D-Notice by Bill Walker (big ebook reader txt) 📗

Erika nodded, her eyes again brimming with tears. Remembering the wine, Michael hurried into the kitchen, switched off the oven, and uncorked a bottle of Chardonnay he’d been chilling for dinner, pouring a generous amount into a whiskey tumbler. Back in the sitting room, he handed it to her and watched as she took a healthy gulp. She closed her eyes and placed the cool glass against her forehead, a deep sigh escaping her lips. Her eyes opened, fixing Michael with another penetrating gaze. “Thank you,” she said. “You’re very kind. My father told me that if anything should happen to him, I was to come to London and find Michael Thorley...that he would know what to do....”

“Do what?”

“I don’t know, he wouldn’t tell me!” she said, almost shouting, frustration bringing frown lines to her face where they ought never to be. “All he said was that your father was a true friend, and the only man he ever trusted enough to tell his secret, and to tell him that ‘The Eagle Flies,’ or something like that. Do you know what it means?”

That hopeful look once again.

Michael shrugged. “No, I’m sorry, I don’t. Sounds like something out of a bad spy novel.”

Erika shot him a hurt look, making him want to shrink into a tiny ball and blow away. He started to say something, then changed his mind. He’d put his foot in it enough for one day.

Draining the tumbler of wine, Erika set it down on the glass-topped coffee table and walked over to the fireplace, where she stood staring at one of the framed pictures standing on the mantel. It was the one photograph of his father that remained, a copy of the one his mother kept by her bedside. It showed him standing by the Thames Embankment. He wore his Royal Guards uniform and the expression on his face was one he could never quite interpret. The sun struck him full in the face, which of necessity made him squint. But there was something else in those long dead eyes staring out from silver halide crystals. Was it a call for help?

And though it was the only picture Michael possessed, it always made him ineffably sad to look at it for any length of time. Yet, he could never hide it in a drawer, either.

“Your father?” Erika finally said.

“Yes.”

“You look very much like him. Very handsome.”

In spite of his embarrassment, Michael felt a thrill shoot though his body at those words.

“I never really saw the resemblance, myself,” he said.

“Oh, ja, it is there, in the eyes, I think.”

Michael joined her at the mantel and let his gaze trace the lines of his father’s face.

“He died fighting in Egypt in 1941...about three months before I was born.”

Erika turned to him and the air in the room thickened, became harder to breath. “You never knew him, then,” she said, “Now, it is I who am sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he said with a shrug. “My mother told me stories about him all the while I was growing up. In a way, I feel as if I really do know him.”

Erika covered his hand with hers, an excited look in her eyes. “Your mother. Perhaps she would know something?”

All Michael could think about was that slim hand with its long tapering fingers laying lightly on top of his own, shooting sparks through his skin.

“I—I’ve no idea....”

“Surely, she might remember something he told her, something that would give me, how you say, a lead?”

Michael wanted very much to help this beautiful, enigmatic young woman, more than he’d ever wanted anything in the world.

“I suppose it couldn’t hurt to ask. Perhaps we should pop down and see her?”

“Really? I do not wish to impose....”

Michael smiled, then motioned toward the door with a courtly flourish. “No imposition at all,” he said. “Besides, the old girl’s always pestering me to bring home a pretty girl for her to dote over. And you most definitely fit the bill.”

Erika smiled for the first time then, her face lighting up with an incandescence that made Michael’s heart stumble. It was like a solitary shaft of sunlight knifing through the boundless gloom—a supernova of the soul.

And it was the scariest bloody feeling he’d ever known.

Chapter Thirteen

Simon Welles hurried out of the Communications Room, a long sheet of fax paper trailing from his right hand, and a look of alarm spread across his youthful face. Turning right at the first hallway junction, his pace increased, and he had to force himself not to run. Not only would it be a breach of etiquette, but anyone seeing the Deputy Director running might draw the wrong conclusions, might start rumors that would be hard to quash. And Welles had built his career on keeping rumors quiet.

Approached discreetly by a recruiting agent eight years before, right after finishing his degree at King’s College, Welles had been dazzled by thoughts of dashing about in Aston Martins and bedding scores of exotic women. Of course, he knew it was all rubbish; he knew the reality would be a lot drearier, but the one thing he knew beyond a doubt: he loved England more than life itself and would do anything to protect her from her enemies.

Now, as he rushed toward the end of the hall, the fax clutched tightly in his fist, he had a funny feeling, the kind he got when he knew something momentous was just over the horizon. These feelings had guided him unerringly since childhood. Call it a sixth sense, ESP, or whatever, it didn’t matter. What did was that it always meant that the ground was about to shift beneath his feet, heralding opportunities for the man who knew how to read the signs.

If Simon Welles