Patriot

CHAPTER 8

Teakettle Cottage, in Bermuda, is no ordinary house. For starters, it is the home of the sixth-richest man in England, though you’d never guess that from the looks of the place. A rather small affair compared to its grander neighbors, it has survived, barely, at least half a dozen hurricanes in the last century. And it is, after all, the sanctum sanctorum of a very private man. Few people have ever seen it. And even to do that, first they’ve got to find it.

Anyone driving the coast road along the southern shore of Bermuda would find the modest limestone house hidden from view. The seaward property consists of a grove of ancient lignum vitae, kapok, and fragrant cedar trees. Only a narrow sandy lane gives a clue as to Teakettle’s existence. A lane resembling a green tunnel finally arrives at the house, but only after winding through an incredibly dense banana grove.

Here, on a headland, Lord Alexander Hawke had resurrected an old ruin he’d promptly named Teakettle Cottage. Trees surround it on all sides except the sea, which it practically overhangs. Great windows capture every breeze, to cool, even on the hottest day, the large white rooms. The windows that look toward the sea are glassless but equipped with heavy outside shutters against the rain, enormous quadrilaterals surrounded by dark wooden frames that enclose a prospect of sea and cloud and sky, and tame the elements, as it were, into an overhanging fresco of which one could never tire.

Upon first glimpse of the house, visitors realize the cottage actually does look like a teakettle. The main portion is a rounded dome, formerly a limestone mill works. A crooked white-bricked watchtower on the far, seaward side of the house forms the teakettle’s “spout.” The whole affair stands out on a rocky promontory above the waves crashing against the rocks some fifty feet below.

Inside is the oval whitewashed living room. The floors are polished, well-worn Spanish red tile floors. The owner has furnished the main room with old planter’s chairs and an assortment of castoffs and gifts donated by various residents seeking their own dream of solitude over the years.

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. had donated the massive carved monkey-wood bar after a long stay during the Second World War. The battered mahogany canasta table where most of the indoor meals were taken was a gift of Errol Flynn. Flynn took refuge here during his stormy divorce from Lili Damita. Hemingway had left his Underwood typewriter on the desk where he’d written Islands in the Stream. The shortwave radio on the bar had been used by Admiral Sir Morgan Wheelock during World War II to monitor the comings and goings of Nazi U-boats just offshore from the cottage.

A lot of less celebrated visitors had left behind the detritus of decades, much of which had been severely edited by the new owner. He wasn’t a fussy man, but he’d pulled down all the pictures of snakes some prior inhabitant had hung in his small bedroom.

The owner of this rather eccentric dwelling, Lord Hawke, won’t tolerate the use of his title and has never used it himself. The only one who is allowed usage is his ancient friend and household retainer, Pelham Grenville, a man whom he has known since birth. Pelham refers to his employer simply as “m’lord.”

Hawke was not a man one could simply glance at and ignore. It was not just his size, his armory of biceps, musculature, rock hardness, and the vast reserves of strength these suggested.

There was a certain nobility of bearing in him; a warrior’s bearing, inherited from the knights at King Arthur’s table, as well as the proud pirate captains of the Caribbean. All by way of saying that it would have been readily apparent to even the most casual of strangers that here was a man apart. A gentle, introspective man, unless aroused sufficiently to unleash the furies of hell upon you. And yet, he was usually contrite afterward, in the event that he’d been forced to use his strength.

His blue eyes were startling and had a range from merriment and charm to profound earnestness. Cross him, and he could fire a searing flash of blue across an entire room. Hawke had a high, clear brow, and a straight, imperious nose above a well-sculpted mouth with just a hint of cruelty at the corners of a smile.

When crossed, it was a much changed Alex Hawke one encountered: at that moment, those friendly blue eyes were as cold and steady as gun barrels.

Hawke’s job (senior counterintelligence officer at Britain’s MI6) demanded that he stay fit. Though he had a weakness for Mr. Gosling’s local Bermuda rum and Morland’s English cigarettes, he watched his diet and followed his old Royal Navy fitness regime religiously. He also spent endless hours at the firing range, and regularly climbed into the boxing ring with men half his age.

Attractive, yes, but it was his What the hell? grin, a look so freighted with charm that no woman, and even few men, could resist, that made him the man he was.

As the talk in certain circles in London had it, he was a hale fellow well met, one whom men wanted to stand a drink; and whom women much preferred horizontal.

Alex Hawke had been dozing out on the coquina shell terrace that fanned out from doors and windows flung open to the sea on a blue day like this. He had nothing on for today, just supper with his dear friends, the former chief inspector of Scotland Yard, Ambrose Congreve, and his wife, Lady Diana née Mars, at their Bermuda home, Shadowlands, at seven this evening.

“Sorry to disturb you, m’lord,” Pelham Grenville said, having shimmered across the sunlit terrace unseen.

“Then don’t,” Hawke said, deliberately keeping his eyes closed against the sun.

Pelham was the octogenarian valet who’d been in service to the Hawke family in England for decades. When Hawke was but seven years old, he had witnessed his parents’ tragic murder aboard their yacht in the Caribbean. Pelham and Chief Inspector Ambrose Congreve had immediately stepped in to raise the child. No one who’d survived that lengthy process would claim that it was easy, but the three men had all remained the closest of friends ever after.

“I think you might wish to take this call, sir.”

“Really? Why?”

“It’s your friend, the director, m’lord.”

“I have many friends who are directors, Pelham. Which one?”

“CIA, sir; he says it’s rather important.”

“You’re joking. Brick Kelly?”

“On the line as we speak, sir.”

Hawke gazed out at the rolling blue Atlantic, pausing a second to gather his wits about him before taking Brick’s call. There were few things in life he felt any certainty about anymore. But he knew damn well that CIA director Brick Kelly never called him with good news.