Angels in the Gloom_ A Novel - Anne Perry [15]
“Don’t push him into the water, Joe. He can’t swim.”
He knew exactly what she meant. It was a touch of the old Hannah back again, from before the war, before the world changed, and youth had to grow wise and brave and die before its time. He hated the Peacemaker for the murders he had committed, and made other people commit, for the loss of John and Alys Reavley, and the betrayal of Sebastian. But he could understand the dream of avoiding war and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands across the battlefields of Europe, the ruin of a generation, the grief of millions. It was the price that choked him—the price in honor. Was betrayal ever right, even if it saved a million lives? Ten million?
Perhaps every one of them was loved as much by somebody as John and Alys Reavley had been by him.
He closed his eyes and drifted off into a half-sleep, aware of his arm throbbing, and his leg, and longing for the time he could turn on his side without pain.
CHAPTER
* * *
THREE
Calder Shearing looked up from his desk as Matthew Reavley came into his office. “How is your brother?” he asked.
“Lucky to keep his arm,” Matthew replied. “He’ll be several weeks before he’s fit to go back. Thank you, sir.”
“I suppose he will go back?” Shearing questioned him. He knew something of Joseph and had a deep respect for him rooted in his extraordinary actions a year ago.
“His conscience would crucify him if he didn’t.” Matthew sat down as Shearing indicated the chair.
Under his heavy, black brows, Shearing’s expression was bleak. “The sabotage is getting worse,” he said grimly, all pretense at courtesy abandoned. “How much longer before we can act?” There was an edge of desperation in his voice. “We’re being bled to death!”
“I know. . . .” Matthew began.
“Do you? The French are being massacred at Verdun. Last month the Seventy-second Division at Samogneux was reduced from twenty-six thousand men to ten thousand. The Russian Front is unspeakable. Sturmer, a creature of Rasputin’s, has replaced Goremykin as prime minister.” His face tightened. “Our people there estimate that a quarter of the entire working age population is dead, captured, or in the army. The harvest has failed and they are facing starvation. We are fighting in Italy, Turkey, the Balkans, Mesopotamia, Palestine, Egypt, and more than half of Africa.”
Matthew deemed it pointless to declare that they had finally succeeded in extricating themselves from the disaster of Gallipoli, and without losing a single man. The actual evacuation had been a military masterpiece, though nothing could make up for the fiasco of the attempted invasion that had cost the lives of over a quarter of a million men. On the worst days the reconnaissance aircraft had reported the sea red with blood.
Shearing was staring at him. His eyes were shadowed with exhaustion and a deep, corroding knowledge. His emotion dominated the austere room in which there was nothing of his home, his past, or the man he was outside these walls.
Matthew was compelled to offer all the brief information he could about his own specific task. “The fact that they are putting smoke bombs in the holds of the ships, in among the munitions, so the captains have no choice but to flood the holds, can be deduced easily enough; it doesn’t need any explanation,” he said. “To trace the money to pay for the bombs themselves and the agents who plant them, all the way from Berlin to America, needs several people. We can fabricate bank clerks, officials, and so on, suggest bribery and betrayal, a degree of carelessness, but it all has to be verifiable.”
“I know that!” Shearing snapped. “You’ve got men—do it!”
He was referring to Detta Hannassey, the Irish double agent the Germans were using to test whether their vital naval code had been broken. It was Matthew’s job to convince her, and them, that it had not. Otherwise they would change the code and Britain would lose one of the very few advantages it maintained. All communication from Berlin to their men in the neutral United States