Jack of Spies (18 page)

He thought back to Tsingtau. Who had made the first overture, himself or the German? He couldn’t remember, but the latter now seemed more likely. If von Schön worked for German intelligence, he might well have initiated an acquaintance with a suspicious British visitor.

But if the German had seen through McColl, he would surely have arrested him there and then, not allowed him to escape and report his findings. No, von Schön had left Tsingtau still believing that McColl was the businessman he claimed to be and only later been told that this was not the case. He had then boarded the
Manchuria
intent on finishing the job that his Chinese hireling had bungled in Shanghai and been frustrated by the fact that his target was hardly ever alone.

McColl felt as if he’d been betrayed and knew that the feeling
was ridiculous. His enemy had proved himself more adept at deception—it was as simple as that.

And the game was not over.

Dates and times were written on the backs of the photographs. Von Schön had visited the ashram the previous afternoon, only hours before the latest would-be assassin had climbed into McColl’s hotel wardrobe. Which hardly seemed a coincidence. The one remaining mystery was the identity of his savior, the author of the warning message. One of the undercover Indians, he guessed—the note-writer’s command of English had seemed a bit on the shaky side.

So where had von Schön been staying? And where was he now? “Did anyone follow this man?” he asked Palóu.

“My younger son tried, but the man jumped on a tram at the last moment.”

Which came as no surprise. McColl went through the rest of the photographs, which were all of Indians. Most had names and addresses penciled in on the back—Palóu and his boys had done a wonderful job.

McColl said as much.

“The weather’s against us today,” the detective said with a gesture toward the fog-filled window.

“Yeah, well, I’m afraid I can’t afford any more days anyway. Not for the moment at least. But I’m going to leave your name with … with my boss here and recommend that he use you if he decides to take matters any further.”

“Thank you.” Palóu smiled. “You’re leaving San Francisco?”

“In a few days. But there is one last thing I need to know. Could you find out if a particular someone has booked a seat on a long-distance train in the past few days?”

“That shouldn’t be too tough.”

McColl pulled von Schön’s photograph from the pile and handed it across.

“Ah. Without a name it might be.”

“His name is Rainer von Schön. At least I think it is. Until I saw that photograph, I thought he was just a businessman, but it seems he works for the German government. And I’d like to know where he’s headed.”

Palóu nodded. “If he’s made a booking in that name, I should be able to trace it.”

Settling accounts with the detective left McColl’s supply of dollars seriously diminished. Outside, the fog showed no sign of lifting, which seemed like a comment on his recent work. He paused to scan the surroundings, but there were no lurking shapes in the immediate vicinity.

Walking on, he told himself to look on the bright side—he had, after all, unmasked a German agent, even if the German agent had unmasked him first. The fact that von Schön’s countrymen had tried so hard to prevent McColl from leaving their Chinese enclave suggested that, for all his blundering, he had managed to garner some useful information. And whether or not his work here in San Francisco would bear useful fruit was still an open question. A reborn intelligence setup was bound to find the photographs, names, and addresses useful, and Father Meagher might prove a thread worth unwinding. His misreading of von Schön hadn’t proved fatal. Not quite.

But his vanity had taken a knock. He owed his shot at Father Meagher as much to knowing Caitlin as to anything else, and the odds on their getting together must have been infinitesimal. When it came to writing the next report for Cumming, he would need to be creative.

Farther down Powell he stopped off at the Chicago & North Western passenger office and booked himself onto Monday’s Overland Limited. There were no single compartments left, which was just as well since he couldn’t afford one. He prayed that Caitlin had reserved one in time, or their three-day journey would be less of an idyll than planned.

Next stop was the telegraph office and a cable to Jed and Mac
announcing the date of his arrival in New York City. He would, he reckoned, be only a day or so behind them. His last task took him back to his hotel, where he watched the manager place the envelope of photographs in the cast-iron safe, clang the door shut, and twirl the combination wheel with a wholly spurious flourish.

With nothing left to do that day, and wary of secluding himself in his room, he went back out into the fog. The restaurants on Geary seemed like well-lit caves in shadowy cliffs, and after eating lunch in one he wandered down to the junction with Market and caught a tram heading west. By the time he got off at the northeastern corner of Golden Gate Park, visibility had begun to improve, and as he took the long walk west toward the ocean, it seemed as if a vast curtain were lifting in front of him. When he finally reached the shoreline, the sky behind him was a mass of gray, the heavens ahead the purest blue.

He stared out across the Pacific, remembering the weeks spent crossing it. Von Schön had certainly not been who McColl thought he was. Had Caitlin?

He took the tram back to the city center and walked up to Union Square. There was another message waiting for him, but it contained no warning of a second assassin. The consul wanted to see him and suggested they meet at eight that evening in a bar called the Schooner. McColl left a message of acceptance on the consulate phone and spent the next hour stretched out in a hot bath, getting his story straight.

The Schooner was close to the fishing wharves, with the low-beamed ceilings and wood paneling of many an English country pub. Maybe that was why Fairholme liked it, or maybe he’d taken a fancy to the buxom brunette behind the bar. The consul led the way to a booth in the corner and leafed through the envelope of photographs that McColl had brought along. “Excellent,” was all he said, a judgment he perhaps regretted when McColl explained about von Schön. “You make interesting friends,” he eventually murmured, removing a folded sheet of paper from his inside
pocket. “You asked me to request a check on Caitlin Hanley and her family.”

The good news was that Caitlin was exactly who she claimed to be, a working journalist with extremely radical views on a wide range of issues, most notably those concerning women’s rights, workers’ rights, and European behavior in the rest of the world. The bad news took longer to digest. Her father, Ronan, had, until recently, been secretary of the New York branch of Clan na Gael and was still a close confidant of its leader, John Devoy. Ronan Hanley was almost certainly a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and was suspected of helping to organize an arms shipment to India three years earlier. Caitlin’s sister, Finola, was not involved—at least openly—in political activity, but her older brother, Fergus, was a lawyer who had represented known Clan na Gael members. Her younger brother, Colm, was a member of both the Irish Brotherhood and the homegrown Industrial Workers of the World. He had spent a month in Dublin the previous year, where his contacts had included extreme socialist friends of the rabble-rousing union leader Jim Larkin.

“They sound like a family to give London nightmares,” Fairholme concluded. “If Finola’s as innocent as she seems, she must be wondering what she’s done to deserve the rest of them.”

McColl bristled inwardly on Caitlin’s behalf but managed a thin smile. He dreaded to think what Cumming had made of the report, assuming he’d already seen it.

“Look,” Fairholme said, “I’ll be blunt. I assume you realize that working for the Service and having a good time with this girl are not very compatible pastimes. And that anything more than a good time would be completely out of the question. The only thing you have to ask yourself—because this is what Cumming will ask you—is how willing you are to use this relationship to serve your country.”

McColl could not smile at that. “To betray her, you mean.”

“Don’t be insulted,” Fairholme said quickly, raising a hand. “I’m
trying to help. If you don’t feel you could do that, then drop her now, while you still can.”

The last four days in San Francisco felt endless. On Thursday, Palóu sent him a final bill, along with the information that Rainer von Schön had taken the previous morning’s train to Los Angeles. He had waited, it seemed, until he knew the result of his plotting.

Caitlin had promised to come by on Friday, but only a message arrived—she had a bad cold and was in “such a foul mood you wouldn’t want to see me.” She softened the blow by saying how much she looked forward to Monday.

He went nowhere near the Shamrock or the ashrams, and spent most of his time away from the hotel, in case another assassin had been primed. On Saturday he hired a Model T and explored the still-Spanish towns farther down the peninsula; on the wet Sunday he spent half a day playing eight ball in a bar on Geary and won enough money to leave a tip at his hotel. Those long-past evenings in Oxford billiard halls had not been completely wasted.

Compartment 4

The train was stretched out on the Oakland quay, ready to leave. The weather had cleared again overnight, and the sunlight sparkling on the waters of the bay almost offset the chill of the wind. McColl’s compartment was toward the rear, his three fellow sharers already in occupation. A dark-haired man with a long and bushy mustache introduced himself as William Pearson, and a younger replica as his son, Gabriel. “Pearson and Son,” he added, as if to stress that business came before family. The third man was a young naval officer named Bragg, who offered McColl the choice of upper or lower bunk. Unsure of how much nocturnal rambling his trip would entail, McColl opted for the latter.

He had caught a glimpse of Caitlin on the railroad ferry, wearing her rose-colored scarf and hat, and had started walking toward her. She had noticed him and quickly shaken her head, adding a slight tilt of explanation in the direction of her companion. Father Meagher, resplendent in long black cassock and biretta, was too busy arguing with a railroad official to have noticed McColl, and she obviously liked it that way. He felt a pang at being spurned but knew he was being ridiculous. Doubtless she had her reasons.

Once his suitcase was safely wedged under the lower bunk, he moved back into the corridor to watch their departure. A shrill blast of the locomotive’s whistle and the train clanked into motion, pulling away from the quay but keeping to the edge of the bay. Two battleships were anchored close to shore, reminding him of the morning he had fled Tsingtau.

He walked forward in search of the club car, found it still empty, and took possession of a leather armchair facing west across the bay. After ordering a beer from the steward, he noticed a fan of newspapers on a table at the end of the car and went to choose one. As McColl returned with an ancient, dog-eared copy of the London
Times
, the steward arrived with his drink and proudly pointed out the electric reading lights that hung above each chair.

McColl read through the paper, occasionally pausing to return a new arrival’s greeting or admire the changing view of the bay. In recent months he had acquired the habit of scanning a newspaper for signs of change in the international weather, but on this occasion nothing leaped out at him—no reports of bloodthirsty speeches or frontier incidents or suspicious war games. The Kaiser obviously hadn’t wedged his foot in his mouth in recent weeks, and the Balkans seemed quiet as Balkans could be. It might be the lull before the storm, but maybe the governments that mattered had finally begun to see some sense.

The one story that did draw his attention concerned fellow spies. A British husband and wife had been arrested in possession of “documents relating to the navy.” Who they were spying for was not mentioned, but the woman had been caught heading for Brussels and a meeting with someone called Petersen. The police had discovered as much after laboriously reconstructing a note that she had torn to shreds in one of their vehicles. Why no one had stopped her was not explained.

The moral of the story, McColl decided, was burn or memorize.

By the time he’d finished the paper, the train had reached the Carquinez Strait and was being divided for loading aboard what the railroad company proudly proclaimed the “largest ferry boat in the world.” The
Solano
was certainly enormous, with two towering chimneys flanking the paddle wheel and four tracks running the length of the vessel to hold the segmented train. The strait was about a mile wide, and the crossing itself took much less time than the maneuvers that preceded and followed it.

The train put together again, the journey resumed. McColl took lunch in the buffet car, then walked back down to the observation car at the rear. All the seats were occupied, but one opened up as he stood looking in, and he gratefully took possession. The upholstered armchairs, like their leather cousins in the club car, all faced inward, which seemed a strange decision, in that observation had to be conducted through the gaps between those sitting opposite. But the arrangement did have the advantage of preventing an approach from behind, which, in view of his recent experiences, McColl found somewhat comforting. As did the fact that all the babbling voices sounded distinctly American.