It made the smallest noise, but he held his breath. He could hear, on the breeze, the quiet conversation of the patrol, even the sound of machine-pistol against bayonet once or twice, one of them clearing his throat, spitting.

He watched them, surrendering to the omnipotence of the moment, looking up at the moon, tensing as the edge of its disc slid from behind the cloud, then lining up the rifle-sight. The backsight needed some fine adjustment, and he attended to it like a conscientious workman. Then he aligned the foresight with the two shapes a hundred yards away. He selected one of them who moved for a moment slightly away from his companion, inhaled, then squeezed the trigger with the gentlest touch. He heard the noise of the rifle in his ear, saw the German topple slowly over, and then the components of the scene moved feverishly as he snicked back the bolt, resighted and fired again as a light in the farmhouse went out and the second German, startled but already moving, was flung forward onto his face. Two huddled, moonlit shadows like sleeping animals beneath the fruit trees.

McBride got to his feet and began running along the hedge, following it as it angled towards the farmhouse. He could hear doors opening and banging shut, and the shouting of orders in German. He drew the Mauser from his waistband without pausing in his stride.

Walsingham himself decided to enter the country house that had been converted into a hotel on the outskirts of Cheltenham, after they traced Goessler's hire car to the hotel's residents" car park and checked the register. The receptionist was helpful but bemused. Two German businessmen, yes — Herr Muller and Herr Schmitt, was there anything the matter?

Exton showed her only the CID card he carried, and then asked to speak to the manager. Only the manager's wife was available, and Exton explained simply that the two men were suspected of currency illegalities and that he would cause as little disturbance as possible and he was sorry but it couldn't be postponed and he'd be grateful if the matter could be concluded immediately.

While he talked at the desk, Walsingham stood where he could see into the lounge bar without himself being seen. He located Goessler and Lobke, enjoying their after-dinner coffee and brandies, and the moment welled in him like a hot, indigestible lump. He had found them, had them in his hand, and they were unaware of his presence. His plan for the two Germans stretched before him as easily and entirely as Emerald had come into his head, the absence of moral or human qualifications suggesting a brilliant, logical inevitability about its components. Those cold moments of clarity were Charles Walsingham's most gratifying and fulfilling experiences. He was, while they still occurred, not an old man on the verge of retirement, of being forced to relinquish his accustomed grip on clandestine power. Goessler laughed at something the more saturnine Lobke said, and Walsingham smiled in concert with him.

Exton came over to him.

"Everything satisfactory, Exton?"

"Sir. They don't like it, but they won't argue — as long as we do it discreetly, sir." Exton smiled thinly.

"With panache and taste always, Exton. Let's go and ask Herr Goessler to accompany us."

Walsingham crossed the half-empty lounge bar swiftly, with a youthful step. As Goessler looked up at him, there was a recognition in his eyes that was not of an individual but a type. A kindred spirit. Lobke, startled and panicked, reached inside his coat but Goessler arrested the movement with his own hand. The barman watched as he dried a pint glass, and one or two of the customers looked up, then down again as Walsingham greeted Goessler familiarly.

"Klaus, my dear fellow, how good to see you again!" He held out his hand, and Goessler took it in his own dry grip. Walsingham admitted the man's coolness, the sense of amusement that lingered in his eyes. Lobke's eyes were already darting towards doors, other people, windows.

"My assistant, Rudi Lobke," Goessler said disarmingly.

"And mine — ah, James Exton." Goessler seemed greatly amused at the hesitation while Walsingham recollected Exton's name.

"Will you sit down, gentlemen — Charles. Walsingham was slightly taken aback, then nodded acknowledgement.

"Of course." Walsingham's secret amusement at Goessler's behaviour increased as he saw the fat man relax, already make assumptions of diplomatic immunity, envisaging only deportation as a final solution, the ultimate weapon possessed by Walsingham. How wrong he was — "No, I think we'd all better get off straight away, don't you?"

Goessler shrugged. "As you wish — our luggage?"

"It will be taken care of."

"Good. Is it a long drive?"

"No. You'll not get cold. Shall we go?"

He gestured towards the door. Lobke appeared dangerously nervous, and Goessler touched his hand with a feminine reassurance that made Walsingham embarrassed.

"It's all right, Rudi — don't be foolish, liebchen." He took Lobke by the elbow and guided him, Exton alongside them, to the door of the lounge bar. Walsingham followed, satisfied with the smoothness of events, the professionalism that Goessler had displayed, was relying on, and about which he was totally mistaken.

Outside, the night was fine and chilly, high stars pale above the halo of light from the hotel's floodlighting. Hard white light that seemed to distress Lobke. Perhaps he was picking up some kind of emitted signal from Exton or himself, Walsingham wondered, and waited until Goessler registered the absence of police cars. Just the one Granada, parked by their own Ford, with two men leaning against it but coming to alertness as they saw the party emerge from the hotel. Goessler turned to Walsingham.

"A quiet and exclusive party, yes?"

"Indeed, Herr Goessler. This way, please." He directed them to the car, and Exton, removing Lobke's gun from his shoulder-harness, pushed the young man into the back seat. The driver and his companion waited for Walsingham's orders. "Driver, you take us — and you, Peters, bring up the Ford. Keys, Professor?"

Goessler seemed to be reassured by another close appraisal of Walsingham's face, and handed over the keys to Walsingham, who tossed them almost carelessly to Peters, then gestured to the open rear door of the Granada. Goessler shrugged and got in. Exton squeezed in beside the two Germans. Walsingham sat next to the driver, nodded, and the Granada pulled away from the harsh floodlighting out of the car park onto the A40 towards Andoversford. For a moment, Goessler experienced the acute fear that they had already located Moynihan, the woman and their prisoner, but he had to close his face against the expression of relief when Walsingham said:

"Now, Professor, where are you keeping young McBride and his IRA friends?" Walsingham half-turned in his seat. The old man's profile was aquiline beyond the suggestion of a mere garden bird. This one preyed on meat. Lobke's leg, pressed against his on the bench seat, was throbbing with nerves, and Goessler patted the young man's thigh in warning and comfort.

"I'm sorry, Herr Walsingham — these people — McBride? — strangers, I'm afraid."

"You don't deny you are a senior officer in the East German intelligence service, I hope?"

Exton, as if on cue, drew the Heckler & Koch VP-70 Parabellum from inside his coat, and laid it in a parody of innocence across his lap. Lobke was supremely aware that the gun contained eighteen cartridges in its magazine. Goessler smiled without apparent effort. Walsingham's eyes watched the lights of the Ford Escort behind them, then focused on Goessler again.

"I am covered, of course, by diplomatic immunity."

"Naturally — under ordinary circumstances. But, it is of the utmost importance — as you well understand — that I locate Professor Thomas McBride and anyone else who may have shared his information. You understand the — urgency of the matter, I'm sure. Therefore, I'm sure you will understand that the ordinary rules do not apply." Walsingham shrugged, declaring innocence and necessity and threat at the same moment. Goessler controlled the fading of the smile from his face, in the oncoming headlights of a car. Dark woods rushed by the Granada, and the half-caught gleam of a thin ribbon of reservoir water. Goessler knew they were still heading towards Andoversford.

"I'm sure I don't understand you, Herr Walsingham."

"You will. Where are they, Goessler — or perhaps little Rudi would like to tell us?" He reached back and lifted Lobke's face by the chin. "Well, young man?" Exton dug the pistol into Lobke's side, making him gasp with pain. Lobke shook his head. "I see."

"This is foolish," Goessler said.

"Turn here," Walsingham snapped, and the driver slowed, came level with an unmarked track, and turned into its darkness. The lights of the Escort jiggled behind them as it, too, turned off the main road. The water of the reservoir gleamed through the trees to their left. Goessler felt chilly, aware of his thin woollen suit, the silk shirt, his underwear, and the fragility and slowness of the old body beneath the clothes. The big Ford bumped and wallowed along the rutted track, puddles hissing against the underside, thin branches slashing at the windows. It unnerved Goessler, though a fatness of mind remained complacent despite the reactions of his body. "Pull over here."

The Granada slid between trees, down towards the gleam of the reservoir. Then it stopped well within the trees of Dowdeswell Wood, the place Walsingham had selected. He already knew that they would not volunteer the information he required. Gloucestershire Constabulary were poised to begin a search of the area at dawn, under the direction of the Assistant Chief Constable who would liaise directly with Walsingham. Army units from Cirencester were also on stand-by. It would simply be much easier if Goessler would tell them. Walsingham was certain he knew.

"Very well, Goessler," he said in the silence after the engine was switched off. "I wish to know where we can find McBride, Claire Drummond, and anyone else who may be connected with this little operation of yours. I do not have a great deal of time, as you know only too well, and therefore I am impatient. Do you intend to tell me?"

"I'm sorry, Herr Walsingham. I must ask to be allowed to contact my embassy—"

"Forget the diplomatic niceties, you bloody fool!" Walsingham barked, making the driver next to him twitch with shock. "You're going to die out here, in these woods, if you don't tell me. Understand? You are expendable — at least to me."

Goessler, visibly disconcerted, managed to say: "Then, as they say, you will never find out what you wish to know."

"Take him!" Walsingham snapped, accelerating the scene through its emotional progression, creating vivid shock on Lobke's face, nervousness around Goessler's eyes. Exton dragged Lobke out of the car, across the moonlit clearing to where the Escort remained in deep shadow. Its driver, Peters, flicked on a torch. Lobke's face was white and strained.

"What—?" Goessler began, then closed his mouth round an unpalatable reality.

"You know what comes next." Walsingham wound down the window and rested his arm on the sill. The driver now covered Goessler with a gun, a Walther. "I shall kill your sweetheart unless you tell me what I wish to know."

"You can't kill us!"

"Oh, but I can. Indeed, one scenario would suggest I must — and blame McBride. A trade-off, his freedom for his silence. Mm?" Walsingham, in the emotional turbulence, wondered whether he had not miscalculated in revealing the scenario he intended to use, just as a threat. If Goessler really believed, then he might not open his mouth anyway— He added: "Of course, he could just be blamed for Hoskins" murder. We could manage that. Now, tell me."

"No. No, I'm afraid you are bluffing." Goessler's throat was small and tight, but the words emerged calmly.

"Be afraid." He raised his voice. "Very well, Exton."

Exton opened the door of the Escort, and pushed Lobke into the back of the car. Then he began screwing a silencer into place on the VP-70, his hands allowing both Lobke and Goessler to see what he was doing. Goessler opened his mouth to protest, then clamped his lips tight. Both men heard Lobke's gasp of fear across the tiny clearing. Goessler exhaled raggedly. Walsingham ignored Goessler, staring at the Escort with a riveted, blank-faced attention. Exton had completed fitting the silencer. He raised the gun, pointing it through the open door of the Escort. He waited.

"Well?" Walsingham asked.

For seconds, Goessler remained silent, then said simply: "No."

"Kill him!" Walsingham snapped, and Exton fired twice into the back of the Escort. Lobke's body twitched like a wired rabbit, his white blob of a face visible for a moment as meaningless as a rabbit's scut caught in a car's headlights, before the corpse slid down out of sight. Exton slammed the door of the Escort with suitable finality. Goessler uttered one dry, racking sob before he spoke.

"Now, Herr Walsingham, we know how far you will go to protect yourself, the author of Emerald." His voice quavered with emotion, with grief and fear and defiance. Even as he listened, Walsingham, unable to interrupt, knew that Goessler would not tell him where they were hiding McBride. He had miscalculated. Goessler might not even want to live — the trouble with queers was one always underestimated their emotional involvement, saw luridly in imagination only the handclasps, the kisses, the sodomy — or he might know the only chance for his operation was to keep his secret. Perhaps he knew his own death was now inevitable. Whatever—

"Yes, Herr Walsingham. You will be ruined by the disclosures that Professor McBride will make, and so will David Guthrie. It was a very clever and subtle scheme, as I'm sure you appreciate. I shall not tell you where they are, because it would not save my life. Besides, I cannot allow the English all the heroics. You must do as you intend, and shoot me. Unless you can find McBride, you will have no trade, as you put it. Once McBride talks, no one will believe he is also a murderer."

"Get him out of the car!" Walsingham snapped, facing the windscreen, angry and humiliated by a fat German. The driver got out, dragged Goessler out of the back of the Granada. "Wait!" He looked up at Goessler, composed even though he was shivering with cold. With thicker underwear, Walsingham thought, he could die a brave man — and that's what it all amounted to, heroic death. Keeping the chill off with warm underwear. Michael McBride had died bravely, no doubt, so had all the Germans and all the Irish who had died. Even Lobke hadn't cried out much — now Goessler. "Well?" he said. Goessler did not even deign to answer his question. "Kill him!"

Walsingham shuddered at the two soft plops of the silenced shots after the crackling footsteps across the clearing and the moment of silence. The door of the Escort slammed shut again. Walsingham rubbed his face with quivering hands. He felt oppressed and driven. He loathed what he was doing, and in the same moment knew that the self-loathing would pass swiftly.

Even before Exton returned to the Granada, he was studying a map of the area on which were already marked the dispositions for the police search the following morning. McBride would not get away. And now he had his trade-off — two dead queers in their last embrace in the rear of a Ford Escort. He forced himself to shrug in amusement at the image, thereby cleansing it of all personal effect.

The woman had gone into Andoversford for food. Moynihan, red-eyed from the bravado of a sleepless night guarding him, was hungry and wanted breakfast. Claire Drummond had acquiesced reluctantly, sensing something uncalculating, vindictive about the Irishman. McBride, who was cramped and aching from sleeping on the sofa, felt dirty and helpless and angry. His sleep had been ragged and broken by dreams of his own danger and by the repetitive, insistent, humiliating impression of himself as a dupe, someone led by the nose by people cleverer than himself to this cottage and this captivity. On waking, his diminished self persisted, and he felt, too, the helplessness which would force him to fall in with Claire Drummond and Moynihan. How could he not do as they wanted?

Moynihan grudgingly filled him a glass of water, tipped it against his mouth, waited while he gulped it down. The tepid, night-tasting liquid made his empty stomach rumble audibly. Moynihan sat opposite him, slumped in his chair. He looked tired and careless, yet also the animosity he felt towards McBride emanated from him like electricity, gleamed in his red-rimmed eyes. McBride was afraid of him. He believed the hatred was sexually inspired — Claire Drummond, who Moynihan could never possess, who had slept with McBride. He wondered whether Moynihan's political fanaticism was stronger than his jealousy, his gnawing sense of humiliation which he evidently blamed on McBride.

Moynihan stood up, and walked over to McBride, who flinched as the Irishman loomed over him. The gun was very evident, lightly held but dangling meaningfully towards McBride's lap. McBride was afraid, anxious for the return of the woman.

"Was she good in bed, Yank?" Moynihan asked after a long time, as if he had reviewed the whole of his past relationship with Claire Drummond in the extended, creeping silence. The clock on the mantelpiece, rewound the previous night, ticked with a solemn hysteria.

"What can I say that's safe," McBride heard himself saying as if the words and the casual tone belonged to someone else; a more considerable man than himself, or a figure from melodrama. "Either way you're going to hit me. If I say no, your ego will be insulted, and if I say yes, she was fine and she climbed all over me and don't you miss it nights, you're going to—" Moynihan hit him at that point, not with the temporarily forgotten gun but with his fist, as if he did not wish to take too much advantage, hurt too much, appear to need the gun to inflict himself on the American. Blood seeped from the corner of McBride's mouth, exciting Moynihan. His hand twitched at his side, where he hid it like something he did not wish to be accused of owning. But this was him, the Yank, the bastard who'd—

"Was she good?" he ground out.

"Yes, dammit! Why in hell's name do you want to know? What good can it do you?" McBride struggled to sit upright again, elbowing himself up, his bound hands tingling with cramp. He sensed he was on a path he had not consciously chosen, but which he had known was there for him to take. He hadn't meant to anger Moynihan, but he had done it deliberately, all the same. Suddenly, he knew that he didn't want Claire Drummond to come back yet. Not until—

"You bastard," Moynihan breathed, leaning closer so that McBride could faintly smell his unwashed mouth and the staleness of last night's supper and his fitful sleeping. And his unwashed body exuded a discernible odour. "You bastard."

"Come on, Moynihan, you're just angry because your piece of tail went to someone else's bed. You're not interested in a scientific account or a consumer's report. You want to know — yeah, I screwed the ass off your woman!"

He steadied himself for the blow. Moynihan raised the gun, but then again used his clenched fist into the side of McBride's face.

"Shut up!"

McBride spat out the mouthful of blood. "You want to know, dammit! You asked me, and brother, are you going to get answered!"

"Shut up, keep your filthy mouth shut!"

"What is it with you guys? You can blow people to pieces but you can't deal with your own balls? You hide in corners watching your women like you watch your bombs go off! You're a prick, Moynihan, a gutless woman-loser — Paddy Pumpkin-Eater, had a wife and couldn't keep her!" Moynihan was standing a yard or so away from the sofa with its brick-coloured stretch covers and the furious, hunched body of McBride occupying its centre. He made a move towards the American, then held off as if he wanted to go on listening while the voice lashed him. His face coloured like a lying child's. "Jesus Christ!" McBride breathed, baring his teeth as if to attack Moynihan like a wolf. "The big tough terrorist wants to marry her. Man, blow society to the moon, kill, maim, burn, explode to get what you want — but make sure you marry the girl before you sleep with her, Sean!" McBride was dangerously elated, long having abandoned caution or calculation. He could not control the urgent press of words, finding his tongue amenable, just able to cope. His stupidity, his captivity and exploitation had been going on too long.

"Shut up, shut up!" Moynihan pressed his gun against McBride's groin, just as the woman had done the previous night. "I could blow it off for you, McBride. Then try laughing with your balls on the floor." Moynihan's face was cold with a sheen of sweat and self-disgust. McBride had shown him an image of himself the truth of which he felt compelled to acknowledge. McBride, their eyes only a foot or so apart, was afraid. The pain in his groin was minimal, to be disregarded — because now he knew why he had arranged this quarrel; it had produced this open, frontal proximity.

"You haven't got the balls to do it. She might be angry—" Moynihan jabbed downwards, and McBride winced and cried out — and grabbed the gun with both hands, jerking upwards and to the side at once, so that the round in the chamber discharged into the ceiling. McBride felt sound go far away, and his own breath was the only noise he understood. Moynihan was yelling, or just breathing, as McBride jerked him by his gun hand to one side, toppling his weight over the arm of the sofa, rolling after him, landing on top of him, knee out into Moynihan's groin.

The desperation that would pump the adrenalin was beginning to come into Moynihan's face, but it was too late. McBride was ahead in that play, felt the hope of escape surge through him. He dropped his head, striking Moynihan across the bridge of the nose with his forehead, then lifted his head as the blood gushed and struck Moynihan's hand against the floor time after time, beating his head into the Irishman's face once more. Moynihan groaned and released the gun. McBride stood up, and his legs felt insecure and newborn under him, the frame top-heavy and overbalanced. He rocked to and fro, holding Moynihan's gun in his two bound hands. It was a big Smith & Wesson from TV police serials, awkward and heavy in his grip. Moynihan lay with his eyes closed, groaning, holding his nose and mouth in cupped hands as if drinking cool water. McBride struck him across the temple with the barrel of the revolver, and he lay still.

The room reasserted itself, returning with the sense of birdsung silence from outside the windows. No sound of a car, the woman not yet returning. He was indecisive now, the body running down like a broken spring without the injections of anger and desperation. He began quivering with shock and the realization of inflicted violence.

He went into the kitchen, scrabbled in a drawer under the enamel sink for a knife, came out with a carving knife which he tried to jam unsuccessfully into the drawer, then the door-jamb, finally squatting on the floor with the knife pressed between his thighs while he stroked the strips of cloth over the blade. They parted singly, and slowly, and he cut himself on his wrists and clenched, eager fists a number of times before he could pull the last of the cloth apart and begin to rub the bleeding wrists. Then he stood up, but cramp assailed him, making him hobble to the rear door of the cottage.

He listened. No car-noise. He paused on the edge of the fine morning, framed in the doorway, coatless and chill with the breeze already, the blue sky interrupted by some rolling white cloud with smudged grey lower edges. He studied the landscape. A farm, and village, the rulered line of the main road half a mile away, and clumps of woodland stretching across the folded, flowing countryside.

He begun running, recklessly, as fast as he could, almost overbalancing in his rapid movement down the slope. The wind yelled in his ear and his blood pounded. He was free now.

He did not hear the siren of a police car, growing louder behind him.

Claire Drummond was anxious to get back to the cottage. The danger inherent in her appearance in Andoversford was more apparent to her because she was the one who had squeezed the trigger of the little Astra twice into the face of the pig in the multi-storey car park. Moynihan's breakfast—

Still, she had to mollify Sean Moynihan somehow, at some little cost. He hated McBride too much, and so obviously and for such a pathetic motive that he was dangerous unless she suggested — even though she hated — that much compromise — that he was back in favour, that McBride had been a necessary stratagem and nothing more. She picked up bacon, eggs, lard, two cartons of UHT milk, some more coffee — they were running low — and a bag of sugar, had to buy a plastic carrier-bag which advertised English apples, and came out of the shop regretting she had left her sunglasses in the car, shading her eyes against the bright morning sun — which gleamed off the chrome and blue-white paintwork of the police car across the main street of the village, parked outside the black-and-white pub. And a white Jaguar with the vivid orange flash of a motorway patrol stood behind the Panda car. Claire Drummond clutched her throat, stood very still, and studied the village street.

Just the four policemen from the two cars, studying a map across the bonnet of the smaller police car, two of them smoking. One of them pointed up the street out of the village, towards Cheltenham. She began walking, not too quickly, slow down, along the opposite pavement towards the car park at the back of the main street. She did not hurry — slow down, slow down — but something about her manner or appearance or the way she could not help hunching against recognition might have betrayed her—

But she turned the corner out of sight of the police without a restraining cry, or following heavy footsteps. She got into the car, shaking from head to foot, and fumbled the key into the ignition. She drove jerkily to the barrier, as if the choke did not function, and reached out to insert the coin, stretching her arm and cursing because she had parked badly, then dropping the tenpenny piece. She made to get out of the car, and it stalled — she'd left it in gear — picked up the coin, fed it into the coin-slot, and the barrier swung up.

She took three attempts to restart the engine, jerked the gear-stick into first, let out the clutch and jerked forward under the raised barrier. Perspiration dampened her upper lip and her hands on the wheel and made her blouse sticky inside her sweater. She pulled forward to the junction of the alley with the main street. The police car — the motorway patrol — passed her as she waited to pull out, and the policeman in the passenger seat stared at her. Her face felt naked and gleaming in the bright sunlight coming through the windscreen. His eyes transferred to the numberplate of the car and then he was out of sight until she turned out into the main street. She watched her rear-view mirror as she drove out of Andoversford.

No police car followed her as she turned off the A436 up the narrow side-road to the cottage.

Walsingham listened to the radio traffic at the other end of the mobile HQ the Gloucestershire Constabulary had set up in the middle of the village of Shipton, less than two miles from the cottage which contained the people he sought. The report of a car driven by a woman who answered Claire Drummond's description had been passed immediately, on Walsingham's intervention, to the spotter helicopter diverted from motorway traffic checks on the M4. The helicopter had not, as yet, picked up the Volvo on any of the main roads around Andoversford, and Walsingham waited with an edginess he could not quite despise. They had narrowed the area just by sighting the car — he had no doubt it was Drummond's daughter, so obsessively single-minded had he become in the sleepless hours after the killings — and it would only be minutes before the car was spotted. Nevertheless, he shifted on his chair, and listened intently to the radio traffic. The ACC for Gloucestershire was in one of the other two caravans, checking the co-ordination of search reports inside his designated circle ten miles in diameter. Walsingham knew they would have to request army help by the afternoon, unless—

"Eagle to Mother."

"Go ahead, Eagle."

Walsingham savoured the code names like distinct tastes on his tongue — Eagle sharp, acid, Mother sweet with anticipation.

"Green Volvo spotted turning off A436, two miles north-east of Andoversford."

Tell them to keep well away!" Walsingham shouted down the length of the caravan, already hot inside from the Indian-summer sun beating down on it. The police radio operator was startled, and looked up at a chief inspector in uniform who nodded without expression on his face.

"Do not close, Eagle—"

"What do you think we are? We're well back. There's a cottage up ahead of the car—"

"Where is that?" Walsingham asked, joining the chief inspector at a map pinned to board along one wall of the caravan. The police officer pointed out Andoversford, then traced the red line of the A436, then the narrow yellow thread of the track. He ran one fingernail up the map, and tapped it.

"About there, sir."

The car's definitely stopping, turning into the gate of the cottage — shit! — we've banked away sharply, and we're out of sight. Orders, Mother?"

Tell them to circle the cottage, but to keep as much out of sight as possible," Walsingham instructed and while his orders were being relayed, he said to the inspector, "Let's get men up there at once, Inspector. Guns, and tear-gas."

"Sir."

She found Moynihan bathing his head and face with cold water, and knew at once what had happened. She could almost hear McBride needling him, bringing him closer—

"You bloody fool, where is he?"

"He's gone — Claire, I'm sorry, he—"

"You idiot! You absolute turd" He was all we had. How can we do anything now?" She realized she was shaking him, his hangdog face like a backward child's puzzled and hurt and about to cry. She despised him, and sensed his dependence at the same time. She turned away from him, wanting to scream, to rage. "We've lost everything — it's all been for nothing!

"Please, Claire—"

"For God's sake what's-the-matter-with-you?" She turned on him, and in the silence as she took in his hurt, beaten face almost unable to register emotional pain, so puffed and misshapen was it, she heard the first distant police siren. He seemed not to hear it, only respond blinkingly to the chalky pallor of her features, wonder at the hand that dabbed round her mouth like a bird seeking a nest. "No—" she murmured at last, running for the door. The siren was loud now, and there was another, more distant one accompanying it, coming from the A436. She opened the door, and saw a police Rover pulling into and across the gate. The driver and the two other policemen all descended on the far side of the car, and she could see the rifles.

She ducked back inside, slamming the door behind her, rolling her body to the shelter of the wall. Moynihan was standing in the kitchen doorway, staring at her, wet hair lank on his forehead, ridiculous broken nose and puffed lips still trying to form adequate expressions. She waited for him to blame her as the second siren wound down the scale and a third member of the sudden chorus wailed more distantly. Then he shrugged, almost pleased that they were trapped there together.

He crossed to the window, something momentous having been decided between them, and peered round the faded curtain. Two cars, one across the gateway and the other a little down the track, its nose poking up over the rise like a scouting animal's — then the police Range Rover disgorging four men who cut through the nearest trees towards the rear of the cottage. Mere details. He looked at Claire, and nodded in expectation. She had moved to the side window of the sitting-room, where she could see the old man in the heavy, burdening fawn topcoat and trilby hat. She sensed his importance, perhaps even his implacability. She returned Moynihan's nod.

Moynihan smiled, then knocked out a pane of the window, and fired immediately through the hole, two shots. Claire saw a head duck back down, the party by the Range Rover scatter, then the rifles returned fire, the heavy bullets shattering the windows, plucking plaster in shards and lumps from the far wall of the room. One whined up the chimney, after ricocheting. No warning, no call to surrender through a loudspeaker, no dispositions for a siege. Claire knew they were not intended to survive. She looked at Moynihan, who loosened off three more shots from the Browning he'd hidden in the cottage weeks before. He yelled with pleasure — she saw a police marksman holding a reddening limp arm behind the Rover. She fired through her own glassless window, bullets skittering from the Astra off the bonnet and bodywork of the Range Rover, starring the windscreen.

Another volley of shots rattled in the room, making their bodies shudder with anticipation.

"I'll watch the back!" Moynihan called, and moved on all fours out of the sitting-room. She watched him go almost with affection. She heard the kitchen window knocked out, but the fusillade of rule shots preceded, drowned, canceled any fire from his pistol. In the silence, she waited fearfully — then she heard one shot from the pistol, and relaxed.

The gas-shells pitched and rolled on the floor near her feet at the same moment that Moynihan stumbled through the doorway to the kitchen, blood smeared across his chest. One of the gas-shells rolled to his feet and he stared at it without recognition while the acid tear-gas enveloped him. His single cough racked him, then he slid down the door frame into an untidy heap, sitting with his legs splayed out like a bonfire Guy. The CS gas masked his frozen, distorted features.

She began to cough. The man outside still would not speak to her. Either they already had McBride, or they assumed he was safe upstairs in the cottage. Or they wanted him dead, too. Her eyes streamed with tears and she dragged air into her lungs, head lifted to the ceiling. She couldn't see to fire through the window, and felt her way along the wall to the door. She should not open the door, but she obeyed the imperative of her lungs and eyes. She plunged through the opening, feeling the air she drew in snatched away by the impact of the first and second bullets. She had no physical sense of falling—

Walsingham's throat was tickled and his tear-ducts irritated as he walked swiftly to the body of Claire Drummond and turned it over with his foot. He thought the woman attractive, but her still-open eyes were bolting in death, suggesting the fanaticism of life. He placed his handkerchief over his mouth and nose and entered the cottage. He virtually ignored Moynihan's body, and climbed the creaking stairs.

"McBride," he called. "McBride, are you here?"

It took him only seconds to check the two upstairs rooms and the bathroom. McBride was not in the cottage. He opened the bathroom window, not to call down to the police but to draw in clean air. He felt weakened and nauseous, a condition he could not ascribe to the tear-gas. McBride had either been taken elsewhere, which was unlikely, or had escaped while the woman was in Andoversford. The man's face downstairs looked beaten about—

Closer, he comforted himself, closer. Just one voice left. Very well — he was still thankful the man had opened fire so conveniently — he would frighten McBride into a parley, into his trade-off. He could already see the item in the afternoon newspapers, and the nationals the following day.

Police seek American professor after double murder in Cotswolds — and then McBride's name. He'd try to trade, he'd come in. He'd have to.

Nevertheless, he felt grateful for the sweet mid-morning air as the last of the CS gas dispersed.

Churchill stood before the mirror of the washroom, staring at his puffy, tired face, seeing his own question answered in the blue eyes. The convoy was perhaps less than an hour from the minefield, and he would allow it to sail on to its certain destruction.

He picked up the towel, and wiped his wet face. His features appeared round the edges of the towel as he dried himself, as if furtively seeking some mark that would indicate his guilt, reveal his decision to the mirror, to the world. No, he could manage to hide it.

Necessity is the mother of atrocity, he told himself with grim amusement. Fitzgerald would be lost, Roosevelt told that U-boats had sunk the convoy, and the Germans would sail into the minefield.

Churchill wished, almost futilely, that Japan would declare war on America and drag Roosevelt and his reluctant Congress into the war. The defeat of this minor German invasion plan was only a respite. Next summer they would attempt Sea Lion again unless the Russians opened up another front in the east, or Hitler tired of Stalin as an ally and turned on him.

Had to be — had to be done. He finished wiping his face, and put down the towel. He nodded in confirmation to his reflection. He had made his decision. Fitzgerald had to die. He was as much an enemy as the Germans they were trying to keep out of Ireland.

He put on his waistcoat and jacket and went back into the operations room beneath the Admiralty. He looked back fleetingly from the doorway at the darkened washroom, as if he had left something behind him or his reflection still gazed out at him in accusation. Then he shut the door firmly.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Trade-off

McBride wriggled through the hedge to the west of the farmhouse, his jersey caught on sharp bare twigs, his hands and knees scraped on the stony earth as he forced his way underneath and through. He pushed the rifle ahead of him, clambered out after it and picked it up, fastidiously dusting its length with his hand as he began running again. The startled and confused Germans were pouring shots towards the point from where his fire had come while he was fifty yards closer to the house and approaching from another, unexpected direction. He skirted the fruit trees which now masked him from his opponents. He paused, knelt down and looked under the low branches of the trees. German soldiers, some without helmets or with uniform blouses and coats undone, were moving towards the hedge which had not returned their concentrated fire. The house was less than fifty yards away, but across a long open lawn which sloped only gently and provided no cover. There was an ornamental pool and a sundial.

He could hardly control his eagerness, the flood of energy that the joining of battle had released; his energies seemed uncontrolled and illogical. He got up into a crouch and moved towards the last of the small trees. His foot crunched wetly on a fallen apple left to rot. He paused, waiting for breath to settle, lungs to expand to meet the effort required, body to judge its own moment. Still nerves jittered in his hands and arms, and impatience crowded him, obscured judgment. Already, his eagerness protested, they would have discovered he had moved on, already it was becoming too late—

He began running, even as he saw a dark shape emerge from the side of the house and another from the fruit trees to his left, twenty yards away. He swerved sideways, barely halting, and fired the Lee Enfield twice from the hip. The figure ducked back into the trees, and McBride did not know whether or not he had been hit. The figure by the white wall of the farmhouse — moonlight leapt betrayingly across the lawn like a finger pointing out McBride and his opponent— was kneeling, taking aim. McBride rolled to one side, coming up onto his belly and elbows and squeezing off three shots simply to distract. He heard each one pluck against the wall, and then the shouts behind him, the pack with a fresh scent.

He drew the Mauser, aimed rapidly, and squeezed off two shots. The heavy old gun jumped in his hand so that he had to compensate by aiming low before firing twice more. Then he rolled again, feeling pinned to card by the moonlight whitening the lawn. The marksman by the wall was an unmoving bundle but there were others now, hardly visible against the fretwork of the fruit trees, and awareness of them dragged at him like clinging mud until he sat up on the lawn, on the edge of the pool where lily leaves still floated but the plants had turned to dry sedge and there was wire to keep herons from the fish. The shadow of the sundial sliced across the lawn, amputated one of his legs. He fired twice, swung the Mauser, held stiffly in both hands, and fired three more shots. He rolled over and got to his feet, running in a crouch until he was a fly against the white wall attracting their fire then a shadow then simply darkness as he slipped round the side of the house, out of the moonlight.

He leaned against the door for a moment, clutching his shoulder as the awareness of pain pushed through his quivering excitement, his elation, and his hand came away wet, very wet. He turned the door handle, sorry, so sorry for the mistake, for the sudden twitching aside of the cloud curtain and sorry for Maureen and the baby — and alive enough to finish Drummond.

There was a shadow in the hall, against the panelling, but the moon was gone again and he could not make it out.

Then, "Michael?" and he fired into the centre of the shadow and it fell away to one side. Then the light came on and he saw the grey uniform and heard the voice again, this time behind him, and even as he turned to the sound of his name he felt the bullets enter, their force knocking him sideways, sending his feet from under him as a rug moved. He fell over, tried to raise the Mauser at Drummond who was at the foot of the stairs, but the effort was far beyond his draining strength. Drummond looked sorry, but it was almost too late to distinguish expressions. He just heard the door bang open and the first pair of jackboots before the light faded and he rested his head lightly on the wooden floor and closed his eyes.

Drummond came and knelt by his body for a moment, feeling for the absent pulse. A German officer began to apologize, but Drummond dismissed him curtly. He was safe now, but it was too early to take comfort from the thought. McBride's dead face looked up, youthful and innocent. He looked no more than lightly asleep. Drummond was sorry — almost — that he had come back, though he had always known he would.

"David, you simply can't do it! We are so close now. I assure you it's a matter of hours, not days." Walsingham stared out of the window of the Cheltenham hotel he had booked into, down the length of the Promenade, wide pavements full of shoppers, the sun filtering down, barred and sliced, through the trees. Guthrie's telephone call, diverted to him by the police switchboard, came as a naked, open shock, encompassed him in a momentary futility until the ego narrowed perspective to the purely personal.

"I'm sorry, Charles. It will come out anyway, I'm certain of that. The meetings can be less harmed by my resignation on the grounds of illness or overwork than they would be if I tried to carry on, and got found out. I'd not be forgiven, by anyone, for that." He tried to chuckle confidently. His whole vocal presentation was a charade, Walsingham decided, and suddenly he was tired of Guthrie and the niceties above the salt. Guthrie could go to hell, but Emerald would never go public.

"I'm sorry you have no greater faith in my assurances, Minister," he snapped dismissively. Guthrie sounded chastened and deflated when he replied.

"It's no reflection on you, Charles, as I'm sure you realize. I am going to do what I feel has to be done to protect my initiative over Ulster. And I can best do that by retiring from the scene — not just temporarily, but permanently." He cleared his throat to make room for a new portentousness. "My resignation will be with the PM this evening. I felt, however, that you should be informed."

Walsingham wanted to tell him that people were dead to protect his precious skin and office and initiative over Ulster, but the bile that rose in him simply drained him, made him feel very old and wish only to end the conversation.

"Thank you for telling me, Minister. Goodbye." He put down the telephone without taking his eyes from the window. Somewhere out there, in all probability, McBride was considering his next step. Walsingham looked at the afternoon edition of the local paper on the telephone table. It was folded to reveal most of the headline concerning the murders in the Cotswold cottage and the police search for Professor Thomas McBride of Portland. Was McBride reading it at that moment, was he wondering when to call? Walsingham could feel the American like another presence in the room, and he was eager for their meeting as a younger self might have been for love or fornication.

He turned his eyes back to the window. Trade-off. If not, then McBride had to be eliminated like the others.

Where was he? Where?

Thomas Sean McBride sat in the restaurant in the Cavendish House department store on the Promenade, attired in an outfit he had purchased via credit card in the men's department, drinking tea and picking idly with a fork at a huge Danish pastry. The evening newspaper was folded on the tablecloth in front of him. His nonchalance was assumed, the pastry a necessary prop. He had cleaned himself up as thoroughly as he could in the washroom of a pub in Andoversford, and had eaten bread and cheese, washed down with beer, before catching the bus into Cheltenham.

The cops were talking to him, through the newspaper. It was a threat and perhaps a plea. No, he decided, reading the details of the double murder again, it was a threat. The cops had killed the woman and Moynihan.

He still could not give her her name back, not even now she was so evidently dead — unless it was a bluff, but he had already rejected the idea because Hoskins" staring, sightless eyes had come back into his mind, looking out of the first cup of tea. It was unnerving, but something in him concentrated more vividly on the woman and on her death than on his own danger. But he still could not name her.

He felt a curious invulnerability sitting there amid the inherited formalities of afternoon tea, premature fur wraps belying the day, jewellery cording old, wrinkled throats or blazoning shrunken bosoms, chatter brittler than glass, or lumpy as the crockery. The newspaper story also served to distance the cottage at Andoversford and the police hunt for him. They had no idea where he was, the story was meant to bring him in. They wanted to trade.

His removal from the sharp, cutting edges of his recent experience made him reluctant to think about Goessler, or about Drummond. One had been the author of his predicament, the other his father's murderer. To think of either of them made him feel tired, incapable of effort. Nothing in his surroundings or his mental landscape prompted him to action. He was being told in the newspaper he could go nowhere, he was on his own — why not drop in and discuss your problem?

He didn't think he wanted to do that.

McBride finished the Danish pastry then took his bill to the cashier. He paid again by credit card. He had only a few pounds in his wallet and could not foresee how to gain access to more cash.

He passed telephones on his way to the lift. He stopped, and a smile crept onto his face, took hold, broadened. Why not? He ducked his head into the plastic bubble, and consulted the directory. He rang the police HQ in Cheltenham.

"My name is McBride," he said. "Don't keep me waiting or I'll hang up. McBride — who wants to talk to me?" Then he listened to the clicks and splutters and the muffled voices until someone spoke to him. A cool, clear old man's voice, a hint of suppressed excitement behind the bland tones.

"Professor McBride, the author of Gates of Hell?"

"Uh? Oh, yes, you want to check I'm no nut, right?"

"That is correct."

"What kind of a file do you have on me?"

"We could call it sufficient — your father's name, for example?"

"Michael — and he was murdered before I was born, November, 1940. Now, can we get moving?"

"Thank you, Professor."

"You had them killed, mm? Who are you, anyway?"

"My name is Walsingham. I knew your father well."

"Nice for you." McBride began looking around him, furtively. He knew he would be long gone before anyone traced his call, but he could not prevent his physical reactions. "Drummond told me about you — he killed my father."

"What—?" Then, with recovered aplomb, "I didn't know that. He is dead, by the way."

"What?" A small hole was apprehensible in McBride's stomach. "When?"

"A heart attack last night. I got a routine report after the Admiralty was informed. So, the whirligig of time—"

"He had over forty years" freedom. You had his daughter killed this morning — quite a lot of dying seems to go on around you, Mr Walsingham."

"Will you come in and talk to us? You have only to pop into the nearest police station."

"You want to trade, uh? But you'll never pin those two murders on me. It had to be done by a small army."

"Ah, but there are other deaths, Professor. We would have released the story tomorrow, had you not got in touch by then. A Doktor Goessler and his assistant, two people helping you with your researches, I believe?"

McBride was silent, staring at the wall with the scribbled numbers, surprised that the occasional obscenity had spread as far as the restaurant in Cavendish House.

Walsingham was his one and only enemy, he told himself, holding the receiver away from his suddenly hot ear as if the voice at the other end might infect him. He'd killed four people who knew about the events of 1940. For Guthrie, for the goddam government?

Curiously, he no longer felt animosity for Goessler, or Lobke, or Moynihan, or for Claire. Only the man at the other end of the line was his enemy, his real enemy. A period of emotional paralysis seemed to have passed, leaving only a single object of focus for the dormant feelings that had multiplied during the past days. He was free now, and all the others were dead. This man had killed them.

"Your plan, right — it was all your idea, forty years ago?"

"I — don't think we'll discuss that now. Rather, the terms for your surrender." The voice was cold. McBride felt flushed, excited. He wanted to raise his voice, shout down the telephone at the same time as he became suddenly more aware of his surroundings, the potential threat represented by the people around him, the waitresses, the cashier.

"I don't think I want to do that right now, Mr Walsingham."

"Just think about Goessler and Lobke. You can be charged with their murders, and will be when we take you, unless you give yourself up voluntarily in the next twenty-four hours."

"What's the deal?"

"I think we'll talk about that next time you call."

The telephone went dead. McBride was bemused for a moment, and then he began shaking. They'd traced the call.

The lift doors opened and he waited, frozen. No policeman emerged. He took to the stairs, then made his way to the rear of the store, to the delicatessen. He heard the sirens while his sense of smell was still sifting the sausages and cheeses and smoked meats and fish. One Panda car arrived outside the exit from the delicatessen, and McBride moved through into the record and TV department, and left by the side street door. He walked down to the Promenade, saw the flashing lights of two police cars parked outside the front of Cavendish House, and turned in the opposite direction, taking cover in the crowds inside W. H. Smith.

He recovered his breath and his judgment there as he browsed through the cassette tapes. Squatting on his haunches, his eyes blind to Folk and TV Advertised, he turned over the conversation in his mind. Walsingham had left him the only one alive who knew about Smaragdenhahkette and the British response to it — the murder of Patrick Fitzgerald, Irish-American confidant of Roosevelt, and hundreds of British seamen. His story was worth maybe two million, and his life.

He smiled reluctantly to himself, as if saying farewell to a good friend. His life. Maybe he could have both, but the money definitely came second. He felt assailed by sadness as sharp as a stomach cramp as he squatted there, so that he stood up, lifted out an unrecognized name, turning the cassette in his left hand. Walsingham had killed Claire Drummond, and even fat Goessler, and none of them had wanted to kill him. Walsingham would, if he had the chance. A sure and certain silence, with the dirt rattling on the lid of the box—

Genesis? The name on the cassette cover became clear, and he put it down as if it burned him. The Lamb lies down on Broadway. Not this one—

He shuffled along the shelving, hands in his pockets. How could he turn the tables? A determination to exploit his circumstances was as evident as a metal plate at the back of his head, preventing the incursion of doubt, or fear. He was alone now, and his enemy was identified and a single man. The police at his disposal did not count, somehow. An excitement passed through him like an earth-tremor. He needed someone else to know.

He walked away from the record department, to stationery, and picked up a writing pad and a packet of envelopes. He'd meet Walsingham, but not without insurance. He saw a rack of typewriters, and replaced the paper.

Five minutes later, he left W. H. Smith with a portable typewriter and a packet of bond paper and a dozen sheets of carbon paper. He felt curiously lighthearted. Doubts and trepidations hammered against the metal plate at the back of his mind, but he knew it would hold. His mind was as shallow and clear as a pool in which, clearly visible, a pike circled a smaller fish. The small fish was grinning.

Gilliatt stopped the car at the entrance to the drive of Crosswinds Farm. The house was in darkness, except for one curtained light in a downstairs window. Maureen, next to him, stared through the windscreen intently, unseeingly. Now they had obeyed her frenetic desire to return to find McBride — a consuming guilt for all the years of her marriage, Gilliatt regarded it, whether fair or unfair in its self-blame he could not say — she seemed drained of purpose and energy.

The minor roads and unsurfaced tracks by which they had returned to Kilbrittain had been empty of Germans. It was an experience on the edge of phantasmagoria, the empty dark roads, the silent countryside, the innocent slopes of the land, the clear moonlight. And the silent, hunched woman beside him. In the small cocoon of the Morris he could not even care very much for the fate of Michael McBride. Now, the farm looked as it always had done and McBride's lurid imagery of betrayal and treachery seemed inappropriate.

He cleared his throat.

"I'll go up to the house," he said. She seemed not to hear him. "You wait here. Get into the driving seat." He opened the door and swung his long legs out of the car. "If anything untoward happens — anything at all — start the car and drive away. Don't stop until you reach Cork. Understand?" She looked at him, and he took hold of her cold hand. The other was placed across her stomach as if to protect the fetus she could not possibly feel. He shook her hand, waking her. "Understand?" Responsibility for her weighed on him as he stared into her white, strained features. McBride had run off to play heroic games, but someone always had to be left to tidy up after heroes. His part, dustpan-and-brush for the remnants of hacked armour and the tiny shards of swords. He was angry with McBride. The silent farmhouse belied his accusations, his silly daring.

"Yes?" she said, then again, "Yes."

"Good,change seats then."

When she had done so, he stood looking at her, then simply nodded and headed up the track to the farmhouse on its knoll. The moonlight illuminated the path and the lawns and the white walls of Crosswinds Farm. He turned briefly and looked out to sea. Nothing. No activity. He closed his mind to all of that. It wasn't his concern.

No one challenged him, and he knocked loudly on the front door, the assumption of innocence done deliberately, with care. After a while he knocked again and heard footsteps in the hall. Drummond opened the door. He seemed perturbed, but Gilliatt excused his expression — he was a stranger to Drummond, after all.

"I'm Peter Gilliatt — sir. I was sent from London with Michael McBride."

"Oh, God," Drummond breathed in an appalled voice that could have been guilt or sadness. "Come in — Lieutenant?" Gilliatt nodded. "Of course. I— you didn't come that night, there was shooting, but I knew Michael had to be alive, probably on the run — the Germans — he's in here—"

Drummond opened the door to his study. McBride was lying comfortably and arranged and quite dead on the sofa in front of the fire. It was obvious that Drummond had been sitting opposite him, drinking. A bottle and a single glass stood on an occasional table next to the armchair. McBride's eyes were closed, his face seemed very peaceful. Gilliatt felt emotion churn in his stomach.

"What happened?"

"He — saved my life. He must have surprised the German unit hiding in the gardens—" Gilliatt looked at him narrowly. "Some of the parachute troops who landed yesterday night, I imagine. He came on them, I suppose. I heard shooting, but by the time I got my own gun, after warning London, it was all over. I found him near the door, dead, and three Germans dead in the gardens. I've seen no one since."

Gilliatt said, "He came back to kill you."

"I don't understand."

"He thought you betrayed him — the other night, when we were ambushed. We saw you then—" He studied Drummond's face, but it was merely sorrowful, half-attentive. "He was convinced you'd betrayed us, you were working with the IRA for the Germans."

"Poor Michael. He ended up saving my life." Drummond went forward into the room and stood over the body. Then he turned to Gilliatt. "I know this has been a terrible shock to you, Lieutenant Gilliatt, but have you anything to report? London is in a flap about these troops landing — my scouts have seen a few signs of them, but nothing more. Why are they here?"

Gilliatt was staring at McBride's body, in valediction. The ultimate futility of courage, he could not help thinking. To die for an error, a stupid, bigoted mistake. He wondered what had possessed McBride—

He looked up. Drummond, a senior naval officer, required his report. He nodded.

"I think I'd better talk to London, sir. How much they're aware of I don't know, but it's urgent."

"The radio's in the cellar— come."

Both men paused at the door to look back once at McBride. Then Drummond closed the door on the body, and Gilliatt decided that Maureen could remain in the car until he had made his report to London. He postponed sorrow until he had done his urgent duty.

As he waited for Drummond to unlock the door to the cellar, the hall window was suddenly illuminated by a garish orange glow from the sea.

Fitzgerald was awoken — thrust into consciousness — by the first explosion. He was tumbled from his bunk, and his head banged painfully against the bulkhead. His vision became foggy, and the weak blue light in his cabin became sinister and frightening. He scrabbled with his hands as the whole cabin lurched sideways, spilling forward, disorientating him and making him suddenly aware of the cold water of the St George's Channel beneath the ship. The cruiser was suddenly made of paper, easily crumpled.

A second explosion, banging his shoulder against the bulkhead, rolling him along the wall of the cabin — along the wain. He groaned from fear rather than pain. The blue light was extinguished, and he was in complete, cold darkness. He called out, to hear his own voice. The cruiser was listing more. Footsteps outside, drumming through the bulkhead, men cursing. Dryness still beneath his hands and knees. His genitals were chilly with anticipation of the creeping, drowning water he knew must come for him. The shudder of a more distant explosion.

Blood seeped into his left eye. He wiped roughly at it like an embarrassing tear. His body was shivering, as if registering all three explosions. His mind was clear, but could not react. He knew they were under attack, even understood that the cruiser was sinking, but there seemed no urgency. Panic was still, sedative, calming.

It was some minutes — it seemed minutes, perhaps longer, perhaps only moments? — before he felt terror return, unfreezing the icy calm. He scrambled to his feet, against the sloping bulkhead, seeming alone in the silent, dark ship, and reached for the door handle. He turned it, and pulled.

The door did not move. He heaved at the handle, but the door remained wedged and buckled into place by the effect of the two explosions.

He heard a siren, but could not be certain because he was screaming by that time and what he heard might have been the sound of his own demented voice. Siren — voice — hands banging on the door. The useless noises went on for some time, even after the cabin tilted forward. He heard the slither towards and past him of clothes and toilet gear and framed pictures of his wife and family and papers and the books he had been reading, then they stilled into an unseen heap against the forward bulkhead. Eventually, he had to grip the door handle with one hand to keep himself sufficiently upright to pound with increasing, weakening hopelessness on the cabin door. His voice had gone by that time, and it seemed the ship's siren was screaming for him.

All his awareness seemed to be in his bare feet and ankles, awaiting the arrival of the icy water that he somehow knew was already reaching through the cruiser towards him.

Churchill seemed to have acquired the company of Walsingham more exclusively than any other officer present. None of them would openly demonstrate their hostility to the Prime Minister, but they had overtly avoided Walsingham since the moment Churchill announced his decision regarding the convoy. It was as if they knew the authorship of Emerald. They may have done, but Walsingham, though he disliked the proximity of the Prime Minister because it so clearly marked him off physically from his companions, could not be disturbed by their animosity. He was bound to Churchill, Emerald would be with him for the remainder of his life — but he was beyond regretting that now. It was done, or soon would be when the report came in, and it would have either to be lived down or lived up to in the coming years and after the war.

If it was not buried efficiently by the Prime Minister— Churchill's face was blank of expression. He had drunk a good deal during the night, alternating alcohol with amounts of coffee, but he did not appear drunk so much as having slipped away from himself and from any pressure or guilts that might assail him. He seemed curiously at peace.

A telephone rang, and it was answered by a Wren. She carried the set over to Churchill.

"The Tracking Room upstairs is receiving morse from the convoy, sir."

Churchill roused himself, the face closed up around the suddenly alert eyes. The other occupants of the room stopped work, watched Churchill's broad back as he leaned over the telephone.

"Yes?"

"Prime Minister, we're getting reports that the convoy is under U-boat attack—"

"What is the convoy's position?"

"That's what's strange, sir. They're well into our new — channel, they should be safe from attack."

"You mean the U-boats are in our channel?" Churchill exploded. The intelligence colonel's face behind him wrinkled with contempt and self-disgust, and he looked up at the wall map and the marked position of the convoy.

"It must be, sir! Sir, two of the merchant ships have been hit by torpedoes, and the cruiser—!"

"My God—"

"The cruiser is signaling abandon ship, sir—"

"You know what to do. We must save as many as we can. Report to me every half-hour."

Churchill put down the telephone. Only the few people in this operations room, Walsingham thought, know the truth about Emerald. They will not be allowed to tell the truth. No one will ever know. Churchill's face was blank of all expression. He put the receiver down on the floor beside his chair. Less than two minutes, Walsingham thought, suddenly and briefly appalled, was all the time that was necessary. Upstairs, they would already be saying how shocked and moved the old man was, how terrible after the secrecy of the southern route through the minefield, even as they began the attempt to rescue the survivors. The subterranean reality in this cramped bunker room was different, but now it was robbed, somehow, of real significance. Voices on the telephone, an awaited radio report from an RAF Anson of Coastal Command, and that was how it was done. No blood anywhere near this room.

"Colonel," Churchill called.

"Sir." The colonel was standing in front of Churchill, his back deliberately to Walsingham, in calculated insult.

"You understand, Colonel? A tragic fact of war — we have lost a cruiser, three heavy merchantmen and God knows how many men — by U-boat attack." The colonel nodded, his face transferring guilt to the old man in the chair, adopting the fixed lines of unthinking duty, the clear brow of necessity. Churchill could see it happening to him, and was satisfied. "I will inform the American Ambassador in due course. That will be all, Colonel."

"Prime Minister." The colonel walked away with almost light step. Churchill studied Walsingham, as if the expression on his face was of the utmost importance, just at that moment. Walsingham understood from the nod he was given that the Prime Minister was satisfied. To Walsingham, the satisfaction was a recognition of something failed or broken or missing within himself. But he dismissed the thought.

Churchill closed his eyes for a moment, as soon as Walsingham returned his gaze to the wall charts. In a sudden, clear, visionary moment, he could hear insects in the garden at Chartwell. All those years, well spent, recollected with affection, had only been an interlude. His destiny was to be the only man capable of making decisions like Emerald. That was why his country needed him, he acknowledged. Not for the V-sign, or the cigars, or the bulldog expression or the black homburg. Because he could make decisions like Emerald and not despair of himself, of his country, or of human nature. It was not having the courage, or even the ruthlessness, to do it that mattered. It was the ability to perceive necessity, to bow to that strange deity's commands.

"Sir," the radio operator called from the other side of the room. "I'm beginning to get a transmission." The colonel moved to the radio, and Walsingham got to his feet. Churchill nodded his permission, but made no attempt to move himself. The volume on the radio was turned up, and the voice of the distant R/T operator aboard the Anson could be heard through a mush of static, stung and obscured occasionally by severe crackling.

Walsingham stood next to the colonel behind the radio operator. The army officer looked at him, and there was complicity in his features. A complicity of duty and transferred guilt and personal innocence. Walsingham nodded to him. The colonel seemed relieved. The authorship of Emerald did not matter. The old man in the chair had committed the atrocity.

"We've sighted the U-boats on the surface, but we're flying low and keeping out of sight." The absence of jargon and the hesitancy of the words indicated that the radio operator knew he was being listened to by Churchill. No code-names, no call-signs, no references to position, just a voice on the ether, a radio commentary of an occurrence at sea. There was silence for a long time, in which only the universe spoke, then: "There's been an explosion, no, two explosions — we're going for a look-see." Another long silence in which each person in the room became less and less aware of the drama and significance of events and more sensible of minor irritations, hunger, a dry mouth, itching eyebrows. The outcome of the war, the fate of Smaragdenhalskette diminished, faded until they could cope with it as a voice commentating on distant events, a race or a Test Match. "Two U-boats have been damaged, and another two are sinking!" Spithead Review commentary, a fireworks display. "The remainder have altered course — there goes another one! There are hundreds of men in the water we can see — one of the damaged U-boats is rolling — she's going!"

"Acknowledge, and switch off!" Churchill barked from his chair, and the colonel turned the volume down almost to inaudibility. He was puzzled by the old man's behavior — he seemed to care more for the fate of the Germans than the convoy crews.

The room returned to insulated silence, and then a telephone rang. It was the receiver still at Churchill's feet. He picked it up warily as he might have done a snake.

"It's the Irish Ambassador, sir."

"What does he want? I'm very busy. Let me call him later, unless it's urgent."

"He wishes to speak to you under code-name Essex." Churchill paused — the Earl of Essex and his invasion of Ireland in the last years of Elizabeth's reign. The first convoyed British soldiers had landed in Cork. "No, that isn't urgent. I'll call him later, my dear. Give him my thanks."

He put down the telephone, heavily and clumsily. Then he lay back in the armchair, fat and helpless as an overfed baby. Walsingham felt himself to be impossibly removed from Churchill, and desperate to renounce everything to do with Emerald. Unlike the colonel, he could not completely and successfully transfer guilt to the corpulent figure of Churchill. He was still the author of the file.

Churchill was looking intently at him. Then he said, softly, "Bury it, Commander. Bury it deep. You can begin tomorrow."

McBride placed his coins on the flat top of the call-box. The telephone was still clammy from use by the woman in front of him, and he wiped it on the sleeve of his jacket. Andoversford was quiet in the early morning. He dialed the Cheltenham number he had used from Cavendish House the previous day.

"Come on, come on—" murmured some impatient part of him, though he felt calm, assured, even bright, despite his almost sleepless night in the small residential restaurant on Cleeve Hill above the orange, serried lights of Cheltenham and the sky-glow of Gloucester in the distance. He'd eaten well, drunk most of a bottle of claret, then retired to his room to type two letters, one to his agent in New York and the other, longer one, to his bank in Portland. He had carbon copies of both letters in the car now.

"Yes, Professor McBride? I trust you slept well?" Walsingham sounded confident, gracious in victory — and as if he was acting a part.

"I want to talk to you."

"Of course. Will you come here?"

"Said the spider to the fly, uh? No thanks."

Walsingham chuckled, but there was a newly cautious note in his voice when he replied. "Of course. Where do you suggest?"

"Somewhere lonely might be nice — for you. However, if you want to shoot me dead you'll do it in the middle of London and get away with it."

I'm glad you understand that."

"Let's say Foxcote Hill, in an hour. See you." McBride put down the receiver. He stepped out of the call-box, and climbed into his car.

He drove out of Andoversford, taking minor roads until he was able, using the OS map, to approach Foxcote Hill from the south. He parked the car at the end of a track which petered out in the copse on Shill Hill, and then climbed until he was above the surrounding countryside. It was misty and autumnal in the fields, and the copses were webbed with mist. In the distance to the north, he could see the village he had left twenty minutes or so earlier, and its main roads. Trees covered the northern slopes of the hill, but he was on short, springy turf, exposed and alone. He descended into the trees again and waited. The morning was still, heavy, but the cloud was thin and transitory.

During the night he had come to the conclusion that Walsingham would let him live — just so long as he knew that the evidence for what had happened in 1940 was in hands other than McBride's alone. Whether he would ask questions first, and so elicit his powerlessness, was another matter. McBride had never possessed a gun, and he could not regret the absence of one now. Nevertheless, during the fifteen or twenty slow minutes before he heard the car approaching from the tiny hamlet of Foxcote to the north, he began to wish for the feel of one in his hand, futile though its possession would have been.

He ground out his third cigarette as he heard the undergrowth move and brush against a body, and slipped back into the shadow of the tree bole against which he had been leaning. A minute later, Walsingham appeared, struggling up the slope, his trilby hat in his hand, his topcoat unbuttoned. He appeared to be alone. He stopped for breath, dabbed his forehead with his handkerchief, felt his pounding heart, and called out.

"McBride — McBride, are you here?"

McBride said nothing. Walsingham looked back behind him, then moved on up the last of the slope to the hilltop, passing the tree that concealed McBride. McBride watched the hill below him, straining to see into the shadows beneath the trees, and listened intently. He could see and hear nothing.

Without moving from the shelter of the tree, he called out after Walsingham, "Don't turn around for the moment, Walsingham. Are you alone?"

Walsingham stopped. "Of course."

"I believe you. I didn't think you'd want our little talk to be overheard. I guess national security covers it, uh?" He heard Walsingham chuckle. "OK, turn around." McBride stepped out from behind the tree. Walsingham was dabbing his brow again. He looked old and vulnerable. "Where's the hit man?"

Walsingham raised his hands, palms outwards in innocence. "My dear fellow—"

"Bullshit." McBride stood higher on the slope than Walsingham. "Let's make it so he has to be a very good shot."

"I'd like to sit down." Walsingham did not appear more ruffled than simply breathless with the short climb. "Over there? You can watch the trees, surely. And I'm not wired for sound, nor am I armed." He held his coat open, and McBride frisked him quickly. Walsingham was aware of the slight tremor through his old body as the American's hands smoothed over his sides and chest, down his legs, between his thighs, around his ankles. Then McBride looked up at him, and the gleam of confidence in his eyes demonstrated that he had sensed the older man's fear.

"OK — a rotten log seems about right."

They sat on the green-coated log in the spaces between the more exotic fungoid growths. Walsingham picked at one, lung-like, then at another the texture and colour of rolled pastry. His fingers were vaguely, senilely destructive. "Entirely appropriate," he answered softly.

"They're all dead. Just like you wanted it, really."

"Oh, no," Walsingham replied quickly. "You were the one who stirred the ant-heap with a stick. On behalf of Goessler." Walsingham's breathing refused to return to normal. Quick, short breaths, as superficial as the relationship of a mayfly to the pond water beneath it. He felt reluctant, and — yes — afraid in the company of this man. He was totally unlike Michael McBride, his father. A superficial physical resemblance, naturally, but nothing marked on the almost bland face except recent tiredness, recent extremity. Even now, he seemed somehow — irresponsible? His innocence as Goessler's pawn forced a comparison of guilt upon Walsingham which made him uncomfortable with himself. Self-esteem, self-confidence both seemed to evaporate.

"You should have buried it all a lot deeper — the hole wasn't big enough to hide what you had to hide. It was all your operation, from first to last, I guess?"

Walsingham's face made the admission with involuntary muscles.

"Yes," he said after a long silence. "I proposed the sinking of the convoy, and Churchill accepted it. It seemed to be a necessity to me at that moment in time, in that situation." He paused, but then hurried on, sensing his physical proximity to Michael McBride's son like a cold wind on his frail skin. "I had nothing to do with the death of your father. That—"

"I know. You would have, if it had helped, but Drummond got there before you. If it had become necessary, you'd have had him killed."

"I liked your father—" Walsingham's voice tailed off as he admitted the inadequacy of the statement. "He was very likable," he added, almost to himself.

"Yes." McBride looked down into the trees for a moment, but in abstraction rather than alertness. Then he returned his gaze to Walsingham. The old man felt McBride's eyes glancing over his face and body in tangible, icy contacts. There was an evident repulsion in McBride's expression. "All men who fight wars are like you, right? Necessity. Then in peacetime it's national security. You make me sick."

Walsingham's face was livid with anger. "You sanctimonious American puppy! Your countrymen were collecting money for the war effort by organizing charity bazaars and dances at the very moment we were in danger of being overrun by the Nazis. You have no room to talk!" As soon as he paused, he seemed to become calmer by an effort of will. His anger had made him more human, more comprehensible to McBride. His thin strands of white hair and his lined face made him less dangerous. "I'm sorry," Walsingham continued. "You could not be expected to understand. Let us get down to the business in hand. As you say, I did not take sufficient care to expunge the evidence of what was done. You have collected a great deal of it. You intend to write a book." Walsingham's thin smile suddenly alerted McBride to the man's intelligence, his superiority of mind, his ruthlessness. It was the American's turn to be disturbed, edgy. He scanned the trees swiftly, knowing as he did so that he would never see the rifleman — if there was one.

Walsingham added: "Were you in fact to write this book of yours, you would be charged with the murders of Goessler and Lobke. You would be convicted."

McBride shivered, then nodded. "And if I keep quiet?"

"Then there would be no need to detain you further, or to charge you. You would be free to go. I would see you onto the aircraft at Heathrow myself." Walsingham attempted an ingenuous smile, but it was an evident false note and he withdrew it from his features.

"Sounds easy. There's a man down there, right? Insurance?" McBride nodded down towards the thicker trees.

"Yes, there's a man down there. As you say, insurance. For my safety."

"It's all for your safety." McBride looked over his shoulder, then back at the trees. A noise? Squirrel or shrew, or the marksman? He wondered about Walsingham, and how desperate he was, and he felt very, afraid. Then Walsingham was speaking again, with a new urgency.

"Have you deposited any evidence with anyone, McBride? I must have all your papers, your notes, lists of people you have seen—"

"What's the matter with you, Walsingham?" McBride reached very slowly into his jacket and removed the carbon copies he had made the previous evening. "I've written to my bank in Portland, Oregon, and to my agent in New York. Also this morning I rang my agent in London inquiring about an advance against royalties for the British edition of Gates of Hell. I said I'd ring again this afternoon."

He waited, his skin crawling, his hands flattened, turning white, on the damp bark of the rotten log. He could be swatted now, removed, eliminated. He had no doubt that Walsingham would do it, had planned to do it. The carbons the old man was studying appeared insubstantial, ineffectual. The bullet would pass through his frame as easily as through those papers. Come on, come on—

"I see. Your American agent would, in the event of your sudden demise, be authorized to receive the documents from your bank, and expose their contents. To the New York Daily News in the first instance, I presume?" There was a livid lightning-flash of hatred on Walsingham's face for a moment, a second of decision, and then the slow relaxing of the hand that held the papers, so that it rested nervelessly on the log beside McBride's hand. The decision had been unmade, altered. McBride wiped his green-stained hands together with relief.

"Make a beautiful noise and a very bad smell, mm?" he asked with adopted lightness, after he had cleared his throat.

What was that? Anything— nothing? Had he lost—?

"This creates something of a problem," Walsingham said with chilling calm. Lost—? "Fortunately, it doesn't seem to be insuperable. We should have to persuade your agent that your death was an accident. The CIA or the FBI would assist us there, I should think?" Walsingham's confidence was growing. Then your documents, your confessions, would moulder on in the vaults of the Citizens" Bank of Portland, undisturbed—" Walsingham had raised his hand to mop his now dry brow. McBride watched the gesture in disbelief.

"My agent in London!" he shouted. Walsingham's hand hovered. "If I don't call this afternoon, he talks to New York. The papers will be out of my bank before you can stop them, and it won't be an accident."

Walsingham sat with his hand still hovering near his brow. Hate and fury crossed his old face like new streams following old, dry courses. McBride studied the trees in panic, then glanced over his shoulder. He had only a moment. Walsingham, in a few seconds, would make the irrational, irreversible decision to have him eliminated. Walsingham's face was now an agony of indecision.

"I don't believe you—" he said.

"Can you afford not to? You're about to retire. I won't talk, to anyone, until after you're dead and in your grave, loaded with honours you don't merit. I'm leaving now. Just keep your hand on your forehead until I've gone." Walsingham chewed his lower lip. His hand fell limply against his brow, and with an effort he held it there. Time, time, McBride thought. Given time, he'll see sense. He'll lose his nerve. Just let me get away from here— "The only way you can expose me is by revealing your own rotten part in things. You won't care about the meetings, or about

Ulster, but you'll care about that. You won't want to have to shoot yourself to avoid the scandal." McBride moved behind the log, watching the sweat break out along Walsingham's forehead, around the crumpled ball of the handkerchief. The old, veined hand was shaking. Slowly, McBride backed up the last yards of the slope to the brow of the hill. "Just take it easy, Walsingham," he called out. "I'll keep my word—"

He was on the long, whale-backed hilltop, and his car was only hundreds of yards away, down in the trees. He felt a curious lightness in his stomach, and began running.

Behind him, Walsingham transferred his handkerchief — glancing in distaste at its grey dampness — to his left hand, and the marksman stepped out of the trees, rifle lowered.

"What happened?" Exton asked when he reached the log. "Why didn't you give me the signal? I could have killed him easily. You were in no danger, at any time."

"He'd written letters," Walsingham offered, his gaze avoiding Exton's eyes and their contempt. "I had to settle for the original trade-off. He'll keep silent if he wants to live."

"As you will?" Yes, it was there, in Exton's voice. The unfamiliar tinge of contempt. Walsingham felt old, older than ever before. He looked up, mustering authority, perhaps merely recollecting it.

"As I will, and you will, Exton — and so will all of us."

Distantly, they heard an engine start, and then the noise of a car accelerating away from them. To Walsingham, the noise was both a relief in the present and a distanced, humming threat from the future. But, it was settled. McBride would let him live out his days, basking in respect and honours. It would have to do. His old body, old nerves, had settled for it when he faced Michael's son.

The sound of the car faded and disappeared on the morning air.