Too Bad to Die by Francine Mathews

most of the world if it got out. He’d never met Wendell Willkie, who’d famously lost the 1940 presidential election to Roosevelt. Willkie had made the best of his disappointment by joining Roosevelt’s administration as an ambassador-at-large. He’d spent the past several years flying all over the world in an old Army bomber named
The Gulliver
. Besides China, he’d visited Stalin in Moscow.
    And the new Shah in Tehran.
    Ian stopped short. Could
Wendell Willkie
possibly be the Fencer? It would make a perfect revenge for losing the last presidential election. Pose as Roosevelt’s loyal man, and sell out the United States in the middle of Roosevelt’s war.
    But Willkie wasn’t in Cairo. Chiang Kai-shek was. If he’d been flying on to Tehran, Ian thought, the Chinese strongman would require watching. Tonight, however, was the last evening the Chinese would spend with their Allies. Ian would have to keep them under his eye.
    There was one more woman Michael Hudson had forced him to assess: Grace Cowles. The very last woman he wanted to suspect. But Hudders was right. Gracie was already up to her neck in spycraft.
    She had pled work this morning and turned him down when he’d invited her on the Cairo jaunt; no surprise there. She avoided him like typhoid now. There’d been a time when that wasn’t true, he remembered, as he lit another cigarette and began to stroll toward the rampart’s steps. A time when she’d seemed to feel as much hunger for him as he’d felt for her. But what if her passion had been a sham? What if she’d surrendered to him not because he was devastating in bed but because he was Assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence?
    It was a damnable thought. But possible. Whether from a deep insecurity, trained cynicism, or his abundant respect for Grace’s inscrutability, Ian could easily cast himself in the role of her fool. He was a source to be exploited. An easy mark, rolled and left.
    Why break it off, then, before the conference was done?
his gullible self pleaded.
Why give me the toss when Overlord
is in the works?
    Because Grace didn’t need Ian for that. He might have been useful when he was planning Deception Ops against the Enemy, but Grace could get the details of Overlord from Pug. As Ismay’s disseminator of secrets to his commanders in the field, she was brilliantly positioned to betray all their trust, flying around the world with Churchill’s Chief of Military Staff. She had her ear in the PM’s War Rooms and her fingers in every Signals pie; she was running communications in Cairo and Tehran! She might have an Enigma encoder in her luggage right now, and nobody would even notice. She could send a message to Berlin without thinking twice. Gracie was the obvious choice for traitor. Except Ian for the life of him couldn’t see General Lord Ismay—of Charterhouse and Sandhurst and the 21st Prince Albert Victor’s Own Cavalry—as having the slightest interest in selling Britannia to the Nazis. Grace’s Fencer—or Kitten—must be somebody else.
    He’d have to keep her very much in his sights for the rest of the conference. And neither of them, Ian thought uneasily, would like that.
    â€”
    H E TURNED AWAY from the broken rooftops of Old Cairo, its desert colors and plumes of smoke, and saw her.
    A sloe-eyed woman with fragile skin and a petal-like mouth. Her blond head was inadequately veiled with a silk scarf, the color of saffron. When his eyes met hers, she smiled slightly. The rose-petal mouth unfurled.
    Despite her dress, she was not even remotely Egyptian.
    â€œLight?” she suggested, lifting a cigarette in her delicate fingers.
    She could not be more than twenty.
    As he offered her the flame, her hand briefly cupped his and she leaned toward him. Then she smiled again and turned away.
    She’d left a slip of paper in his palm.
    He moved casually back toward the