The Unlikely Spy
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
PREFACE
Epigraph
PART ONE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
PART TWO
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
PART THREE
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
PART FOUR
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
PART FIVE
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Acknowledgements
Praise for The Unlikely Spy
"A satisfying and fast-paced World War II espionage thriller."--The San Francisco Examiner
"Bodies pile up, and Silva keeps the suspense keen as the advantage shifts back and forth between the good guys and the Nazis."--Los Angeles Times
"[Silva] has clearly done his homework, mixing fact and fiction to delicious effect and building tension--with breathtaking double and triple turns of plot--like a seasoned pro."--People
"Deserves a standing ovation . . . superbly written and plotted. . . . In intensity and intrigue, it matches Ken Follett's Eye of the Needle and Robert Harris's bestselling Enigma."--San Antonio Express-News
"A well-crafted first fiction that entertains while it educates." --Chicago Tribune
"A first novel of remarkable ingenuity and daring. . . . This is a book that will stick in your imagination long after you have figured out where all the pieces fit."
--Playboy
"Engrossing . . . a first-class spy thriller . . . a fine piece of fiction, full of plot twists and intriguing characters. . . . The denouement is quite amazing."
--Chattanooga Times-Free Press
"[A] tautly drawn thriller . . . plenty of nail-biting scenes."--New York Post
"A classic World War II adventure thriller."
--Robert Harris, bestselling author of Fatherland and Enigma
"Breathtaking . . . spellbinding . . . grabs readers from the first page and holds them to the dramatic ending. . . . . This first work of fiction by journalist Daniel Silva puts him up there among the best of the spy writers."
--Abilene Reporter-News
Praise for Daniel Silva's The English Assassin
"Anexceptionallyreadable,sophisticatedthriller . . .abundant action. . . . Silva ranks . . . among the best of the younger American spy novelists."
--The Washington Post
"[A] swift new spy novel. . . . Silva excitingly delivers his story's twists and turns."--The New York Times
"Good assassin vs. bad assassin. . . . The plot is rich, multilayered, and compelling with issues as timely as the daily headlines and problems as old as humankind. . . . Silva maintains tension and suspense."--The Denver Post
"Enthralling . . . a thriller that entertains as well as enlightens." --The Orlando Sentinel
"Breathtakingly orchestrated. Silva makes a stunning contribution to the spy thriller."
--Booklist (starred review)
"Thrilling . . . a good cinematic story."
--St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"Smooth and compelling."--Detroit Free Press
"Silva's sophisticated treatment, polished prose, an edgy mood, and convincing research gives his plot a crisp, almost urgent quality."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Silva knows how to plot. . . . [He] will draw you in--and you'll learn something at the same time."
--Rocky Mountain News
"Cleverly crafted . . . engrossing . . . an intelligent thriller of the old school and one that will satisfy Silva fans and earn him many new ones."--The Chattanooga Times
"A page-turner from start to finish."--BookBrowser
Praise for Daniel Silva and His Previous Thrillers
"[A] spy-fiction ace."--People
"A writer who brings new life to the international thriller."
--Newsday
"Each plot-twisting segment is marked by almost unbearable tension. . . . Silva's unsmiling prose urges you on like a silencer poking at the small of your back."
--Entertainment Weekly
"A terrific thriller . . . one of the best-drawn fictional assassins since The Day of the Jackal."
--The San Francisco Examiner
"The spy novel is alive and well and Daniel Silva among those who are nursing it back to life. . . . The fast-paced plot and multiple twists--not to mention multiple villains and semivillains--are the backbone of Silva's tales. Those of us who have doted on the spy novel for decades have a new light to watch."
--The Sunday Advocate (Baton Rouge, LA)
"A master writer of espionage."
--The Cincinnati Enquirer
"Silva . . . writes with the atmospheric grace and whip-lash tension of Le Carre."--Booklist (starred review)
"In the style of authors like Frederick Forsyth and Ken Follett . . . highly imaginative fiction set against a non-fiction background. . . . You will want to read this one straight through once you've started."
--New York Law Journal
"At the forefront of his generation of foreign intrigue specialists."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Silva writes superbly suspenseful thrillers, and he makes excellent use of today's headlines."--American Libraries
Also by Daniel Silva
The Secret Servant
The Messenger
Prince of Fire
A Death in Vienna
The Confessor
The English Assassin
The Kill Artist
The Marching Season
The Mark of the Assassin
SIGNET
Published by New American Library, a division of
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Published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin
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Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
First Signet Printing, May 2003
Copyright (c) Daniel Silva, 1995, 1996
eISBN : 978-1-440-60727-1
Excerpt from The Secret Servant copyright (c) Daniel Silva, 2007
All rights reserved
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Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
PUBLISHER'S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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For my wife, Jamie, whose love, support, and
constant encouragement made this work possible,
and for my children, Lily and Nicholas
PREFACE
In April 1944, six weeks before the Allied invasion of France, the Nazi propagandist William Joyce--better known as Lord Haw-Haw--made a chilling radio broadcast directed at Britain.
According to Joyce, Germany knew the Allies were at work on large concrete structures in the south of England. Germany also knew those structures were to be towed across the English Channel during the coming invasion and sunk off the coast of France. Joyce declared, "Well, we are going to help you boys. When you come to get them under way, we're going to sink them for you."
Alarm klaxons sounded inside British Intelligence and the Allied high command. The concrete structures referred to by Joyce were actually components of a giant artificial harbor complex bound for Normandy code-named Operation Mulberry. If Hitler's spies truly understood the purpose of Mulberry, they might very well know the most important secret of the war--the time and place of the Allied invasion of France.
Several anxious days later those fears were put to rest, when U.S. intelligence intercepted a coded message from Japan's ambassador to Berlin, Lieutenant General Hiroshi Baron Oshima, to his superiors in Tokyo. Oshima received regular briefings from his German allies on preparations for the looming invasion. According to the intercepted message, German intelligence believed the concrete structures were part of a massive antiaircraft complex--not an artificial harbor.
But how did German intelligence make such a crucial miscalculation? Did it simply misread its own intelligence? Or had it been deceived?
This project is so vital that it might be described as the crux of the whole operation.
--Admiralty memo
Considering the thousands of workers who at one time or another were involved, it was remarkable that the enemy had no inkling of what was afoot.
--Guy Hartcup, Force Mulberry
In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.
--Winston Churchill
PART ONE
1
SUFFOLK, ENGLAND: NOVEMBER 1938
Beatrice Pymm died because she missed the last bus to Ipswich.
Twenty minutes before her death she stood at the dreary bus stop and read the timetable in the dim light of the village's single streetlamp. In a few months the lamp would be extinguished to conform with the blackout regulations. Beatrice Pymm would never know of the blackout.
For now, the lamp burned just brightly enough for Beatrice to read the faded timetable. To see it better she stood on tiptoe and ran down the numbers with the end of a paint-smudged forefinger. Her late mother always complained bitterly about the paint. She thought it unladylike for one's hand to be forever soiled. She had wanted Beatrice to take up a neater hobby--music, volunteer work, even writing, though Beatrice's mother didn't hold with writers.
"Damn," Beatrice muttered, forefinger still glued to the timetable. Normally she was punctual to a fault. In a life without financial responsibility, without friends, without family, she had erected a rigorous personal schedule. Today, she had strayed from it--painted too long, started back too late.
She removed her hand from the timetable and brought it to her cheek, squeezing her face into a look of worry. Your father's face, her mother had always said with despair--a broad flat forehead, a large noble nose, a receding chin. At just thirty, hair prematurely shot with gray.
She worried about what to do. Her home in Ipswich was at least five miles away, too far to walk. In the early evening there might still be light traffic on the road. Perhaps someone would give her a lift.
She let out a long frustrated sigh. Her breath froze, hovered before her face, then drifted away on a cold wind from the marsh. The clouds shattered and a bright moon shone through. Beatrice looked up and saw a halo of ice floating around it. She shivered, feeling the cold for the first time.
She picked up her things: a leather rucksack, a canvas, a battered easel. She had spent the day painting along the estuary of the River Orwell. Painting was her only love and the landscape of East Anglia her only subject matter. It did lead to a certain repetitiveness in her work. Her mother liked to see people in art--street scenes, crowded cafes. Once she even suggested Beatrice spend some time in France to pursue her painting. Beatrice refused. She loved the marsh-lands and the dikes, the estuaries and the broads, the fen land north of Cambridge, the rolling pastures of Suffolk.
She reluctantly set out toward home, pounding along the side of the road at a good pace despite the weight of her things. She wore a mannish cotton shirt, smudged like her fingers, a heavy sweater that made her feel like a toy bear, a reefer coat too long in the sleeves, trousers tucked inside Wellington boots. She moved beyond the sphere of yellow lamplight; the darkness swallowed her. She felt no apprehension about walking through the dark in the countryside. Her mother, fearful of her long trips alone, warned incessantly of rapists. Beatrice always dismissed the threat as unlikely.
She shivered with the cold. She thought of home, a large cottage on the edge of Ipswich left to her by her mother. Behind the cottage, at the end of the garden walk, she had built a light-splashed studio, where she spent most of her time. It was not uncommon for her to go days without speaking to another human being.
All this, and more, her killer knew.
After five minutes of walking she heard the rattle of an engine behind her. A commercial vehicle, she thought. An old one, judging by the ragged engine note. Beatrice watched the glow of the headlamps spread like sunrise across the grass on either side of the roadway. She heard the engine lose power and begin to coast. She felt a gust of wind as the vehicle swept by. She choked on the stink of the exhaust.
Then she watched
as it pulled to the side of the road and stopped.
The hand, visible in the bright moonlight, struck Beatrice as odd. It poked from the driver's-side window seconds after the van had stopped and beckoned her forward. A thick leather glove, Beatrice noted, the kind used by workmen who carry heavy things. A workman's overall--dark blue, maybe.
The hand beckoned once more. There it was again--something about the way it moved wasn't quite right. She was an artist, and artists know about motion and flow. And there was something else. When the hand moved it exposed the skin between the end of the sleeve and the base of the glove. Even in the poor light Beatrice could see the skin was pale and hairless--not like the wrist of any workman she had ever seen--and uncommonly slender.
Still, she felt no alarm. She quickened her pace and reached the passenger door in a few steps. She pulled open the door and set her things on the floor in front of the seat. Then she looked up into the van for the first time and noticed the driver was gone.
Beatrice Pymm, in the final conscious seconds of her life, wondered why anyone would use a van to carry a motorcycle. It was there, resting on its side in the back, two jerry cans of petrol next to it.
Still standing next to the van, she closed the door and called out. There was no answer.
Seconds later she heard the sound of a leather boot on gravel.
She heard the sound again, closer.
She turned her head and saw the driver standing there. She looked to the face and saw only a black woolen mask. Two pools of pale blue stared coldly behind the eyeholes. Feminine-looking lips, parted slightly, glistened behind the slit for the mouth.
Beatrice opened her mouth to scream. She managed only a brief gasp before the driver rammed a gloved hand into her mouth. The fingers dug into the soft flesh of her throat. The glove tasted horribly of dust, petrol, and dirty motor oil. Beatrice gagged, then vomited the remains of her picnic lunch--roast chicken, Stilton cheese, red wine.
Then she felt the other hand probing around her left breast. For an instant Beatrice thought her mother's fears about rape had finally been proved correct. But the hand touching her breast was not the hand of a molester or a rapist. The hand was skilled, like a doctor's, and curiously gentle. It moved from her breast to her ribs, pressing hard. Beatrice jerked, gasped, and bit down harder. The driver seemed not to feel it through the thick glove.