Mr.Churchill's Secretary(93)

Claire took an endless moment and looked at Maggie. A muscle in her jaw twitched.

This is it, Maggie thought. This is really it. That was all she had time to process.

Then Claire said, “This is a waste.”

“What?” Devlin said, surprised.

“She’s one of Churchill’s key secretaries,” Claire said. “The information she knows could be invaluable to us. To you.”

“I asked you to kill her,” Devlin said pleasantly. “Now, do it.”

Claire lowered the gun and checked to see if it was loaded.

That brief act of delay provoked an avuncular look of disappointment on Devlin’s face. “Oh, Miss Kelly,” he said, sighing and shaking his head, “I expected so much more from you.”

Then, to the other two men, “Please show our guests downstairs. I’ll see them again after Saint Paul’s.”

“They’ve been in there too long,” Snodgrass said, drumming his short, bony fingers on the Cabinet Room table. Edmund, John, and David looked on, tense and pale. Frain was on the phone, standing with his back to the other men.

There was a tap at the door. “Excuse me?” It was Mrs. Tinsley.

“What!” Snodgrass exclaimed, rising to his feet.

“May I—may I be of any assistance?”

“You may be of assistance, Mrs. Tinsley, by carrying on with your duties,” he said sharply.

Mrs. Tinsley took a step backward, hands to her pearls. “Of course, Mr. Snodgrass,” she said. “I only meant …”

“As far as we know, she’s all right,” he said, his voice softer now. “We’ll let you know when there’s news.”

“Thank you,” Mrs. Tinsley said. She turned and closed the door behind her.

“What’s going on at Saint Paul’s?” Edmund asked Snodgrass. “Has the bomb squad made any progress?”

“Some,” Snodgrass said. “But not enough. Not with only an hour left.” He ran his hands through what was left of his hair. “We need the damn override key.”

Frain replaced the receiver and turned around. “MI-Five has lost visual confirmation on both Miss Hope and Miss Kelly. But they also state that no shots have been fired.”

“What now?” John asked, his face gray.

“Now we wait.”

“You can wait,” Edmund said. “I have an idea.”

Devlin’s men tied Maggie and Claire to a water pipe in the basement. They stood, back to back, their hands bound with wide adhesive tape and attached to the pole in the oily gloom from slatted windows high up near the ground. The large room was filled with towers and towers of cardboard boxes, and the air smelled of dampness, mildew, and mouse droppings.

Without speaking, the men left, their footsteps on the stained cement floor fading into the darkness.

“Well, you must be happy now,” Maggie said when the footsteps died away. She pulled away as much as she could in her bond, not wanting to touch. Her arm burned and throbbed.

“Hardly,” Claire muttered.

“Let’s see if I got all this straight—you fooled all of us, you were a secret IRA agent conspiring with Nazis, you killed Sarah, you took my identity, you tried to assassinate the Prime Minister.”

“Michael killed Sarah,” she said in a quiet voice. “Not me.”

“Well, that makes it all better, now, doesn’t it?” Maggie snapped. “I’m sure it was a great comfort to Sarah.”

Claire was silent for a moment. “I don’t suppose you can appreciate what I did back there. I could have killed you—should have killed you—when Devlin handed me that gun.”

“And why didn’t you?”

Claire gave a deep sigh. Just when Maggie thought she’d never speak, she said in a small voice, “Because I can’t kill anymore. I didn’t—I didn’t know what it would be like. The toll it would take.”

“ ‘The toll’?”

“I killed one man. And he deserved to die. But I’ve been part of other plots, Diana Snyder, now …” She could barely bring herself to say the name.

“… Sarah.…”

“Ah,” Maggie said. “It’s different when it’s someone you know, is it?”

“I didn’t do it—but I was there.”

“And then you were going to kill the P.M.? Mr. Churchill?”

Claire squirmed in the darkness. “John—John got to me first. And again, I couldn’t pull the damned trigger. I know John—knew him—I just couldn’t shoot him point-blank. I couldn’t make my hand do it.”

Maggie took a moment to absorb what Claire had told her. Then she snorted in the darkness. “So your hand’s your conscience? Good for your hand, then.”