London
“God how I hate these bloody things,” Chief Inspector Ambrose Congreve said. He was struggling to keep both his putter and his spindly golf umbrella under control in an unexpected blizzard. Nearly white-out conditions were not ideal for his golf score.
Lord Alexander Hawke, who much preferred the name Alex, smiled at his old golf partner and even older friend, a currently snow-coated former Scotland Yard chief inspector. “Would you mind putting, Constable? I mean, while we’re still young?”
“I can’t bloody see the bloody hole, can I?” Congreve shouted with a trace of frustration.
“So what? You can’t get it in even when you can see the bloody hole. So, putt!”
It was December, a Saturday. A day on which no sane man in England would venture out onto a golf course. But Ambrose Congreve and Alex Hawke made no claims regarding their sanity. Only their passion for the grand old game of golf dictated their actions.
A coating of light snow and frost had painted the trees and the fairways a fairy-tale white. The sudden sight of nasty weather had made one of them inexplicably cheery. And the other rather not.
The two sportsmen were on the treacherous fifth green at Hawke’s beloved Sunningdale Golf Club just north of London—a difficult par four, and the bane of Inspector Congreve’s existence, most especially on this particularly insalubrious Saturday morning.
Congreve, who carried his weight around his circumference, was attempting to squat down and line up his putt, somewhat in the manner of Tiger Woods. The new Tiger, not the old Tiger. Suffice it to say, it was not a pretty sight.
And that sudden wind had come, howling up and down the wide fairway. And the icy particles. And the blinding snow. Hawke, who’d always nursed a secret love of foul weather, was stoic, braving the gale-force winds, standing rooted to the snowy green, his frozen putter in his hand and a smile frozen on his face. He was watching Ambrose struggle with his wild umbrella, trying to keep his footing on the treacherous ice. “Perhaps the hurricane will simply loft you and your errant brolly up and away, into the heavens, just like Mary Poppins in the Disney film of the same name,” he said.
Ambrose shouted above the wind, “And hopefully I’ll be dropped off somewhere near the bloody clubhouse! Hopefully in the middle of the men’s grill room. There’s a crackling fire blazing in the hearth right now, you know, Alex. Warmth, whisky, and not a wife in sight.”
“Shut up and putt, Ambrose.”
“Then get out of the way, will you, you’re standing directly in my line!” Congreve cried above the wind, waving putter and umbrella around in a rage of frustration.
Hawke said, “How am I supposed to know where your line is when it’s covered with snow!”
They were the only twosome either brave enough, or foolish enough, to be out on the links this frightfully wintry morning. Fiendishly icy winds and wet snow were terrorizing the few souls who’d not retreated to the grill.
Congreve’s putt was well wide of the mark. It slid thirty feet past the cup, gathered speed on a sheet of black ice, narrowly missed a frozen water hazard, then trickled down into the snow-filled sand trap. He would now be hitting an eight.
“May I?” Hawke said, standing over his nearly invisible ball, which lay three. He was looking at Congreve deferentially, but with just a tinge of schadenfreude.
“Just putt.”
Lord Hawke promptly sank a smashing fifteen-footer, even though he couldn’t see it disappear into a slight depression that had marked the cup’s location.
“Four! That’s a par!” Hawke said, pumping his fist in the air as he bent down to pluck his ball from the hole.
“Par?” Ambrose snorted. “Surely you did not say the par word, Alex. Hardly a par, my dear boy. Bogie or double bogie at the very best.”
Hawke was indignant. “Count them. Drive into the middle of the fairway, lying one. No mulligan. Two into the fairway trap. Three, chipped onto the green. Four, sank the putt. Par.”
“Not four, Alex, not even close. Let me think about it. Six. Yes. Take at least a six on the card while I consider the sequence of salient events for a moment.”
Hawke could hear the wheels spinning as Congreve cogitated beneath his umbrella. He could never fathom how the world-famous criminalist could work his brain so fast and deep that no other man in the country could touch him.
Whenever anyone inquired about the contents of his cranium, the man would lift his great head and say, “It’s not my brain at all, it’s the lower nerve center. That’s the base of operations.”
Whatever that meant.
“I was right,” the rotund detective said. “Bogie. Take a five. Even though it was arguably a six or seven.”
“I certainly will not take a five, I am not about to let you . . . hold on a tick. My mobile’s humming.”
“You can’t take a call on the course, Alex. There’s a loo up on top of that hill. Go up there before you get us thrown off this hallowed ground!” Hawke ascended the hill.
“What took you so long? I’m bloody freezing,” Ambrose said when Hawke came trudging back down through knee-deep snow.
“The telephone call, you mean? Oh, Sir David calling from the office, on a secure line. You won’t like it one bit.”
“Try me.”
“Another last-minute summons from my esteemed employer at MI6. Of course, while we’re out enjoying a fine Saturday morning on the links, he’s helming the great ship of state from his desk by the Thames, hell-bent on making the rest of us poor serfs feel guilty.”
“I don’t feel guilty in the slightest. And I would opine that the chief of British Secret Services takes great delight in toying with you, Alex. Playing you like his star fiddle.”
“Not even remotely true.”
“What’s the old man on about this time?”
“Something about a murder in Zurich. Impacts state security, that’s all. Very hush-hush about the whole affair, as befits his station. Wants us, yes, you too, to meet him for cocktails in London at his club, Boodle’s, at five.”
“Fine. Wonderful. Why in God’s name do I have to come? He’s your boss, not mine, thank heavens. I’ve other things to do, frankly. My wife expects me home at two to help her can peaches.”
“Sad, no? Sir David said he might well be in need of that monumental brain and those legendary detective skills before whatever nasty business that awaits us is over. What it’s really all about, he neglected to say—what time is it? We’d better get on the road. As you know, he abhors tardiness.”
They headed for the car park and Alex’s steel-grey 1957 Bentley Continental. A mammoth beast he called “the Locomotive.”
“If we’re late,” Congreve said, “just use that lethal smile of yours to charm the birds out of his trees.”
“Tried it many times. His birds have all flown the coop.”
Lord Hawke had charm to spare. He stood well north of six feet. He had a full head of unruly black hair and crystalline blue eyes that some London gossip queen had once referred to in print as “pools of frozen arctic rain.” People of every stripe and gender found him attractive. As was often said of him, “Men wanted to stand him a drink, while women much preferred him horizontal.”
For a gentleman in his midthirties, he was in splendid shape. His nearby country estate, five miles from the Sunningdale links, was called Hawkesmoor. He had a stable of race cars, a boxing ring where he sparred, a shooting range where he shot, and a hall where he fenced. He swam six miles in open ocean whenever he got the chance and did laps in the indoor pool at home when he did not.
But it was his easygoing manner, matched with fierce determination, a keen moral sense, and courage under fire that made him the most valued and successful counterterror officer in the entire British Secret Service.
Many had, over the years, underestimated Alex Hawke, this gentleman spy, at their peril, and many had paid full measure for that mistake. He was, when all was said and done, a dashing and aristocratic English nobleman, of noble principles, who could kill you using only one of his bare hands.