Too Bad to Die (12 page)

“Huh.” Roosevelt handed the paper back to Schwartz. “And now he won't come over for dinner. Down with a volume of Dickens and Scotch, my ass! The whole thing stinks. If I'd known . . .”

“Yessir?”

“If I'd known about Fleming this morning, I'd have delayed takeoff long enough to talk to him. I don't like this bit in the cable.” He shook it at Schwartz. “About how the Fencer may be one of us. If Joe Stalin gets wind of a traitor among his allies, he'll never trust another word we say. We need Stalin, Sam. We've got to have his trust.”

“The whole Fleming story sounds like a bunch of who-shot-John,” Schwartz said. “What do you know about him, Mr. President?”

Roosevelt looked suddenly tired. “No more than you do. He's been trailing along behind his chief and Churchill at every one of our joint conferences over the past two years. Likes the ladies. And they like him. When he does offer an opinion, he's not stupid. Hudson—our OSS man—knows him best.”

“Thank you, sir. Will there be anything else?”

They looked at each other for the space of several heartbeats.

“What would you do, Sam?” Roosevelt asked thoughtfully. “Sit on Fleming's cable—or confront Winston with it?”

Schwartz shook his head. “That's not much of a choice, sir. Sit on the cable, and you could be target practice for Hitler's boys. So do we move into the British Embassy—or shack up with Stalin?”

T
he pilot was called Dutch and nothing more. He was a genial Jewish air rat from Poland who'd fled the German invasion in '39 and had knocked around North Africa ever since. He told Ian that when one place got too hot for him, he flew to another. There was always somebody who wanted to hire a set of wings, whether he was in Casablanca or Tripoli or Addis Ababa or Cairo.

Joe, the Swiss barman at Shepheard's, had sent Ian out to Payne Airfield, the massive complex that had suddenly bloomed under American hands, in the desert an hour northeast of the city. It was a major Allied Air Transport command, shipping cargo and troops in and out of Egypt. Ian found Dutch drinking coffee in the mess. By that time, it was seven o'clock in the evening and Ian's bandaged shoulder blade had stiffened to a vise. He could not lift his right arm. His bludgeoned head was pounding methodically with his heartbeat, as though Big Ben had taken up residence in his skull.

“Tehran?” Dutch asked, his voice unexpectedly high and light, but overlaid with Poland like treacle on a tart. “It'll cost you, mate.”

“I want to be there by dawn.”

Dutch took a slow sip of coffee. “Night flying? Over the Arabian Peninsula and the Trans-Jordan? Crash in those parts, you don't just walk out. Got a death wish, Commander Bond?”

“Ever since I was a boy,” Ian said. “You?”

He was trembling all over at this point in the night, barely holding himself together. More than the pain and lethargy that swept over his body, it was the fear that made him shake. Nazir had been knifed to death. His throat slit. That simple phrase encompassed a slew of garish images in Ian's mind. A severed carotid. Blood sprayed in an arabesque across the wall. Had it been the same hand, the same knife, that plunged into his back?

Then why was he still alive?

The question—Turing's contradiction—tolled like a bell through his brain. The endless boring clang would drive him mad. Nazir was the only one who knew what Ian knew. Nazir was dead. Ian had been spared for the pursuit—and he suddenly understood it was his own madness driving him forward, his need to prove something that should not have to be proved.
His worth.
To his brother. To Eve. To a man who had been dead for more than twenty-five years.

You actually believe, Bond, that the Fencer knows your mind? Understands what drives you? That this is a personal contest—between you, a Chocolate Sailor in His Majesty's Wavy Navy, and the most dangerous agent Hitler has ever known?

You're drunk, 007. Not to be trusted.

Not just that, sir. I'm completely absent without leave. Defying direct orders. Terrified to the point of incontinence.

Shitting yourself, in other words?

And completely buggered.

He and Dutch decided on a price of forty-two pounds, seven shillings, which was all Ian found in the wallet Ambassador Lord Killearn had given him. They would refuel at RAF Habbaniya. This was the sprawling and raw complex built by the Royal Air Force on the west bank of the Euphrates. It was the principal Allied airfield in Iraq and a favorite stop of American Lend-Lease transports delivering aircraft to the Soviet Union.

“If we leave in an hour,” Dutch said, “we should touch down at Habbaniya by two a.m. Provided the Old Sow holds up. That should get you to Tehran by daylight.”

The Old Sow was a Polish R-XIV two-seater parasol wing recon plane, with a two-hundred-twenty-horsepower radial engine and fixed landing gear. There was a machine-gun port in the tail that a third passenger could use, if they'd had a third passenger.

“It was in for repairs the last day in August 1939,” Dutch told Ian. “And I was the mechanic. Three days later I'd put the engine back together and the Germans were in Warsaw. I liberated the Sow and flew to Romania that night. Not like she could beat the Luftwaffe in aerial combat, anyway. A lot of good men died trying. By the end of the week, my country had ceased to exist and it was an easy decision to keep flying south, with the birds, for winter.”

Dutch filed a flight plan with the Americans while Ian found a girl who could mix a stiff drink in the airmen's lounge. He took two morphia pills and bought a packet of sandwiches. Lamb on flatbread, of course, with some kind of yogurt. The metal plate in his nose radiated pain. Within minutes of consuming his first sandwich, the morphia had kicked in and his right arm felt like a helium balloon. It threatened to levitate. He blew his nose and felt light-headed, as though his cranium might lift off, too.

Dutch came back. He carried Ian's bag like a porter, and Ian followed him out onto the tarmac. The air was cool and dry off the desert, and but for the landing strip lights, the night was like pitch. Dutch gave him a leather pilot's cap that strapped under the chin and a set of goggles. The cockpit was open. There was no second leather flight jacket. Dutch handed him a rough wool blanket. Ian tucked it under his bad arm and tried to pull himself into his seat. He discovered that the morphia had rendered his good left arm as wobbly as gelatin. Dutch heaved from behind and Ian tumbled headfirst into the cockpit. It was a labored business to right himself and settle his legs. As soon as he had managed it, he was overcome with acute claustrophobia.

Dutch was extending his hand to a slight, muffled figure standing on the tarmac in the darkness—no more than a boy, Ian thought—who sprang up on the wing and moved past him like a cat to the machine-gun port in the tail. The fellow settled himself into the narrow seat and blew on gloved hands.

So they did have a third passenger, after all—one who possessed his own cap and goggles and leather jacket, and who apparently knew how to train the barrel of a weapon on a swiftly moving aerial target.

“Is that really necessary?” Ian shouted at Dutch, but by that time the propeller was turning and the pilot's head was wavering in front of his as the plane bumped its way down the strip. The Sow surged forward and lifted uncertainly into the air.

Ian glanced down.

Egypt retreated like the perpetual mirage of old tribal fires flickering. The fires were hotel lights and airports and highways now—but still tribal, Ian thought.
His
tribe. He felt intensely lonely. His teeth were chattering from wind and cold. He struggled to wrap the blanket around him and waited for it to warm.

—

“H
OW'S DARLING
K
ATHLEEN?
” Pamela asked brightly. “Dashing about like a Tolstoy heroine, charming all the Russian men?”

Kathleen Harriman was Averell's daughter and his official hostess in Moscow—his wife was too rooted to her life in New York to play that role. Kathleen was a couple of years older than Pam, and they'd been good friends in England. Pam had found her useful in cultivating Ave; and Ave had used his daughter as cover for his affair. He'd rented a house for the two girls outside of London when the bombing got serious—and visited often. Kathleen loved Ave more than anybody on earth; and his current wife wasn't her mother, anyway. Kathleen did not confront Ave when he dallied with her friend.

Breeding,
Ave would have said if Pamela asked. His Kathie had breeding.

It went without saying that Pammie did not.

“She's well,” he said. “Working as a reporter, in fact, while she helps me out in Moscow. She's writing great stuff. But surely you've had letters?”

“A few,” Pam replied. Very few. She suspected Kathleen's affection for her had waned. Someone else had written to alert her, perhaps. Rumors about Ed. Or one of Pam's other men.

“But tell me about
you
,
sweetheart,” Averell said, as he sank down into the love seat beside her. “Tell me about London! I miss the place terribly. And all the old gang.”

It was nearly midnight, and the two of them had long since finished dinner—a small affair of a few tired people gathered around the British ambassador's shining mahogany table. Winston, true to his word, was in bed with Dickens. Sarah and Gil Winant put in an appearance—Gil was an old colleague of Harriman's from London, and always treated him as a friend. Sarah was less predictable. She knew her father valued Harriman and winked at his affair with Pamela, but she resented the mogul's presumption on her brother's behalf. This was one of those inexplicable emotions so common in siblings. Sarah had no great love for Randolph, but her loyalties were divided: between her father's pragmatism and her brother's humiliation.

Dinner was an uneven affair—Gil talking shop, Pamela uttering bright commonplaces, Sarah mostly silent. She pushed her food around on her plate without eating much, responded absently to the ambassador's studied small talk, and excused herself on the grounds of exhaustion immediately after dinner. Gil lingered, hoping to share Harriman's hired car back to the American legation, but after ten minutes of awkward waiting he allowed a British staffer to drive him home.

Pamela was sorry to see Winant go. She valued the safety of numbers, these days, in Averell's company.

She was wearing the turquoise evening gown she'd shown off in Cairo; Ave had paid for it, after all—he deserved to get his money's worth. She was nursing a glass of port and smiling at him dreamily over the rim of her crystal glass. Hoping to forestall any painful questions. The British ambassador had left them to themselves. Apparently he had a great deal of work to do with the Churchills in town.

“It's very dull, really,” she murmured. “I volunteer at the servicemen's clubs. We just started them—a couple of places where the boys can relax for a bit, have a cup of tea, read a scandal sheet and talk about something other than war for a change. It's exhausting work, running the whole show—but so worthwhile. The boys are pathetically grateful.”

“Boys always are, where you're concerned,” Harriman said. He lifted her chin and stared into her vivid blue eyes. “Age becomes you, Pammie. You're more confident. More fully the woman you were always meant to be.”

“I'm only twenty-three,” she said defensively.

He smiled, and kissed her.

She tried to respond, parting her lips and leaning into his embrace, but she sensed he was unmoved. Whatever had stirred between them in the first months of meeting—more than two years ago, now, she thought with slight surprise—was utterly gone. When she had met him at Chequers that day in late March, she hadn't expected to be so bowled over by his magnetic charm. She'd given birth to Little Winston six months before. Randolph had spent her hours of labor in the bed of another woman. Averell was not yet fifty, then. His hair was jet black. He wore the rumpled, careless clothes of the very wealthy, who never need to impress. There were dark circles under his eyes because he worked too hard, but his sudden smile felt like a gift, rarely bestowed.

Three weeks later, after a party at the Dorchester, Pamela found herself sheltering in Ave's apartment at three o'clock in the morning. Wave after wave of German bombers were flying over London. Nearly five hundred that night. They watched the flames go up all around them and fell into a frantic bout of lovemaking, tearing at each other's clothes. It was, Pamela told herself, the survival instinct. The Dorchester was considered the safest building in London, but Pamela had no desire to be safe. That was the start of her life of dancing on the grave's edge.

“How's Little Winston?” Ave asked now, releasing her with a faintly sardonic lift to his mouth. He was grayer, more lined, she thought. The three decades between them were increasingly obvious.

“Thriving. Nanny stuffs him with so many good things, he doesn't know what war is.”

“Then he's lucky. You wouldn't believe the scenes I've witnessed in Russia, the past few months.” His expression darkened. “Makes you feel that a lifetime will never be long enough to atone for the things you've always taken for granted. Food. Heat. The assurance you won't be killed when you're forced to go hunt for either.”

“How dreadful for you,” she murmured.

He studied her. “You missed the point, Pammie. It's terrible for the
others
. Never for
me
. I've been safe all my life, and only lately have I learned to despise myself for it.”

“Lord! You sound like Gil Winant,” she said petulantly. “As though you weren't enjoying every
minute
of this war! It's the most glorious time of our lives, Ave!”

“Pamela. Haven't your new friends taught you about suffering?”

“My new friends?” she faltered.

“I hear you've been running around with the CBS news boys. Ed Murrow,” Ave said neutrally. “Seems to me he takes nothing for granted. Except possibly his wife.”

She felt a chill finger her spine. “Don't be silly, Ave. We're just good chums. That's all.”

He offered her his sudden audacious smile. “Let's not lie to each other, my dear. Our time together is so short as it is.”

“Averell—” She clutched at his sleeve, suddenly terrified. If he cut off her rent in Grosvenor Square—if he stopped telling her all the delicious gossip she knew so well how to sell—

“Ambassador,” said a voice from the doorway.

Pamela glanced over and saw Michael Hudson. He still wore his overcoat and held his hat in his hand. He had clearly come from the American legation, and at such an hour . . . She searched his face for some hint of the trouble, but his expression was carefully wooden. He refused to meet her eyes. She might have been invisible. Some other woman kept at great expense by Averell Harriman. Was it only last night he'd carried her up to her room in Giza?

Damn.
Now she would have to explain to Michael—

“The Soviet Foreign Minister—Mr. Molotov—has arrived at our embassy. He's asking for you,” Hudson said.

—

I
T WAS A
FEW MINUTES
after midnight, somewhere over the Trans-Jordan, when they picked up the pair of Messerschmitt Bf 110s, the heavy night fighters of the Luftwaffe. The German planes announced their presence with a strafing burst that fell harmlessly short of the Sow but got Ian's attention all the same. He had been dozing before the staccato fire punctuated the steady throb of the propeller. The Messerschmitts came in from the north, off the Mediterranean, dividing their attention and killing force as they bore down on Dutch's tail.