The Prime Minister's Secret Agent(78)

They looked up at the sky and saw the outlines of Japanese Zero planes flying overhead, so close that the blowback nearly knocked them down. The morning sun had risen red, and its crepuscular rays looked like the flag of Japan.

Over Pearl Harbor, torpedoes began to fall and Admiral Kimmel, watching the destruction of the U.S. fleet, fell to his knees.





Chapter Twenty


When Clara regained consciousness, she was in a hospital.

Her wrists were bandaged in white gauze. An IV was stuck into a vein of her inner elbow.

There was a figure on the chair, a man in a rumpled suit, his usually perfectly Brylcreemed hair mussed, a file of papers, still unread, on his lap. He gazed, unseeing, out the window, at flakes of swirling snow.

But when he sensed Clara’s eyes open, he trained his eyes back to her.

“Peter,” she said, smiling weakly. “You came.”

“If you’d really wanted to kill yourself, you would have slit your carotid artery—you wouldn’t have wasted time with your wrists,” said Frain, unable to tear his eyes away from Clara’s.

She smiled, a satisfied cat-like smile. “I bought myself some more time,” she said. “I know British law. Even though I was scheduled to be shot the next morning, you wouldn’t have let me bleed out on the floor. The moral inconsistencies of your people amuse me to no end.”

Frain put his thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose.

“No,” Clara said. “I know your ways. I knew that you would hospitalize me, and wait until I’ve recovered, and then shoot me.” She smiled. “You British are so civilized.”

“Now that you’re awake, I’ll leave you in peace,” Frain said, gathering up his belongings.

“No, no,” Clara said, never taking her eyes from his. “It’s been, let’s see—how long? Twenty-five years now?” Her gaze flicked up and down his body. “You’ve aged well, Peter, I must admit. Except for the gray in your hair and a few more wrinkles, you look the same.”

“I’m not the same, Clara,” he said, putting his files in his briefcase and rising to his feet. “And neither are you.”

“How do you know that?” she mocked. “You don’t know me. You don’t know what I’ve been through over there. In Germany … They’re insane—do you understand? Hitler is insane and he’s surrounded himself with yes-men who cater to his every whim. I did what I needed to do to stay alive. To keep my family in Berlin alive.” She looked at him, eyes wide. “I did what I had to, to survive.”

Frain put on his overcoat. “Yes, I’m sure,” he answered drily. “And what of your family here? Did you ever think about them? And now that you’re here, what of your family back in Germany?”

“Margaret, yes, of course. You know how I loved her. But Edmund—no. He was a means to an end. Miles—well, that marriage was dead long ago. And Elise …”

“Yes?”

Clara shook her head. “Too pious for her own good, but Elise is a survivor, too. I’ll bet on it.”

“And me?” he asked, putting on his hat and shrugging into his overcoat.

“Peter,” she said, her eyes green and wide. “I loved you. I always loved you. And we both know you loved me, too.”



The clock in Secretary Hull’s antechamber ticked as Ambassador Nomura and Special Envoy Kurusu waited. It was five minutes past two in Washington.

Hull was just finishing up a telephone conversation with President Roosevelt. “Yes, Mr. President,” he said, standing, his eyes like flint. “And it’s been confirmed by multiple sources?” Then he sat, his knees buckling under him, hitting the leather seat with a bang he didn’t even notice. “All right then. Yes, they’re about to arrive. Of course I won’t let on that we know when I receive them. Yes, Mr. President. Thank you, Mr. President.”

Hull hung up the telephone and took a ragged breath. He called out to his secretary, “Send them in.”

Nomura and Kurusu entered. Both bowed, then Nomura handed Hull the fourteen-part document, the so-called Final Notification.

Hull picked up his pince-nez and pretended to read it for the first time.

When he was done, he rose to his full height and began what his grandmother would have called a Tennessee tongue-lashing. “In all my fifty years of public service, I have never seen a document so crowded with infamous falsehoods and distortions. On a scale so huge, that I never imagined until today that any government on this planet was capable of uttering it.” Hull would not meet Nomura’s eyes.

While Nomura looked wounded, Kurusu’s face remained unreadable.