The Eagle has Flown Read Free Page B

at the altar, the Virgin in a chapel to one side. Instinctively, I dipped my fingers in the holy water and crossed myself, remembering the Catholic aunt in South Armagh who'd raised me for a while as a child and had anguished over my black little Protestant soul.
     
     
The confessional boxes stood to one side. No one waited, which was hardly surprising, for according to the board outside I was an hour early. I went in the first on the right and closed the door. I sat there in the darkness for a moment and then the grill slid open.
     
     
'Yes?' a voice asked softly.
     
     
I answered automatically. 'Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.'
     
     
'You certainly have, my old son.' The light was switched on in the other box and Liam Devlin smiled through at me.
     
     
He looked remarkably well. In fact, rather better than he'd seemed the last time I'd seen him. Sixty-seven, but as I'd said to Ruth Cohen, lively with it. A small man with enormous vitality, hair as black as ever, and vivid blue eyes. There was the scar of an old bullet wound on the left side of his forehead and a slight, ironic smile was permanently in place. He wore a priest's cassock and clerical collar and seemed perfectly at home in the sacristy at the back of the church to which he'd taken me.
     
     
'You're looking well, son. All that success and money.' He grinned. 'We'll drink to it. There's a bottle here surely.'
     
     
He opened a cupboard and found a bottle of Bushmills and two glasses. 'And what would the usual occupant think of all this?' I asked.
     
     
'Father Murphy?' He splashed whiskey into the glasses. 'Heart of corn, that one. Out doing good, as usual.'
     
     
'He looks the other way, then?'
     
     
'Something like that.' He raised his glass. 'To you, my old son.'
     
     
'And you, Liam.' I toasted him back. 'You never cease to amaze me. On the British Army's most wanted list for the last five years and you still have the nerve to sit here in the middle of Belfast.'
     
     
'Ah, well, a man has to have some fun.' He took a cigarette from a silver case and offered me one. 'Anyway, to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?'
     
     
'Does the name Dougal Munro mean anything to you?'
     
     
His eyes widened in astonishment. 'What in the hell have you come up with now? I haven't heard that old bastard's name mentioned in years.'
     
     
'Or Schellenberg?'
     
     
'Walter Schellenberg? There was a man for you. General at thirty. Schellenberg _ Munro? What is this?'
     
     
'And Kurt Steiner?' I said, 'Who, according to everyone, including you, died trying to shoot the fake Churchill on the terrace at Meltham House.'
     
     
Devlin swallowed some of his whiskey and smiled amiably. 'I was always the terrible liar. Now tell me what is this all about?'
     
     
So, I told him about Ruth Cohen, the file and its contents, everything, and he listened intently without interrupting.
     
     
When I was finished, he said, 'Convenient, the girl's death, you were right about that.'
     
     
'Which doesn't look too good for me.'
     
     
There was an explosion not too far away and as he got up and opened the door to the rear yard, the rattle of small arms fire.
     
     
'It sounds like a lively night,' I said.
     
     
'Oh, it will be. Safer off the streets at the moment.'
     
     
He closed the door and turned to face me. I said, 'The facts in that file. Were they true?'
     
     
'A good story.'
     
     
'In outline.'
     
     
'Which means you'd like to hear the rest?'
     
     
'I need to hear it.'
     
     
'Why not.' He smiled, sat down at the table again and reached for the Bushmills. 'Sure and it'll keep me out of mischief for a while. Now, where would you like me to begin?'
     
     
Berlin, Lisbon, London 1943
     
     
Chapter TWO
     
     
BRIGADIER Dougal Munro's flat in Haston Place was only ten minutes' walk from the London headquarters of SOE in Baker Street. As head of Section D, he needed to be on call twenty-four hours a day and besides the normal phone