0630 hours.
He spent the night lying on the floor on his stomach, with a German bedroll unfurled beneath him. Siranoush had split his undershorts to expose his iodine-painted wounds to the air—impossible to place a blanket over them, anyway. Otto had taken the bedroom as a right of rank; Hudson had sat up in a chair all night, sleeplessly waiting.
At around three p.m., Ian asked the question he’d saved for the wee hours.
“When did it all change, Hudders? When did you leave us behind?”
There was a silence. Perhaps Michael was asleep.
After a few moments, Ian wondered if he’d even voiced the question out loud.
But then Michael said: “I didn’t leave you. You let me go.”
“Let you go?”
“Like that day off Dancing Ledge. When I dropped down to the bottom. I could see you kick out for the surface. Away from me.”
“I came back,” Ian said. “I came back and saved you.”
“Not when it mattered,” Michael said. “Not when I was really drowning. Those years in New Haven. And after.”
“I didn’t know. You didn’t tell me.” It was like Hudders, he thought, to make this his fault. He knew how Ian was driven by guilt.
“You never bothered to ask.” In the dim light of the safe house, Michael’s head lifted. “You didn’t have to. You’ve always had a place in the world. Eve and Peter and the rest. You mattered. I was just extra.”
Ian might have protested. Argued. But the self-pity behind Michael’s words seemed suddenly sick.
“So you joined Hitler’s family?” he asked. “Seems a bit extreme.”
“Hitler joined mine,” Michael retorted. “Make no mistake, Johnnie. I control this party. I have for years.”
Poor fool, Ian thought. And asked him nothing more.
Michael was gone when Ian woke at dawn. He was stiff from lying on the floor on his stomach. He felt nothing of the winter cold, however. He was sweating and shuddering at once as he thrust himself upright on his arms.
Fever.
His mouth was parched, and the outlines of the room dilated and contracted before his eyes. He saw the paratroopers begin to rouse, rolling monstrously from their bedrolls. And then a face loomed over him. Bloated and almost unrecognizable. He fell back heavily to the ground.
“Too hot,” Siranoush whispered.
He lifted an eyelid, but the bloated shape had gone. His entire pelvic area throbbed. He let out a groan.
“Here.” She was back, pressing a cool cloth against his forehead and neck, what little of his face she could reach. “Take some water.”
He struggled upward again. She dribbled some water between his lips.
“Now. Two morphia pills.”
“Where did you get those?”
She smiled in the piratical way he loved. “They were in your uniform pocket. Zadiq gave them to me when you changed clothes, back in the bazaar.”
He swallowed the pills with more water and then sank back onto the floor. His mind skittered away into feverish dreams.
“The sod’ll die soon enough,” he heard Otto say from the bedroom doorway. His voice came to Ian amplified and distorted, a run-down gramophone.
Siranoush did not answer.
—
0800 HOURS.
When he awoke again, there was a strong smell of coffee. His fever was unabated, but his pain floated somewhere above him in a bubble of helium. The pain was a distraction like a persistent fly, but he could swat it aside from moment to moment and force himself to concentrate. To comprehend his hallucinations. The Germans were eating fresh bread—Michael must have fetched it—their jaws working stolidly as cows. They muttered jokes he could not hear or stared in an unfocused fashion at the floor in front of them. The light seeping through the shuttered windows was much stronger now.
Coffee at his elbow.
“Try to drink,” Siranoush whispered. “It may help.”
“With what?”
“You have to stand.”
“I can’t,” he hissed back.
“You must. He has plans.” She glanced over her shoulder; Ian followed the direction of her eyes.
Otto. The Nazi colonel was in high spirits, slapping one of his boys on a meaty shoulder. Maybe it was the distortion in Ian’s head or the angle at which he lay, but each of the paratroopers looked gargantuan. Inflated. The sort of brawn generally reserved for sideshows, in England.
“Is he going to hit me again?”
“I don’t think so. It doesn’t matter anymore what you know.” She was half kneeling beside him; Ian cocked his head sideways.
“Because the sod’ll die soon enough?”
Her eyes met his, flicked away. “I have to go. Please—will you drink the coffee?”
“Then I’ll have to pee.” He grimaced and hoped the effect was comic. “You have no idea how agonizing the thought seems.”
“If you will try to stand,” she said patiently, “I’ll walk you to the WC now.”
He nodded. She was right. He had to get off the floor. To die like a paralyzed animal would be humiliating.
Very well, Mr. Bond. For England and His Majesty’s Secret Service—
He thrust himself upward on his hands. Then, more shakily, brought first one leg and then another to a kneeling position. He swayed, suspended there with his torn flesh dangling, but the morphia dulled the edge of the knife slicing through his groin and colored the stars exploding before his eyes. He drew a shuddering breath and reached for Siranoush’s arm.
She helped him to a half crouch. He swore fluently. She eased him upright. He wrapped the blanket like a shroud around himself, and with one free hand, took the coffee.
Siranoush slid her shoulder under his right arm—had he once found that knife scratch painful?—and helped him shuffle toward the water closet.
“It’s today, isn’t it,” he said, as she stood with her back to his, blocking the doorway. “Long Jump.”
“Yes.”
“Where’s Michael gone?”
“He didn’t tell me. I have only my orders.”
“Which are?”
“To kill Stalin, of course.”
“And then? You run away to America with your Fencer hero?”
She did not reply.
“He didn’t give you an escape plan, did he?”
Ian was stalling. He had to pee—but he was terrified of the searing pain he knew would come. “Do you still have that piece of wood?” he asked. “The one you gave me to bite?”
“Of course.” She disappeared momentarily. When she returned, she murmured, “Reach behind you. Carefully.”
He felt for the knife handle and clenched it between his teeth. It was pitted already from last night’s ordeal. He closed his eyes and emptied his bladder into the filthy bowl of the German safe house.
“Bond,” she said urgently. “Bond!”
He shook his head to clear it. He had crumpled by the base of the commode, clutching it for dear life. Probably blacked out momentarily. There was blood mixed with the urine in the bowl, and he did not think that was a good thing. Unless, of course, one expected to die in the next few hours. Then it was immaterial.
He had dropped the knife in falling, and it was lying by his left hand on the floor. He palmed it.
Siranoush grasped his shoulders. He forced himself to stand. Wrapped the blanket around himself, hiding the knife in the folds.
“Could you possibly find my trousers?” he asked carefully. “If I must go to my execution, I bloody well won’t go debagged.”
“What is this debagged, please?”
“Without my pants.”
She managed a smile. When she left him, he slid the knife into his right sock. He had a bad moment, bending over, when he thought he might not stand up again. It passed.
“Siranoush,” he said, as she helped him into his trousers, “why are you so kind to your enemy?”
“Because I do not love Hudson anymore. And we are both about to die, Bond.”
—
0830 HOURS.
Franklin Roosevelt allowed himself to be shifted from his wheelchair to the backseat of the embassy car. When Schwartz had settled the President, Elliott stood for a moment by the open car door and peered at his father. When he grinned, there was something about his mouth that reminded Franklin of Eleanor.
“That’s the most ridiculous fake mustache I’ve ever seen,” Elliott said.
“You can have one if you like,” Franklin offered. “I’ve got three more in my pocket.”
Elliott saluted his Commander in Chief. “Save them for Halloween, Pop.”
Schwartz waited for the President to flash his grin, then slammed the car door. Elliott stepped back. Schwartz slid behind the wheel. Franklin waved to his son and tried to tamp down his excitement. Sneaking like a covert operator from the embassy compound made him feel like a boy again. It was as good as playing cowboys and Indians in the long grass, long ago, when he had never thought of such things as wheelchairs.
Schwartz let in the clutch and the car rolled forward. They bucketed over the gravel drive and turned away from the compound’s front entrance, where already crowds were gathering beyond the guardhouses, across the street from the iron gate: Iranians from the provinces in tribal dress; impromptu bands playing the dulcimers, drums, and long-necked lutes of traditional Persian music; tumblers turning handsprings in the street; beggars with blighted eyes and tin cups. They had assembled because the Great Leaders of the West were leaving Iran today and they were happy to see the back of the Invaders. But they would not be seeing Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Only his Secret Service double.
Schwartz came around the bend on the unpaved back drive and slowed as he approached the compound’s rear gate. A lanky figure was lounging against it, head down as he consulted his wristwatch.
“There’s Hudson, by all that’s grand,” Roosevelt said, craning forward to look over the front seat.
Schwartz grinned and waved at the OSS man.
Hudson hurried to unbar the gate and swung it open.
He lifted his hand to his hat as the car passed through. Then he closed the gate and ran up to where Schwartz waited, motor idling.
“Good morning, Mr. President,” he said. “I’d never have known you in that mustache.”
Roosevelt held a finger to his lips. “Call me Frank,” he said boisterously. “I’m nobody’s leader now.”
—
SIRANOUSH WAS GONE.
Otto and his men were dressed in a miscellany of Persian tribal clothes that Hudson must have collected at the bazaar. The colonel ceremoniously returned Ian’s passport and wallet to him, tucking them himself into Ian’s suit pockets, since Ian’s hands were still bound. Then he ordered two of his men to drag Ian to the back door of the house, which was flung open. Two lorries were parked in the alley beyond: Ian recognized one as the NKVD vehicle he’d ridden in a few nights before. The other was Tehrani. A dozen goats were penned in the open back.
Otto and two of his commandos jumped into the NKVD lorry. Ian was lifted, his teeth gritted at the careless manhandling of his body, and tossed into the rear with the goats. His wrists and ankles were still bound, but no one had thought to pat down his socks.
He heard the remaining two paratroopers climb into the cab and start the engine.
With a groan, he rolled to his stomach and then to his knees. The lorry lurched in and out of ruts, tossing him like a bale of hay. The goats were interested. They crowded against him, strong-smelling and inquisitive, their uncanny devil’s eyes staring through him. A few nibbled tentatively at his clothing and his hands tied behind his back. He knew goats from his boyhood at Arnisdale, and he did not fear them. But why bring them at all? Why two lorries, if it came to that? There was plenty of room for all of them in the NKVD one.
Knees planted, ankles bound, Ian craned his head to peer over the roof of the cab. Otto was driving ahead of them, bowling along in his stolen vehicle and his peasant’s clothes. Although he might be the kind to die for the Führer, Ian thought, he was not likely to do so for Michael Hudson. Even if Hudson was the Fencer. Which meant that when the violence came, it would not come from Otto.
Two lorries. Because the Nazis needed one for killing. And the other for escape.
The situation is dire, Bond. The Kitten is under orders to assassinate Stalin. The Fencer means to get Roosevelt. And YOU, 007—you will take the fall for Churchill’s murder . . . When the shots ring out or the bomb goes off, it will be Ian Lancaster Fleming, deserter, whose body they find in the wreckage . . .
It was a nice touch. Winston Churchill, killed by the son of one of his oldest friends. Hitler would love it.
Get the knife, 007 . . .
Arms still pinned behind his back, he began to wriggle his wrists. He swatted a goat’s nose in the process. Felt teeth beneath his fingers. The ropes were wet. They would be hemp in this part of the world. Edible. Inviting, even, to a local ungulate.
Ian held himself as still as possible in the rolling lorry bed. The flutter of tongues and noses against his hands resumed. How much time did he have? How much rope would the goats eat? He tried not to calculate his chances.
—
0840 HOURS.
When the guard at the compound gate challenged her, Siranoush barked a command at him in Russian. It was a phrase she had heard often in her NKVD camp. Shut up, pig. Don’t you know who I am?
He had no idea who she was, but he took one look at the flowing blond hair, the glimpse of silk beneath her coat, her flawless skin—and came to attention. He held his gun on the girl and said, in a more tentative tone, “Identify yourself.”
From the bodice of her dress she drew her papers. The boy—he was younger even than Siranoush herself—paled a little when he saw the special identification she carried.
“SMERSH,” he whispered. “I have heard rumors. But never have I met . . .”
“Be glad,” she said. SMERSH was the counterintelligence section of the NKVD. Few Russians knew it existed, but those who did were terrified by the name. The acronym stood for Death to Spies. SMERSH operatives had one job: to kill those who betrayed Stalin. “May you never have reason to meet us, Comrade.”
He swallowed hard. “You wish to speak to . . .”
“Lavrentiy Pavlovich,” she said clearly.
He let her pass.
It never occurred to him to search her.
Siranoush kept her hands in her coat pockets as she strode up the embassy drive. It was a cold morning, this second of December, and her fingers were chilled. Her right hand gripped the butt of her gun. It was Arev’s old Nagant M1895.
—
ONCE OUTSIDE the center of Tehran, the idea of civilization vanished abruptly and gave way to a treeless plain, barren at this time of year, the road to Gale Morghe airstrip spooling out in front of Schwartz. There were no other cars. A vague suggestion of hills, dark on the horizon. The occasional herd of Persian gazelle. Schwartz kept the sedan at a steady forty-five-mile-per-hour clip, the noise from the engine loud enough to make conversation difficult. When he glanced in his mirror, he saw Roosevelt dozing, his hat off and his head lolling. In the passenger seat beside him, Hudson was more alert, glancing through his window from time to time like a tourist confounded by lack of subject.
“Looking for something?” Schwartz yelled.
“Caracal,” Hudson said.
“What?”
“A caracal. Type of cat. Like a lynx or a cougar. They’re native to this place.”
“Ah,” Schwartz said. They were coming up on a bend in the road, and he knew Gale Morghe wasn’t far now—a matter of a mile and a half. There was no one ahead and no one behind. A hundred yards up ahead there was a turnout from the road. He had just seen it when he caught the flash of Hudson’s hand reaching into his breast pocket.
He had almost turned to look at him when he felt the steel cylinder against his right temple.
“Pull over,” Hudson shouted.
Schwartz hesitated. “You really want to do that, Mike?”
“I said, Pull over.”
“Okay. If that’s how you want this to go,” Schwartz bellowed. He pulled the wheel hard and fast to the right. The car squealed and spun in a tight three hundred and sixty degrees, the movement so sudden and vicious Hudson was unprepared. His gun wavered toward the roof, and Schwartz abandoned the wheel, allowing the tires to follow their ordained momentum. He grasped Hudson’s wrist with both hands and slammed it hard against the car’s dashboard. The gun flew out of Hudson’s grip.
Schwartz jammed on the brakes and felt the car skid sideways. They were facing the wrong way on the road. Correction: he’d spun roughly five hundred degrees.
Hudson sprang for his neck.
“Mike,” Schwartz gasped as the hands closed around his throat. “You don’t want to do this.”
“Let him go,” Roosevelt said. “Let him go, or I’ll shoot.”
He had pulled his personal revolver from his coat and had it jammed, now, in Hudson’s neck. Never mind that he was clinging to the back of the front seat as a climber clings to a cliff edge, using all the strength of his fingertips to pull his body forward; his paralyzed lower half had not cost him much. He was grinning ferociously at Sam, and there was such a look of elation in his eyes that Schwartz merely reached for Hudson’s slack hands and removed them from his windpipe.
“Thanks, Mr. President,” he said. “How about I take care of that thing for you now?”
—
0850 HOURS.
“This woman begged to see you in person, Iosif Vissarionovich,” Beria said. He was standing before the great desk in Stalin’s embassy office. There were papers scattered all over it—he recognized his son’s handwriting. Translations. Transcriptions. Nothing really worth reading. Abuse of himself, of course—it amused the Americans to ridicule him in his own hearing. Toward Stalin they were respectful. He wondered how Sergo felt, writing down the insults leveled at his father. Conjugating them in two languages.
“Why?” Stalin asked. His flat, hard gaze traveled indolently from Beria to the girl standing two yards behind him. She was stiff and expressionless, the gun she had carried in her coat pocket held steadily to her own head. Sergo’s finger was on the trigger. He and the girl were roughly the same age, and it would be interesting, Beria thought, if he told his son to kill her. A demonstration for the Marshal of what family loyalty could do.
“She says—”
“I am an officer of SMERSH, Excellency,” the girl interrupted.
Beria glanced at her. Two spots of color were burning now in her cheeks.
“So?” Stalin offered indifferently.
“I worked with Colonel Zadiq before his murder last night.”
“Zadiq is dead?” Beria asked tonelessly.
“He was tortured by Nazi commandos he was attempting to intercept. His son also was killed. A useless woman, I was left behind in the NKVD headquarters.”
“How do you know this?”
“Zadiq told me the location of his safe house. When he did not return, I went to the place. I found him dying.”
“Beria,” Stalin interrupted. “Do I give a shit about the death of an NKVD officer?”
“No, Excellency.”
“Then why do you bore me with this bitch?”
Beria glanced at the girl. Then at his son. Sergo’s hand was trembling. The weight of the gun held aloft, perhaps, for so long a time. Or the weight of what it could do.
“You are boring us, bitch,” Beria said.
The girl had the stones to smile faintly. She looked straight at Stalin, and it seemed to Beria that if looks were a knife, Iosif Vissarionovich would be bleeding by now.
“Zadiq had only enough breath for a few words,” she said. “‘Long Jump. 0900 hours. The embassy gate.’ I do not know, of course, what it means. But I know, from his blood, that it is a matter of life and death.”
There was a short silence.
Stalin grunted. “The time?”
“Five minutes to nine.” Beria was looking at his son. Sweat had settled like mist on Sergo’s forehead. Anxiety for the girl? He should tell him to kill her. It would be good for the boy. Put some steel in his veins. He was too much his mother’s son.
Stalin slapped his desk. “Then we go. You first, Beria. You can shield me with your body, eh?”
“It would be my honor, Iosif Vissarionovich.” Beria inclined his head.
“Cocksucker,” Stalin said genially. “I’ll ask Churchill to drive through the gate first. With his little Sarah, who refused to eat at my table. No loss if they’re blown to bits, eh?”
He stopped short as he passed the girl. She was staring at the place where he’d been, her lip bitten between her teeth. Sergo still held the gun to her head. But his hand was shaking so badly, now, that if he’d actually cocked the thing, it might have gone off.
Stalin stroked his finger down the girl’s cheek. “You did well, bitch. Spread your legs once or twice and you’ll go far in SMERSH.”
Her head turned as swift as an adder’s, and Beria saw, then, the hatred in them. Her lips parted, and for an instant he thought she would curse. Or spit.
“Fortune preserve you, Iosif Vissarionovich,” she whispered, “because your friends never will.”
Stalin threw back his head and laughed.
—
GRACE COWLES had been unable to eat that morning. She had risen early and sent a coded cable to Alan Turing. Fleming missing. Believed taken or killed by Fencer.
It wasn’t as though Turing could do anything to help. Grace simply needed to tell someone who understood the few words. By the time Turing replied, she would already be in the air. Clutching her knees in Lord Leathers’s plane—which still smelled of Ian’s Laphroaig. Gazing down at the hills and forests of Iran as they sped away from her, wondering if he was alive.
Ten minutes before they were scheduled to load up in cars and brave the compound’s gate—all but a few of them utterly unaware that an attack was coming—Grace slipped by the porter at the embassy entrance and hurried down the drive. The British military police manned one side of the compound entrance, the NKVD officers the other. Two guardhouses flanked the gate itself, and visitors to the embassies reported to one or the other before being admitted. Identities and appointments were verified via phone lines connected to the embassies themselves. It was all very modern.
Grace rapped on the guardhouse’s rear door. A cautious face appeared around the edge of it—wearing a helmet and battle gear instead of the usual uniform.
“Yes, miss?” the guard said impatiently.
“I . . . I wanted to . . .” Why had she come, indeed? To reassure herself that everything was normal? That Turing was inventing things? That Michael had been right all along—not a traitor but a true friend, who knew Ian Fleming was lost in his own fiction?
“You’ve been warned,” she said to the guard. “About the possibility of attack.”
“Mr. Thompson sent down a message an hour ago,” the guard explained. “We’re double-staffed and on the alert. There’s a couple of jeeps full of snipers, too, stationed both directions along the road.”
Thompson was Churchill’s bodyguard. Of course he would have informed the gate staff. Grace was useless here.
“I’m glad to hear it. Good luck.”
She glanced at her watch—five minutes to nine, and nearly time for the first cars to depart. She must hurry. Her luggage—
Then the sound of a lorry horn, wildly blowing, assaulted her ears.
She turned and peered through the bars of the gate at the street outside. Impossible to detect the military jeeps full of snipers in the crowd that had gathered—both sides of the road were lined with colorful groups of people, men and women and children, clapping their hands and shouting in various dialects, in Arabic and Farsi and even French. There were music and small pops as children tossed lighted firecrackers in the air. Any excuse for a celebration.
How horrible, she thought suddenly, if they’re hurt by this—
The horn blared again. She looked to the left, where an ordinary lorry approached. Behind it, careening out of control, was another vehicle, probably headed for market. Its lorry bed was filled with goats.
And a man.
He was in torn and filthy clothes, but Grace saw immediately that they were Western, not Persian. And he was hanging over the side of the lorry’s cab.
Grace’s pulse quickened. Even upside down and from the rear, she recognized those shoulders. That head.
The guards ran pell-mell out of the gate, rifles leveled. The NKVD soldiers, too, were moving.
“Don’t shoot!” she screamed. “He’s a British officer!”
—
THE GOATS had done their work. When the last frayed edges of the rope parted from his wrists, Ian reached for the knife hidden in his sock and slashed at the bindings on his ankles. The fact of his fever and his wounds could not be ignored. His hands shook, and his vision was blurred. His body from the waist down throbbed relentlessly, and the friction of his trousers on his raw backside was both maddening and banal in its familiar pain. But he would not lie down and take the death Otto had planned for him. He would not die a traitor.
Ian lurched forward through the forgiving goats and grasped the edge of the cab. He could see the former NKVD lorry ahead of them—they would not yet have noticed he was standing with his hands free. There were only two men in the cab below. The point was to keep the lorry from arriving at its destination—he felt sure it must be the British Embassy, because they were rolling through a tony section of Tehran, the preserve of the wealthy and the foreign. There were people lining the sides of the road now, and up ahead he could see what looked like a massive stone gate.
He should try to take out the driver first. By the time the passenger reacted, the lorry would be out of control. It might crash, and if there was a bomb hidden somewhere it might explode and kill them all. But it would not kill Churchill.
He peered over the side of the cab and realized that it was not a British lorry—the driver of this one sat on the left. Fortunate; Ian’s left hand was the only one he could trust. He edged in that direction, swaying with the movement of the vehicle. The driver’s window was open, and his arm rested casually on the edge. Summoning his giddy body, Ian leaned over the lorry’s bed, knife raised. He plunged it as forcefully as he could into the man’s left biceps.
The arm was flung upward with a howl. Ian pulled out the knife blade and plunged it again, this time into the cab—and into the man’s neck.
The lorry swerved and the horn blared; the driver had fallen forward onto the steering wheel. Then the lorry turned violently in the opposite direction. For an instant it was possible it would somehow find balance. But the tires were old. Ian was thrown back among the goats and huddled there on his hands and knees, feeling the slow-motion whirl of the lorry as it began to overturn. The animals were bleating with terror, scrabbling on their cloven hooves as the world upended. A horn grazed his temple. Then they were all tossed like garbage into the air. The last thing Ian saw was the ground coming up to meet him.
—
“DON’T SHOOT!” Grace cried again, but the NKVD troops did not understand her, and as the lorry overturned and slid, metal groaning under the impact of the road, a rifle shot rang out.
There was a muffled crump. A millisecond’s hesitation. Then the engine of the still-sliding truck exploded in a ball of flame. As Grace dove for the withered grass behind the guardhouse, a single lorry door arced upward and struck the iron bars of the compound gate with a resounding clang.
—
“SO WHAT WAS supposed to happen here, Mike?” Sam Schwartz inquired as he stood by the President’s car in the turnout of the Gale Morghe road. “Were you going to shoot us both? Did I die first, then Mr. Roosevelt?”
Hudson said nothing. His hands were cuffed behind his back and his legs were bound securely with Schwartz’s necktie. He was sitting in the dirt by the side of the road, staring at his knees.
“Or did you plan to make it look like I’d pulled the whole stunt?” Schwartz persisted. “Murdered the President and then killed myself?”
Hudson glanced up.
Schwartz nodded, sure of himself. He was suddenly insanely angry. “You calculating bastard. You didn’t figure on an old Secret Service guy outsmarting the Ivy League, didya? OSS asshole. Wheels within wheels. But I saw the truck.”
“You were warned about me,” Hudson said.
“Gil Winant told me all about it last night. But he needed proof. So I explained the deal to Mr. Roosevelt and he was game. It’s a big risk, shooting craps with a president’s life—but Mr. Roosevelt hates a traitor, Mike. He wasn’t about to skip town early and let you scuttle back to Berlin with the dirt on D-day. He put his gun in his pocket and his smile on his face. And we both let you into our car.”
“What now?” Hudson asked.
Schwartz squinted at the horizon. The faint sound of an engine drifted out of the distance on the morning air. “We wait and see who shows up. I figure you didn’t plan to walk out of here after that murder-suicide. Got a ride coming?”
Silence.
Schwartz strolled over to the car and thrust his head into the back. “How we doing, Mr. President?”
“Just grand, Sam. Just grand.”
“I think we’ll be pulling out of here in a minute or two.”
“Wouldn’t want to keep the Sacred Cow waiting.”
“No, sir. You just sit tight and keep your head down, all right?”
Schwartz slapped the roof of the car and straightened. His eyes narrowed again as he peered back down the road. A truck was coming. He pulled his Thompson submachine gun from the floor near Roosevelt’s feet and propped it on the roof. The entire body of the car was between him and the approaching vehicle, and Roosevelt was lying flat on his back on the car seat.
The truck was slowing as it approached the turnout. The driver wore Persian tribal dress, but his face was a Westerner’s; a livid scar ran crudely from his left temple to his jaw. Schwartz watched the man take in Hudson’s figure huddled by the side of the road. Then the truck started to accelerate again.
“Germans?” FDR asked softly from below.
At that moment, the driver raised his left hand from the wheel and aimed a pistol at them. A second gun snaked from the passenger window and a shot rang out. Schwartz squeezed his trigger and let the Thompson dance.
The truck veered and swayed under his concentrated fire, but as he watched, the driver pulled back his arm and put his head down. The truck sped up. Schwartz kept it in his sights. He fired another round.
“Sam.”
He glanced down.
Roosevelt was sitting upright, staring through the back windshield at Michael Hudson.
He was sprawled like a dummy in the dirt, killed by a single bullet to the head. That would have been from Scarface’s pistol, Schwartz thought. He let him go—the truck was too far to reach now, anyway—and walked over to Hudson.
He was staring up at the sky, his face in death more than ever like a hawk’s.
“With friends like these . . .” Schwartz said softly.
After an instant, he bent down and closed Michael’s eyes.