Too Bad to Die (16 page)

He stared at her. “My dear girl, is
everyone
talking about it?”

“Not really. But you know, Papa—people tell me things.” She looked suddenly helpless and young. Like a kitten. “They just do. As though they were talking to themselves and have forgotten I'm in the room. Take that jolly Yank, Mr. Hudson. We had a drink or two in Cairo. He's a friend of Commander Fleming's. Why
did
Fleming stay behind in Giza, Father?”

“He came down with bronchitis,” Churchill said distinctly. “You're not to suggest anything else, mind. Regardless of other people's questions. This is very important, Pamela.”

“Because the traitor is still with us?” She pressed her hand against his cheek. “Papa, darling—please.
Tell me.
I so hate to think I'm stupidly in the dark, when the danger . . . Papa,
whom do you suspect
?”

Churchill removed her hand gently from his face. Her breath was coming quickly and her blue eyes were wide with apprehension. She was fearful for someone. But whom? He knew she cared for Harriman, but surely she had no reason to
fear
for him. He could not be guilty of treason. He was . . . Harriman. One might as well suspect the Princess Elizabeth.

And Harriman had not been in Cairo when Fleming was attacked.

“Don't worry your pretty head,” he soothed, squeezing her hand. “I daresay it's all Russian lies, intended to get poor Franklin into their clutches. I could wish he'd shown better judgment—and remembered his
true
friends.”

T
he NKVD safe house was in the southern part of Tehran, within the gates of the Grand Bazaar, a vast covered market that was the largest of its kind in the world.

“They say that twenty thousand people walk through this place each day,” Fatima murmured.

“Who does?”

“My friends. That is why they live here. If you do not wish to be seen, wrap yourself in a crowd.”

That had been Nazir's philosophy, too, Ian supposed—settling himself like a benign spider between the alleyways and leaning mud-brick houses of Old Cairo. But Nazir had been seen. And eliminated. The crowd had not saved him.

“We must get out of these clothes.” With his height and his uniform, Ian was instantly identifiable as Royal Navy Reserve. If he ran into some of the British Occupying Forces, they'd be certain to ask his name—and why he was there. Fatima had pulled a shawl from her bag and thrown it over her bright hair. She was less obvious than Ian in her stateless khaki, but an oddity nonetheless; although he counted a number of people in Western clothes and a babel of foreign tongues, she was the only woman he'd seen in trousers.

He walked protectively beside the girl, closest to the street. Instinct, on his part, not something she wanted. “Have you been to Tehran before?”

“Never. But Grandfather made me learn the direction. If anything happened, I was to find Arev, in the Grand Bazaar, above the gold sellers' corridor, at the Sign of the Camel. He made me learn this by heart.”

“Arev?”

“I was only told his first name.”

“As I only learned Nazir's. And yours.”

She flashed her crooked smile. “When we find Arev, please to call me Siranoush. Otherwise it is possible he will kill us.”

“He dislikes Fatima so much?”

“Siranoush is my real name. Fatima is . . .
was
 . . . something to use in Cairo.”

“Siranoush. I like it. What does it mean?”

She shook her head slightly and looked, if anything, embarrassed. “Never mind. Siranoush, for Arev, will be a sign. You understand?”

“Bona fides,”
Ian said. “Tells him you're on the up and up. That you are who you say you are,” he added, when she looked puzzled.

“Up and up,” she repeated. “I like that. It is hopeful, no?
Siranoush is on the up and up.
”

The bazaar was as soaring and inspired as a cathedral, Ian thought. The stalls were laid out under beautiful stone arches that called to mind the Byzantine Empire, the floors flagged and the walls covered in mosaics. Oil burned in heavily wrought lamps suspended from the ceiling, and shafts of sunlight penetrated from Moorish windows set high in the stone vault. It felt to Ian like a sacred space—but for the cries of merchants hawking their wares.

They were surging with the crowd through the Perfume Bazaar. Ian was conscious of eyes on his back. He walked stiffly from his wounds. He stuck out. A stranger. An Occupier. An Infidel.

The clouds of scent wafting from the stalls on every side were clouding his senses. He hadn't eaten much since his skull was bashed in, and the combination of morphia and whiskey he'd ingested over the past forty-eight hours had done nothing for his head. It was throbbing abominably. He glanced behind him, with a sickening sensation of a trap closing.

“Gold sellers,” he muttered. “It's a different corridor, surely?”

“So many things are on offer here,” Siranoush faltered. “There are even schools within the bazaar. Guesthouses. Banks and moneylenders.”

And if there were signs, Ian thought, they were all in Farsi. The flowing script painted on the plaster meant nothing to him.

Hands pressed against his thighs, multiple hands, patting him rhythmically. He glanced down: a covey of children, brown eyes staring up at him unblinkingly, repeating one word over and over.

“They want money,” Siranoush said.

His sensation of claustrophobia surged. He had only a fiver to his name and somehow, at some point, he would have to buy his way out of this country. He grasped the girl's good arm and led her rapidly down the corridor to the point where another crossed it, and turned blindly left. He was walking too fast. People would notice. What had Siranoush said, back there in Habbaniya?
You run, you draw attention to yourself.

They hurried through the spice corridor. Turned right into the rug and carpet stalls. Kept going, and found themselves among lamps. Alabaster. Spices.
Chickens.
Impossibly, there was an entire corridor of goats. The smell was, if anything, more comforting than the perfume.

“Here,” Siranoush breathed. “To the left—quickly!”

And into the soft quietude of men counting coins.

Robed figures were seated at tables with abacuses. Ian heard the clink of coin against coin and wondered why the pack of children did not find their way here. Some mark of respect, perhaps, not accorded to Occupiers. The gleam of gold flashed beneath the brazier lamps and was reflected in the eyes of the dealers. Fingers moved swiftly, a blur of exchange and sale. Ian felt his racing heart grow calmer. His steps slowed.

Trust an Englishman to relax in a bank.

“The Sign of the Camel,” Siranoush whispered.

He glanced around. It was a dromedary, in fact, with two humps and a tasseled harness, in mosaic, set midway up the eastern wall. Its mouth was open in a blaring howl and its yellow teeth showed. For an instant, he thought they were made of gold. Beneath the sign was a man with an abacus. Above it, there was a stone gallery with several dark archways leading into shadow.

Siranoush had seen it, too. Without a word, she made her way to the foot of the stairs, Ian following. There was no one about. He glanced over his shoulder. Only the moneylender sitting beneath the mosaic dromedary was watching them. At his feet was a small boy, curled up like a dog. As Ian watched, the moneylender spoke a single word. The boy sprang up and ran off.

Because of them?

Siranoush was already halfway up the stairs. Ian mounted them two at a time. Once on the gallery she hesitated. There were too many archways, too many paths.

“It'll be the one above the camel,” he murmured.

She glanced down at the moneylender's head, and turned left through the nearest arch. Ian followed her.

And felt the cool metal cylinder of a pistol abruptly against the base of his skull.

He stopped short and did not turn around. After a few seconds of heart-stopping silence, he put his hands in the air.

—

“J
ESUS
,” Sam Schwartz muttered as one of the Soviet Embassy's numerous staff strode past. “Have you noticed the heat that guy's packing?”

He spoke in an undertone to Michael Hudson. They were standing in the hallway outside Franklin Roosevelt's suite. The President was lodged on the ground floor, so that no awkward arrangement of wheelchair ramps was required. The only drawback to the quarters was that Roosevelt was isolated. His relatives and staff were placed upstairs.

That fact had not escaped Michael Hudson's notice.

Schwartz had his hands shoved into his trouser pockets, the tails of his suit jacket rucked up around his wrists and his legs spread, gangster style. It was an image he intended to convey to the Russian guys all around them—a deliberately Cagney look he figured they'd recognize. They had to have seen at least
one
American movie. He felt like loosening his tie and knocking back a strong drink after the tense and hurried drive from the legation, but even though his chief was safe, he couldn't afford to relax yet.

Within five minutes of their arrival at the embassy, Joseph Stalin had appeared in Roosevelt's doorway. He was in uniform, complete with medals and marshal's peaked cap. Franklin was seated in his wheelchair, but at roughly five-foot-six, Stalin was short enough that the difference between the two men was far from humiliating. Roosevelt extended his hand. Stalin bowed over it in a courtly—almost Czarist—fashion. He'd brought his translator, a tall fellow in his late twenties with immaculately groomed black hair and tailoring that suggested Savile Row. There was no time to summon Chip Bohlen. The solid wood door had closed and the murmur of voices came dimly to those standing guard outside in the corridor.

“There's another one.” Hudson nodded slightly toward a waiter opposite them, a napkin draped over his forearm and a jug of ice water firmly grasped in both hands. “They're all NKVD. Harriman says Uncle Joe shipped three thousand of his best into Tehran for the conference. That's insane, Schwartz. Three
thousand
secret police! How many have the Brits got? How many have we?”

“Couple hundred, total,” Schwartz returned grudgingly.

“So we're surrounded by thugs in white aprons. You can see their uniforms trailing out beneath. And the gun holsters under the armpits. There have to be fifty strongmen masquerading as servants in this place.”

“I guess they think we won't notice.” Schwartz rocked on his heels. The waiter with the pitcher of ice water was singularly expressionless. Either he understood not a word of English or he understood it far too well.

“They want us to notice,” Hudson said grimly. “It's an implicit threat, Schwartz. You've just delivered the President of the United States into the hands of the Russian secret police. And left the cowboys in tents back at the legation.”

“You're a little ray of sunshine, aren't you, Mike,” Schwartz said admiringly. “You realize I take orders from Mr. Roosevelt, just like everybody else?”

Hudson rounded on him. “We're talking about a man who can't stand up without help. Much less run. They've got his son here—Elliott would make a great hostage—and an entire conference to waste, negotiating their terms. You realize that if anything goes wrong—if Stalin gets his balls in a sling or decides he doesn't like the tone of FDR's conversation—there's absolutely no way you, or any of your Secret Service clowns, can save him? Uncle Joe will have you shot in the line of duty without a thought. And blame it on his imaginary Nazis.”

Schwartz's expression hardened. “Secret Service clowns, eh? I've been protecting the President since you were in short pants, buster. Don't tell me how to do my job.”

“I'm sorry,” Hudson muttered. He raked his fingers through his hair—a mistake, as he'd pomaded it that morning. “I shouldn't have said all that. I'm just . . . jumpy as hell. I don't like this place.”

Schwartz clapped a hand on his shoulder. “It's all the rumors flying around. Nazis gunning for us, these boys . . . And Fleming's a friend of yours. So I guess what he says, you take to heart. His cable sure backed up Molotov's story. That's enough to make anybody jumpy.”

“Here's something I don't understand, Schwartz.” Hudson lowered his voice, his eyes on the sphinxlike NKVD waiter. “Stalin doesn't share
intelligence
. He doesn't share anything. So why are Stalin's boys pushing this story? Why trot out Molotov to give Harriman a tour of the splendid facilities? Why feed Ian Fleming a fairy tale?”

“Show of good faith for the new allies?”

Hudson shook his head. “These guys want control. They want to dictate terms at this conference of ours, and if things go wrong—if Roosevelt or Churchill ends up dead—they'll score twice if they blame it on Hitler. All Stalin has to do is
stage
an assassination and announce the sad news to the rest of the world!”

Schwartz's hands came out of his pockets. They were balled into fists. “You think we've been set up?”

“Brilliantly,” Hudson muttered. Then he moved toward the gun-toting waiter. “Can we get a couple of glasses of water here?”

The man nodded. He'd understood every word.

—

T
HERE WERE
five of them, which Ian took as a compliment. They could not possibly have known his right arm was almost useless and he was unable to fight his way out of a girl's knickers. While one of them pressed the pistol muzzle above his left ear, another swung out of the shadows and punched him hard in the gut. He doubled over and crumpled to the floor, which had one advantage—it displaced the gun muzzle—but a serious drawback: he was curled in a fetal position while his opponent kicked him in the head. He made the stupid mistake of warding off the blows with his left hand and got his fingers battered.

Incongruously, he was transported back to Durnford: a chill day, possibly his second year, well after Mokie was gone. Shrill cries of invective and support, from the ring of boys in for the kill. Hudders taking bets on the side with marbles as collateral. Himself, groveling in the mud of an inner courtyard. The smell of earth and rain. A savage on his neck, scrabbling at his ear with dirty fingers. Some sort of bitter dispute between ten-year-olds he was foreordained to lose. And a caning, afterward.

Peter would manage better, he thought. God knows 007 would.

Both of them had training. Ian would have to make it up.

He could hear Siranoush speaking urgently—not screaming like a girl, he thought, with a fairly disembodied admiration, but
talking
to their assailants in a firm and rational manner, even if her voice was raised. She was delivering a stream of words in a language he did not recognize. It was certainly not Arabic, but he wasn't entirely sure it was Russian.

Armenian, he thought suddenly, remembering a peddler in the Portobello Road.

Nazir was Armenian. So's she.

The booted blows at his head suddenly stopped and he was hauled abruptly to his feet by a wrenching hand on his right shoulder. His unhealed knife wound screamed. He felt stitches rend. He wavered, trying to focus on the small, pinched face of the ratlike man in front of him.

Man? He was nothing more than a boy. With thin shoulders and a bad haircut. Half Ian's age. Barely as old as Siranoush, in fact. The rest of the emaciated band hovered behind him. None of them could possibly be old enough to shave.