Too Bad to Die (9 page)

She hesitated. It was tempting to pour out her heart to Michael—his open, American face was as guileless as Jimmy Stewart's. But anything she said would go right back to Ian. She refused to let him know he'd hurt her.

“He's not to be trusted,” she said flatly, “with anything of value. I imagine that, as his friend, you're not to be trusted, either. I won't allow you into the ladies' rooms.”

He sighed. “I promise I won't finger their underwear.”

“That's not the point,” she said. “It's the principle of the thing. You're not
cleared
for their underwear, Mr. Hudson.”

“Michael,” he said.

“You're not a British subject,” she persisted. “I'd be committing a breach of security if I allowed you anywhere inside the private rooms of this villa.”

He moved closer to her. Reached tentatively for her arms, as though they were glass and might break. Grace felt his touch slide down her shoulders, warm and insistent, and knew an impulse to fold into him. She had carried so much for so long—

“Every room in the villa?” he asked softly. “You won't let me into
any
of them, Grace?”

Pam Churchill never had to make these kinds of choices.

Grace stepped backward, away from his hands. “Not a single one, Mr. Hudson. Will you let me get back to my work, now—or must I summon a guard?”

E
ve was pregnant by her lover, the painter Augustus John, in the summer of 1925. She closed up her house and departed for the Continent to have the baby, whom she named Amaryllis. Both were back in London by December. Eve insisted the child was “adopted,” and that was the story eighteen-year-old Ian told Hudders, but there were sniggers behind cupped hands and derisive looks in Slater's. Nobody would have dared to gossip in front of Peter, but Peter was gone to Oxford. Ian pretended he didn't care, but his anger was savage. His grades plummeted. And then, abruptly, in April of his final year, Eve pulled him from Eton.

She had decided he wasn't Oxford material. Ian was sent off to a Sandhurst crammer, a Colonel Trevor who lived in Bedfordshire. The general stupidity of his fellows at Trevor's was staggering, but Eve was unmoved.

“If you can't be bothered to learn,” she said, “you shall have to fight.”

Michael Hudson graduated from Eton and left for the foreign world of Yale. He arrived in New Haven with British affectations and an accent he quickly learned to lose. He was adept at rugby and cricket instead of baseball and football. He had no family in the United States—his father being posted at this point to Ankara. Michael wrote pathetically cheerful letters to Ian, who urged him to spend his Long Vac with Eve and Amaryllis and his brothers in Cheyne Walk. But Michael did not come.

He did not come the following year, or the year after that; and then the worldwide slump took hold, and there was no money in America for Atlantic passages.

Ian moved in and out of Sandhurst, under his proverbial cloud.

It was 1933 before he saw Hudders again.

—

I
T WAS THE SOUND
of a piano, oddly, that stopped him as he strolled through the lobby of the National Hotel. Confident and careless, like the Cole Porter tune being played.
What
is this thing called love? This funny thing called love . . .

He'd been thinking about a drink and the dubious food he'd had over the past six days. He'd flown from Croydon to Tempelhof, then caught the six o'clock Nord Express from Berlin to Moscow. Russian trains still operated on prewar rail fittings—a wider-gauge track than the rest of Europe—so at the border he detrained and took a seat in a different carriage, much colder than the last. In Moscow that night his Reuters contact drove him to the National because, he explained, the entire Western press corps stayed there. It had one of only two bars in Moscow that served gin.

Ian had been sent to Russia in a tearing hurry because six British engineers were about to be tried for espionage. Their firm, Metro-Vick, installed generators and turbines that provided electrical power to the country. Metro-Vick had operated in Soviet Russia for decades, but at the moment, the Soviet-British trade agreement was under renegotiation. Stalin didn't like the terms he was getting. He felt himself and his country to be at a disadvantage before ruthless capitalist negotiators. So he accused a few Englishmen close at hand—the employees of Metro-Vick—of spying, and arrested them.

It was possible the engineers would be executed.

This was the hottest story Ian had followed at any time during his sketchy Reuters career. But after only a single day in a Soviet court, he suffered a quelling sense of boredom. It was purely a show trial, with a gravel-voiced judge and a handpicked if raucous crowd of spectators. Even Stalin wasn't stupid enough to risk a trade embargo with England merely to pop a few guns at the British. Ian laid a bet with his cronies—chaps from the International News Service and the Associated Press—that Metro-Vick would get off with a wrist-slapping. Their Russian conspirators, of course, would get the gulag.

. . . just who can solve its mystery? Why should it make a fool of me?

The song tugged at his brain. Ian pushed through the glass doors into the bar, his eyes straining through clouds of cigarette smoke. Most of the tables were filled with Westerners in good suits; a few were held down by the local secret police, obvious in their ill-fitting clothes. Three women, all professional. One of them was leaning over the piano with a glass of gift Scotch in her hand.

The back of Hudders's head was as instantly recognizable to Ian as Peter's or Eve's. The cords of the neck and the fragility of the skin where it met the brutal hairline. The imbecility of the ears, which resembled a monkey's. He noticed, too, the thinness of the shoulder blades and the way they knifed backward as Michael Hudson played. He had not been eating well for some time.

“What are you doing in Moscow?”

The bottled blonde with the Scotch glanced up. Hudders swung around, his fingers trailing off the keys.

“Looking for you, Johnnie,” he said.

—

T
HEY WERE
thrown out of the bar at two o'clock when the Communist Watchers decided it was time to go home. Hudders wasn't staying at the National—incredibly, he had an apartment in Gorky Street. He
lived
in Moscow.

“You left America. And never told me.”

Michael studied the vodka in his glass. He'd introduced Ian to the Russian poison even though they were sitting in a Westerners' bar.
You can't drink in Moscow,
he'd said,
without drinking vodka.

“My father died,” he said simply. “While he was posted in Ankara. Typhoid. I never told you that, either. It seemed so . . .
tired
a way out, after Mokie.”

The State Department would have sent his father's body home in the hold of a cargo ship for Michael to pick up on the docks of New York, but he had no idea where to bury it. Hudson Senior had not set foot in his native country, really, for over thirty years. So Michael boarded a ship instead, and after several weeks of travel, reached the high and empty steppes of Asiatic Turkey. The new capital of Ankara had been peopled since the Bronze Age. Hittites built its streets, Phrygians dug its fountains. Lydians and Persians, Macedonians and Galatians, Byzantines, Seljuks and Ottomans succeeded one another down the millennia. Michael thought his father—that quiet and dusty bureaucrat of the world—should lay down his bones with the rest of them.

“And once that was done,” Michael shrugged, “I saw no reason to go back. The U.S. was never really my country, anyway.”

You should have come home,
Ian thought.

He kept traveling east, by train and hired car, to Mount Ararat and the Transcaucasus. He reached the edge of the Caspian Sea and worked north through Astrakhan and Krgyzstan and the Urals. And then, as the winter of 1932 was coming on, he turned back toward Moscow.

“Siemens was looking for a fixer,” he said simply. “Somebody who could talk to both their engineers and the Sovs. Think about it, Johnnie!
How many Fascists and Commies in a room does it take to change a lightbulb?
But I can talk to anybody. It's in my blood.”

The bitterness, Ian thought, was new. The collateral damage of age.

“So you do pretty much what the Metro-Vick people were arrested for,” he suggested.

Michael grinned. “I just do it better.”

“But doesn't it grow tiresome?” Ian asked tentatively. “Never hearing a word of English?”

“That's why I spend my nights in hotel bars,” Michael said. “For the conversation. But there's nothing really for me in the U.S. No family. No jobs to speak of, with this damned Depression.”

“The Russians can't possibly pay.”

“Well—” Michael tapped his glass on the counter and said a few words to the barkeep Ian didn't understand. More vodka was poured. “You've heard about the famine?”

Ian nodded. Another reason Stalin was angry at the West—newspapers had blared the news that his people were starving. Communism didn't work. Nothing grew in the vast wasted plains and there was nothing for sale in the shops. Stalin blamed
saboteurs
for the bad press and restricted the travel of Western journalists. If it wasn't reported, it wasn't happening.

“At least they've got light,” Michael said, “thanks to us.”

“Light isn't free.”

“It's pretty damn close.” Michael reached for Ian's cigarette and took a deep draft. “General Electric and the Metro-Vick fellas and us boys over at Siemens have been price-fixing for the past couple of years. Pooling information, too. About everything, really. Stalin's right to call us all spies. We had a nice little cartel going—nobody undercut anybody else, Russia got electricity, and we made a buck or two. But the Iron Man will probably seize our plants now and send us packing. It's cheaper than paying for it.”

“Then what will you do?”

The familiar smile turned in on itself. “Sell what I know,” Michael said, “to the highest bidder.”

—

I
AN WAS
to remember that when war broke out six years later—and Roosevelt suddenly needed spies.

T
he November dark had fallen by the time Ian reached Mena House. Golden light spilled from the windows staring out at Giza, but the Great Pyramid rose implacably cold in the desert night, its massive white blocks faintly luminous. He had found no official cars waiting at the Khan el-Khalili Bazaar when he'd taxied there from Shepheard's, so he'd hired a driver to get him to Mena House. Concertina wire and checkpoints stopped them half a mile from the hotel. Ian showed his papers and set out to walk the rest of the way. He moved quickly, his head down.

Nazir's warning had forced the only possible decision that afternoon: if the Fencer had orders to kill, Ian must tell Churchill what he knew. Then he and Hudders would talk to Roosevelt's man, Sam Schwartz.

Marshal Stalin,
Nazir had said,
knows a killer is waiting in Tehran. The same man who snatched Mussolini from the sky. Our network has told him this. Stalin comes to Tehran with an army around him, and if our network cannot save him, we will all die, Fleming.

Ian had neglected to tell Nazir that his killer was right there in Giza. It would save a world of trouble if he could flush out the Fencer tonight.

He reached the end of the drive and hesitated. Strains of music filtered from the hotel: orchestral background, not dance tunes. That meant the delegations were still at dinner. There would be a number of ceremonial toasts, since the Chinese were parting from them tomorrow. The dinner would be protracted, which would give him time to compose his briefing.

He turned aside from the front entrance and followed the line of the building as it descended the hillside. Mena House was laid out on several levels, with multiple entrances, following the terrain in such a way that at least three floors were technically at ground level. Ian took a path that brought him down to his floor, found the entrance, and made for his room.

This end of the hotel was far quieter. He shut the door behind him with a sense of relief. His bed had been turned down, his dressing gown laid out. He picked off his cuff links and undid his tie. While his bath was running, he poured himself a drink. To his disappointment, no pale blue official telegram had been shoved under his door in his absence. Alan Turing had no more information to offer. Ian would sound like a fool when he briefed Churchill. He had not a shred of proof to support what he meant to say.

The bathwater was scented with orange and clove. He sighed as he slid into it, reached for a writing tablet he'd left on the commode, and propped it on his knees.

You mean to tell me, 007, that you expect His Majesty's Government to alter its whole course of action in the final hour—when the war hangs in the balance? Dammit, man, we've flown halfway around the world to meet Stalin tomorrow!

—I'm afraid it can't be helped, sir. The Fencer expects you to walk into his trap. The surest way to foil his plan . . .

No pun intended. Ian crumpled his sheet of prose and began another, aware that the water was cooling and his Scotch was growing warm.

Dear Hudders,

Meet me at the PM's villa as soon as you get this.

Johnnie

Fifteen minutes later, he was swinging down the sanded path in a fresh dress uniform, his dark hair slicked back behind his ears. He hadn't eaten since breakfast, but his nerves were too raw to stomach food. At Eton he'd broken his nose on the playing field and an indifferent doctor had fused the cartilage with a metal plate. Whenever Ian was under stress, the plate let him know. Pain was flaring along the bridge of his nose and behind the sockets of his eyes. He closed them for an instant. With the shuttering of sight, sound was suddenly amplified.

The strains of music from the hotel, several hundred yards behind him. The ripple of the swimming pool, at the edge of the lawn on his left. The rustle of the breeze in the fronds of a date palm, waving just off this sanded path.

He stopped short, eyes fluttering open. The air was dead calm. There
was
no breeze tonight. Which meant . . .

He started to turn just as the knife pierced his back with a force that sent him stumbling. Instinct helped; that slight shift in posture at the moment of attack deflected the thin steel into his shoulder blade and saved his lung. He flung his arm backward, groping for his assailant, and fell to his knees.

Applause burst from the Mena House ballroom. Churchill must have said something witty.

Pain seared through Ian's shoulder. The man was on him immediately, one gloved hand clamped across his mouth. He would pull the knife out of Ian's back and slit his throat in a matter of seconds. Ian thrust an elbow viciously into the man's rib cage, trying to twist out of his grasp. There was a grunt. But the hand on his mouth only tightened.

He could feel the man's free arm rising.
The knife,
he thought. But he was wrong. Something hard and metal came down on the back of his skull. Ian's world cracked wide.

—

I
T HAD
NOT
been difficult to lure Michael Hudson into the waltz, Pamela reflected, once she found him standing by himself near the entrance to the lounge. The music and the servicemen ringing the wooden floor weren't officially part of this final night in Giza, but once the stuffy dinner broke up and the various members of the delegations began drifting away to their rooms, she'd been mad for some sort of diversion—anything but her empty bed and another dose of chloral to bring on sleep. Pamela had walked alone to the lounge, her head lifted. She would be unassailable. Beyond criticism. She would not hear them if they called her back. Someone would stand her a drink and charm her. Someone would play the game.

One cigarette and a drink into the night, she'd glimpsed Michael.

She leaned now against his encircling arm, her half-lidded eyes fixed on his. He was a superb dancer. Had Pamela been asked what she meant by this, she'd have said he didn't think about his feet and he made the point of the whole exercise the greater glorification of Pamela. He certainly behaved as though there was nobody but themselves in the room; his eyes never wavered from hers, and his hands made her body respond in exactly the way he intended. Pam couldn't help but enjoy herself. For all his breeding and charm, Averell Harriman was an uneasy dancer. Ed Murrow didn't have time for it. Was it any crime to amuse herself with Michael, who took to music like a cat? All these men pretended to love her—said they would give the world for her . . . but they left her alone in the end. She hated being alone.
Randolph.
Ave. Now Ed. Expecting her to waste the best years of her life while they ran off on their adventures.

The best years.
She loved this war. It was the most exciting time she could ever imagine. None of the old rules applied. Everyone snatched at sensation because they might die tomorrow. When the killing was done, it would be the risk-takers who'd won. The people who seized their chances with both hands. The ones who didn't bother with guilt. Pamela's mother had put the fear of God in her as a girl, but she learned early that fear was just another name for guilt, and she'd chucked both when she left home. She was one of the winners.

Michael's face was very close to hers. The intensity of his gaze was making her restless. He was ten years older than she was, but twenty years younger than Ave. She wondered what he was like in bed. Her gaze wandered to his mouth. His lips parted and he drew a rapid breath, as though winded. The music stopped.

“Walk me home,” she murmured. “I'm so tired of all these people.”

He steered her through the group as instinctively as he'd waltzed. The faces around her seemed to fall back, an indistinct halo to their charmed circle; Pamela kept her easy smile fixed on her face and murmured nothings at the others. She must be tight. How much champagne had she drunk? Or was she intoxicated by Michael? She could feel his hand in the small of her back. Her evening cloak—one of Ave's furs—slid over her bare shoulders. She nestled her chin in the softness and closed her eyes.
Lord.
She would see Ave tomorrow. She hoped she could manage to feel something.

The desert air was chill and a vault of stars arced overhead. She shuddered and leaned into Michael as he steered her down the sanded path.
It was going too fast. They'd be there too soon.
She stopped short and made him face her. Went limp in his arms. Of course he bent his head and kissed her. Probing. Hungry. Bending her head back to find her throat, the cleft at her collarbone, intent on the breast curving below. The fur cloak wrapped around both of them.

“My room,” she breathed.

He lifted his head, gathered her in, hurried them both down the path.

And so neither of them noticed the clawed and painful marks in the sand, the spray of pebbles in the garden bed, the scuffs where the heels had been dragged in a wavering sketch toward the date palm—or the dark gouts of Ian Fleming's blood.

—

G
IL
W
INANT NOTICED.

He never drank to excess, and he had piercing eyes that were used to working in the dark. Too many nights in the past year he'd jumped into a bomb crater, pulling back timber and brick rubble where there'd once been a house.

“Looks like somebody's butchered a pig here, Sal.”

He came to a measured halt on the sanded path, Sarah Oliver shivering in her evening dress beside him.

“Arabs don't eat pork.”

“Sheep, then.”

“Or fatted calf. For a prodigal son. Bloody hell—do you think Randolph's turned up? And Pamela's murdered him?”

Gil drew Sarah toward the PM's villa. “Come on,” he said gently. “You're cold as ice and you need your sleep. We've all got a big day tomorrow.”

—

T
HE MOONLIGHT
moved slowly across the uneven stone of the Great Pyramid. It picked out the edges of the hewn stone blocks and the Bedouin stillness of the snipers positioned among them. A jackal threw out its high-pitched cry. One of the snipers shifted painfully, his muscles cramping from the cold.

Michael Hudson moved his right leg from the warmth of Pamela's bed to the floor, careful not to make a sound. He waited for the space of several heartbeats, then slid the rest of his body from beneath the covers. Her steady breathing was unchanged. She slept facedown, her cheek turned away from him, her burnished hair spread across her pillow. One silken arm reached toward him. But she hadn't held him close in sleep; Pamela was anything but possessive. It interested Michael that a woman so voracious in her pursuit of men felt so little need to hold on to them. Pamela was beyond his usual experience. She'd enjoyed him like a good glass of wine or a satisfying meal, as if there'd always be another waiting for her.

A thin line of moonlight knifed through a gap in the heavy draperies at the window. She'd told him she hated the sight of the Great Pyramid, that the curtains were always drawn in her room. It didn't matter. The moonlight was like a pencil torch—it illuminated enough so that Michael could navigate.

He pulled on his trousers and quietly slid his arms into his shirt. Then he drifted toward Pamela's desk. A sheaf of papers, scrawled in her somewhat childish hand.
Letters.
What was she telling people about the conference?

He scanned them quickly. One to Beaverbrook. Another to Murrow.
Madame Chiang has the most divine frocks, but her husband never gives her the time of day . . . Mr. Roosevelt really
is
a cripple! He has to be lifted out of his wheelchair . . . The son isn't half as good-looking as his pictures make him out to be . . .

She shifted in her sleep—the arm she'd flung across his pillow collapsing like a furled wing. He watched, his breathing suspended.

She slept on.

He moved from the desk, crouched down near the wardrobe, and began to ease the door open. He was looking for anything—a transmitter, a radio, a codebook with a German name.

He had a bet with Ian Fleming that there was nothing to find. And a deep personal reason for hoping he was right.