For LARM on her birthday -- Susan and Tebbitt AU
For l_a_r_m on her birthday. Birthday fic! The first part some of you might recall from the Give the Pevensies a friend commentfic. This expands it a little bit. Years and timing and dates are wrong wrong wrong. Also, I borrow heavily from the ideas of John LeCarre's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The ideas are, in sum and substance, his. I've just inserted Tebbitt and Susan into it.
****
Walking all the way from the train station was not one of his better plans. He had been so concerned that Stanley was wise to him, George Walker-Smythe (formerly Colonel, commission resigned, sacked) had considered getting off a stop later.
The rain stopped just as he pushed open the squeaky gate of the tiny Oxford cottage. His shoes crunched on the gravel walk. Gate and stone were just one of her early warning signals should an enemy made in twenty years of their dodgy business came back for a reckoning.
She had never changed the name on the postbox. It still read D. Kirke. The well-heeled all knew though that if you wanted to pass your French, German, or Russian orals, she was the tutor to seek.
George juggled the case containing the greatest secrets of their realm, and rang the bell. How to address her? Which code name? Which identity? He did not know all of them, though she certainly did. Caspian, he decided, the first working name she had ever used when they’d run circles around the American diplomatic establishment in 1942 and helped win the war in North Africa with 350 Sherman tanks in time for Operation Torch.
He could have sworn it was the immense, shaggy wolfhound who opened the creaky door.
“Well, it if isn’t my old friend, Sallowpad!” Susan Caspian nee Pevensie cried. Her eyes darted up and down the street, but there was no one there, no mysterious passerbys, no windowless vans the watchers and lamplighters favored. “And walking all the way from the station, on the twelve forty-two, judging from the state of your trousers.”
They went to her parlor. It was an addition, hastily done to accommodate an enormous wardrobe decorated with wild animals. Applewood, Mrs. Caspian had explained with a smile. Belonging to Professor Kirke, you know. Tea appeared so readily, he wondered if she had her own watchers watching the station.
“You heard about Tebbitt?” George asked.
“It was in the Times!” she replied tartly. “Of course I read it.” The edge softened. “How is he? I didn’t dare try to contact him.”
“Recuperating. Backs are tricky things. He’s teaching at some girls’ school in Scotland.”
“I warned him,” Susan said. “But he’s always been so bloody idealistic. He refused to believe what you and both saw.” She took another sip of her tea, eyes flitting to the case tucked under his elbow.
He nodded and really, what could be said? He had been sacked first, forced out, one of only a handful of honest competents left in the Intelligence Service. Mrs. Caspian had survived barely six months after that.
“There’s a letter in that bag from the Minister,” he told her. “Full apology, pension, special commendation, the usual package and then some.”
She stirred her tea, lips pursed, a sour expression on her face. “After all this time? The trail to Stanley is cold, Sallowpad. And I’ll have to fight with every secretarial cow for access to what I need to find it again.”
“Full access,” he said flatly, repeating the demand he had made, knowing it would be her condition. “The Minister is sending in the broom and the shovel. Clean house, go backwards, forwards, pick up Stanley's trail, find the mole.”
“You do know how to sweet talk a lady, don’t you Sallowpad?”
“You and I both know it. Tebbitt was betrayed.” Tebbitt had been her friend, her partner, her cover, and probably her lover, though George had never been clear on that part of the working relationship. They had built a string of agents from Rio to Moscow, run networks through the slums of Istanbul and Bucharest. And seen nearly every one of those precious agents blown or dead.
“You said fifteen years ago there was something wrong, Susan. It took three bullets in Tebbitt’s back and his cover blown on the front of The London Times, but the Minister agrees. England needs a terrier to run a Soviet mole to ground.”
“Terriers,” Susan said with a sly smile. “They are loud and draw attention to themselves.” She set a hand on the head of her great, gray, silent dog. “I think the wolf is the better metaphor.”
***
Shep had told her that he did not want to travel by car or rail all that long way up to Edinburgh. They both liked the city well enough, but the Wolfhound would rather cavort with his fellows in the fields of Oxfordshire than go the long way North to a hotel with a tiny bed. He’d never forgiven her for the B&B in Cornwall with one of those heaters that you had to put coins in to keep them running and all the food coming out of tins.
So, Susan would make the trip by herself. As Clive (the “Home Secretary” to those who didn’t have access to those pictures of him with that pretty danseur) was paying for her expenses out of the Widows and Orphans fund, she took a first class train and booked a weekend at the Scotsman. In the old days, it would have been a flophouse near the A7.
The service wasn’t worth the price, but it was the principle of the thing. The Welfare State had abandoned her with barely a by your leave, a commendation that wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on and half the pension she was entitled to because some cow in personnel insisted that Susan provide adequate documentation for those years in foreign “postings.” Odd that in the years she and Tebbitt had been smuggling people from behind the Iron Curtain she’d not thought to keep receipts from every bowl of ciorba and cabbage she’d gulped down in cold, dark apartment blocs or every border guard they had bribed.
One night in the silk sleeping bag she always traveled with atop the adequate bed at the Scotsman and Susan was ready. She bought a bottle of 18 year old Glenlivet single malt and hired a car - charging both to the Home Office with her personal regards - and drove herself to the St. Stephens Girls’ School.
For this visit, she’d decided to dress the part of a well-heeled matron coming to visit her upper form daughter or even (she sighed inwardly) granddaughter - slim tweeds, strand of pearls, practical pumps, a shade of lipstick and powder. Out of habit, she carried her slightly larger than fashionable handbag and within its false sides and bottom she concealed three fake passports, currency from four countries, a camera, a makeup kit, a pair of custom-made rubber slippers, a Swiss Army multi-tool, and a small caliber pistol which she always had neglected to return even though she had never, ever used it. Violence was a failure of imagination.
Tebbitt and his ruined back would have not have agreed with that characterization - but then, they never had agreed on the issue of guns.
She had timed her visit precisely. Susan signed in at the office, flashing a fake identification. She walked the school grounds and made a to-do looking at the staff post boxes. She chatted with the vicar at the chapel and asked to see the pew lists, making sure that some of the girls overheard her asking.
She knew Tebbitt’s tradecraft - the two of them had, after all, developed it together. He would have charmed every girl in the school to keep an eye for strangers and report back to him immediately. She had had two weeks to prepare for this meeting and he was owed at least a few hours to collect himself as well.
And so, predictably, by the afternoon physical education, she was getting shifty looks from the girls jogging out to the archery range in their droll, unflattering gym clothes and trainers.
Susan followed the girls. Tebbitt was already at the range, leaning on a cane, hunched over like a man twice his age. The girls were all lined up, facing targets. The bows were horrid, as bent and misshapen as Tebbitt’s ruined body. It would be a miracle if the girls could hit anything. Hobbling up and down the row, Tebbitt was, with a touch to the elbow, a shift of a hand, the change of the feet, improving the girls’ stances.
Arrows were flying all over the place.
“Well, if it isn’t Mrs. Caspian, looking so bonny and in the pink!” Tebbitt bellowed from down the line.
Susan smiled as the girls suspiciously stared at her. Their eyes grew quite large as she set her bag down and took up a bow. “With your permission, Mr. Tebbitt?”
It bothered her to use his real name here, in public, even if among a gaggle of schoolgirls. But, his cover, real names and working names had been blown on the front page of The Times, so really what was the point?
“Even if you shouldn’t, you would anyway, Mrs. Caspian. By all means, disrupt my athletics class.”
The girls all giggled; Susan quelled the smirks as she smoothly fitted an arrow to the bow, and in a fluid movement, sighted the target and released the arrow.
“Bullseye!” Tebbitt crowed, though his clapping was mocking more than complimentary. “But then, you never miss a target, do you, Mrs. Caspian?”
***
In the old days, they would have taken the Glenlivet and a pair of binoculars and walked the perimeter of their target, or picnicked on a blanket to conduct their surveillance. Today, with her hand at his elbow, and by pushing the seat all the way back, Tebbitt was able to slide awkwardly into the car. Susan sat in the driver’s side, took two glasses out of the glove compartment, and poured them both two fingers’ worth.
“I’m back in,” Susan said, beginning bluntly. “They called Sallowpad out of retirement and he’s brought me back, and we’re going to run Stanley to ground.” She hoped he would trust her, but a man betrayed and abandoned as Tebbitt had been was rightfully wary and skittish. “You can call Clive if you need confirmation; even the PM will take your call.”
Tebbitt nodded, and took a deep drink. The green pitch of the girls’ school spread out before them just beyond the car park. “You’re here to find out about the Operation? About why the Chief sent me to Tulcea to declare private war upon the Romanians?”
“Yes, Operation Weasel. The Chief is dead, everyone else was sacked and is suffering convenient amnesia.” She shifted in her seat to face him, to study his scarred, mobile, ever so familiar face. “You’re the only one left who can tell me what happened.”
He let out a deep sigh. To her, and no one else, Tebbitt would tell the tale. And he would not lie to her. Not after so many years and so many miles and so much death and loss. “I thought he was barmy, Susan. Even the name, Weasel. They’re predators, you know.”
“Yes,” Susan said. “I remember that.”
“Chief said there was a choice prospect, a potential defector from the Romanian Securitate. He had a name of a deep cover, KGB hood.”
Tebbitt stopped there, taking another drink, shifting uncomfortably in the close confines of the car. It couldn’t be easy for him. They’d need to go to the hotel. And, perhaps, to the double bed she had upgraded to, and charged the Ministry for.
Susan picked up the story, trying to fill in the gaps. “And you were to be the Chief’s weasel.”
“We were going to catch ourselves a British mole.”
She opened the bottle and splashed more into his glass, and took a steadying drink herself.
“How did you enter? From the north, through Vişeului, or the…”
“You hated that overland route,” Tebbitt said. He had always been bad about interrupting. “No, I came through the Black Sea, from Istanbul.”
“On Vasily’s fishing boat?” Susan asked, smiling at the memory of the shabby-looking trawler and its toothless captain. Like other places she had experienced in her life, the outward appearance had been very deceiving and the inside much different than the ship’s outside.
Tebbitt nodded. “And the moment I jumped ashore on the Constanţa dock, I knew I was blown.”
***
It seemed inevitable, but it really wasn’t. They might have stayed in the bar, or gone to dinner, or he might have rebuffed her advance, or stormed out when she refused his. The mad and urgent passion of their first (second, third, and fourth), furtive, abortive romances had faded to something else, deeper, mellower, and gentler. Susan wasn’t the toned, smooth young thing she had been; Tebbitt was broken. She mapped the familiar territory of his old scars, learned the terrain of his many new ones. She kissed the marks on his body that marred her own as well - the telltale scars of cigarette burns left by Moscow-trained interrogators. It wasn’t as easy as it had once been; it was probably better.
After, they sat together, side by side, in the tangled bed, sharing a cigarette and washing it down with the Glenlivet. For old time’s sake, she wore one of his old shirts, left behind after he stormed out of a Marseilles safehouse in 1959. The radio was playing the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. She could see no reason why there would be electronic surveillance, but there was no reason to be stupid about it, either.
“I don’t know where I was taken for the interrogation,” Tebbitt said. “They moved me north and west. I knew I had to hold out long enough to give our Romanian network time to roll up and get out or go to ground. And that I had to protect the real reason Chief had sent me there.”
Susan realized with a sinking heart that Tebbitt didn’t know.
“I was sweated and roughed up, the usual.” He smiled thinly, shrugging off torture as he would.
“No one told me what happened when I was finally sprung.” Staring at the drink in his hands, he finally asked her what they had both been avoiding. “Did the stall work, Susan? Did they make it out?”
“No,” she finally managed, taking the drink from him with shaking hands.
“Nikolai and Elena? The Stoicas?”
She shook her head and drained the last of the smoky, burning scotch herself.
“Andrescu? Vitz? Mister Nikita?”
“No.”
Tebbitt buried his head in his hands, choking on a dry, tearless sob.
“The Securitate took them, Tebbitt. All of them.” Even now, months later, and still Susan dashed her own tears away for friends they had recruited and built into their Balkan network. The friendships and work of years. Gone. Shot. Blown. All dead.
“And everyone thinks I sold our agents out to save my own hide, don’t they?” Tebbitt bit out, savagely.
“Yes,” Susan whispered. The glass rolled away, off the messy bedsheets and thudded to the floor.
Tebbitt thrashed about on the bed, trying to rise, hissing with the pain of bullet wounds and betrayal. She wrapped her arms around him, pulled him back to her. “I know there had to be more to it, Tebbitt. You would have had the interrogation scripted. What happened? You wouldn’t have given up our ...”
He sagged against her, burying his head in her shoulder, muttering.
Susan brought her hands to his head, tilted his face up to her own. “Tell me.”
He turned his head to the side, kissed her palm, rested his cheek there. “They never even asked…”
“What?” Susan said, confused. “Who?”
“The Securitate. They never asked about the networks. They just held me until the KGB gorillas arrived. And all they wanted to know about was our mad, senile Chief and how close he was to finding the mole. It wouldn’t have mattered if I’d sung like bird. They knew everything before we even started.”
Tebbitt raged and drank and she held him until he finally collapsed in a drunken stupor.
Susan rose from the bed, tucked a blanket around Tebbitt, and put a pillow at his back. Then, she went to the desk, to record his testimony. It had been strange to pick up again the old Narnian code she and Edmund had developed. She had enjoyed teaching the code to her niece and nephew when they had been younger; it was very satisfying to know that a little bit of Narnia lived on in her dead siblings’ children.
As Susan carefully recorded her notes, it was with the certainty she had known in her heart, but had needed to hear from him. Reginald Tebbitt had not been responsible for the death of 23 agents in the Balkans. His account corroborated the report she had gathered from one of their pianists, a radio man in Istanbul. The Romanian Secret Police, with Soviet backing, had moved against their Balkan spies within hours of when Tebbitt had been shot in the back while fleeing from a dacha at the Moldovan border. Operation Weasel had been a trap, orchestrated to be blown and to discredit those who knew, but could not prove, that a mole had undermined the very fabric of the British secret service.
She was on his trail. And he’d better hope Scotland Yard got there first. Susan had never used the gun she carried in her bag. But there was always a first time.
****
Walking all the way from the train station was not one of his better plans. He had been so concerned that Stanley was wise to him, George Walker-Smythe (formerly Colonel, commission resigned, sacked) had considered getting off a stop later.
The rain stopped just as he pushed open the squeaky gate of the tiny Oxford cottage. His shoes crunched on the gravel walk. Gate and stone were just one of her early warning signals should an enemy made in twenty years of their dodgy business came back for a reckoning.
She had never changed the name on the postbox. It still read D. Kirke. The well-heeled all knew though that if you wanted to pass your French, German, or Russian orals, she was the tutor to seek.
George juggled the case containing the greatest secrets of their realm, and rang the bell. How to address her? Which code name? Which identity? He did not know all of them, though she certainly did. Caspian, he decided, the first working name she had ever used when they’d run circles around the American diplomatic establishment in 1942 and helped win the war in North Africa with 350 Sherman tanks in time for Operation Torch.
He could have sworn it was the immense, shaggy wolfhound who opened the creaky door.
“Well, it if isn’t my old friend, Sallowpad!” Susan Caspian nee Pevensie cried. Her eyes darted up and down the street, but there was no one there, no mysterious passerbys, no windowless vans the watchers and lamplighters favored. “And walking all the way from the station, on the twelve forty-two, judging from the state of your trousers.”
They went to her parlor. It was an addition, hastily done to accommodate an enormous wardrobe decorated with wild animals. Applewood, Mrs. Caspian had explained with a smile. Belonging to Professor Kirke, you know. Tea appeared so readily, he wondered if she had her own watchers watching the station.
“You heard about Tebbitt?” George asked.
“It was in the Times!” she replied tartly. “Of course I read it.” The edge softened. “How is he? I didn’t dare try to contact him.”
“Recuperating. Backs are tricky things. He’s teaching at some girls’ school in Scotland.”
“I warned him,” Susan said. “But he’s always been so bloody idealistic. He refused to believe what you and both saw.” She took another sip of her tea, eyes flitting to the case tucked under his elbow.
He nodded and really, what could be said? He had been sacked first, forced out, one of only a handful of honest competents left in the Intelligence Service. Mrs. Caspian had survived barely six months after that.
“There’s a letter in that bag from the Minister,” he told her. “Full apology, pension, special commendation, the usual package and then some.”
She stirred her tea, lips pursed, a sour expression on her face. “After all this time? The trail to Stanley is cold, Sallowpad. And I’ll have to fight with every secretarial cow for access to what I need to find it again.”
“Full access,” he said flatly, repeating the demand he had made, knowing it would be her condition. “The Minister is sending in the broom and the shovel. Clean house, go backwards, forwards, pick up Stanley's trail, find the mole.”
“You do know how to sweet talk a lady, don’t you Sallowpad?”
“You and I both know it. Tebbitt was betrayed.” Tebbitt had been her friend, her partner, her cover, and probably her lover, though George had never been clear on that part of the working relationship. They had built a string of agents from Rio to Moscow, run networks through the slums of Istanbul and Bucharest. And seen nearly every one of those precious agents blown or dead.
“You said fifteen years ago there was something wrong, Susan. It took three bullets in Tebbitt’s back and his cover blown on the front of The London Times, but the Minister agrees. England needs a terrier to run a Soviet mole to ground.”
“Terriers,” Susan said with a sly smile. “They are loud and draw attention to themselves.” She set a hand on the head of her great, gray, silent dog. “I think the wolf is the better metaphor.”
***
Shep had told her that he did not want to travel by car or rail all that long way up to Edinburgh. They both liked the city well enough, but the Wolfhound would rather cavort with his fellows in the fields of Oxfordshire than go the long way North to a hotel with a tiny bed. He’d never forgiven her for the B&B in Cornwall with one of those heaters that you had to put coins in to keep them running and all the food coming out of tins.
So, Susan would make the trip by herself. As Clive (the “Home Secretary” to those who didn’t have access to those pictures of him with that pretty danseur) was paying for her expenses out of the Widows and Orphans fund, she took a first class train and booked a weekend at the Scotsman. In the old days, it would have been a flophouse near the A7.
The service wasn’t worth the price, but it was the principle of the thing. The Welfare State had abandoned her with barely a by your leave, a commendation that wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on and half the pension she was entitled to because some cow in personnel insisted that Susan provide adequate documentation for those years in foreign “postings.” Odd that in the years she and Tebbitt had been smuggling people from behind the Iron Curtain she’d not thought to keep receipts from every bowl of ciorba and cabbage she’d gulped down in cold, dark apartment blocs or every border guard they had bribed.
One night in the silk sleeping bag she always traveled with atop the adequate bed at the Scotsman and Susan was ready. She bought a bottle of 18 year old Glenlivet single malt and hired a car - charging both to the Home Office with her personal regards - and drove herself to the St. Stephens Girls’ School.
For this visit, she’d decided to dress the part of a well-heeled matron coming to visit her upper form daughter or even (she sighed inwardly) granddaughter - slim tweeds, strand of pearls, practical pumps, a shade of lipstick and powder. Out of habit, she carried her slightly larger than fashionable handbag and within its false sides and bottom she concealed three fake passports, currency from four countries, a camera, a makeup kit, a pair of custom-made rubber slippers, a Swiss Army multi-tool, and a small caliber pistol which she always had neglected to return even though she had never, ever used it. Violence was a failure of imagination.
Tebbitt and his ruined back would have not have agreed with that characterization - but then, they never had agreed on the issue of guns.
She had timed her visit precisely. Susan signed in at the office, flashing a fake identification. She walked the school grounds and made a to-do looking at the staff post boxes. She chatted with the vicar at the chapel and asked to see the pew lists, making sure that some of the girls overheard her asking.
She knew Tebbitt’s tradecraft - the two of them had, after all, developed it together. He would have charmed every girl in the school to keep an eye for strangers and report back to him immediately. She had had two weeks to prepare for this meeting and he was owed at least a few hours to collect himself as well.
And so, predictably, by the afternoon physical education, she was getting shifty looks from the girls jogging out to the archery range in their droll, unflattering gym clothes and trainers.
Susan followed the girls. Tebbitt was already at the range, leaning on a cane, hunched over like a man twice his age. The girls were all lined up, facing targets. The bows were horrid, as bent and misshapen as Tebbitt’s ruined body. It would be a miracle if the girls could hit anything. Hobbling up and down the row, Tebbitt was, with a touch to the elbow, a shift of a hand, the change of the feet, improving the girls’ stances.
Arrows were flying all over the place.
“Well, if it isn’t Mrs. Caspian, looking so bonny and in the pink!” Tebbitt bellowed from down the line.
Susan smiled as the girls suspiciously stared at her. Their eyes grew quite large as she set her bag down and took up a bow. “With your permission, Mr. Tebbitt?”
It bothered her to use his real name here, in public, even if among a gaggle of schoolgirls. But, his cover, real names and working names had been blown on the front page of The Times, so really what was the point?
“Even if you shouldn’t, you would anyway, Mrs. Caspian. By all means, disrupt my athletics class.”
The girls all giggled; Susan quelled the smirks as she smoothly fitted an arrow to the bow, and in a fluid movement, sighted the target and released the arrow.
“Bullseye!” Tebbitt crowed, though his clapping was mocking more than complimentary. “But then, you never miss a target, do you, Mrs. Caspian?”
***
In the old days, they would have taken the Glenlivet and a pair of binoculars and walked the perimeter of their target, or picnicked on a blanket to conduct their surveillance. Today, with her hand at his elbow, and by pushing the seat all the way back, Tebbitt was able to slide awkwardly into the car. Susan sat in the driver’s side, took two glasses out of the glove compartment, and poured them both two fingers’ worth.
“I’m back in,” Susan said, beginning bluntly. “They called Sallowpad out of retirement and he’s brought me back, and we’re going to run Stanley to ground.” She hoped he would trust her, but a man betrayed and abandoned as Tebbitt had been was rightfully wary and skittish. “You can call Clive if you need confirmation; even the PM will take your call.”
Tebbitt nodded, and took a deep drink. The green pitch of the girls’ school spread out before them just beyond the car park. “You’re here to find out about the Operation? About why the Chief sent me to Tulcea to declare private war upon the Romanians?”
“Yes, Operation Weasel. The Chief is dead, everyone else was sacked and is suffering convenient amnesia.” She shifted in her seat to face him, to study his scarred, mobile, ever so familiar face. “You’re the only one left who can tell me what happened.”
He let out a deep sigh. To her, and no one else, Tebbitt would tell the tale. And he would not lie to her. Not after so many years and so many miles and so much death and loss. “I thought he was barmy, Susan. Even the name, Weasel. They’re predators, you know.”
“Yes,” Susan said. “I remember that.”
“Chief said there was a choice prospect, a potential defector from the Romanian Securitate. He had a name of a deep cover, KGB hood.”
Tebbitt stopped there, taking another drink, shifting uncomfortably in the close confines of the car. It couldn’t be easy for him. They’d need to go to the hotel. And, perhaps, to the double bed she had upgraded to, and charged the Ministry for.
Susan picked up the story, trying to fill in the gaps. “And you were to be the Chief’s weasel.”
“We were going to catch ourselves a British mole.”
She opened the bottle and splashed more into his glass, and took a steadying drink herself.
“How did you enter? From the north, through Vişeului, or the…”
“You hated that overland route,” Tebbitt said. He had always been bad about interrupting. “No, I came through the Black Sea, from Istanbul.”
“On Vasily’s fishing boat?” Susan asked, smiling at the memory of the shabby-looking trawler and its toothless captain. Like other places she had experienced in her life, the outward appearance had been very deceiving and the inside much different than the ship’s outside.
Tebbitt nodded. “And the moment I jumped ashore on the Constanţa dock, I knew I was blown.”
***
It seemed inevitable, but it really wasn’t. They might have stayed in the bar, or gone to dinner, or he might have rebuffed her advance, or stormed out when she refused his. The mad and urgent passion of their first (second, third, and fourth), furtive, abortive romances had faded to something else, deeper, mellower, and gentler. Susan wasn’t the toned, smooth young thing she had been; Tebbitt was broken. She mapped the familiar territory of his old scars, learned the terrain of his many new ones. She kissed the marks on his body that marred her own as well - the telltale scars of cigarette burns left by Moscow-trained interrogators. It wasn’t as easy as it had once been; it was probably better.
After, they sat together, side by side, in the tangled bed, sharing a cigarette and washing it down with the Glenlivet. For old time’s sake, she wore one of his old shirts, left behind after he stormed out of a Marseilles safehouse in 1959. The radio was playing the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. She could see no reason why there would be electronic surveillance, but there was no reason to be stupid about it, either.
“I don’t know where I was taken for the interrogation,” Tebbitt said. “They moved me north and west. I knew I had to hold out long enough to give our Romanian network time to roll up and get out or go to ground. And that I had to protect the real reason Chief had sent me there.”
Susan realized with a sinking heart that Tebbitt didn’t know.
“I was sweated and roughed up, the usual.” He smiled thinly, shrugging off torture as he would.
“No one told me what happened when I was finally sprung.” Staring at the drink in his hands, he finally asked her what they had both been avoiding. “Did the stall work, Susan? Did they make it out?”
“No,” she finally managed, taking the drink from him with shaking hands.
“Nikolai and Elena? The Stoicas?”
She shook her head and drained the last of the smoky, burning scotch herself.
“Andrescu? Vitz? Mister Nikita?”
“No.”
Tebbitt buried his head in his hands, choking on a dry, tearless sob.
“The Securitate took them, Tebbitt. All of them.” Even now, months later, and still Susan dashed her own tears away for friends they had recruited and built into their Balkan network. The friendships and work of years. Gone. Shot. Blown. All dead.
“And everyone thinks I sold our agents out to save my own hide, don’t they?” Tebbitt bit out, savagely.
“Yes,” Susan whispered. The glass rolled away, off the messy bedsheets and thudded to the floor.
Tebbitt thrashed about on the bed, trying to rise, hissing with the pain of bullet wounds and betrayal. She wrapped her arms around him, pulled him back to her. “I know there had to be more to it, Tebbitt. You would have had the interrogation scripted. What happened? You wouldn’t have given up our ...”
He sagged against her, burying his head in her shoulder, muttering.
Susan brought her hands to his head, tilted his face up to her own. “Tell me.”
He turned his head to the side, kissed her palm, rested his cheek there. “They never even asked…”
“What?” Susan said, confused. “Who?”
“The Securitate. They never asked about the networks. They just held me until the KGB gorillas arrived. And all they wanted to know about was our mad, senile Chief and how close he was to finding the mole. It wouldn’t have mattered if I’d sung like bird. They knew everything before we even started.”
Tebbitt raged and drank and she held him until he finally collapsed in a drunken stupor.
Susan rose from the bed, tucked a blanket around Tebbitt, and put a pillow at his back. Then, she went to the desk, to record his testimony. It had been strange to pick up again the old Narnian code she and Edmund had developed. She had enjoyed teaching the code to her niece and nephew when they had been younger; it was very satisfying to know that a little bit of Narnia lived on in her dead siblings’ children.
As Susan carefully recorded her notes, it was with the certainty she had known in her heart, but had needed to hear from him. Reginald Tebbitt had not been responsible for the death of 23 agents in the Balkans. His account corroborated the report she had gathered from one of their pianists, a radio man in Istanbul. The Romanian Secret Police, with Soviet backing, had moved against their Balkan spies within hours of when Tebbitt had been shot in the back while fleeing from a dacha at the Moldovan border. Operation Weasel had been a trap, orchestrated to be blown and to discredit those who knew, but could not prove, that a mole had undermined the very fabric of the British secret service.
She was on his trail. And he’d better hope Scotland Yard got there first. Susan had never used the gun she carried in her bag. But there was always a first time.