Jack of Spies (13 page)

He was disappointed but managed not to show it. Was she trying to let him down gently? He had no way of knowing. Her physical passion seemed undiminished, and her kiss good-bye seemed even more loving than usual.

As he watched her walk across the square, she turned and flashed him a wonderful smile.

The British consulate had been housed in temporary offices since the earthquake, but Cumming’s agents were, in any case, always expected to contact the local diplomats away from their official place of work. Sir Reginald Fairholme’s personal address, as included in Cumming’s cable, was a large house north of Laurel Hill Cemetery, close to the border of the Presidio Military Reservation. Judging by the height of the surrounding trees, it was one of the districts that had escaped the fire.

The consul was not surprised to see McColl and seemed
unperturbed at having his dinner interrupted. He ushered his guest up to a small study at the back of the house, drew the curtains over the last of the sunset, and gestured him into an armchair. Fairholme was probably about forty, with a single gray streak in his black hair and the sort of well-bred, well-meaning face McColl had often encountered at Oxford.

He was interested in McColl’s trip, and particularly the Maia, but soon came back to the matter at hand. “So how well up are you on the situation here?”

“Assume I know next to nothing,” McColl advised.

“All right. But you do know about Har Dayal?”

“I know the name, that he wants us out of India, and that he’s started a newspaper here. But not much else.”

The consul hitched up a trouser leg and folded his arms. “Both paper and movement go by the name of
Ghadar
. He’s been here on the West Coast since the summer of 1911. He kept his head down at first, and Berkeley University—Berkeley’s on the other side of the bay, by the way—hired him to lecture on Eastern philosophy. He was only there about six months, but it was enough.” Fairholme looked suitably dismayed. “During that time he recruited several sponsors to fund scholarships for Indian students, and around forty arrived over the next year or so. Once they’d become his disciples, he sent them out to spread the word. There are several thousand Indians in California.”

“Have you met him?”

“No, but people who have are impressed. He’s made a lot of friends in the Bay area, and not just among the Indians. The
San Francisco Bulletin
is fond of quoting his anti-British statements—their writer John Barry thinks he’s wonderful. The local IWW—the Industrial Workers of the World union people, I presume you’ve heard of them—well, they love his socialist rantings. He even corresponds with Sun Yat-sen. But his most important allies are the Irish. I don’t know how well you know this city—”

“I’ve never been here before.”

“Well, one in three San Franciscans is of Irish descent, and most of them hate us as much as Har Dayal does. From what I’ve been told, the Irish and Indians had close links in New York until recently, and now they’re in each other’s pockets out here. Have you heard of Larry de Lacey?”

“No. It’s Kell’s people in the Security Service that deal with the Irish,” McColl explained, responding to Fairholme’s look of surprise. “Not Cumming’s bureau. And yes, I know it’s ridiculous that we don’t pool our information, but …” He shrugged.

Fairholme smiled. “I understand, but you really need to appreciate how important the Irish are in this.”

“Tell me about de Lacey.”

“He’s the local republican leader. I doubt he’s thirty yet, but he has influence in city hall and friends in the press, and most of the priests in the city seem willing to run errands for him. He and John Devoy—he’s the daddy of Irish republicans in America, by the way—they’re always corresponding, so de Lacey must be a member of Clan na Gael—that’s the main Irish-republican organization on this side of the Atlantic. And they’ll both be thick as thieves with the Irish Republican Brotherhood back in Ireland. De Lacey hates us with a passion.”

“Which gives him and Har Dayal something in common, and no doubt they’re willing to help each other. But what about the Germans? It’s their involvement that worries Cumming.”

“With good reason. We’re pretty sure that de Lacey plays the go-between for the Indians and Germans—he and the German military attaché, von Brincken, have been seen together on more than one occasion. Both von Brincken and his boss the consul were at the big Ghadar meeting in Sacramento on New Year’s Eve, when Har Dayal announced that Indian revolutionaries should make the most of an Anglo-German war.”

“A sensible plan,” McColl said, “but what are they doing to put it into practice? Other than talking and writing articles.”

“I don’t think we can discount the newspaper. I’ll let you have
some copies, and you’ll see—it’s well written, persuasive, just the sort of thing we don’t want turning up all over the empire. And that’s what it’s doing already, before the Germans lend a hand with the distribution. Har Dayal’s aim is pretty clear: He wants another Indian Mutiny. And what could help the Germans more?”

“Agreed, but he’ll need more than propaganda. What about weapons?”

“We’ve heard rumors of a German arms shipment, but nothing definite. Har Dayal’s students have been using Japanese friends to buy revolvers and rifles from a store in Berkeley, obviously with India in mind. We’re not talking large numbers, but the ones we know about might be the tip of an iceberg.”

McColl was unconvinced. “Even if it was, the threat seems pretty remote. And from everything you’ve said, I get the impression we’re usually one step ahead of them. Our people are intercepting their mail, attending their meetings, probably hiding under their beds …”

“Ah, well. A few weeks ago, that was the case—the DCI had several men undercover in the Ghadar organization, and they’d persuaded several of Har Dayal’s converts to turn informer. We’d been paying the Mundell and Pinkerton agencies a small fortune for surveillance and managed to convince the local branch of the BOI—that’s the national Bureau of Investigation—that arresting and deporting Har Dayal would be in everyone’s interests. And then one of the Mundell men got a tip-off, which looked like it might sew everything up: An Irishwoman on Eddy Street who was acting as a postbox for all of them—Irish, Indians, Germans. The BOI raided the house and arrested the woman, who did admit to sometimes receiving mail for friends. But the only thing they found in the house that was vaguely incriminating was a list of names and addresses. Not of her friends, but of all our people who were spying on them—DCI men, Mundell and Pinkerton detectives, even BOI agents. They knew them all. And next day one of the DCI’s informers was found on the headland north of here. He’d been
shot, executed. If the other informers are still alive, they’re keeping their heads down. As things stand at the moment, we have to build a new network from the bottom up, which will take months. I only hope we have that long.”

“They don’t know me,” McColl murmured, mostly to himself.

“I was hoping you’d say something like that.” Fairholme opened a desk drawer and brought out a wad of photographs. “These are the pictures we have,” he said, passing them across. “There are names and addresses—those we know, that is—on the backs. Jatish will fill you in on the wider picture—he’s one of the DCI men we’ve had to reassign. He was undercover in Ghadar for almost a year and only got out by the skin of his teeth. He’s on his way to Vancouver, but we asked him to delay his departure for a couple of days. He’s staying at the Station Hotel in Oakland, under the name Chatterji. Here, I wrote down the hotel number for you.”

McColl put the slip of paper in his pocket. He would talk to the DCI man and decide what, if anything, he should do himself. Fairholme obviously considered Har Dayal worthy of serious attention, but outwitting the local intelligence setup was not, in McColl’s mind, proof of a far-reaching threat. Nor was killing some hapless informer. Molehills often looked like mountains from close up, and the prospect of risking his life on a mere bump in the imperial road held no attraction whatever.

As he waited on California Street for a cable car to take him back downtown, he forced himself to consider another unpalatable subject. Listening to the consul’s strictures on the importance of the Irish dimension, he had realized just how worrying Cumming would find his involvement with Caitlin. The first thing his boss would want to know was how much McColl actually knew about her and her family and any possible links they might have to anti-British organizations. And when it turned out that McColl knew next to nothing, Cumming would probably hit the roof.

McColl was glad he had never succumbed to temptation and
told her about his clandestine work—with her family history, she would probably have run a mile in the opposite direction.

Of course, the notion of her as an enemy was ridiculous, but Cumming might fear he was blinded by lust or love. McColl could imagine the conversation—Cumming noting that his new girlfriend was Irish, a friend of Sun Yat-sen’s secretary, an open sympathizer with the sort of revolutionary nonsense that people like Har Dayal spouted. Had it occurred to McColl, he would ask sarcastically, that someone like her might not have the best interests of the British Empire at heart? Might in fact be working against it? Might even have been planted on McColl as part of that work? If anyone knew the value of pillow talk when it came to gathering information, it had to be His Majesty’s recent visitor to Tsingtau.

What did McColl have to offer in rebuttal? Only those things he had learned in their time together as lovers, things he could hardly define or express, let alone put in a cable.

He should have her and her family checked out, he thought—it was the professional thing to do. Cumming’s man in New York could do it, and she need never know. If she came out clean, as McColl was certain she would, then no harm would be done. And there was no need to make a big deal of it—next time he cabled Cumming about more important matters, he could slip it in as an aside.

Back in his hotel room, he worked his way through the literature that Fairholme had given him. Har Dayal made no bones about his objectives or how he planned to achieve them. Assassinations, as the Russian secret societies had proved, were righteously effective—they put governments under pressure and forced them into mistakes. The price of one pamphlet, as trumpeted on the cover, was “the head of an Englishman.”

And some Englishmen were fairer game than others. Har Dayal demanded constant vigilance when it came to spies—those “wolves” of the British government. “Fixing them” was Ghadar’s highest priority.

Next morning McColl told Jed and Mac that they would have to do without him until the afternoon. Neither asked him why, which made McColl wonder how much they had guessed about his “government work.” While he was in the Shanghai hospital, Mac had asked whether there was anything he and Jed needed to know and seemed somewhat relieved when told that there wasn’t.

Once the two of them had left for the showroom, McColl asked the hotel desk clerk to connect him with the number in Oakland. A man with a booming voice told him Chatterji had just gone out but had promised to soon be back. He agreed to pass on the message that McColl would be there in a couple of hours, but he couldn’t guarantee that the Indian would take much notice—“He looks like a man who might just skedaddle, if you take my drift.”

So no time to waste, McColl thought. He walked down Geary and Market to the ferry piers and had time for a coffee before the next Oakland departure. The
Melrose
was a modern craft, its whole lower deck reserved for automobiles. He joined the other foot passengers upstairs, took a place by the port rail, and watched the shoresmen slip the ropes as the two giant wheels began to churn.

The trip across the sunlit bay took around twenty minutes, the walk to the Station Hotel less than five. The man with the booming voice was, as often seemed the case, not much larger than a midget, and McColl almost mistook him for a child. “Mr. Chatterji” had received the message and was waiting in his room, number 102.

McColl climbed the stairs and knocked.

“Who is it?” an Indian-accented voice asked.

“Consul Fairholme sent me.”

The door opened slightly, and a single eye came into view. Apparently satisfied, its owner widened the gap and waved McColl in before offering a limp hand to shake. “Thank you for coming so promptly,” he said. “My name is Narayan Jatish. And you are?”

“Edward Finney,” McColl said, picking up a name at random.
“Thank you for waiting.” The man had fair skin for an Indian and was smartly dressed in the European style. He looked like he came from a wealthy family, and McColl wondered why he was risking his life for someone else’s country.

Jatish walked across to the window, drew back the curtain a few inches, and took a cautious look out at the street. “I’m not safe here,” he said, somewhat unnecessarily.

“The consul said you were going north.”

“Yes, I have just purchased a ticket for this evening’s train.” He pulled the curtains closed again, offered McColl the only seat, and sat himself down on the bed.