Too Bad to Die (14 page)

TEHRAN

S
UNDAY
,
N
OVEMBER
28, 1943

M
ichael Hudson was too junior to rate a room in the American legation where Roosevelt and his party stayed. The official U.S. envoy, Louis Dreyfus, had commandeered half of the Park Hotel—Tehran's finest—for the President's entourage. Hudson caught a few hours of sleep there and a ride in one of Dreyfus's cars to the legation the next morning.

The first man he met was Sam Schwartz.

He was familiar with him by sight. But the two men had never had much reason to speak. Hudson walked up to Schwartz, who handed him a cup of coffee. Then he drew him slightly apart and muttered low in Hudson's ear.

A few minutes later, Schwartz welcomed Averell Harriman with another cup of coffee. Amid all the noise of the ambassador's arrival, Hudson slipped unnoticed back out into the street.

This time, he took a cab.

—

G
RACE
C
OWLES
had finished her breakfast. For such an exotic place as Tehran, it was sadly anticlimactic: an expatriate cook's attempt to reproduce Britain in the heart of Persia. They were dutifully served broiled tomatoes, so out of season that they looked like dead salmon, with fried eggs and streaky rashers of bacon. Grace ought to be thankful—the food in London was so stringently rationed it had been months since she'd seen real bacon—but her mind was not on her work. There'd been a letter for her in the embassy pouch.
News from home.
As usual, it was uniformly depressing. Her sister Audrey, who was barely sixteen, had gotten into trouble. Which meant that some soldier on leave had either seduced or raped the wretched girl. Audrey would say nothing about the father, however much Grace's mother beat her. She was ruined now and would have to leave school.

Another casualty of war,
Grace thought.

Men,
she thought.

She lifted her eyes from the sickening breakfast plate, with its dried smear of egg and flaccid tomato. From this makeshift breakfast room—hastily converted from a lady's morning room before the Prime Minister's delegation arrived—the wide windows offered a staggeringly beautiful look at the world. Today it was sunlit, fringed with pines that Grace knew would scent the air with resin. There would be the smell of snow, too, off the heights of the mountains that ringed this extraordinary city. If she had thought about it at all in her hurried progress in Pug Ismay's service, she had expected Persia to be hot, like Egypt. With palm trees. It was
Persia,
after all, a word that made one think of rugs and camels and men in turbans. But that was British stupidity. The lovely old embassy sat snugly behind its walls in a lap of green, the pines rising grandly. It was the most restful place Grace had seen in a very long time.

And when they laugh at my dedication,
she thought bitterly,
they never understand this. Work has saved me. I am no one's plaything. No war casualty. Or any man's.

“Grace.”

She peered over her shoulder and felt her heart skip a beat. “Mr. Hudson.”

He was halfway through the breakfast room door, one hand grasping the lintel. His hair was mussed and he was not smiling.

“Have time for a walk?”

She glanced at her watch. “I don't think so. Pug—”

“And I'm due back at the ranch for a briefing. Five minutes, Grace.
Please.
We should talk.”

—

T
HEY CHOSE
the back garden, where paths of crushed stone wound among the trees and the distant plash of water suggested an unseen fountain. Another day, Grace thought, she would like to find it. If Pug could spare her.

“Did he send you some sort of crazy cable?” Michael asked abruptly.

“Who?”

“Ian. I hear he was
attacked
the other night in Cairo. With a knife. That's why he stayed behind. It wasn't bronchitis at all.”

“I know,” Grace said. Rushbrooke had told Ismay. Ismay had told her.

“Why didn't you say something?” He stopped short on the path and glowered at her. “He's my best friend.”

She hugged herself defensively. “Because I was informed it was a security matter, Mr. Hudson. And however matey you may have become with
some
members of the British delegation, you are not, after all, a British subject.”

“Matey,” he repeated.

“Much less cleared for our intelligence.”

“Come off it, Grace.” He grasped her by the elbows and shook her slightly. “This isn't intelligence. This is
Ian.
You're punishing me because of Pamela.”

“I don't know what you mean.”

“You needn't bother. She was tucked up quite nicely with Harriman last night.”

She stepped backward, safe from his reach. “If you've quite finished, Mr. Hudson—”

“Michael. For Chrissake, I'm Michael.” He ran his fingers through his spiky hair. “Look—Ian's already shared his story with the rest of the world. He sent some long rigmarole about an assassination plot to Sam Schwartz. Schwartz is—”

“The head of Roosevelt's Secret Service. I know.” Strange, Grace thought, that Ian hadn't sent the cable to Hudson instead. But perhaps the matter was urgent enough to go straight to the top. In which case—“Why exactly are you here, Mr. Hudson?”

“Because you need to tell your people. About Ian. That this whole cable is . . . is some kind of
spy story
he's made up.”

She stared at him, brow furrowed. Was it possible Michael was drunk? Not at this hour of the morning, surely. Had he even read the cable—or merely heard about it secondhand, from the Secret Service fellow?

“Are you saying,” she attempted, feeling her way, “that you know . . . Ian
lies
 . . . too?”

His harassed expression softened. “Oh, God, Grace—I'm so sorry. Is that why you stopped seeing him?”

She shrugged, her gaze falling to the ground. “I couldn't trust him. He'd tell me he was working late. Or engaged in an operation overseas that was frightfully hush-hush. When all the time, he was just with that . . . female dispatch rider. With the motorbike.”

It sounded pathetic even to Grace's ears.
Jealousy.
Disillusionment. Duplicity. The usual ration from Ian Fleming. She'd been warned off him by nearly every girl she knew, before she'd agreed to see him.

“Muriel,” Michael said.

“I'm sorry?”

“The dispatch rider. With the motorbike. She delivers his supply of cigarettes when she has time. It's a custom blend, you know—from Morlands.”

“Your point?”

“Just that Muriel's an old flame. She's known Ian forever. It doesn't mean a thing to him, sweetheart. She doesn't, I mean.”

Grace flinched. “That's even worse. It means we're all just bodies. Ian's incapable of caring for anyone but himself. Would you call that arrogance, or something more pathological?”

“I'd call it self-protection,” Michael said. “Something to do with his mother.”

“Oh, Lord—not
that
old chestnut.”

“If he doesn't give his heart away, he can't be hurt.”

“Then he'll never win hearts, either,” Grace said crisply. “Certainly not mine. But you seem more forgiving, Mr. Hudson. I suppose men ignore the ways they fail each other.”

“Not exactly.” He raised his arms in a gesture of futility. “He doesn't lie to me. Not about important things. But the guy writes
stories,
Grace. Spy stories. About adventure heroes. That's what this cable's all about. He's been doing it ever since Mokie died.”

“Mokie?”

“His dad.” Michael began to trudge along the gravel path. “It's how he deals with—with his nerves, I guess. When things get too tough. He escapes into fiction.”

“The way you do, by playing music,” she suggested.

He glanced at her, his expression arrested. “Why do you say that?”

“I hear it,” she faltered. “In the sound. The pain and . . . and the grief—”

“I play show tunes, for Chrissake.”

“Not always.” She hurried on, aware she had trespassed and he might not forgive her. “Don't they say the most desperate actors usually try comedy?”

“The point is, Ian goes off into a dream world where fiction is fact,” Michael said impatiently. “
And
he drinks too much. We joke about all that Scotch he carries around, but seriously, when you look at what he consumes . . . Nerves, again. Last week he told me somebody at the conference—
one of us,
Grace—was spying for the Nazis. Now he's convinced the guy is going to kill us all.”

She made a small sound of protest. He stopped short and grasped her shoulders urgently.

“When we were at Eton, he was almost sent down for printing a smutty story about his house master and circulating it anonymously throughout the school. He hated Slater because the guy was a sadist who liked to draw blood. But Ian's prank nearly cost him his place and, incidentally, threw suspicion on everybody else in his house. I think Johnnie liked that—watching the others squirm.”

“But in the end, he owned up to it, didn't he?”

Michael glanced at her, surprised. “He told you about it?”

“No. But Ian Lancaster Fleming would never be the sort of scrub who would let another boy take his blame.”

“Actually, you're right.” A grudging silence. “But try to understand, Grace,” Michael said. “Ian's not entirely . . .
reliable.
That's why I meet up with him at every one of these conferences. I want to make sure he's on a tight leash when the President's around. He's never been sent out into the field, either—Rushbrooke is afraid he'll make a complete ass of himself and go to pieces
.
Don't get me wrong—Ian's damn good at coming up with Ops. When we were kids, he was the mastermind of every stunt we pulled. But there's a reason he's permanently tucked behind a desk. He needs to be under a grown-up's eye.”

Grace drew a shaky breath. “Are you suggesting that besides being a liar and a cad, Ian Fleming is
potty
?”

“I'm suggesting that after a guy's been whacked on the head hard enough to bleed, we might want to give him some time before we swallow what he says,” he retorted.

They walked on. The morning was growing late. She ought to turn back. Pug would be looking for her, and Michael was expected at the American legation—

Ian had sent his cable to the American legation.

Suddenly, she was awash in dismay. He
did
tell stories. He loved detective films. There had been that one, last summer, they'd seen in London—
The Thin Man . . .
Nonsense, of course, with a terrier and martinis. But then there were the bones hidden beneath the floor . . .

“If Ian's unreliable,” she demanded, “why is he still employed? And in such a sensitive intelligence position?”

“Because he's been shielded,” Hudson said quietly. “For years. By me. By his brother Peter. You know his dad was a friend of Churchill's, right?”

That conversation in the Signals Room at Giza. The PM signing Ian's yellowed scrap of paper.
Shielded.
“Why are you telling me all this?” she asked.

“Because he's a loose cannon.” Hudson rolled his eyes. “And he's not in my shop. He's in
yours,
Grace. You're the only person I can talk to, in your delegation.”

Other than Pamela, she thought. But there was no point in stating the obvious. Michael needed somebody in the chain of command. Somebody like Pug, who had Churchill's ear.

“I'm concerned about the damage he could do,” he persisted.

“What kind of damage?”

“Harriman's called a meeting of the President's advisors to discuss Ian's
Nazi threat.
Which means Schwartz shared the cable. For all I know, Roosevelt's read it by now.”

Dismay turned three times and settled like a dog in her stomach. But she said nothing.

“So I repeat, Grace: Did he send this espionage crap to you? Has Ismay read it?”

“Yes,” she muttered. “And naturally—
yes.
”

Hudson closed his eyes, as though willing a higher power to give him strength. “Then you might want to pass this on. Ian's cable has the U.S. delegation in such a snit, Harriman says we all ought to move in with Joe Stalin for the duration of the conference. Think about the security implications of
that,
Grace. And how Churchill will feel when you're all shut out of our party.”

D
utch spent several hours longer than he'd expected at Habbaniya, so that Ian and the girl could get medical attention. Ian's stitches were intact but seeping blood; a medic painted him with iodine and applied fresh bandages.

Fatima had pieces of German steel in her left arm.

“It is of no importance,” she said impatiently, as the medic picked at the shrapnel with a pair of surgical tweezers. “Nothing hit bone.”

“Where did you learn to shoot like that?” Ian asked.

She lifted her eyebrows coolly and ignored the question.

He left the clinic and found Dutch beside his plane, examining the propeller with an RAF mechanic.

“Where'd you pick up the girl?”

“I knew her grandfather,” Dutch said.

Ian noted the use of the past tense. News of murder traveled fast.

“Where'd she learn to aim a gun?”

“In an NKVD training camp, of course,” the pilot said. “They've got a strict up-or-out system. Hit your targets or die trying.”

“NKVD? That girl? She can't be out of her teens.”

Dutch grimaced. “Communists don't believe in childhood. Try to get some food or sleep, Bond. I have some repairs to make before Tehran.”

Ian made his way to the airmen's lounge. The door from the tarmac was unlocked, but the place was utterly deserted at three a.m. There was a pot of stone-cold coffee that still managed to smell burnt. He went around the bar counter and used his good arm to rummage among the higher shelves. There were bottles of Bass and Guinness. A half-empty fifth of bourbon. And another, surprisingly, of—

“Vodka,”
Fatima said behind him. “I would like a martini. Shaken, not stirred.”

“I don't think you have a choice,” he replied, without glancing around. “There isn't a shaker in the place. Much less ice.”

“That's where you're wrong. That brute of a doctor used an ice pick on my arm.”

She was smiling crookedly. There were dark hollows under her eyes and her child's skin was almost transparent with a mixture of exhaustion and what Ian suspected was grief. She spoke English with a heavy accent but great precision. She was wearing borrowed khaki clothes that looked vaguely military but lacked any insignia. A field uniform for an operational girl.

“Who killed your grandfather?” he asked her gently.

“I don't know. But when I find out—” She glanced away, toward the silhouette of Dutch's plane.

“You weren't there?”

“I had gone to the market. I found him when I returned. On the floor. You saw him?”

Ian shook his head.

“His throat was slit. The Egyptians, they do this sometimes, for sacrifice—with sheep or goats, not men. I dropped my basket. Vegetables, oranges, bread. They rolled into the blood on the floor. God forgive me, I tried to pick them up—”

Ian handed her the vodka.

She tipped the bottle straight into her mouth and drank it like water, like she was overcome with heat on a summer's day. “Then I packed a small bag and left him. I did not run, because he trained me in such things. You run, you draw attention to yourself. I walked very fast through the streets of our quarter, and I went veiled, like a good Egyptian woman. I turned into side streets and doubled back on my trail as he taught me, and I do not think anyone was following. So I went to Dutch.”

“Why?” Ian asked. “Why come to Iran, Fatima?”

She set the vodka bottle carefully on the bar. It was nearly empty.

“Because you know, and I know, that my grandfather was hunting a German agent. Someone has to finish the job.”

“And avenge him?”

“That, too.”

“He shared his work with you? Wasn't that dangerous?”

She shrugged, and winced as her arm twinged. “My choice, not his. I do not ask why you are in Dutch's plane, Mr. . . .”

“Bond,” he supplied. “James Bond.”

“Men are expected to fight and women are told it is
dangerous.
You are
hunting him, too, no?”

“The Fencer?”

“Or Butcher. Whichever you like.” She met Ian's gaze and shrugged slightly. “He is a killer. Call him anything else, you give him power. You give him a story to tell, a myth to wrap himself in. He becomes a monster of fear and greatness, harder to fight. But this Butcher? He is just good with a knife.”

“You're better with guns,” Ian said quietly.

Fatima smiled again—that heartbreaking, crooked smile.

She was unlike any woman he had ever met. How many had he known well, however, besides his mother, Eve? And even Eve he did not begin to understand. There had been a fearless girl he had loved briefly in Geneva and a clutch of cousins he'd known in Kitzbühel. His old lover Muriel, who skied like an Olympian and wove her motorbike through the London bombs as though they were raindrops. He was drawn to women who flouted convention. Who flouted fear. But he expected them to desire and need him.

Fatima needed nobody.

It was a challenge, this brittle indifference she wore. It intrigued and alarmed him. She had been schooled by brutal circumstances and pitiless teachers. There were stories of endurance she could tell. And yet she was here—barely twenty, a gossamer thinness. Weariness about the eyes. She remained. She could teach him what no other woman could: how to risk and die.

He walked behind her across the tarmac an hour later when the Sow was ready to fly, uncertain whether anyone who had drunk so much would be capable of mounting a plane's wing. But she seemed unaffected by the vodka or her bandaged arm, allowing Dutch to hoist her up. She skittered across the body of the plane to the gunner's seat, camouflaged once more in her goggles and flight jacket. She did not look at Ian as he stood on the tarmac, staring at her. She was already examining her gun mount. Dawn was breaking.

Three hours later, they landed in Tehran.

—

“T
HE DETAILS ARE SKETCHY
,” Averell Harriman said, “but hair-raising. Our Russian friends tell me that a squad of German commandos parachuted into the foothills outside the city about three weeks ago. Soviet security forces rounded up all but six of them. Molotov says they're true believers, like all Nazi Special Forces. Hell-bent on completing their mission. And their current whereabouts are unknown.”

They were gathered around the breakfast table in the American legation, a litter of stained coffee cups and soiled plates in front of them. Harriman and Schwartz, Hudson and FDR. Elliott Roosevelt and John Boettiger were not included, because they were family, not staff. Gil Winant was already at the British Embassy. General George Marshall was sitting a little by himself, toying with a piece of toast, a skeptical expression on his face. Harry Hopkins was at Roosevelt's right hand. He had eaten nothing, but had smoked three cigarettes to ash.

There were pomegranates in a bowl in the center of the table. Most of them had never seen pomegranates before and had no idea what to do with them. Michael Hudson was the exception. He had split open a fruit and was digging at its seeds with the tip of a knife.

“The mission being . . . ?” Marshall asked.

Harriman shrugged. “Raise a little hell around the conference, I guess. Molotov didn't really say.”

“Can we talk to the guys they captured?” Sam Schwartz demanded. “Find out what they're planning?”

“I should have been clearer.” Harriman refilled his coffee cup. “When I said the Krauts were rounded up, I meant they were killed.”

“Or executed,” Hudson observed, “after digging their own graves.”

Harry Hopkins cleared his throat. “That sounds like sympathy for the Enemy, Mr. Hudson.”

“Does it? My apologies, sir. But I think it's worth remembering that we're dealing with the Soviets. Who'd butcher their own mothers if Stalin told them to do it.”

“I think that's a bit—” Harriman began.

“Hear, hear,” Marshall intoned.

Hudson waited for silence. “We should be careful before we believe what the Russians say. Who knows if these Nazi commandos even exist? They haven't shown us a single German.” He glanced at Roosevelt. “It seems damned convenient, Mr. President, that there's nobody left to interrogate. Molotov's ginned up a bogeyman.”

“Why?” Roosevelt wondered genially. He was at ease in his chair, a cup and saucer balanced on his carefully crossed legs. “You know him best, Ave. Any ideas?”

“Molotov's just the front man,” Harriman said. “We already know Uncle Joe refuses to step outside his embassy's door. There's a lot of bad blood between the Persians and the Russians, Mr. President, and it's not only about this Occupation. This so-called Nazi plot helps Stalin save face.”

“In other words, he wants us to move over to that compound,” Schwartz interjected. “Accept his hospitality. Or Churchill's.”

“And piss off the fella you don't take to the dance,” Marshall interjected. “Don't get caught between the Lion and the Bear, Franklin. Fool's game. Stay here.”

“With respect, Mr. President, I agree,” Hudson said quickly. “Move into Stalin's embassy, and you put yourself entirely into Soviet hands.”

“There's no love lost between you and the Russians, is there, Mr. Hudson?” FDR was smiling his shark's smile. His teeth were bared, but no emotion reached his eyes. His face was creased with exhaustion; he wasn't sleeping well in the series of strange beds he'd inhabited lately. “Winston has been pressing me to accept his hospitality. But I hate to give Uncle Joe the idea that we're ganging up on him.”

“Gil Winant won't like it if you offend Churchill,” Harry Hopkins said. He was frowning; he was as fond of the PM as Gil was.

“Winston will understand,” Roosevelt retorted. “Like a loyal dog, he always trots back. What exactly is it that scares you about Stalin's shop, Mr. Hudson?”

“Thugs monitoring your every move,” Michael said frankly. “If Lavrentiy Beria is in the Soviet embassy, the most deadly intelligence network in the world is there, too. There's a reason Stalin chose Tehran for this conference, Mr. President.”

“Which is?”

“Because Beria has got one of the best NKVD spy networks already in place. His son was part of it for the past two years.”

Schwartz raised his hand.

Roosevelt nodded at him.

“If Soviet intelligence is as crackerjack as Hudson says,” the Secret Service chief suggested, “shouldn't we believe what they're telling us about the Nazis?”

This unexpected reversal stopped the conversation dead.

Marshall looked at Harriman. Who looked at Roosevelt.

“Mr. Hudson?” Roosevelt queried.

“They're more interested in you, Mr. President, than anybody else in the world right now,” he said. “You're meeting Marshal Stalin for the first time. You're about to negotiate the invasion of Europe. The future of the Balkans. The fate of Poland.
He wants to know what you think. In the privacy of your own bedroom.
No sitting president in your shoes would place himself in the hands of such an enemy.”

“He's our ally, Mr. Hudson,” Roosevelt reminded him.

This time, the silence was profound.

It was a matter of faith in government circles that Stalin was a friend to the United States. Somebody the President could work with. A sagacious and capable guy. But Hudson had followed the Great Terror of 1938. Lavrentiy Beria had made sure that Stalin's rivals were accused and tried and shot for their crimes. Thousands had disappeared overnight into the gulags. Stalin's boys made the Gestapo look like Judy Garland's Lollipop Kids. Hudson doubted Roosevelt had an inkling of this, and it was no time to explain it to him. Roosevelt was still studying Michael's face. “Does your friend Fleming agree with you?”

Hudson glanced up quickly. “I couldn't say, sir. We never discussed Mr. Stalin.”

“I read his most recent cable. It tracks with the Russian story. He thinks these Nazi commandos want to assassinate all of us.”

The men around the table stirred restively.

“I think it's possible Commander Fleming wrote that in an impaired state, sir,” Hudson said. “He was recently hit in the head, not to mention stabbed in the back. He lost blood. He can't have been thinking clearly. And his story is . . . well . . . a little fantastic. In my opinion.”

“What story? What cable?” Harriman demanded.

He pushed back his chair and threw his napkin on the table, a potentate denied his empire. “And who the hell is Commander Fleming?”