The Secret War (12 page)

“We had to part to go through college, but it was already an understood thing that we should marry when we were older, and our first thought when vacations came round was always to be together again. When he was twenty-one all his great business interests were handed over to him formally. For a few years he worked terribly conscientiously on the boards of his companies and travelled all over the States to make a thorough personal investigation of his affairs. That was when I took up flying and began breaking records because, you see, we were separated for a bit. He wasn't very successful as a business man. He wasn't practical enough and he placed the well-being of his work-people before the piling up of profits. That couldn't go on indefinitely; his companies began to suffer; his shareholders began to kick. Eventually his co-directors combined against him and he was practically forced into retirement. He came back to me as handsome and
attractive as ever but—well, just a bit shattered. He needed me more than ever and he took it for granted that we were to carry out our boy-and-girl understanding. One night he just said, ‘Isn't it about time we thought of getting married?' and I agreed that it was.”

“Did nothing occur before then to make you feel that one day you might prefer someone else?” Lovelace asked slowly.

She turned to him sharply. “Why do you ask that?”

“I don't know,” he shrugged. “Your flying must have taken you about the world a bit—I only wondered.”

“I'll be quite truthful,” she confessed after a moment. “There was just one episode, years ago, when I was travelling in Europe with my father and mother—before I went to college. That changed me from a child into a woman, I think. It haunted me for a long time but it was only a sort of schoolgirl dream.”

“Have you ever met the man again?”

“Yes, but he didn't even know me. After the first shock I wasn't really surprised either. It was only a silly incident that happened to make a tremendous impression on a little girl but could have had no significance at all for a grown man.”

“How strange—life is strange, isn't it?”

She nodded. “Anyhow, that's all over. It never happened except for the things my imagination built round it. Nothing has ever really come between Christopher and myself—and I'm glad. I've never realised until these last few weeks quite how desperately he needed me. He needs you too.”

“Valerie.” He placed a hand gently on her shoulder and turned her towards him. “Where did we meet before? Why do you make such a mystery of it? I know we did—won't you tell me?”

The bright moonlight glinted on her smooth chestnut hair as she shook her head. “It was in the land of dreams perhaps, but this is Athens and Zarrif is leaving
here to-morrow to obtain his Abyssinian concession. If he succeeds we know that it will be used to bring about another European war. Christopher means to try to stop him, but what chance will he have unaided? Poor, flame-like, impractical Christopher is standing alone as the sole defence of the peace and happiness of ten million homes. He needs us, Anthony—both of us—and we can't let him down.”

“No,” said Lovelace slowly. “We can't let him down.”

At six-thirty the following morning Christopher invaded Lovelace's room and shook him gently by the shoulder.

“Lovelace!” he said in a low voice. “Lovelace, wake up, I want to talk to you.”

The sleeping man turned over and blinked his eyes. “What's the matter?” he muttered. “What's the time?”

“I don't know, something after six, I think.” Christopher said vaguely.

“Then you can go to hell,” Lovelace grunted. “I never talk to anyone before nine,” and he buried his head firmly in the pillow.

He was furious at being wakened in the middle of a very pleasant dream. In it, he was a young man again and back at Fronds, the lovely old place in Yorkshire that had been in his family since Charles II's time. He knew that he was not much over twenty because the gardens were beautifully kept, just as they had been before he succeeded to the title and heavy death duties had compelled him to close the place down. It was high summer and the sun made dazzling patches of light and shade upon the neatly trimmed yew hedges of the famous Maze. Lovelace had known every turn and twist of it from his earliest boyhood and he was only strolling through its high-walled alleys to its centre because he wanted to think something out and be alone. Why he should have found it necessary to seek refuge there when he could have sat in the far more lovely pond garden or paced the long, walled
border with its multitude of flowers, he could not recall. Suddenly the peace of the place had been disturbed by running feet and a pleading voice had cried, “Please! please! show me the way out of here.” The dream had become confused then and he felt himself rocking as though in a ship at sea while someone was saying, “Lovelace, Lovelace, wake up!”

He tried to recapture it as Christopher tiptoed from the room, but he could only see the gardens, now overgrown and uncared for, as they had been since straitened circumstances had necessitated his living on the few hundreds a year which was all his father had been able to leave him with the place.

For the hundredth time he wondered if it wouldn't really be wisest to sell Fronds. It was a very gracious house, a little larger perhaps than most people wanted these days, but a moderately rich man could keep it up quite easily and close one of the wings if he found it too big for him. The gardens were famous and could soon be put to rights again with a little money. The roofs were sound and there were plenty of bathrooms since it had been modernised, when his over-generous father had spent far more than he could afford running it, free of all charges to the country, as a hospital during the war. He hadn't known then, of course, how a grateful Government would repay his patriotism by taxing him so highly, when the war was over, that he could no longer live there without making inroads on his capital, and that death duties would prove the final blow which would make a mockery of his son Anthony's inheritance.

It was saleable enough, Lovelace knew. He was often getting letters from Mount Street house agents asking him to allow them to offer it and holding out the prospect of interested parties who would be pleased to enter into negotiations. The place and contents, which included a few good pictures and a fairly valuable library, would bring him enough to turn his eight-hundred-and
fifty a year income into the best part of three thousand a year. That would make life a far more pleasant affair and enable him to spend a good portion of his time at the more expensive places where most of his friends congregated when they were abroad, or to keep his end up among them in London if he wished, instead of being forced to trek from one remote portion of the globe to another by the cheapest means of travel because living was reasonable and the places of some interest when he got there.

Yet he could never bring himself to sign the letter that would place Fronds on the market. He knew that he would never make enough money himself to live there again. Long ago he had come to accept the fact that he was not the type of man who makes money and that he lacked all aptitude for business. But he had various fairly wealthy aunts and cousins who might possibly remember him substantially in their wills, although he had no real reason to expect it, and if that did happen he knew that he would never be able to forgive himself if he had parted with Fronds. Besides, he had always felt that one day he might marry and have a son. How that would improve the situation, he did not see, unless his wife happened to be an heiress. Still, as long as a son remained even a remote possibility he did not feel that it would be fair to the boy to rob him of the chance of living in the old place which had been the home of his forefathers for so many centuries, if times were better then.

With these well-worn thoughts passing vaguely through his mind he dropped off to sleep again; but not for long. At half-past seven Christopher roused him out once more; this time to say that Valerie was downstairs and anxious to talk to him.

Grumbling, but resigned now to the fact that further sleep was impossible, Lovelace tumbled out of bed, wrestled with the indifferent plumbing which had been installed two generations before in the small Greek
hotel, and made his way down to the lounge a little after eight.

Valerie was seated in a basket chair under an old fig tree that grew in the centre of the courtyard. Her face was pale and her big eyes unnaturally sunken in the hollows beneath her level brows.

“Sorry to get you up so early,” she apologised at once, “but I simply couldn't sleep.”

Lovelace was feeling better now he was bathed, shaved and dressed. He looked at her with grave concern. “Don't worry about me, please. What about some breakfast? I'll bet you haven't had any yet.”

She shook her head. “Thanks. I've had some coffee, but I couldn't eat a thing.”

“That's nonsense,” he said firmly. “You don't go on a starvation diet when you're in the middle of one of your flying stunts, do you? You know how vital it is to keep up your strength.”

“You're right,” she admitted with a wan little smile. “It's a bit unfair that I'm not supposed to have nerves like any ordinary woman but I've got myself to blame for that. I'll do what I can with some rolls and butter and some fruit while you're feeding, if you like.”

“Good, come on then.”

Christopher laid a hand on his arm as he was about to move in the direction of the little dining-room. “If you must eat, why not do it at the airport restaurant while they're getting Valerie's plane ready?”

They both looked at him in surprise as he hurried on: “I didn't sleep much last night, either, so I had a chance to think the whole thing out. I've behaved abominably in dragging the two of you into this. I suppose I've become obsessed by it in a way, otherwise I'd have realised before the danger you were running on my account. It's a bit late to apologise for that now, but I meant what I said last night about going on with it, and before I take the next step I want both of you to be safely out of Athens. That's what I came
to tell you, Lovelace, when I roused you out early this morning.”

Lovelace hesitated a moment. It struck him as grimly humorous that after Valerie had persuaded him, the night before, to give his further assistance by stressing Christopher's absolute dependence on their help in carrying out the task to which his mystic idealism impelled him, they should now find a new and determined Christopher who told them politely but firmly that he meant to complete his mission on his own.

“I see,” he said slowly. “Well, I'm all for Valerie clearing out. Have been from the beginning, as you know, but I don't feel at all happy at the idea of leaving you myself.”

Christopher shrugged impatiently. “This isn't your show any longer. I mean, you've done all you promised in providing me with a perfect opportunity—more—as you fixed things so that I could have got away safely afterwards, and I'm very grateful to you. But I mucked it and Zarrif's leaving Athens at midday. There's no time now to prepare another fool-proof chance and I naturally don't expect you to risk your life in the attempt I've decided to make on him before he gets away.”

“Now look here!” Lovelace pushed him back into his chair and sat down himself. “Let's hear what you intend to do before we go any further.”

Christopher bent forward and spoke in a low voice although the courtyard was deserted. “Zarrif's going to Addis Ababa, isn't he, although we haven't the faintest idea which route he means to take. It's only the 13th to-day so that gives him eighteen days for his journey as he's not due there till the 1st of May. He probably intends to transact all sorts of other business on the way out, but where, we haven't the faintest notion. Once he's left Athens in his plane we're stuck. It's clear therefore that I've got to get him before he starts—within the next five hours. We know already
that it's impossible for me to get into his house and, seeing the sort of bird he is, he'll probably drive to the airport in a bullet-proof car, so it's not much good my standing at the gate to have a pot at him. I'd only get shot myself to no purpose by one of his gunmen. But he's got to leave his car to walk over to his plane, hasn't he? Well, that's my opportunity and I mean to take it.”

“But, Christopher!” Valerie gasped. “That's suicide! Even if you succeeded his bodyguard would shoot you down.”

Lovelace looked thoughtful. “Your reasoning's sound enough about the odds against your ever being able to trace him once he's left Athens, and about the airport being the only place that gives you any hope of doing the job here, but as Valerie says, there's not a chance in a million of your getting away afterwards.”

Christopher stood up again. “I know, but I've brought that on myself. It's the price I've to pay for acting like a squeamish fool when the going was good. I think I'd best say good-bye to you both now. You'll read about what happens in the papers, I expect.”

“Sit down, you young idiot,” Lovelace snapped. “It's revolting to see you dramatise yourself like this.” He had caught Valerie's glance beseeching him to prevent the insane plan and went on more quietly.

“How can you talk so glibly of us reading about your being riddled with bullets. We both know you're doing the heroic thing—sacrificing yourself for an ideal—and all that. But is it necessary? Can't we think of another way.”

“There is no other way,” Christopher stated with a mulish look.

“Maybe you're right; but at least you might give us the chance to exercise any brains we've got on it before you go rushing out to die.”

“Yes, please, Christopher, please,” Valerie added imploringly. “At least listen to what Anthony has to say.”

After that the discussion became heated. Valerie denounced the scheme as sheer madness, entailing Christopher's certain death, while Lovelace backed her up with every argument he could think of, realising now that it was Valerie, not Christopher, whom he would be letting down by withdrawing from the affair unless he could turn the pale-faced young fanatic from his purpose. From becoming a reluctant accomplice he found himself pressing the younger man to accept his further help, for it only needed Christopher's change of front and new desire to have them both safely out of it to spur him into a determination to save the boy from committing such a crazy action, whatever the risk might be himself.