The Enemy's Enemy
A telegram arrived in the summer that said his brother's aircraft had gone down, and everything Julian Croft has done since has been an argument with that piece of paper.
Three hours until dawn and he is still in the briefing room, tracing a river with his fingertip. The map lies across the oak table like a corpse laid out for identification: a city divided into districts, each marked with the last known locations of safe houses, dead drops, and the men who stopped transmitting.
He memorised the street names two days ago. He memorised the addresses that matter, and the routes a man might take between them if he wanted to stay alive.
He also memorised the photograph in his breast pocket. Thomas grinning, one arm slung round Julian's shoulders, a beach in the summer of thirty-eight. Before the war. Before the telegram. Before the coded message from a contact placing his brother in a camp, waiting for somebody to come and get him out.
Somebody. Him.
Then the door opens without a knock.
What follows: a trap he helped build, a wound another man is carrying without mentioning it, a marriage of spies, a gilded cage, secrets kept for the right reasons and the wrong ones, a dance of liars, a thread pulled until it comes away in the hand, and a debt that outlives the person owed.
*He died believing his son was a pervert and a traitor.*
Julian's vision blurs. He blinks and forces it back and asks them to write the thing down anyway.
Dominic cups his jaw, feels the stubble rough against his palm, and kisses him back with everything he has: months of grief, years of everything neither of them said.
They will get out of the city. They will get the brother out too, or they will not. And even then, in a war that has made liars out of every honest person in it, forgiveness is not promised to anybody in this book.
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Three hours until dawn and he is still in the briefing room, tracing a river with his fingertip. The map lies across the oak table like a corpse laid out for identification: a city divided into districts, each marked with the last known locations of safe houses, dead drops, and the men who stopped transmitting.
He memorised the street names two days ago. He memorised the addresses that matter, and the routes a man might take between them if he wanted to stay alive.
He also memorised the photograph in his breast pocket. Thomas grinning, one arm slung round Julian's shoulders, a beach in the summer of thirty-eight. Before the war. Before the telegram. Before the coded message from a contact placing his brother in a camp, waiting for somebody to come and get him out.
Somebody. Him.
Then the door opens without a knock.
What follows: a trap he helped build, a wound another man is carrying without mentioning it, a marriage of spies, a gilded cage, secrets kept for the right reasons and the wrong ones, a dance of liars, a thread pulled until it comes away in the hand, and a debt that outlives the person owed.
*He died believing his son was a pervert and a traitor.*
Julian's vision blurs. He blinks and forces it back and asks them to write the thing down anyway.
Dominic cups his jaw, feels the stubble rough against his palm, and kisses him back with everything he has: months of grief, years of everything neither of them said.
They will get out of the city. They will get the brother out too, or they will not. And even then, in a war that has made liars out of every honest person in it, forgiveness is not promised to anybody in this book.
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