The Dark Chronicles (57 page)

I couldn’t resist any longer. I caught hold of her by the hips and struggled to unclasp the overalls, cursing as I did. She laughed at my ineptitude but finally the clasp was undone, and she removed her T-shirt and bra while I ran my fingers down her body to her panties. I eased them down over her thighs and she gasped, clamping her eyes shut.

We stood there naked, gazing at each other, and then she pushed me down onto the seats. She leaned over me for a moment, breathing hard, and tipped her head back. Her neck and breasts glistened with sweat, and I pulled her closer to me, until we were locked tightly together. I clasped her shoulder to slow her rhythm and she cried out, then moved with me, rocking back and forth. She stared down at me, her hair covering her eyes, and I thought for a moment I could feel what she was feeling, her flesh parted by me, the shiver through her body. She began panting louder, gasping for air, and I moved more frantically, and she bit down on my hand as we rocked back and forth, faster and faster…

There was a fierce knocking on the door of the cabin, and we froze, our hearts thumping against each other.

‘I say,’ called a voice, ‘everything all right down there?’

I glanced at Sarah, a film of sweat covering her forehead.

‘Out in a minute!’ I called back.

There was no reply for a second, then a ‘Righty-ho!’ and the sound of receding footsteps.

Sarah leaned forward.

‘I do hope not,’ she whispered, and then slowly ran her tongue along the underside of my neck. I grabbed hold of her and took her with renewed ferocity.

We spent the rest of the journey above deck with Ralph Balfour-Laing: Sarah and he discovered that they had a few acquaintances in common, and I learned more about the London ‘scene’ and the Cresta Ball than I needed to know. We both declined several offers of marijuana cigarettes. But, as promised, he took us all the way to the mainland, dropping us at the main harbour at Civitavecchia. It was just coming up to eight o’clock in the morning. When we told him we needed to get to Rome, he unhesitatingly thrust a sheaf of
lire
into our hands and brushed aside all our thanks and assurances that the embassy would be in touch to reimburse him. He chanced his hand one last time by giving Sarah a card with his details, and then he returned to the boat and to the sweet life in his island retreat, and we jumped aboard a crowded bus on its way to Rome.

As the bus sped through the dusty roads, I opened the window so the sun could warm my bones. Our driver had the radio on, and sang along to the romantic ballads emanating from it in a loud and gloriously out-of-tune baritone, but about twenty miles outside the city, relief came in the form of a news bulletin. The first headline: someone had hurled a bomb from a passing car at the headquarters of the Communist party in the city the previous night, and the party had responded by pulling down the shutters and drafting in students and activists to guard the building.

‘These damned Communists deserve what they get!’ cried the
driver in Italian, throwing out an arm angrily, and rather dangerously. Several voices in the bus grunted their agreement.

Sarah looked at me questioningly, and I shook my head. This wasn’t connected, although it didn’t help the situation much. Severn and Zimotti were going to use the current climate to stage something, and I had a feeling it would be more spectacular than a bomb thrown from a car. It would also, of course, be something they would blame on the Communists, rather than targeting them. She turned away, and as she did I took the opportunity to examine her profile. She looked like a Pre-Raphaelite painting, crossed with Grace Kelly. No… that wasn’t quite right. She was like nobody else, of course – utterly unique. The line of her jaw, of her nose, the positioning of every feature was so simple, so fitting, that one wondered why God or whichever artist was responsible had not repeated the trick with all women, with all the world…

‘Easy prey for any beautiful woman.’
It was a phrase I’d read in my dossier at Pyotr’s flat – part of the preparatory document for my recruitment in ’45. But could this be different? I put it out of my mind. My attraction to Sarah was strong – frighteningly so – but it was simply being reinforced by the position we were in. We were both on the run, and we had only each other to turn to. I had to make sure I didn’t get carried away. We hadn’t talked much since our love-making on the boat, but perhaps she had simply needed a release, a way to prove she was still alive and banish the thought of Charles a little. I had simply been there, that was all – I had done the same myself many times.

*

About an hour and a half later we got off the bus at the main train station, and from there we took a taxi to the embassy – Balfour-Laing’s money was disappearing rapidly. There were no cars parked outside. It looked like Severn had not yet made it here. We knocked on the large iron door and were led into the entrance by the same butler as had let me in three evenings earlier. He didn’t seem
surprised to see us, and I breathed a tiny sigh of relief. We hurried across the marble floor to the reception desk. The clerk did look a little surprised, but then it was Sunday, and we had turned up looking like a couple of clowns.

‘Good morning, Mrs Severn. Mister… ?’

‘Dark,’ I said. ‘I was at the reception here on Thursday.’

‘Yes, sir. If I could just see your identification… ?’

‘Don’t be so absurd, Harry,’ Sarah said. ‘I’m here every day, and this is the Deputy Chief of the Service. We’re going up.’

Harry’s face flushed but he didn’t move from his desk, and we quickly headed for the staircase and made our way up to the Station. The place was deserted, and it was odd to think I’d been here just two days earlier, about to go out to meet Barchetti.

‘Are there any weapons in here?’ I asked Sarah, but she shook her head.

‘Charles has a Browning, but he had it with him in Sardinia.’ She caught my look. ‘There may be something hidden somewhere, but I’ve no idea where.’

I nodded. It was unfortunate, but we didn’t have time to waste on it. She ran over to a drawer next to the
cafetière
and pulled out the key to Charles’ office, which she swiftly unlocked. The morning sunlight streamed through the window and the sound of traffic came up from the street below. She went over to the painting above the desk – a portrait of the Queen, of course – and I helped her take it down, revealing a wall safe. That was new – I’d only had a locked filing cabinet when this had been my office. She dialled the combination, and then, with a click, it opened.

She hadn’t been exaggerating on the boat: there were
hundreds
of dossiers, all arranged in metal shelves within the safe. Thank God I had her with me – I’d never have found the right one by myself. As the thought hit me, I noticed the look on her face.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘It looks different,’ she whispered. ‘I think he’s rearranged it.’

My heart sank. I considered taking the whole lot with us for a
moment, but there was simply far too much to carry. I started removing the dossiers from the left-hand side of the safe and lifting them over to Severn’s desk.

Anything you remember about the dossier?’ I asked. ‘About what it looked like?’

She was already bent to the task. ‘Some of the pages had a black banner across the top,’ she said. ‘And the whole thing was paper-clipped together.’

I started going through them, wanting to set aside anything that didn’t look right as fast as possible, but not so fast as to miss the crucial dossier. There were insurance papers, staff lists, files on Italian leaders… Some fascinating information, no doubt, but none of it threatening the imminent death of innocent civilians. I continued riffling through, looking for paper-clipped pages with black banners…

I had looked through and abandoned over a dozen dossiers when I froze.

‘Did you hear that?’

Sarah looked up. ‘What?’

I thought there had been a noise from outside. I leapt over to the embrasure of the window and peered down into the driveway. But there was nobody there. I hurried back to the desk.

‘Got it!’ Sarah suddenly shouted. ‘I’ve got it!’

‘Are you sure?’ If we took the wrong documents, we’d be back where we started.

She nodded furiously. ‘This is it.’

‘Let me see,’ I said, and she reacted to my tone and handed it across. I suppose part of me had refused to believe it possible, and I needed to see it for myself. By the look of it this was Severn’s own copy, and I guessed it had come through the diplomatic bag to avoid being deciphered by Sarah. The whole thing was held together with a large and slightly rusty paper clip, and a black banner across the top read ‘STAY BEHIND: STRATEGY AND EXECUTION’. Beneath that was the date: 18 June 1968. I read it almost in a haze:

I flicked through the rest – it was in sections, but I wanted to check that the whole thing was here. I needed to be sure that it contained the details of the operation, and that they hadn’t been saved for another paper. The next section of the dossier was titled ‘Targeting’, and I turned to it anxiously.

That didn’t help much. The country was littered with historic monuments. I hurried on:

Damning stuff, but there were still no specifics: there was no indication of
which
targets they had chosen or on what dates they planned to attack them. I flicked to the end of the document, to the final page:

‘Soccer’, I noted, rather than football. The Americans were definitely involved, then.

Apart from the reference to soccer, it had all the hallmarks of one of Osborne’s Section reports. I had misread him all along, seeing him as a little Englander, a rabid Mosleyite who thought ‘the wogs start at Calais’. But even Mosley was a European these days, and it seemed Osborne’s hatred of Communism was rather stronger than his distaste for foreigners. He evidently had some powerful friends, and together they had taken over the original stay-behind networks and planned to use them to forge a hard-right agenda for the Continent.

And it was as well I had checked: the report seemed to end here, followed by a sheaf of documents in completely different typefaces. So either this was merely the first in a series of reports about the operation or someone had removed whatever came next in it – either way, it seemed to be missing the details of what they were planning. I turned back to Sarah. ‘Do you remember if this was the exact dossier you saw, or could it have been one of the others?’

She looked at me in despair. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I really don’t know.’

‘We need to find the next part of this dossier,’ I said. ‘We need to know the operational—’ I stopped. A car had just driven past the window, followed by the sound of tyres screeching on gravel. Severn? I ran over and looked down.

Yes. He was parking the Alfa Romeo, and coming through the gates behind it were two black Lancias.

I glanced at Sarah, and nodded affirmation. A clanging of iron echoed up the stairs.

They were in.

I calculated we had less than two minutes. I scooped up as many dossiers as I could, about half a dozen of them, stuffed them under my shirt, and gestured to Sarah to do the same. We would just have to hope that the operational plans were among them.

We stepped out of the office, and Sarah pointed to a door at the end of the corridor. Behind it was a much narrower staircase, with no carpet and no paintings on the walls: the staff staircase.

‘This way!’ she said.

As we reached the foot of the staircase, we met the man with the beak coming into the main hallway. He froze at the sight of us, then reached for the pistol in his waistband. I leapt towards him and aimed a kick at the lower half of his legs – several of the dossiers that had been in my shirt fell to the floor, scattering in a spread at his feet. He stumbled on one of them, but then managed to throw out his hands and catch hold of Sarah by the waist as she made to run past him. She screamed and lashed out with her feet, catching him in the jaw. He was knocked to the ground, but she had also lost a few dossiers in the meantime, and started to lean down to pick them up.