Authors: David Downing
McColl gave them a minute, then sidled up to take a look within. The ground floor was divided by a wood-and-glass partition, with both rooms having access to each other and the semicircular bar. A young man was seated at the piano in the near room and seemed to be playing more for himself than the half dozen drinkers at the widely spaced tables. Brady and Suhr had joined a single large group in the farther room—McColl could see the American’s cap above the partition.
If he wanted to hear anything, he had to go in. He could buy a beer, sit by the partition, and hope that no one he knew came into his half of the bar. If anyone did, he would just have to keep his head down and pray that whoever it was would be taken in by the new beard and old clothes. The risk seemed enormous, but so did the potential rewards, and what other choice did he have? If he waited outside until the group emerged, he’d have to pick one man to follow. He’d still have no clue as to what was intended, or who they all were, or where all the others were going.
He patted the gun in his pocket for luck and carefully opened the door. Nodding a cursory greeting to the faces turned toward him, he walked up to the bar and asked the middle-aged man
behind it for a bottle of porter. Behind him the pianist seemed unable to decide which tune he wanted to play, starting several before settling for one McColl didn’t recognize.
“New in Dublin?” the bartender asked in response to his Australian accent.
“I am,” McColl told him with a smile. “From Down Under,” he added before carrying his bottle and glass over to a table beside the partition. On impulse he sat facing away from the bar—and from anyone rounding the end of the partition. Not being seen felt more important than seeing.
On the other side, a voice was asking why it wouldn’t be simpler to take the ferry.
McColl heard no reply, only silence and the shifting of chairs. Then feet sounded behind him, and it took all he had not to turn around.
Something hard jammed into his side. A gun.
“Keep your hands on the table,” the familiar American voice ordered.
He did as he was told. “What the fuck do you want?” McColl protested angrily, emphasizing the Australian accent. “And who the fuck are you?” An innocent man, he realized, would do what he couldn’t risk doing—look his assailant in the eye.
Brady seemed to sense as much. He placed the barrel of his pistol under McColl’s chin and, almost gently, used it to lever his head around. Curiosity gave way to surprise, and that to amusement. “Mr. McColl,” he drawled. “Stand up.”
McColl did as he was told, wondering how the rest of the room was reacting to events. The pianist had stopped playing.
“Let’s move to the other room,” the American suggested, adding a jerk of the gun in support.
As he walked in the required direction, McColl allowed himself a glance around the room. There were bleak stares aplenty and no hint of sympathy. The barman looked pleased with himself, presumably for supplying the tip-off.
In the other room, one of those waiting was Colm Hanley. “It’s your sister’s boyfriend,” Brady told him with a laugh. “Donal,” he said to the nearest man. “Check his pockets.”
The gun was taken and laid on the table. “Now sit,” Brady said, prodding McColl toward an upright chair by the wall.
“Who is this man?” Suhr asked.
“His name’s Jack McColl,” a familiar voice answered. Seán Tiernan’s.
“McColl!” the German expostulated, half rising to his feet.
“You know him?” Brady asked. The pianist was at work again, playing, if anything, a little louder.
“He is an Englander agent. Two times already he escapes from us.”
“Third time lucky, then,” Brady said with a grin, sending a shiver of fear through McColl. The tune the pianist was playing was “After the Ball is Over.”
“Are there any more questions?” Tiernan asked, glancing around at his comrades. McColl mechanically noted their number—there were nine including the German, and all but Suhr were still in their twenties.
“Just him,” one man said, gesturing toward McColl.
“Leave him to me,” Brady said shortly, drawing momentary looks of relief from one or two faces.
Everyone got up to leave, and McColl noticed for the first time that each of them had brought a bag or suitcase. As if they were all going off on vacation together. But presumably not to the seaside.
Some looked at him on their way out and some didn’t, but there was no pity in any of their eyes. Colm had been staring at him ever since his appearance, and when he stopped in front of McColl, there was still surprise in his. “How could my sister have been such a fool?” he asked, shaking his head in stupefaction.
“She was never that,” McColl said quietly.
Colm shook his head again, offered a withering look, and walked out.
The bartender, meanwhile, was whispering something in Tiernan’s ear. “Not here,” were the two words that McColl recognized.
Brady soon confirmed as much: “We’re going for a walk. A short one.” He handed his gun to Tiernan, put on the long coat that McColl remembered from Paterson, and took the weapon back. “This way,” Brady said, inviting him through an open door at the side of a bar and into the passage beyond. McColl walked slowly down it, supremely aware of the gun in his back, trying to steel himself. If he did nothing, he was a dead man—he had no doubts on that score. Doing something would probably end the same way, but there was always a chance. And it was better to die fighting back than just let the bastard gun him down.
Which was all very well in theory. He felt almost frozen by fear and oh, so eager to heed those voices advising him to wait for the perfect opportunity.
“Stop,” Brady told him as they reached a door to the outside world. “You’d better take a look,” he told Tiernan, increasing the pressure of the barrel in McColl’s back as the Irishman squeezed by.
The door opened, and rain blew in. Cursing, Tiernan stepped out into what looked like an alley between buildings. “All clear!” he shouted back after glancing both ways.
“Out,” Brady ordered.
Now, McColl thought. It wasn’t much of a chance, but it had to be better than none at all. He stepped away from the gun faster than Brady expected and levered himself around the jamb with one hand. Tiernan was momentarily in the way, but the force of McColl’s onslaught knocked the Irishman down, and the dark, rainswept alley lay open before him. Twenty feet to run, he told himself, and not in a straight line. Who was he kidding?
He heard Brady’s first shot scrape along a wall a split second ahead of the booming gun. He felt the force of the second, was aware of his sprint turning into a stagger as he passed through the mouth of the alley. He didn’t know where he’d been hit, but
it took every ounce of will to keep his legs moving across the cobbled quay, toward the only possible place of safety. It seemed to get no nearer, and his body was almost at the point of giving up on him when another blow in the back provided the propulsion he couldn’t provide for himself, throwing him over the edge of the quay and into the side of the ship that was berthed alongside, to drop through the dark well between them.
Even in July the water was cold enough to jerk him back from unconsciousness. He experienced one brief moment of panic as he bumped into the harbor bottom, but growing up beside the sea had cured any fear of water, and he had the presence of mind to seek out the faintest strip of light above and rise painfully up between ship and dock. He knew he’d been hit at least twice, but it was difficult to tell how serious the wounds were, and for the moment it hardly seemed to matter—if those shots hadn’t killed him, his enemies still might.
They would be looking down, he thought, but they wouldn’t be able to see him. And the rain on the water would mask any sounds.
He was right, but the next few moments were still terrifying. When his head broke surface, it took forever to clear his eyes, and the night sky above seemed so much brighter than he’d expected. And there were two silhouetted heads up above, leaning over the lip of the dock. He waited for gunfire, but none came. They couldn’t see him.
He edged closer in among the pilings in search of something to grab. When he found it, the pain of seizing hold almost made him cry out, and he had to use the other arm. He wondered how long it would be before he lost consciousness—he had to be losing blood, and he still wasn’t sure where he was wounded. The second bullet had hit him in the shoulder, uncomfortably close to the neck, but the first was lower down, and the only organ he was sure it had missed was his heart.
He heard a voice above—Brady’s, he thought, but he couldn’t make out what the American had said.
“He must be dead,” Tiernan said, loudly enough for him to hear. “You put two bullets in him.”
The American said something McColl couldn’t catch.
“And we have a boat that’s waiting,” Tiernan reminded him.
If Brady replied, McColl didn’t hear it. For the next five minutes, all he heard was the rain and the water lapping against the pilings. He was feeling weaker with each passing second. He had to do something.
Leaning out, he could see no other heads up above. He felt sure they were gone, but if they weren’t, they weren’t. He couldn’t stay where he was.
Half swimming, half clinging, he worked his way down the quayside wall until he found a ladder of rusted iron rings. He had no idea how long it took to pull himself up, but the last thing he remembered was slumping forward onto the cobbles, straining to roll himself free of the edge, and lying stretched out on his back with raindrops tap-tap-tapping on his face.
For the second time that year, he woke up in a hospital ward. According to the blue-eyed nurse on duty, he’d been discovered by a passing constable and brought into the hospital on a collier’s cart. Her smile as she tucked in his sheet reminded him a little of Caitlin, and he felt his heart tighten. Now that Colm knew, so would she.
A passing sense of relief, which he ascribed to the end of pretense, quickly gave way to a much more lasting sense of loss. It was over; it had to be.
His body felt strangely unimpaired until he tried to move. Then pain kicked in with a vengeance, as if he were being stabbed in several different places. After a few minutes, he was sufficiently recovered to call the nurse, who told him a doctor would soon be around to explain his condition.
But it was Dunwood who arrived first. McColl told him all he could, which wasn’t much—there were nine of them, including
one German and at least two Americans, and most if not all had been about to take ship. “You might still be able to intercept them,” he added, noticing for the first time that it was still dark outside.
Dunwood shook his head. “Too good a start,” he said.
The penny dropped. “What day is this?”
“It’s Tuesday evening. You’ve been out for nearly forty-eight hours—they’re in England by now.”
“Shit.”
“Which probably means you’re safe enough here,” Dunwood continued as he got up to leave. “But just in case, there’s an armed constable outside the door.”
An hour or so later, the doctor turned up. McColl had lost a great deal of blood from the two wounds, and for a while on the Sunday they’d been “a trifle concerned.” But now it was only a matter of time and healing. The wound in his shoulder wasn’t serious, but he wouldn’t be able to do much with his left arm for a couple of weeks. Hold a cigarette perhaps, but not much more. The other bullet had passed between his right lung and his liver, narrowly missing both but creating “a bit of a mess.” That, too, would need time to heal, and he could expect a fair amount of stiffness and pain.
“How long before I’m out of here?”
“Ten days if you’re lucky, but then you’ll need some convalescence.”
It wasn’t a rosy prospect, given how fast things seemed to be moving in the world outside. When she came to empty his bedpan next morning, the staff nurse was full of the news that Madame Caillaux had been acquitted in the sensational French murder trial, but she was less up to date on Balkan affairs. It was only when he got hold of a newspaper that McColl discovered Serbia’s less fortunate fate. The Austrians had declared war the previous day, and fighting had already begun.
Over the following days, he lay there in the crowded ward with nothing to do but watch and listen to the other patients, pick at
the dreadful food, and stare at the bare gray walls. In truth, he didn’t have much to be proud of. In the unlikely event he would ever get to offer one, he rehearsed a defense of his conduct toward Caitlin and found it far from convincing. When he caught himself hoping that Colm wouldn’t live to tell her, the sense of self-disgust was almost overwhelming.
He wondered where Colm and his comrades-in-arms were now and what they were doing. Each day he scanned the papers the nurses brought him for news of an outrage in London or some other city, but thus far in vain. If they’d been caught, Dunwood would have told him, so they had to be out there somewhere, waiting for their chosen moment to strike.
By Friday he was able to walk to the toilet and to sit at other bedsides and talk to his fellow patients. Ever since the Austrian declaration, the main topic of conversation was the possibility of British involvement if the conflict started to spread. The consensus was no—why should Britain involve itself in a Continental squabble over a murdered archduke? No one even knew where Bosnia was, and the whole business seemed like a comic opera.
Dunwood, when he came again on the Saturday evening, offered rather a different slant. Germany had just declared war on Russia, he told McColl in a whisper, as he plunked some grapes on the bedside table. Which meant that Germany would also declare war on France in the next couple of days.
“Why?” McColl wanted to know.
“Because they have only one strategic plan, and that involves defeating France before Russia has time to mobilize.”
McColl could hardly believe it. “They’ve been that stupid?”
“It looks like it. And attacking France will bring us in.”
“Definitely?”
“I think so. The French moved their whole fleet to the Mediterranean because we promised to cover the Channel, so we can hardly abandon them now.”