Ghosts of War (4 page)

Donovan didn't know what to say. He took a long draw on his cigar. It tasted stale. A spy? “You mean here, in the police department?”

Banks shook his head. He glanced at Montague, who nodded, urging him on. “No, Inspector. But here in the city. He's been posing as a young philanthropist from Boston. Quite successfully, I might add. He was able to insinuate his way into various political circles here in New York, and over the course of the last year became quite influential in certain quarters.” The senator pulled a handkerchief from his breast pocket and mopped his brow. “Even had him over to dinner at my own home,” he said wistfully, as if embarrassed to admit he'd ever been taken in by such a dangerous scoundrel.

“So he's still at large?” Donovan asked, furrowing his brow. He wasn't quite sure where this was going.

“Quite so, Inspector. Quite so. Yesterday, it seems, he came into possession of certain…facts that could prove very damaging indeed if they were to fall into enemy hands. But he made a mistake, blew his cover. Now he's somewhere in the city, and I imagine by now he knows that we're on to him.”

Donovan nodded. “What are these…facts, Senator?”

Banks frowned. “Suffice to say, Inspector, that they would leave this country very exposed if they were to come into the possession of a hostile nation.”

“And you think the British mean to use them to that end?” Donovan tried to hide the incredulity in his voice. Did they really think the British were likely to invade?

Banks inclined his head, just a fraction. “I think anything that puts this nation at risk, Inspector, should be taken very seriously indeed.”

“Felix, what I believe the senator is getting at is that he would like the help of this department in locating and containing the British spy.” The commissioner beamed at him, as if the very thought of such patriotic work filled him with pride.

Donovan turned to face the commissioner. “But surely, sir, there's some sort of counterespionage unit who'd be much better placed to deal with something as significant as this? We're a local police force, and we have our hands full with this plague of abductions. I'm not really sure how we can help.”

Montague shook his head. “Donovan, the security of the nation comes first. It must. Of course there are government men already working on the case. How else do you think we're aware of the spy in the first place? All the senator is asking for is some local assistance with containment. Our men know these streets better than anyone else in the city. We can hound this man down. We can close the borders. We can stop him getting off this island and, in doing so, prevent the outbreak of war.” The commissioner took a swig of his own drink. “Once we've got him, we'll simply hand him over to the right government agency and the matter will be closed.”

Donovan wanted to laugh. Montague made it sound so easy, instilled it with such romance and melodrama. Closing the borders would be nigh on impossible, and while his men did know the city like the back of their hands, they were hardly trained to be able to handle an active foreign agent. Particularly one who knew he was being hunted. The Englishman was probably armed to the teeth and would fight like a cornered animal if any of Donovan's men even got near him.

Nevertheless, he supposed he had no choice in the matter. And besides, he knew a man who might be able to help. He nodded, glancing at Banks. “What's his name?”

“Jerry Robertson. An alias, we presume. We don't know if he operates under any other names.”

“A description?” Donovan prompted.

“Commissioner Montague has photographs and descriptions for you already, as well as his last known address.”

“Very well.” Donovan reached for his scotch and emptied the glass with another long pull. He dropped the barely smoked cigar into the ashtray, scattering dust. “I'll get my men onto it right away. Commissioner?” He glanced at the portly old man, who returned his look with a confused expression. “The photographs?”

“Ah, yes.” He rose from his chair and crossed to a bureau, turning a key in the lid and folding down the writing stand. He withdrew a large, cream-colored envelope from within, holding it out for Donovan.

Donovan stood, taking it from him. It felt thick with sheaves of paper. Whoever had assembled the file had clearly been doing so for some time. But hadn't Banks said it was only yesterday that Robertson's cover had been blown? Had they been keeping a file on him for a different reason, then? Something didn't add up, but Donovan didn't have the heart, or the energy, to force the issue now.

Banks also rose from his chair, extending his hand to Donovan. “We won't forget this, Inspector.”

The thought made Donovan's skin crawl. He took the senator's proffered hand. “I'll do everything in my power, Senator.”

“Be sure that you do, Inspector,” Banks said dryly. “Be sure that you do.”

Donovan quit the commissioner's office, pulling the door shut behind him. He breathed a heavy sigh of relief. He could hear the two men still talking on the other side of the door, but didn't wait around to hear what they had to say. He'd heard enough already. The commissioner was clearly moving in more significant circles these days. It was obvious to Donovan that this was not the first time the commissioner and Banks had met. He only hoped that whatever game Montague was playing, he knew what he was getting himself into. Whatever Donovan thought of the old man, he knew he wasn't a crook.

He wasn't sure he could say the same about Isambard Banks.

P
eter Rutherford was feeling more than a little out of his depth.

He was alone in a hostile country, his head full of state secrets, and he knew the authorities were on to him. That much had been made clear by the reaction of the British embassy when he'd tried to report in earlier that day. They had denied all knowledge of his existence, refusing to let him in through the doors.

Just a day earlier, he'd been welcomed in with open arms and ushered to a back room where he'd been encouraged to use the holotube terminal to contact his handler back home. The staff at the embassy—people he'd been working alongside for months—had been proud to play a part in the protection of British interests, proud to welcome him into their midst, clapping him on the back and telling him what a stand-up job he was doing, how he was working on the front line for the good of the Empire.

Today, however, those very same people had refused to acknowledge him, and that, Rutherford realized, was a very bad sign indeed. That meant they'd been leaned on by the US government and were now trying to protect him, to give him a signal that he needed to get out of New York as quickly as he could. If the US government knew there was an English spy in their midst, the embassy would eventually be forced into giving him up.

He was under no illusion: he would be sacrificed to prevent a diplomatic incident, and the embassy would deny all knowledge of his actions. He'd be branded a renegade and hung out to dry. They would have no other option. Otherwise, given the tensions that already existed between the two nations, there was the potential for a full-blown outbreak of war.

The irony was that war was exactly what Rutherford was attempting to prevent. If he couldn't get his warning to the people back home, everyone was in dire danger indeed.

Now, he was sitting in Central Park, wrapped against the wintry chill in a thick woolen overcoat, trying to discern his next move. He needed to find transport to England, and he needed to find a secure means of communicating with the British secret service.

Peter Rutherford had never expected to wind up working as a spy. In all his years of public school he'd trained to be a teacher, but then the war had come, and he had done what every self-respecting Englishman had done—he'd joined up.

The war had not been kind to him, and he'd seen most of his friends cut to ribbons by enemy fire, or else frozen in the trenches or blown apart by mortar fire. But, amazingly, he'd managed to make it out alive, ferried back to England by airship after the Behemoth Land Crawlers—the giant war machines unleashed by the British forces to bring an end to the conflict—had effectively rendered the Kaiser's army impotent.

Rutherford had seen one of them in action while still out on the front in France. It was like a fortified city on wheels, an enormous land tank bristling with gun turrets and machine gun emplacements. It was slow moving and ponderous, but it was utterly impregnable.

The British forces had shipped them over the channel on massive floating platforms and set them loose on the battlefields of Europe, where they had simply trundled across no-man's-land to the enemy-occupied territory. Once there, they had unleashed a storm of death, gun turrets blazing as the Behemoths had rolled over the enemy trenches, crushing those who hadn't fled or been mown down by the all-consuming gunfire. The machines had even rolled into the enemy-held cities, remorselessly leveling buildings and razing all before them to the ground.

The Behemoths were weapons on a scale never seen before—weapons of mass destruction—and while they had won the war for the Allies, they had inspired a sense of nervousness in the Americans. The British Empire was still a significant power in the world, and now, harboring such monstrous weapons and led by a monarch who was keen to reclaim the glory of her ancestors' days, many thought it was only a matter of time before they mounted an invasion of their former colony.

Rutherford wondered if that were really such a wild claim. Queen Alberta regularly referred to the American government as “upstart colonists,” and, party as he was to many of the strategic secrets of the British government, Rutherford had himself wondered whether the reclamation of the American continent was the endgame they had in mind. Whatever the case, a cold war between the two nations had developed as they'd jostled for position in the new world order, and while things were not outwardly hostile between them, Rutherford knew the gloss of cooperation was only skin deep.

By the time he'd returned from the trenches, of course, Rutherford had given up all hope of ever settling down to become a teacher. Instead, finding himself feeling dislocated from normal life and isolated from his family and the people he had left behind, he had enlisted in the secret service. At least that way, he had felt, he could still make a difference.

As a veteran of the war he had risen quickly through the ranks, and having shown an aptitude for espionage work, he was soon assigned to work in Chicago, and then Washington, and most recently New York, operating out of the embassy.

He'd been in New York for over a year now, during which time Rutherford had managed to ingratiate himself into New York politics, adopting the persona of a rich young bachelor from Boston. He'd attended parties and soirees, funded carefully selected political campaigns and written articles for the
Globe.
He'd made his presence felt, and soon enough he'd been drawn into an inner circle of senators, councilors, businessmen, and statesmen. He'd played their games, taking part in their petty political squabbles, earning their confidence and trust. He'd listened to everything, recording it all in his eidetic memory, searching out each of their weaknesses and flaws in case he found need to exploit them later. They all had their secrets: booze, whores, boys, bribes. Rutherford knew them all.

For a while, little of any importance had happened: more political games, more character assassinations, more bribery and corruption. Then, when he was least expecting it, something had fallen into his lap, something so big and so startling that, at first, he hadn't known how to react.

That night—last night—he'd gone straight to the embassy to report his findings. But he hadn't been able to get through on the holotube. Transatlantic connections were notoriously temperamental, and he knew it was likely the terminal would be working again in the morning. He didn't trust anyone else with such potentially explosive information, and he knew that any calls home through an unsecure line risked being overheard. So he had returned to his apartment where he had waited, barely able to sleep, and had returned to the embassy early that morning to make the call.

But something had happened during the night. Somehow, someone had found him out. He'd been turned away at the embassy door, and the pleading look in the eye of the concierge told him everything he needed to know.

Rutherford wondered if perhaps he'd been followed to the embassy the previous day. He'd taken every precaution—heading home first, then changing and going out into town, taking in a show, visiting a speakeasy, then drifting past the embassy first before using the rear entrance when he knew the coast was clear. He wondered if perhaps he'd missed something crucial. Or perhaps someone had found his room in Greenwich Village, the little bolt-hole in a run-down apartment block where he stashed any evidence as to his real identity. That was where he kept all of his equipment, the tools of his trade.

He knew they'd searched his apartment on numerous occasions, but the place was clean—they could have found nothing incriminating there, nothing to even suggest he was an Englishman from Crawley rather than a young and wealthy Bostonian with an interest in local politics.

Regardless, it was too risky to visit either location now. So he was left wearing the clothes he stood up in, carrying only the items he had in his pockets. Luckily, experience meant he was rarely unprepared, and he had stitched a handful of useful items into the lining of his coat—a stash of dollar bills, a penknife, an American passport, a lock pick, and the address of a safe house in Brooklyn.

Brooklyn was no good to him, though. Yes, he'd probably be safe there, perhaps even long enough for the whole thing to blow over and for him to make good his escape. But by then it would be too late. By then war would have been declared, and half of Great Britain would already be lost.

Air travel was the only way. A steam liner would simply take too long. He needed a berth on a transatlantic airship. And he needed to call ahead. That was his priority. Get his warning to the people who could make a difference. Get help.

If he couldn't get into the embassy—and he knew, now, that his enemies would be watching the embassy like hawks—his only other option was to head back to his room in Greenwich Village. He had a secure line there, for use in the direst emergencies. He knew it was a terrible risk and that it went against everything he'd ever been taught, all the experience he had from his years in the service. The safest thing for him to do was run.

Yet running wasn't an option. There were bigger things at stake than Rutherford's own safety. He only hoped that he was wrong, that his cover hadn't been entirely blown. All he needed was ten minutes alone in the room, and then he could focus on getting out of the country alive.

Bracing himself against the chill, Rutherford got to his feet. The walk downtown would do him good, stir some blood in his veins. He turned his collar up against the light drizzle and set off for the Village, alert for anyone who might be following behind him.

The dingy, run-down apartment block was not at all the sort of place where anyone would expect a foreign spy to set up his bolt-hole. Rutherford knew that, back home, most people's idea of the secret service was swanky dinners in posh restaurants, Monte Carlo and fast living. They thought the danger was romantic, exciting, sophisticated. He knew better. There was nothing glamorous about poking around in other people's filth, in murdering people in alleyways and trying to scrub away the bloodstains afterward. It was dirty work, and it left a dark impression on one's psyche.

Rutherford had lost track of the number of people he'd killed in the name of his country. There had been dozens of them during the war, scores and scores, wiped out by the rapid-fire gun emplacements he'd manned, blown apart by the mortar shells he'd fired or speared through the bellies with his rifle blade as he went over the top.

After the Behemoths had trundled over the battlefields, he'd followed in their wake, mopping up the survivors with his squad. He'd seen firsthand what their weapons had done to those young men, witnessed their eviscerated corpses, put mercy bullets through their skulls so they didn't have to suffer any longer, leaving them to bleed out in the cold, wet mud. He knew they were the enemy, but he pitied them nonetheless.

Rutherford had seen what war could do to a man, and that was why he had to do everything in his power to prevent it from happening again.

Of course, he'd killed others since the war. It was inevitable in his line of work. Whether it was self-defense or political assassination, he'd carried it out in as detached a fashion as he'd been able to muster, always doing what was necessary, always remaining calm and logical. But he knew someday it would catch up with him.

The war had changed him. The war had made him a killer, and the British government had seen that, had harnessed that. They had taught him about efficiency, about stealth. They had trained him in the art of death. They had, in short, turned him into a monster.

Rutherford knew he was damaged goods. He'd never be able to return to a normal life. Never be able to love without always somehow compromising it, seeing the blood on his hands and knowing that he didn't deserve to be happy.

There was a dark place inside his mind, a place where he buried all of the memories, all of the sights and sounds, all of the things he wanted too much to pretend had never happened. The best thing he could do for his countrymen, he knew, was to ensure that in the future none of them had to see the things he had seen, or do the things he had done. Perhaps that, and only that, could be his benediction.

Rutherford melted into the shadows on the street corner opposite the apartment building and stood there for some time, watching, waiting. He was cold, chilled to the bone, and his breath made steaming clouds before his face.

People came and went. Cars hissed by belching trails of oily smoke. The light began to wane. Still he waited. He smoked a cigarette, and then made sure to dispose of the butt down an open drain. He didn't want to leave any evidence he had been there for even the slightest amount of time. He studied the parked cars nearby, watching for any signs that the building was being watched.

Two hours later, confident that the apartment block was clear, he stepped out from beneath the awning of a derelict store and crossed the road. He moved quickly, ducking into the shelter of the doorway and slipping the key out from a hidden compartment in the sole of his shoe.

The key grated in the lock, the door swung open, and then he was inside, rushing up the stairwell toward the third floor. The stairs were covered in a thick layer of grime and the detritus of poverty. He wrinkled his nose at the smell.

Moments later he was outside the door to apartment thirty-four. A different key, this time in the sole of his other shoe. He unlocked the door and pushed his way inside the apartment.

He hadn't been here for weeks, and the place was filled with a musty scent, of dust and underuse. Everything seemed to be in order. They couldn't have discovered the place yet.

His heart was pounding in his chest. He wondered how long it would be safe to stay here. He only needed ten minutes, time enough to make the call to London and toss a few belongings in a bag. Then he'd take the train out to Brooklyn and spend the night in the safe house before trying to book a berth on one of the airships leaving for the Continent in the morning. If he could make it to Paris or Berlin, he could take a train to Calais and be home in a few days.