"That's the beauty of it, Alfred." Boothby held up his big paws for Vicary to see. "The blood is on my hands too. But I can't see it and no one else can either. It's a secret stain."
The car's engine fired as Boothby opened the door.
"Who's Broome?" Vicary asked one last time.
Boothby's face darkened, as though a cloud had passed over it.
"Broome is Brendan Evans, your old friend from Cambridge. He told us about that stunt you pulled to get into the Intelligence Corps in the First War. He also told us what happened to you in France. We knew what drove you and what motivated you. We had to--we were running you, after all."
Vicary felt his head beginning to throb.
"I have one more question."
"You want to know if Helen was part of it or whether she came to you on her own."
Vicary stood very still, waiting for an answer.
"Why don't you go find her and ask her for yourself ?"
Then Boothby disappeared into his car and was gone.
64
LONDON: MAY 1945
At six o'clock that evening, Lillian Walford cleared her throat, knocked gently on the office door, and let herself inside without waiting for an answer. The professor was there, sitting in the window overlooking Gordon Square, his little body folded over an old manuscript.
"I'll be leaving now, Professor, if you've nothing else for me," she said, beginning the ritualistic closing of books and straightening of papers that always seemed to accompany their Friday evening conversations.
"No, I'll be fine, thank you."
She looked at him, thinking, No, somehow I doubt that very much, Professor. Something about him had changed. Oh, he was never the talkative sort, mind you; never one to strike up a conversation, unless it was completely necessary. But he seemed more withdrawn than ever, poor lamb. And it had grown worse as the term progressed, not better, as she had hoped. There was talk round the college, idle speculation. Some said he had sent men to their death, or ordered men killed. Hard to imagine the professor doing such things, but it made some sense, she had to admit.
Something
had made him take a vow of silence.
"You'd better be leaving soon, Professor, if you want to make your train."
"I rather thought I'd stay in London for the weekend," he said, without looking up from his work. "I'm interested in seeing what the place looks like at night, now that the lights are back on again."
"That's certainly one thing I hope I never see again, the bloody blackout."
"Something tells me you won't."
She removed his mackintosh from the hook on the back of the door and placed it on the chair next to his desk. He laid down his pencil and looked up at her. Her next action took them both by surprise. Her hand seemed to go to his cheek on its own, by reflex, the way it would reach out for a small child who had just been hurt.
"Are you all right, Professor?"
He drew away sharply and returned his gaze to the manuscript. "Yes, I'm fine," he said. There was a tone in his voice, an edge, she had never heard before. Then he mumbled something under his breath that sounded like "never better."
She turned and walked toward the door. "Have a pleasant weekend," she said.
"I intend to, thank you."
"Good night, Professor Vicary."
"Good night, Miss Walford."
The evening was warm, and by the time he crossed Leicester Square he had removed his mackintosh and folded it over his arm. The dusk was dying, the lights of London slowly coming up. Imagine Lillian Walford, touching his face like that. He had always thought of himself as an adequate dissembler. He wondered if it was that obvious.
He crossed Hyde Park. To his left, a band of Americans played softball in the faint light. To his right, British and Canadians played a noisy game of rugby. He passed a spot where only days before an antiaircraft gun had stood. The gun was gone; only the sandbags remained, like the stones of ancient ruins.
He entered Belgravia, and by instinct he walked toward Helen's house.
I hope you change your mind, and soon.
The blackout shades were up, and the house was ablaze with light. There were two other couples with them. David was wearing his uniform. Helen hung on his arm. Vicary wondered how long he had been standing there, watching them, watching her. Much to his surprise--or was it relief, perhaps--he felt nothing for her. Her ghost had finally left him, this time for good.
He walked away. The King's Road turned to Sloane Square, and Sloane Square to quiet side streets of Chelsea. He looked at his watch; there was still time to make the train. He found a taxi, asked the driver to take him to Paddington Station, and climbed inside. He pulled down the window and felt the warm wind in his face. For the first time in many months, he felt something like contentment, something like peace.
He telephoned Alice Simpson from a phone box at the station, and she agreed to come to the country the next morning. He rang off and had to rush for his train. The carriage was crowded, but he found a seat next to the window in a compartment with two old women and a boyish-faced soldier clutching a cane.
He looked at the soldier and noticed he was wearing the insignia of the 2nd East York Regiment. Vicary knew the boy had been at Normandy--Sword Beach, to be precise--and he was lucky to be alive. The East Yorks had suffered heavy casualties during the first minutes of the invasion.
The soldier noticed Vicary looking at him, and he managed a brief smile.
"Happened at Normandy. Barely made it out of the landing craft." He held up the cane. "Doctors say I'll need to use this for the rest of my life. How'd you get yours--the limp, that is?"
"The First War, France," Vicary said distantly.
"They bring you back for this lot?"
Vicary nodded. "A desk job in a very dull department of the War Office. Nothing important, really."
After a while the soldier slept. Once, in the passing fields, Vicary saw her face, smiling at him, just for an instant. Then he saw Boothby's. Then, as the darkness gathered, his own reflection, riding silently next to him in the glass.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The events portrayed in this novel are the product of the author's imagination, as are the characters who populate it, and it is not intended as a representation of actual events. However, many people gave generously of their time and knowledge to help a young man write about things that happened a long time ago. Obviously, the expertise is theirs. Any mistakes and dramatic license are mine.
I am forever indebted to the team at Weidenfeld & Nicolson in London: Anthony Cheetham, Cassia Joll, and Maureen Kristunas, who missed her tube stop. But most of all, a very special thanks to Ion Trewin, who lent me his eyes and ears and patiently answered each of my questions, no matter how mundane. Truly, this novel could not have been written without his help, encouragement, and weekend research outings with his wife, Sue, along the Norfolk coast.
To all my friends and colleagues at CNN, especially Tom Johnson, Ed Turner, Frank Sesno, Richard Davis, and Bill Headline, who gave me the time and freedom to write this novel, then allowed me to come home when it was done.
To the team at International Creative Management: Heather Schroder, Sloan Harris, and Jack Horner. But most of all to my agent, friend, and guide, Esther Newberg, who made a dream come true. There is none better.
To all those who gave me assistance or advice along the way: Dr. Uwe Heldt and Professor Klaus Fischer for their expertise on the history of Nazi Germany; Dr. Michael Baden for his counsel on the intricacies of stab wounds and decomposition; to Brian Montgomery for his patient lecture on the anatomy of a diesel engine; and to Lisa Havlovitz for her assistance in preparing the final manuscript. Also, special thanks to Adria Hillman, Kenneth Warner, and Jeffrey Blount for their invaluable support, and to Professor Bernard Jacob, my friend, my teacher, my eternal shoulder to lean on.
And finally to the remarkable team of professionals at Random House: Harry Evans, Linda Grey, Leona Nevler, Sybil Pincus, Jennifer Webb, Dan Rembert, Lilly Langotsky, Adam Rothberg, Brian McLendon, Kirsten Raymond, Mark Speer, Dianne Russell, Sairey Luterman, Annik La Farge, Melissa Milsten, Leta Evanthes, Camille MacDuffie, and Lynn Goldberg.
And of course David Rosenthal, my publisher and brilliant editor, who showed me the way, gently set me back on course when I strayed, and helped me turn a manuscript into a novel. A true friend from beginning to end.
Please read on for an excerpt from
Daniel Silva's exciting new novel
THE SECRET SERVANT
Available from Signet
AMSTERDAM
It was Professor Solomon Rosner who sounded the first alarm, though his name would never be linked to the affair except in the secure rooms of a drab office building in downtown Tel Aviv. Gabriel Allon, the legendary but wayward son of Israeli Intelligence, would later observe that Rosner was the first asset in the annals of Office history to have proven more useful to them dead than alive. Those who overheard the remark found it uncharacteristically callous but in keeping with the bleak mood that by then had settled over them all.
The backdrop for Rosner's demise was not Israel, where violent death occurs all too frequently, but the normally tranquil quarter of Amsterdam known as the Old Side. The date was the first Friday in December, and the weather was more suited to early spring than to the last days of autumn. It was a day to engage in what the Dutch so fondly refer to as
gezelligheid,
the pursuit of small pleasures: an aimless stroll through the flower stalls of the Bloemenmarkt, a lager or two in a good bar in the Rembrandtplein, or, for those so inclined, a bit of fine cannabis in the brown coffeehouses of the Haarlemmerstraat. Leave the fretting and the fighting to the hated Americans, stately old Amsterdam murmured that golden late-autumn afternoon. Today we give thanks for having been born blameless and Dutch.
Solomon Rosner did not share the sentiments of his countrymen, but then he seldom did. Though he earned a living as a professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam, it was Rosner's Center for European Security Studies that occupied the lion's share of his time. His legion of detractors saw evidence of deception in the name, for Rosner not only served as the center's director but was its only scholar-in-residence. Despite those obvious shortcomings, the center had managed to produce a steady stream of authoritative reports and articles detailing the threat posed to the Netherlands by the rise of militant Islam within its borders. Rosner's last book,
The Islamic Conquest of the West,
had argued that Holland was now under a sustained and systematic assault by jihadist Islam. The goal of this assault, he maintained, was to colonize the Netherlands and turn it into a majority Muslim state, where, in the not too distant future, Islamic law, or
sharia,
would reign supreme. The terrorists and the colonizers were two sides of the same coin, he warned, and unless the government took immediate and drastic action, everything the freethinking Dutch held dear would soon be swept away.
The Dutch literary press had been predictably appalled. Hysteria, said one reviewer. Racist claptrap, said another. More than one took pains to note that the views expressed in the book were all the more odious given the fact that Rosner's grandparents had been rounded up with a hundred thousand other Dutch Jews and sent off to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. All agreed that what the situation required was not hateful rhetoric like Rosner's but tolerance and dialogue. Rosner stood steadfast in the face of the withering criticism, adopting what one commentator described as the posture of a man with his finger wedged firmly in the dike. Tolerance and dialogue by all means, Rosner responded, but not capitulation. "We Dutch need to put down our Heinekens and hash pipes and wake up," he snapped during an interview on Dutch television. "Otherwise we're going to lose our country."
The book and surrounding controversy had made Rosner the most vilified and, in some quarters, celebrated man in the country. It had also placed him squarely in the sights of Holland's homegrown Islamic extremists. Jihadist Web sites, which Rosner monitored more closely than even the Dutch police did, burned with sacred rage over the book, and more than one forecast his imminent execution. An imam in the neighborhood known as the Oud West instructed his flock that "Rosner the Jew must be dealt with harshly" and pleaded for a martyr to step forward and do the job. The feckless Dutch interior minister had responded by proposing that Rosner go into hiding, an idea Rosner vigorously refused. He then supplied the minister with a list of ten radicals he regarded as potential assassins. The minister accepted the list without question, for he knew that Rosner's sources inside Holland's extremist fringe were in most cases far better than those of the Dutch security services.
At noon on that Friday in December, Rosner was hunched over his computer in the second-floor office of his canal house at Groenburgwal 2A. The house, like Rosner himself, was stubby and wide, and it tilted forward at a precarious angle, which some of the neighbors saw as fitting, given the political views of its occupant. Its one serious drawback was location, for it stood not fifty yards from the bell tower of the Zuiderkirk church. The bells tolled mercilessly each day, beginning at the stroke of noon and ending forty-five minutes later. Rosner, sensitive to interruptions and unwanted noise, had been waging a personal jihad against them for years. Classical music, white-noise machines, soundproof headphones--all had proven useless in the face of the onslaught. Sometimes he wondered why the bells were rung at all. The old church had long ago been turned into a government housing office--a fact that Rosner, a man of considerable faith, saw as a fitting symbol of the Dutch morass. Confronted by an enemy of infinite religious zeal, the secular Dutch had turned their churches into bureaus of the welfare state.
A church without faithful,
thought Rosner,
in a city without God.