Susan MacNeal - Princess Elizabeth's Spy

Across the long table, Maggie met his eyes.

“Then who was it?” she asked, softly.

“It was—” Edmund faltered, unable to continue.

“Oh, good Lord, man, just rip the bandage off!” the P.M. interrupted. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Miss Hope—I truly am—but the double agent in question wasn’t your father.

“It— she —was your mother.”

Unblinking, Maggie pushed back her chair and rose to her feet. Then she slowly walked to the door. Once through it, she began running down the long hall, her footfalls echoing on the marble floor.

“Maggie!” Edmund called. “Wait! Please!”

Maggie stopped in the middle of the empty corridor but didn’t turn around.

“You can’t …” Edmund chose his words carefully. “You can’t let this affect you.”

She spun to face him. “You know what— Dad ? You have no right—no right to lecture me. Or to tell me how I should deal with this!”

“I know how horrible this feels. I’ll never forget how I felt when I learned the truth.”

“And having a child? Was that part of the plan too? Did Sektion dictate that as part of the cover story?”

Edmund was silent in the face of her accusation.

Maggie turned on her heel and left.

Meeting adjourned, Hugh caught up with Maggie outside of the MI-5 building on St. James’s Street.

“Quite the piece of news,” he said, falling into step beside her.

“I adore British understatement.”

“Let’s find somewhere to sit down, all right?”

She shrugged.

“Or, we can just keep walking.”

“Let’s go to Saint James’s Park.”

Eventually, they reached a bench by the bottle-green lake, wrinkling in the wind. Hugh put his arm around her and Maggie started talking, words pouring out of her. “When we were on the U-boat, I watched a man die. Someone I cared about.” Despite the bucolic picture in the front of them, they could still hear the sound of traffic and bells of big Ben.

“Gregory Strathcliffe was a traitor. If he hadn’t drowned, he would have been taken into custody and hanged. Do you really think once you reached Germany, you’d just be sent back to England? Or that you and he would go quietly to Switzerland? Gregory was a bad man. The worst kind, actually—a turncoat.”

“A weak man, perhaps,” Maggie admitted, watching the swans circle warily around the geese on the water. “I’m not exonerating him, but the way he grew up, and then the stress of battle, and his injuries.…” She sighed. “I supposed it doesn’t matter. He did what he did. But the truth is, he’s one in a long line of people I’ve known who’ve betrayed me, who’ve lied to me. And where does that leave me? Never knowing whom to trust. Since I’ve come here, since I’ve gotten involved with these people, it’s becoming a part of me. And I’m afraid of becoming what I despise.”

The cold wind rustled what leaves were left on the enormous ancient maple trees. “Maggie, you’ve a brave, loyal, strong Briton, despite that accent of yours. What you’ve done—are incredible accomplishments. You should feel proud.”

“I got distracted,” Maggie said, admitting her secret guilt. “I didn’t like Louisa and I let that color my perception of her. You were right all along—she wasn’t an exemplary human being, but she never did anything wrong. And I was so convinced she had, that I let my feelings trump logic.” She gave a sharp laugh. “I did that with my father too. I was so mad at him for abandoning me, that I let it cloud my judgment—and lead me to suspect him of being a double agent.”

“The file was incriminating.”

“No,” Maggie snapped. “It was inconclusive. I let my emotions cloud my judgment.” Then, in gentler tones, “I miss math—two plus two always equals four.” Maggie thought for a moment. “Although, as Kurt Gödel theorized, there’s a vast difference between the truth and the part of the truth that can be proved.”

“Er, what?”

“Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem tells us that it’s impossible to fulfill Hilbert’s wish to find a complete and consistent set of axioms for all of mathematics. In other words, we’ll never be able to prove everything. We might know something to be true, or we might want something to be true, need it to be true—but we may not ever be able to prove it.”

“Let’s take this back to the practical—you had theories and you followed them.”

“I wasted valuable time on Louisa, when I could have been looking for the real threats: Gregory and Audrey. And I missed the connection between Lily and Gregory. She called him Le Fantôme. Then she hid the decrypt in Le Fantôme de l’Opéra. It was plain as a nose on a face! How on earth did I miss that?”

“It’s easy to see these things after the fact.”

Maggie snorted.

“Personally, when I think of Intelligence, I like to think of Sherlock Holmes. Not the hot-on-the-trail-of-the-killer Holmes, but the man sitting quietly at his desk, putting two and two together. It’s not glamorous in the least—it’s hard, boring, often exasperating work. You need to organize the facts, assess them, dismiss the irrelevant. Then, using induction and deduction, you come to a conclusion.”

“I know—”

“But you’ve got to do this without emotion, or prejudice or even hope clouding your judgment.”

“It was so much easier when it was just maths. You throw all these people into the mix—”

“It’s hard, yes. But now you know. You have experience. And I know you—you won’t make the same mistake again.”

“ That’s for certain.” Maggie looked off across the lake. After a few moments of silence, “Thank you.”

“We’re partners, Maggie. And friends. And … more. I’d do anything to help you.”

“I know.”

Prime Minister Winston Churchill was in his large Victorian bathtub in the Annexe when his butler, Mr. Inches, showed in Peter Frain.

The P.M., plump, rosy, and naked as a cherub, was immersed in steaming water, smoking a cigar, glass tumbler of brandy and soda balanced on the edge of the tub.

“Prime Minister,” Frain said.

“Take a seat,” Churchill growled. Then he shouted to Mrs. Tinsley, seated outside the bathroom door with her noiseless typewriter propped on her lap. “We’re done, Mrs. T.! Go away!”

“Yes, sir,” she said serenely, picking up the typewriter and her papers and making her way downstairs.

Frain sat down on the wooden chair placed in Churchill’s bathroom specifically for meetings. He tried not to stare at the large, pink form. “Sir.”

The P.M. splashed like a child, then a shadow passed over his face. “Inches!” he bellowed.

The beleaguered butler appeared in the doorway. “Sir?”

“I believe the temperature of my bath has dropped below one hundred and four degrees, Inches. Check. Now.”

The butler entered the bathroom and went to the tub. He knelt, rolled up one sleeve and reached into the water, pulling up a thermometer that was attached by a thin chain to the faucet.

“Well?” the P.M. demanded, chewing on the end of his cigar.

“Ninety-nine degrees, sir. Shall I add more hot water?”

“Damn it, yes! Do I need to tell you everything?”

“No, sir,” Inches said mildly as he turned on the hot water tap.

Frain permitted himself a small smile, thinking of the rest of Britons with their five-inch water mark and limited supplies of hot water. Rules just never seemed to apply to Winston Churchill.

As the tub filled, the P.M.’s lip jutted forward in a pout. “Now get out!”

“Yes, sir.” Inches took his leave.

Churchill rested his cigar in a cut-glass ashtray, then sank beneath the waterline and blew bubbles. Rising to the surface, he stared up at the ceiling, floating. “I was thinking about our meeting at MI-Five today.”