Too Bad to Die (30 page)

—

“S
O WHAT WAS
supposed to happen here, Mike?” Sam Schwartz inquired as he stood by the President's car in the turnout of the Gale Morghe road. “Were you going to shoot us both? Did I die first, then Mr. Roosevelt?”

Hudson said nothing. His hands were cuffed behind his back and his legs were bound securely with Schwartz's necktie. He was sitting in the dirt by the side of the road, staring at his knees.

“Or did you plan to make it look like I'd pulled the whole stunt?” Schwartz persisted. “Murdered the President and then killed myself?”

Hudson glanced up.

Schwartz nodded, sure of himself. He was suddenly insanely angry. “You calculating bastard. You didn't figure on an old Secret Service guy outsmarting the Ivy League, didya? OSS asshole. Wheels within wheels. But I saw the
truck
.”

“You were warned about me,” Hudson said.

“Gil Winant told me all about it last night. But he needed proof. So I explained the deal to Mr. Roosevelt and he was game. It's a big risk, shooting craps with a president's life—but Mr. Roosevelt hates a traitor, Mike. He wasn't about to skip town early and let you scuttle back to Berlin with the dirt on D-day. He put his gun in his pocket and his smile on his face. And we both let you into our car.”

“What now?” Hudson asked.

Schwartz squinted at the horizon. The faint sound of an engine drifted out of the distance on the morning air. “We wait and see who shows up. I figure you didn't plan to walk out of here after that murder-suicide. Got a ride coming?”

Silence.

Schwartz strolled over to the car and thrust his head into the back. “How we doing, Mr. President?”

“Just grand, Sam. Just grand.”

“I think we'll be pulling out of here in a minute or two.”

“Wouldn't want to keep the
Sacred Cow
waiting.”

“No, sir. You just sit tight and keep your head down, all right?”

Schwartz slapped the roof of the car and straightened. His eyes narrowed again as he peered back down the road. A truck was coming. He pulled his Thompson submachine gun from the floor near Roosevelt's feet and propped it on the roof. The entire body of the car was between him and the approaching vehicle, and Roosevelt was lying flat on his back on the car seat.

The truck was slowing as it approached the turnout. The driver wore Persian tribal dress, but his face was a Westerner's; a livid scar ran crudely from his left temple to his jaw. Schwartz watched the man take in Hudson's figure huddled by the side of the road. Then the truck started to accelerate again.

“Germans?” FDR asked softly from below.

At that moment, the driver raised his left hand from the wheel and aimed a pistol at them. A second gun snaked from the passenger window and a shot rang out. Schwartz squeezed his trigger and let the Thompson dance.

The truck veered and swayed under his concentrated fire, but as he watched, the driver pulled back his arm and put his head down. The truck sped up. Schwartz kept it in his sights. He fired another round.

“Sam.”

He glanced down.

Roosevelt was sitting upright, staring through the back windshield at Michael Hudson.

He was sprawled like a dummy in the dirt, killed by a single bullet to the head. That would have been from Scarface's pistol, Schwartz thought. He let him go—the truck was too far to reach now, anyway—and walked over to Hudson.

He was staring up at the sky, his face in death more than ever like a hawk's.

“With friends like these . . .” Schwartz said softly.

After an instant, he bent down and closed Michael's eyes.

GIZA

S
ATURDAY
,
D
ECEMBER
4, 1943

H
e was resting earlier,” the nurse said, “but I think he may be awake now. Remarkable how a few days in that wretched Persia can wreak such havoc! The poor Prime Minister is in a very bad way, what with pneumonia taking hold, and as for
this
fellow . . .” She leaned closer to Grace's ear. “Doctor is very worried he'll turn
septic
. Blood poisoning.”

“But the damage . . . if he survives . . . will he . . . ?”

“Be able to have children?” The nurse shook her head doubtfully. “Who knows? Doctor says he's never seen such a terrible set of lacerations. And
he
served in the first war. Afraid he'd have to amputate, he was. But it hasn't come to that yet, and I'm sure I hope it never does. If it turns gangrenous, of course . . .”

“May I see him?”

The nurse wheeled abruptly and led her down the hallway of Churchill's villa to Ian's bedroom. It was next to the Prime Minister's, whose door was closed. Lord Moran had been dancing attendance on his Great Man's lungs now that the Tripartite Conference was over. It wasn't the first time Churchill had contracted pneumonia, but Moran was frank in saying it was the worst case he'd yet had. He was having difficulty breathing. Off his feed and off his sleep. It was uncertain whether Churchill could be moved in the next few days, and his return to Britain had been postponed. Even low-altitude flight would strain his lungs. Moran would not be answerable for the consequences. He had cabled Downing Street and Chequers and Whitehall with the news. Pamela was flying home the next morning, but Sarah was spending long hours in her father's room.

Ian's door was ajar.

The nurse grimaced at Grace and left her.

She tapped lightly on the panel
.

“Come,” he drawled.

Bored already, she thought, and peered into the room.

He was propped up on his elbows, face downward, leafing through a book. A sort of tray arrangement had been erected over his buttocks and the sheet was drawn up over this, hiding the damage that had so horrified the delegation when he'd been carried, unconscious, from the compound gate up to the British Embassy. It was Grace who had insisted he be brought in, ordering the military police to find a stretcher. She had seen him thrown from the lorry seconds before it exploded and was not about to let Ian be trampled by hysterical goats and Persians.

They had doubled-timed it up to the embassy that morning, past the open car carrying Churchill bravely toward a doom that had already escaped him. It was Sarah who had whipped around in her seat and shouted at Grace, “Isn't that . . . ?”

“Yes,” Grace had cried. “Go on to the airstrip. We'll follow.”

It was another day before she and Ian flew out of Iran in Lord Leathers's plane, Ian lying prone. The embassy doctor supplied Grace with several doses of morphia and told her on no account to disturb Ian's dressings until he was in the hands of medical personnel in Giza. He ought to have been placed in the British garrison's sick bay at the Old Citadel in Cairo—only Churchill wasn't having any.

“Fleming is a hero,” he decreed, in the foghorn voice pneumonia had caused. “Chip off the old block. An Englishman to the core. Moran shall see to him.”

And so he had been brought to the villa in Giza, where Churchill hoped they would both convalesce.

“Ian,” she said.

He shot her his familiar quizzical look, one eyebrow raised, and slapped the covers of his book closed. “Gracie, by all that's holy. Let me have a look at you. I understand you saved my life.”

“You saved your own,” she said roundly. “I saw you straddling that lorry. How you did it, in your condition—”

“Nerves. Wonderful things, when one's about to die. Go into all sorts of gyrations one never anticipated.”

She came toward his bedside slowly and looked about for a chair. There was one in the corner of the room, near the window framing the Great Pyramid. She drew it close to him and sat, feeling suddenly awkward and tongue-tied.

“How are you?”

“I won't say
Never better.
But better than yesterday. That's my motto for the next few weeks. I'm to be here awhile, apparently.”

It was ludicrous talking to him like this, lying as much at ease as though he were on the shingle at Biarritz, attempting to brown his back. In reality he must be in constant pain, and the uncertainty about his prospects—

“I understand Lord Moran is pleased. You're healing.”

His lips quirked. “The doctor views me as a valuable experiment. He's dosing me with a laboratory bug that's supposed to save lives when Overlord goes down. It's called penicillin, if you can manage the mouthful, and they're rushing production to have enough in hand by May. Doesn't look good for the jolly lads on the French beaches, does it, if they're already worried about torn flesh and infection? This war only gets better with each passing year.”

“I hate it,” she said. “I hate what it does to us all. Listen to you—nattering on like Bertie Wooster when you know—you must have heard—”

She came to a full stop. Ian's gaze didn't waver, but the humor had leached from his eyes. “That the bastard is dead?”

“Don't call him that.”

“It's what he was.”

“Yes.” She dropped her chin and studied her hands. “I'm sorry.”

There was a silence.

“I know I shall have to think about it,” he said. “All of it. Why a fellow I loved from a child became a man I never knew.”

“People grow apart, Ian.”

“We'll say it was that,” he agreed. “We'll say I refused to accept that we'd gone our separate ways in the years between Eton and Dunkirk. That I wanted to believe in him. Or what he represented.”

“Which was?”

“Immortality. That because both of us were rotters, we were doomed to live forever.”

“You're not a rotter, Ian.”

He shrugged. “I'm no hero, either, Grace. I'm not sure they exist. Except in that most dangerous of places—their own minds.”

“Well, I hope you've satisfied that itch of yours. To do more than a desk job, I mean.” Her eyes skimmed hastily over his form. “I should think this result would cure you forever.”

He glanced at her evilly. “I have itches in places, my dear girl, I wouldn't dream of mentioning.”

“I have something for you.” Grace drew a packet from her purse and placed it on the bed beside him. “A girl from the Soviet Embassy called at our legation, the day you were brought in. Nobody knew who she wanted at first, because she asked for
Bond.
But I remembered what that meant. She said she'd met you in the bazaar. You were delirious and the girl had a plane to catch, so she trusted me with this.”

“Was she blond?”

Grace nodded. “Rather a stunner.”

His fingers curled around the envelope, but his eyes were on her face. “What happened to Stalin, that day?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Churchill drove through the gate first, you know.”

“He would.” Ian attempted a smile, but his expression was suddenly tragic. As though he were looking backward at hideous things Grace could not ask him about.

“Can I get you anything?” she said hurriedly. “Tea—or . . . or . . . some of your Laphroaig?”

“Is there any vodka in the place?”

She looked blank. “I've never been asked for that before.
Vodka.
How do you drink it?”

“In a martini. Shaken, not stirred.”

“I'll hunt down a barman.”

She kissed him lightly on the cheek and left.

When he was alone, Ian's fingers fumbled at the packet. It was too light to contain much. A few words of farewell, perhaps?

He tore open the envelope and drew out its contents.

A glorious length of saffron silk.

He held the softness to his face and breathed deep.

Do svidaniya, Siranoush.

As someone who loves a good spy story, I've been reading deep in the history of World War Two for years. It is impossible to thread one's way through that wilderness of mirrors without bumping headlong into Ian Lancaster Fleming—arrogant, athletic, ridiculously compelling, with his dark blue eyes and broken nose. As the assistant to the director of British Naval Intelligence in wartime London, Fleming was up to his eyeballs in secret plots. His shadow falls across many of the most daring and ingenious deception operations of the war, particularly disinformation campaigns against the Axis. A great number of myths have grown up around him as well—from the outset, he was a character meant for fiction. In an effort to pin down his elusive figure, I tore through Andrew Lycett's biography,
Ian Fleming: The Man Behind James Bond
(Turner Publishing, 1995). I recognized a fellow traveler. Fleming spent so many hours making up stories because in some ways he found invented lives preferable to his own.

But Fleming's history left me with questions. He was a caustic and a callous individual who was capable of brilliant insights and profound loyalties. A man who desperately needed the affection and support of women, he was inveterately misogynistic. Uncomfortable in his own skin, he invented an icon of male suavity: 007, James Bond. Genteel, privileged, and sheltered by family wealth, Fleming was fascinated by violence and the underworld. A complex and fundamentally lonely man, he looked at least seventy when he drank himself to death; he was fifty-six.

I began to explore him as a character in his own spy story—one who'd lost his father too young and spent the rest of his life attempting to live up to his myth. In the 1943 Tehran conference, which Fleming planned (but did not actually attend—he came down with bronchitis and was left behind in Giza), I found the kernel of my plot.

A good deal of research later, I can recommend the following sources for those interested in the events and people of this novel:
The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington
, by Jennet Conant (Simon & Schuster, 2008);
You Only Live Once:
Memories of Ian Fleming,
by Ivar Bryce (Foreign Intelligence Book Series, 1975);
Ian Fleming's Commandos: The Story of the Legendary 30 Assault Unit
, by Nicholas Rankin (Oxford, 2011);
Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory
, by Ben Macintyre (Crown, 2010);
Alliance: The Inside Story of How Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill Won One War and Began Another,
by Jonathan Fenby (Simon & Schuster, 2006);
Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin: The War They Waged and the Peace They Sought,
by Herbert Feis (Princeton, 1957);
Hitler's Plot to Kill the Big Three,
by Laslo Havas (Cowles, 1967);
Beria—My Father: Life Inside Stalin's Kremlin
, by Sergo Beria and Françoise Thom
(Duckworth, 2001);
SMERSH: Stalin's Secret Weapon,
by Vadim Birstein (Biteback Publishing, 2012);
Citizens of London:
The Americans Who Stood with Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour,
by Lynne Olson (Random House, 2010);
Reflected Glory: The Life of Pamela Churchill Harriman,
by Sally Bedell Smith (Simon & Schuster, 1996); and, last but not least,
Cairo in the War: 1939–1945,
by Artemis Cooper (Hamish Hamilton, 1989).

I am indebted to my editor at Riverhead Books, Jake Morrissey, for his sensitive and thorough treatment of this story in manuscript; to assistant editor Ali Cardia for her shepherding of my words through the book process; and to my agent, Raphael Sagalyn, who is always an inspired critic and collaborator. This is, of course, a work of fiction—and all errors in the facts underpinning it are my own.

—
Francine Mathews
Denver, Colorado
2014