Cunningham followed him across the marble-floored hall and into a large reception room. “Help yourself to a drink,” Morley said, pointing out the decanters on the side table. “I’ll see what the colonel’s up to.”
Cunningham poured himself a generous whiskey and looked around the room. The creamy white walls were patterned by sun and shadow, the furniture a mixture of raffia and mahogany. Not a lot had changed since his last visit in 1918.
“The colonel will see you now,” Morley said from the door.
Another corridor took them through the bungalow and out onto a bougainvillea-draped veranda. Colonel Mortimer Fitzwilliam was sitting in an incongruously European chair with a polished walnut frame and burgundy velvet upholstery. His suit—the sort of limp white affair favored by tropical traveling salesmen—had rather less class.
Cunningham shook the outstretched hand and accepted the offer of a simple wooden chair. Morley remained standing.
“Glad you made it,” the colonel was saying. “How was the trip up from Bombay?” he asked, with the tonelessness of one repeating an oft-used phrase.
“No worse than usual,” Cunningham replied noncommittally.
The colonel smiled. “Ah, well, I expect we’ll be using airplanes soon.” He looked up at the sky, as if expecting one to appear at that very moment. “Ah, well,” he repeated, turning back to Cunningham, “I just wanted to welcome you in person. As to your business here”—the tone implied distaste, but whether that came from patrician breeding or a lack of sympathy with this particular endeavor wasn’t clear—“Morley here will fill you in on the current state of play.”
It sounded like a dismissal, and Cunningham got to his feet.
“At any rate,” the colonel said, staring at his garden, “it must be for the best that we’re all working together on this one.”
Cunningham presumed he meant Five, the IPI, and British India’s Department of Criminal Intelligence. “Indeed,” he agreed.
“You spent several years here, didn’t you?” the colonel asked.
“Three in Calcutta, two here in Delhi.”
“Then you know what we’re up against.”
“I hope so, sir.”
“Good, good,” the colonel said, finally signaling the end of the interview with a limpid wave of the wrist. A muttered “desperate remedies” floated after Cunningham and Morley as they reentered the bungalow.
Two short passages brought them to a small and untidy office. The walls were covered with maps, the desk with papers; a line of papier-mâché elephants sat atop a display cabinet packed with handguns that went back a century or more. Morley moved a pile of files onto the floor and offered Cunningham the newly empty chair.
It seemed hotter than it had outside, despite the fan whirring erratically overhead.
One of the maps was peppered with colored flags representing various expressions of political dissent. There seemed to be a lot of them, and more than half were red, depicting the highly serious kind. “How bad are things?” Cunningham asked.
Morley followed his gaze and shrugged. “Who knows? I think London’s been getting a trifle complacent lately. No offence, old boy,” he added with a crooked smile.
“None taken. There’s no money to spare, and complacency’s a damn sight cheaper than panic.”
Morley was rummaging around in a desk drawer. “Right,” he said, extracting a bulging folder, “I’ll give you the news as we got it ourselves. Seventh August—we had the first report of a gun battle in Kerki…” He turned and reached an arm toward the large map behind him. “Which is here,” he added, tapping with a finger. “There were Europeans involved, but we didn’t find out who until”—he moved on to the next message—“the eleventh. The battle took place on the twenty-eighth of July. The local Russian authorities—led, incidentally, by some high-ranking Cheka boss from Moscow—tried to stop a riverboat heading upstream past the town. Several men were killed, including the Cheka boss. There were two Europeans on the boat, who turned out to be members of the Good Indian team. By the time we heard about all this, they were halfway across Afghanistan, on their way to Kabul.”
“And McColl?”
“We had that message you know about, the one from Samarkand on”—he checked through the file—“on the twenty-fourth of July, and nothing since. According to our source in Kerki, the Cheka boss was already holding an Englishman, who might have been McColl. If so, he was probably taken to Tashkent, questioned, and shot. Which will save us the trouble.”
“Was there really no way of bringing him back on board?” Cunningham asked.
“When?”
“I don’t know. There must have been almost a month between his arrival in Moscow and his reaching… wherever you said the battle was.”
“Kerki.” Morley shrugged. “Maybe. But once Suvorov had taken the ‘need to know’ directive as literally as he did… well, the colonel decided we couldn’t take the risk.” He looked at Cunningham. “You knew McColl, right? I’ve talked to others who knew him in Calcutta during the war, and they all said much the same thing, that they never really thought of him as one of us.”
“No, he wasn’t.” Cunningham couldn’t say he’d ever liked the man’s holier-than-thou approach when it came to dealing with Indians, but he had been annoyingly proficient.
Morley turned to another page in his file. “Brady made contact in Kabul on August nineteenth and collected all the papers he and the others needed. He was told about Gandhi’s plans to visit Delhi in the third week of September.” Morley looked up. “Our loin-clothed friend is planning to stir up trouble during the Prince of Wales’s visit,” he explained. “And Brady was pleased to hear that—he thinks the local police will be stretched to the limit while the prince is here. Oh, and we did ask him about McColl. Brady said he hadn’t run into him in Russia.”
Morley consulted the next cable. “August thirty-first. They didn’t want to spend more than three weeks in Delhi, so they stayed a fortnight at Flashman’s Hotel in Peshawar and only arrived here a couple of days ago. We’ve put them up at Sayid Hassan’s…”
“Who’s he?”
“Ah, since your time. He’s from some tin-pot royal family or other—somewhere in Rajasthan, I think. Fortunately for us, he has some rather disgusting habits, and last year he got a little carried away with one of his little boys. We helped him out of the mess, which rather put him in our debt. He’s gone off to the hills for a holiday while this business is completed.” Morley grinned. “We’ve provided the Good Indian team with servants, a genuine one and three of our men. The real one’s there to show the others how it’s done. The team has been asked not to stray—we told them it’s for secrecy’s sake, but really it’s because it makes the surveillance that much easier. If and when they try to twist things around, we’ll be on them like a ton of bricks.”
“If? I don’t think there’s any doubt that Brady will try.”
“When, then.”
“Desperate remedies,” Cunningham murmured to himself.
“You don’t sound too sure about all this.”
“I’m sure enough. Whichever way it goes, they’ll be dead. And with any luck, Gandhi will be, too.”
“We certainly won’t be sorry to see the back of him. He can’t be ignored, he can’t be arrested without making things worse, and he can’t be killed by any obvious friend of ours without turning him into a martyr…”
“I know the rationale,” Cunningham said dryly.
The shadows were lengthening on Chandni Chowk, but the offices on one side of the street were still bathed in dazzling sunlight. On the other, leaning in a derelict doorway, McColl idly wondered what the street had looked like before the bomb attack on the viceroy had prompted the authorities to cut down all the trees.