"Yes?"
"Prime Minister, we're getting reports that the convoy is under U-boat attack—"
"What is the convoy's position?"
"That's what's strange, sir. They're well into our new — channel, they should be safe from attack."
"You mean the U-boats are in our channel?" Churchill exploded. The intelligence colonel's face behind him wrinkled with contempt and self-disgust, and he looked up at the wall map and the marked position of the convoy.
"It must be, sir! Sir, two of the merchant ships have been hit by torpedoes, and the cruiser—!"
"My God—"
"The cruiser is signaling abandon ship, sir—"
"You know what to do. We must save as many as we can. Report to me every half-hour."
Churchill put down the telephone. Only the few people in this operations room, Walsingham thought, know the truth about Emerald. They will not be allowed to tell the truth. No one will ever know. Churchill's face was blank of all expression. He put the receiver down on the floor beside his chair. Less than two minutes, Walsingham thought, suddenly and briefly appalled, was all the time that was necessary. Upstairs, they would already be saying how shocked and moved the old man was, how terrible after the secrecy of the southern route through the minefield, even as they began the attempt to rescue the survivors. The subterranean reality in this cramped bunker room was different, but now it was robbed, somehow, of real significance. Voices on the telephone, an awaited radio report from an RAF Anson of Coastal Command, and that was how it was done. No blood anywhere near this room.
"Colonel," Churchill called.
"Sir." The colonel was standing in front of Churchill, his back deliberately to Walsingham, in calculated insult.
"You understand, Colonel? A tragic fact of war — we have lost a cruiser, three heavy merchantmen and God knows how many men — by U-boat attack." The colonel nodded, his face transferring guilt to the old man in the chair, adopting the fixed lines of unthinking duty, the clear brow of necessity. Churchill could see it happening to him, and was satisfied. "I will inform the American Ambassador in due course. That will be all, Colonel."
"Prime Minister." The colonel walked away with almost light step. Churchill studied Walsingham, as if the expression on his face was of the utmost importance, just at that moment. Walsingham understood from the nod he was given that the Prime Minister was satisfied. To Walsingham, the satisfaction was a recognition of something failed or broken or missing within himself. But he dismissed the thought.
Churchill closed his eyes for a moment, as soon as Walsingham returned his gaze to the wall charts. In a sudden, clear, visionary moment, he could hear insects in the garden at Chartwell. All those years, well spent, recollected with affection, had only been an interlude. His destiny was to be the only man capable of making decisions like Emerald. That was why his country needed him, he acknowledged. Not for the V-sign, or the cigars, or the bulldog expression or the black homburg. Because he could make decisions like Emerald and not despair of himself, of his country, or of human nature. It was not having the courage, or even the ruthlessness, to do it that mattered. It was the ability to perceive necessity, to bow to that strange deity's commands.
"Sir," the radio operator called from the other side of the room. "I'm beginning to get a transmission." The colonel moved to the radio, and Walsingham got to his feet. Churchill nodded his permission, but made no attempt to move himself. The volume on the radio was turned up, and the voice of the distant R/T operator aboard the Anson could be heard through a mush of static, stung and obscured occasionally by severe crackling.
Walsingham stood next to the colonel behind the radio operator. The army officer looked at him, and there was complicity in his features. A complicity of duty and transferred guilt and personal innocence. Walsingham nodded to him. The colonel seemed relieved. The authorship of Emerald did not matter. The old man in the chair had committed the atrocity.
"We've sighted the U-boats on the surface, but we're flying low and keeping out of sight." The absence of jargon and the hesitancy of the words indicated that the radio operator knew he was being listened to by Churchill. No code-names, no call-signs, no references to position, just a voice on the ether, a radio commentary of an occurrence at sea. There was silence for a long time, in which only the universe spoke, then: "There's been an explosion, no, two explosions — we're going for a look-see." Another long silence in which each person in the room became less and less aware of the drama and significance of events and more sensible of minor irritations, hunger, a dry mouth, itching eyebrows. The outcome of the war, the fate of Smaragdenhalskette diminished, faded until they could cope with it as a voice commentating on distant events, a race or a Test Match. "Two U-boats have been damaged, and another two are sinking!" Spithead Review commentary, a fireworks display. "The remainder have altered course — there goes another one! There are hundreds of men in the water we can see — one of the damaged U-boats is rolling — she's going!"
"Acknowledge, and switch off!" Churchill barked from his chair, and the colonel turned the volume down almost to inaudibility. He was puzzled by the old man's behavior — he seemed to care more for the fate of the Germans than the convoy crews.
The room returned to insulated silence, and then a telephone rang. It was the receiver still at Churchill's feet. He picked it up warily as he might have done a snake.
"It's the Irish Ambassador, sir."
"What does he want? I'm very busy. Let me call him later, unless it's urgent."
"He wishes to speak to you under code-name Essex." Churchill paused — the Earl of Essex and his invasion of Ireland in the last years of Elizabeth's reign. The first convoyed British soldiers had landed in Cork. "No, that isn't urgent. I'll call him later, my dear. Give him my thanks."
He put down the telephone, heavily and clumsily. Then he lay back in the armchair, fat and helpless as an overfed baby. Walsingham felt himself to be impossibly removed from Churchill, and desperate to renounce everything to do with Emerald. Unlike the colonel, he could not completely and successfully transfer guilt to the corpulent figure of Churchill. He was still the author of the file.
Churchill was looking intently at him. Then he said, softly, "Bury it, Commander. Bury it deep. You can begin tomorrow."
McBride placed his coins on the flat top of the call-box. The telephone was still clammy from use by the woman in front of him, and he wiped it on the sleeve of his jacket. Andoversford was quiet in the early morning. He dialed the Cheltenham number he had used from Cavendish House the previous day.
"Come on, come on—" murmured some impatient part of him, though he felt calm, assured, even bright, despite his almost sleepless night in the small residential restaurant on Cleeve Hill above the orange, serried lights of Cheltenham and the sky-glow of Gloucester in the distance. He'd eaten well, drunk most of a bottle of claret, then retired to his room to type two letters, one to his agent in New York and the other, longer one, to his bank in Portland. He had carbon copies of both letters in the car now.
"Yes, Professor McBride? I trust you slept well?" Walsingham sounded confident, gracious in victory — and as if he was acting a part.
"I want to talk to you."
"Of course. Will you come here?"
"Said the spider to the fly, uh? No thanks."
Walsingham chuckled, but there was a newly cautious note in his voice when he replied. "Of course. Where do you suggest?"