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  Other Winston Churchill thrillers by

  Michael McMenamin and Patrick McMenamin

  The De Valera Deception

  The Parsifal Pursuit

  Also by Michael McMenamin

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  The Gemini Agenda

  A Winston Churchill Thriller

  by

  Michael McMenamin

  and

  Patrick McMenamin

  Enigma Books

  All rights reserved under

  The International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  Published in the United States by

  Enigma Books

  New York

  www.enigmabooks.com

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the written permission of Enigma Books.

  Copyright © 2011 by Michael McMenamin and Patrick McMenamin

  eISBN: 978-1-936274-38-3

  Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Available

  To Carol and Becca, the loves of our lives.

  And to the next generation, Dorothy, Meredith,

  Teddy, and Arthur, “the big A”

  Contents

  Publisher’s Note

  Part I

  England, America, and Germany: 9 May — 20 May 1932

  1.There Are Worse Things Than War

  2.Improving the Race

  3.Thanks For Leaving The Lights On

  4.The Assassin

  5.A Fine Nordic Specimen

  6.I Prefer Vodka With My Caviar

  7.Some Dinner Dates, Nothing Serious

  8.Stay Away From Other Men’s Wives

  9.My Husband Is a Very Big Man

  10.Wild Bill Donovan

  11.Keep Your Damn Autogiro!

  12.You’re Not in His League

  13.He Made Me Like Him

  14.Bobby Sullivan

  15.Ted Hudson

  16.Blood and Steel

  17.She’s Fair and Even-handed

  18.Get the Hell Out of My Office

  19.That Is Certainly Not My Husband

  20.You Need To Be Taught a Lesson

  21.Make Yourself At Home

  22.We’re Making Some Progress

  23.Going Home

  24.Twins!

  25.The Bitch Deserved It

  26.A Sitting Duck

  27.We Weren’t Painting the Town

  28.This Is a Travesty

  29.How About Europe?

  30.His Holiday Was Over

  Part II

  America and Germany: 21 May — 28 May 1932

  31.What List?

  32.Personal and Confidential

  33.Three Obstacles

  34.Helen Talbot

  35.She Had a Spare

  36.Tonight for His Client; Tomorrow for Mattie

  37.The Names Matched

  38.A Gentlemen Never Tells

  39.I Work Best Alone

  40.The Street Was Empty!

  41.Your Life is in Danger

  42.What About Ted?

  43.How Could She Blame Ted?

  44.It’s Still Ted’s Story Too

  45.Emerging From the Mist

  46.I’m Their Big Sister

  47.Cathedral in the Sky

  48.Something Has Gone Wrong

  Part III

  Germany: 28 May — 31 May 1932

  49.A True Believer

  50.I Will Find Them

  51.We’re Going to Need More Guns

  52.Why Are You Working for the Nazis?

  53.I Am Spoken For

  54.The Nazis Are Not My Friends

  55.I Want To Help the Party

  56.Where Is Verschuer’s Clinic?

  57.Other Undesirables

  58.I’m No Gentleman

  59.The Other Man Was You

  60.A Fine Day to Fly

  61.For The Good of All Mankind

  62.That’s Suicide

  63.Trigger-Happy Boyfriend

  Part IV

  Germany: 31 May — 6 June 1932

  64.A Favorite of the Führer

  65.Ted Agrees With You

  66.Is It Really You?

  67.Hudson’s Tunnel

  68.I Wish Luck to You Both

  69.Spee
chless

  70.Fight for Me

  71.My Weakness for a Pretty Face

  72.I Do Care For Kurt

  73.Growing Up in Passau

  74.Just Like Your Wife

  75.Ask Him His Name

  76.We Have No Guidelines

  77.We Are Not Monsters

  78.Burn in Hell

  79.SS Ambush

  80.On Ice

  81.You’re Alive!

  82.Are the Twins There?

  83.Because We Are Patriots

  84.They’re All Dead

  85.We Will Build a New Clinic

  86.Bourke Cockran!

  87.No One’s Going to Extradite Me

  88.I Hope She Was Worth It

  89.Plan B

  90.Brandy and Cigars

  91.An Unusual Proposal

  92.Who Knew?

  93.No Luckier Than Me

  94.Your Contribution to the Next Generation

  95.Read Me Last

  Historical Note

  Acknowledgments

  Publisher’s Note

  Some may question casting Winston Churchill as a key character in a series of historical thrillers set during 1929–1939, his “Wilderness Years” when he was out of power, out of favor and a lone voice warning against the rising danger posed by Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. They shouldn’t. Saving Western Civilization in 1940 when England stood alone as a beacon of liberty in a sea of tyranny tends to overshadow Churchill’s earlier accomplishments.

  Churchill is, in many ways, a perfect historical figure around which to craft a period thriller. Winston was an adventure-seeking young man, a fencing champion in prep school, a championship polo player in the Army and a seaplane pilot in the early, peril-filled days of flight in 1910. In between, he was a much-decorated war hero in bloody battles on the Afghan-Indian border, in the Sudan, and in South Africa where his commanding officer nominated him for the Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest military honor, and where he escaped from a prisoner of war camp and made his way to freedom over hundreds of miles of enemy territory. In World War I, while other politicians, safely abed, sent millions of young men to their death, Winston was with his troops in the trenches of the bloody Ypres salient daily risking death himself.

  More importantly for this new series, Churchill maintained a private intelligence network in Britain and Europe during the 1930s which often left him better informed than his own government. The writing team of the critically acclaimed Churchill biographer Michael McMenamin and his journalist son Patrick McMenamin use this fact as a catalyst for their stories. With Churchill at the center spinning his own web, he lures into many adventures his fictional Scottish goddaughter, the beautiful Hearst photojournalist Mattie McGary and the American law professor Bourke Cockran, Jr., a former U.S. Army counter-intelligence agent. Winston, a romantic at heart, brings the two young people together. Romance blooms but it is not a match made in heaven. Both characters are strong-willed individuals and their Celtic tempers frequently clash. Cockran is the fictional son of Churchill’s real life mentor Bourke Cockran, a prominent turn-of-the–century New York lawyer, statesman, orator and presidential adviser whose life is chronicled in Becoming Winston Churchill, the Untold Story of Young Winston and His American Mentor by Michael McMenamin and Curt Zoller (Enigma Books, 2009).

  The first three novels take place during 1929–1932 before Hitler’s ill-fated, but entirely legal, appointment as the German Chancellor. In The DeValera Deception, Winston, Mattie and Bourke tangle with the IRA and a real-life, pre-Hitler, Russo-German conspiracy to dismember Poland. In doing so, they discover a plot in the US to assemble arms for an IRA coup d’etat in the new Irish Free State and Cockran seeks revenge for his wife’s murder by the IRA in the 1922 Irish civil war. In The Parsifal Pursuit, Winston sends Mattie on a grail quest in the company of a handsome villain intent on her seduction, a journey shadowed by the Nazis who want the ancient Christian artifact for Hitler. Also at Winston’s behest, Cockran travels to Germany to represent a beautiful blonde heiress who is the victim of a Nazi fund-raising tactic—extortion of her business by a protection racket worthy of Al Capone. In The Gemini Agenda, Winston and his private intelligence network put Mattie and Bourke on the trail of a plot by Nazi scientists to kidnap and conduct lethal eugenic experiments on American twins. Shockingly, they learn the conspiracy is funded by Wall Street financiers and elements of US Army Intelligence who hope to unlock the secret to creating a master race.

  I hope you have as much fun reading these stories as I did. A new Winston-Mattie-Bourke trilogy set in 1933–1934 is in the making so stay tuned…

  Robert Miller

  Publisher

  Enigma Books

  The Gemini Agenda

  The march of Science unfolding ever more appalling possibilities… the fires of hatred burning deep in the hearts of some of the greatest peoples of the world & fed by the deepest sense of national wrong…

  Winston Churchill, 1924

  PART I

  England, America, and Germany

  9 May — 20 May 1932

  Eugenics is the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race. The aim of eugenics is to bring as many influences as can reasonably be employed to cause the useful classes in the community to contribute more than their proportion to the next generation.

  Sir Francis Galton, 1904

  [T]here is now no reasonable excuse for refusing to face the fact that nothing but a eugenic religion can save our civilisation from the fate that has overtaken all previous civilisations.

  George Bernard Shaw

  1904

  1.

  There Are Worse Things Than War

  Chartwell

  Kent, England

  Sunday, 8 May 1932

  WHY did you have me make those inquiries in Germany?”

  Winston Churchill stopped walking but otherwise ignored the question as he looked out over the weald of Kent, the most beautiful view in the world. And it all belonged to him. The view, that is, not the weald. He may have been out of power—and certainly out of favor with his own Conservative Party—but he still had the view.

  It was a glorious spring day in the south of England. Churchill stood on the back lawn of his country estate, Chartwell, with two people very close to him. One was Professor Frederick Lindemann whose question he had not answered. Known fondly to Winston as “the Prof,” he was an accomplished mathematician and scientist. The Prof, whose father had emigrated to England from Germany, still had many contacts there among the scientific community and that was why he was here today.

  The other man was Churchill’s son Randolph, a budding young journalist attempting to follow in his father’s footsteps, both as a writer and, if he were fortunate, a politician. He had recently returned from Germany after covering Adolf Hitler’s campaign for president where the Nazi leader had received over 13 million votes, second only to President Hindenburg himself.

  The trio walked slowly along the lawn, toward the artificial lake whose digging Churchill had personally supervised. They were walking slowly because Churchill had not yet fully recovered from the injuries he had suffered the previous December in America. While crossing Fifth Avenue en route to the home of his friend, the financier Bernard Baruch, Churchill looked in the wrong direction and had been struck by an automobile traveling forty miles an hour. He had been thrown up over the hood, sustaining broken ribs, facial lacerations and a concussion.

  Churchill had been home for several months now and Chartwell was just the tonic his bruised and battered body needed. He had to conserve his strength while his body healed if he were to carry through with his plans to visit Germany later that spring. The public reason he gave for his upcoming visit was the biography he was writing about his famed ancestor John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough. Churchill wanted to tour the battlefields where the first Duke had made his name and secured his fortune. But there was another reason for his forthcoming visit that h
e chose to keep to himself. Whispers out of Germany on certain matters had reached his ear and troubled him greatly. Matters of life and death.

  Churchill turned to the Prof. “So, your sources turned up nothing new?”

  The Prof withdrew his pipe from between his clenched teeth and shook his head from side to side. The Prof was taller than Churchill and his hair was short and dark, matching his mustache—below which was found his ever present pipe. In contrast, Churchill was a cherubic man with thinning red-hair, no more than five foot nine inches tall when his shoulders weren’t slumped forward—which hardly ever happened. His face was pink and clean shaven and between his lips—a twin to the Prof’s pipe—was a long unlit Havana cigar.

  “That is a shame,” Churchill replied, his voice a low growl. He turned to his son. “What are your plans for later this spring, my dear boy?”

  Randolph was an exceptionally handsome young man, slightly taller than his father, with long blond hair combed back from his forehead. Having turned twenty-one earlier in the year, he had dropped out of Oxford—much to his father’s dismay—to pursue a career in journalism. Lord Rothermere had hired him for the Sunday Graphic and sent him to Germany to cover the presidential election.

  “It depends on what happens in Germany.”

  “Pray elaborate,” Churchill replied.

  “Chancellor Brüning is on his last legs. He could be forced out at any moment and new elections held. As the number of unemployed grows, so does Hitler’s popularity—and all the street violence that goes with it. It’s positively bad for your health, Papa, to be a Socialist, a Communist, or a Jew in Germany today. And the Brown Shirts don’t spare women either,”

  Randolph paused and then chuckled. “Given Hitler’s views on the Jews, you would think Jewesses at least would be safe from rape. Racial pollution, mongrelization and all that nonsense, eh? But my sources tell me their women aren’t any more safe from the SA thugs than blonde-haired German maidens.” Randolph laughed again. “Actually, I suppose they are all safe from the SA types who are queer. Plenty of those, starting at the top with Rohm.”

  Churchill frowned. “I see nothing humorous in rape.”