Chapter Two Thousand Five Hundred Seventy-Eight
16th August 1976
Dublin, Ireland
“And you thought that I was acting stupid” Greyson said as he dropped a fat envelope on Ed’s desk. “I arranged for Treasury to give us first crack at this.”
“Isn’t that illegal?” Ed asked, seeing the return address, “And strongarming an orphan is not a good look even if she is in her twenties.”
“Then I guess it won’t be admissible in Court” Greyson replied. Everything they had seen suggested that Anne Morgan was smart enough to know that
With a bit of reluctance, Ed opened the envelope and saw the forms that had been filled out with neat penmanship by one Margret Anne Morgan of Belfast, Ireland, age 25, her occupation was Student Teacher. The documents stated plainly that most of Anne’s income was from survivor’s benefits from the Irish Government which funded a very sparce existence. The money she had made working as a waitress in Boston over the summer was more than she normally saw in a year. Most of the year Anne was a starving post-graduate student, with emphasis on the starving part. She had filed this return because the alternative was another summer spent in Belfast with only enough money to keep a roof over her head.
“There is nothing here” Ed said, “She only made enough to pay taxes when she was working in Boston. She actually has a refund coming to her. That is something that the staff at the US Consulate in Belfast was perfectly happy to tell her.”
“You don’t get it” Greyson said, “They invented stonewalling and boycotting in this country. Unless you have exactly what they want they will never cooperate. You have a girl who grew up with distant relatives, who now attends a third-tier university and lives in an apartment straight of a Charles Dickens story. Becoming a teacher is probably not something she wants to do but is a regular paycheck. That is the basic idea.”
“I still don’t get where we fit in” Ed said flatly.
“Your friend, Jack Kennedy, is up to his eyeballs in the German BND and British MI6, even has Katherine von Mischner herself as a client. Doing defense work for gangsters here in Dublin is something he does because getting labeled a collaborator can get you killed here.” Greyson said, delighted to have an audience. “In Berlin, the GS, their answer to la Casa Nostra, which was founded by Katherine von Mischner’s father, has been working with the IRA factions to box the Russians out of Western Europe. The head of the GS calls himself Birsha Bleier, I assume that it fits his flair for the dramatic. The sick fuck’s real name in Joseph Ratzinger and he was supposedly run out of Bavaria for being a pervert.”
Ed was getting annoyed by all this. It seemed like random facts about European criminals. “Is there a point to all this?” He asked.
Greyson smiled and tapped on the papers on Ed’s desk.
“This is pure fiction” Greyson said removing a piece of paper from his pocket and handing it to Ed. “She doesn’t want to go by Margret because it doesn’t sound like her real name, which is Tatiana. She is actually a bored little rich girl hiding from her mother in Belfast of all places with an identity that holds up to a surprising amount of scrutiny. Working menial jobs to stay in character. Do I need to point out the possibilities? She connects all of this together.”
Ed looked at the piece of paper in his hand, it was a photograph from a magazine of the same girl he had met in Belfast a few days earlier. Except she was with Sophie Sommers, the Olympic Cyclist who had wowed the world in Montreal just a few weeks ago.
“What are we supposed to do with this?” Ed asked.
“Us, nothing” Greyson said, “She isn’t actually working against American interests here in Ireland or in Boston for that matter. Watching her though, that is where we come in.”
Richthofen Estate, Rural Silesia
It being the summertime, Mathilda had cast away the uncomfortable school uniform and was wearing the sort of simple homemade dress that she had learned to make at her mother’s side years earlier as a child and the sandals that Opa had acquired for her after she had outgrown her old ones. Her goal was to learn how to make the sandals herself, which seemed like a fun and useful thing to learn. Still, as Mathilda had worked on the new dress it had swiftly become awkward as the cut had needed to be different and the pattern altered accordingly. She was taller than she had been, and there were other considerations… Ilse, who she had asked for help in this matter had just smiled and pointed out that Mathilda was fifteen, it was expected. Then had come the trip to Canada, which had been interesting.
Now that she was back in the forest on Opa’s estate, it felt like the Holiday was truly starting. Singing to the forest with her dog, a Siberian Husky she had named Freyja at her side was one of the true pleasures of her life. Being joined by Ingrid, who showed an interest in singing and had needed to be taught the words, was a bother at first. As Mathilda did that and Ingrid showed a real interest in harmonizing it became fun. Beyond the words of the songs, Ingrid wanted to know the stories and Mathilda was perfectly happy to tell them.