The British Lion (16 page)

“Would you kill?”

“If I had to.”

“Would you betray your country?”

Neumann paused. “Why are you asking?”

“Answer the question.”

“If I had to.” The words barely carried on the wind.

Koehler turned back to the river before continuing. “You said before I had a window of time.”

“I did.”

“I think my daughter is still alive. I need that window to save her.”

“The window was to save you.”

“I don’t care about myself.”

“Same as you don’t care about your country?”

“I care about my daughter.”

“And in saving her you are going to damage Germany?”

Koehler nodded.

“If I have to.”

Neumann stared at him and then turned to follow his gaze across the river.

“What have you gotten yourself into, Major?”

“Hell.”

CHAPTER 20

F
RANK KING HAD
chosen a house almost directly opposite the one where he had seen Eric being taken. He’d been pushed for time, only allowing himself one pass in the car before parking around the corner and walking down to the place he’d picked out.

He’d chosen it for several reasons, but mostly because he had seen a little old lady struggling to pick up a milk bottle from the front step as he approached.

One old lady.

One milk bottle.

No big family, at best an old man to take care of as well.

Perfect.

He’d strolled, collar up, head down, to the house and cheerily tapped on the door. When it opened he’d been fast. One hand had covered her mouth and the other had gripped her throat as he walked her backward into the living room. He’d asked her if anyone else was at home; she had shaken her head with scared eyes that had already begun to brim with tears.

She’d fooled him.

“If you are quiet, you are quite safe. Please, go sit down,” he had whispered. She had taken a step backward and then punched him squarely in the mouth.

She wouldn’t fool him again.

King ran his tongue across the split just inside his lip, then looked at the tough old lady sitting on the floor.

“Are you all right?”

She grunted something through the gag that sounded rude and angry.

“If you behave, you can sit on the chair.”

Frank got the same reply, so he shrugged and went back to looking out of the window and stirring the cup of tea he had made himself.

Before he had chosen the old woman’s home he’d checked the back alleys that crisscrossed behind the houses opposite. He had counted off the tiny brown brick buildings and sneaked a look through the half-broken back gate that led to the tiny yard. He’d seen that the windows and back door were boarded up, meaning that only the front door was available as a means of rapid entry. King needed to figure out how many people were in the house, which was why he was sitting at the window of the old lady’s house.

If the situation didn’t change and his information didn’t improve . . . well, he didn’t want to consider that. He would watch for a few hours at least. He guessed Koehler would be heading to Cambridge by now, but he knew the journey would be a tough one in this weather.

There was no panic, everything was in hand, he could give Cook a few hours of his time. He owed Eric that much, at least. Plus, King had a feeling Dulles wouldn’t be happy if a dead embassy worker turned up on the news.

No, he would try his best to save the boy, for everyone concerned.

King looked at his watch, sipped his tea, and waited.

He didn’t move for two hours. The quarter inch of tea at the bottom of his cup was long cold when the van came back.

King watched as the driver of the van got out of the cab, casually looked around, and then crossed the pavement to the already opening front door, where he went straight inside.

“Here we go,” King said softly, and the old lady on the floor, who was by now lying on her side, grunted in agreement.

THE VAN DRIVER
stood in front of Ma Price in the back room of the house, the snow on his feet barely melting in the chill.

“Sterling says the kid claims she was held by two Yanks. They were trying to make her dad do something.”

“So this one upstairs is telling the truth?” Ma Price had to peer up at the driver, who was holding his cap in front of his chest.

“Looks like it.”

Ma Price turned and stared at the empty fireplace as everyone else in the room remained silent, waiting for her decision, watching her back as she paced a few steps.

Not many men interrupted Ma Price when she was thinking. Not many men interrupted Ma Price ever. She was a woman to be reckoned with, respected, listened to, and most definitely not interrupted. She had once run a crime family that covered most of the East End of London, but then along came a war that had taken half of her boys away.

And then along came the occupation, which took nearly the other half.

Hitler had interrupted Ma Price, and she hadn’t liked it.

She had never made a concrete decision to join the resistance; she couldn’t put her finger on when it had happened. If pushed, she would guess, it would have been around the time she bought a job lot of stolen dynamite from a quarry in Cornwall. One thing had led to another, and then it had suddenly seemed obvious to her to blow up a railway line to stop a goods train.

At first she’d wanted to steal what was on board.

When the bomb went off, it turned out the cargo was humans in the wagons, humans who had hugged her and held her hand in thanks, calling her a hero as they had stumbled out into the night. Ma Price became a freedom fighter, whether she meant to or not.

She hadn’t totally given up crime, of course; a woman had to make a living.

She’d made some money and opened up channels with people who “knew people.” The resistance liked doing business with her, and she liked doing business with them. They paid well and didn’t mess her around. When they gave her a wireless and a code book, it had seemed a natural extension of their dealings together.

Over time, crime had increasingly given way to resistance warfare, and she had found the two lives weren’t that far apart in their nature. They were both about power, power built on money and violence. Price had often thought that politicians were just criminals who knew what fork to use in a restaurant, and being a freedom fighter had only deepened that conviction.

She wasn’t happy, though, because she had realized one important thing: her time was running out.

Back when she was a kid with no shoes except on Sunday, she had known she was different. Her life had been no more or no less miserable than everyone else’s had, in the shithole tenement she lived in. She used the same outside toilet, wore the same rags, slept with the same bedbugs, coughed the same rattling cough, with the same damp half-dead lungs everyone else had.

But she was different.

People in that tenement dreamed of a better life, but Ma Price was the only one with the balls to go and get it.

She had nothing to lose. She didn’t care if she died trying because if she failed, she didn’t want to carry on living.

So she started grifting and grafting, ducking and diving, buying and selling, and then lifting and loaning. She got some cash, a little; she fought men; she fought women; and she was their worst enemy because she didn’t care.

They had it all to lose.

She had nothing.

She earned her place; she earned respect, and she got it wherever she went.

Ma Price wasn’t scared of anything and anyone then, but that was then and this was now. Ma Price was clever enough to know things never lasted forever. She’d seen people come and go over the years, some dead, some in prison, some just wiped off the face of the earth.

She’d watched the changes carefully, seen how they came and went, learned from them, and second-guessed them. She’d done that because she was different, because she had always been different.

And now, after all this time, Ma Price knew the clock was ticking down for her. All good things must come to an end, and she knew they were coming to an end sooner rather than later. She knew because she was tired; she knew because she was scared for the first time in her life, and she knew she couldn’t afford to be scared.

Not now she had something to lose.

Back in the day, if the law caught you up, you’d go to prison, do your “bird,” ride the ride and come out the other side. You’d maybe have a bit of money salted away, you’d maybe start again or maybe take a backseat, let someone else come up, take your place so you could walk away.

Those were the rules. Prison didn’t scare her.

Rivals didn’t scare her. They knew better than to attract her attention, let alone cause her concern.

The one thing that scared her, the one thing that made her think twice, the one thing that caused her to furrow her brow and bury her head?

The Nazis, because just like her, the Nazis didn’t care about anything.

They didn’t have rules, they didn’t play by the book, they didn’t worry about consequences, they had nobody to answer to and nobody to worry about.

And that scared Ma Price, because an enemy with a million men and nothing to lose can’t be beaten.

Ma Price had started thinking about a future, something else, and that was when she realized all her hard work had given her something to lose, which meant it was time to get out.

Deep down, deep, deep down, when she dared to dream, Ma Price wondered if there might be a way out of England. A passage to somewhere where she could spend some of her money and finally relax, kick off her boots, stare at the sunset, breathe out.

Live.

One day, but not yet, because now, right at that minute, she was stuck in London, in a dreary house with a confused American who was presenting her with a situation she needed to figure out.

“We could just let him go.” The old man in the black suit bobbed his head as he spoke, as if expecting a slap around the ear.

Somewhere nearby a train whistled and the sound of clattering tracks carried across the snow-covered rooftops. It died away as the train traveled on, leaving the room seemingly quieter than before.

Ma Price stared at the empty hearth, not moving, chin in her hand, deep in thought, until she finally looked up at the van driver.

“What else did Sterling say?”

“He says he wants us to give him the Yank upstairs.”

She frowned and returned to staring at the hearth. She was worried.

She could walk away, hand over the Yank, wash her hands, and leave Sterling and the Germans to their games.

She could, but she wouldn’t, because if she did, she would look weak. She wasn’t worried about the boys in the room seeing that weakness; she was worried about the boys outside the room, around London, in pubs, warehouses, taxis, and cafés seeing that weakness.

It didn’t do to look weak, not in her line of work.

“He’s our Yank.” Ma Price scratched her head. “If Sterling wants him, he can either pay for him or try to take him. Sterling has the girl, she fell into his lap. But he only knows half the story.” Ma Price pointed at the ceiling. “We’ve got the important bit upstairs. The girl doesn’t know what is going on; all she knows is she was snatched. She is the riddle, but upstairs we’ve got the answer. Him upstairs knows what her old dad had to do to get her back, upstairs knows what was so important, and upstairs knows what was going to happen next. Upstairs is the key to all this, we just need to figure it out. Once we get to the bottom, we’ll know how much that information is worth, and I’ll wager what upstairs knows is worth a hell of a lot.”

“So what do we do?”

Ma Price lowered her hand and pushed past the driver.

“We go and ask him.”

ERIC WAS STILL
lying on the floor facing the wall when they entered; Mustache was sitting on the same chair he had taken hours earlier. He rose and gave the seat to Ma Price, then joined his colleague by the door.

“Prof?” Ma Price nodded to the old man who crossed the room and knelt down next to Eric and rested his hand on his shoulder.

“You need to roll over and speak to us now,” he whispered.

Eric turned his head and looked up. His cheeks were wet with tears and he sniffed loudly before slowly rolling over and looking at Ma Price, who smiled at him.

“He started crying ten minutes ago,” said Mustache.

“I hope you ain’t hit him?” Ma Price replied and Mustache shook his head.

“He just started crying.”

“You all right, my lovely?” Ma Price said to Eric.

Eric nodded and wiped his nose again, pushing himself up onto his elbow as he did so.

“Why are you crying?”

“I don’t want to die.”

“Oh, dear.” Ma Price tilted her head and looked at the others in the room. She turned back to Eric and smiled sadly. “What you told us about the girl was true. We checked.”

Eric nodded.

“People we know have the girl now. Seems like she scared you and your chum off, didn’t she?”

Eric’s elbow was hurting on the floorboards, so he moved again, pushing himself up so that his knees were tucked under his chin and wrapped by his arms. He looked at the two men leaning against the wall, who both stared back at him impassively.

“Now then, you need to tell us what you wanted her old dad to do,” Ma Price continued.

“He is going to get someone from Cambridge, a scientist, and give her to us.”

“What kind of scientist?”

Eric looked at Ma Price and swallowed hard.

“I don’t know.”

“Where in Cambridge?”

“I don’t know, I wasn’t told. I just know that Koehler, the girl’s father, is going to get someone and then get further instructions on where to take them. When we got word that he had, we were to take his daughter and go to that address ourselves.”

“What’s the address?”

Eric looked at Ma Price and then the men by the wall. He knew he had to hold something back. He knew once he gave away what they wanted, he ceased to have a reason to exist. He had heard the horror stories whispered around the embassy, tales of careless or unlucky German soldiers captured by the resistance, then left hanging by piano wire from lampposts.

He’d heard about the guts ripped from stomachs, about the burning tires jammed around necks.

He wasn’t a German, but he also wasn’t English. These people were animals, and he didn’t want savaging. These people knew about the American government’s growing fraternity with the Nazis. Eric was aware that this had caused anger with the British both at home and abroad. Eric had seen
KENNEDY IS A KRAUT L
OVER
daubed in white paint on one of the embassy cars, not long after the ambassador had given a long interview to the
Daily Mail
about his admiration for Nazism.

The Americans were becoming enemies, which meant Eric Cook wasn’t among friends.

He buried the information they wanted down deep inside, away from them and their questions, behind the last vestige of bravado he could muster, behind his watery eyes.