Summerland

22 CANARY TRAP, 6TH DECEMBER 1938

A gentle rain drummed on the canvas roof of the car where Rachel White sat with her husband, waiting for Roger Hollis to make the dead drop. A leaden lump of nervous anticipation sat heavily in her belly.

The Metropolitan Sepulchre on Primrose Hill was a gigantic, hundred-storey pyramid housing nearly five million dead piled side by side. Roger had just vanished into its maw. Their car was parked on the sloping lane that served the massive vertical cemetery, near the main gate. Helen and Joan were out in the rain, covering the other exits.

Roger’s silhouette appeared at the gate, a tall, long-limbed figure under an umbrella. Rachel could hear his cough even over the car’s electric whirr and the whisper of the rain.

They had followed Roger from his flat. He had returned from Blenheim Palace—he worked the night shift, when it was easiest to communicate with Summerland—changed clothes and headed back out, carrying a briefcase.

Soon after he had vanished around the corner, the car’s front and back doors opened, and Helen and Joan got in. Joan took a seat next to Joe in the back, while Rachel yielded the driver’s seat to the diminutive Scotswoman and moved to the passenger seat on the left.

‘’E did it,’ Helen said. ‘Left it in a lockbox in a vault. Paid me no mind, I was lighting candles on some poor sod’s tombstone.’

‘Thank you, ladies,’ she said. ‘You do understand that we are about to commit a crime, or possibly treason, or whatever lies on the other side of treason.’

‘That sounds like something he would have said,’ Joan replied. ‘Back when he was alive, he would’ve lit up his pipe just now, looked like Devil himself in the glow, and given a wee lecture just on that kind of thing.’

‘It’s be’er than babysittin’,’ Helen said. ‘God bless the tots, but they get on me West Ham Reserves. Give me a good kidnapping-and-intimidation anytime.’

Joe’s eyes were wide. Rachel winked at him.

Joan started the car, keeping the lights off, and drove slowly in the direction Roger had gone.

The zapper was heavy in Rachel’s hand. She tested the trigger and a tiny electric arc sparked between its spikes.

‘Careful with that,’ Helen said. ‘Got it off a Yank in the East End, Tesla design, it is. Wasn’t cheap, neither.’

‘I will, I promise.’

Roger was up ahead, walking, head down. The lane looked empty.

‘Now,’ Rachel said.

Joan flashed on the headlights and accelerated. Rachel’s former assistant turned to stare, pale-faced, blinking in the car’s blinding beams. Then Joan swerved to the right, hit the brakes and came to a stop next to Roger.

Rachel threw the passenger door open, pushed the zapper into Roger’s gut and pulled the trigger. The weapon vibrated, sparked and then died with a pop and a wisp of acrid smoke, short-circuited. She swore, but Roger was already collapsing against the car’s hood. Joe got out and helped her carry him into the back seat.

‘Skinny chap,’ he grunted. ‘Thank goodness for that.’

Helen studied the broken zapper and threw it down a drain.

‘Can’t trust them damn Yanks to make anythin’,’ she said.

Then they sped into London’s dark blue night, sending up great waves from fresh puddles of rain.

* * *

‘You!’

‘Hello, Roger.’

They were alone in a small, bare room in one of Max’s safe houses in the East End—Helen maintained several of them on his behalf. The wallpaper was torn and the noise of a commuter train made the place shake every now and then. Joan was in the car on the street and Helen guarded the hallway. Joe had insisted on staying at first, but Rachel had managed to convince him to patrol the rear of the building and given him an ectophone for summoning help in case of trouble.

Tying Roger into a chair had felt too theatrical, so Rachel had handcuffed him to the bed frame instead. His hair hung in wet, limp curls on his forehead.

‘Rachel, are you completely insane? Get me out of these right now and we will figure something—’

‘Oh, do stop it,’ Rachel interrupted him. ‘I know everything.’

Roger shook wet hair from his eyes. The handcuffs clanged against the bed’s metal frame.

‘Rachel. We can still sort this out. We’ll explain about your baby, they will always believe that a woman is hysterical over losing a child—’

‘You had better tell me how you know about that.’

‘Kathleen in the office noticed the signs, and told me. When … things didn’t proceed, I put two and two together.’

‘You were keeping files on all your co-workers, weren’t you? That was exactly what Bloom made me do. For leverage. Quite useful, really.’

‘Where are you going with this madness? What proof do you have?’

‘Proof will turn up soon enough, when your handlers empty that dead drop.’

Roger grimaced. ‘What if I was just paying my respects to dead relatives?’

‘Who goes to graveyards these days?’

‘It’s very weak, Rachel.’

‘Not when the NKVD sends a death squad to the location in Madrid that was in the file you received earlier tonight.’

‘If this is a canary trap, Rachel, then why not wait for it to go off?’

Rachel took a deep breath. ‘Because I want to make a deal with you. You give me your handlers and the message in your lockbox goes away, and there is nothing to link you to it. You resign, take the fall for the Dzhugashvili mess and go back to the Orient, or to Hell, for all I care.

‘Here’s what I think. You were being groomed to replace Bloom, after Kulagin’s defection exposed him. Max told me about the sacrifice technique: when one asset is in danger of being exposed, let another asset catch them and be promoted. But something went wrong. I am guessing it was related to what CAMLANN actually contained. Suddenly, Bloom was too valuable to be sacrificed. So you warned him and helped him get away.’

‘Rachel, it is just as easy to make a case that you are the second mole. Even easier, in fact. Bloom recruited you, you were supposed to replace him, you failed to capture him. What will Noel Symonds think about that?’

‘Ah, the familiar song. Admit nothing, deny everything, make counter-allegations. I heard the same thing many times in Ireland, with a different accent, of course.’ Rachel folded her arms.

‘How about this, then, Roger? We leak that you are a double agent—a conduit of disinformation to the NKVD. They won’t find Dzhugashvili in that safe house you just told them about, so they will believe that. We bring you in, set you up somewhere nice for debriefing, maybe even the Langham. Do you know what Kulagin did in that situation? He blew his brains out because he knew they were coming for him to do something worse.’

‘Jesus, Rachel.’ Roger closed his eyes. ‘What do you want?’

‘What did you once tell me? I want to protect you. What happened to Bloom? Where are his handlers? Give them to me and I will make this go away.’

‘On two conditions,’ Roger said, smiling weakly.

‘Name them.’

‘I want all that in writing, signed by Symonds. And you are personally going to make me tea.’

* * *

In half an hour, after a call to Symonds, Roger was sipping dark builders’ tea—the only kind Helen stocked in the safe house—with his free hand.

‘I was given instructions to make sure Bloom got away,’ he said slowly, ‘so I had Kathleen call and warn him.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t know why, but I had my marching orders. The handlers are a couple. I am not sure where they are from, Netherlands, maybe. Otto and Nora. They are odd ducks. Volatile, especially the woman. They recruited me after Kulagin did his walk-in. They work for someone called Shpiegelglass who is higher up, and is apparently doing a bit of a witch hunt himself on their side. I get the impression Kulagin was tarnished, ideologically, and they were taking care of assets he might have polluted. That’s why they decided to sacrifice Bloom. But of course, that all went to shit.

‘I wasn’t privy to the whole extraction plan, but Bloom can’t hide in Summerland—the Summer Court could find his luz via thought-travel. And the Russians need some special equipment to send our boy to the Presence, so he is probably lying low somewhere. Otto and Nora have a facility I helped set up, for people they need to make disappear. If Bloom is still in the country, that’s where they will be keeping him, in some poor medium’s body like a sardine in a can. In any case, what you find there will not be chickenfeed.’

‘A crime hospital?’ Rachel asked.

There had been a few of those in Belfast. Summerland made getting away with murder difficult, and thus an entire criminal industry had sprung up around making people disappear—without killing them. The solution was crime hospitals where the still-living victims were kept comatose for months or years, alive but only barely, their souls trapped in their bodies.

‘Something like that.’ Roger grimaced. ‘I hope you are not afraid of the dark, Rachel.’