The Great Game (27 page)

  
Fogg was out of the Bureau at that time. Mycroft, I believe, had sent him away, I was not sure where. It was shortly after Moreau had been exiled, or banished, or transferred – versions varied – to an isolated research facility on an island in the South Seas. Rumour had it Mycroft wanted Fogg far away – and making sure Moreau stayed banished might have been a good enough reason.

  
For myself, though, I did not think giving Fogg access to Moreau's re
search was a good idea, and said so. But back then Fogg was Mycroft's golden boy, and he could do no wrong. Or so it seemed…

  
Mycroft always plans further, deeper, I know that now. He plays the long game. Did he suspect Fogg even then?

  
I came to him that day. It was night time, the gas lamps were lit outside, and inside the Bureau it was cold. We were running a shadow operation in Afghanistan then, following that disastrous war we had run over there. The operation, as I recall, did not go well. Berlyne was coming in and out of the fat man's office, sneezing and coughing and politely barring access to anyone who came. But Mycroft saw me. He always made the time – for his own benefit, have no doubt. He needed me, and he knew it. On that we were of one mind.

  
"What do you want, Havisham?" the fat man had said, looking up at me from his desk. I knew he hated it, preferred his armchair at the Diogenes, the silence there, his food…

  
I said, "Ultra."

  
He went very still. Mycroft has the talent. "What are you talking about?" he said at last. I looked at him. "Krupp," I said.

  
"Yes?"

  
He was giving nothing away. So I told him about Rauchfus, and watched him go even stiller, as if delving deep inside himself.

  
"Is he real?" he said.

  
I shrugged.

  
"Your gut instinct."

  
"My instincts took me to look at him in the first place."

  
He nodded. That was all, but it was decided, there and then. Just like that.

  
"Is he safe?"

  
"We need to move him."

  
"Where?"

  
"The village?"

  
He shook his head. "Too public. It needs to be close by. A relation."

  
Meaning family. Meaning one of us…

  
We looked at each other with the same thought.

  
"Mrs Beeton."

  "
Isabella
Beeton?" Lucy said, interrupting. Miss Havisham looked momentarily surprised. "Do you know another one?" she said.

  "Our
Prime Minister
Isabella Beeton?"

  Miss Havisham smiled tolerantly. "She wasn't Prime Minister then," she said, reasonably. "But she'd always been family. Even when she was fomenting revolution, later, in eighty-eight."

  "Mrs Beeton worked for the Bureau?"

  Miss Havisham shook her head at that. "A relation," she said. "One of the people we used to call Mycroft's Irregulars. She ran a safe house for the Bureau, every now and then. And Mycroft and I decided it was the perfect place to move our reluctant German defector to."

  Lucy looked at her closely. "But something went wrong?" she said, softly.

  Miss Havisham sighed. "Something went wrong," she agreed, sadly.

 
 

 
 
 

That same night
(Miss Havisham said)
we undertook a rare excur
sion together, Mycroft and I. At Ham Common we picked up Rauchfus, and drove him, in Mycroft's baruch-landau, to Mrs Beeton's place. We erased Rauchfus's trail of paperwork, excised all mention of him on the Ham facility's records, and returned to the Bureau, confident he was safe, and that we had time.

  
As it turned out, we were wrong.

  
I was woken up in the archives. I had dozed at my desk. Mycroft's voice on the Tesla unit. I had never heard him so angry, so controlled.

  
"We lost him," he said.

  
I said, "What?"

  
"Rauchfus. He's gone."

  
"Gone where?"

  
A silence on the line. Then: "Gone."

  
I saw him being carted away. We came there, to the safe house, and there he was, peaceful, at rest. The resultant autopsy revealed a minute hole in the back of his neck, as if a thin needle had been inserted there all the way to his brain. There had been no reports of intruders, no one unauthorised entering or leaving the house. Mrs Beeton was – justifiably – outraged. I thought I heard Mycroft murmur, "The Bookman," just once, but that was that. We burned Rauchfus's files. There was no more mention of Ultra, or a highly placed British power playing in the sandbox with Krupp, or what it could mean.

  
Then there was the mess in eighty-eight… I was made redundant and Mycroft was beleaguered. The political landscape changed, Moriarty lost the elections, the Byron automata ran against him but in a surprise move it was Mrs Beeton who won…

  
Is this why you are here? Why Mycroft sent you?

  
Are the old suspicions resurfacing?

 

"You mean…" Lucy wasn't sure what to say. "You suspected
Mrs Beeton?"

  "No one knew Rauchfus was there. Only Mycroft, and myself, beside her. It was Occam's Razor, Lucy. The simplest explanation is the most likely correct one."

  Miss Havisham smiled, suddenly. "We are shadow players," she said, and shrugged. "We seldom keep to only one side."

  There was a silence. "What
happened
in eighty-eight?" Lucy said at last.

  Miss Havisham shook her head. "I do not know, exactly. Something is buried, deep under Oxford, which needs to remain buried. That is all I will say." She glanced at Lucy sharply. "Mycroft never sent you to me, did he?" she said.

  "No."

  "What are you playing at, Miss Westenra?"

  Lucy didn't know what to tell her. "I need you to trust me," she said, simply.

  "Why?"

  "Because I think Mycroft is in trouble."

  Miss Havisham snorted. "He is always in trouble."

  "I think… I think the Bookman is back."

  Miss Havisham fell quiet. Then, as if, between them, something had been decided, she said: "Tea?"

  "Please," Lucy said.

 

  
But you were asking me about Abe Stoker, and I quite went about it in a roundabout way
(said Miss Havisham)
. Well, Rauchfus had awakened our suspicions, but my interest in Stoker came two weeks later, at that first-night performance of
The Pirates of the Carib Sea
, a performance in which the very man who had so concerned us made a rare appearance.

  
Alfred Krupp had come to London unannounced. He had come, naturally, on business, but had taken time for the theatre–

  
Which had us curious. Krupp was seldom seen in public. Even on our home turf following him was near impossible. He had his own team of anti-surveillance experts.

  
Could the theatre be something more than entertainment? Could this engagement mean a clandestine meeting of some sort?

  
And if so, with whom?

  
In light of what we had learned – or thought we had – from Rauchfus, I was insistent that we monitor the theatre as closely as possible. Fogg was back by then, and argued vehemently against it. Krupp was too important – we had to be careful – we didn't have the budget – the staff–

  
I had argued with him. Mycroft was distracted – the Afghanistan operation had gone badly – at last we agreed on a compromise, a small but select team of watchers, and I myself secured a ticket to the show, which had by then sold out.

  
Did we learn anything from that evening? Krupp was sitting with his people in a box. The Queen herself was in attendance, in the Royal Box, of course. Lord Babbage made a rare – one of his last, in fact – public appearances. The cream and crop of London society was there. That rogue Flashman, toadying beside the Queen… I always had a soft spot for him – you know where you stand with a liar and a bully better than you do with a hero, sometimes. There is often only a fine distinction between the two.

  
But I'm digressing. We spotted nothing that evening, hard as we tried. Could a clandestine meeting be carried out in the open? That is, sometimes, the best way… but who was Krupp there for? It had even crossed my mind it was Mycroft behind it all, Mycroft who, to my surprise, also attended that evening, sitting in the Holmes family's own box, close by the Queen's…

  
Could Krupp be meeting the Bookman?

  Babbage?

  
And it occurred to me all this was foreground, it was scenery, it was stagecraft – and that I was looking in the wrong place.

  
I had to look behind the scenes. I had to look backstage.

  
Where little Abe Stoker moved about, unobtrusively.

 

  "A facilitator," Miss Havisham said, fondly. "An unobtrusive little man, a clerk really. Going about his business – which also means touring on the continent, and corresponding overseas, and in so many ways he could have been the perfect deep-cover spy, undistinguished from his cover story. I fell in love with him a little, then. When I realised this. I told Mycroft, that very night. We had to study Stoker. Learn him, and make our approach. We had to find out who he represented. He was a liaison, I could see that clearly. But between what powers? This insight, together with the German defector's story, added up. I pushed…"

  "But?" Lucy said.

  Miss Havisham shrugged. "Nothing came of it."

  "Nothing?"

  "Fogg argued, but Mycroft approved the plan. And nothing happened. Little Stoker was just who he appeared to be – a notparticularly-important theatrical manager of little talent or ambition. We had teams on him round-the-clock for a month, then it got dropped to periodic spot-checks, and finally it got dropped entirely. And there," Miss Havisham said, "the matter rested, until now. Why, has something changed?"

  Lucy smiled. She stood up. "Routine inquiry," she said. And, "I had better head back into town before it is dark."

  Miss Havisham smiled too, and also stood up. Her look said Lucy wasn't fooling her for a moment.

  "You watch out," she told her, leading her back through the comfortable room and out into the ruined front of the mansion beyond, and Lucy thought that Miss Havisham herself had quite a bit of stagecraft in her. "And go safely."

  "I will," Lucy said. And, "Thank you."

  Miss Havisham nodded. Lucy walked down the steep path of the cliff, back into the grim little village of Satis-by-the-Sea, and to its small, deserted train station. All the while she was aware of Miss Havisham standing where she was, watching as she went.

  Mycroft had reactivated the plans concerning Stoker, she now knew. Something had changed, but his attention had been turned not to Germany, and Krupp, but farther, to the remote and inhospitable mountains of Transylvania…

  It was when she was approaching London on board the old, patient steam train that the device she had been keeping on her person for days began to blip, faintly at first and then with renewed vigour, and the tension that had been building inside her reached a crescendo and then, all at once, disappeared, leaving her calm and focused.

  The moment she had waited for had arrived.

  Mycroft's agent, the mysterious Mr Stoker, was finally approaching.

 
 

 
 
 

Night time, and the sky over Richmond Park was strewn with stars, the clouds clearing, a moon beaming down silver light. A deer moved amongst the dark trees, smelled humans and gunpowder and went another way.

  "Everyone present?"

  "Present and ready."

  Lucy surveyed her team. They have been with her on the raid in Aksum, and they have been with her in the Bangkok Affair, and in the Zululand Engagement… she could trust them with her life.

  She was going to have to trust them with Stoker's.

  "Listen up." They were gathered around her in a semi-circle. Black-clad, guns ready: not shadow executives but the muscle shadow executives sometimes had to call on, to use, ex-military and ex-underworld and ex-mercenaries, retrained and retained by the Bureau for secretive, semi-military operations.

  "Ma'am."

  "An airship travelling on a Bureau-approved flight plan is expected to make landing in Richmond Park within the next hour or two. Its cargo is of vital importance. Our mission is simple: retrieve the cargo safely, and get the hell out. Understood?"

  "Ma'am, yes, ma'am."

  A hand up – Bosie. "Do we expect opposition?"

  Smiles on the men's faces, echoed by Lucy's. "We always expect opposition," she said.

  Bosie nodded. "Ma'am."

  "Spread out. Keep in contact. We may need to signal to the airship when the time comes. Keep a lookout – and remember."

  Her men looked at each other, soberly. "Try not to get killed."

  "Yes, ma'am!"

  They spread out, silent as shadows, and she was left alone, amidst the trees.

  And deadly worried.

  Too many things to go wrong.

  Too many things had
already
gone wrong…

 

Like that persistent feel that she was being followed, as soon as she got off at Euston Station. She had doubled back and changed hansom cabs but still the feeling persisted.