The Spy (31 page)

“I am glad to hear that,” Churchill replied. Allegiance to an agent was important to him, as long as it was his.

Mountbatten assured him that she was.

They discussed Hamilton, who had launched the mission; and who was already en route to his rendezvous in the English Channel. Weather Command was reporting dangerous seas. Mountbatten felt apprehensive about the safety of the girl. Churchill nodded. The Frenchman though, he would be all right. Lord Louis got up from his desk and closed the door, leaving the phone talking: it took just a few seconds. He returned to his chair.

Churchill: “—well then! Presuming David rides it out, so will his agents.” Word had it that Hamilton's Security Team, having delivered, were in high spirits at The Red Lion. “Blackstone has not yet called in—”

It was a dagger, but a sweet one.

Mountbatten listened, still not convinced. Cats
did
come out of bags; yet this one might have to be drowned at sea. If Lord Louis had to make another call, it would not be to John Blackstone.

“Calm down, Louis.” The Prime Minister was on
his
side. What mattered, the central and real reason for the mission, Churchill had made clear, was to beat The First Army to the punch and to acquire the Bomb before they had to buy it. If Mountbatten had doubts, it was too late to change them; and there, effectively, rested the Prime Minister's case. For if Germany delivered it first...

They would lose
.

“Come about, Louis...”

The man at Broadlands had tried harder than most to exceed. The great-grandson of Victoria, and stubborn, it was not his custom to surrender to another in matters of public opinion. If time to join the battle, the night was new. Outgunned, Lord Louis laid it on the line, the other end of which was tightly clasped in the Prime Minister's hand. “From a purely tactical view, perhaps GOLDILOCKS should not go swimming tonight.”

“I am sorry, Louis,” Churchill coughed, “but you are wrong about that.”

Mountbatten said something.

The other said it better: “
No
,” he said. Mountbatten of Burma, who had fought him to get the mission back, had embarrassed him with Ike. Mountbatten acknowledged it, but not very much. They went into it.

It was Blackstone.

The P.M. demanded to know the charges, along with the facts—Kay Summersby?—it wouldn't wash. “Try this,” Mountbatten said. Blackstone's mysterious network of connections could also be suspect; and what about the Free French—his Appointments!

De Beck, he meant.

“What about him?” This was the second time. What was the problem? The Prime Minister went on explaining his official position: suspicions were not guilt; and sources, unnamed or withheld, were not worth a damn! Besides, who were they? Turing?
Turing didn't know
. Mountbatten couldn't say. It had come to him, that's all. His Informant did not have a name.

Just a voice
...

“There! You see?” Churchill was assuring him that it was all right to be wrong. At the same time, he was revealing the nature of truth:

It was his.

“—how's that?” Lord Louis said. The German launch date for the Waterfall had come into question. The Prime Minister's
own
new sources—civilian clearance—were making clear to him that they'd been off in their assessment by over a week:
July 24th then, not August 6th
.

Three weeks.

If true, and he had no reason to think otherwise, the Prime Minister's chilling disclosure had greatly weakened Mountbatten's case. Not subject to argument, it was the Voice at the Top. Churchill had reversed the players. Of course, if Lord Louis
wanted
to share this information with John Blackstone—? He didn't? “Well now,” said Churchill, “is there something that I know that you don't know?”

Mountbatten grinned. “Bloody right!” he shot back, hoping for more. “I would certainly think that there is.” All cards up, Churchill had spread the deck. It was on the table of the War Office. Blackstone's cards were not among them. Mountbatten looked: Pierre de Beck's wouldn't be there, either. Word had it that he had been rubber-stamped by Parker. Fact had it that he had been personally cleared by General LeClerc.

Winston had won.

Lord Louis acknowledged it. A leader perceived of grace and honesty, and born to it, ruthless in his own case, he threw it out. Friday's admonition had repeated itself; some Commodores never learn, and Mountbatten had again taken it on the chin. The Prime Minister assured him that he was free to call back. But later, of course, if there were still bothersome questions. In any event, GOLDILOCKS was squarely in Mountbatten's hands now, and any further decisions would be his. That settled, there were still a few odds and ends that needed to be gone over; and would Lord Louis mind not hanging up just yet? Not at all, and Mountbatten looked at his watch.

“I think I have it now,” Supremo said.

“As I have already told you, you have it faster than imagined,” Churchill crooned.

“Sir!”

He had put the phone down. Mountbatten was on hold.

Lord Louis had opened the drapes.

Rain blew against his window. Faces of life, of his sudden and greater duty, had arrived at his Estate unannounced. Wealth notwithstanding, it was the Estate of a man. He thought back to the First War, where like the remembered cry of a French urchin in the street,
they
—these faces of future responsibility—would be pressing themselves up against the glass. Through that mirror would come the children of the world, of all the worlds; and he knew: they would be looking back at him, through time.

“Louis—?”

There was crackling on the line.

Time is on out side
...

Mountbatten glanced up. The clock on the wall was nearing midnight. He mentioned it. GOLDILOCKS would be aboard the sub in two hours. Forty-five miles away, the P.M. made a note. He spent a few moments remarking on the weather: considered essential.

Lord Louis inquired how it was.

Churchill looked.

Outside, wind was rising through the trellises, churning heat and dust against the wall of the distant storm. He asked Mountbatten to hold. “Two minutes,” he said, and he turned the page.

“
Governments,” wrote Winston Churchill, “were invented by people who are too lazy to work
...” True enough, he conceded. His own philosophic honesty, however publicly unadmitted, could be just the ticket here. No? He scratched through it, changing the directive, if not history itself, in the letter he had been composing to Marshal Stalin. Mountbatten was waiting. Churchill picked up the phone.

“You may well imagine what the demands are here.”

Still, Sinclair had not been settled.

“So, Louis, my best advice to you is to let GOLDILOCKS have her romp. Do what you do best, dear man, but give me your word that you have laid these frightful fears to rest.”

Mountbatten couldn't do that, but he agreed.

Important, from Churchill's view, his own loyalty had not been questioned. “We shall be expecting results. Good luck!”

He was wrapping it up.

“Ring you on Tuesday!” Mountbatten's voice had strengthened. James Bridley would rejoin him before dawn; they would be returning at once to Kandy. In terms of Record, Louis Mountbatten would not have been here.

“Tuesday then,” the P.M. said, his voice was on the war.

Mountbatten hung up.

The clock struck midnight.

Churchill smiled, his gaze spanning the room. There from behind the antique glass of the Chippendale bookcase, toy soldiers, standing guard before the Creasey collection, stormed forth upon the world. At the moment, men like he and Joseph Stalin owned it. Churchill arose from his desk and walked to the door. An Aide reached in, turned off the light, and closed it.

The Prime Minister mounted the stairs.

In the darkened study, in currents high above his desk alive with frequencies of voices past, a letter lay unsigned beside a humidor of black Havanas, next to pencils stubbed from pads of notes, with pages missing.

Upstairs, loud with voices, he entered. In the large bright maproom flashed with pointers, thick with smoke and waiting for him, the war went on that wasn't there. Calling back to them, from courage, they did not hear it:

The red telephone was ringing
!

Thunder boomed beyond the windbreak.

Rains splattered across the fields. Falling away in the roar of the weather, shrill as a scream through the ghostblack night, the sound had stopped.

Valerie listened
...

Giant clouds exploded ahead of them, lightning illuminating the flats of the sea. In the back seat of the speeding limousine, rich with ozone and the mysterious smell of felt, she had put down her lipstick. Ryan could hear it, too: bells and conversations, high above them, in England's stormy air. She rolled down the window, engulfed in the surge of the wind. The horizon rose distant, where hills were; and above it, the void was; and the icy bright blinking of stars.

The powerful black and silver car shot down the snake of the road! Tooling up the lanes of night, across countryside familiar, he soon had them free of the coast. Nervously, Valerie glanced over her shoulder.
Weren't they being followed
! No, not the way Ryan was driving. He said: “Why do you think he hired me?”

Valerie shook her head, she didn't know.

“For this...” the driver muttered, and he broke all laws save the laws of physics, in ascending a slippery rise. Valerie liked him, they could work together. Crashing through a roadblock, wood spun behind them. The road up ahead could be washed out any minute, because of the storm. Conquering curves, he jumped to the ALTERNATE ROUTE, tires whistling up traindark culverts: black tracks, disappearing into rain, “—hear what I have to say,” she heard him saying, “before we get there...” She had a right to know.

Valerie listened, her heart in her mouth.

Twenty years ago, before either of their times, the man destined to become The Spy had been an International Banker, secretly pledged to undermine the fascist dictator, Franco. The demands on the Spanish Dossier, represented in New York at that time by Brown Bros. Harriman, had caused him to deal heavily on the French
Bourse
. Loyal to the Bank of France, and on a tip from Rothschild, who seemed embarrassed by it, he had pursued it until it lead him to the discovery of a crooked picture: the passage of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, effected against the interests of the people of the United States. Aware that he himself had been a party to it, though unwittingly, and at the same time enjoying enormous personal wealth, The Spy had pledged his life, his fortune, and his uncanny comprehension of The DEAL, to the redress of justice and to the protection of Individual rights...rights, if his friends, the Bankers, had their way, that were scheduled for absorption in a Treasury Series of New World Orders; where personal tax, disguised as interest; and mortgage rates, compounded over time, would absorb all profit from the produced value of work, indebting those who performed it. The self-serving convenience of invented laws by bureaucratic leaderships, particularly in the United States, would enforce the collection of money. On that day, voters voiceless, all the lemons would be squeezed dry. Thus, the Individual, correctly numbered, would serve the Bankers; and the Bank would become the State. In that same year, 1913, the Individual 1040 Tax Form slipped quietly through the American Congress, becoming the first of an arsenal of weapons by the London Financial District directed against the Constitutional protection of American citizens; and the inviolable rights of each Individual: the right to the protection of
life
, the right to the protection of
work
, and the right to the protection of
choice
. It was all figured, down to the last twenty-dollar gold piece; the actual writing, left to the Warburgs. Years would go by and the picture that was crooked, carefully concealed in those years, would begin paying off: farms would fail, the absorption of
land
. Stock markets would crash, the absorption of
gold
. And wars would follow:

The absorption of value
.

Cloaked in their dark clouds, the world had narrowed, but his circle of friends had widened. One of them was the physicist Nicola Tesla. The eccentric Serb, sought by few, and master of electrical resonance, had pointed him in the right direction: quasi-organic intrusion into electronic communication, including phone lines. Later, confirming results with the renowned Dr. Steinmetz, pioneer of magnetic transformers, Ryan's employer had asked himself a question:
how safe are the secrets of time?
Advancing into chemistry, he had concluded that if they were to be safe at all, they would be safest with him. Meanwhile, the secrets of banking, and cash accumulation, along with his hard-won scientific knowledge, shared with Ryan, had put him on a parity, and in a fighting-stance position, as it were, with those whose purposes it was to pull the wool over the face of the world:

Over Eisenhower's, in particular.

From Ryan, who had driven down from Dublin, Sinclair was now hearing about Bernstein; and their impending meeting with The Spy.
Where?
That there would actually be one, coiled as it were in dark mysteries, was the news of the hour. So, for her personally then, where had it all begun? Had it started at the vicarage? When she had first known she was different? She remembered her years of struggle, to be somebody; meeting Mrs. Churchill at the Royal Hotel; the Ferry Pilots, and the months at Weymouth; Lieutenant Carrington; and David Hamilton. Suddenly, she was feeling terribly frightened: it was her son. The Allied cause was looming larger than the storm. And of England's imminent danger, her real traitors, what?

De Beck
!

Ryan came out of a skid, his hands were on the wheel.

“De Beck? He's a German.” He glanced at her in the rearview mirror. “Friend of yours?”