The Windsor Protocol Read online

  Conroy smiled and shook his head.

  “I’ll stick to tea.”

  O’Gorman vanished.

  “Ah, a wise man,” observed the newcomer. “You’ll be one of the transatlantic passengers?”

  Conroy frowned. He had guessed the man’s identity before his companion turned and said: “The name’s O’Regan. I’m a commercial traveller. Often stay here. It’s a favourite hotel for those travelling on the flying boats. So if there is a stranger, such as yourself, it is a sure bet that he is making the transatlantic trip.”

  “Well, you’ve guessed right,” conceded Conroy. It was always better to concede the obvious when being questioned.

  O’Regan sipped at his whiskey and appreciatively smacked his lips.

  “So you’ll be away to Newfoundland tomorrow, mister…er…?”

  Conroy assumed that the man had probably read his name in the hotel register already.

  “Conroy.”

  “Conroy, is it? Now that’s a good Irish name, out of Clare and Roscommon mostly. It means ‘hound of prosperity’ in the old tongue. Are you Irish, Mister Conroy?”

  “I’m from Kent,” Conroy replied, trying not to complicate matters.

  O’Regan smiled. “Ah, would you look at the colouring of you? Look at your hair and eyes, man. You probably had an Irish ancestor. No matter. And you’re off to Newfoundland? Did you know it was the Irish who first settled there? Talamh an Eisg — the land of fish! That’s what it was first called. Lot of families from the west of Ireland went out there and settled. The island was Irish-speaking until recently.”

  Conroy made a sound conveying polite interest as O’Gorman returned with another tumbler of whiskey for O’Regan and then took the opportunity to start clearing away the plates.

  “Indeed,” O’Regan waved his hand expansively. “The first Irish poetry to be written in the New World was composed in Newfoundland in the 18th century.”

  O’Gorman, who had returned for the rest of the plates, shot Conroy a glance of sympathy.

  “Now don’t let your man bore you, sir. Sure, he’s a terrible one for the blather.”

  O’Regan waved a hand as if to dismiss O’Gorman, pausing to sip wheezily at his whiskey until the hotel owner departed, and then he smiled.

  “I guess you will not be spending much time in Newfoundland? You’ll probably be going on to those fine cities like Montreal or Ottawa, eh? You’ll be a Government man, I’m thinking? ‘Tis only Government men who cross the Atlantic these days.”

  The pumping was so obvious that Conroy had to hide the smile which threatened to crease his features.

  “No, no. I’m staying in Newfoundland,” he said, as if confiding a secret.

  O’Regan turned and winked.

  “So you’d be working for the Government there, eh?”

  Conroy pretended to be shocked at his outspoken attitude.

  “We are not allowed to talk about such things. There is a war going on, Mister O’Regan.”

  The man spread his hands apologetically.

  “But sure, there’s no Germans in this wee town and we can’t help but know that people don’t make the trip these days for their health’s sake.”

  Conroy pretended to think about it and then nodded reluctantly.

  “Well, you’re right, of course. I’m working for the Ministry of Agriculture.”

  He saw O’Regan’s head moved forward a fraction, unable to entirely control his satisfaction at the quick result to his probing.

  “I’m a statistician. We are trying to sort out Newfoundland’s pig yield problems. So I’m going to be based in St John’s for some time. Nothing more exciting than checking agricultural books for the next few weeks, I’m afraid. I probably won’t even see much of Newfoundland.”

  O’Regan pulled a face to hide his obvious disappointment at Conroy’s answer.

  There was no secret that Newfoundland’s Government had gone bankrupt in the early ‘thirties. For years the people of Newfoundland had voted to reject joining the confederation of Canada, so the British Colonial Office had to step in and govern the island with a joint commission, in an attempt to revive the failing economy while trying to persuade the people that their future lay in joining Canada.

  The Irishman swallowed his whiskey and stood up.

  “Well, I have to meet a friend at Clancy’s Bar. I’ve a little business to transact so I’ll be on my way. Nice talking to you, Mister Conroy. Oiche mhaith, that’s good night in our old language.”

  O’Regan exited with a nod and a grin.

  Conroy felt somewhat complacent.

  Another little bit of misinformation for German intelligence, he thought as he finished his tea. Always supposing the Abwehr were interested in pig yield problems in Newfoundland.

  O’Gorman was in the lobby as he went up to bed. He decided to pay his bill in advance and asked O’Gorman to make sure he was up by five-thirty.

  CHAPTER VI

  Saturday, August 17, 1940

  Conroy came awake with a mouth that was dry to the point of discomfort. He felt an almost uncontrollable desire for a drink of water. Cursing the fact that his thirst had awakened him and thus deprived him of precious sleep, which he would need to fortify himself against his journey the next day, he reached to the bedside table for his wristwatch. The luminous dial showed it to be ten minutes after two o’clock.

  There was nothing for it but to leave his warm bed in search of water. He did not fancy drinking from the tap in the hand basin in his room. He knew that most wash basin water supplies came from tanks rather than directly from main supplies and he had developed, in his travels, a mistrust of such water coupled with a secret apprehension of contracting cholera. He had once seem a companion suffering the acute biliousness and a vomiting attack induced by drinking contaminated water. Ever since then, he had been scrupulously careful.

  He presumed a fresh water supply would be found in the kitchen of the hotel.

  He slipped from the warm bed, shivering slightly and, without bothering to switch on the light, he padded to the door of his room and passed down the passage to the top of the stairs.

  He was about to start down the stairs into the darkened hallway of the hotel when a low voice halted him. He had no difficulty recognising O’Regan’s wheezy tones.

  It took Conroy a few seconds before he realised that the man was talking on the telephone.

  “No, no. But it’s him, right enough.” A pause. “Look, I am just an information gatherer. If he wants that sort of work done then he must get someone else.” Another pause. “Jesus!” The voice was agitated but O’Regan was trying not to let its tone rise. “No. I am not an assassin. Someone else must do that dirty work. No, that’s final.” There was a long pause. “All right. If it is to be done, then it must be done over there. I’m the first person they’ll suspect if anything happened here. They can pick him up at Botwood. Don’t drop this on mv own doorstep.”

  Conroy heard the soft click of a receiver go down. He heard a movement, turned and swiftly padded back to his room, all thoughts of thirst suddenly evaporated.

  His mind was working rapidly. Everyone in Foynes seemed to know that O’Regan was some sort of an agent. He had already been warned by the airline official and O’Regan’s unsubtle questioning confirmed it. From the one-sided conversation Conroy had overheard, it seemed that whoever was paying O’Regan was trying to persuade him to assassinate someone. Who? Surely O’Regan could not have identified him as being an intelligence officer? That would have been unlikely, in fact, downright impossible.

  He went back into his own room and stood, peering back through a crack towards the head of the stairs.

  A moment later O’Regan came puffing up the stairs, hesitated, standing with his shoulders heaving, and looked around him cautiously before disappearing into a room at the far end of the corridor.

  Slowly, Conroy closed the door.

  He turned an ancient key in the lock of the bedroom door and returned
to his bed. He wished he had a weapon, just as a precaution. However, it was impossible to travel with a gun through neutral countries. His contact, Harry Adams, would be supplying weapons, if needed. He reached for a cigarette and lit one up. He wished he had some means to defend himself just in case he was the subject of O’Regan’s curious telephone conversation.

  He did not know when he fell asleep. It seemed only a moment later that he heard a pounding on his door and O’Gorman’s voice telling him to get up. A good breakfast had been prepared for him but he had little appetite for bacon and eggs as he nibbled at them. He swallowed two cups of tea. There were a couple of other people breakfasting, also apparently heading for the BOAC flight, but there was no sign of O’Regan when he left the hotel.

  The morning was -night, even by six o’clock, when Conroy, with several other passengers, gathered at the BOAC office. Out in the estuary they saw their transport, swinging gently at its anchorage.

  The giant S.30 C-Class flying boat, a product of Short Brothers yards, rested lightly on the broad rippling waters of the Shannon, glinting in its natural unpainted polished silver finish. Conroy was surprised that it was not painted in camouflage like the rest of the British civilian aircraft. He had once seen the sister ship of the S.30, which flew out of Poole on to Gibraltar via Lisbon, and knew that all BOAC aircraft had been camouflaged earlier in the year. It occurred to him that the Irish Government, being strict about their neutrality, were touchy about foreign military aircraft using its airports and airspace and it was probably in deference to their wishes that this particular aircraft still kept its pre-war markings.

  There were no more than fifteen passengers making the trip and the pilot of the aircraft, Captain Kelly Rogers, came into the terminal building to introduce himself.

  The inevitable question came up. The possibility of being intercepted by German aircraft.

  The pilot was reassuring.

  “At Foynes we are almost at the limit of German intercept capability. Once we are a few miles out from the coast we can safely put German aircraft out of our minds. For those who haven’t flown across the Atlantic before, I should tell you that we have a still-air range of one thousand, three hundred miles which we extend by in-flight refuelling.” Fie gestured through the window. “You will see over there a fuel tanker aircraft. That will take off immediately after us and escort us to the refuelling point. When we have refuelled, the tanker returns here. We carry on and touch down in Botwood, Newfoundland, later this evening.”

  “What time will that be?” demanded one of the passengers.

  “Approximately nineteen hundred hours, that’s seven o’clock this evening, our time. That will be two o’clock in the afternoon or fourteen hundred hours, Newfoundland time.”

  There were few questions after that.

  Then they were escorted out to the flying boat — the Clare. In peacetime it must have been a luxurious form of travel, carrying between 16 and 24 passengers with sleeping berths available, a day cabin and even a well-stocked bar, all linked by two internal staircases, for the flying boat was multi-decked. Now the passengers were attended by two stewards and every available space was crammed with materials for transport to Canada and the USA.

  The journey, in fact, had been a deadly boring affair and Conroy had been conscious of the continuous vibration and engine noise. He was thankful when, at last, the great machine circled over the brooding grey seas of Notre Dame Bay, on the northside of the island of Newfoundland, before making its descent into Exploits River to anchor off Botwood, the little township which was the terminal for the Transatlantic flying boat run.

  Once at Botwood, Conroy was conscious once again of O’Regan’s telephone conversation and, instead of keeping to his original plan of simply mingling with the civilian passengers and catching a regular flight to Montreal, he showed his military credentials to an official. There was hardly any time to rest before he was invited to join a military transport aircraft from Botwood to Montreal.

  As the Royal Canadian Air Force transport took off, Conroy wondered whether O’Regan’s cronies were still waiting at the civilian terminal for him. The more he thought about it, the more he felt justified in thinking that O’Regan’s conversation could not have anything to do with himself. There was just simply no way O’Regan would have been able to identify him as an agent of British intelligence. But if the opposition were following him then they would have missed him at Botwood, and they would have a job picking him up in Montreal. He decided that once in the city he would change his identities.

  He stayed the night in a hotel situated in a quiet side street off Montreal’s Sherbrooke Street. He booked in under the name Seamus O Conratha, a citizen of the Irish Free State, and gave his profession as a businessman representing an agricultural machinery import business in accordance with his passport. The passport was not a forgery, for Conroy had applied for it several years ago on the chance that he might need it one day. It gave his name in its Irish form and the details of his birthplace in Kilcrea were entirely accurate. The hotel clerk had scarcely bothered to check it.

  It was as Seamus O Conratha that he presented himself the next morning, Sunday, at the American Eastern Airlines offices and purchased a ticket to New York. The Irish businessman was hardly questioned at all when he landed in New York that afternoon. He did not go to the city but made an immediate change to an internal flight of an Eastern Airlines’ DC3 to Miami via Norfolk and Jacksonville.

  He had arrived fairly exhausted late on Sunday evening and took a cab from the airport, telling the driver to drop him at any hotel on Key Biscayne. Eight hours of deep sleep followed. He awoke before noon and ordered a light breakfast. Now Conroy was relaxing in the bar of the Miami waterfront hotel and considering the next stage of his journey. He was satisfied that he had covered his tracks if anyone had become suspicious of his movements. But he could not help feeling concern as he remembered O’Regan’s midnight telephone conversation. Rationally, he still felt that it could not have applied to him. But who, then? At the next opportunity he would send a report in to London about the wheezy Irishman.

  However, he felt an irritating anxiety. He consoled himself by applying logic to the situation. If there were agents on his trail and they were able to trace him to Montreal then they would have lost him when he emerged as Seamus O Conratha. Yet even on the flight from New York he had once or twice felt a tinge of unease, some curious sense pricked at his mind that he was being scrutinised, but there was no logical explanation. Still, Conroy had been in the business long enough not to dismiss his sixth sense entirely. But maybe he was letting the O’Regan incident spook him. No one had seemed unduly interested in him at Miami airport and he put his anxiety down to worrying about O’Regan, coupled with his tiredness due to the long crossing and air journey.

  The next stage, of course, was to find Harry Adams whose yacht, the Eleuthera, was reportedly moored at Southwest Point on Key Biscayne. Then he could let Adams worry about the next stage of his journey.

  CHAPTER VII

  Monday, August 19, 1940

  The cab dropped Conroy at the pier at Southwest Point. After his mid-day “breakfast” he had checked out of his hotel and decided to go in search of Adam’s yacht. He paid off the cab and stared around at the waterfront. An elderly man in dungarees, dirty chequered shirt and battered yachting cap was sitting on a bollard apparently doing nothing more strenuous than resting in the sun. Conroy moved across and asked the man where the Eleuthera was moored. The old man let his gaze run up and down Conroy, as if adjusting to the unfamiliar tones of his accent. Then he jerked a thumb over his shoulder.

  “She’s along there, mister. You can’t miss her.”

  Conroy gave an acknowledgment and walked down the planked pierway against which numerous yachts and cabin cruisers were tied up. Eleuthera was easy to spot. She was one of a group of larger vessels tied at the far end. A trim, low built, fifty-footer with beautiful racing lines. She was evidently engine driven b
ut had a rig and auxiliary sails. The white paint, teak wood and sparkling brass fittings were obviously lovingly tended. He saw that a radio aerial ran up the main mast. He knew enough to appreciate that such an aerial would have a powerful reception. A small Union flag with the Bermudan crest hung at her jackstaff.

  Conroy could see no sign of anyone on deck. He went up the small gangplank and stood looking around before he moved to the cockpit and called: “Hello!” There was no answer. He put down his case and eased down the companion-way into the midships cabin. It was the saloon, wide, spacious and well-tended. On the walls were photographs of yachts, and a collection of silver trophies were fixed at strategic positions. Everything was immaculately tidy. He called again before moving down the short companion-way out of the cabin.

  There was another cabin beyond the saloon which turned out to be a well fitted galley and beyond that was another cabin. He swung the door open to peer in. It contained four bunks but was large and had plenty of cupboard space. A doorway for’ard led to the toilet facilities, or the heads.

  Conroy turned back to the saloon and halted abruptly.

  He saw the legs first. A pair of brown shapely legs with rope sole espadrilles encased the small feet while white shorts fitted snugly on the thighs and lower torso. Next the main section of the torso came into view, lowering itself below the hatchway as the person descended the companion-way. It, too, was well proportioned and clad in a white blouse. Then the head ducked into view. A head with finely chiselled features and short, curly black hair. The lips were parted, showing perfect white teeth, and the eyes were large and brown. She caught sight of Conroy and they widened in astonishment, the facial muscles changing her expression from serene attractiveness to hard suspicion. He immediately saw her anxiety. Conroy placed her age in the mid-twenties.

  “Who the hell are you, mister?” the girl demanded, still standing on the cabin steps, one hand balancing on the hatchway. Her voice was harshened by emotion caught between her surprise and fear.