A Gathering of Spies (19 page)

A young man cleared his throat.

“Yes, Kendall?”

“Sir,” the young man said, “begging your pardon, sir, but … a couple of the lads are wondering, sir—”

“Speak your mind, lad.”

“Well—it's Highgate, sir. If she was able to kill eight …”

Winterbotham stepped forward. “Go on,” he said.

Kendall looked at him with huge eyes.

“Go on,” Winterbotham said again.

“Sir, the lads are thinking that if she was able to kill eight, sir, and we're moving in groups of two—”

“In Highgate she had conducted surveillance of the target area, gentlemen; but here she is stranded in countryside she has never seen before. On the other hand, this is
our
country. We outnumber her twenty-four to one, without counting the Special Forces patrols at the perimeter. So what, precisely, frightens you?”

Now the young man was blushing. “Nothing, sir.”

“Do you not feel comfortable with groups of two?”

“No, sir. I mean, yes, sir.”

“You'll be with me, Kendall. I'll hold your hand, if you like.”

More snickers, nervous laughter.

“Well, then,” Taylor said, “if that's settled. Quadrant one: Lee, Weaver, Davis, Cooper, Bennett, Nuffield. Quadrant two: Hardwicke, Lipton, Lewis, Sayers, Kemsley, Benson. Quadrant three …”

Katarina approached the houses carefully, staying as much as possible in the shadows of the encroaching dusk, listening.

There were six houses, cheaply made from plain wood, arranged in a loose semicircle. They were not farms, although all possessed large, if scrubby, gardens. They reminded her of houses she had seen while driving from Los Alamos to Ohio. Poverty was not there, not at the moment—but it was close. She could see it lurking in the rows of yellowish unhealthy tomatoes, in the dilapidated roofs, in the homemade blackout shades on the windows, black paint on cardboard. What could they have here that would possibly help her? She would do better to move on.

Then she saw the lorry.

It was sitting on a patch of grass in the center of the semicircle, looking forlorn. She approached it warily. From somewhere not so far away, over the murmur of summer insects, she could hear a voice singing “Kiss Me Goodnight, Sergeant Major.”

The bed contained empty buckets, a coiled hose, a cork helmet. It was a makeshift fire-fighting vehicle, manned, no doubt, by volunteers from the small village around her. Pitching in and doing their part for the war effort, just like everybody else—when they were sober enough. These were the “heroes with grimy faces” whom Churchill had praised so vocally when the London Fire Brigade had been absorbed into the National Fire Service in 1941.

Katarina looked around. A chicken was strutting importantly across the dusty yard in front of a nearby house; otherwise there seemed to be nobody watching.

She opened the lorry's door, slipped inside, and bent down to have a look at the ignition.

Winterbotham drove.

Kendall sat beside him up front, drumming his fingers on the windowsill. They dropped off agents in groups of two: Lewis and Hobbs at the fringe of the forest; Richards, Temple, and a bloodhound named Sad Sack near A380. Then they headed back toward the center of the quadrant, and the holiday homes.

“Try to relax,” Winterbotham said.

Kendall's fingers immediately stopped drumming. “Sorry, sir.”

“I hope you don't think I came down on you too hard back there, Kendall. I was hoping to make a point in front of the men.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Between you and me,” Winterbotham said, “you're absolutely right. There's no reason at all to believe that two-man teams will suffice.”

Kendall stared at him.

“Can you reach in the glove, Kendall, and hand me the pistol there?”

“Um … yes, sir.”

The Bentley drifted to a stop fifty feet away from the nearest house.

Winterbotham counted six of the little hovels arranged in a loose cluster—hardly more than shacks, really, with their two rooms and their scrubby gardens. The irony was that these pathetic houses would be inhabited, for the most part, by exiles from the tonier neighborhoods of London. When the bombing had grown thick, in the midst of the Blitz, those who could afford to buy a plot of land and leave the city had done so. But their new “holiday houses” had been necessarily modest. First had come a lack of supplies—metals, rubber, textiles, woods, paint—and then, as time wore on, a lack of even the most basic amenities.

“We'll stay together,” Winterbotham said softly. “Sweep from one house to the next, starting with the closest one.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Nervous, Kendall?”

“No, sir.”

“Hm,” Winterbotham said, and threw open his door.

They began to stalk toward the nearest house, side by side, pistols in hand. As they drew close, Winterbotham heard the sudden cough of an engine turning over. He frowned. Where was that coming from? Now it was revving, spiraling up and down. Close by, he thought. Out of sight—but very close by. In fact …

He caught movement out of the corner of his eye. He grabbed Kendall and pushed him down, flinging himself after in the same motion.

The lorry swept past within inches, headlamps off, the stench of oil following in a thick cloud.

Winterbotham gained his feet, brushing at himself.

Kendall, beside him, stood more slowly.

“Check the houses,” Winterbotham said. “Somebody may need help.”

Kendall showed no sign of having heard him. He was looking off after the lorry, dazed.

“Check the houses, Kendall, God damn it!”

Winterbotham gave him a push in the direction of the nearest house, then turned and hurried back toward the Bentley, cursing under his breath.

The engine labored audibly, sending up clouds of sooty black smoke.

Katarina blocked out the noise. She needed to think.

Should she try to keep the lorry? Or should she make a go for it on foot?

Keep the lorry, she decided, at least for the time being. They would be closing in. If she was on foot, they would nab her immediately.

She turned right—north—and opened up the engine. The lorry bumped along the old road under the deepening twilight, sounding pained. Twice she nearly slipped off into a ditch that paced the road on the right. Both times she dragged the lorry back onto the road with clenched teeth, amid tremendous gouts of dust. If she dared turn on the headlamps she would have felt a bit safer—but even with the blackout hoods, she couldn't risk it.

Don't panic
, she thought.
Think
!

Maybe she should dump the lorry, hide in the countryside. But what if they had dogs? She was afraid of dogs. Hagen had trained her to handle them anyway—but no, the wind was shifting too frequently for her to be confident of keeping the correct orientation. The best thing to do …

Who knew the best thing to do? Not she.

She was finished.

“Damn it,” she said aloud. “
Think
, God damn it!”

She wanted a cigarette. But her purse had been left behind, on the train, with the suitcase.

She moaned low in her throat and kept driving.

She was
better
than they were, she could handle any given dozen of them. But they would overwhelm her with sheer numbers. They would pile on, tear her apart like dogs fighting over a bone.

She wiped her hand across her nose.

Don't panic, for Christ's sake. Think, for Christ's sake
.

No. It's over
.

It's never over
, she thought.

Roadblocks? Most definitely. And sooner rather than later. And even if she could barrel through the roadblocks—not that she could, but even
if
she could—there were thousands of troops assembling in this part of England. Along with the thousands of troops came hundreds of tanks and half-tracks and Jeeps. They would block the road with something that couldn't be rammed.

Leave the lorry and you'll get the dogs. Keep the lorry and you'll hit a wall
.

Take the lorry off the road?

The going would be even slower driving over fields. The trick might buy her a minute or two as they tried to figure out where she had gone, but she'd be no closer to breaking through the second perimeter.

A low whining sound reached her ears. As she listened, it climbed higher to a piercing shriek. She began to tremble.
An alarm
, she thought. Because of her? Was every person in this godforsaken stretch of country going to be looking for her now? She would hang, no doubt about it, hang, hang, hang. For a moment she believed it, and the panic that had been nibbling at her began to slaver.

Then spotlights poked up into the night. Four, six, an even dozen. She heard the first coughing rattle of antiaircraft fire:
ack-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack
.

Not an alarm, she realized.

An air-raid siren.

Then she could hear the planes themselves, far away. She craned her neck out the window as she drove, searching the sky.

Why bomb out here, in the middle of nowhere?

The railroad. They would be trying to bomb the railroad.

The bombs would smash the perimeter for her.

She spun the wheel, and the lorry bounced off the road into a rocky field, heading west.

When the first bombs hit, Winterbotham pulled the Bentley to the side of the road and watched.

The bombs were falling in a scythe pattern some distance away—seven or eight miles, he guessed, to the west. The railroad tracks, then. Some of the planes would probably also make a go for the oil refinery, if they had the fuel and the bombs to spare.

He sat, hands on the wheel, watching the geysers of flame rise up into the night, and he tried to think.

If she hadn't turned off the road, he would have caught up to her by now. The Bentley could outrun that lorry; he had no doubt of it. And so she
had
turned off the road. But why? She must have known that her progress would be severely impeded by the fields. How far could she hope to get?

Put yourself in her place
, he thought. The net closing all around; time running out; nowhere to go.

Another carpet of bombs exploded far away. Pillars of brackish smoke began to rise. He thought of all the wildlife, the varied flora and fauna, being destroyed—
Abies grandis, Taxus baccata, Cerastium glomeratum, Pteridum aquilinum
. Countless others. The creeping buttercup, however tenacious, could not hold its own against a bomb.

This goddamned war
, he thought.

And how would
she
feel, witnessing this?

Proud of her country for penetrating England's defenses? He rather doubted it. The bombing put her in danger, after all—a few miles was a small distance with this kind of operation. All it would take was one Heinkel, one Dornier drifting slightly off-course, and bombs might saturate this very spot. Her own people could be the ones who kill her.

When she saw the planes, then, she would turn away. East was her direction, in any case. It led to the coast, her ultimate goal.

But she's not one to lose her head
, he thought then.
She's not one to run blindly away from danger. On the contrary. She
embraces
danger, simply because it makes her unpredictable. Perhaps when she sees these geysers of flame she does not see them as a threat. Perhaps she sees them as just the opposite
—
a curtain of fire to shield her from the prying eyes of MI-5
.

In that case, she heads toward them.

Winterbotham turned west.

The lorry jounced over a ditch, nearly got hung up on a bush, tore free, tilted up onto two wheels, balanced precariously, and then righted itself.

The explosions were moving east and north. Katarina twisted the wheel hard, pointing herself toward them, and jammed her foot down on the accelerator. The trick would be to get close enough to slip through any gap made in the perimeter, but not so close as to become incinerated.

She crashed through a hedgerow, splashed through a fen, then broke out into an open field.

She saw the explosions marching toward her. She held the wheel with both hands, squeezing hard, and kept on. At the last instant, she would turn—but not before. If she lost her nerve now, she would lose her last chance.

The noise was deafening, apocalyptic, night turned to day.

Her hands started to twist the wheel, to veer away.

Her mouth formed a tight line.

She turned the wheel back.

Kept on.

They were perversely beautiful: multicolored spouts of earth and flame, trees and debris and grass and stone and funneling smoke, sixty feet away, forty feet, thirty …

She spun the wheel—too late.

The world became a slow and sweet place.

Winterbotham saw the lorry an instant before it vanished into a wall of flame.

He stepped on the brake. He blinked, then reached up and rubbed his eyes.

He prepared to follow her—to drive the Bentley into the inferno.

Instead, he found himself sitting where he was at an almost-safe distance, engine idling, heart thudding in his wrist.

The perimeter, he thought, would have crumbled. Even the most stalwart SF man wouldn't stand still while a Junker dropped a bomb on him. They would close ranks as soon as the barrage had ended, plugging any hole; but if she survived, she would find her chance. They wouldn't be able to reorganize effectively until dawn.

He kept watching. He raised his thumb to his mouth and nibbled on the nail, a habit he had vanquished forty years before.

The explosions continued.

Nobody could survive that
, he thought.

Katarina watched, feeling pleasantly high.

She felt as if she had been swatted with an especially large, soft pillow. Tiny somethings rained on the car all around her, on the undercarriage and then the roof, undercarriage and then roof, as she rolled again and again, slowly and sweetly.