As he stalked Wright through the snow-covered streets of Cambridge, Edmund's mind went back to a memory of another snowy walk a long time ago. It wasn't a real memory, but a memory of a dream, from when Lucy had been so persuasive that she could draw you into her make-believe world and make you have dreams about it the next night that were so vivid they almost seemed real. In the dream, he had been the traitor, selling out his brothers and sisters to the evil witch for a tin of enchanted Turkish Delight. It didn't take Freud to figure out what that symbolized – Egypt. Edmund thought of another, much happier, memory. It must have been the last season before the war, when it was still reasonably safe to take the kids on the dig and leave them to happily shift through the piles of sand that the workmen turned over for any overlooked artifacts. They almost never found anything and looking back it was probably mostly to keep them out of the way, but on this one occasion Edmund turned up a shabti – one of the little figurines the pharaohs made to be their servants in the afterlife. His father had beamed with pride.
"Look what Ed's found, Helen! He's going to give us a run for our money one of these days!"
Ed told himself that his parents would be just as proud of what he was about to do. After all, he was following in their footsteps just as assuredly as if he'd taken a degree in archaeology. They had taught him with their deaths that the real world was a dangerous and unfeeling place, where the bottom could fall out at any moment. In the real world, traitors didn't mend, and there were no talking lions on men on crosses to die in their stead. So Edmund drew his gun and fired.
Wright went down but he didn't stay down. His coat was thick enough to slow down the bullet from Ed's underpowered Baretta, which lodged in his back without dealing a fatal blow. Stunned and not fully realizing what had happened, he staggered to his feet and turned around. He saw Edmund and the gun and realized what had happened.
"Pevensie, you rat bastard!"
"I'm not a rat, I'm a mole," Edmund retorted, "an altogether more respectable species."
"You were onto us the whole time?"
Edmund kept talking, remembering his training. An adversary who's talking is an adversary who's not killing you, and he might just say something interesting. "Not the whole time. We knew Professor Fennimore had contacts in Russia before the war, and I was going to Cambridge anyway, so they decided to have me join his Marxist reading group on the off chance there was something fishy going on. You can imagine our surprise when we found out how deep the rot went.
"So why did you shoot me now?"
"First because the packet of papers you're carrying inside your coat contains materials the Soviets could use to blackmail British officers serving in Korea. Secondly because a pair of Fenny's acquaintances went over last summer – a Mr. Burgess and a Mr. MacLean. The Americans are quite upset with us over the whole affair, and the public revelation of a spy ring would be an embarrassment to His Majesty's Government, so we've been orders to handle the whole thing clandestinely."
"So no right to a trial or any chance at starting over."
"No, but on the bright side you won't have to face your mother from the dock. She'll go to her grave thinking you were a bright young lad with a promising future who died in a senseless act of street violence." Edmund raised the gun again and pointed it at Wright's head.
"Wait! If you let me go I can help you. I can help you bring in the others."
"We already have a plan for that, old chap."
"You don't know everyone who's involved. Fenny didn't tell you who we had in the Foreign Office." 'Fenny' was under the impression that he had recruited Edmund to go to work as a mole in the Foreign Office after graduating. The NKVD's security measures included not telling one spy the names of other spies in the same organization, so that they wouldn't have any names to give up if they were ever caught.
"I need names."
"Kim Philby, John Cairncross…Alec Trevelyan."
"Any more?"
"That's all I know now, but if you let me work on Fenny…"
Edmund fired again, splattering Wright's brains out onto the freshly fallen snow. It was quite a nasty piece of work, but orders were orders. Ed knelt beside the body and removed the papers he had been planning to leave at a dead drop, along with his wallet and wristwatch. The police were to think it had been a mugging gone wrong.
Now that the deed had actually been performed, Ed's unflappable reserve failed him. He lit a cigarette with trembling hands, hoping to dispel the taste of copper from his mouth, and told himself the water on his face was melted snow. There was no time to be sentimental, Ed had to call in what he'd just heard.
He walked briskly back to his room and dialed the telephone. M answered.
"Is it done?"
"Yes, and he gave me names," Edmund repeated the names Wright had given him and there was a silence on the other end of the line.
"Good God," M finally said, "Trevelyan's a double-O." Double-O was MI6's most elite section, available to be dispatched anywhere in the world at a moment's notice.
"He wasn't the double-O you sent after MacLean and Burgess, was he?"
"No, that was Bond…how did you know we sent a double-O."
"It's the type of thing double-O section would usually handle."
"The thing is, I'd ordinarily say this was insufficient evidence, but Bond was Trevelyan's best friend, and he never came back from Russia."
"Do you want me to make inquiries, sir?"
"No, continue with the operation as planned."
"Very good sir." Edmund hung up the phone and looked at the clock on his wall. It was just before 11:30. He poured himself a drink and dialed the phone again.
Susan answered it. "Hullo?"
"It's Edmund."
"What's the matter?"
"Oh, nothing's the matter. I've just wrapped up some business for a friend of Mum and Dad's."
"Did it go all right?"
"It's the sort of thing that's inherently unpleasant, but it went off more or less as planned, so I suppose I should say so."
"Well, that's good then."
"Yes. It's just…well, I know it's silly, but I don't want to go to bed just yet."
"Would you like to hear about my evening?"
"That would be splendid, Su."