Mr. Churchill's Secretary (25 page)

And there was a job to do. She put a final dab of powder on her nose, then rose to her feet and spun around. “Ta-da!” she sang, hands on hips.

“It’s good,” Murphy said. “Very good. But of course I miss your hair.”

“Don’t you like the red, darling?” Claire reached up to pat her waves of hair, held back with a carved tortoiseshell barrette. “There’s not much to do with it. She doesn’t care much about her hair, after all.” She looked down at her hands, stripped of polish and cut straight across. “Or her hands.”

Murphy gestured to the brown straw hat on the bed. “Try it with that.”

Claire put on the hat and stabbed it with a pearl-tipped pin. Slowly she lowered the net veil down over her eyes, then dropped them and gazed demurely at the floor.

“What do you think?”

“Dead ringer,” he said with a low whistle. “Congratulations, my dear. Are you ready?”

Claire gave a sigh and then looked at her reflection in the mirror once again. “Ready as I’ll—”

They both started at a noise from below, then froze. Claire put her finger to her lips.

David and Maggie drove through an autumn countryside of copses and hedges beginning to turn yellow and
brown, orchards with trees laden with tiny red apples, fields dotted white with grazing sheep. They motored past thatch-roofed pubs and over-wrought Victorian railway stations, the heavenward-pointed spires of Gothic churches, and the occasional Romanesque Norman tower with narrow arrow slits in its thick, heavy walls.

It’s enough to make you want to sing “Rule Britannia!,”
Maggie thought, rolling down the window and letting the fresh fall air blow over her. She was trying not to get overly excited about something that could turn out to be just a dead end.
I only hope Robin Hood and his Merry Men don’t accost us before we get there
.

Bletchley was a small Victorian railway town, with brick homes and shops with cheerfully colored awnings built up alongside the train tracks. The air was punctuated with the sound of locomotives chugging, clanking, and then letting off low, mournful steam whistles and belches of steam and soot.

David navigated his way through town and, after a few wrong turns, pulled up in front of the Eight Cups.

“Is this really time for a pint?” Maggie managed.

“We can both do with a bit of lunch,” David replied with a grin. “And before we do anything else, I have to make a phone call.”

“A phone call? To whom? Why?”

“Just give me a few minutes.”

Murphy and Claire heard the sounds—a bag dropped down, a coat hung up. Then the light tread of feet on the stairs.

“Hello?” They heard a low and raspy voice call. “Anyone home?”

The door suddenly swung open. “Hello? Maggie?”

She’d taken a step into the room when Murphy came at her, swinging a milky-glass bedside table lamp
at her head. There was a sickeningly loud thump on impact, the glass shattering and raining down. The young woman crumpled to the floor like a broken doll.

Claire took one look at the figure on the floor, arms flung open and legs akimbo, blood gushing from the wound on the head and starting to puddle in her hair.

“Oh my God, Michael!” she cried, falling to her knees, mindless of the shards of broken glass. She looked up at him. “What have you done?”

It was one thing to assassinate the Prime Minister to further their cause. It was another to just, well, murder someone. Someone who hadn’t done anything, really. Her thoughts flashed to Diana Snyder, and she shook her head as though to force them out.

“What I needed to. What we needed to. Now let’s get up and get moving.”

Claire’s shoulders slumped, and she buried her face in her hands, the grim reality setting in. “Is she dead? Really dead?” Diana Snyder was different—Claire hadn’t known her. But this wasn’t the same. This was someone she knew. This was someone, she realized, she loved.

Murphy felt at the prone girl’s neck for a pulse. “If not now, she will be soon.” Then, “For Christ’s sake, pull yourself together, Claire,” he said, taking the powder-blue silk quilt from the bed and throwing it over the girl’s slight, still form.

Claire looked at him, tears in her eyes. “You didn’t have to kill her.”

“Yes, I did. Because you didn’t have the courage to kill her yourself.” He gently but firmly put his hands on her upper arms and gave her his most charming grin. “Besides, you, my dear girl, have an appointment with the Prime Minister.”

With a long last glance down at the girl’s body, Claire
wiped tears from her eyes and squared her shoulders. She took a deep breath. “You’re right. I do.”

Maggie sat down in the smoky, dim dining room of the Eight Cups, which boasted burgundy flowered wallpaper, lace curtains covering the ubiquitous blackout tape, and spindly dark-wood tables and chairs. From the blowsy blond waitress, she ordered the fish of the day for both of them—an unidentified sea creature covered in a gummy sauce. Maggie toyed with hers in silence while David used the telephone in the back. In the distance, she heard a church bell toll five times, its solemn chime reverberating through the air.

All right
, Maggie thought as she waited, pulling out the newspaper clipping and the codebook for company. Around her she could hear the low rumble of conversation, the clink of silver and china, and the wireless playing “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.”

She took a deep breath and then released it, letting her mind go still. What was it she needed to see? No, wait, maybe if she didn’t try to look so closely …

Nothing.

Oh, hell
, she thought crossly, pushing it aside.

As she walked the gravel paths of St. James’s Park in the cool fall air, passing the lake and plots of dying victory gardens, ducks and geese honked overhead as if in warning. Claire adjusted her hat and arranged the waves of newly red hair to conceal as much of her face as possible. She flipped up the collar of her coat against the bracing breeze and steeled herself as she reached the sandbagged Whitehall and the government buildings, making her way to the Treasury—and the entrance to the War Rooms.

This is it
, she thought.
This is really it
.

Head down and eyes lowered, she passed by the two marines standing duty and presented her identity cards. One looked at her papers and motioned her along. The other spent considerable time looking them over.

Claire took a deep breath and forced her face to relax. Finally, he handed her back her papers. “Thank you,” she said as he opened a large metal door, which gave a terrific creak as it swung open. She went down a narrow spiral staircase into the bowels of the building.

Michael Murphy and Malcolm Pierce were engaged in an intense conversation in the shadows of the Black Horse pub. Pierce looked at his watch. “Must have happened by now.”

“Claire’s a good agent. She won’t let us down. And she’ll get herself out, too. That’s part of the plan.” Murphy twisted his Claddagh ring, then motioned to the waitress for another round. “Besides, it’s not as if Churchill’s office would send out a press release to the BBC. They’d keep it quiet. We won’t know for days, most likely. Weeks, even.”

“You’re right,” Pierce said, quieting for a moment as the bartender put down two more pints in front of them. “Although most likely your girl’s a goner, isn’t she?” he continued in a low voice. “Poor thing; such a looker, too. You’d think they’d use an ugly girl for that kind of mission.”

“Your goal is Germany’s winning the war,” Murphy said, shrugging. “Ours is a united Ireland. Claire knew what she was up against.”

“You’d blow up the Pope if you thought it would help, wouldn’t you?” Pierce gave an admiring whistle through his teeth.

“Look, I’ve set off a few bombs in my day—Tube stations, women, kiddies.… The higher-ups thought it was bad publicity, ultimately. And the bigwigs put a stop
to it.” He shook his head. “Shame. We were just getting started, really shaking them up.”

“That’s why, when we had this opportunity with Claire—and Maggie Hope—”

“Speaking of Miss Hope, what ever happened to her?” Pierce asked suddenly.

“She’s away—some sort of trip, Claire said. Seemed like the perfect timing.”

“Perfect, until she comes back.”

Murphy swigged the rest of his beer. “What—you’re saying we need to …?”

“My friend—” He paused delicately. “I would take care of the situation.”

Murphy got to his feet and stood for a moment and thought. Why should that bitch Maggie Hope get to live when Claire, love of his life Claire, probably wouldn’t? He’d take care of Maggie. But first things first.

“Sorry, mate,” he said, putting a few coins down on the table for the beer. “I’ve got an appointment with our friend Paul.”

“Very well, then,” Pierce said. “We’ll each be on our separate ways.”
With our separate memories of the same woman
, he thought.

“Go n-éirí an t-ádh leat,”
Murphy said.

“Good luck to you, too.”

Just as the waitress brought more hot water for the tea, something clicked.

There. There it is. It’s code, Morse code
.

But it doesn’t
translate.

“Want anything else, love?” the waitress asked. “We have strawberry cobbler—not bad, even if we don’t have enough sugar.…”

“No,” Maggie said, not even looking up. “Thanks, though.”

Maggie set her jaw in frustration.

It just doesn’t translate
.

Maybe … Maybe it’s super-enciphered? One code within another? Scrambled once, then again? All right, let’s try that.…

T
HE AIR UNDERGROUND
was cold and damp, and had the watery smell of concrete and chemical toilets. Claire’s heels clicked loudly on the cement floor as she walked down a long hallway with low whitewashed ceilings and hoses looped against the wall with red fire buckets, passing men with clipped mustaches and somber faces. She walked quickly and kept her eyes averted.

She and Murphy had been over stolen blueprints of the Treasury and the War Rooms, but walking the steep stairs and cinder-block corridors was altogether different. Nonetheless, Claire kept her pace brisk and her head down as she made her way to the P.M.’s underground office.

Her hands were shaking as she found it, room 65A, next door to the Map Room and across the hall from the Transatlantic Telephone Room. She knocked, and when no one replied, she eased the door open and found herself inside.

The P.M.’s tiny private chamber had all the trappings of a senior officer—camp bed made up with a quilted silk duvet, plush red Persian carpet, large wooden desk. Microphones for his BBC broadcasts. A humidor for his cigars.

She felt light-headed, and flashes of light danced around the periphery of her vision as she sat down at the P.M.’s desk and removed the pistol from her handbag. With a series of quick clicks, the ammunition was loaded and the silencer attached.

Maggie refused to give up believing the code to be super-enciphered, a code within a code.
All right
, she thought, scratching her head,
what if … What if it’s written backward? What then?

And So

in Morse code became Orqvsavnaqyhat Mhirefvpug Orqvsavnaqyhat Are Frrbssvmvre Orqvsavnaqyhat Cnhy.

Bugger, bugger, bugger
, Maggie thought, rubbing her temples and biting her lower lip.

Murphy and Claire had no illusions about the mission she was to perform. Her goal was to assassinate Winston Churchill and thus topple the British war machine. Everything else was secondary.

Claire would do the deed and then get out as quickly as possible, before the assassination was even discovered. Then into Michael’s waiting arms.

But a more likely scenario was that she would be apprehended and hanged as a traitor to the empire. Or she could be killed by marines on the spot. In any case, they both knew her chance of survival was low. In a sense, she was already a ghost.

But she wasn’t thinking about her own death as she waited, loaded pistol pointed at the door. She was gathering her courage, her hatred. She remembered the targets she had practiced on, the rabbits and then the deer. How it felt to see them panic and run, then the hit and
the huge recoil in her arm, and then how their eyes became glassy and still just as they began to fall. She remembered her first real kill, the British officer in Dublin who’d harassed her mother, then followed them back to their house. She’d fired a shot through one ear and out the other while he was raping her mother on the dining-room table. With Murphy’s help, she’d disposed of the body, driving to the sea and taking out a small fishing skiff.