Chapter 6 – Hell on Earth

Wednesday, 16 April 1941

London

It had been two hours since Neal had sent the small boy off to Russell Square to try to get Neville Chambers to come rescue him. The note had said Phillip Talbot's house had been blown away, Neal's wound from Dunkirk had been opened again, and Neal didn't think he could walk away on his own. They were in a lull in the blitz bombing. No one had come to him. He couldn't wait, exposed like this on Starcross Street, with fires going on all around him, negating any effect of blackout measures to deny the attackers in the sky a view of London below them.

An air raid warden, running by Neal and seeing him collapsed to the pavement in a pose he'd arranged to attract Neville Chambers's attention and sympathy, which included opening the area of his leg wound himself to make the damage look more serious than it was, stopped and called out, "Can you not make it to the shelter yourself, lad? I'll help you there. Come lean on me. It's beginning again. All who will go need to be in the shelters."

Neal began to demur, saying, "No, thank you, I'm waiting for a specific person to save me and take me to his home," but he realized how idiotic that sounded, so he hauled himself up, with help from the air raid warden, and let the man help him to the nearby Euston Square Underground tube station entrance and down the stairs into the air raid shelter there.

The warden helped Neal settle on the tube station platform tiles, propped up against a wall, while other local residents, many still in their nightclothes, joined those already there since the first wave of bombers of the night went through. Already looking down the platform to gauge the needs, the warden said, "Rest here, sonny. I'll find a medical worker to come dress that wound for you before I go back up to bring others down."

Neal barely had time to voice a weary "Thank you," before the warden was gone. He was frustrated, but the man had just been doing his job—fearlessly and well, and with admirable patience in view of how long the bombardment had been going on. They'd had nights like this since the previous September. This was what Neal was going through with this farce for—to help relieve the embattled people of London and of the rest of England beyond them.

The sounds of the bombs going off and the slight shudder of the shelter walls broadcast that the blitz had resumed. This day would be registered in history as "The Wednesday," the worst raid of London by the Germans of the war. Some 2,000 civilians would die this night in London and more than 100,000 homes would be destroyed in addition to the military-related targets that were hit.

That the bombing would be so brutal on this night had not gone into the planning of trying to put Neal in Neville Chambers's house, but it would bolster the plan. At least it would do that much to further the Allied efforts in the war.

Looking around the shelter, Neal could see the weariness and the fear—and the justifiable anger—in people's faces, but he also saw the resolve, patience, and the care and regard everyone was giving each other just as the woman crouching beside him and dabbing away at the reopened wound on his leg was doing. No one was in hysterics—after seven months of this, the hysterics had dissolved. No one was fighting for space or arguing with anyone else. They had come down into the shelter in all stages of dress and undress but none were shirking away from anyone else or being aggressive. Some had brought bedding and some had brought paperwork to work on. One woman had her family gathered around her and she was boiling water on a makeshift burner for tea and chattering away cheerily to distract her young children. Others were settling in for the night, able after all these months to sleep even with bombs raining down on their heads, just waiting for a direct hit.

None of them, though, Neal thought, were feeling the frustration and anger that he felt, knowing there was something he could do about this, something he must do about this with no thought to his own degradation in the effort.

When it had been fifteen minutes since the last bomb blast had been heard, Neal pushed away from the wall, stood, and went to the stairs that would take him back up to the surface.

The devastation of over half a year of bombardment had been evident when Neal had gone down into the Euston Square tube station, but it slapped him in the face when he came back up onto the surface and started stumbling down Gower Street, trying to reach Russell Square before the blitz started up again. Already the sky was abuzz with fighter planes, both German and British, battling each other while waiting for the next wave of bombers to arrive.

The whole area was alight. As Neal looked down Gower Street, it looked like every fourth building on each side of the road had been hit or had been obliterated. The first horror to accost him was a row house that had had its façade peeled off by a bomb hitting in the forecourt. The rooms were exposed up three levels much as with a Victorian doll house. Getting a view of the furniture and the contrasting wallpaper and a sense of the layout of the building brought the gaze upward to the horror of seeing a woman's bloodied head and an arm dangling over the side of a bath tub, a beam from the ceiling having come down on her in the impact of the bomb. Firefighters were raising a ladder to her, but it obviously was a futile effort. She wasn't moving. There was too much blood trailing down the side of the tub for her to be alive.

In earlier months, perhaps Neal would have wondered what a woman was doing taking a bath during an air raid, but, after half a year of bombardment, he knew that some people had given up on panic and were risking refusing to let the war brought to their homes dictate their lives anymore. Not all went for shelter in the raids these days. Even some of those who did had the roof collapse on them there. There was virtually no place to hide in London.

On the other side of the street and down, a child was being carried out of a smashed building by a fire warden. She was alive, if scuffed up, but she was looking dazed and a rag doll dangled from her hand. She was dressed for sleep. It was clear that she wouldn't have been alone in the building, which looked more like a pile of bricks than a house, and was smoking. There must have been other family members in there with them. None of them were coming out of the building.

Neal passed a body in the street, incongruously covered by an expensive-looking full-length fur coat. The arm extending from it was that of a man, in workman's clothes. It was evident the coat wasn't his but had been draped over him to give him some dignity until the firemen and police had exhausted their search for the living and could attend to the dead, not likely to happen until sometime in the light of the next day.

Neal stumbled on, but only as far as the Canadian soldiers' and sailors' home, a large four-story building. It had taken a direct hit and a fire was smoldering in one of its wings, a fire that surely would consume the rest of the building before firefighters could get to it. Bodies, in all stages of dress for the evening and dress for the night—expired, dying, wounded, and just in shock—were strewn around on the small lawn in front of the building and out onto the street, as firemen, policemen, fire wardens, and anyone else nearby, fought to bring men out of the building before it imploded. It was evident that the building had been hit before any of the men could seek shelter.

Instinctively, Neal went to the building rather than further down the street. The fire warden who had helped Neal get to the Euston Square air raid shelter was struggling to bring a man twice as heavy as he was out of the doors. The warden and his burden were made a shadow by the fire in the building behind him. Without further thought, Neal went to them and helped the warden carry his burden out into the street. It wasn't clear then whether the elderly man was alive or dead.

Neal stayed and helped, making three trips into the building himself to find and bring out the wounded until those in charge of the evacuation declared the building was clear, which came mere seconds before it collapsed within itself.

They hadn't noticed, but the bombing had resumed. There was nowhere to go to be safe, so Neal joined the others in checking the men lying out on the street out and called medics to those who were still alive but were the most critical of the wounded. Mercifully, the bombing wasn't concentrating on this area of Bloomsbury anymore, but there was a particularly loud explosion further along on Gower Street, and Neal looked up to gauge that it was at University College, the current offices of the Ministry of Information—where Neal worked. Where Sir Neville Chambers was a senior unit chief.

He rose and was on the move down Gower Street again, toward what was a major fire. His thoughts immediate went to Neville Chambers, and contrasting emotions flashed through Neal's brain. Was Chambers at the ministry? He shouldn't be. Neal spent longer hours there, working for Chambers, than the civil servant spent there himself. Neal's brain went through the emotions of euphoria that perhaps he didn't have to kill the traitor himself—perhaps Chambers had met an ironic end—to anger that Neal might have been cheated of putting the man down himself, to anger with himself for considering putting personal satisfaction over the mission. Phillip had said the head of the German spy cell needed to be taken alive. They needed for Chambers not to be in the burning ministry building.

When Neal got there, he could see that it had been just one wing of the building that had been hit, not one near where Chambers's unit was housed. Nonetheless, he wanted to go in to check for himself. But firemen were there and they held him back.

"I work there. I have to make sure that none of my coworkers are there," he declared.

"You don't work there today, lad," one fireman said.

"We don't believe anyone is still in there," another one said.

Neal turned to the east, headed down Montague Place, toward Russell Square. All of the buildings on the square were intact, including the Chambers house, a large, three-story Georgian-style brick house on an English basement. The house was dark, surely employing the required blackout curtains as well as minimizing the light burning inside, but Neal could see that the blackout curtain had drawn partially open on one of the sunken story windows. A flickering light was going inside. He moved as silently as he could to check that out before he tried knocking at the front door, even though anyone inside surely was in the subbasement shelter. Chambers had said that he had his own air raid shelter below the English basement.

But at least some of the house residents, including Neville Chambers, had not withdrawn to the shelter. Peeking into the window, Neal could see that the room inside was a large kitchen, but the area immediately on the other side of the front wall was a dining area for the servants, with a rough wooden table and chairs, and a bank of china closets on the side wall. Gathered around the table with their heads together were Neville Chambers; his butler, Otto; and, surprisingly, the refugee Austrian cardinal, Heinrich. Neal drew away from the window immediately; retired, exhausted, to the front steps leading up to the double-door entry; and waited.

He didn't have long to wait before the light in the basement was extinguished and he could hear voices—Chambers's and Otto's—in the front hall. He went up the stairs and pounded on the door. He knew what to do from here. He just hoped that it worked.

The door opened. Otto was at the door, with Chambers, holding a torch, standing behind him. The door only opened half way, though, and it was evident that Otto was on the brink of closing it again, even in seeing that it was Neal and that he looked like he had traveled through hell to get here, which, in fact, he had.

The bombing had stopped again, and the blue of the sky was becoming more pale. There was hope that the longest, the most destructive night of the London blitz was over—for the day.

"Neal!" Chambers exclaimed from behind Otto's shoulder. "What's happened: You look like you were caught up in the bombing."

"I was. He's gone," Neal said in a choked voice, staggering forward, beyond where Otto could close the door and leave him outside.

"Who's gone? What's happened?" This was spoken by Chambers again. Otto looked like he was sorry he'd opened the door.

"I sent a boy to tell you."

"I received no message. What has happened?"

"Phillip. Phillip Talbot. Phillip's gone. And his house. I stepped out to see what had been hit up the street, and a bomb landed on Phillip's house. He's gone. There was nothing left to go into. I didn't know where to go. I came here. To you." Neal looked pleadingly at Chambers and then collapsed into a faint on the entrance hall floor.

Neal was awake, more awake than he was letting on an hour later, when the men carried him upstairs in Chambers's house, and Chambers had taken him to a bathroom, with a tub, and had drawn water, put him in it, and bathed his bruised body and his reopened leg wound. Chambers had suggested that Otto prepare a room for the young man and, with a sigh of disapproval and resignation, the butler had left them to do that.

Later, as he lay, naked, in a bed, on his side, in a well-appointed bedchamber, Chambers stole into the room, stretched out beside Neal, and ran his hands all over Neal's body, eventually penetrating him with a finger. The man's breathing became heavy and he was kissing Neal on the throat.

"It was good at Stedham Hall," Chambers whispered. "Are you going to open to me . . .?"

"Yes."

"You aren't too tired." It wasn't a question.

"No." Neal sighed, relaxed, turned on his back, parted his legs, and let his body move against the exploring hands, still seeming not to be completely awake, still dozing in total exhaustion, or so he wanted Chambers to think. Chambers folded Neal good leg up into his chest and turned the young man's body a bit toward his stomach. The older man scooted down a bit, bringing his pelvis in under Neal's buttocks. He embraced the young man's body close to his, wrapping one arm under Neal's waist and palming his lower belly. Chambers's other hand moved his erect cock into position at Neal's hole, and Chambers pressed his body upward, his shaft penetrating Neal's passage and stretching the young man's channel as it moved deeper inside him.

Neal moaned softly and deeply, seemingly still in an exhausted doze, yielding to the man in every way. As the older man began a languid-movement fuck, the younger man moved his pelvis into a coordinating rhythm.

Neal was in the house and in the man's bed—or in one of the man's beds, hopefully one that now would be Neal's bed. Now he had to ensure that he could continue to be there until he had found all that MI5 needed to know about this man and the German spy cell he was running here in London.

God, the man was thick. Neal shouldn't be enjoying this—not from this traitor—but he was. He let out a deep moan, whispered, "Yes, yes. Like that. Fuck me." Chambers began to hum, enjoying his work.

Chapter Seven: Every Little Bit

May 1941

Russell Square, London

The low couch, draped in a deep-purple velvet throw, was positioned in the center of the small garret room in the attic of Sir Neville Chambers's Russell Square townhouse. A beam of light was directed through an alcove window onto the naked, beautifully proportioned, small body of Neal Singer, posed on the couch so that the beam of sunshine picked up the white-blond hair on the young man's head and pubic bush.

Sitting off to the side, holding his sketch pad in one hand and stroking his cock with the other, Cardinal Heinrich, tall, thin, tightly muscled, hawk-like in appearance, brushed the sides of his cassock more open, all thirty-three of its buttons undone and the rigor of religious abstinence in his torso's gaunt, sinewy, musculature showing through. His legs were spread; his cock curved up from a salt-and-pepper pubic bush in full erection as he stroked himself. His eyes were intently watching the young man, stretched out in an open, sacrificial position on the couch.

With a sigh, the old man—in his fifties but still austerely handsome and firm of body—set his drawing aside. His rendering of Neal Singer in the nude was masterful, evocative. He intended his taking of the young man to be masterful as well.

He was in no hurry; he'd fucked the young man before.

Knowing what they really were there for, as he watched the cleric move across the room, his cassock flaring open, the tight-muscled power of the body and his sexual need palpable, Neal turned on his back; bent and spread his thighs, placing his feet flat on the surface; lifted his tail; and prepared to be mounted and fucked.

He had been living with Sir Neville Chambers, in his Russell Square house, for nearly a month now, waiting and watching, keeping track of the men and women who came and went, stealing into the house, conversing with Chambers, and leaving as furtively as they had come. Each time Sir Neville said that Neal's services were required, Neal dutifully and docilly responded to the request. By night, he slept in Chambers's bed, under the man's demanding body as well as the censuring gaze off to the side of Otto, the butler. Otto liked to attend judgmentally in the bedchamber, but he clearly wanted to watch the fuck. At other times Neal lay with the men and women who came to report, as part of their reward and as their preferences dictated.

This had been the cardinal's third visit to the townhouse. Each time he spoke with Chambers, usually with Otto present as well, and each time he sketched Neal and mounted him and fucked him.

Neal continued to accompany Chambers to the Ministry of Information, the building not having sustained any damage to their offices, where he continued to doctor war reports for public consumption. All the time Chambers worked to indoctrinate Neal on the inevitable—and, increasingly, desirable—German victory, and Neal pretended to be influenced in that direction, malleable to Chambers's views and ever-more German-directed action as long as the older, dominating man put his thick cock inside Neal every night and moved it to the chorus of Neal's moaning. Increasingly, Neal could see how the office's releases were working to demoralize rather than to buck up the public that was being bombarded from the skies every clear night. Neal fell in with all that, biding his time, searching out the substance and extent of the German spy cell centered at Chambers's Russell Square townhouse as best he could. The young man was reaching the breaking point, though.

He told his MI5 handlers, "Every day, I participate more in harming the public. I can't—"

"Then work quickly to catalogue what the cell is doing, how it's getting it done, and its chain of command. How does it get its orders and pass its intelligence on?" came back the reply.

All the time he lay under Chambers, or any man Chambers designated, opening his thighs to the man, wrapping his legs around the undulating buttocks, pressing his fingertips in the man's shoulder blades, and moaning for the thick cock—or even the not either thick or long cock—moving inside him, Each time responding that the man inside him was the best he'd ever had. Neal was seething, wanting to scream, wanting to plunge a knife into the man's back. But he held back and bided his time, knowing where his duty lay, knowing what he had to do.

Cardinal Heinrich didn't mount Neal in a missionary position. Instead, he leaned down and kissed the young man on the lips. Neal hungrily met the man's mouth with his, opening his mouth and letting the cleric's tongue in, feigning burning need to be writhing under the man. Coming out of the kiss, Heinrich grasped the young man under the armpits and pulled his body to the top edge of the couch so that Neal's head arched back over the edge. Holding the young man's head in place between his hands, the cardinal moved the bulb of his upcurved cock to Neal's lips, and the young man opened his mouth to take the cock into his throat, deep. The prelate put his hand on the young man's throat where he knew his cock was lodged under the surface and stroked Neal's flesh there lightly.

The cardinal leaned over Neal's body, his cassock folding around both of their torsos. He let his hands glide down Neal's heaving chest and onto his belly, and then lower. He was a tall man. Bending over Neal, he was able to take Neal's cock in his mouth. He did so and gave the cock suck. Neal moved his hands to the man's hard chest, taking the cardinal's puffed nipples between the thumb and forefinger of his hands, and worked the cleric's body into a shudder. Heinrich was humming, his mouth vibrating on Neal's cock, causing the young man to moan deeply, as Heinrich's cock massaged his throat.

For the fuck, Cardinal Heinrich moved Neal to his back, the young man's torso reclining on the couch, his arms dangling off the sides of the sofa, in an attitude of cruciform surrender. Neal's legs were rising up the cardinal's chest, the young man's ankles on the cardinal's shoulders. Heinrich had one arm wrapped around Neal's legs, holding them close together, and restricting the give of Neal's passage. His cock was fully sheathed in Neal's passage and pumping, and he was stroking the young man's cock with the other hand, hard at work in trying to synchronize their releases. The cardinal was a connoisseur of fucking young men. He brought them off nearly together.

For a man of the Catholic cloth who had renounced sex decades ago, Cardinal Heinrich certainly knew how to fuck a young man.

* * * *

The day of reckoning arrived at the Russell Square townhouse on May 9th of 1941. It came with Neal listening in at the library door and discovering one of the missing pieces of the German espionage cell operations before uncovering the last one later in the evening. He knew that they were expecting one of their agents to report in, because Sir Neville had warned Neal to be available to help them with a visitor. To Neal, that could only mean that he was to have sex with whoever showed up.

Neal was on the upper landing of the entrance hall, knowing that Sir Neville was in the library, a room at the front of the house on the main floor, with a door giving access from the entrance hall. Neal was about to come downstairs and see if he could position himself in the parlor, connected to the library by double doors, to see—and possibly to hear—what Chambers was up to when he had to pull back. Otto appeared in the entrance hall and entered the library. He shut the door behind him, but it didn't shut all the way. Neal stole down the stairs to listen at the door, and then he recoiled in shock.

The two men were speaking and they were discussing what they believed the visitor who was expected would tell them. The man was a Dane, named Hans Ailing, who had been an importer of tinned ham from Denmark to England and had been caught in England when Denmark had fallen to the Germans the previous June. Since then he'd been working in a fighter plane assembly plant. Neville and Otto discussed the questions that were going to be put to him. What struck Neal like a ton of bricks, though, was that it was Otto who was giving the direction on what Neville would ask the asset, not Neville.

Otto, the supposed butler, was in charge of this cell, not Chambers.

The kicker to this was that Otto was speaking, and that he was speaking with a heavy German accent. So, it wasn't that the butler couldn't speak. It was that, if he did speak, he would reveal his origins—and it wasn't English.

Leaving the house, Neal crossed the street to the Russell Square park, where a couple of British agents were on watch over Chambers's mansion and noting who came and went. He reported the crucial find on who was the head of the cell to the agents and one decided to go to MI5 headquarters to report this development.

"That should be enough for us to move tonight. Good work, Singer."

That agent left and Neal turned to reenter the house, but the other agent pulled him back. "A man is approaching the house," he whispered.

"It must be the Dane they are expecting," Neal whispered. "His name is Hans Ailing, and I think he will give them information on the workings of a fighter plane assembly plant."

Ailing was tall, solid, without being heavy. Neal understood that he was a factory worker. After the man was let into the house, Neal waited for a few minutes and then he went across the street as well, looking at the house and this way and that to see if he was being observed. He planned to go into the house through the back, as Otto probably was at the front of the house on the main level. He was, after all, playing the role of butler. When Neal approached the front of the house, he discovered the last piece of the puzzle, though. He saw that the window of the kitchen in the ground floor still had its blackout curtain parted and he caught a glimpse of the back of Otto. Neal looked more closely. Otto had opened the false front of a kitchen china cabinet to reveal a sophisticated telecommunications center. Otto was sitting in front of it, with earphones on his head and was fiddling with a radio console.

Otto was preparing his radio set to send the report on the meeting with the Dane to someone else—maybe across the channel to occupied Europe.

Neal hustled his way back across the street to the park in the square, and the other agent scurried off, but not before saying: "Don't do anything until we have agents here in strength. Stay there until the household has settled in for the night. We'll try to have agents in place to pick off the Dane when he leaves, but we won't move in on the operation until you have come out of the house when everyone is in bed and you give us the sign."

It was happening. At last they were rolling up the German cell in the Ministry of Information.

* * * *

The Dane, strong and controlling, holding Neal close in his embrace, pumped his load and lowered the arm he'd had wrapped around Neal's waist to the surface of the bed in Neal's bedroom, letting Neal's buttocks come down to the mattress as well. He pulled his cock out of Neal's hole; rolled over the leg that Neal let go flat on the mattress; turned on his side, facing Neal; and turned Neal away from him and into his body. Hans Ailing was tall, thin, angular, and blond. He had one of the longest cocks Neal had ever sheathed and he had wanted as much pumping time as he could get before coming. That had been fine with Neal. The upside of being a whore for Chambers was that sometimes the men who covered him were good fucks. Ailing clearly was one of those men, strong and dominating, muscular and with a good cock.

Ailing had knelt between Neal's thighs, holding Neal's pelvis up to his crotch, with Neal's torso streaming back on the bed and Neal raising his arms over his head, grasping the brass rungs of the headboard to help hold himself in place. Neal had enjoyed the fuck, his mind a jumble of thinking of the gathering hammer of justice forming outside the house while every nerve ending was focused on the very long, long—not thick, but long—cock mining his passage deep. The Dane would come right up to the moment for release—by him or Neal—and then edge off, again and again, until, his balls aching from need and cum buildup, Neal came in an arc up the Dane's belly. As Neal's ejaculation ended, Ailing's release began, rolling on and on and on, flooding Neal's channel deep with his cum.

Neal lay there, in Ailing's embrace, keyed up, waiting for the man's cock, which was nestled in the small of the young man's back, to go fully flaccid and for the Dane's body to relax and his snores, gentle or otherwise, to commence. When Neal was sure the Dane was in deep sleep, he moved out of the man's embrace and silently left the room, walked across the upper landing of the balcony overlooking the entrance foyer, and moved into Sir Neville's bedroom.

"Is he satisfied?" Chambers asked.

"He's asleep and smiling," Neal answered, trying to regulate his voice, trying not to warn Chambers that all hell was about to break out. "I was just checking to see if you were still awake."

"I'm still awake. Come here. Make me happy." Chambers tossed the covers off and fished his cock out of the fly of his sleeping trousers. He was half hard. He obviously wanted to be fully hard and buried in something warm and soft. Neal was sorry he'd checked too soon on whether the man was asleep. Resigned, not wanting to make a fuss, and figuring this was a good way to keep Chambers from noticing the forces that were gathering outside his house, Neal padded over to the bed. He leaned over the man and took Chambers's cock in his mouth. His gaze slid to the side. The papers Chambers had been reading looked like some sort of organizational chart. He tried to read it as he sucked.

Chambers lifted Neal up onto the bed and saddled on his lap. With effort, he put the young man on the thick cock, with Neal writhing, groaning, and panting heavily. Chambers wasn't preparing the young man to take something that thick. He was forcing him down on the shaft. And his hands were on Neal's throat.

"What did you hear at the library door earlier tonight?" Chambers growled. "Spying on Otto and me, were you? And where did you go? You left the house. Why were you trying to read these papers here? What are you up to, Neal?"

The young man couldn't answer even if he wanted to. Chambers was choking him, shaking the young man's body while, simultaneously lifting him and slamming his channel down on the thick cock. "I think Otto's right. I think you're here to spy on us."

Struggling against him, Neal managed to roll off the bed. He ran for the door out onto the balcony landing. Chambers came after him in pursuit, reaching him out on the landing, where the two struggled.

The explosion of the first bomb of the night just next to the townhouse slammed the two men, their bodies entangled, against the wall at one side of the balcony railing and then back against the railing. Freed from the struggle, Neal struggled down the staircase as the Dane appear in Neal's bedroom door. The next bomb took that corner of the house down, Ailing being blasted across the landing and into the open doorway of Chambers's bedroom.

Before Neal hit the bottom of the stairs, the MI5 agents had battered down the front door and were pouring into the entrance hall. The second floor was engulfed in flames. Neal, naked, continued out the front door even as the second wave of men, the fire wardens, were appearing on the street outside. As Neal come stumbling down the outside stairs, he fell into the arms of . . . Phillip Talbot.

* * * *

"Every little bit helps."

On the next afternoon, Saturday, May 10th, Phillip Talbot, MI5 agent and Neal Singer's handler, was debriefing Neal at MI5 headquarters, outside of London, at Blenheim Palace at Woodstock, near Oxford. This was where Phillip and Chloe had withdrawn after making it seem they had been killed in the bombing of Talbot's Starcross Street house on April 16th. His house hadn't been bombed. He had gotten the idea of taking his house out of the picture to ease Neal's insertion into Sir Neville Chambers's Russell Square townhouse when a neighboring house on Starcross Street had been bombed and collapsed on April 16th. They had tried to lure Chambers to come there, see for himself the collapsed house—he wouldn't have known it wasn't Talbot's house—and then accept that Neal needed other shelter and volunteer to provide it.

The point Phillip was making was in response to Neal's "You say Otto hasn't said anything yet, and Chambers and the Dane can't answer for anything, so all of this effort hasn't made any difference."

"It's made a difference," Talbot continued. "This particular cell is out of business and we'll be vigilant about the Germans trying to infiltrate the Ministry of Information again. And Otto will talk. We've put the word out that he was killed in the bombing of the Russell Square house, so we have him all to ourselves forever. Now about Chambers. We found him on the entrance hall floor. When you came out of the house, you were babbling about having killed him. We need a tidy story—something different."

"We were struggling on the landing above when the first bomb went off," Neal said. "He'd decided I was spying on them and we fought on the landing. He went over the side. I can't say for sure if he went over under his own momentum or if I pushed him. I wanted to push him."

"You didn't push him over the railing," Talbot said. "Notice that that wasn't a question. That's the story for the reports and that has to be what you believe for now. I know you wanted to kill him, and I know you might have believed you could after you found out that Otto headed the cell, since I'd told you it was the cell leader we had to take alive. But you didn't kill Neville Chambers. That's the neat and tidy answer we want. It was an accident, caused by the shock of the bomb going off. You two weren't even fighting. If we can manage it, you weren't there at all. That's what all of the evidence points to. You may be questioned closely on that. You have to believe it's true that it was an accident."

"Later, after everything is investigated, can I decide I pushed him over the railing?" Neal asked.

"If you want to," Talbot answered and laughed. "But not until after the investigation is over."

"I wonder how he went bad," Neal mused. "He was solid English. He was of the privileged class. He had every reason to be loyal, to fight to the last to keep the Germans at bay."

"That was his wife, Irma," Talbot said. "Her father was German. There was family in Germany. And Irma ran with the Prince of Wales's crowd that were German sympathizers."

"How can we know it was her influence?" Neal asked.

"We picked her up as soon as she landed in Canada. She wasn't going there on vacation or to evacuate England. She was going to head up a German espionage cell in Montreal. We'd already infiltrated that developing operation from the Canadian end and were waiting for her."

"You waited until she got to Canada? You knew what she was doing and didn't seize her here?"

Talbot laughed again. "She gave us a golden opportunity. If you remember, at her farewell party she seemed so sure she'd make the Atlantic crossing on the Estonia without incident—without German submarines accosting the flotilla the Estonia had joined. We figured the Germans wouldn't sink their own agent they were sending to start a cell in Canada. We packed all we could of vital material—historical archives and national treasures we wanted to get somewhere safe—and the families of civil servants in that convoy. And, not surprisingly, they all arrived safely on the other side—thanks to Irma. Irma did England a great service there."

Neal started to say something, but they were interrupted by Chloe sticking her head into Talbot's office. She was decked out in evening wear and looking like a million pounds. "Cheerio," she called out. "I'm off to the party. How do I look?"

"You look magnificent," Talbot said. "9:00 tomorrow morning. Debriefing. We'll have to bring young Neal here up to snuff."

"Where's she off to?" Neal asked after Chloe had moved on.

"Remember the young man, Sidney—Sidney Longston—Chole charmed at Chambers's farewell party for his wife?" Talbot asked.

A bit more than charmed, Neal thought. She was riding his cock when I saw them. That's not what he said, though. He just answered with a "Yes."

"Well, young Sidney took a shine to her and Sidney and some of his palace friends are still quite chummy with some of the German assets we are keeping track of here. Chloe and I have been working that as well as Otto's gang. You're free now to work on that too. Do you have evening wear, or do I send you to a tailor this afternoon? And, yes, several of the men in that circle prefer other men, so you'll have your dance card filled quickly again."

"Are these people a big threat?" Neal asked.

"Big enough," Talbot answered. "And as I said about Otto's cell, every little bit helps. The search goes on. It must."