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

are the son I have prayed for, then...after me. However you turn out, please know that you are wanted and loved.

“A great deal has happened in the last two months, so much that I can scarcely comprehend the consequences. All I know is that after returning from a successful and highly secret mission to Finland—that I was ordered to undertake—I have been hastily reassigned from a comfortable job as a translator in the Foreign Office to a post within Hell itself....

“I write you now from my barracks in Cairo. I leave tomorrow for Siwa, where the temperature reaches an ungodly one hundred twenty-five in the day and plunges to near freezing at night. God only knows why the war has been brought to this godforsaken land....

“My coming journey will take me right to the heart of the enemy, and I fear this will be my undoing. If that be so, I can accept an honorable death in battle. What I cannot accept is the treachery of my own government.

“Now comes the difficult part. Though we will probably never meet, I must ask you to do your father a favor. My solicitors, Cadwallader and Soames, are holding certain items for me in safekeeping. If I fall, they are instructed to release them only to my heir. That is you, my child. Aside from providing the solicitors with a copy of your certificate of birth, you must utter these three words, ‘The Eagle Flies.’ These items hold the key to the peace and security of the world, my child. When you see them, you will know what to do. Use them wisely, and well. Love, your father....”

The yellowed pages fluttered to the floor, resembling leaves scattered by the wind on a raw Autumn day. Michael watched his mother reach for them, her delicate, liver-spotted hands grabbing for them with sharp, desperate movements. She held them to her breast, her breath coming in great sobs, her eyes brimming.

“I had no idea this was up there, Michael,” she said. “No idea at all. I’m so dreadfully sorry.”

Michael nodded. His father, who had been little more than a dusty photograph and a collection of stories his mother had told him over and over again, had suddenly taken on flesh and blood, had called out to him from the grave and asked his help. Part of him yearned to reach out and tell his father that he’d loved him all his life, but the thought of it also left him feeling a trifle silly, as if he were contemplating confessing to a statue. And then there was the fog of mystery surrounding his death. What had he meant by the “...key to the peace and security of the world?” Certainly, whatever the problem was, the urgency was long past; it couldn’t be more than an historical curiosity, by now—a mere footnote. And yet the passion behind his father’s words continued to resonate within Michael. He hungered to know more, any scrap that would reveal more of this man who still remained partially hidden by the shadows of time.

I want you to know that your father loves you with all of his heart....

“Where are Cadwallader and Soames located, mother?” Michael asked, breaking the silence.

Lillian looked up, a look of panic flitting across her face. “I—I’m not sure. I believe they used to be in Piccadilly, but I stopped using them after your father....”

“Then they could still be there?”

“I don’t know, I suppose so, but would they even remember something from so long ago?”

Michael stood, and began moving toward the door, his lips compressed into a thin line. “Let’s go, Erika.”

“Surely, you’re not going back tonight? Let me fix up your old room. Miss Rainer could stay in my room on the chaise lounge—”

“No.”

Erika reluctantly followed Michael, her expression mirroring her extreme discomfort with the mounting tension in the room. Lillian joined them, her hand reaching out to her son. “Please, Michael, don’t go.”

He whirled on her. “How could you not know of this? You were his wife, for God’s sake! And that letter.... Waiting in that dusty attic all these bloody years! Something happened to him out there, something they’ve covered up! And you’ve just let them bloody do it.”

A panoply of emotions swept across Lillian’s face: shock, anger, outrage, then...sadness. “No, I didn’t! I loved your father.”

“Bloody crap! They send all his worldly possessions home in a tidy little box, and you just tucked him away in the attic and never looked back. How could you do that to him? How could you do that to me!”

Before she could answer, Michael turned and stormed out, letting the weathered oak door slam against the wall. There was a moment of silence before Lillian spoke, a moment where the two women listened to Michael’s feet crunching across the gravel drive.

“I should have expected this,” Lillian said, with a sigh. She turned to the younger woman and fixed her with a level gaze. “With just he and I all these years, it’s been so very, very hard. All we had was the memory of his father.... We tried to forget the disgrace....” Lillian paused and watched her son, who sat leaning against the red Mercedes, brooding. “I should have remarried. I had plenty of suitors. Good men they were. But after Michael, I—I just couldn’t. Lord knows little Michael needed a man around to teach him how to become one.”

“I think your son is a fine man,” Erika said.

“You’re kind to say that.”

“I mean it.”

Lillian stared at the younger woman again, her aged eyes searching Erika’s face for some indefinable something. “I believe you do,” she said finally. “I