Michael Hudson was too junior to rate a room in the American legation where Roosevelt and his party stayed. The official U.S. envoy, Louis Dreyfus, had commandeered half of the Park Hotel—Tehran’s finest—for the President’s entourage. Hudson caught a few hours of sleep there and a ride in one of Dreyfus’s cars to the legation the next morning.
The first man he met was Sam Schwartz.
He was familiar with him by sight. But the two men had never had much reason to speak. Hudson walked up to Schwartz, who handed him a cup of coffee. Then he drew him slightly apart and muttered low in Hudson’s ear.
A few minutes later, Schwartz welcomed Averell Harriman with another cup of coffee. Amid all the noise of the ambassador’s arrival, Hudson slipped unnoticed back out into the street.
This time, he took a cab.
—
GRACE COWLES had finished her breakfast. For such an exotic place as Tehran, it was sadly anticlimactic: an expatriate cook’s attempt to reproduce Britain in the heart of Persia. They were dutifully served broiled tomatoes, so out of season that they looked like dead salmon, with fried eggs and streaky rashers of bacon. Grace ought to be thankful—the food in London was so stringently rationed it had been months since she’d seen real bacon—but her mind was not on her work. There’d been a letter for her in the embassy pouch. News from home. As usual, it was uniformly depressing. Her sister Audrey, who was barely sixteen, had gotten into trouble. Which meant that some soldier on leave had either seduced or raped the wretched girl. Audrey would say nothing about the father, however much Grace’s mother beat her. She was ruined now and would have to leave school.
Another casualty of war, Grace thought.
Men, she thought.
She lifted her eyes from the sickening breakfast plate, with its dried smear of egg and flaccid tomato. From this makeshift breakfast room—hastily converted from a lady’s morning room before the Prime Minister’s delegation arrived—the wide windows offered a staggeringly beautiful look at the world. Today it was sunlit, fringed with pines that Grace knew would scent the air with resin. There would be the smell of snow, too, off the heights of the mountains that ringed this extraordinary city. If she had thought about it at all in her hurried progress in Pug Ismay’s service, she had expected Persia to be hot, like Egypt. With palm trees. It was Persia, after all, a word that made one think of rugs and camels and men in turbans. But that was British stupidity. The lovely old embassy sat snugly behind its walls in a lap of green, the pines rising grandly. It was the most restful place Grace had seen in a very long time.
And when they laugh at my dedication, she thought bitterly, they never understand this. Work has saved me. I am no one’s plaything. No war casualty. Or any man’s.
“Grace.”
She peered over her shoulder and felt her heart skip a beat. “Mr. Hudson.”
He was halfway through the breakfast room door, one hand grasping the lintel. His hair was mussed and he was not smiling.
“Have time for a walk?”
She glanced at her watch. “I don’t think so. Pug—”
“And I’m due back at the ranch for a briefing. Five minutes, Grace. Please. We should talk.”
—
THEY CHOSE the back garden, where paths of crushed stone wound among the trees and the distant plash of water suggested an unseen fountain. Another day, Grace thought, she would like to find it. If Pug could spare her.
“Did he send you some sort of crazy cable?” Michael asked abruptly.
“Who?”
“Ian. I hear he was attacked the other night in Cairo. With a knife. That’s why he stayed behind. It wasn’t bronchitis at all.”
“I know,” Grace said. Rushbrooke had told Ismay. Ismay had told her.
“Why didn’t you say something?” He stopped short on the path and glowered at her. “He’s my best friend.”
She hugged herself defensively. “Because I was informed it was a security matter, Mr. Hudson. And however matey you may have become with some members of the British delegation, you are not, after all, a British subject.”
“Matey,” he repeated.
“Much less cleared for our intelligence.”
“Come off it, Grace.” He grasped her by the elbows and shook her slightly. “This isn’t intelligence. This is Ian. You’re punishing me because of Pamela.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You needn’t bother. She was tucked up quite nicely with Harriman last night.”
She stepped backward, safe from his reach. “If you’ve quite finished, Mr. Hudson—”
“Michael. For Chrissake, I’m Michael.” He ran his fingers through his spiky hair. “Look—Ian’s already shared his story with the rest of the world. He sent some long rigmarole about an assassination plot to Sam Schwartz. Schwartz is—”
“The head of Roosevelt’s Secret Service. I know.” Strange, Grace thought, that Ian hadn’t sent the cable to Hudson instead. But perhaps the matter was urgent enough to go straight to the top. In which case—“Why exactly are you here, Mr. Hudson?”
“Because you need to tell your people. About Ian. That this whole cable is . . . is some kind of spy story he’s made up.”
She stared at him, brow furrowed. Was it possible Michael was drunk? Not at this hour of the morning, surely. Had he even read the cable—or merely heard about it secondhand, from the Secret Service fellow?
“Are you saying,” she attempted, feeling her way, “that you know . . . Ian lies . . . too?”
His harassed expression softened. “Oh, God, Grace—I’m so sorry. Is that why you stopped seeing him?”
She shrugged, her gaze falling to the ground. “I couldn’t trust him. He’d tell me he was working late. Or engaged in an operation overseas that was frightfully hush-hush. When all the time, he was just with that . . . female dispatch rider. With the motorbike.”
It sounded pathetic even to Grace’s ears. Jealousy. Disillusionment. Duplicity. The usual ration from Ian Fleming. She’d been warned off him by nearly every girl she knew, before she’d agreed to see him.
“Muriel,” Michael said.
“I’m sorry?”
“The dispatch rider. With the motorbike. She delivers his supply of cigarettes when she has time. It’s a custom blend, you know—from Morlands.”
“Your point?”
“Just that Muriel’s an old flame. She’s known Ian forever. It doesn’t mean a thing to him, sweetheart. She doesn’t, I mean.”
Grace flinched. “That’s even worse. It means we’re all just bodies. Ian’s incapable of caring for anyone but himself. Would you call that arrogance, or something more pathological?”
“I’d call it self-protection,” Michael said. “Something to do with his mother.”
“Oh, Lord—not that old chestnut.”
“If he doesn’t give his heart away, he can’t be hurt.”
“Then he’ll never win hearts, either,” Grace said crisply. “Certainly not mine. But you seem more forgiving, Mr. Hudson. I suppose men ignore the ways they fail each other.”
“Not exactly.” He raised his arms in a gesture of futility. “He doesn’t lie to me. Not about important things. But the guy writes stories, Grace. Spy stories. About adventure heroes. That’s what this cable’s all about. He’s been doing it ever since Mokie died.”
“Mokie?”
“His dad.” Michael began to trudge along the gravel path. “It’s how he deals with—with his nerves, I guess. When things get too tough. He escapes into fiction.”
“The way you do, by playing music,” she suggested.
He glanced at her, his expression arrested. “Why do you say that?”
“I hear it,” she faltered. “In the sound. The pain and . . . and the grief—”
“I play show tunes, for Chrissake.”
“Not always.” She hurried on, aware she had trespassed and he might not forgive her. “Don’t they say the most desperate actors usually try comedy?”
“The point is, Ian goes off into a dream world where fiction is fact,” Michael said impatiently. “And he drinks too much. We joke about all that Scotch he carries around, but seriously, when you look at what he consumes . . . Nerves, again. Last week he told me somebody at the conference—one of us, Grace—was spying for the Nazis. Now he’s convinced the guy is going to kill us all.”
She made a small sound of protest. He stopped short and grasped her shoulders urgently.
“When we were at Eton, he was almost sent down for printing a smutty story about his house master and circulating it anonymously throughout the school. He hated Slater because the guy was a sadist who liked to draw blood. But Ian’s prank nearly cost him his place and, incidentally, threw suspicion on everybody else in his house. I think Johnnie liked that—watching the others squirm.”
“But in the end, he owned up to it, didn’t he?”
Michael glanced at her, surprised. “He told you about it?”
“No. But Ian Lancaster Fleming would never be the sort of scrub who would let another boy take his blame.”
“Actually, you’re right.” A grudging silence. “But try to understand, Grace,” Michael said. “Ian’s not entirely . . . reliable. That’s why I meet up with him at every one of these conferences. I want to make sure he’s on a tight leash when the President’s around. He’s never been sent out into the field, either—Rushbrooke is afraid he’ll make a complete ass of himself and go to pieces. Don’t get me wrong—Ian’s damn good at coming up with Ops. When we were kids, he was the mastermind of every stunt we pulled. But there’s a reason he’s permanently tucked behind a desk. He needs to be under a grown-up’s eye.”
Grace drew a shaky breath. “Are you suggesting that besides being a liar and a cad, Ian Fleming is potty?”
“I’m suggesting that after a guy’s been whacked on the head hard enough to bleed, we might want to give him some time before we swallow what he says,” he retorted.
They walked on. The morning was growing late. She ought to turn back. Pug would be looking for her, and Michael was expected at the American legation—
Ian had sent his cable to the American legation.
Suddenly, she was awash in dismay. He did tell stories. He loved detective films. There had been that one, last summer, they’d seen in London—The Thin Man . . . Nonsense, of course, with a terrier and martinis. But then there were the bones hidden beneath the floor . . .
“If Ian’s unreliable,” she demanded, “why is he still employed? And in such a sensitive intelligence position?”
“Because he’s been shielded,” Hudson said quietly. “For years. By me. By his brother Peter. You know his dad was a friend of Churchill’s, right?”
That conversation in the Signals Room at Giza. The PM signing Ian’s yellowed scrap of paper. Shielded. “Why are you telling me all this?” she asked.
“Because he’s a loose cannon.” Hudson rolled his eyes. “And he’s not in my shop. He’s in yours, Grace. You’re the only person I can talk to, in your delegation.”
Other than Pamela, she thought. But there was no point in stating the obvious. Michael needed somebody in the chain of command. Somebody like Pug, who had Churchill’s ear.
“I’m concerned about the damage he could do,” he persisted.
“What kind of damage?”
“Harriman’s called a meeting of the President’s advisors to discuss Ian’s Nazi threat. Which means Schwartz shared the cable. For all I know, Roosevelt’s read it by now.”
Dismay turned three times and settled like a dog in her stomach. But she said nothing.
“So I repeat, Grace: Did he send this espionage crap to you? Has Ismay read it?”
“Yes,” she muttered. “And naturally—yes.”
Hudson closed his eyes, as though willing a higher power to give him strength. “Then you might want to pass this on. Ian’s cable has the U.S. delegation in such a snit, Harriman says we all ought to move in with Joe Stalin for the duration of the conference. Think about the security implications of that, Grace. And how Churchill will feel when you’re all shut out of our party.”