His Majesty's Hope Read online

  PRAISE FOR SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL

  Princess Elizabeth’s Spy

  “MacNeal’s sophomore historical outing (after Mr. Churchill’s Secretary) synchronizes perfectly with the 60th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign. With a smart, code-breaking mathematician heroine, abundant World War II spy intrigue, and a whiff of romance, this series has real luster. The author leaves readers with a mind-boggling conclusion that hints at Maggie’s next assignment.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “MacNeal provides a vivid view of life both above and below stairs at Windsor Castle.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Mr. Churchill’s Secretary

  “Susan Elia MacNeal perfectly captures the spirit of wartime Britain in Mr. Churchill’s Secretary, a delightful mystery that follows the adventures of an appealing heroine who is both secretary and spy. This wonderful debut is intelligent, richly detailed, and filled with suspense.”

  —STEFANIE PINTOFF, Edgar Award—winning

  author of In the Shadow of Gotham

  “Chock-full of fascinating period details and real people, including Winston Churchill, MacNeal’s fast-paced thriller gives a glimpse of the struggles, tensions, and dangers of life on the home front during World War II. A terrific read.”

  —RHYS BOWEN, author of Royal Blood and

  winner of the Agatha, Anthony,

  and Macavity awards

  “Think early Ken Follett, amp it up with a whipsmart young American not averse to red lipstick and vintage cocktails, season it with espionage during the London Blitz. Add to that her boss Churchill and War Room intrigue, and you’ve got a heart-pounding, atmospheric debut in Mr. Churchill’s Secretary. I loved it.”

  —CARA BLACK, author of Murder in Passy

  “Brave, clever Maggie’s debut is an enjoyable mix of mystery, thriller and romance that captures the harrowing experiences of life in war-torn London.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “[A] solid historical cozy debut. MacNeal squeezes in plenty of World War II facts but never slows the pace.”

  —Library Journal (starred review, debut of the month)

  “Delightful may seem a strange word to describe a novel that takes place against the backdrop of the bombings of London during World War II, but it’s appropriate for this debut novel.… Family secrets, a bevy of adorable roommates, a budding romance and Maggie’s role in a sting operation make this novel as sweet as it is intriguing.”

  —USA Today

  “MacNeal, whose prodigious research results in an accurate depiction of the historical context, fashions a page-turner of a story, complete with a plucky heroine and other well-conceived characters—real and fictional, good and evil. A ripping good yarn, Mr. Churchill’s Secretary enthralls and satisfies.”

  —Richmond Times-Dispatch

  His Majesty’s Hope is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A Bantam Books eBook Edition

  Copyright © 2013 by Susan Elia MacNeal

  Excerpt from The Prime Minister’s Secret Agent by Susan Elia MacNeal

  copyright © 2013 by Susan Elia MacNeal.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Bantam Books,

  an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming novel The Prime Minister’s Secret Agent by Susan Elia MacNeal. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  MacNeal, Susan Elia.

  His Majesty’s Hope: a Maggie Hope mystery/Susan Elia MacNeal.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-53875-8

  1. Americans—England—London—Fiction. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Great Britain—

  Fiction. 3. Historical fiction. 4. Spy stories. I. Title.

  PS3613.A2774H57 2013

  813′.6—dc23 2012043224

  www.bantamdell.com

  Cover design: Thomas Beck Stvan

  Cover illustration: Mick Wiggins

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Historical Notes

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Excerpt from The Prime Minister’s Secret Agent

  The right of personal freedom recedes before the duty to preserve the race. There must be no half-measures.

  —Adolf Hitler

  In the higher ranges of Secret Service work, the actual facts in many cases were in every respect equal to the most fantastic inventions of romance and melodrama. Tangle within tangle, plot and counter-plot, ruse and treachery, cross and double-cross, true agent, false agent, double agent, gold and steel, the bomb, the dagger and the firing party, were interwoven in many a texture so intricate as to be incredible and yet true. The Chief and the High Officers of the Secret Service reveled in these subterranean labyrinths, and pursued their task with cold and silent passion.

  —Winston Churchill

  Prologue

  Wannsee-Berlin, April 1941

  The urn the ashes came in was beautiful—shiny and black, with an enamel swastika on one side. It was small, so very small, Jens Hartmann thought. How could it possibly hold the remains of his son?

  Jens launched their small boat, the Lorelei, from the dock of their summer home on the lake. It was still spring; most of the villas ringing the lake were empty, their doors locked and curtains drawn, ballrooms and great halls quiet, boats dry-docked for the winter in carriage houses. A breeze rustled the branches of the linden trees near the shore as the rising sun burned off the morning mist.

  Neither Jens nor his wife, Mena, had asked the housekeeper to take the sheets off the furniture. It had seemed appropriate last night, when they’d arrived from Berlin-Charlottenburg, that everything was shrouded in white, like apparitions in the dark.

  Their seven-year-old son, Gregor, had loved their summer house. He’d spent hours playing tag near the shore with his friends, sailing across the sparkling water, or climbing the
tall oak trees in the garden. On rainy days, he curled up in a window seat with a book—Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter or the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales. The fact that he was different seemed to matter much less in the summer, away from school and the heart of Berlin. He even seemed to have fewer seizures.

  The family doctor had treated Gregor’s epilepsy by prescribing phenobarbital and phenytoin, and putting him on a ketogenic diet. For a while, the program had seemed to work. But then the seizures came back, worse than ever, and the doctor told them to take Gregor to Charité Hospital, Mitte-Berlin, and see Dr. Karl Brandt, the Führer’s personal physician.

  Events proceeded quickly, too quickly, after that.

  Gregor had been admitted, then scheduled for tests. From there, he’d been taken to the Hadamar Institute, for yet more tests. Jens and Mena had received a letter not long after, informing them that Gregor had died of pneumonia. Everything possible had been done, of course. And that the urn, with their son’s ashes, would be arriving the next day.

  “Mein liebling!” Mena had wailed, tearing at the letter. “My baby!”

  “Shhh,” Jens had said, patting her arm, taking the heavy, cream-colored piece of paper with the embossed swastika out of her hand. “They probably had to cremate”—it was hard for him to form the words—“his body immediately. To make sure the pneumonia didn’t spread.”

  Which was why they were on the Lorelei on the Großer Wannsee, the glossy black urn in Mena’s arms as Jens steered, then anchored in the middle of the lake. The planks of the boat creaked, waves lapped softly against the shore, and across the lake, a black heron gave a deep, ragged cry that echoed through the mist.

  “He’ll be happy here.” Mena shivered in her black shawl. “He always loved the lake.”

  “He did,” Jens said, stepping to her and reaching for the urn. He took off the cap. “Let nothing disturb thee,” he intoned, reciting the prayer of St. Teresa: “Let nothing dismay thee. All things pass. God never changes.” His fingers pressed against the urn’s sides. “Patience attains all that it strives for. He who has God finds he lacks nothing. God alone suffices.”

  He tipped the urn and poured the gray ashes onto the water, then put the urn down on the wooden seat. The boat rocked, nearly tipped over, with his movements. “Heil Hitler!” he cried, raising his right arm in the sharp Caesar-style Hitlerguss salute.

  “Heil Hitler,” his wife whispered, her hands grabbing at the boat’s sides, knuckles white.

  Jens sat and they both bent their heads in prayer.

  When they were finished, Mena picked up the urn. “Jens,” she said, peering inside, “there’s something still in here.”

  “What?”

  She tipped it over. Some gritty gray ash fell into her gloved palm, along with a charred piece of black metal, the white pearl tip scorched black.

  “Mein Gott,” she said, brows creasing. “Why, in heaven’s name, would there be a girl’s hairpin in Gregor’s ashes?”

  Chapter One

  Maggie Hope was feeling her way through thick darkness. She was panting after shimmying up a rickety drainpipe, knocking out a screen in an upper-story window, avoiding several trip wires, and then sliding silently onto the floor of a dark hallway. She took a deep breath and rose to her feet, every nerve alert.

  Beneath her foot, a parquet floorboard creaked. Oh, come now, she thought. She waited for a moment, slowing her breathing, feeling her heart thunder in her chest. All around her was impenetrable black. The only sounds were the creaks of an ancient manor house.

  Nothing.

  All clear.

  Maggie could feel dampness under her arms and hot drops of sweat trickling down the small of her back. Aware of each and every sound, she continued down the hall until she reached the home’s library. The door was locked. Well, of course it is, Maggie thought. She picked the lock in seconds with one of her hairpins.

  Once she’d ascertained no one was there, she turned on her tiny flashlight and made her way to the desk. The safe was supposed to be under it. And it was, just as her handler had described.

  Good, she thought, sitting down on the carpet next to it. All right, let’s talk. That was how she pictured safecracking: a nice little chat with the safe. It was how the Glaswegian safecracker Johnny Ramensky—released from prison to do his part for the war effort—had taught her. She spun the dial and listened. When she could hear the tumblers dropping into place—not hear, but feel the vibrations with her fingertips—she knew she had the first number correct. Now, for the second.

  Biting her lower lip in concentration, immersed in safecracking, Maggie didn’t hear the room’s closet door open.

  Out from the shadows emerged a man. He was tall and lean, and wearing an SS uniform. “You’re never going to get away with this, you know,” he lisped, like Paul Lukas in Confessions of a Nazi Spy.

  Maggie didn’t bother to answer, saving her energy for the last twist of the dial, the safe’s thick metal door clicking open.

  In a single move, she gathered the files from the safe under her arm and sprang to her feet. She turned the flashlight on the intruder. He squinted at the light in his eyes.

  Maggie ran at him, kneeing him in the groin, hard. While he was doubled over, she elbowed him in the back of the head. Satisfied he was unconscious, she ran to the door, folders still in hand.

  Except that he wasn’t unconscious. An arm shot out and a hand grabbed Maggie’s ankle. She fell, files sliding across the floor. She kicked his hand off and scrambled for the door.

  He struggled to his feet and ran after her, catching and holding her easily with his left arm while he wrapped his right hand around her throat. She gasped for breath, trying to throw him off, but she couldn’t get the proper leverage. He threw her up against the wall, pinning her—

  “Stop! Stop!”

  Then, again—the voice amplified by a megaphone, louder this time: “OH, FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE, STOP!”

  The man’s arms around Maggie relaxed and released her.

  “What on earth …?” she muttered in exasperation.

  The hall’s lights blinked on, bare bulbs in elaborate molded ceilings. It wasn’t actually the home of a high-ranking Nazi in Berlin but the Beaulieu Estate in Hampshire, England. Beaulieu was considered the “finishing school” of SOE—Special Operations Executive—Winston Churchill’s black ops division. Some of the recruits joked that SOE didn’t stand for Special Operations Executive as much as “Stately ’omes of England,” where all the training seemed to take place.

  “What now?” Maggie grumbled and started to pace the hallway.

  A severe-looking man in his late forties with a full head of gray hair walked out into the hall with a clipboard. “All right, Miss Hope—would you like to tell us what you did wrong?”

  Maggie stopped, hands on hips. “Lieutenant Colonel Ronald Thornley.” Maggie had to remember not to call him Thorny, which was his unfortunate nickname among the trainees. “I picked the lock, cracked the safe, took the folders, disarmed the enemy—”

  “Disarmed. Didn’t kill.”

  Maggie stopped herself from rolling her eyes. “I was just about to do the honors, sir.”

  “You were about to be killed yourself, young lady,” Thornley barked.

  The tall man in the SS uniform walked up behind Maggie, rubbing the back of his head. “Not bad technique there, Maggie. But they told me that if you only knocked me out and didn’t fake-kill me I’d have to come after you again.”

  She gave him her most winning smile. “Sorry about the knee, Phil.”

  “Not at all.”

  Thornley was not amused. “Not killing the enemy is the worst mistake because …”

  Maggie and Phil looked at each other.

  From behind Thornley came a loud, high-pitched nasal voice: “Because the only safe enemy is a dead enemy.”

  “Oh, Colonel Gubbins—we didn’t know you were there,” Thornley said, as Gubbins stepped out of the shadows.

  “There i
s nothing more deadly than an angry Nazi—remember that—you’re not killing a person, you’re killing a Nazi. A Kraut. A Jerry.”

  Colonel Colin McVean Gubbins was Head of Training and Operations at Beaulieu—a haunted-looking man with dark, recessed eyes, thick eyebrows, and wispy mustache. “Only sixty percent of agents dropped behind enemy lines survive, Miss Hope. You’re the first woman to be dropped into Germany—The first woman to be dropped behind enemy lines in this war, period. Lord only knows what your odds are. We’re taking an ungodly risk. And we want you to be prepared.”

  Maggie’s frustration cooled. This wasn’t about her—it was about the mission succeeding. “Yes, sir.”

  “You’re going in to deliver a radio part to a resistance group in Berlin, and also to plant a bug at a high-ranking Abwehr officer’s home. For whatever reason, the Prime Minister has asked for you for this mission specifically. And if you take out a Nazi or two in the process, so be it. This is no time to be squeamish or sentimental. Do you understand?”

  The P.M. asked for me specifically for this mission! Maggie glowed with pride but tried to damp it down so Gubbins wouldn’t notice. “I do, sir.”

  “With your fluency in German, and the skills you’ve been working on, you just might pull it off,” he said. “But it’s dangerous work and that’s why you can leave nothing—and no one—to chance.”

  “Yes, sir.” Maggie had dreamed about becoming a spy sent on a foreign mission. She’d dreamed of it working as a typist to Prime Minister Winston Churchill and she dreamed about it while she was acting as a maths tutor to the Princess Elizabeth. Now, finally, was her chance.

  “Let’s try it again,” Gubbins said. “And this time, Miss Hope, I want you to finish the Nazi off. Kill the damned Kraut.”

  It was ungodly hot and humid, even though it was still early morning. The skies were dark and swollen with bloated clouds. Above the buildings soared the baroque verdigris roof of the Berliner Dom, its golden cross pointing heavenward like an accusing finger.

  Elise Hess navigated the narrow cobblestone side streets of Berlin-Mitte in order to avoid the parade on Unter den Linden, fast approaching the Brandenburg Gate.