Copyright © 2005 by John T. Cullen. All Rights Reserved.

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Intersect: Danger

a novel

by John T. Cullen

14.

Part II: London, 1943-1945

London, 1943-1945

Tim Nordhall flew from the Congo to the Canary Islands, courtesy the Belgian airline Sabena. From there, he flew to London on a Pan Am Boeing-314 flying ship. London was to be his home for the next two years or a little more. He loved the city’s atmosphere and antiquity, particularly Big Ben (in St. Stephen’s Tower near Westminster Bridge and the Houses of Parliament) shuddering the hour-strokes through dark fog so thick neither German bomber nor American tourist could navigate—leave it to Cockney taxi drivers.

In early 1943, Tim underwent several months of training as an O.S.S. operative, learning the elements of spy craft. He studied the rudiments of cryptography and parachuting. He learned about cryptic radio transmission, dead drops, shadowing, and more. Starting mid-1943, he lived a double life.

On the Navy side, as Lt. Tim Nordhall, he worked for Commander Jack Stone, a friendly enough bureaucrat with a reserve commission and a University of Chicago degree in law. Jack Stone was 45, a tall, graying, jovial man with crisp blue eyes and a wry little grin. He served in the tangled chain of command that ultimately led to the Allied high command headed by Winston Churchill, Charles deGaulle, Dwight Eisenhower, and a number of other famous names.

On the O.S.S. side, as Major Robert Malone, it wasn’t that simple. Officially, he was attached for pay and records to an office in Whitehall, in a back street, behind closed doors and in utter secrecy. It was a place he would never have seen unless his situation had not become dangerous in the extreme in late 1944 not long after D-Day and about the time of Hitler’s counter-punch at the Bulge.

Tim’s only real contact on the O.S.S. side was a shadowy figure code-named Jaguar, whose real name Tim did not know. Jaguar was a civil servant someplace in the City of London, or at least pretended to be. They met for the first time a month after Tim’s arrival in London.

Tim spent most of his workweek on the Navy side, as if the O.S.S. side did not exist. He worked with a Naval Intelligence branch that analyzed captured enemy munitions and equipment. Their working location was a village outside London—Tinning Mallow to its British workers; Marshmallow Heights to its American work force. Every morning at dawn, a train would come in from the southeast, from London, disgorging about 2,000 men and women in a variety of military and civilian garb, speaking a variety of languages from English to French to Polish and beyond. Some of the work was highly top secret, but most of it had the usual Government nod of Secret. Much of it was carried on in a maze of converted railroad repair workshops belonging to the London tube system, which had sent cars and locos out this way for servicing before the war. In the middle of the sooty little town was the ruin of a glass and iron Victorian structure that had been bombed to rubble early in the Blitz. Inside that hulked a half dozen or more rusting steam locomotives under piles of debris and coal. The yard had been slated for obsolescence anyway, and no effort could be spared to clean it up. Like so many other things in a world on hold, that would have to wait for the future after the war, when and if that ever came. The war seemed to keep dragging on and on, year after year. Entire childhoods and youthful years were gulped by the hideous maw of its deprivations and depredations.

Tim and his section, which worked for Jack Stone, were tasked with examining salvaged Axis maritime equipment. Tim had shared a small office with two female petty officers that specialized in radio equipment. Both of them, plain young women from the Prairies who brought with them a white-bread, no-nonsense dedication, were quite smart and liked to joke in innocent little ways that Tim found pleasant but frustratingly inhibited.

Tim had a tall, narrow window overlooking a narrow flowerbed bounded by remnant gravel ballast from the town’s fading rail factory days. Tinning Mallow was slowly becoming a suburb of London, and before the war, people of the middle manager class had started buying tidy little homes on tidy little streets and commuting to the capital to work in its banks and administrative departments. Now that commuter influx was swollen with American and British military personnel, and Marshmallow Heights had a booming little American Main Street with jazz and bebop joints that swung all night. The pubs might close and open at bizarre hours by American tastes, but soft drinks were on sale at any time. Shifts came and went at staggered hours. Main Street glittered with activity around the clock.

A large bomber command base lay nearby. It was common to see young women in uniform pouring out to watch several hundred machines droning by overhead—some with engines out, or engines burning and trailing long plumes of smoke. Once or twice, Tim watched a hapless B-17 or B-24 or B-25 quietly emit an extra ugly black column of roiling gray-black smoke and disappear with a loud clapping echo into the hillsides. Smoke would pour up into the sky, and a lone little box of a fire engine might be seen cruising along country lanes looking utterly out of place.

By late 1943, Tim moved to a flat in Westminster, not far from Victoria Station. It was larger, and he shared it with a roommate—another young U.S. Navy officer named Stan Kehoe. Stan was a well-intentioned guy who often managed to say the wrong thing, or speak at the wrong time. He worked in ONI with Tim and held a Secret clearance. He knew nothing of Tim’s work with O.S.S. Stan was a good-natured, freckled young man with short sandy hair, who tended to talk out of the side of his mouth, faster than his brain could follow. He was honest and easy-going, and Tim felt he couldn’t ask for a better fellow to room with, if room one must. Stan had a girlfriend, English girl he’d met in Tinning Mallow, by the name of Connie Brace or Branch or something, whom he took the train to see each weekend and it appeared they were pretty serious. Good for them, Tim thought. Good, too, to have the place to himself on weekends.

Jaguar, a slim Englishman in the ubiquitous work uniform of the London middle manager—black suit, umbrella, briefcase, bowler—met Tim for the first time on a quiet side street near the bombed out church of St. Dunstan in the East on St Dunstan's Hill, between Lower Thames Street and Great Tower Street. This was within a stone’s throw of the ancient Roman wall outside the Tower of London, and not far from Scotland Yard and other highlights. London life flowed on around these landmarks as well as around their ruins, as it had for thousands of years and would no doubt continue on for at least a few thousand more.

A telegram arrived, slipped under Tim’s apartment door when he arrived tired from work and a few touts at the pub up the street. “Robert,” it read, “Jaguar has the stamps you ordered. The 1913 Philatelic was not available but...” and so on, the coded nonsense Crane had taught him to decipher.

Jaguar was an ageless man, maybe 35, with watery blue eyes, thin brown hair with the first speckles of gray, and a bland sort of pleasant Everyman face. “This will be our meeting place when I summon you,” Jaguar said. He sat on an age-blackened wall overlooking the rubble-strewn green area under the ruined walls of the church. The church had been a small Wren masterpiece. Now only some of its window arches, and the tower itself, remained intact. Jaguar sat looking away with his umbrella and briefcase stiffly on his lap. Tim stood nearby, finishing an orange from his lunch, careful not to get his fingers too sticky. Jaguar said: “This will be our only mode and time of contact. I'll have more instructions as time goes on.” He rose abruptly, and walked away, leaving Tim at the rubble's edge.

Tim was promoted to Lieutenant Commander, with access to increasingly top-secret materials, including decryption devices for the latest German naval codes. Once or twice, he made trips to an installation outside London called Bletchley Park.

He dated a number of English and American women, nothing that lasted. His American girlfriends typically completed their tours and returned home, one of them to a fiancée she had not mentioned, and Tim found that bit of dishonesty quietly devastating. He still kept seeing the faces of drowning men just under the waves, their arms waving at him when he slept. He always remembered their names—Jerry Harris whose wife Edna had the finches in Manchester; Ben Meyer whose Shula probably cried daily over her carpets right here in London; red-haired Harvey Kinnan, whom he’d watched torn in pieces by sharks, whose wife Nuala was a nurse right here in London; and of course dour Jerry Harris with the dark staring eyes. It was material for many a nightmare, many a strangled scream awaking suddenly sitting up choking and unable to go back to sleep.

There was an H.M.S. Sturmer mothers’ league centered in Canterbury. Tim first learned of this organization from Jaguar, who instructed him on firm orders from Crane not to go, not to contact any of the bereaved parents—and the official British line was that the ship had gone down with a total loss of life.

Stan Kehoe, too, had his ups and downs.

One day, Tim returned home from work to find his friend getting quietly drunk in the backyard. Rain fell on the grass, while Stan sat still in uniform, tie loose, with a bottle of gin in one hand and a toothpaste glass in the other. Stan was already leaning to one side in the white wrought-iron lawn set—four chairs, and a table covered by a torn multi-hued umbrella. Tim was just in time to rescue him from a fall on the flagstone walk. “Connie Bruce,” Stan managed to mumble, “she’s run off with a freckled guy from the U.S. Army, damned infantryman, gonna get killed and see there we are, whatcha get, she’ll eternally regret...” On that dire note, Stan passed out in Tim’s arms. Tim had a hell of a time dragging the body upstairs to bed.

In the next few weeks, Tim almost welcomed Stan’s morbid state because it distracted from Tim’s own bleak horizons. A British attaché with the Logistics office invited Tim and a Limey navy nurse named Anna Stokowska to join them at a tea. The British officer was a fellow named Billy Seward, who’d lost an eye in the Battle of Britain flying a Spit, and now did desk duty in the espionage circus. Anna was a pretty blonde, a classic Polish beauty with blue eyes, pink cheeks, and dimpled snowy skin. She hung on Tim’s arm, and Billy Seward’s eye did not fail to notice her. He was a tall, boyish looking man of 30 with a black eye patch and a deceptively mild manner. He later asked Tim: “Where did you find her? Do they have any more of her?” and Tim told him most likely in Warsaw.

“You fellows often look so bleak,” Billy Seward said a week or so later, with a glance at Stan Kehoe, at an office coffee and cookie munch sponsored by the American A.G. in this wedded U.S.-European command. Billy held a cup of tea laced with vodka, and a cigarette on which he puffed voraciously. He asked about Anna Stokowska, and Tim told him his new flame was on duty just then.

Stan and Tim each politely maintained a bracing dark porter while outside the wind howled. Leaves blew against the light-tight windows. The glass rattled in its frames, and one was almost tempted to pull up the blinds because no Kraut would be out flying on such an afternoon. But rules were rules. “You should stop by our shop sometime,” Billy Seward said.

Acting on that invitation, about a week later, Tim organized a trip across the sunken courtyards, amid long-dead lanterns in which birds nested ever since blackouts had become a way of life. The British were good hosts, amid their canvas-draped filing cabinets and locked library vitrines. Tim had a vague idea that they were in the same game, picking apart lost screws and radios and machine gun parts. In fact, Billy Seward introduced Tim to a senior colonel, saying “This is Lt. Commander Nordhall, Sir. He wrote the fascinating white-paper about assaying hardware to determine the enemy’s lot as we bomb them into the ground.”

The colonel, a pale man with bushy gray eyebrows, who looked like a schoolmaster who smoked so much there were hints of yellow in his brows, nodded. “I think I read your paper, Nordhall. Nice piece of work. Picking out clues from the purity of the alloys and so forth. I think we found traces of contaminants, using your method that suggested the Huns are mining inferior ores on their own land. Good sort of hip-pocket information.”

“Thank you, Sir.”

“Tim is a clock-maker,” Seward said, with easy social grace.

“Indeed.” The elderly man effused: “You will love London. All we have here is clocks, if the damned pagans would stop bombing our churches.”

“I’m enjoying London very much,” Tim said. A loose knot of happily glowing, gin-soaked faces were beginning to form around their elderly baron. The old man noticed the ribbons on Tim’s chest. “Been through some shooting, have you?”

“Had a ship sunk under me, Sir. Coast of Africa.”

The other nodded. “You and Seward here. Damn shame. Young men and all. You should be out squiring, not firing.” He burst into laughter, echoed by the barks of the young officers around them.

“You are a poet, Sir,” Tim said.

The old man reddened. “Oh, what. Sunday school rhymes. I teach Latin when we aren’t living behind sandbags. Small private school for boys in Devonshire. You ought to come up and visit some time, when you tire of London. But then, wasn’t it Boswell who said, if a man...”

“...Tires of London,” Seward said, “he is tired of living, for London offers all that life has to afford.”

More laughter. The party drifted hither and yon, as parties do, and that was when Stan tugged anxiously on Tim’s sleeve. Stan pointed to a particularly attractive young woman. “I’m in love, buddy.”

Tim used both hands, gripping Stan’s dark blue dress uniform by the padded shoulders, to position Stan in the line of vision so he could look past Stan’s ear to examine the lady in question. “She is an angel indeed,” Tim said. “But she seems to be hovering around that guy with the gold ropes swinging from his uniform, or is that a detail you prefer to ignore?”

“Just look at her,” Stan whispered as if they were in a church looking at a stained glass figure of some holy woman. Tim looked, and saw why. Of course the dark uniform, the white blouse, the tightly wrapped bun of dark reddish-brown hair, added a framework of crispness. She had pale skin and a softly angular face that looked as though someone with great talent had carefully brushed her features in, making it look easy, making it look careless as her clean white smile, her lively dark eyes in pure white settings, like fine bone china. Whoever she was, she had a polished, perfect sort of insouciant grace that brightened the entire room. She was the woman for whom the WREN uniform had been designed; she and no other; that was immediately clear. She was a lieutenant, with cute little cords and bangles of rank and decoration, and young officers did seem to hover about like sullen magnets, like little planets soaking in the glow of her sunlight.

For a moment, Tim thought she must be American. Maybe a visiting movie star. Stan, for his part, seemed to think so too, and was having trouble swallowing. Then Tim heard, quite distinctly, her charming and well-tooled upper class British dialect. Immediately, he was conscious of the entire divide. Perhaps the Gilbert and Sullivan admiral standing nearby was her father, or her lover, or for that matter Jupiter to her Io. In any case, it was immediately clear that they were equestrians while the rest of the crowd were an array representing the plebs.

“Give it up,” Tim told Stan.

“I can’t,” Stan said. “I’ve fallen in love.”

“You’ve fallen out of your mind.”

In the ensuing weeks, Stan’s infatuation for Claire Denby became a source of amusement and comment between Anna and Tim. Stan was one of several loose ends who tended to hang about until they went off to get drunk at the O Club. It was a sad, hard fall for Stan, who had seemed so happy with his Bruce or Bryce woman. Anna leaned close, smiling, one evening as they sat in plush blood-leather chairs in a restaurant near Pall Mall. Stan had just left on one of his drinking errands. Through the smoke and gloom, she told Tim: “Don’t worry, he will find another woman. But I do not believe it will be this Clair Denby gal.”

Not surprisingly, however, from rooming and hanging out with Stan, Tim frequently came into parallel orbits with Claire Denby and her older paramour. They were very discreet, those two, hardly ever touching or betraying emotion, but Anna was able to point out what seemed obvious to a woman. “He is cheating on his wife,” Anna told Tim, “and she is shallow and insincere, but I don’t know what her game is.”

Tim found himself to be disappointed at that verdict, almost annoyed with Anna. How unworthy that such enchanting and lively beauty should be so easily written off. To drive her point home, Anna said: “She is like leather inside. I can tell.”

Tim almost fell in love with Claire Denby himself. It seemed many of the Americans in particular did, though the Brits for some almost genetic reason seemed to shy away from her. He found himself fantasizing about her until one night, while walking an unfamiliar route on an errand to fetch medicine from a chemist shop that was open late, he saw the two of them come staggering out of a private home. She looked delectable in a tan and white outfit with high heels. Tim stood fascinated, capturing the near-erotic intensity of the moment. They were quite inebriated, and her skirt was hiked up in the back. Lord Humhaw had one hand up her behind and the other on his fly as they bounced from wall to wall on their way to his car. Apparently he was trying to urinate while walking, and at the same time clumsily fondle her, while she laughed like a braying horse. Tim glimpsed pale skin and gorgeous curvature, but her hat was on crooked, and she laughed too loudly. Then she stopped abruptly and lost about two gallons of brown fluid from the mouth, in several seconds of turbid high pressure discharge that momentarily hung like a sheet in the air before her, then loudly spattered down her front and all over the sidewalk. Her outfit now had a large wet cone shape on its front, and Tim turned away in distaste. She seemed cheap, and her companion seemed an incomprehensible match of age and grossness.

A few evenings later, Stan had had a few drinks too many to drive safely. It was a rainy evening, and the Germans momentarily quieted on their side of the Channel. War raged across Europe, and buzz bombs dropped randomly on Britain, but at the moment it was nothing like the nightly horror of the Blitz that people talked about. Britain was full of Americans, Free French, Poles, anyone who hated the Nazis, and there was a growing confidence now that the Krauts were being pushed back into their own country. In that relaxed, almost excited atmosphere, Stan demanded that Tim drive him to a small village about forty miles north of London. Tim was tired and tried to demur, but Anna was working and Stan was insistent. So rather than stay home and catch up on his sleep, Tim found himself driving Stan along narrow country roads, trying to dodge between the ubiquitous military convoys that tied up traffic everywhere.

“Would you mind explaining what this is all about?”

“Sorry,” Stan said, “maybe a bit later.” He looked about with an air of conspiracy. “The walls have ears.”

They rode in silence a while, Tim driving, Stan behaving rather smugly with an air of someone who has been desperate for so long that the most harebrained scheme begins to seem logical. “I’m telling you,” Stan said nursing a cigarette and a small bottle of whiskey in the passenger seat, “I am finally going to strike while the iron is hot.”

“Claire Denby?”

“Yes.”

“You’re still not on first base, and you never will be.”

“I am in love, Tim.”

“Don’t you get it?” Tim was annoyed. He’d seen enough of the beautiful Claire to follow Anna’s instant assessment. “You are American. She’s some sort of British snob. They look down on their own people. To people like her we are the colonial riffraff that came back to do our duty and help them out of a jam. Then they’ll want me and you to go back to our farms or wherever we came from, and they’ll want to get on with their Empire.”

Stan shook his head. “Tim, my boy, you are getting cynical in your old age. Open your eyes, in the beauty of youth, and live thy short span before snows close our petals softly, and without pity or remorse, forever.”

“What is that, John Donne? Shelley? Keats?”

“Stan Kehoe.”

“You’re kidding.”

“She drives me to poetry. Isn’t that insane?” Stan lounged dreamily back in his seat, forgetting his cigarette until it burned his fingertips and he had to throw it out the window, fumbling. Then he explained: “I’ve been spying on her. Hard act she is to follow. She’s got some kind of dark and unfortunate thing going with old Brigadoon there, who's old enough to be her father. I can’t figure it out. But she has smiled at me more than once.”

“She hopes you’ll take a hint and go away,” Tim said.

“She wishes I would come and rescue her. And that I shall.”

“I have to save you from yourself,” Tim said. “That’s the only reasonable explanation for why I am driving you across England in the middle of a squalid night like this.”

“The rain has let up,” Stan said.

“But the fog is setting in, you dumb bastard.” Tim had to start rubbing the condensation off the inside of the windshield with an old rag, because the heater was out.

“We could stop for a dram or two,” Stan said, pointing to a tavern.

“Closed. They look up the liquor at all sorts of strange hours to keep the working people productive.”

“Too bad. Well, we’ll scare something up in Ledding Lyme. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this, pal. You will forever be a hero to me.”

Tim shook his head. “Remind me to stay home and get drunk instead.”

“Now don’t be harsh. You’ve got Anna. She’s a beautiful young woman. You can afford to be patronizing.”

“I’m sorry. Don’t mean to be patronizing.” Tim pulled over and took a leak in a foggy field while thunder growled and lightning flashed someplace far away. What a mad night. When he got back in, he said: “Now either you explain, or I head back home.”

“Spoilsport. Okay.” Once he’d made sure Tim was headed to the town of Ledding Lyme, a crossroads in the middle of nowhere, Stan launched forth: “This babe, Claire, is a spy.”

“No.”

“Yeah. I’m sure of it. I was eavesdropping on her and Lord Haw Haw in a dark and dank murky cellar under the armorium where we toil, by the banks where once the Fleet flowed. I kind of know where they meet, and I have been looking for an opening.”

“You are sick.”

“I know. Love makes one ill. Love makes one puke. Love makes one, well, crazy, so here I am. I’m not the only one. Half the building is in love with her. You know that guy with the pirate eye patch, Billy Sewage? He actually warned me off. He’s in love with her too! So I’m listening in on this argument she and Lord Scrimshaw are having. She is demanding some kind of document, and he is saying he can’t fork it over because ships will sink and planes will fall from the sky. England will be forever lost. He pleads with her to run away with him. They will settle in the Bahamas or some other faraway nook of the Empire, to raise roses and fuck night and day so she’ll forget he has a paunch. He’s got a couple of bluish jowls, older than she is, that are pickled in forty years of strong drink.”

Tim interrupted Stan’s monologue: “What does she sees in that guy?”

“Yeah, well you know how it is. Host country nationals.” That was the old byword from a hundred training films—never raise an eyebrow no matter what the Host Country Nationals do or say. If they offer you a drink of something that smells like shoe polish mixed with goat’s milk, kindly thank them and demur, saying you are of a religious denomination that prohibits...well, all sorts of rubbish like that. Tim and Stan both laughed.

“Seriously,” Stan said, “I’ve got it figured out. She’s a spy. She’s been letting this geek violate her in return for some information that she needs.”

“To sink our ships,” Tim said thickly.

“To shink our sips, but there has to be a reason,” the lovelorn Stanley mooned. “Don’t you get it, Tim? See what I mean? Here is my chance to tell Lord Humbug to fuck off and go tend his tulips and be thankful I didn’t turn him in, and at the same time I tell her I can save her if she’ll only let me.”

“How?”

“I don’t know yet. I’ll figure that out as I go along.”

“Stan, you are insane.”

“I am Napoleon, leading my armies. I trust my fate. I will prevail.”

“He died on an island halfway to the South Pole.”

“I’m a lot younger. I have a long time left.”

“You go on the wagon tomorrow, you hear?” Tim couldn’t help laughing. “I swear, unrequited love has turned your brain to porridge.” He added: “So why does she have to betray her country?”

“I don’t know. Figure it out. She needs money to save the family castle.”

“And you can help her more than he can.”

“Just get me there, Tim. I’ll figure out what to do. First, I need her love and cooperation. Love conquers all. She’ll see the logic immediately and surrender to my charms.”

They came to a crossroads in the middle of nowhere, just as Tim had expected. Two narrow roads—flanked on either side by hedges, which contained fragments of ancient walls—met at a little turnabout. On a metal post were several enameled signs: Lyme Canter, Lyme Wendell, Less Lyme, Upper Lyme, but no Ledding Lyme. “Now what?”

“We find a cop and ask directions.”

“Right, it’s nearly ten thirty. British cops are probably all in bed by ten.”

“An old Civil Warden then. They are always on duty.”

“Right. Here we go.” Off they sped, Tim picking the most likely target, which happened to be Less Lyme. His worst fear was that they’d be sent back and forth from one Lyme to another, by various well-meaning souls who insisted the correct Lyme was ‘that way, just over the hill there.’

Not only did they not find anyone to ask for directions, but Tim found they were driving in large circles and getting low on gas. The same landmarks began to whirl past with tiresome regularity: a certain large tree, a hedge with a hole in it, a small tan car parked at an odd angle before a stone church, a village in which several shop lights still burned behind locked doors, and so forth. They passed the unhelpful crossroads several times. Stan was out of liquor and beginning to sober up, though he complained of a low, nagging headache.

The fog was really starting to roll in now, bringing an eerie silence. The men had the windows down, and the echoes of the motor rattled back and forth through pastures and orchards.

“That church back there,” Tim said. He tortured the car through a six-point turn on the narrow road and drove back.

“We’ve been by it a dozen times,” Stan agreed. He half hung out the window, head, shoulders, one arm. “We’ve got to find her!”

Tim was on the verge of calling a halt to the adventure and driving home, when they rolled up the gravel path before the Church of England Ledding Lyme parish chapel.

Tim cut the engine and they sat in silence.

In the silence, the little car parked nearby was making eerie clicking and popping sounds. “Cooling down,” Tim said. “Been driven recently.”

“Damn,” Stan said. “I could have sworn I heard her say to meet him in a town called Ledding Lyme.”

“Well, it’s not a town, and it’s not Ledding Lyme,” Tim said, “but we found it. No Claire.”

“Yes, but what is that in the car over there?” Stan asked, pointing. He still hung half out the window.

Tim looked at the oddly parked little tan car, which seemed to have exceptionally smeared windows. “Let’s get out and stretch our legs.” They stepped out on the gravel. Tim left the parking lights on. Footsteps crunching, they walked across the front portal, to the edge of a little copse of trees, where the car sat with its windshield glinting with reflected amber light in the darkness. The car was a rather plebeian Leyland.

“What’s that inside?” Stan asked. He’d begun trembling.

Tim felt a knot in his stomach. He leaned in close and rubbed water off the window. “Stan!” he said, seeing a twisted shape inside.

Stan came running around the front of the car. “There’s a man inside!”

“It’s them,” Tim said. He tried to pull the door open, but it was locked. Inside were two bodies, and they weren’t moving.

“Oh God!” Stan shrieked. “It’s him! Then that must be her!”

The windows were smeared with gore, and there was a smell of gunpowder in the air. The older man’s face peered out, fish-like, as if he’d been caught in a net and dredged from the lightless void at the bottom of the ocean, where his skin was white and his eyes were pale blue dots swimming in egg white. His face was tilted up, his mouth open in a gaping motion. His pale hand, and the heavy black service revolver it held, were plainly visible as Tim frantically and mechanically kept wiping his raincoat wrist in compulsive and endless circles. “Stan, what the hell is going on?”

“Oh good Jesus,” Stan said holding his hands over his ears. He appeared to be fully sober now. He fumbled with a cigarette, but dropped it in the wet gravel at his feet. Then he dropped the whole pack. Small white cylinders, cigarettes, dropped out and got wet.

“Gentlemen,” a voice said.

Tim and Stan whirled and looked at several men in hats and raincoats who had appeared on the church steps. With them were several constables, including two British military policemen in red caps. Tim noticed infantry-like figures hovering in the mist holding rifles.

Billy Seward stepped down and walked across toward Tim and Stan, who stood frozen. Tim’s heart pounded in his neck. He had trouble breathing.

Seward lit a cigarette and stuck it in Stan’s mouth, slapping him on the cheek, audibly, humiliatingly. Seward stepped close to Tim. “You too?”

“I really have no idea what is going on,” Tim said.

Another, older man stepped down. He was gray-haired and chubby, with thick glasses. “Dammit, Seward, I told you to sanitize this mess.”

Seward seemed a bit rigid, but tried to regain his usual comedic composure. “Sorry, Inspector. The last thing I ever expected was this fool to come rolling along, much less our friend Nordhall. Quite a combination.”

“Never mind the comedy,” the Inspector said. “You know these fellows?”

“I’ll take full responsibility for them, Sir.”

“Then run them over to the station and keep them there until I can deal with them. Hurry.” A powerful dark-green sedan pulled in with only its parking lights on. It was an American made Ford, olive-drab, with British plates. Its motor thrummed in the night. “Get in if you know what’s good for you,” Seward said. “Hurry.”

Tim and Stan sat in the back seat. Seward sat in the passenger seat beside a young red-haired man with a steely face, who wore a plain black suit and coat. As they pulled out, another man followed closely, driving Tim’s car. They left the tiny country church and its grisly scene behind. Tim estimated that all this had transpired in less than ten minutes.

“You boys may have blown a major operation for us,” Seward said, lazily popping a stick of American spearmint gum in his mouth. He didn’t offer to share. He sat with one elbow over the neck rest, looking toward the backseat while the driver focused on the road ahead.

“Sorry,” Tim said. “We were out for a drive. I had no idea.”

Seward shook his head, grinning sardonically at Stan, then addressing Tim again. “Sorry, won’t wash. Too much of a coincidence, your working in the same area in London, and then showing up less than twenty minutes after Colonel Grimsby kills himself.”

Stan whispered: “Was that Claire in the car with him?”

Seward stared at him as if Stan were an insect. “No, Mrs. Grimsby.”

Stan was pale and silent. Tim explained as briefly as possible, from his friend’s infatuation to their joy ride out here.

Seward chewed his gum pensively, looking from one to the other. “This is your roommate?”

“Yes,” Tim said.

“You have some explaining to do, both of you.”

Tim could imagine the consternation, the need for explanations, the possible reprimands, Article 15s, who knew what, when he did not show up for work in the morning. It would be at least as devastating for Stan. “Tell them the whole story, Stan.”

Stan nodded. “I was hoping to help Lieutenant Denby. I had no idea the situation was so grave.”

“Really?” Seward chewed noisily. The car smelled of spearmint overlaid upon damp wool and dusty upholstery. “How grave did you think it was?”

“I don’t know,” Stan said, getting more rattled. “I just thought...I overheard them talking. Her and Colonel Grimsby. I thought she was a spy.”

“Uh-huh. Keep talking.”

“You knew.” Stan’s eyes widened. “You knew all along. You were watching her. Waiting to catch her.” Stan’s mind seemed to be churning out ideas that spilled over the wheel of his tongue as fast as they came into being. “You had a stakeout going. You were waiting to catch her accomplices, and then we blundered along.”

“Very close,” Seward said. He looked at Stan with much contemplation. “You have it backwards. He was the spy. She was working for the Crown.”

Stan looked as if he’d been struck by lightning. The effect was amplified by the fact that the car pulled into the back parking lot of a brick building. The Ledding Lyme Police Depot, according to a sign looming out of some bushes in the fog.

“Let’s get out,” Seward said. They all stepped out onto crunching gravel. Seward sent the driver away into the building. “You men stay here a moment and we’ll talk.” He stood staring at them. Stan gave Tim a look of apology and Tim stared back in annoyance. Fog rolled by thickly, and the air smelled damp and woodsy.

Tim’s car drove in and was parked. The driver got out, exchanged a few words with Seward, threw him the keys, and went into the station. Seward threw the keys to Tim, who was relieved to get them back. “The question before us is, what to do with you two.” Seward took out his gum, slowly rolled it into a ball, and tossed it far away into the woods. “Things are back to where they were before you rolled in, and we may still catch our Germans if you two didn’t warn them off.”

“I’m so sorry,” Stan said. “I got him into this.”

“You guys want this to be over with, forever?”

“Yes!” Tim and Stan said in one voice.

“You both have high level clearances, so you won't be made to disappear to some destroyer escort guarding ice floes south of Australia. I know where to come find you if either of you opens your mouth.”

Tim cleared his throat. “Billy, okay, we get the message. So what’s the poop here? How do we get on with our lives.”

Tim never saw Billy Seward again. Stan Kehoe was transferred to California not long after. A late night bash over beers with a few fellow officers sealed the deal, and Tim drove him to his standby hop on an elderly B-17 heading for retirement from RAF Lakenheath.

There was, however, an upshot to the whole thing, about which he did not tell Stan until long after—the following year, in San Francisco.

A few months after the Ledding Lyme suicide, a new girlfriend invited Tim to attend a concert at Winchester Cathedral. Ginny Bell was a pretty brunette Canadian veterinarian from Toronto. She worked with police dogs at a military facility in Bath.

Tim and Ginny took a train from London’s Waterloo Station to Winchester, about 50 miles southwest. They wore raincoats and carried umbrellas, because it was early winter 1944. Tim had been intimate with Ginny, but it had subsided into a pleasant friendship. Ginny was one of those women who forever had a program of every scheduled event for miles around, and Tim could always count on her to have a pair of free or cheap tickets (when they weren’t available through the USO or its British sister agency), and they walked arm in arm. The concert was scheduled for 2 p.m., and they arrived at noon, in time to eat a leisurely lunch of fish and chips (the fish fresh from Portsmouth on the Channel). They strolled through the ancient city, enjoying the park, the museums, the medieval guild hall, High Street with its market and shops, and the famous cathedral.

Winchester Cathedral had the longest nave of any medieval cathedral. It had a spectacular 12th Century Bible in the original Latin of St. Jerome’s Vulgate, lavishly illustrated with gold and jewels, and representing the life’s work of a band of master craftsmen. As Tim and Ginny wandered from exhibit to exhibit in the sprawling complex, they noted there were plenty of visitors and tourists despite the war. As at St. Paul’s in London, many of the stained glass windows were packed away for safe keeping.

As they passed through the galleries, they heard an organ start up. Ginny gripped Tim’s arm and whispered: “They’re staring early. We’d better hurry.” As they rushed toward the chapel where the concert was to be, they heard the piping voices of boy choristers starting to practice. Organ music stunned the echoing and incense-smoky space with exquisite ribbons of sound. Then, as they passed another side altar, they heard the stentorian voice of a priest, and when they looked, they saw two men in bishops’ miters and gold-crusted copes or cloaks. Their white-gloved hands held gold crosiers like question marks. A crowd of well-dressed persons stood around a baptismal font, including men in military uniforms glittering with gold, a few of them with old-fashioned tricorn hats with white plumage. “Friends,” said one of the bishops, attended by several priests, “we are gathered here for the solemn and joyful occasion of christening the newest child of Sir Peter and Lady Jane MontRobert DeLory, whom I hold here in my arms.” He raised his arms, draped with the lacy edges of an alb or white tunic, and in his hands was a baby girl exquisitely swaddled in expensive linen and lace, with pink bows in her thin blonde hair. The bishop’s voice echoed among the burial stones of British gentry going back centuries as he said: “We are honored to celebrate with one of England’s most ancient families the birth and christening of Lady Elspeth Marie Jane Beatrice Anne Victoria Kempton MontRobert DeLory. Please, let the parents and siblings step forth.” As Tim watched in amazement, several small children in immaculate suits paraded forth. Behind them on crutches came a slender young dark-haired army colonel wearing a sword and fancy uniform; he was missing one leg but carried himself with strength and dignity. On his arm, demurely dressed in a somberly joyous mauve dress complete with pillbox hat and eye-net, was the beautiful woman briefly known as Lieutenant Claire Denby. Her thin, tastefully red-glossed lips, dark hair, white teeth, crisp facial features, were unmistakable, along with the humorous eyes.

Ginny tugged at Tim’s sleeve. “Honey, you are gaping.”

While serving with the logistics intelligence command, Tim was permitted to send short, heavily censored letters to his mother in New Haven, with greetings to his sisters.

From the replies he occasionally received, he learned that the letters were posted for him from Tinning Mallow or a neighboring town. His superiors were not letting him let his family know that he was openly working for ONI in London, because the strategy was to sow seeds of doubt that perhaps he was really Robert Malone working under cover of the late Tim Nordhall, deceased in the sinking of H.M.S. Sturmer. Anyone interested in checking would have readily found out that he was performing some functions for O.S.S.

To boost this ruse, Jaguar called him to their rendez-vouz point on a drizzly day. As water dribbled down from the broken ogives, and ivy splattered in a light wind, Jaguar huddled under his umbrella. Tim stood nearby, hunched in his poncho, with his hands in his pockets.

“Robert Malone will have to show more signs of life,” Jaguar said. “There is a weekly courier pouch that goes from a technical section of your headquarters to a courier division across town at Home Army Division One. Starting next week, Robert Malone will start carrying that pouch, to keep his hat in the ring.”

Props to support the Malone deception arrived via a package left by his apartment door. The packet contained I.D. card, ration cards, dog tags, and other items ostensibly part of Major Robert Malone’s life. Tim sat on his bed in a gray half-light, while rain dribbled outside the window, and read a small brief about Malone.

Feeling strange, he changed into civilian clothing at three p.m. on Thursday, and walked a quarter mile across town to a factory facility on Womble Road. There, as instructed, he signed in at a front desk as Major Robert Malone. He showed the Malone I.D. card and was ushered through a series of heavy, locked gates and down echoing semi-lit hallways to a U.S. Army secure technical facility. There, a sergeant had him sign a log book and handed him a canvas bag with a heavy lock built into the zipper. As far as the sergeant seemed to be concerned, his work was done and he respectfully wished Major Malone a good day.

Feeling downright creepy, Tim marched with his bag, out through the gates, wished the pretty young female English petty officer a good day, and took a taxi across town with his bag. He dropped the bag off at Home Army Divisional HQ, where a British NCO signed for it with a snappy but respectful “Thank you Sir!” and the deed was done. Let the Reds or anyone else track his comings and goings. It was after 5 p.m. now, and he stopped at a pub for dinner, taking the rest of the day off. This would be his routine for the next seven months. Every Thursday at 3 p.m. he would become Major Malone and repeat this ritual.

One day, on a Friday afternoon in autumn 1944, long after Ginny Bell had returned to Vancouver for good, Tim had a dinner date with that same attractive slender young blonde Polish nurse, Anna Stokowska.

Tim had become very fond of Anna, and he feared she might be more smitten with him than was good for her. They’d gone to a few movies and concerts, and slept together a few times in a hotel room upriver near Windsor. Anna was warm and loving, and Tim found himself in that awkward limbo in which he found her irresistible but could not fire the extra piston or two to fall in love. Nevertheless, he felt a stirring for her that he hadn’t for the several attractive British, French, and American girls he’d been dating around London.

Anna’s English was exceptionally good, since she was of aristocratic background and educated at a London finishing school in the late 1930s. She’d stayed on in England after the Polish occupation in 1939, changing her training from education to nursing so she could be of more immediate practical use in case someone, somewhere, decided to come to her nation’s aid...which nobody did, Germany being the big bully across the continent, France gone, England on her knees, but Anna had soldiered on. Tim couldn’t tell her about his own background, but she quietly sensed there was more to his story than he could tell her. Again, it was one of those friendships with the spark of sex but not the flame of love, and they enjoyed their passion as much as it served them in the loneliness of being far from home. On that particular Friday, he was in a taxi headed for Highgate when it suddenly occurred to him that he had forgotten his wallet at the office. He told the cabbie to turn around, right at Shoreditch Park.

As they raced back toward the River, Tim glanced at his watch. Pulling the tan leather of a glove back, he saw that he might barely make it to the restaurant, assuming Anna was late as she usually was coming off her shift at King’s College Hospital in Denmark Hill.

It was now six p.m. and the main iron gate was closed as the taxi let Tim out. Still wearing his naval uniform, he dashed through the small side gate. He returned a snappy salute rendered by a fatigue-clad Royal Marine toting a Bren machine pistol. He made his way through a complicated set of diversions, including sandbagged corridors and blacked out windows, under the watchful eyes of several Marine NCOs, and came to the night desk. There, a corporal checked his I.D. and questioned his reason for coming in.

“I usually come and go by the main entrance, Corporal. Sorry. I left my wallet in the office. Anxious to get to a dinner date.” He showed his I.D. badge and the man nodded. “I understand fully, Sir. Please sign in and we’ll have you right on your way.”

Tim picked up a pen and started to fill in his information: name, rank, service, nationality, I.D. number, the works...as he scribbled furiously, his eye roved up a few lines, and his hand froze in mid-signature. A Major Robert Malone, U.S. Army, had signed in just twenty minutes earlier. The service I.D. was the same one as on the Malone card in Tim’s pocket.

Shivers ran up and down Tim’s back as he glanced at the signer’s destination: the top secret map room on the third floor.

Tim stopped and stared at the corporal, a bony man with a large Adam’s apple, who stared back with blue eyes that radiated a desire to be helpful. The corridors inside were busy, even at this hour, with night shift and round the clock signals people, mostly in Marine Corps and Army uniforms.

“Is everything all right, Sir?”

“I’m just thinking.” Absently, he began to doodle over his name and signature to make them illegible without making them stand out too much. Hopefully, the impostor would not notice.

“Hot date, remember, Sir?” The Corporal winked.

“Yes.” Tim laid the pen down. “Thanks.” He calculated. It would take him about 15 minutes to get his wallet and make it back here. Dinner with Anna was out, that was for sure. He’d call her later at the restaurant. She’d have to be understanding. Maybe they could still link up later. At the moment, however, he had a mystery to solve.

As he rushed down the zigzag corridors with their caged-in overhead lights casting a ghastly gleam on men and women carrying gas masks at their sides, and the occasional grunt clomping along in hobnails, Tim thought furiously. Was there a chance of some mistake? He kept coming up with no. Somehow, the impostor had to have shown an I.D. badge similar or identical to the one Tim was carrying.

Tim entered the locked office where he’d labored all day. He flicked on the lights and marched past empty desks to his own. With trembling fingers he unlocked the desk and took out his wallet, pocketing it. He locked the desk, turned out the lights, and let himself out. Trying to seem nonchalant—what if the impostor spotted him? What if he didn’t recognize the impostor?—he strode back to the night entrance. As he signed out in the book, he noticed that “Malone” was still in the building. How to handle this?

“Corporal, I’ll wait over there by the statue if you don’t mind.” He pointed with his chin to a rather typical London figurine, a beautifully carved honey and white marble of some 18th Century aristocrat in pigtail and breeches, waving a book in one hand and holding a thin, elegant sword erect with the other hand. The niche was in a dark corner with a window overlooking the path outside.

“Not at all, Sir. Do you need me to call you a taxi?”

“Not quite yet. I’m hoping a friend of mine will come by.”

“If you need—“

“No, really, thanks!”

The man brightened. He winked again and gave a devilish smile. “Quite, Sir. I understand.”

Tim stepped into the shadows and pretended to be looking outside, but kept the corners of his eyes on the desk. He tried to position himself so he could tell at a distance who had signed which line as individuals left.

The corporal’s desk was located under a broad arch. A dim lantern glowed, amber glass trapped in iron cage, in the central ceiling. Footsteps echoed as men and women came and went, each quickly and casually signing in and out.

Tim sweated: would he miss the impostor? He craned his neck to see who was signing where. Finally, unable to stand the suspense any longer, he walked up to the desk and said: “Is there a drinking fountain?”

“Right over there, Sir,” the corporal said without fuss. He was reading a copy of The Times furtively to one side.

“Right. Thanks.” Tim glanced down. The impostor had not yet signed out. Tim went for a sip of lukewarm water that tasted of gravel and chlorine. He just realized how dry his mouth was. As he turned, he almost came face to face with Jaguar, who tromped along in a U.S. Army major’s uniform, carrying a stiff cardboard tube. The tube was olive drab, with a cover and a strap at one end. Jaguar walked right past Tim, but apparently didn’t notice him. Tim froze. He could have reached out and touched the other man’s lapel without extending his arm fully.

Tim turned quickly and had another drink, watching through the corner of his eye. Jaguar signed out, exchanged a cool formal pleasantry with the corporal and a private who had arrived, and left.

Tim sauntered after him, nodding to the sentries in the sandbagged entrance. Jaguar strode confidently along, cool as a pickle, and emerged on the broad sidewalk outside. Tim tailed him, staying just far enough back so he did not have to seem furtive. Jaguar hailed a taxi in the front circle. Tim hailed the next cab and had the Cockney tail the other man. Tim slipped him a five-dollar bill. “No questions,” he said.

“No questions, Sir. Right.” The driver never missed a beat, looking thoroughly bored and in control. He was a slight man, in a light blue sweater, balding early in life, and combing the dun-colored remnants of his long-ago mane over a bony skull that shone like refrigerated cheese. They cruised easily along the north bank of the river, until they came to Cheyne Walk, then Chelsea Embankment, and turned onto Albert Bridge Road. Still following the other cab, they rode down past Battersea Park and the Boating Lake. Then they crossed over toward Kennington Oval, back up Clapham Road, and finally stopped at Cleaver Street.

Jaguar got out of the cab.

Tim was a half a block back, tucked in at the curb behind a blue delivery truck. When he stood half out of the rear door, he could see past the delivery truck that a man walked up and accepted the tube. Jaguar’s taxi roared off, and Tim made a quick decision. He threw a five-pound note in, thanked the cabbie, and hurried up the sidewalk.

The man carrying the tube was a slender little man in a broad-brimmed brown hat. He wore a long dark woolen overcoat and solid walking shoes. He carried an umbrella tucked under one arm and the tube under the other.

Tim followed at a discreet distance, as the man walked toward Kennington Lane in the general direction of Lambeth.

Suddenly, the man stepped into the street and hailed a black taxi, which stopped briefly. The man climbed in and slammed the door. The taxi took off in a screech of rubber. Tim had only time enough to see the white license plate with its black lettering as the taxi drove off into a gathering fog.

What now? Tim stood helplessly on a curb in the middle of a side area of London. There were shops around, several of them open. He walked into a well-lit, warm little newspaper shop and asked directions to a phone.

Tim went around the corner to a familiar red booth. First, he called the restaurant. Anna was waiting for him, and she sounded patient if a bit disappointed. She seemed happy when he asked her to meet him later at the hotel. Then he hailed a taxi and rode it to the only place he thought he should sensibly turn right now: his Navy chain of command. Jack Stone had recently made Captain, and lived with his wife and three children in a tidy little Tudor style second-floor apartment in Alderney Street. As the taxi drove him along rain-slicked streets, he could picture himself having a soulful conversation with his bland and friendly Navy-side boss, whose reaction, as Tim thought about it, would have to be increasingly veiled and furtive. After all, Stone gave Tim top ratings and winked an eye shut at the half day or so Tim absented himself for Special Operations duties on Thursday afternoons. Throwing himself under Stone’s protection would serve to blow what was left of his own cover, Tim began to see, and he told the driver to change course. “Union Street near Blackfriars Road in Southwark.” The driver nodded, seeing Tim waving a pound coin tip, and swung sharply right onto a side street.

After another 15 minutes’ deep thought, Tim stepped from the taxi, paid the main, and put his collar up. The rain had spent itself a bit, but a sharp wind drove cold stinging slivers of water against his cheeks as he hurried down several townhouses, up a flight of steps, and tried to look into a dark hallway through a door whose glass was criss-crossed with wires. Gold lettering arching over a gold bird with a scepter and a fish in its mouth on a black background advertised a victualer company called King’s Point & Pelican Purveyors To The Crown. He pressed a doorbell and waited. A dim red light winked on, and he looked into a small wall nook with little marble columns on either side. A small square of heavy plate glass, onyx-black, regarded him, reflected his face back to him in umber. Tim held up his service card against the glass. The door buzzed, and he pushed inside. Letting the door shut behind him, he opened his coat and shook water from it. The inside was anything but a civilian supply company. Young women carrying cable printouts strode by, wearing U.S. army uniforms. Soldiers and sailors with headsets rushed from office to office with dispatches. The place was in full swing, with officers rushing about like clerks through the smoky corridors. At the reception desk, a tech sergeant looked up. “Lieutenant Nordhall, Sir. What can we do for you tonight?”

“I need to see the Staff Duty Officer, M.I.”

“That won’t be possible, sorry.”

“It’s urgent.”

“What about, Sir?”

“Can’t tell you. I need to see the Old Man.”

“You’ll have to go up the chain first.”

“Let’s do it—fast!”

“Yessir. Please hold.” The heavyset, older sergeant turned and spoke into his huge telephone switchboard. “Down the hall, Sir. Room 101.”

Tim strode down the hall, cap in hand and coat over arm. In Room 101, the duty officer, an Army lieutenant, briefly reviewed the cryptic bits of his situation that Tim could tell him. After some cajoling, Tim reached the assistant Staff Duty Officer, a major, who seemed more interested in an upcoming Saturday football game between an Army and a Navy command near Brixton. Tim and the major were approximately equal in rank, and the conversation became forceful.

“What, you want to keep secrets from me?” the major said, putting his feet up and playing with a leather football.

“It’s a matter of—it’s important.”

A side door opened. A gray-haired colonel stuck his head out. “What’s the commotion?”

The major rose, with a red, angry face, and explained—not in these words—that this Nordhall had disturbed his betting pool reveries and should be shot, although he did not express it in quite that fashion.

“Come in and close the door,” the colonel told Tim.

Conscious of the major’s venomous eyes on his back, Tim followed the colonel into a large office with plenty of bookshelves and oak furniture. The wallpaper was ghastly mustard and yellow stripes, with large bright spots where some family portraits, no doubt a century or more old, had been removed for safe keeping from Yank cigarettes and other depredations. The colonel, a slender aging tennis player type, strode about with his tie loose and his collar open. One hand in his pocket, he held a cigarette with the other and smoked incessantly. The room had layers of smoke that looked almost solid. “Lieutenant,” the colonel said, “I’m the S.O. staff duty officer. My name is Jack Halliburton. One of Donovan’s boys, aren’t you?”

Tim wanted to speak, but couldn’t bring himself to.

“Bill and I play poker on Friday evenings. He and I go way back.” Seeing the look of mistrust on Tim’s face, he dialed through to Donovan’s headquarters. Moments later, the familiar voice of one of Donovan’s assistant adjutants was on the line, and he assured Tim it was okay to spill the beans to Halliburton.

“You can square with me,” Halliburton said, hanging up the phone.

Tim took a deep breath. “Thank you! I’m in over my head, Colonel. I think my contact has framed me. I’m not sure what’s going on, but I want to slap the mat before I get choked out.”

“Tell me what you feel you can.”

Tim trod carefully. “I’m a blind, I guess, if you want to call it that. If you ever went duck hunting, you know what I mean.”

The colonel grinned. “Long as you’re not a dead duck.”

“Not yet, Colonel. I supposedly hold a commission as a major in your service branch, strictly an O.S.S. creation. I’m supposedly a Major Robert Malone who was actually killed in Africa. Tonight I happened to go back to my office, and there was my regular contact, posing as Major Robert Malone and walking out with a tube full of who knows what.”

“Did you follow him?”

“Sure did. He passed the tube off to another fellow, and I had to make a split second decision.”

The colonel chuckled, chin on chest. “Not a trained operative, are you?”

“I thought I was. I feel a bit like a piece of meat for bait, Sir.”

Halliburton nodded, picked a piece of tobacco off the tip of his tongue. “You went for his bluff. Whatever he was carrying, it was probably in his pocket. The tube act would have been to throw off potential followers.”

Tim’s heart sank. “You mean, I was had?”

“That’s my guess, Nordhall. Don’t worry, it happens. Who signed you up for this espionage racket?”

“Man named Crane, in the Congo, in 1942.”

The phone rang and Halliburton picked up. “Yes? Yes. Yes. Yes...” After saying yes a bunch more times, he hung up. “Well, that’s interesting. The license plate you gave...that particular cab made a stop near the Soviet embassy. The fare was a man with a document tube, who got out and walked toward the embassy. The driver remembers seeing a door open, and two embassy guards let him in.”

The room was silent for a moment.

Halliburton said: “You actually delivered an important piece of information without meaning to.”

“What’s that, Sir?”

“It’s another piece of evidence that we can’t trust the Soviets, no matter how close an ally they are at the moment.”

Tim rose. He was tired of shadowy games.

Halliburton seemed mildly nonplused. “Are you going somewhere?”

“Sorry. Effective right now, I’m resigning from my position as Major Robert Malone, since I’ve become redundant. If you’ll excuse me, I have a dinner date waiting.”

The next morning at his regular Navy job, Tim nursed a slight hangover and tiredness, given that he’d killed a large bottle of wine with Anna and then spent half the night making love with her.

Bleary as he felt, he let Donovan’s people talk him into assisting them yet a short while longer in their spycraft. “Follow-through!” they heartily called it, and Tim could see the sense in it. A few days later, as expected, Jaguar did not show up at their assignation. Tim walked slowly through the ruins of St. Dunstan-in-the-East and then down toward Tower Bridge.

A call from Halliburton next day confirmed: Keep delivering the Thursday letters, but otherwise sit tight. It was important not to let the Reds know the Brits had a better handle on the Malone matter than they let on.

Early the following week, late one morning, a yeoman dropped off a little note. He was to call the number circled in purple pencil. He went to a secure phone and returned the call. It was Halliburton. “Nordhall, can’t discuss details just now. Stop by on Thursday. Good work.”

Tim met Halliburton as ordered at a pub in East London, but it wasn’t Halliburton doing the talking today. They sat in a back room that was sealed off. Two radios played simultaneously at an otherwise dark and shuttered bar—one, the BBC symphony orchestra laying down cover in the form of Mozart’s Symphony No. 42, the other a football game between Leeds and Manchester with over 50,000 fans screaming themselves hoarse. This was during closed hours, and they couldn’t order beer, but they were served a decent meal of bangers and mash with hot tea.

With Halliburton were two other O.S.S. officials. One introduced himself as Allen Dulles, working out of Bern in Switzerland, and the other was a younger man who was his assistant. Tim and his three companions were all in unassuming civilian clothes, including hats and overcoats soaked with rain. They were having a working lunch. “I wanted to meet you,” Dulles said, beaming. “Heard about your exploits and wanted to shake your hand.”

“I’m quite honored,” Tim said, guardedly, as he shook the men’s hands.

While water dribbled down the picture window at his side—shade half drawn, window embellished with painted pub name—Dulles ate fastidiously holding his knife and fork in the European manner. He spoke softly, in an aristocratic version of an upstate New York twang that seemed heavily tinged with a variety of subtle accentual shadings from his many years of service across Europe and the Middle East. “Good of you to meet with us on such short notice, Lieutenant.”

“My pleasure,” Tim said.

“I understand your reasons for wanting to leave our service,” Dulles said. “The last thing we want is an unhappy trooper on board. However, I hope I can prevail upon you to think about something.”

“I’ll think about anything you suggest, Sir,” Tim said carefully. Dulles conveyed an air of such stratospheric importance, sophistication, and competence that it was hard not to think about whatever he said. Though nothing was said, Tim suspected Dulles probably held at least brigadier general rank—in any case, he handled himself like a very senior flag officer.

Dulles dabbed his lips with the corner of a linen napkin. “We seem to have lost your handler. You knew him as Jaguar, I believe.”

“Yes, that’s right.” He felt a bit intimidated by Dulles’s matter-of-fact, lordly attitude.

Dulles quaffed at his beer and sighed contentedly, wiping foam from his mustache with the back of his hand. “If we take it on face value—always a dangerous thing to do, but we have no choice at the moment—that our Jaguar is a double agent, then most likely he is working for our Soviet allies. A less likely scenario is that he was working for our enemies over in Germany. We have been able to determine that he made alcohol prints of some maps, and those are what went out in the tube. We know that at least one of the maps was of a German physics research site near Joachimsthal, so it looks increasingly dubious that he is working for the Germans. The fact that he entered the Soviet embassy would seem to clinch it.”

“I’m not done then?” Tim asked.

“Commander, the Soviets are of course our rightful allies, and we understand how desperately they grab whatever they can. At the same time, there are some things we simply cannot afford to give away to anyone. We must guard our intimate secrets at all costs. I am here personally today to beg you—please keep a hand in the game a while yet.”

Tim finished eating and pushed his plate away. He sat back, and with his napkin stifled a belch. Reluctantly, he nodded. “Of course, Mr. Dulles, if you feel it is in the national interest.”

“I do feel that, or I would not presume to ask.”

“Very well then.”

“Thank you, young man.” Dulles looked visibly relieved.

“All I ask is that you keep me from being framed again.”

“I assure you,” Dulles said, “I will personally review your records and see that you are duly promoted, decorated, and whatever else is due to you.”

“That’s all I ask,” Tim said.

“Good. Here’s what I’d like you to do. We’re going to suspend the courier runs. We want to send a vague signal that you are in fact somehow no longer in our trust. You won’t take this personally, of course.”

“Oh no,” Tim said, “I’m getting used to it.”

The other men laughed.

Dulles nodded, grinning. “Good. Good. Sense of humor. I like that. Nordhall, you are in our dearest favor, never mistake it. You are going to be a sleeper, after a fashion. You go right on doing what you are doing, but we are going to transfer you to the West Coast of the U.S.A. early next year. With the invasion of Germany under way, it looks as if it’s only a matter of time until they break. Meanwhile we’ll want to focus on the Pacific war, and we’ll be shifting people in that direction. Until then, I want you to stay aware of the Malone persona, but stop going to that church to meet Jaguar. That’s finished. He’s gone back to his people, whoever they are. If he’s a Kraut, he’ll turn up in Germany. If he’s Soviet, we’ll never see him again.”

“Sounds like an easy thing for me to do.”

“We’ll check in with you about once a month or so,” Crane said. “Nothing to it, Nordhall. Oh, and I’m authorized to inform you that you’ll be receiving a number of decorations shortly in regard to the H.M.S. Sturmer sinking, including the Navy Cross, the Purple Heart, a Navy Commendation Medal, and several British decorations. The citations won’t mention why, but they can perhaps be updated in a few years to show your uncommon what not and so forth. For the moment, we’re leaving it as an open book.”

“What he means,” Dulles said, “is that we won’t tip our hand too much. We want to leave that faint scent in the air, as if we’re not entirely certain what to do with you, when in fact we love you dearly and recognize Uncle Joe has kicked us in the nuts. We don’t want the Commies to see our pain.”

“Understood, Sir,” Tim said with a grin.

“Don’t call us, we’ll call you,” one of the men joked.

“Pleasant way to ease you out,” Halliburton said with a happy, toothy grin. “You’re good on the technical analysis side. We’ll find you a plum job in San Francisco. I believe your friend Stan Kehoe is on his way there.”

“Yes, he is.” Tim looked forward to seeing more of his friend. They shook hands, and Tim never did see Mr. Dulles again.

Regrettably, too, he saw the last he saw of Anna Stokowska, for she was reassigned to a military hospital near Rome. They had one last tender weekend together, during which they made love in a cottage near Eton, went for rainy walks in the green countryside, and shared cozy meals in a country inn. They promised to keep in touch, though wartime correspondence would be difficult. “You come and visit me in Warsaw after the war, yes? My family live in Praga, which is a quiet area. I miss home very much.”

“Sure,” he told her as they nuzzled together in bed, “and I will bring you home to New Haven.” Even as he said it, he wondered if his hometown would ever be big enough for him anymore, with its old brick university buildings and quietly rainy streets in spring, hot and muggy in the summer, snowy in winter, radiant as an orange lantern in the fall. There had to be something more for him, but he had no idea yet what that might be. “I will write to you from wherever I land, and then we can be together again.”

The invasion of Germany started June 6, 1944, and soon Allied forces were pushing through occupied France. V-1 buzz bombs started hitting London the same week, on June 12, and killed thousands. For the first time since the Blitz and the Battle of Britain years earlier, sirens again sounded regularly across London. By late 1944, the V-1’s had ceased to buzz across the sky and drop silently. Instead, a devastating new weapon came silently out of the distance. Sometimes there was a whistle or a contrail, but most often nothing because the V-2 rockets reached the outer limits of the atmosphere and dropped back in at enormous speeds. The V stood for Vergeltung, Revenge, for the horrific bombing of German cities, which in turn was a result of Goering and Hitler’s vicious assaults during the Battle of Britain, and other atrocities.

Tim’s room had a skylight overlooking a little rampart. At one lucky moment—or unlucky, depending on one’s point of view—he lay on his bed resting, glanced out, the window, and saw a buzz bomb or V-1 go cruising by. This diabolical German invention was a kind of super bomb or unmanned aircraft that came sailing in with a loud buzzing noise. Often the RAF sent up a Spit or two to knock one down. The scary part, the thing people stopped and listened to with bated breath, was the silence. When the V-1 was ready to do its dirty work, its engine would cut out. Some people swore little men with mustaches controlled it all from over the channel. The V-1 would come buzzing in like a hornet, sputter once or twice, and go silent. Then it would heel over and drop like a stone, and seconds later one would hear a loud explosion. Sometimes it would land in a field and kill a sheep or two; at other times it would destroy some antique church with lovely stained glass windows that survived the great fire of 1666.

It was all part of wartime life in London. American GIs crowded the streets and defined the new nightlife. British girls, like their American counterparts, made do with scarcity and painted mascara lines down the middle of the backs of their legs to fake the seams of good silk or nylon stockings. People made new clothing out of old. A smart new Eisenhower jacket on a pretty woman might be grandpa’s moth-eaten army blanket from the ironically named War To End All Wars. Here and there, one saw an automobile whose front half had been sawed off, to be replaced by a horse in harness as if the centuries were rolling backwards.

The V-1 carried a one-ton warhead and was powered by a pulsejet motor. It cruised at 350mph at 4,000 ft with a range of 150 miles (240km). It was a small plane 25 feet long with a 20-foot wingspan. Germany launched over 9,500 V-1’s against England in late 1944, causing over a million people to flee London in panic, though most residents showed great bravery and stayed put in their homes and jobs. Half of the buzz bombs were destroyed by anti-aircraft fire or by RAF fighters including the new Gloster Meteor turbojet fighter. Some 6,184 people were killed in the attacks. By late 1944, fewer and fewer of the buzz bombs were getting through to their targets. Then a fearsome new weapon appeared: the V-2. Like the V-1, it carried a one-ton warhead. Hundreds were reaching England by the time Tim boarded a B-29 for his trip to a new posting in San Francisco.

On July 21, the Democrats announced that FDR would seek an unprecedented fourth term, with Harry S. Truman as his running mate. In the Pacific, the Japanese were resisting U.S. advances in the Marianas. On Europe’s Eastern Front, the Soviets were advancing broadly across the Ukraine and into Poland, bombing Warsaw. To further indicate the threatened position of Hitler, a bomb plot by some of his top generals failed, barely, on July 20th. The Allies were starting to plan for the world after the war. At Bretton Woods in New Hampshire, representatives of 44 nations met to hammer out future world monetary policy, establishing the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and creating agencies for reconstruction.

On August 25, General Charles deGaulle marched into Paris at the head of a Free French Army, signaling the effective liberation of France. Right behind him were many Allied unites, including elements of a special O.S.S. team scouting out German atomic bomb sites, with an eye toward measuring Nazi progress toward the ultimate weapon of mass destruction.

In September, the first U.S. forces were pushing into western Germany. Meanwhile, the first of the dreaded new V-2 rockets were beginning to lend in England, causing more panic and more thousands of deaths. For a moment, some of the Allies might have thought there would be atomic warheads coming across the Channel atop those V-2s, but they were relieved to learn the V-2s were simply faster, higher carriers of the same one-ton high explosives payload as their predecessor, the V-1.

In October, MacArthur liberated the Philippines, clearly signaling that Japanese power was on the wane.

Also in October, the Soviets entered the eastern German province of Prussia, historic heartland of Junkers and Kaisers.

At Christmas, when the Allies thought they had it wrapped up, Hitler threw forth a tremendous offensive in the Ardennes, the Battle of the Bulge. For several weeks, Eisenhower’s forces were shaken, until they destroyed the German counter-attack and punched back into Germany with renewed fury under the leadership of Patton.

Meanwhile, at Yalta in the Crimea, representatives of four great nations met to plan how the world would be divided after the war. An ailing FDR, a struggling Churchill who was about to be thrown out of office by thankless voters in Britain, an ineffectual and corrupt Chinese warlord named Chiang Kai Shek, and a wily Joseph Stalin sat down together. It was one of those moments of history when, as with the almost casual British division of the Near East after World War I, a few pencil marks on a map, or an offhand dinnertime phone call, would spell the division of millions of people, the lives and deaths of future generations in the resulting civil wars, and the fate of the world.

Unexpectedly, as he was leaving work one day, Tim bumped into his former boss. As Tim bounded down the steps outside, he nearly knocked down a slim, graying officer with the artificial hand who was just passing by on the sidewalk. Tim saluted. “Colonel Crane!”

Ivor Crane returned the salute and stared for a moment, then brightened. “Tim Nordhall! Well, I’ll be. Looking good—didn’t expect to see you again.”

They shook hands, and Tim said: “What a surprise.”

Crane grinned. “You’re telling me. I was just over here to drop off some paperwork. They have me working over at a British location.” He rolled his eyes up in the general direction of the upriver skyline some blocks away inland. He put a fingertip on his lips. “You know how it is.”

Tim nodded. Half the people in London were on secret business, so why not Crane? “Quickly changing the subject, are you in town for long?”

“I’ll be moving to the Pentagon if this war ever ends.” He held up his arm, with the raincoat half draped over his prosthesis. “Time to chew grass in the back forty.” Both laughed. “Look, Nordhall, can I buy you a drink?”

“I’d be delighted, Sir.” Tim felt genuinely flattered, though a bit puzzled.

“Great! In the City then, a little bangers and mash with a stout to wash it down.” An olive drab Ford with Colonel pennants rolled around. A young black buck sergeant drove, expertly and fluidly navigating the heavy traffic. They got in and Crane said: “You’re looking mighty fit.”

“Thanks. I’ve been walking a lot. Seeing the sights.”

“Women?”

“Oh, a few.” He didn’t mention his disappointment with Anna, and the dearth of really interesting women since. “London is full of pretty girls.”

“It sure is,” Crane said sitting back comfortably in the plush interior. Crane had the driver leave them near Piccadilly Circus and told him to return in an hour. Tim took his former boss to a pub he liked on Friday Street, off Cannon, near the badly bombed out Wren church of St. Christopher Cole. As they climbed over rubble and wound through home defense barricades, Crane commented: “Seems like a million years ago that we were in Africa. Did you ever meet Malone, that poor fellow who wound up in Mauritania with a knife in his back?”

Tim shook his head. “Nossir, it was pure coincidence that the German fellow and I stumbled on him and his girlfriend.”

“Oh yes, the Belgian woman. Regine Clery. Poor thing. Your luck was with you throughout that African ordeal, from the shipwreck forward.”

“Yessir.”

They sat in a smoky Victorian pub with its clutter and mirrors and hard wooden benches. The first ale tasted good, and a rather heavy but hearty smell of fried fish and potatoes filled the air. Tim agreed things had turned out reasonably well. They lifted their mugs and clicked them together in a toast so flecks of foam spattered on the tabletop. “Here’s to your continued success, my friend,” Crane said warmly.

“Good luck to you too, Sir.”

A postcard finally arrived from Anna Stokowska, who had been promoted to Captain in the Nursing Corps of the Polish Army, and was now stationed at a British Army rear casualty hospital in Athens.

Tim dashed off a reply to her, just as he received a visit from his boss, U.S. Navy Captain Jack Stone. “Tim, my lad! The war’s winding down, and we are going back to the States! Are you ready? Pack your belongings and be ready in two days. I have billets for us on board a B-29 on military orders. We’ll fly by way of Paris. Two weeks TDY with SHAEF, just strolling around, and then you’re being reassigned to San Francisco. You get to take a month off in New Haven along the way.”