“Okay,” he murmured. “Let me be frank about this, Miss Piotrowska; my security people want to crawl all over you, your life and your career. They tell me I can’t afford to wait until secure communications are restored to England. They failed to keep Rykov under control,” he vented a disgruntled snort, “and they are looking for somebody to blame. Things being what they are I need you to give me a reason to let you walk out of this room a free woman. More than that I need to know that I can trust you. I must know what happened in the period immediately prior to your arrest. I have heard garbled stories about your, er, exploits, but I’d like to hear your version.”
Rachel very nearly giggled. It must have seemed hysterical, manic but she did not care. The balance of her mind, her sanity, was every bit as perturbed, disturbed as it ought to have been by the things she had done yesterday.
Why pretend otherwise?
“When I was thirteen,” she prefaced, involuntarily making an apologetic spreading gesture with her hands, “I killed Fascists. With a knife mostly; but once I threw a bomb into a crowded mess room. The only Germans who got out alive were on fire from head to toe. I had a gun but I let them burn. Killing a Fascist with a gun was nothing; I got more satisfaction using a knife. If I couldn’t cut their throats or stab them through the lung or heart I twisted the blade in their guts. What with one thing and another after the war I never really ‘got on’ with other young people of my own age.”
Dan French nodded his face a grim mask.
“After the Germans caught me I ended up at Ravensbrück. I was there were the Soviets ‘liberated’ the camp. I killed the first two Red Army soldiers who raped me,” Rachel added, very much as an afterthought. “That was before I realised that killing everybody who raped me was going to be, well, dumb really. There were about two million Red Army soldiers in Germany at the time. If I spent all my time killing Russians I’d starve to death. So, I stopped killing Russians.” Once more she smiled thinly at the silent, handsome man who had the power to click his fingers and to have her taken outside and shot. “For a while.”
Still the man said nothing, waiting patiently as if he knew she was beyond threats, beyond fear and that she had already realised that he was not the sort of man who was going to have the Redcaps beat any kind of truth out of her.
“Sorry, yesterday,” Rachel murmured.
Why do I feel foolish?
“When Margo Seiffert was murdered,” she went on, consciously trying to pull herself together, “it was like a switch clicking in my head. I killed as many Russians as I could,” she explained, as if it was the most rational thing. “I’d forgotten how easy it was to kill people. Especially, people who deserve it. I enjoyed it so much I nearly forgot that the only thing which would really make me feel any better was killing Arkady Pavlovich Rykov. It wasn’t as if I didn’t know where he was likely to be.”
“And you killed him?”
“Yes. It was like putting down a wild dog.”
“Why didn’t you kill the second Soviet officer in the room?”
Rachel Angelika Piotrowska looked at the Acting Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces on Malta and realised with a prick of shock that he understood nothing.
“Because he was never any threat to me.”
Her sophistry was completely lost on the Englishman. A flash of muted vexation flickered in his level gaze.
“Sorry,” she muttered. “Sorry. The second man isn’t a Soviet officer. Well, not a real one, anyway. The Soviets must have given him a uniform when they landed, or he might have had one ready for when they landed. I don’t know which.” She was making very little sense so she spelled it out for the Englishman. “He wasn’t one of the parachutists because he was already on Malta when the attack began.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because he speaks bad Moskva Russian,” she declared, “and he is Maltese.”
“You’re positive about this?”
“I met him the first time Arkady Rykov and I were in Malta. That was just before Admiral Christopher arrived on the archipelago and the big American bombing raid. Well, I say I ‘met him’, really it was more a case of ‘seeing him’ once from across the street, and another time from the other side of a crowded bar while I was supposed to be ‘minding Arkady’s back’.”
This obviously confused Dan French.
“I was Arkady’s lover and ‘agent’ but he would have killed me the moment I ceased to be useful to him. By the time we got to Malta in November he was starting to think about ending our partnership but he still needed somebody to ensure that nobody was taking an unhealthy interest in his activities. When, for example, he was meeting one of his agents…”
Rachel’s voice had trailed off because she realised she had ignored one of the two questions the man badly wanted her to answer. The time for deceit and deception was over; after yesterday her cover was ‘blown’ to smithereens even if, for a moment, she had had it within her to pick up the scattered traces of her previous life. A life that in truth, she had been running away from long before that Soviet trooper had murdered Margo Seiffert.
“Sorry, sorry,” she whispered. “The second man in the room when I killed Arkady Rykov is, was — I thought he was dead before I found him in that office in the Citadel — a Maltese citizen. His picture was in the Times of Malta two or three months ago,” she said, struggling to get to the point. “You know; when HMS Torquay was sabotaged in the Grand Harbour, remember?” She still honestly did not know why she had to tell him this.
Dan French’s eyes widened a fraction.
The most powerful man on the Maltese Archipelago was in a quandary.
Something screamed at him that he did not want to hear what he was about to hear and yet, he had to know everything.
“Who is he?”
The woman’s shoulders sagged.
“He’s Marija Calleja-Christopher’s eldest brother,” she murmured, feeling like she had stabbed her new found sister Marija in the back, “he’s Samuel Calleja.”
Chapter 22
Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the forty-four year old Shah of Iran stifled a yawn and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He sat up and listened for some seconds to the mounting thrumming drone of many, many aircraft engines high in the skies over the Sa’dabad Palace. Mohammed Reza had ascended to the Peacock Throne on 16th September 1941 when an Anglo-Soviet invasion had forced his father, the first monarch of the Pahlavi dynasty to abdicate. A ruthless and coldly pragmatic man brought up from infancy in a palace environment populated with scheming, duplicitous and positively mendacious characters that would not have been out of place in a Medici or a Byzantine court, he saw threats and plots in every shadow.
Why is my air force flying over the capital of the nation this night?
He rose to his feet and padded to the great tall windows of his bed chamber. Presently he was outside on the balcony, gazing into the darkness of the heavens. Here and there a star winked faintly through a gap in the overcast and a cool breeze blew down from the mountains north of the city.
The sky seemed alive with distant noise.
Like usurpers throughout history the Pahlavi dynasty was intensely sensitive about its legitimacy. Beneath the appearance of absolute command, of regal certitude and unquestioned authority, a crippling underlying sense of nameless insecurity touched every aspect of Mohammed Reza’s regime. His father, an army officer, had seized the throne in a coup in the 1920s and his son could never forget that he had been installed as a tame ‘place man’ by the British and the Russians; just another pawn in the ‘great game’. It mattered not that he was the inheritor of the monarchy of Cyrus the Great, King of Persia, or that he perched at the apex of a lineage stretching back over two millennia; nor did it matter that among his numerous titles and honorifics he boasted that he was Āryāmehr, the ‘Light of the Aryans’, and Bozorg Arteshtārān, the ancient ‘Chief of the Warriors’.