“I wasn’t up on any of this, George,” Q said grumpily and George had to convince the old fool that George had been aware of the operation from the start and could not divulge too much in case it became necessary to “compartmentalize severe reactions.” The gobbledygook suited everyone from the PM to George.
But George was still afraid of an end run by the Americans and pushed his probe for the whereabouts of the British agent, Michael Brent. Unfortunately, Michael Brent surfaced four days later on the cover of an American newsmagazine as Tomas Crohan. He had been hidden safe in a priest’s house in Dublin until the long, bizarre story of his arrest and imprisonment was broken.
“It is the American agent again,” Latvia said to George on the day the story was screaming on front pages in the British papers. “Both of them.”
“Yes. But there’s very little to be done about Miss Macklin now. Or for that matter, about our Michael Brent. At least he can hardly go back on his new-fashioned lie, unless he wants to face a charge of murder.”
Tomas Crohan became a national hero overnight in Ireland and the Irish People dutifully recorded on Sunday that Tomas Crohan preferred eggs for breakfast and apples as well.
George felt at last he was safe because the Americans had been unable to follow up their first telegram with a probe about the man called George. The story by Rita Macklin had boxed them in as well as the British; neither side could contradict the lies of Tomas Crohan and the woman journalist without revealing more about their own sordid operations than was good for them.
Nothing had changed, George thought; not for him, not for either of the people he worked for. He only regretted the boredom of being safe again in his dual role as computer director and Soviet agent.
Which is why George was the last person in the world to credit what would happen six days after the story broke about Tomas Crohan and three days after George was mentioned in the Times as receiving personal congratulations from the queen for a recently completed Anglo-American operation that emphasized the friendship and cooperation of the two peoples. Naturally, nothing about the operation itself could be mentioned in the paper.
It was a windy and wet night in London where theater goers scurried along the streets of the West End with their faces flushed by fresh, stinging breezes that smelled of the River Thames. It was a strange, invigorating evening full of lightning flashes and sudden downpours and then, sudden periods of immense calm.
The man called George stepped out of the rear door to his black Rover in front of his graystone residence at 29 Gloucester Road and waited a moment for the chauffeur to close the door behind him. He left instructions to be picked up the following morning at seven; he had to fly to Brussels for the day, first for a conversation with the Americans at NATO and later, for a reporting session to the European Theater Soviet control officer who lived in Liège.
George started up the stone stairs as the car pulled away. He paused a moment at the top of the stairs to regard the face of the red-tinged London sky. Lightning broke sullenly over the old houses and he thought the feeling of the evening was quite enough to rid him of his boredom — at least for a few minutes. George actually smiled as the sky broke again and again with lightning that was, nonetheless, followed only now and then by muted thunder.
Thunder, he thought then; the slow and faithful servant to the brilliant messenger of the gods.
The sentence framed in his thoughts pleased him as well and the smile did not fade as he stood at the top of his stairs and surveyed the world.
“George.”
He glanced down to the walk and saw the figure huddled against the stone banister on the street. He blinked in the dim light to better see the man just as a bolt of lightning broke like crazed glass across the sky.
“Why… Bluebird. What on earth do you want?” George asked with mild interest. He had not seen Wickham from the moment he had been sacked nearly six weeks before. Poor old Wickham, he looked dreadful.
“George, I had to see you, they wouldn’t admit me at the ministry—”
“Of course not, Bluebird. You’re not secure.”
“But I got in anyway,” Wickham said and smiled strangely. “Not through the doors but through the computers. I got in through the computers at Cheltenham. All I needed was a small home computer and a telephone. And George, I went back through the records in Seeker and this time I used your code name—”
George stood perfectly still. He had nothing to fear but it was obvious that Bluebird was insane. His eyes glittered in the strange light of the strange evening and he smiled too much.
“You’ve changed the files, George. You’re the only one who could change them. About me. About the kidnapping. You knew I was going to be kidnapped.”
“You’re talking utter nonsense, Wickham. Are you drunk or mad?”
“Both, George. You set me up, George; my God, George, for no reason at all, you’ve ruined my life.” Wickham sobbed then but made no attempt to climb the stone steps to the place where George stood watching him with faint fascination.
“I thought it was for no reason,” Wickham continued suddenly in an altered voice, one that was too calm for his words. “George. You’re not what you seem to be, are you?”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow you, Bluebird, and I am afraid I do not wish to continue this conversation—”
George turned on the landing.
“No, George,” Wickham said. He held a metal object in his right hand; it had not been there a moment before. George felt energized suddenly. He turned to face the man at the bottom of the steps.
“Is that a knife, Wickham?”
“No, George. It’s a pistol.”
“Where on earth did you purchase a pistol?” George asked with sudden curiosity. What an odd question, he thought dreamily, as soon as he had uttered it.
“It doesn’t matter, George. George, I want my position restored, I want to be reinstated—”
“I’m afraid you’d better go home and sleep it off—”
“My wife has left me. Do you understand what you have done to me?”
“I’ve done nothing at all to you.”
“Damn you, George—”
“But I will do something if you don’t leave immediately. You are threatening an official of—”
“Shut up, George, I don’t care.” The calm was replaced by a sob again. “I don’t care about anything.”
“My God, Bluebird, act your age,” said George in a gruff voice. He took a step down and Bluebird did not react. He reached the bottom step and saw that Bluebird was crying copiously.
No guts, George thought. They never had any guts.
He took the barrel of the pistol and began to remove it gently from Wickham’s right hand.
Wickham, inexpertly, had wrapped his first finger too tightly inside the trigger housing. The fleshy part of the first third of the finger became caught as George removed the pistol. No one meant what happened; it was a small act of fate, similar to the fate that caused lightning to strike and destroy a four-hundred-year-old oak that night in Hyde Park to the west.
The bullet exploded almost quietly, the roar muffled by George’s heavy coat. If the bullet had been anything but a .45 caliber shell, George might have survived it. The bullet tore into his liver and then struck the edge of a rib and ricocheted up into the lungs and had enough velocity left to tear across the left ventricle of the heart.
George was alive for about four seconds. His last image on earth was of Wickham standing very close to him, his eyes wide in horror, his face covered with a stubble of beard.
And George thought, the moment before he fell, that the absurdity of his death fit well the absurdity of his life.