Jack of Spies (12 page)

But that needn’t be true, he told himself. The people he admired might all be men, but they weren’t the ones refusing women the vote or sex education, or the ones exploiting workers or glorying in war. They were the engineers and scientists who were turning the world upside down and bringing it out of the darkness. There was no incompatibility there, no reason his heroes and hers couldn’t change the world together.

A European war, of course, would set everything back. They talked about the prospect—as, it sometimes seemed, did everyone else on the ship. Most were determined to be optimistic. There hadn’t been a major war in Europe since Prussia’s demolition of France almost half a century before, and peace had become a habit. Maybe too much of one, an aged veteran of the American Civil War told his dining table—there were too few people left who remembered how ghastly a war could be.

“You won’t have to go, will you?” Caitlin asked during one such conversation.

“I doubt it. But Jed and Mac—who knows? God help them if they do,” he added bitterly.

She gave him a look.

“I was in the last one,” he told her. “The South African War.”

“You never said.”

“It never came up. And I guess I’d rather forget the whole business.”

“You must have been terribly young.”

“I was eighteen when I shipped out.” He grimaced. “And all through my own stupidity. I thought Oxford had turned me down, and I couldn’t wait to get away from home. So I joined up, thinking at least I’d see the world. When the letter finally arrived confirming I had a university place, my father pulled every string he could find to get my enlistment reversed, and at any other time he’d probably have succeeded. But the war in South Africa was just getting started, and the army wasn’t about to let anyone go. As it happened, I was badly wounded and back home in a few months. But that’s another story.” He felt, as ever, reluctant to relive the night on Spion Kop, but he needn’t have worried—she had different questions.

“So did you get to Oxford in the end?”

“For my sins.”

“I always thought Oxford was for the rich, the sons of the establishment. No offense, but how did you get in?”

“There are scholarships for the gifted poor. Not many, but I have this ridiculous knack with languages—”

“I’m so jealous,” she interrupted. “What others do you speak?”

“Apart from Shanghainese? My Mandarin’s not bad. French and German, of course, Spanish, Russian, and Urdu—I think that’s the lot. Oh, Scottish Gaelic—I grew up with that.”

“I’m impressed,” she said with a smile.

“It’s just a gift,” he replied, but listing them for her he felt a rare sense of pride in his linguistic abilities. There was obviously a first time for everything.

“So they gave you a scholarship …”

“They did. It felt like an honor, being the first person in the family to go to university, but I struggled from the start. Not with the work—that was easy—but with fitting in. I lost my Scottish accent, tried to wear the right clothes and have the right
opinions, but it was no use. No one was convinced, least of all me.” He had a sudden memory of a particularly obnoxious boy mocking the way he spoke, the flush of shame he’d felt.

“You must have made some friends.”

“Not that many. After trying—and failing—to fit in, I eventually realized that I didn’t much like most of my fellow students. After what I’d been through in South Africa, most of them seemed like spoiled children, and I couldn’t take them seriously. The few friends I did make were fellow outsiders for one reason or another, and about the only thing we had in common was drinking too much. I left after a year when one of them offered me work as a salesman in his father’s whiskey business. If nothing else, I told myself, I really would see the world. And I have, or at least large chunks of it.”

“Your time at Oxford sounds a bit like mine at Wesleyan,” Caitlin told him thoughtfully. “There, but not really part of it.”

So they did have things in common, he thought later that night as she slept with her head in the crook of his arm. But they had reacted differently—she had taken on the world, while he … What had he done? What was he doing? Lurking in the shadows, in more ways than one.

On several occasions he had come close to divulging his other source of employment, but he had always drawn back. It would, he knew, be foolish to do so. For one thing it would be utterly unprofessional, for another it was unlikely to meet with her approval. She would see it, at best, as government work and, at worst, as serving the global needs of the English ruling class. She would not see him as he sometimes liked to see himself, as a player in a global game in which men from various nations tested their wits against one another.

It would be foolish to tell her, but he hated the deception. If they had been set on a future together, then living such a lie would have been impossible. But they were not. Indeed, their future was the one subject both avoided like the plague. And he
could keep the secret for the few weeks they had, no matter how much it gnawed at him.

It was hot on deck now, even at night, and they slept to the whir of the stateroom’s electric fan. The ship arrived at Honolulu for another thirty-six-hour stopover, and after exploring the town he and Caitlin hired swimming costumes on the famous Waikiki Beach and waded out into the water. She couldn’t swim very well—“There was never room to move at Coney Island!”—and he helped keep her afloat while she learned the Australian crawl. Farther down toward Diamond Head, they walked off into the lush vegetation and found a place to make love beneath the swaying palm fronds. Walking back to the town, he had never felt happier. He had fallen in love, but he knew better than to say so.

There was news from China in the local press—Yuan Shih-kai had dispensed with the new parliament and seemed intent on restoring the empire. McColl’s cynical response annoyed her more than seemed reasonable, and they had their first row on a Honolulu street corner. It simmered all the way back to the ship but then just blew itself out in the throes of passion.

Next morning at breakfast, McColl detected a change in von Schön. The German had also gone ashore, to “look around and buy some postcards,” but something had happened to leave him less at ease with himself. When McColl asked if he’d had bad news, von Schön almost jumped. “No, no, I’m sorry,” he said before mumbling something about the Saverne Affair turning out as badly as he’d expected.

McColl didn’t see much of the German over the remaining days of the voyage—he and Caitlin hardly ever seemed to leave Stateroom 302—but von Schön sought him out on the crowded rails as the ship passed through the Golden Gate. They swapped hotel addresses, shook hands, and wished each other well.

Provided the freighter carrying the Maia had arrived on schedule, McColl would be in San Francisco for around ten
days, time enough to win some orders and complete the task that Cumming had given him. Caitlin was staying with friends of her father but couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell him for how long. They weren’t yet saying good-bye, but as he left the ship, it felt like the end of more than a voyage.

The Shamrock Saloon

McColl had never been to California, or indeed anywhere on the American West Coast, and had been looking forward to this part of their round-the-world trip. San Francisco showed no signs of disappointing him—the city’s situation, on hills overlooking a gorgeous blue bay, could hardly have been more beautiful. And most of the damage done almost eight years earlier had apparently been put right—during the short taxi ride from dock to hotel he saw precious little evidence of 1906’s devastating earthquake and fire.

The St. Francis Hotel was on the western side of Union Square. It was expensive, but a prosperous front usually encouraged buyers, and the rooms were large and well fitted out. On the assumption that Caitlin would be a frequent visitor, Jed and Mac announced that they would carry on sharing, and McColl accepted their gift, though more in hope than expectation.

There was a cable from Cumming waiting at the desk, and once ensconced in his room he tore open the envelope. It was long and encrypted, which didn’t bode well. Deciding it would wait, he buried the flimsy in his suitcase and accompanied the others down Geary Street in search of a late lunch. They found a cheap and cheerful restaurant serving steak and potatoes but had to make do
without tea—from the look of surprise on the waitress’s face they might have been asking for champagne.

By the time they had finished, it was midafternoon, and all agreed that work could wait for morning. Mac and Jed were intent on an exploratory walk, but McColl declined, pleading tiredness. After watching the two of them stride off, he took a short stroll down Market Street, which seemed like the city’s busiest thoroughfare. There were a lot of people on the sidewalks but only slightly more automobiles on the streets than there’d been in Shanghai. The big difference, he realized, was the smell, or the relative lack thereof. The wonders of underground drainage.

He walked back toward the hotel, wondering what Cumming had to say for himself. When they’d spoken in London, the Secret Service chief had known that McColl was spending only a week or so in San Francisco and had lowered his demands accordingly—all he wanted was a thorough update on the situation there, particularly as it pertained to German involvement. McColl’s first point of contact would be Sir Reginald Fairholme, an old yachting friend of Cumming’s who served as His Majesty’s consul in the city. “The Department of Criminal Intelligence in Delhi have their own people in San Francisco,” Cumming had added, “most of them undercover. But the only thing the DCI people care about is their precious Raj, and since they can’t imagine the Germans turning up at the Khyber Pass, they tend to dismiss them. And to ignore our requests to be kept informed. But Fairholme will know whom you should talk to.”

“So what do the Germans hope to get out of it?” McColl had mused out loud.

“Isn’t that obvious?” Cumming had snapped back at him. “Trouble in India. Not enough to threaten the white man’s rule—the Germans would hate that—but enough to make Delhi think about how many soldiers—English and Indian—it could safely send to Europe in the event of war. A couple of divisions might make all the difference on the Rhine.”

Not a bad return on the odd illicit shipment of rifles, McColl thought as he climbed the stairs to his second-floor room. He could appreciate Cumming’s concern.

After decoding the message, he felt less sympathetic. Cumming was asking him to prolong his stay in San Francisco, to take as long as he needed in order to make a thorough assessment of the situation. “Alarming reports” had reached London of deepening collusion between the German diplomatic service and those Indian and Irish groups sworn to oppose the Crown. And while contacts between these groups were occurring in Europe, Asia, and the eastern United States, the epicenter of their global conspiracy seemed to lie in San Francisco. What, Cumming wanted to know, were these people planning?

A grateful Crown would of course compensate McColl for any business losses sustained on its behalf. Once he’d filled in a dozen forms, visited a bewildering array of offices, and waited an eternity, McColl added sourly to himself.

It was highly inconvenient, but he could hardly afford to say no, not if he wanted an expanded role in the Service’s future. And there was really no reason Mac and Jed couldn’t handle their business in Chicago. His brother would probably learn from the experience, and Mac would be there to hold his hand. With any luck McColl would catch up to them in New York.

It was cooler in San Francisco than it had been in Honolulu, but still remarkably pleasant for late February. While Jed and Mac collected the bottle green Maia from the docks, McColl hired space in a Market Street showroom and placed advertisements in five newspapers explaining where and when the luxury automobile could be ogled and test-driven. When the other two finally arrived back at the hotel with the freshly cleaned vehicle, they all set off for the showroom, whose owner was waiting. He examined the Maia carefully, opined that an expensive English automobile would be a hard sell in San Francisco—“There’s not enough money and too
many Irish in this town”—and reluctantly settled for a 5 percent rake-off.

It was extortionate, but the location was excellent—a crowd was already gathered at the window—and McColl doubted they could do any better. He put a sign in the window repeating the hours in the advertisement and told the owner they’d be back first thing in the morning. When the other two suggested a walk around the city, he almost accepted, but a hunch that Caitlin would turn up at the hotel proved both irresistible and correct. He walked through the doors to find her writing him a note in the lobby.

“I’ve only got an hour or so,” she said. “Do you want to eat or …?”

“Or.”

Afterward, sitting and smoking by the window that overlooked the square, she said she couldn’t see him again until Saturday. “My father’s friends have arranged a sightseeing and social schedule you wouldn’t believe, and there’s other people I have to see.”