Too Bad to Die (27 page)

“Why not?” she said. “Doesn't Ian's story about the Nazis tally with the Russians'?”

“A little too much,” Hudson said drily. “Did you know they've been running the surviving paratroopers all along, through some turned radio operators of theirs? Knew exactly where they were. Could have picked 'em up at any time. But they've been holding them in reserve. Probably plan to unleash them at the last moment, so they can gun them down in public and have the glory of saving Churchill and Roosevelt.”

“That's . . . that's abominable.”

“That's Communist Russia.”

“And you think Ian mistook this plan for a serious German plot?”

“Sure. With a little help from Turing. Of course the Fencer has gone silent—he's probably just Sergo Beria sending messages from the basement! The NKVD orchestrated this whole sham from beginning to end. Only they didn't count on Ian surfacing in Tehran. The loose cannon. Beyond their control.”

“So they bagged him.” Grace glanced back at the Soviet Embassy. “Bastards.”

“Uncle Joe doesn't play nice.”

She tried to follow his train of thought. It made overwhelming sense. But there was a snag somewhere—a problem . . .

“What about Pamela?” she said.

“Pamela?”

“The codebook. That you found in her things. If the Fencer's nothing more than Beria's son, why does Pamela have a German codebook? And not even an Enigma one?”

Michael lifted his arms in a gesture of futility. “Search me. But I'm sure Ian could invent an explanation. Come on, Grace—let's get out of here. Can I buy you a drink at the Park Hotel bar?”

T
he first thought that penetrated Ian's mind was that he must have died. Death was the only explanation for the surreal blend of pain and Siranoush's voice. The pain was real, but the voice must be a hallucination. The fact that Siranoush was speaking German deepened his conviction. She spoke too many languages as it was. There ought to be one she hadn't mastered.

His mouth suddenly watered as the tantalizing smell of lamb stew from the bazaar hit his nostrils. The warmth of it filled his mind. He struggled to lift his head and open his eyes. Tried to croak her name.
Siranoush.
His mouth and tongue were swollen. His arms were still bound, the limbs deadened from lack of blood, and he could not touch his face. He sensed, however, that his eyes were swollen, too. The slight movement he made in his effort to lift his eyelids awakened the excruciating wounds in his scrotum and penis, and he whimpered aloud.

No one answered.

He forced his eyes open, one at a time.

The light in this back room was dim. The door to the front was firmly closed. Next to him, Zadiq was breathing like a man whose lungs were filling slowly with fluid. Otto was nowhere to be seen.

Then he heard the Nazi colonel's voice, raised in flirtatious laughter.
Siranoush.
She was laughing, too, and it came to Ian with sickening despair that he had been duped by all of them—by everyone he'd trusted—and that the girl was a liar and a bitch. Otto had forbidden all contact with the outside because Otto knew Siranoush would come to help them. It was prearranged. She'd brought dinner.

She would feed Ian's enemies and watch him die.

Cutlery scraped earthenware plates. Men sighed with satisfaction after a long pull at a bottle. Someone gave forth a belch. The pain in Ian's groin was maddening. He would scream until he blew himself out like a candle.

Not in front of that girl.

“Danke, Fraülein.”
Erich's voice. He was still there, then. He yawned audibly. Yawned again. Tomàš said something Ian couldn't catch, and the rest of the Germans roared.

He thought suddenly of Mokie: his father's face, blurred in memory and gradually replaced by the set image of a photograph. It captured nothing of his soul. Mokie had known exactly what death was like. Not glorious. Balls torn to shreds. Please, dear God, he thought, in a variation on the old theme, help me to face death more like Mokie.

There was a crash from the front room. A chair had toppled over. None of the Germans was speaking anymore. The only sound was a persistent snoring.

The door to his death chamber eased open. She was standing there. Staring at him. A look of horror and pity on her face.

“Bond,” she whispered. Then she came swiftly to his side. She had a knife in her hands. She cut the ropes at his arms. He tried to move them while she freed his legs, but they fell to his sides like planks of wood.

“Otto,” he ground out.

“Drugged. They're all drugged. I put it in the food.”

“Erich. He didn't . . .”

“Betray me to them? No. Maybe even
he
wants out.”

She glanced over her shoulder as a man's shadow filled the doorway.

God help us,
Ian thought. Then he saw who it was.

“Dutch,” he gasped.

“I'll help you get your shirt on.” The Polish pilot was sweating profusely, and his hands shook. “
Skurwysyn
—what have they done to you?”

More Polish obscenities as he saw Zadiq.

“
Kurwa!
We'll never get trousers on these two.” He glanced around the storeroom. “Blankets. There must be blankets.”

“Out there.” Siranoush tossed her head toward the front room.

Dutch disappeared from Ian's view. He closed his eyes for an instant; Siranoush was cutting the bonds on Zadiq's arms.

“We'll have to carry them out one at a time,” Dutch said.

“Arev?” Ian asked.

“Dead,” Siranoush said brusquely.

She'd freed Ian's legs. He tried to move his feet. The mere twitch of his thigh muscles sent agony spiking through his abdomen. He had to stand up and free himself from the chair, but his mind skittered away from the pain.

Dutch lifted one arm, then the other, as he eased Ian's shirt onto his back. Ian was still weak; but sensation was returning. From his shoulders to his fingertips, he throbbed with blood.

Dutch gripped him beneath the armpits. “Swear if it helps,” he said. “Now. On the count of three—”

“No,” Ian said clearly. “Get Zadiq out first.”

—

“A
MBASSADOR
W
INANT?
”

“Yes?” He poked his head out of the conference room. He and Anthony Eden, Churchill's Foreign Secretary, were fine-tuning the proposal for postwar Poland's borders. Stalin demanded the frontiers respect the Molotov-Ribbentrop Line of 1939—which had been guaranteed by Hitler—because it returned Ukraine and White Russia to the Soviet Union. The British government preferred something called the Curzon Line, which dated from World War One and gave a bit more land to the Poles. Roosevelt wanted the Poles to gain territory to the West, land taken from Eastern Germany. He'd ordered Gil Winant to talk to the Brits. If anybody could broker compromise, Winant could.

Gil lifted his brows at the uniformed NKVD officer standing before him. The man inclined his head. “You are requested on the telephone line.”

He followed the soldier to the embassy switchboard—the obvious nerve center for communication, as opposed to the secret one below stairs that Michael Hudson had found. A young woman offered him a receiver. He put it to his ear. The woman remained standing, staring at him, as did the NKVD officer. Both were probably ordered to listen to his conversation. He turned his back.

“Winant speaking.”

“Good evening, Mr. Ambassador.”

“Mr. Diba! What a very great pleasure, sir.”

“As it is for me.” Diba switched immediately to French. “I regret to disturb your conferences, Mr. Winant, but I have encountered a slight problem at the Park Hotel. There is a young British woman in uniform sound asleep in a chair in the lobby. We do not believe she is one of our guests.”

Winant frowned. “Is she a member of the Occupation Forces?”

“I do not think so. When I arrived here for my usual luncheon, I observed her in the hotel bar. I will add that I noted her particularly, because she was in the company of your American friend. The one named for the river.”

“Where is Mr. Hudson now?”

“Certainly not in the Park Hotel.” Diba hesitated; Winant could almost feel him thinking down the telephone wire. “We have tried to rouse the young lady. She remains quite insensible. In view of that—and a similar incident involving another young Englishwoman—I decided to call
you,
sir, rather than the British Embassy.”

“I see.” Winant thought quickly. He would find Sarah and take an embassy car. “Get some coffee into her, Mr. Diba. I'll be there as fast as I can.”

—

Z
ADIQ HAD NOT
regained consciousness, and his breathing was labored. Ian guessed he was in a coma and envied his near-death state. It allowed Dutch to throw a blanket over Zadiq's body and lift him like a large sack of potatoes. He turned carefully and made his way through the room full of snoring commandos.

“Water?” Siranoush said.

Ian lifted his head.

She held a cup to his mouth and he felt the liquid seep between his lips. It dribbled over his chin. He tried to raise a hand to wipe his mouth—and found that he could. He grasped the cup and drank by himself.

Then he looked at her. “Is there a car?”

“A taxi. We paid it to wait.”

“Where do we go?”

“Back to the bazaar.”

Ian shook his head. “Zadiq needs a doctor. So do I. We go to our embassies this time. You, too—and Dutch. You'll be safer there.”

“Can you stand?”

Ian met her eyes. No tears of pity there—just ice-cold determination. “I can try. Let me hold on to you.”

He grasped her shoulders and clenched his teeth. The blood from his torn genitals had congealed on the wood frame of the gutted chair. Like a bandage, he thought. Tear it free in one go. He bore down with his hands on the girl's frail shoulders and forced his thighs to lift him.

The dancing dots of pain swam again in his vision. Siranoush, unbalanced, took a step backward. He swayed and moaned but did not scream. The blackness cleared. He stood upright by himself.

He swaddled himself in the blanket she gave him and said, “Let's go.”

They shuffled slowly into the front room. The time it took seemed endless. They were horribly noisy. Exposed. At any moment, Ian thought, one of the men would wake and with the reflex born of years would reach instantly for his gun.

Otto was sprawled across the table, his head in his arms. Ian was tempted to take the knife Siranoush had used to cut his bonds and plunge it into the man's back, but she was guiding him carefully along the wall, well away from any of them, and he did not have the strength to fight her. Or the strength to plunge a knife.

The house's front door eased slowly open. Dutch's head peered around it, and he seemed about to speak. But there was a small
pop!
as though one of Pamela's Pol Roger bottles had blown its cork, and Dutch forgot whatever it was he had intended to say. With an expression of astonishment, he crumpled suddenly to his knees. Then fell face forward to the floor.

A neat black hole was burned through his back.

Ian looked from the dead Pole to the man in the doorway.

“Hudders,” he said. “I've been wondering when you'd get here.”

M
ichael Hudson had a gun trained on them—a High Standard HD .22 caliber pistol, the usual OSS issue. It had an integral sound suppressor—a silencer. Wonderfully effective for killing a man in broad daylight.

He shoved Dutch's body farther into the room with his foot and closed the door. The Polish pilot lay like a bundle of old clothes in the entryway. “How long have you known?” he asked.

“Since I heard about Pam Churchill's German one-time pad,” Ian said. “You and I both know the Fencer uses Enigma codes.”

“My mistake.”

Ian drew breath. It hurt to expand his lungs. “Pammie knew you'd searched her things back in Giza. You were afraid she'd tell Churchill. So you spiked her champagne in the hope she'd die. When she survived, you were forced to frame her—and produce a plausible reason for a suicide attempt. But it was the wrong evidence, Hudders. You couldn't produce an Enigma encoding machine. I'm sure you've got one in your hotel room at the Park—but you needed it for this operation. So you showed Grace the one-time pad.”

He shrugged slightly, his head down. “I didn't know you were here in Tehran, Johnnie. Or that Grace would tell you about Pamela. I tried to get you out of this. Why didn't you go home?”

“Because I never do what I'm told.”

Michael stepped deliberately over Dutch's body and set his gun down on the table with a sigh. “No. You don't, do you? It's the pin-striped pants all over again.”

Ian closed his eyes. He was still leaning heavily on Siranoush. “I wish it were. I wish there were some reason to stand with you, Michael. But we have different loyalties now.”

Michael shoved his fingers through his hair. “Stand with me! Nobody stands with me. That's what those pants were all about, Johnnie. You made a fool of yourself then, and it's exactly the same now. You think you've betrayed me—but I'm the one who's going to walk out of here alive.”

“You betrayed yourself,” Ian retorted harshly. “Quite early in the game. You allowed me to
live,
that night you coshed and stabbed me in Giza. The Fencer ought to have killed me. It was a contradiction I couldn't figure out. Alan Turing's basic rule of code-breaking.
The contradiction that holds the key to everything.”

“I guess I never wanted you hurt.”

“Because it would have been killing a bit of yourself,” Ian said implacably. “I know. Stupid of you, Hudders, to hold on to any kind of feeling. It's a luxury your sort can't afford.”

Hudson's face twisted briefly. Regret? Grief? “
My
sort. The ones who are really running this war,” he said. “As opposed to the Ian Flemings—who just think they do. You live in a fucking fantasy world, Johnnie. You always have. You like to think you break the rules, but you've never broken any that matter. You've never killed a man just because you could or watched the best hope of a nation explode in flames. You don't have that kind of power. You're a hero of the old school. And you're going to die a ridiculous death. Do you know what a waste I think that is?”

“Probably for the best.” Ian ignored the grief for both of them that was turning his heart over. “I'm not fit to live in your world.”

“No. I've known that for years.” Hudson's eyes roamed over the sleeping Nazi commandos. “What happened here? Chloral?”

“Barbiturates,” Siranoush said crisply. “Much more effective.”

Hudson inclined his head. “I'll have to take some lessons from you, sweetheart. Come here and give me a kiss.”

She did not let go of Ian, but he felt her stiffen beside him.

“Siranoush,” he said slowly. “She's the Kitten?”

“Of course.” Hudson smiled faintly. “She was right there on the inside of the NKVD operation. And along the way, she'd picked up
you
. She kept me informed. But I didn't know Commander Bond was my old friend, Ian.”

“Yet she couldn't let me die, either,” Ian said. His grip tightened on her rib cage.

“She's a woman. Emotion's her weakness.”

“Don't be so bloody patronizing. She's worth ten of you.”

Hudson set down his gun and lifted Skorzeny's head. He pulled back one eyelid. “How much of that stuff did you give them?”

“I don't know,” Siranoush said woodenly. “Perhaps too much. It had to be . . . enough.”

Hudson allowed the colonel to slide to the floor. Then he pulled out Otto's chair and sat in it. He sighed. “Christ, what a day. We'll have to make coffee and start getting it into them, or they'll be no use at all. Put Ian down and get working on it.”

“I can't sit, old thing,” Ian said, before Siranoush could move. He was swaying as he leaned on her, and he doubted she could support him much longer. He summoned his ebbing strength to face Hudders; he would not appear weak. “My arse is out of commission. Which reminds me—did you kill Zadiq, too?”

“If you mean the bloody corpse in the taxi, I didn't bother. He won't last till midnight. What did they do to you, Johnnie?”

For a second, Ian almost thought Michael cared. “If you're a very good boy, I'll let you have a look,” he said.

“He needs a doctor,” Siranoush burst out. “He has lost too much blood. There will be infection—fever—”

Hudson frowned. “That's not possible tonight. The last conference dinner is about to start, with kisses and fanfare and bullshit no one will read in the morning. We need to sit tight and get our rest. Stir up the troops and push through to the end.”

“Long Jump?” Ian asked.

“Sure. Everybody says
ta-ta
tomorrow.” Hudson grinned—his old, familiar look of mischief. “Gonna be quite a send-off, Flem.”

—

S
ARAH
O
LIVER
and Gil Winant were pacing the floor of a private dining room in the Park Hotel with Grace Cowles between them. Abolhassan Diba had informed the Tehran police—because, as he explained to Winant, he could not allow the Park's guests to be drugged in his bar. Winant had called the British and Soviet Embassies, asking for Hudson, and had been unable to locate the man anywhere. He was not in his room at the Park Hotel. He seemed to have left Grace Cowles in the lobby and vanished into thin air.

The Signals officer's head was lolling like a broken doll's, and her eyes were closed, but she was no longer a dead weight, and from time to time she made a faint moaning sound that suggested she was doing more than dreaming.

“She got less than Pamela, didn't she,” Sarah said.

“Probably just the one dose. Pamela took a second in her bedroom. Which raises a question,” Gil replied. “Was Grace just meant to sleep—and was Pamela meant to die?”

Sarah shook her head. She had kicked off her high heels and was walking the carpet in her stockings, aware of both increasing tiredness and panic. She and Gil were supposed to attend the final Tripartite Dinner tonight. Their absence from the Soviet Embassy would be noticed. Hers could be put down to a headache. Gil's was a diplomatic breach that bordered on a political insult.

“Either, probably,” she said. “It's the coward's murder weapon—let God choose. The chloral is just a passive agent. It sets off a chain of events that may or may not end in death. Like the man who administers it.”

“I wouldn't call that cowardice.”

“No?”

“It's a supreme act of egotism. Any man who believes he's an agent of Fate is convinced he controls the future.”

“Does that sound like Michael Hudson?”

Winant pursed his lips. “I wouldn't have thought so yesterday.”

“Then he's very plausible,” Sarah suggested. “Which means he's clever enough to subdue his egotism to a greater end. But what's the point, Gil? Why poison these women?”

He did not immediately answer. He was convinced that Pamela's drugging had been attempted murder—because she had caught Michael Hudson spying. Had he really found a codebook in Pamela's drawer in Giza? Or was the whole story a lie?

What Winant could not explain was the decision to drug Grace. What did she know—or what was she capable of doing—that threatened Michael Hudson?

“You say she works for Pug Ismay?” he asked Sarah.

“His personal assistant.”

“So she must know a good deal about the PM's plans.”

“Absolutely. Lives in Pug's back pocket. Sends out all his intelligence. She's worked Signals most of the conference—it was she who connected me to Mummy when I was forced to call home with the bad news about Pamela.”

“Signals,” Winant said thoughtfully. “Any idea how she came to know Hudson?”

“She's an old flame of Ian Fleming's. He and Hudson were always palling around.”

The girl stumbling between them suddenly lifted her head. Her lips parted. In a slurred voice that was almost unintelligible, she said, “Ian.”

Sarah and Winant stopped walking. Grace's eyelids were fluttering.

“Quickly,” Sarah said. “More coffee.”

“It's stone cold.”

“Does it matter?”

They eased Grace onto a sofa. She was definitely awake—staring blearily before her, dazed at the strangeness of her surroundings. “My head,” she moaned.

Sarah cupped one hand behind the girl's neck, and with the other held a cup of coffee to her lips. Grace tasted it and grimaced. But she held on to the cup with one hand and helped Sarah guide it.

A few seconds later she said, “Where am I?”

“The Park Hotel,” Winant said.

Grace closed her eyes. “Am I drunk?”

“You had a drink. We think it was drugged.”

“That's mad.”

Gil met Sarah's eyes. Sarah shook Grace gently and said, “Who bought you the drink?”

“Michael.” Her eyes opened. “Michael. He was with Pamela, too.”

“Good girl,” Winant said. “You're thinking again.”

“Oh, God!” Grace gestured away the cup and tried to force herself upright from the sofa. “Ian. I told him everything about Ian.”

“Fleming should be back in England by now,” Sarah soothed.

“What time is it?” Grace was still struggling to rise.

On impulse, Winant reached out and helped her to her feet. “It's nearly seven o'clock.”

“Which means it's four-thirty in England.”

“Thereabouts,” Sarah said.

Grace's eyes were wide open now. She began to walk unsteadily toward the dining room door, her arm clinging to Winant's. “He wanted me out of the way. In case Turing cabled.”

“Who?” Winant asked, bewildered.

“The Fencer.
Michael.
” She clutched at his arm. “I've got to get back to the embassy.”

—

T
HEY LAID
Ian on his stomach across a couple of chairs. Hudson began to rouse the unconscious paratroopers while Siranoush attempted to bathe Ian's wounds. She used hot water and gauze she took from a dressing kit she had found in one of the Nazis' packs. There were iodine tablets in the kit, too, and she dissolved one of these in a teaspoon of hot water and painted it on Ian's torn flesh. She gave him a knife with a wooden handle she discovered in a kitchen drawer, and he put this between his jaws like a dog. When she touched him, he left deep tooth marks in the wood.

“You should have listened,” she whispered. “You should have stayed out of all this.”

“But then we should never have met,” he gasped. “Only think how tragic that would be, Kitten.”

“My name is Siranoush.”

“Ah. So
something
you told me was true.”

He could feel her tense as she worked above him, and for an instant he was afraid she would deliberately hurt him. But she governed her temper. The searing pain of the iodine dissipated and he was able to breathe again.

“How did you meet Hudders?” he asked.

“Years ago. Before the war. He knew Nazir.”

“Nazir being the sort of man to play both sides.”

“Nazir played only his own. He was a Soviet, remember.”

“And you? What are you playing at, Siranoush?”

The gauze moved with deliberate pressure, regardless of the cost. Gentleness would never have got the job done. She was that kind of woman. Despite everything, he could admire her. The inner certainty that kept her alive.

“I want revenge.”

“Against us? The Allies?”

“No, no.” She shook her head; he glimpsed a fall of blond hair. “I like the Allies! Someday I will live with Hudson in America.”

“So that's the lie he told you.”

“But first I must revenge my parents. My mother died in the Gulag. My father—God knows where. We were left, my brother and I, in the NKVD camp. Stefan was shot for stealing bread. He was only eleven years old. I could not save him. I could not . . . And I . . .”

“Grew up angry.”

“I was sold to Nazir. When I was fourteen. That was six years ago.”

Ian considered this.
Not
her grandfather, then. The exchange of money for the life of a girl suggested something far beyond repugnant.

“You want to kill,” he said. “And Nazir is already dead.”

“I made sure of that. It was many years in coming.”

The knife blade to the carotid artery. What had she said? Her market basket rolling to the floor. Vegetables smeared with blood.

“And now? Who do you kill now, Siranoush?”

She was silent. Her fingers probed at his exquisite agony.

He did not repeat the question. He already knew her answer.