The Prime Minister had grown impatient with such sophistry. Things had reached the point where the country needed to know where it stood. Was the United States at its back or not.
“No, Tom,” she said, biting back her annoyance. “No, no, no.”
All eyes fell on her in the sudden silence.
“Please inform the Philadelphia White House that I wish to speak to the President this evening. Please make sure that they understand that if the President is unable to take my call there will be consequences!”
Chapter 9
“Ah, we meet again, Rachel,” Tom Harding-Grayson observed ruefully as he stepped forward to take his visitor’s hand. “As lovely as ever, I see?”
The woman greeted this remark with weary forbearance. Her hair, straw blond was cut short almost like a man’s and the grey-blue dress she wore was an abysmally tailored sack that was far too thin for the chill of the late April day in England. Worse, she had foregone the use of makeup for several days and she felt horribly, inconsolably guilty and ached with loss. Not one scintilla of her guilt attached to the butchering of the Red Army parachutists — somewhere between twenty and thirty, she had not been counting — she had gunned down in her rampage through the Citadel at Mdina on the afternoon of the Battle of Malta, no, it was more subtle and insidious than that. She kept asking herself if she could have done anything to warn anybody what was about to happen? If she had kept closer to Arkady Rykov might he have let something slip? What had she missed?
“You look older, Tom,” she said, looking around the Foreign Secretary’s cluttered office. The state of the office reflected the mind of the man; endlessly curious, acquisitive, restless. His was a mind that worked in unique ways and saw things few of the people around him would ever see.
“I feel older,” he confessed. “I should probably ask you what you’ve been up to the last ten years,” he went on dryly, “but I won’t.”
The woman frowned.
“Just drink poison and I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”
Tom Harding-Grayson chuckled.
“The Shah of Iran came to a sticky end,” he remarked for no particular reason. Except that they both understood it was anything but a casual observation.
Rachel Angelika Piotrowska’s eyes narrowed a fraction.
Otherwise, her composure was perfect.
“He was a pig,” she replied blandly, “like most men.” She shrugged. “The bastards didn’t have to kill those girls. That was cold.”
“Very Russian, you mean?”
“No, Russians are human beings too. What we and the Americans did on the night of the war; that was pretty cold, too.”
“More the Yanks than us, actually,” the man objected dryly.
Rachel fixed him with a quizzical expression.
“The first we knew about it was when the Soviets started lobbing medium range ICMs at us from the Baltic,” he explained. His tone was that of a man explaining away the foibles of a dissolute younger brother, as if to say these things happen.
“You’re joking?”
“No. We lost over forty V-Bombers on the ground. One day our people will find out what really happened on that night,” he shrugged. “Hopefully, future historians will endorse the RAF’s decision to fly east not west that night.”
The woman stared at him.
“We didn’t start it? The war, I mean?”
The Home Secretary shook his head.
“No. So far as I can tell JFK wasn’t taking Harold MacMillan’s calls the day of the war. For what it is worth, our hands are clean. We only attacked the Soviets after we came under attack ourselves.”
The man waved for Rachel to take a seat in a well worn upholstered chair near the guttering fire. She sat down and ruminated on the coals in the hearth, her thoughts roiling with the implications of what she had just been told. She waited for her host to make the next move.
“Presumably,” Tom Harding-Grayson probed, “your spell in Tehran with the Shah would have been your last assignment before Dick White sent you off the grid looking for our friend Arkady Pavlovich Rykov?”
Rachel nodded, her lips sealed and her eyes drawn down again into the glowing remnants of the fire.
“That was before the war, of course,” the man mused out aloud.
“You didn’t order me to come here to discuss Arkady.”
“I didn’t order you to do anything. That’s Dick White’s job.”
The woman snorted disdainfully.
“I ought to bullet in that man’s brain.”
“I don’t think you’d be very popular with Airey Neave if you did a thing like that!”
Rachel fixed the Foreign Secretary with a hard, dangerous look.
“Airey, too,” she added with a sigh. “I suppose they told you I didn’t want to come back to England.”
“No?” Tom Harding-Grayson’s expression had become unyielding. He had heard the tales about what his former protégé had done in Mdina at the height of the Battle of Malta; and queried the wisdom of bringing her back into the fold. But then the twin imperatives of bringing the man who claimed to be Nicolae Ceaușescu, the First Deputy Secretary of the Communist Party of the People’s Republic of Romania to Oxford, and the necessity of neatly tidying up the loose ends contingent upon the execution of the traitor Samuel Calleja had concluded the debate. “Why ever not?”
Rachel ignored the question.
“You should talk to Ceaușescu,” she said abruptly.
“This fellow really is Nicolae Ceaușescu?”
The woman nodded.
“How do you know? How could you know that?”
“I met him several times before the war. That would have been after you got yourself sent into internal exile, Tom,” she remarked, nowhere near as cattily as she intended.
Rachel did not have her heart in clawing out his eyes, figuratively or for real today. All her anger was gone; burned out by the knowledge of the grief that she was partly responsible for bringing to the lives of her good friends Marija Christopher and Rosa Calleja. Even though she had only known the younger women a relatively short time, they were her friends, Marija particularly had been there for her when she was at her lowest ebb and even now she did not blame her for any of that had happened. If Marija and Rosa were sisters, she had become their honorary step sister.
“Bucharest was a dreary, horrible place but perfect for talking to the Russians,” she went on. “Switzerland, Berlin or Vienna were always far too public, and there were always too many people looking over your shoulder. The first time I met Ceaușescu he thought I was a KGB whore. He almost wet himself with relief when he discovered I was actually only interested in ‘opening up channels of communication’ with the West. A direct line to the ‘Free World’ was always going to be his trump card when he finally wormed his way to the top. He’d keep Romania under his thumb and still enjoy the benefits of having friends in the West. The thing you must never forget with little shits like Nicolae is that it is all about them. I doubt if he’s given his wife and kids — the ones he left behind in Bucharest for the KGB to pick up — a second thought since he escaped from Romania.”
“And what about the other times you met him?”
“Courier in plain sight,” she murmured, somewhat elliptically.
Her meaning was not lost on the man.