Dutch spent several hours longer than he’d expected at Habbaniya, so that Ian and the girl could get medical attention. Ian’s stitches were intact but seeping blood; a medic painted him with iodine and applied fresh bandages.
Fatima had pieces of German steel in her left arm.
“It is of no importance,” she said impatiently, as the medic picked at the shrapnel with a pair of surgical tweezers. “Nothing hit bone.”
“Where did you learn to shoot like that?” Ian asked.
She lifted her eyebrows coolly and ignored the question.
He left the clinic and found Dutch beside his plane, examining the propeller with an RAF mechanic.
“Where’d you pick up the girl?”
“I knew her grandfather,” Dutch said.
Ian noted the use of the past tense. News of murder traveled fast.
“Where’d she learn to aim a gun?”
“In an NKVD training camp, of course,” the pilot said. “They’ve got a strict up-or-out system. Hit your targets or die trying.”
“NKVD? That girl? She can’t be out of her teens.”
Dutch grimaced. “Communists don’t believe in childhood. Try to get some food or sleep, Bond. I have some repairs to make before Tehran.”
Ian made his way to the airmen’s lounge. The door from the tarmac was unlocked, but the place was utterly deserted at three a.m. There was a pot of stone-cold coffee that still managed to smell burnt. He went around the bar counter and used his good arm to rummage among the higher shelves. There were bottles of Bass and Guinness. A half-empty fifth of bourbon. And another, surprisingly, of—
“Vodka,” Fatima said behind him. “I would like a martini. Shaken, not stirred.”
“I don’t think you have a choice,” he replied, without glancing around. “There isn’t a shaker in the place. Much less ice.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. That brute of a doctor used an ice pick on my arm.”
She was smiling crookedly. There were dark hollows under her eyes and her child’s skin was almost transparent with a mixture of exhaustion and what Ian suspected was grief. She spoke English with a heavy accent but great precision. She was wearing borrowed khaki clothes that looked vaguely military but lacked any insignia. A field uniform for an operational girl.
“Who killed your grandfather?” he asked her gently.
“I don’t know. But when I find out—” She glanced away, toward the silhouette of Dutch’s plane.
“You weren’t there?”
“I had gone to the market. I found him when I returned. On the floor. You saw him?”
Ian shook his head.
“His throat was slit. The Egyptians, they do this sometimes, for sacrifice—with sheep or goats, not men. I dropped my basket. Vegetables, oranges, bread. They rolled into the blood on the floor. God forgive me, I tried to pick them up—”
Ian handed her the vodka.
She tipped the bottle straight into her mouth and drank it like water, like she was overcome with heat on a summer’s day. “Then I packed a small bag and left him. I did not run, because he trained me in such things. You run, you draw attention to yourself. I walked very fast through the streets of our quarter, and I went veiled, like a good Egyptian woman. I turned into side streets and doubled back on my trail as he taught me, and I do not think anyone was following. So I went to Dutch.”
“Why?” Ian asked. “Why come to Iran, Fatima?”
She set the vodka bottle carefully on the bar. It was nearly empty.
“Because you know, and I know, that my grandfather was hunting a German agent. Someone has to finish the job.”
“And avenge him?”
“That, too.”
“He shared his work with you? Wasn’t that dangerous?”
She shrugged, and winced as her arm twinged. “My choice, not his. I do not ask why you are in Dutch’s plane, Mr. . . .”
“Bond,” he supplied. “James Bond.”
“Men are expected to fight and women are told it is dangerous. You are hunting him, too, no?”
“The Fencer?”
“Or Butcher. Whichever you like.” She met Ian’s gaze and shrugged slightly. “He is a killer. Call him anything else, you give him power. You give him a story to tell, a myth to wrap himself in. He becomes a monster of fear and greatness, harder to fight. But this Butcher? He is just good with a knife.”
“You’re better with guns,” Ian said quietly.
Fatima smiled again—that heartbreaking, crooked smile.
She was unlike any woman he had ever met. How many had he known well, however, besides his mother, Eve? And even Eve he did not begin to understand. There had been a fearless girl he had loved briefly in Geneva and a clutch of cousins he’d known in Kitzbühel. His old lover Muriel, who skied like an Olympian and wove her motorbike through the London bombs as though they were raindrops. He was drawn to women who flouted convention. Who flouted fear. But he expected them to desire and need him.
Fatima needed nobody.
It was a challenge, this brittle indifference she wore. It intrigued and alarmed him. She had been schooled by brutal circumstances and pitiless teachers. There were stories of endurance she could tell. And yet she was here—barely twenty, a gossamer thinness. Weariness about the eyes. She remained. She could teach him what no other woman could: how to risk and die.
He walked behind her across the tarmac an hour later when the Sow was ready to fly, uncertain whether anyone who had drunk so much would be capable of mounting a plane’s wing. But she seemed unaffected by the vodka or her bandaged arm, allowing Dutch to hoist her up. She skittered across the body of the plane to the gunner’s seat, camouflaged once more in her goggles and flight jacket. She did not look at Ian as he stood on the tarmac, staring at her. She was already examining her gun mount. Dawn was breaking.
Three hours later, they landed in Tehran.
—
“THE DETAILS ARE SKETCHY,” Averell Harriman said, “but hair-raising. Our Russian friends tell me that a squad of German commandos parachuted into the foothills outside the city about three weeks ago. Soviet security forces rounded up all but six of them. Molotov says they’re true believers, like all Nazi Special Forces. Hell-bent on completing their mission. And their current whereabouts are unknown.”
They were gathered around the breakfast table in the American legation, a litter of stained coffee cups and soiled plates in front of them. Harriman and Schwartz, Hudson and FDR. Elliott Roosevelt and John Boettiger were not included, because they were family, not staff. Gil Winant was already at the British Embassy. General George Marshall was sitting a little by himself, toying with a piece of toast, a skeptical expression on his face. Harry Hopkins was at Roosevelt’s right hand. He had eaten nothing, but had smoked three cigarettes to ash.
There were pomegranates in a bowl in the center of the table. Most of them had never seen pomegranates before and had no idea what to do with them. Michael Hudson was the exception. He had split open a fruit and was digging at its seeds with the tip of a knife.
“The mission being . . . ?” Marshall asked.
Harriman shrugged. “Raise a little hell around the conference, I guess. Molotov didn’t really say.”
“Can we talk to the guys they captured?” Sam Schwartz demanded. “Find out what they’re planning?”
“I should have been clearer.” Harriman refilled his coffee cup. “When I said the Krauts were rounded up, I meant they were killed.”
“Or executed,” Hudson observed, “after digging their own graves.”
Harry Hopkins cleared his throat. “That sounds like sympathy for the Enemy, Mr. Hudson.”
“Does it? My apologies, sir. But I think it’s worth remembering that we’re dealing with the Soviets. Who’d butcher their own mothers if Stalin told them to do it.”
“I think that’s a bit—” Harriman began.
“Hear, hear,” Marshall intoned.
Hudson waited for silence. “We should be careful before we believe what the Russians say. Who knows if these Nazi commandos even exist? They haven’t shown us a single German.” He glanced at Roosevelt. “It seems damned convenient, Mr. President, that there’s nobody left to interrogate. Molotov’s ginned up a bogeyman.”
“Why?” Roosevelt wondered genially. He was at ease in his chair, a cup and saucer balanced on his carefully crossed legs. “You know him best, Ave. Any ideas?”
“Molotov’s just the front man,” Harriman said. “We already know Uncle Joe refuses to step outside his embassy’s door. There’s a lot of bad blood between the Persians and the Russians, Mr. President, and it’s not only about this Occupation. This so-called Nazi plot helps Stalin save face.”
“In other words, he wants us to move over to that compound,” Schwartz interjected. “Accept his hospitality. Or Churchill’s.”
“And piss off the fella you don’t take to the dance,” Marshall interjected. “Don’t get caught between the Lion and the Bear, Franklin. Fool’s game. Stay here.”
“With respect, Mr. President, I agree,” Hudson said quickly. “Move into Stalin’s embassy, and you put yourself entirely into Soviet hands.”
“There’s no love lost between you and the Russians, is there, Mr. Hudson?” FDR was smiling his shark’s smile. His teeth were bared, but no emotion reached his eyes. His face was creased with exhaustion; he wasn’t sleeping well in the series of strange beds he’d inhabited lately. “Winston has been pressing me to accept his hospitality. But I hate to give Uncle Joe the idea that we’re ganging up on him.”
“Gil Winant won’t like it if you offend Churchill,” Harry Hopkins said. He was frowning; he was as fond of the PM as Gil was.
“Winston will understand,” Roosevelt retorted. “Like a loyal dog, he always trots back. What exactly is it that scares you about Stalin’s shop, Mr. Hudson?”
“Thugs monitoring your every move,” Michael said frankly. “If Lavrentiy Beria is in the Soviet embassy, the most deadly intelligence network in the world is there, too. There’s a reason Stalin chose Tehran for this conference, Mr. President.”
“Which is?”
“Because Beria has got one of the best NKVD spy networks already in place. His son was part of it for the past two years.”
Schwartz raised his hand.
Roosevelt nodded at him.
“If Soviet intelligence is as crackerjack as Hudson says,” the Secret Service chief suggested, “shouldn’t we believe what they’re telling us about the Nazis?”
This unexpected reversal stopped the conversation dead.
Marshall looked at Harriman. Who looked at Roosevelt.
“Mr. Hudson?” Roosevelt queried.
“They’re more interested in you, Mr. President, than anybody else in the world right now,” he said. “You’re meeting Marshal Stalin for the first time. You’re about to negotiate the invasion of Europe. The future of the Balkans. The fate of Poland. He wants to know what you think. In the privacy of your own bedroom. No sitting president in your shoes would place himself in the hands of such an enemy.”
“He’s our ally, Mr. Hudson,” Roosevelt reminded him.
This time, the silence was profound.
It was a matter of faith in government circles that Stalin was a friend to the United States. Somebody the President could work with. A sagacious and capable guy. But Hudson had followed the Great Terror of 1938. Lavrentiy Beria had made sure that Stalin’s rivals were accused and tried and shot for their crimes. Thousands had disappeared overnight into the gulags. Stalin’s boys made the Gestapo look like Judy Garland’s Lollipop Kids. Hudson doubted Roosevelt had an inkling of this, and it was no time to explain it to him. Roosevelt was still studying Michael’s face. “Does your friend Fleming agree with you?”
Hudson glanced up quickly. “I couldn’t say, sir. We never discussed Mr. Stalin.”
“I read his most recent cable. It tracks with the Russian story. He thinks these Nazi commandos want to assassinate all of us.”
The men around the table stirred restively.
“I think it’s possible Commander Fleming wrote that in an impaired state, sir,” Hudson said. “He was recently hit in the head, not to mention stabbed in the back. He lost blood. He can’t have been thinking clearly. And his story is . . . well . . . a little fantastic. In my opinion.”
“What story? What cable?” Harriman demanded.
He pushed back his chair and threw his napkin on the table, a potentate denied his empire. “And who the hell is Commander Fleming?”