Library of the Dead by Glenn Cooper Read Free Book Online Page B

and he coughed a few times to clear the phlegm. "I've thought about this night and day since we were taken into custody. Please bear in mind that I was the one who contacted the authorities. I didn't go off and ring Fleet Street, you know. I'm prepared to enter into a secrecy agreement and I'm certain I can persuade my colleagues to do the same. That should put any concerns to rest."
    "That, sir, is a very helpful suggestion which I shall consider. You know, in the course of the war, I made many difficult decisions in this room. Life and death decisions..." He drifted off, remembering one in particular, the horrific choice to allow the Luftwaffe to firebomb Coventry without ordering an evacuation. Doing so would have tipped off the Nazis to the knowledge that the British had broken their codes. Hundreds of civilians died. "You have children, Professor?"
    "Two girls and a boy. The eldest is fifteen."
    "Well, no doubt they will want to see their father back at the earliest possible moment."
    Atwood teared up and became emotional. "You were an inspiration to all of us, Prime Minister, a hero to all of us, and today a personal hero to me. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your intervention." The man was sobbing. Churchill gritted his teeth at the spectacle of a man letting loose like this.
    "Think nothing of it. All's well that ends well."
    Afterward, Churchill sat alone, his cigar half done. He could almost hear the echoes of war, the urgent voices, the static of wireless transmissions, the distant crunch of buzz bombs. The plumes and swirls of blue cigar smoke were like ghostly apparitions floating in the underground miasma. Major General Stuart, a man Churchill had casually known during the war, came in and stood erect, parade ready. "At ease, Major General. You've been told this mess is in my lap now?"
    "I have been so instructed, Prime Minister."
    Churchill put the cigar out in his old ashtray. "You're holding Atwood and his party down in Aldershot, correct?"
    "That is correct. The professor believes he is being released."
    "Released? No. Take him back to his people. I'll be in touch. This is a delicate matter. One can't be hasty."
    The general peered at the portly man, clicked his heels together and saluted smartly.
    Churchill gathered his coat and hat and without looking back slowly walked out of the War Rooms for the last time.

J ULY 10, 1947
W ASHINGTON , D.C.

    H arry Truman looked small behind his enormous Oval Office desk. He was neat as a pin, his blue and white striped tie carefully knotted, his smoke-gray summer-weight suit fully buttoned, black wing-tips polished to a high gloss, every strand of thinning hair perfectly combed down.
    Midway through his first term, the war was behind him. Not since Lincoln had a new President undergone such a trial by fire. The vagaries of history had catapulted him into an inconceivable position. No one, himself included, would have bet a plugged nickel that this plain, rather undistinguished man, would have ever risen to the White House. Not when he was selling silk shirts at Truman & Jacobson in downtown Kansas City twenty-five years earlier; not when he was a Jackson County judge, a pawn of boss Pendergast's Democratic machine; not when he was a U.S. Senator from Missouri, still a patronage puppet; not even when FDR picked him to be his running mate, a shocking compromise forged in the hot sticky back rooms of the 1944 Chicago convention.
    But eighty-two days into his vice presidency Truman was summoned urgently to the White House to be informed that Roosevelt was dead. Overnight he was obligated to pick up the reins from a man to whom he had hardly spoken during the first three months of the term. He had been persona non grata in FDR's inner circle. He had been kept out of the loop of war planning. He had never heard of the Manhattan Project. "Boys, pray for me now," he told a gaggle of waiting reporters, and he'd meant it. Within four months the ex-haberdasher would