The Unlikely Spy

"Can I make you forget?"

 

 

He had just wanted to sleep. He was exhausted, and being around a body always made him feel dirty. But she began to kiss him, very slowly at first, and softly. Then she was begging him to help her out of her flowered flannel nightshirt, and the madness began. She always made love to him as if she were possessed, clawing and scratching at his body, pulling at him as if trying to draw venom from a wound. And when he entered her she wept and pleaded with him never to leave her again. And afterward, as she lay next to him sleeping, Harry was struck by the most awful thought of his life. He found himself hoping her husband would never come back from the war.

 

 

 

 

 

34

 

 

LONDON

 

 

 

 

 

They gathered around a large model of a Mulberry harbor the following afternoon in a secret room at 47 Grosvenor Square: senior American and British officers assigned to the project; Churchill's personal chief of staff, General Sir Hastings Ismay; and a pair of generals from Eisenhower's staff who sat so still they might have been statues.

 

The meeting began cordially enough, but after a few minutes tempers flared. There were charges and countercharges, accusations of foot-dragging and distortion, even a few quickly regretted personal insults. The British construction estimates were too rosy! You Americans are being too impatient, too--well, too bloody American! It was the pressure, they all agreed, and they started over at the beginning.

 

With little more than three months remaining until D-Day, the Mulberry project was falling hopelessly behind schedule. It's the bloody Phoenixes, drawled an English officer who happened to be assigned to one of Mulberry's more successful components.

 

But it was the truth: the giant concrete caissons, backbone of the entire project, were perilously behind schedule. There were so many problems it might have been funny if the stakes weren't so high. There were critical shortages of concrete and critical shortages of steel for reinforcement rods. There were too few construction sites and no room in Britain's south coast harbors to moor finished units. There were shortages of skilled workers, and the workers they had on the job were weak and malnourished because there were critical shortages of food.

 

It was a disaster. Without the caissons acting as a breakwater, the entire Mulberry project was unworkable. They needed someone to go to the construction sites first thing in the morning to make a realistic assessment of whether the Phoenixes could be completed on time, someone who had overseen large projects and knew how to make design modifications in the field once construction was under way.

 

They chose the former chief engineer of the Northeast Bridge Company, Commander Peter Jordan.

 

 

 

 

 

35

 

 

LONDON

 

 

 

 

 

The Hyde Park shooting made the first editions of the London evening papers. All the papers printed quotes from the bogus police statement. Investigators were treating the murder as a robbery that went wrong; police were searching for two men thought to be Eastern European in origin--very probably Polish--seen near the site of the murder shortly before it occurred. Harry even had invented two rather vague descriptions of the suspects. The newspapers all bemoaned the shocking rise in violent street crime in the West End that had come with the war. The stories contained accounts of men and women who had been beaten and robbed in recent months by bands of roving refugees, drunken soldiers, and deserters.

 

Vicary felt a tinge of guilt as he leafed through the newspapers at his desk early that afternoon. He believed in the sanctity of the written word and felt bad about misleading the press and the public. His guilt was easily assuaged. It was impossible to tell the truth--that Rose Morely might very well have been murdered by a German spy.

 

By midafternoon Harry Dalton and a team of officers from the Metropolitan Police had pieced together the final hours of Rose Morely's life. Harry was in Vicary's office, his long legs propped up on the desk, so that Vicary was treated to a view of his worn soles.

 

"We interviewed the maid at the home of Commander Higgins," Harry said. "She said Rose had gone out to do her shopping. She went most afternoons before the children arrived home from school. The receipt we found in her bag was from a shop in Oxford Street near Tottenham Court Road. We interviewed the shopkeeper. He remembered her. In fact he remembered almost every item she purchased. He said she bumped into another woman that she knew, a domestic like herself. They took tea together at a cafe across the street. We spoke to the waitress there. She confirmed it."

 

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