to fight the instinct to intervene on his behalf. They were empty threats to make the young man talk, surely.
“Ellie, you oughtn’t see this,” Colm said suddenly. “Go upstairs.”
I felt I was frozen in place.
The major didn’t look at me but at Felix. He jerked his head toward the doorway, and Felix, in answer to the silent command, came to me, took my arm, and began leading me from the room.
“Time starting … now,” Colm said.
I couldn’t help but look over my shoulder. Kimble took a step toward Matthew Winthrop.
I like to believe they wouldn’t really have harmed him, that it was all a bluff, but I decided not to think too much about it. Major Ramsey had warned me that a lot of cold things are done in wartime, and Kimble was the sort of man who didn’t seem to mind at all doing them.
In any event, it wasn’t a chance Matthew Winthrop was willing to take. “I’m to pass off the papers to the German agent at two a.m.,” he said quickly, his expression dark.
“Two seconds,” Colm said.
“Where?” the major demanded.
“Here at the house. He … he’s coming up from the beach.”
“That path that leads to the back door?” the major asked.
Winthrop shook his head. “No. That was too obvious. We planned for him to take another beach path down the road a bit and then come up the drive.”
“Just one man?”
“Yes, just one.”
Matthew Winthrop continued to babble on about the meeting he was to have with the German agent while keeping an eye on Kimble.
I was feeling a bit shaken by the whole experience myself, and decided I needed a breath of air.
“I’m going to go outside for a moment,” I told Felix in a low voice.
“I’ll come with you.”
“No, they’ll need you to do the forgery,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”
So I left him and slipped back out into the cool night air, which was how I happened to miss the next bit of extremely pertinent information. According to the account I had later, it went something like this:
Colm wandered over to the desk and glanced down at the documents there. Then he frowned. Picking up the papers, he glanced over them.
“What are these?” he asked after a long moment.
“Sensitive weapons plans,” the major said, glancing away from Winthrop. “Put them down, if you please. They’re classified.”
“These aren’t weapons plans,” Colm said.
There was a brief pause. Everyone went still at once, as though Colm had set off some sort of explosive in the room.
“What do you mean?” Ramsey asked, his voice tight.
Colm held up the papers. “This is a bunch of nonsense. Gibberish. These plans would never work.”
“What do…” Felix began, but the major interrupted him, stepping toward my cousin.
“How do you know?”
“I’m a mechanic, mate. I may not be an engineer, but I know how plans work, and these plans don’t make anything. Looks like someone was either blotto when they drew them up or made them up off the top of their head.”
Colm had inherited Uncle Mick’s head for figures. He hadn’t had any advanced schooling, but he might easily have been an engineer or a chemist. If he said the plans were wrong, then they were wrong.
The major didn’t know him as well as Felix and I did, of course, but there had been something in his tone that was convincing. Perhaps the major recognized that aura of absolute confidence that comes from knowing one is right.
Whatever it was, he stared at him for a moment and then strode to the desk, picking up the envelope. Ripping it open, he pulled the letter from inside. It was not in Jocelyn Abbot’s handwriting.
“They’ve already done the switch,” Major Ramsey said, turning to the men. “Winthrop is a decoy. Someone else is meeting the German agent on the beach.”
* * *
I, meanwhile, believing that our culprit had been caught, had wandered out toward a copse of trees not far from the cliffside. From that vantage point, I was concealed from anyone who might be watching from a boat out on the water. The sea was beautiful in the moonlight, the crash of the waves soothing after the excitement we’d just had in the cottage. I felt a great sense of relief, knowing that we had succeeded.
Which was why, when I once again heard rustling in the woods behind me, I thought it must surely be an animal.
I went right on thinking that until I heard the snap of the twig too close for comfort and