Too Bad to Die (3 page)

“She probably gets a lot out of her men,” Winant said thoughtfully. “And I don't mean money. She learns things, Sal. And passes them on. I bet your dad finds that damned useful. Love Pam or hate her, she's got the makings of a great political courtesan.”

He was right, of course. They both knew Pamela Digby had won Churchill's heart from the moment she sailed into the family and took Randolph off their hands. As a child, Sarah's brother had been difficult; as an adult, he was a hard drinker, a hopeless gambler, and a bruiser with an uncontrolled temper. For a few months, Pamela had seemed like a God-given answer. A steadying influence. A good woman whose love could save even Randolph. The fact that Pamela was neither steady nor good was apparently beside the point. Randolph's abandonment—and Pam's determination to ignore it—had only ranged his parents more firmly on his wife's side.

It occurred to Sarah that Gil was right. Her father appreciated the courtesan in Pamela. Used it, even, in a way he would never appreciate or use any of his own daughters. Sarah felt suddenly like weeping. She had spent much of her youth trying to escape the Churchill name, the Churchill madness—running away to the stage and an unhappy marriage with a showman who was too cheap and too old for her—and now, in the midst of this bloody war and her father's visible decline, she wanted nothing so much as to
belong
to him. One of the most brilliant and demanding personalities on earth.

Gil didn't have to be told any of this. He seemed to understand everything important about Sarah and her troublesome family. Not because he was one of Roosevelt's trusted men or had twice been governor of New Hampshire or because he had raised two sons himself. Gil was a philosopher and a lover of poetry, a quiet and inward-looking man whose simplest pronouncements rang with existential truth. He hated to speak in public, but he'd won British hearts by risking his life in bombing raids and promising far more help than America would ever give. Sarah suspected he'd gladly die if it would save her country from annihilation—and he'd do it in a heartbeat to save her. Which meant that she'd already destroyed something precious in Gil Winant. Because the man with more integrity than anybody in England had left a wife behind in the United States.

She was no better than Pamela after all, Sarah thought. An adulteress who took her happiness in both hands. But unlike Pamela, she was strangling it with guilt.

“Ever had turkey?” Gil asked her now.

She shook her head.

“It's dry. Go for the stuffing instead.” He kissed her cheek. “See you at dinner.”

He glanced down the villa's empty hall, then slipped noiselessly from her room on stocking feet. Sweet of him, but Sarah wondered why he bothered to tiptoe. If Pamela knew they were lovers, so did the entire British delegation.

—

“I
LOATHE
and abominate that sly dog of a Chiang,” the Minister for War Transport, Lord Leathers, was saying petulantly as he sipped his whiskey. His short legs were stuck straight out on the wool carpet, as though discarded by his round body. “He wants to bugger our understanding with President Roosevelt. Nattering on, in his slit-eyed way, about
Colonials
. Playing up the democratic bit. Deploring our nasty British
ambitions.
Our postwar plans to buy and sell them all, from Shanghai to . . . to . . .”

Leathers's knowledge of the world momentarily failed him; he had left school at fifteen. A shipping magnate with a shrewd and canny sense of sea lanes, certainly, but no Public School education. That was what Ian was for.

“Guangzhou?” Ian suggested delicately.

“Indeed!” Leathers grunted, and raised his glass.

Ian topped it off. “I'd like the name of his tailor. Fellow's extraordinarily well dressed.”

“
Blasted
Orientals,” Leathers continued, swallowing. “You'd think enough of our sort had died in that Boxer business to satisfy the bloodlust of 'em all. But
no
. Our yellow friends would rather the Japanese raped their women from here to there and sideways than we turned an honest pound selling
tea
. I
ask
you, Ian—”

“Don't,” he interrupted, pouring out three fingers of Scotch and handing it to Michael Hudson. “Ask Hudders. He's the one who's got the President's ear. Does Roosevelt give a damn what Chiang Kai-shek wants, Michael? Or is he just throwing the Chinese a bone?”

The three men had met in one of the hotel's side lounges to brace themselves before dinner, which would be a protracted and formal affair—Roosevelt was hosting the American celebration of Thanksgiving tonight. He'd brought twenty-two turkeys to Egypt, along with his aide Harry Hopkins, a few generals, and assorted hangers-on like Michael Hudson.

Hudson had flown uncomfortably into Egypt in the cargo plane carrying Roosevelt's car. His job was something vaguely to do with Lend-Lease, the American program that allowed Britain to borrow everything from old ships to new hospital beds. Hence his chumminess with Lord Leathers—who had negotiated the British end of that deal. His chumminess with Ian Fleming had long since been explained. It was their chiefs' sixth bilateral meeting in two years, and the sight of Hudders and Flem clinking glasses in various conference rooms was old hat by now.

Ian knew that Hudson's title was simply cover for far more interesting work: he was one of Wild Bill Donovan's handpicked aides—a spymaster in the Office of Strategic Services. Ian had helped draft the blueprint for the OSS a few years back, during an official visit to New York. He'd probably gotten Hudders his job.

“A Yale man,” he'd suggested, “by way of Eton and Durnford. You can't possibly find a better liaison, Bill. He already knows how the English think.”

Ian was personal assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence, a deeply conventional and unimaginative sailor by the name of Rushbrooke. He did not like Rushbrooke much; he thought his mind small and his courage stillborn. As a consequence, Ian spent a lot of the war ignoring Rushbrooke's instructions and issuing his own. Liaising, when possible, with his American friends.

He was still whispering to Hudders in the companionable dark, plotting the ruin of their enemies. The Too Bad Club was alive and well.

“Of course FDR cares,” Hudson said now. “Our boys are dying every day in the Pacific. Chiang's fighting the Japs. We need
him
just as much as you Brits need
us
.”

“But does America need England anymore?” Ian threw himself into a chair by the carved sandstone fireplace; coal was burning feebly in its depths. “The PM's beginning to wonder. A few months ago it felt like a marriage made in heaven, Churchill and FDR. But the starch is off the bedsheets, the bloom is off the rose. Admit it, Hudders—we Brits bore you. We talk too much and haven't a fiver between us.”

“Hear, hear,” Leathers intoned.

There was an uncomfortable silence. The truth usually shut people up, Ian thought. He'd planned the Cairo meeting as he'd planned all the others between Churchill and Roosevelt, and he knew the Chinese were only a sideshow. Cairo was just the first stop on a far trickier journey ending in Tehran—where Roosevelt would meet Joseph Stalin for the first time.

Uncle Joe, as the American press admiringly called him.

Stalin had been keeping Hitler busy for years now, tossing cannon fodder at his guns on the Eastern Front. He'd tried to use the Nazi war machine to his own ends, but he'd been stabbed in the back and lost millions of people to starvation and siege. The Soviet strongman wanted only one thing from his allies in Tehran: Overlord. Their promise to invade Europe. As soon as possible. So that Hitler would turn around. So that Hitler would go home.

Talk of invasion made Churchill nervous. He didn't think his army was ready to attack Hitler in France, and he wanted Roosevelt's support for a simpler approach. A series of lightning raids, maybe, from various parts of the Mediterranean. More time, perhaps, to train for a brutal amphibious landing across the unpredictable Channel. Stalin would pressure them in Tehran for a date and a detailed plan, anything that would guarantee him a pitched battle on Hitler's Western Front within six months. But Churchill was stalling. A commitment to Overlord meant concentrating all his military effort on one terrible stroke; and if Overlord failed, it would take England down with it.

Churchill was deathly afraid of putting his head into a noose of Stalin's making. It was vitally important that he explain his position to Roosevelt, here in Cairo, before their joint delegation arrived in Tehran. He and Roosevelt had to stand together—present a unified front against Stalin's demands.

But Roosevelt was playing hard to get.

—

T
HE
P
RESIDENT
had been polite but distant to his British friends since his plane had touched down three days before. He'd seized every opportunity to draw Chiang Kai-shek aside, instead, and to talk Broadway shows with his stunning wife. So far, Churchill hadn't been able to get a word in edgewise. And they were flying to Tehran in thirty-six hours.

Hudson lifted his glass in salute. “Hey. No England, no Scotch. How in the hell did you find this bottle in Cairo, Johnnie?”

“Brought it with me on Leathers's plane.” The Scotch was Ian's personal poison, a single-malt bottled in secrecy on the remote Scottish island of Islay. The Laphroaig distillery had been converted to a military depot since the start of the war, but precious bottles could still be found. Ian's family was Scots. One of his bottles had smashed during a rough patch of turbulence over Rabat. Leathers's plane cabin smelled like caramel and peat.

The Minister for War Transport snorted. “Needn't have bothered,” he said. “The PM has flown in enough drink to flood the Nile.”

“Let's hope he can swim, then.”

“That's why he brought me,” said a voice from the doorway. “Keep his head above water and floating in the right direction.”

She was a mirage of gold and turquoise, a perfect hourglass in shimmering silk. Her smile was aloof and enigmatic. Ian had seen that feline look before, lit by flaring torches, on the wall of a pharaoh's tomb.

But Pamela was the sort of woman who bored him silly. The kind who might as well be a pet, something fed and cosseted and groomed. Played with when she demanded it. Never an equal. Never anything but
owned
.

“Mrs. Randolph.” Leathers harrumphed and struggled to his feet.

“Pamela,” Ian murmured.

Michael merely saluted with his drink. She had the ability to strike him dumb.

She fixed her glowing gaze on Ian. “I've got something for you, Commander. A telegram. Passion by post, direct from the PM's
private
wireless. A penny says it's Ann!”

A faint line furrowed Ian's brow. He set down his Scotch and held out his hand. “Give,” he said quietly.

“You might offer a girl a drink.”

“Hudders, the girl wants a drink.”

Michael rose hurriedly to his feet. “We've got whiskey here, but I'm sure you'd prefer—”

“Champagne,” she murmured. On Pamela's lips, the word was a bauble. Something to toss in the air and catch in the teeth. Michael was mesmerized. He held out his arm. She took it.

“Pamela,” Ian said wearily. “The telegram?”

She drew it from her bodice like a harem girl of old. Still warm from her skin when she handed it to him. He noticed Leathers
almost
try to touch it.

“If you'll excuse me,” he said.

And left the Minister for War Transport in possession of the Laphroaig.

—

T
HE TELEGRAM
was not from Ann O'Neill, of course. Ian's latest flirt could hardly gain access to Churchill's private commo network.

It was from Alan Turing, an eccentric and solitary man who lived out his days in Hut 8 at a place called Bletchley Park, working for something known affectionately as the Golf, Cheese, and Chess Society—the Government Code and Cypher School. Turing was an odd fish in most people's estimation, but Ian had learned long ago to ignore most people.

He strolled out onto the Mena House terrace. The Great Pyramid's hulking silhouette blotted out a few stars. A November chill was rising from the desert; he was completely alone for the first time in days. He tore open the telegram.

The Fencer's in town. He's brought a girlfriend with him.

Ian's fingers tightened, briefly, on the paper. Then he reached into his jacket for his gold cigarette lighter and burned Turing's words to ash.

T
he Prof, as Alan Turing's friends called him, was an indisputable mathematics genius, with degrees from Cambridge and Princeton and a mind that shook up the world like a kaleidoscope, rearranging it in unexpected and intricately beautiful ways. He saw the war as waged not by Fascists or heroes, tanks or bombers, but by bits of information reeled out into the ether in a code so complex and constantly mutating it was virtually impossible to break: the German Enigma encryption.

Ian didn't understand Turing's mathematical world in the slightest. Codes, and breaking them, were games he'd played with Hudders in their public school days. But the Enigma problem was urgent—the German naval cyphers, in particular, were the most complex encrypted communications known to man, and they told submarines where to sink Allied shipping in the Atlantic. Thousands of tons of cargo Britain desperately needed were torpedoed daily. Countless lives were lost. Breaking the codes was critical to survival—not just for the men drowning in the frigid Atlantic seas, but for all of Europe going under.

Turing had set up a series of “bombes,” as he called them, at Bletchley. These were electromechanical machines that mimicked the rotor and plugboard settings of an actual Enigma encoder, sifting through millions of variations in those settings for the one correct combination that could translate gobbledygook into plain German text. Ian had no idea how the bombes worked. Turing had tried to explain it to his layman's mind in terms he would understand. But the Prof spoke in stuttering, truncated words that seemed to reel off his own rotors. Snatches of code, opaque in meaning.

“Expect the world to make sense. Certain co-co-co-
here
nce. Isn't the key. Not to codes. Not to life. Co-co-herence
hides
meaning. Seas hide a shark. Ha! Contradic-ic-ic-tion's what matters. Fin on the sea's surface. Tells you the shark's
there.
Contra
dic
tion gives up the gh-gh-ghost.”

From a single contradiction,
Ian translated,
you can deduce everything.

The Enigma's contradiction was that no letter could ever be encyphered as itself. If the bombe's trial settings produced that result for an intercepted German message, the combination was instantly discarded. Which meant one less set of variables in the cipher universe. And so on, and so on, for days and hours, disproving every incorrect combination of settings until only the right one remained. The combination that broke the code.

Ian had met Turing two years ago, in the old loft of the converted stable that was Bletchley Park's Hut 8, where the Enigma naval ciphers were parsed by Turing and his team. The mathematician never met another person's eyes and avoided physical contact; he winched lunch baskets up into the loft with a block and tackle and sent requests back down on slips of paper with his dirty plates.

“C-c-could learn
heaps
from a single Enigma r-r-rotor,” he'd said when Ian climbed up the treacherous ladder and introduced himself. “Or a c-c-codeb-b-book. German bits left b-b-b-behind
when there's a raid.”

What he was saying, Ian figured out, was that they needed the right sort of men on the ground after an enemy rout. The sort who knew how to spot treasure among the wreckage of German Signals equipment or torpedoed ships, and pocket it for analysis at Bletchley. It would save Turing time. But nobody was actually looking for such things in the heat of battle; anything haphazardly salvaged appeared in Hut 8 like a bit of the True Cross.

The Prof's words had lingered in Ian's mind. Like everybody in Naval Intelligence, he tried to do whatever Alan Turing asked. On the train back to London, Ian scribbled down a few words:
Special unit. Targeted collection. Intelligence support.
Rushbrooke's predecessor at Naval Intelligence, Sir John Godfrey, was enthusiastic about the idea.

“It must be a small group of fellows,” he warned. “Thoroughly trained in survival techniques. Nontraditional warfare.
Commandos,
we'll call them. Churchill will like that name.”

Co-Co-Co-Commandos.

“I want to volunteer, sir,” Ian had said, with the first real pulse of excitement he'd felt since the beginning of his war.

But no, Godfrey replied with a regretful shake of the head. Ian was too valuable. Too creative in the deception operations he'd unleashed against the Germans over the years. He knew far too much about the inner workings of Naval Intelligence. They could not risk his capture in the field.

A year later, Rushbrooke said the same.

And so it was
Peter
Fleming who'd volunteered for Commando training in the wilds of Scotland instead . . .

The closest Ian came to action was the deck of a landing boat off Dieppe, when his Red Indians, as the intelligence commandos were called, had gone in on a raid. Ian's heroics that night were limited to comforting an eighteen-year-old kid under fire for the first time. He might look like a hero—tall, broad-shouldered, Byronically handsome, with a broken nose women swooned over—but he was denied all opportunity to prove himself. Ian was a
planner.
The brains of every operation.

And his desk job was driving him mad.

He'd taken to writing down the wild ideas in his head, lately—improbable contests with a sinister enemy—just to vent his frustration. It was
King Solomon's Mines
all over again. Cracking good stories, none of them real.

What would Mokie think of him now?

He pocketed the lighter and dusted ash from his fingertips.
The Fencer's in town . . .

He needed more information than Turing would give in a one-line telegram. And, unfortunately, that meant grappling with Grace. She'd assume he'd invented a reason to see her, when in fact he wanted nothing less. But it couldn't be helped.

He stepped off the terrace and made for one of the sanded paths that led directly from the hotel to the Prime Minister's villa.

—

“N
O EVENING GOWN FOR
G
RACIE?
”

“Ian!” She glanced over her shoulder, a distracted look in her gray eyes, and snatched irritably at the earphones she was wearing. They'd muffled the sound of his approach to the Signals Room, and Grace would resent the fact.
A security breach,
she'd say. In the future he should expect a cordon of alarms to herald his approach, if not a locked door.

It could be a metaphor, Ian thought, for his entire history with Grace Cowles.

She was an expert Signals operator, a composed and efficient twenty-six-year-old from Lambeth who was cannier than her education and more vital to the British war effort than most people knew. Grace served as General Lord Ismay's right arm—and Ismay was chief of Churchill's military staff. Since Ian coordinated intelligence and Grace disseminated it all over the British field, they'd been thrown together for years. Ismay could not function without her.

Only last week, Grace had flown to Moscow; a few months before, she'd worked the Quebec conference; and before that, she'd shared a silent cab with Ian down Pennsylvania Avenue. There'd been a time in London last summer when they'd shared dinners and films, too—
The Thin Man,
he remembered. Grace probably didn't. She'd embarked on a ruthless campaign to forget his existence. And she was the kind of woman who took no prisoners.

He ran his eyes over her elegant figure, the way her dark hair coiled sleekly behind her ears. He'd known the hollow at the base of her neck and the scent of her skin. He'd taken her to bed on nights when the blitz shuddered and screamed in the air around them and hadn't cared, then, if they'd died in the act. But her eyes were hard and flat tonight; the windows to her soul, a brick wall. Her fingers twisted impatiently on her earphones. In a few seconds she'd throw him out.

“You're on duty,” he said.

“Obviously. And you should be with the Americans.”

“They might have let you try the President's turkey.”

“Choke on it, more like,” she retorted, “watching poor old Pug swallow the bloody insult Roosevelt's offered him. The President's demanding we agree on a chief to coordinate American and British bombing—a Yank, no doubt. With about as much experience of real war as Eisenhower. Pug's
furious
. Could barely knot his tie, poor lamb. I expect he'll have a stroke before dinner's out.”

Ismay was Pug to his friends, although Ian doubted Gracie called him that to his face.

“You took down the cable from Bletchley?” he asked.

“Yes.” Her mouth pursed. “Don't fret, Ian. I won't talk about your Fencer and his girlfriend. I'm not that interested in your social life.”

“I didn't think you were. But I need to reach Turing. As soon as possible.”

She picked up a pad and pencil. “Fire away.”

Ian shook his head. “It's urgent. I'd like to place a trunk call to Bletchley on the Secraphone.”

Her eyes strayed to a black Bakelite telephone with a bright green handle. The nondescript box beside it was filled with something that scrambled voice frequencies. A similar box on Turing's end would unscramble them.

“You're not supposed to know it exists.”

“But I do.” He stepped toward her desk, that safe barrier, willing all his charm into his voice, caressing rather than challenging her. “It's absolutely vital that I use it. You're my only hope, Grace.”

“I've heard that lie before.” Her eyes narrowed. “Is this to do with the stray Dornier?”

“What stray Dornier?”

She brushed a strand of hair from her forehead. “Spotted over Tunis. Possibly zeroing in on us. Pug ordered snipers in the heights and an RAF post on the top of the pyramid on the strength of it. He doesn't want this conference to end in a blaze of German glory.”

Ian's hands were propped on Grace's desk and his body yearned toward her. It was she who'd ended things between them, and he'd never quite gotten her out of his system. He suspected she knew that and enjoyed having the upper hand. Enjoyed denying him. He was intoxicated by her closeness, the fold of her mouth when she smiled, and his mind was only dimly processing the fact of the Dornier, which would be the 217 model, not the lighter and older 17, a reconnaissance plane and bomber that could outrun most defending fighter craft. Certainly most fighter planes the RAF could throw at it. Particularly in North Africa. The gun site on the Great Pyramid suddenly made sense.

“Do you know,” he murmured, “that your left eye has a green cast in the iris?”

She swatted his head, hard, with her steno pad.

“For the love of God. Romancing the bloody secretaries again?”

Gracie came to attention, her eyes fixed on the door; Ian spun around. “Prime Minister.”

—

W
INSTON
S
PENCER
C
HURCHILL
was nursing a foul bout of bronchitis with cigar smoke, whiskey, and petulance. He was frowning now, a portrait in annoyance and white tie.

“Val Fleming's boy,” he muttered. “Peter, is it?”

“Ian, Prime Minister. Peter's my brother.”

“Ah, yes. Splendid chap.
Commando.
Read his book on Brazil.”

Everyone had. Ian said only: “That will give him the greatest pleasure, sir.”

“I didn't say I enjoyed it,” Churchill barked. “Knew your father once upon a time. Excellent fellow. We shall not see his like again.”

It was true Mokie and Churchill had been friends. Members of Parliament together. Churchill's younger brother, Jack, had served with Val Fleming, and Ian remembered hating him as a boy—hating anyone who'd failed to die in the stinking mud trenches. It was infuriating to know that even one man had escaped to take his morning tea in the comfort of London, to snap open the newspaper his valet handed him and carelessly ruffle the head of a hunting dog or a ten-year-old son, while thinking idly of his breakfast. Survived, when Val Fleming hadn't. They never saw Mokie's body. It was buried with all the other waste among the poppies and the sagging trenches.

Ian drew his wallet from his jacket. There was a newspaper clipping tucked in one of the folds, much creased and yellowed with age.

“I wonder if you might sign this, Prime Minister,” he said.

Churchill's paw reached for it. “Lord! My tribute to Val from the
Times.
How do you still come to have it?”

“He could not share the extravagant passions with which the rival parties confronted each other,”
Ian recited. “
He felt that neither was wholly right in policy and that both were wrong in mood.
You cannot know how those words marked my childhood, sir.”

“For good, I hope,” Churchill growled. “From what your mother says, you're a bit of a scoundrel. Left Sandhurst under a cloud, didn't you?”

“Yes, sir.”

The PM swept Ian's length with frowning eyes. “Have you a pen, Cowles?”

Grace offered him one.

He scrawled his signature in the faded margin of the piece. As he handed it to Ian, he was swept by a fit of coughing. They watched as Churchill doubled over, his jowls heaving. A man of his corpulence did not double easily. Ian wondered whether Gracie worried, as he did, that Churchill might drop dead, worn out by this war. And abandon them to their various fates.

“What's all this?” the PM demanded, his eyes streaming as he surfaced. With a gesture of his cigar he encompassed Ian, Grace, and the Signals equipment. A clump of silver ash fluttered to the Turkish carpet.

“Commander Fleming received an urgent cable from Bletchley, sir,” Grace said. “He's requested the use of the Secraphone to answer it.”

“Ah.” Churchill drew a fraught breath and paused to bury his nose in his handkerchief. “You'll tell me what it's about? After dinner?”

“Certainly, sir,” Ian said.