Bushell shook his head. He couldn’t afford thoughts like that, not now. He glanced back at the icon of the Virgin. He had no great piety, but couldn’t help wishing Irene had found a different place to tell him what she’d told him. Then it occurred to him that even a pious man would agree no man - or woman save only the Virgin’s Son was without sin. Maybe the little chapel hadn’t been the worst place for such news after all.

He went out and walked back to the bar. He stiffened when he saw a red coat there, but Samuel Stanley was wearing it. Sam, who was holding a pint pot, glanced over at him as he ordered another Jameson. “Haven’t seen you in a while,” Stanley remarked. The unspoken question How many of those have you had? lay behind his words.

“I’ll drive you back to the William and Mary, if you like,” Bushell replied, answering what his adjutant had asked rather than what he’d said.

“We’d disappoint the poor fellow waiting out there for us if you did,” Stanley said, but let it go at that. He glanced toward the bartenders to make sure they couldn’t overhear before lowering his voice: “Learn anything worthwhile?”

“Oh, a couple of things,” Bushell said. Stanley brightened. Then Bushell added, “They haven’t got anything to do with the case, though, worse luck. How about you, Sam?”

“Me? I’ve learned pickled herring goes right well with ale, and I’ve learned I ought to brush up on my French: I know I’m missing half of what goes on around me. That hasn’t got anything to do with the case, either. I was hoping you’d have better news - you must have been poking into odd corners.”

“Oh, I was,” Bushell said, “and I ran into some odd people, too.” He let it go at that. Running into Irene would have been trying enough without what she’d told him. With that news... he knew he needed to do a lot more thinking.

Sam Stanley straightened to a semblance of attention, just ostentatiously enough to show Bushell he was doing it. Bushell could think of only one reason why Sam would do such a thing. He turned to find Sir Horace Bragg approaching.

“Here we are all together, a flock of Robin Redbreasts,” Bragg said, his jovial tone contrasting oddly with his usual dolorous expression. “We can give the damned Russians something to stare at.”

“Yes, sir.” Bushell brought the words out with an effort, as if he were much drunker than he was in fact. How could Sir Horace have taken Irene to bed when he and Bushell had already been friends for half a lifetime? Friends didn’t - or friends shouldn’t - do things like that. And how could he have gone on about his business afterward as if nothing had happened? It was a puzzlement. Bragg leaned close to him. “Any luck?” he whispered, breathing Scotch and tobacco into Bushell’s face.

“No, sir,” Bushell answered, as woodenly as before.

Sir Horace set a hand on his shoulder. He almost shook it off in unthinking rejection, like a horse twitching its ear to be rid of a fly - that was the hand that had cupped Irene’s breast, squeezed her bum, and then clasped his own hand in friendship. Years ago, all years ago, he reminded himself, and stood still. “We’ll get the bastards tomorrow, then,” Bragg said. He sounded very sure of himself. “It’s heading toward midnight now, though. We should break away if we’re to be good for anything in the morning. This affair will go on till all hours.” His bushy eyebrows came down in stern disapproval. “Why not?

Most of the people here don’t have to work for a living, not really.”

“I suppose not,” Bushell said - he could come out with more than two words at a time. The more he tried, the easier it became: “Let me find, uh, Kathleen.” He’d almost said Irene. To cover the near-slip, he went on, “Your driver will be wanting to get home, too, I expect.”

Bragg tried to fit a smile onto the narrow, bony contours of his face. “You always did take good care of the men in your command, Tom.”

“It’s the mark of a good officer,” Samuel Stanley observed. Half a beat too late, he added, “Sir.”

“Come on, Sam, you can help me round up the lady,” Bushell said in his best facetious tones. He wanted nothing more than to get away from Sir Horace Bragg, and, after that last dig, Stanley needed to escape the commandant.

Bushell found Kathleen near the buffet, discussing early nineteenth-century art with Comte Philippe Bonaparte. “I hold you personally responsible, Colonel, for depriving me of the company of this charming young lady,” Bonaparte said.

“I’ll survive,” Bushell said dryly. The Franco-Spanish ambassador chuckled. Bushell went on. “I have to say, Monsieur le Comte, that I may owe you an apology.”

“For taking Dr. Flannery away?” Bonaparte asked. “Other than that, you have done nothing to cause offense, I assure you.”

“No, not for that,” Bushell answered. “I’ve been thinking. You may have been right about the trouble a merely competent man can cause.” Kathleen Flannery looked a question at him. He pretended he didn’t notice.

Maybe Lieutenant General Sir Horace Bragg had actually got himself a good night’s sleep. Maybe he’d just fortified himself with several cups of coffee or

302 Richard Drey fuss and Harry Turtledove strong tea. Whichever was the case, he seemed alert, energetic, and enthusiastic when Bushell and his companions walked into RAM headquarters the next morning.

“Here - come see,” he said, directing them to a storeroom where RAMs were methodically going through a couple of file cabinets’ worth of documents. “We pulled these from Eustace Venahle’s home and cabinetry shop yesterday. We haven’t seen everything there is to see, but you were right, Tom - he is definitely linked to some men in and round Victoria who are known to be affiliated with the Sons of Liberty. We’ll pay them visits today.”

“That’s - first-rate, sir,” Bushell said. Regardless of whether Sir Horace had taken Irene to bed, his minions looked to have come up with important evidence. If dealing with the evidence meant dealing with Bragg, too, Bushell was willing to make the sacrifice. Solving the case was more important than whether his friendship survived. A huntsman’s eagerness stirred in him. “I want to go along on one of those raids.”

“So do I,” Samuel Stanley said.

“Me, too,” Kathleen added. Before Bragg could say anything, she went on, “Pity you didn’t send your men to Venable’s house and shop a day earlier, Sir Horace. Then they could have been raiding while we were at the embassy banquet last night.”

The RAM commandant, who had been lighting a cigar, suffered a coughing fit. When he’d stopped hacking, he said, “I do regret that, Dr. Flannery. Of course you may accompany Colonel Bushell and Captain Stanley. I have no doubt that you will discover something they overlook.” The irony was thick enough to slice. Kathleen didn’t care. She looked smug. She’d goaded Sir Horace into giving her exactly what she wanted. And, as far as Bushell was concerned, she’d been dead right about when the RAMs should have gone out to Eustace Venable’s residence and business.

“Where do you propose sending us, sir?” Stanley asked. He had no interest in quarreling with Bragg. All he wanted to do was to help push the case forward in whatever way he could.

“Based on the evidence we found at Venable’s shop, we’ve obtained a warrant to search the home of Phineas Stanage,” Bragg answered. Now it was his turn to be smug.

Bushell jerked as if stung by a wasp. “Stanage!” he said. “We never could touch him before. Not enough evidence, the judges kept saying - he’s a sharp devil, and a careful one. But we’ve got it now, by God! Kilbride was visiting with him, that tea-seller up in Boston told me. If Venable is - was - connected to Stanage, too, odds are good he’s up to his neck in the Two Georges case.”

Sam Stanley looked at Bragg with respect perhaps grudging but no less genuine for that. “If you’ve talked a magistrate into granting us a search warrant for Phineas Stanage’s house, sir ... we ought to break things wide open.”

“Let’s hope so,” Bragg said. Bushell nodded in understanding. He and Sam had both thought the case was about to break wide open several times, only to be disappointed. Here in Victoria, Sir Horace must have been sliding from exhilaration to gloom along with them. Now he added, “Stanage isn’t the only chap we’ve tied to your cabinetmaker, either, Tom.” He spoke several other names, two or three of which were familiar to Bushell.

“They’re all guilty as sin, no doubt. Let somebody else bag them, though.” Bushell’s face went predatory. “Stanage is the one I want. Cut off the head and the body dies.”

“Pity you didn’t find anything leading you back to John Kennedy,” Kathleen remarked. Yes, she could hold a grudge: Bushell took note.

For the first time, Sir Horace Bragg looked on her with something other than glowering disapproval, no doubt because it was the first time she’d said in his presence anything with which he agreed. “That is a pity,” he said in musing tones. “Well, no matter. I presume you want to be after the foe.”

Bushell nodded, replying with a couplet from Pope’s Essay on Man: “ ‘One master-passion in the breast, I Like Aaron’s serpent, swallows all the rest.’“

Kathleen smiled; maybe she recognized the quotation. Bragg obviously didn’t. He wasn’t one for poetry or classics - law books suited him better. A competent man, Bushell thought. Philippe Bonaparte notwithstanding, competence was useful and more than useful in a police officer. But could you truly understand what if you’d never thought about why?.

He put aside such musings as unprofitable as he went out to the steamers that would take him and his companions, along with several local RAMs, to Phineas Stanage’s home. The locals were armed. Bushell nodded again, this time in grim approval - Bragg was taking no chances. Bushell had seen Stanage’s home before, when RAMs surveyed it in the hope of discovering something actionable there. The oaks in front of it and the magnolia to one side were taller than they had been years ago. Sometime in there, Stanage had changed the paint on the two-story building from white to light blue. Otherwise, all was as it had been.

No, Bushell found one more difference: now he didn’t have to watch the home from afar. Along with the rest of the RAMs and Kathleen Flannery, he marched up to the front door. The knocker was a shiny brass eagle. He took primitive pleasure in making a racket with it.

The door opened. A servant in a long black skirt and frilly white shirtwaist stared out at the RAMs. “Oh, God,” she said.

One of the local officers brandished the search warrant. In a fine bureaucratic drone, he said, “By authority of His Majesty’s court here in Victoria as symbolized in this warrant, we are authorized to search the property and premises of Mr. Phineas W. Stanage. Please stand aside, Miss, and let us perform our duty.”

“Mr. Stanage, he isn’t going to like this,” the servant predicted.

“What a shame the warrant doesn’t cover his opinions,” Bushell said. He stepped over the threshold. The servant got out of his way.

He - and no doubt the other RAMs with him - took a certain malicious glee in going through the home of a Son of Liberty. By the time they’d been inside for a couple of minutes, the place looked as if a tornado had hit it. The contents of drawers were dumped out onto the floor, then the drawers themselves, then furniture cushions. After that, chairs and sofas got overturned so the RAMs could make sure nothing was lurking in their linings.

Kathleen watched in amazement as what had been a neat and orderly establishment was turned inside out. The maidservant who’d admitted the RAMs and the rest of the staff watched, too, in something more like horror. Bushell felt a certain amount of sympathy for them. Once the RAMs had left, they were the ones who would have to clean up the mess.

Phineas Stanage arrived about half an hour after the RAMs went to work. Bushell presumed one of the neighbors had called him. He was a corpulent man in his mid-fifties, with a close-trimmed white beard and gold-framed bifocals. He wore a suit of Donegal tweed that Bushell wouldn’t have minded having, and looked like what he was: the chairman of a prosperous brewing company. He took one look at the chaos in the front hall and bellowed, “This is an outrage!” He proceeded to embellish and elaborate upon that theme for several minutes, with ever-increasing heat and sulfur content. Bushell listened in considerable admiration. Whatever Phineas Stanage was now, at some point in his life he’d been a soldier, a sailor, or a scatologist’s assistant.

When Stanage started repeating himself, Bushell whistled a couple of bars of “Yankee Doodle.” “That’s a filthy lie!” Stanage shouted.

“Is it?” Bushell said. “Eustace Venable didn’t think so. Do you want to tell me about your dealings with him?”

He hoped Stanage would be furious enough to do just that. But the brewing magnate said, “I wouldn’t tell you my name without my solicitor present.”

“Good to hear someone knows it,” Bushell murmured, which set Stanage spluttering anew. It was not an informative sort of spluttering; after a minute or so, Bushell stopped listening to it. A call came floating down the stairwell: “We’ve started up here on the first floor, sir. All sorts of lovely things to take apart and paw through.” Bushell glanced at Phineas Stanage. The man’s cheeks and forehead were noticeably redder than they had been when he first reached his home. Would he fall down in a fit of apoplexy? Bushell wouldn’t have missed him, but he stayed resolutely - and irately - upright. Sure enough, when Bushell went upstairs he found Sam Stanley and a couple of other RAMs tossing clothes out of Stanage’s closets and going through the papers in three tall oak filing cabinets. Kathleen had joined the sport, too. The cabinets had presumably been locked before the RAMs got to them, but any search team brought along someone gifted in the art of making locked things open.

“Anything juicy?” Bushell asked in hopeful tones.

Stanley made a sour face. “We haven’t found anything yet. I don’t care for his politics, I don’t care for the people he associates with” - he gestured toward some of the file folders strewn on the floor to show how he’d drawn his conclusions about those - “but nothing out-and-out illegal, not yet.”

“I don’t know about that.” A local RAM held up a copy of the scurrilous pamphlet about the imperial princesses that Titus Hackett and Franklin Mansfield had printed in New Liverpool - paid for with Russian roubles, Bushell remembered. “If this isn’t obscene, what is?”

Regretfully, Bushell shrugged. “I don’t know, Captain, but a jury decided that it wasn’t.”

The local RAM rolled his eyes. “Juries do strange things sometimes.” Every RAM in the room nodded solemn agreement to that.

Phineas Stanage came clumping up the stairs. He clapped a melodramatic hand to his forehead. “Good God! The minions of the Grand Inquisitor in Madrid couldn’t do worse than this!”

“You’re wrong in two particulars,” Bushell answered. “Inquisitors wouldn’t bother with a warrant, and they’d take you apart at the same time as they would the house.”

“Only a barbarian, a Cossack, would boast that something could be worse,” Stanage retorted. One of the RAMs searching on the ground floor knocked something over with a crash. Stanage groaned and dashed down there to find out what the newest catastrophe was.

Kathleen Flannery pointed to the file cabinets. “Do those drawers come out?” she asked. “He might have hidden something behind one of them.”

“Next item on the agenda, ma’am,” a RAM said, and whipped out a long-shanked screwdriver. He attacked the file cabinets, one after the other. Out came the drawers. He set them on the floor, none too gently. Then he peered into each cabinet, shining a little electric touch to make sure he missed nothing. “If he has stashed anything away, he didn’t do it here,” he said in disappointed tones.

“Who says he didn’t?” Kathleen reached out and plucked free a folded sheet of paper that had been taped to the back of one of the drawers. With a flourish, she presented it to Bushell. The gleam in her eyes said she had a sharp comeback waiting for Lieutenant General Sir Horace Bragg.

“Well, well, what have we here?” Bushell said. The other RAMs and Kathleen crowded round to see what they had there. Bushell unfolded the paper, holding it at arm’s length so he could read whatever message it contained. That message, eight typewritten characters’ worth, did not make immediate sense: HM 1608 DC

“What the devil does that mean?” asked the RAM who’d dismantled the file cabinets.

“I can figure out part of it, I think,” Kathleen said. Everyone looked at her. She colored a little, but went on, “His Majesty is coming to Victoria on the sixteenth of this month - the sixteenth of August - isn’t he?”

“So he is,” Bushell said, nodding approval: three fourths of the riddle solved in one fell swoop.

“Nicely done,” Samuel Stanley agreed, just as quietly. At the praise from him, Kathleen’s face lit up like a sunrise. It brightened even further when the RAM with the screwdriver clapped his hands together twice. She could pull her weight here, and was proving it to everyone. Bushell stared at the last two characters, the ones Kathleen hadn’t deciphered. In a musing voice, he went on, “We have what. We have when. What does that leave?” He often used Sam for a sounding board; now he noticed he was talking to Sam and Kathleen both. Before either of them could speak, he answered his own question: “Who was sending the message, maybe.”

“Who’s DC?” Kathleen asked.

“Haven’t you ever heard of Defore Christ?” asked the RAM with the screwdriver. Kathleen gave him a disgusted look. Bushell didn’t blame her, but saw something she missed: the banter meant the RAMs had accepted her as one of their own.

And, with a light like the sun breaking through on a cloudy day, he knew who DC might be. Without another word, he folded the paper again and put it in his inside coat pocket. He wondered if Captain Patricia Oliver could match the typewriter on which the message had been produced. If she couldn’t, he’d suggest some possible comparisons.

Samuel Stanley nudged him. “You don’t think - ?” He stopped, his eyes widening. “You do think.”

“Do you know what, Sam?” Bushell said. “I hope I’m wrong.” That surprised him. For years, he would have liked nothing better than to see Sir David Clarke held up to public obloquy. Now that the chance appeared before him, he found it was liable to cost more than it was worth. Betraying your sovereign was a much darker business than stealing another man’s wife. He didn’t want to imagine even Clarke capable of it.

Kathleen realized who DC might be a few seconds after Bushell and Stanley. “I hope you’re wrong, too, Tom,” she said, “for - for everyone’s sake.”

“For everyone’s sake, I’m going to arrest Mr. Phineas Stanage,” Bushell said. “We’ll see what questioning him back at RAM headquarters will get us.”

When Stanage found out he would have to go with the RAMs, he put on a display of cursing that made his previous efforts sound uninspired. Bushell showed him the paper that had led to his arrest. “You are an idiot, a cretin, a moron, a one hundred percent unadulterated jackass,” Stanage boomed. “That, if you must know, is the password I have to furnish at the Bank of London, Victoria, and Alexandria to gain access to my safety-deposit box. My solicitor can arrange to prove that for you. He can also arrange a suit for false arrest, and I have no doubt that he shall.”

“You’ll come along with us anyhow,” Bushell answered, which produced more bravura blasphemies from Stanage. Inside, though, Bushell worried. Bank records were hard to alter, and he’d never heard of the Bank of London, Victoria, and Alexandria’s being connected to the Sons of Liberty. On the contrary: it was, so far as he knew, a solid, conservative financial institution.

“Don’t let it bother you, Chief,” Sam Stanley said as they drove back to RAM headquarters. “Let him sue all he likes. There’ll be enough in those papers of his to keep him in hot water for years.” He sounded as if he relished the prospect.

“I know,” Bushell answered. “But there’s one particular kind of hot water I want him to be in.” He looked at the sheet Kathleen had found, then shook his head. “No, no one would believe this didn’t have something to do with The Two Georges, not even a judge ... I hope.”

Several teams of RAMs had already returned from their raids when Bushell and his companions got back to headquarters. They cheered when they found he’d come back with something worth pursuing; most of them had had little luck. “From what we found by looking, you’d think the miserable Sons were all deacons and altar boys,” a disgruntled RAM complained.

Bushell took the paper with the single typewritten line on it to Captain Oliver. He explained where he’d found it and what he thought it was. “Very good,” she said with a brisk nod, and examined the line. “Yes, that’s a Quiet Writer, a popular brand here in Victoria. I use one myself, as a matter of fact.”

“And Victoria’s the typewriter capital of the NAU, along with every other kind,” Bushell said. “How can you be a bureaucrat if you don’t have a typewriter? That makes things harder.”

“Not necessarily.” Patricia Oliver reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a jeweler’s loupe, which she set in front of her eye to look at the characters more closely. “Yes, I thought so. The C rides slightly above the line, and the H slightly below. And there is - I think there is - a slight flaw in the left-hand stem of the M. If this comes from any machine Sir David Clarke was likely to be able to get his hands on at the governor-general’s mansion, we should be able to identify it.”

“Good. I hoped you’d say that.” Bushell paused for a moment. “If he has a typewriter at home, you might want to check that, too. Discreetly, of course.”

She took off the loupe and glanced up at him. “So discreetly he never finds out about it? So discreetly a judge never finds out about it?” Bushell didn’t answer. He made a point of not answering. Patricia Oliver gave him a knowing smile different from the one she’d used in the Grosvenor Hotel bar on the other side of the continent. “That might be arranged . . . discreetly, as you say. If we learn anything interesting from it, I expect we’ll be able to bring it to the attention of the proper authorities . . discreetly, again.”

“Fine,” he said. “I thought you’d be able to manage something along those lines. Getting type samples from machines you want to check must be hard sometimes.”

“Sometimes,” she agreed. “One way or another, though, I generally manage to get what I want.” When Bushell didn’t rise to that, she said, “I must introduce you to my husband one day while you’re here.”

“I’d like that,” Bushell said. “I suspect he’s a luckier man than even he knows.”

Patricia Oliver laughed. “You’re so quiet most of the time. That makes you twice as dangerous when you do let fly.” An expression he couldn’t quite read replaced the amusement on her face. “I gather your current . . friend wasn’t hampered by the inconvenient presence of a bit of jewelry?” She spread the fingers of her left hand. The diamond on the fourth one sparkled: a large stone, and a fine one, if Bushell was any judge.

“No, Kathleen’s not married,” he said steadily.

“Not yet,” Patricia murmured. More directly to him, she went on, “I hope you end up happy, however that turns out.”

Bushell hadn’t thought about being happy in a long time, not as a continuous as opposed to a momentary condition. He found the notion unlikely. “I suppose stranger things have happened,” he said, and left before Patricia Oliver found a reply.

More teams of RAMs were coming in, bringing with them little evidence but a lot of unhappiness. “By what my gang found, you’d think the bloody Sons knew we were coming,” growled a major with a beard that didn’t quite hide a scar on his right cheek.

He might not have meant his words literally, but they produced an appalled silence from his colleagues. Then, from the doorway, Sir Horace Bragg said, “I heard that.” The local RAMs were appalled all over again; several of them seemed to be looking for places to hide. Bushell didn’t blame them. Sir Horace might be good at holding things in, but when he lost his temper, the results could be memorable. Remembering what Irene had flung in his face, Bushell realized just how good Bragg was at holding things in. For one frightening instant, Bushell teetered on the edge of throwing himself at the man who had cuckolded him and then gone on about his business as if nothing had happened. His right hand twitched, starting to make a fist; the muscles in his shoulder bunched, as if he were about to throw a punch. Making himself ease away from that animal rage was one of the harder things he’d done. Not now, dammit, he told himself fiercely. No matter how good it would feel, not now. Bragg, oblivious - as Bushell had been oblivious for so long - looked around with his large, sad eyes and said, “Williams, I fear you may be right.”

“My God, sir,” said the scarred major - Williams, evidently. “That would mean the Sons have a source here.” He turned through 360 degrees, as if to scan everyone’s face to try to spot the traitor.

“The day before yesterday,” Bragg said, biting his lip in anger, “I had the distinct displeasure of sacking a pair of Royal American Mounted Policemen at our Richmond office, on the grounds that they had cooperated with the Sons of Liberty there to impede investigation of several local crimes of which various Sons were suspected. This cooperation had apparently been going on for some time before it drew notice. If it happened there, it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that it could be happening here. I have instituted an investigation to determine whether that is in fact so.”

Now every RAM was looking at all the others. No one bore the mark of Cain on his forehead. Bushell rubbed at his mustache. If the RAMs couldn’t trust their own friends in the investigation, that would make things a lot harder. You wouldn’t want to share what you’d learned. You’d hold it and keep it to yourself. And if Fred over there might usefully have combined it with something he knew . . . well, too bad.

“Sir, I hope you find the - “ The presence of Kathleen and a couple of RAMs of the female persuasion inhibited Bushell in his choice of words, but he packed as much temper into that silence as Phineas Stanage had into a whole string of incandescent obscenities.

“So do I,” Sir Horace said wearily. “I heard on the wireless this morning that the Britannia has set sail for the NAU. We haven’t much time left.”

The gathered search teams broke up after that, some to examine the meager haul of evidence they’d found, others to pursue new leads. Bushell went off to find a telephone. The busier he kept himself, the less chance he’d have to think about what Bragg had said. He didn’t want to think about that. He couldn’t do anything about it anyhow, except to be careful to whom he spoke. Trying to get The Two Georges back before Charles III arrived and trying to make sure Victoria was safe for him when he did arrive would keep him busy enough, or rather more than busy enough.

He rang Captain Jaime Macias back in New Liverpool. A few days before, Macias had been on the point of telling him something important, and he still didn’t know what. Time to find out, he thought. The connection went through smoothly. Given Victoria’s massive telephone exchange building, he would have been surprised and annoyed if it hadn’t. And, for a wonder, Jaime Macias was at his desk. “Tom!”

he said when Bushell reached him. “Good to hear from you, friend. By what I see in the papers and hear on the wireless, you’re not having a dull time of it.”

“That’s a fact,” Bushell agreed. “This case has given me a whole new appreciation of what a lovely word routine is, let me tell you. You sit at your desk, you sift through the clues, you go out and arrest the villains, and you fling them into gaol where they belong. That’s the way it’s supposed to work. Having the buggers greet you with bullets and grenades isn’t.”

“Adventures are nasty things that happen to other people, eh?” Macias suggested. They both laughed. Bushell said, “Last time I managed to get hold of you, you sounded like a man on the trail of something good. I never did find out what - that was when I got to make the acquaintance of Mr. Eustace Venable, or rather of his hand grenade. So what’s the word?”

“We have a little more checking to do, to make the case as gastight as a coronium bladder in an airship, but in another few days, we’re going to drop on the chap who shot Tricky Dick. We’ve got him under twenty-four-hour surveillance now; he won’t get away. We need to nail a last couple of things into place before we get out the warrant.”

“That is good news,” Bushell said, leaning forward on the desk as if to go after the villain himself.

“How’d you come to suspect him?”

“We went over every bloody square inch of that brush-covered knoll across from the governor’s mansion about a dozen times,” Macias answered, his voice full of remembered weariness. “Not far from where we think the gunman fired, we found a good, clear footprint of a size eleven and a half shoe. And ever since then, we’ve been following up on Sons of Liberty whose gaol records show they have size eleven and a half feet.”

“Good Lord,” Bushell said in profound respect. “Talk about needles in haystacks! And you found a match, did you? Who is he?”

“His name is Zack Fenton,” Macias said. “He’s not your typical Son, by any means: he has a Nuevespanolan common-law wife, for instance. Only political arrest was for disorderly conduct at an Independence Party rally a few years ago, at which time pamphlets from the Sons were discovered on his person. But he has served two stretches of time for poaching on the property of His Majesty’s Wildlife Parks.”

“He’ll know how to handle a rifle, then,” Bushell said, nodding even though Macias could not see him.

“Good circumstantial evidence. If you can get someone to put him at the scene of the crime at the right time, he’s yours.”

“That’s what we’re working on,” Jaime Macias answered. “He’s supposed to have been at a card game, but one of the chaps there is starting to go, ‘Well, he might have stepped out for a little while, but maybe he didn’t, too’ - you know what I mean?”

Bushell nodded again. “Oh, yes. I don’t think there’s a police officer in the NAU who hasn’t heard that song a time or six. Make this Fenton’s chum sweat - if you can break the case open from that end, it’ll do me a good turn on this one. Let me know whenever something happens. If you can’t catch me here at headquarters, I’m staying at the William and Mary.”

“The William and Mary,” Macias repeated, probably as he was writing it down. “All right, Tom, you’ll hear from me as soon as I know anything.”

“Thanks, Jaime. Good luck - and be careful.” Bushell had given that warning to a great many officers since The Two Georges disappeared. He still lived in the hope that people occasionally listened to what he said, though he hadn’t evidence of it to take before a judge.

He got up and started off to carry the good news to Sir Horace Bragg. Before he made it to the door of the office he’d borrowed, the telephone rang. He frowned, wondering if the call could be for him. Only one way to find out. “Hullo? Bushell here.”

“Colonel Bushell?” a RAM operator asked, confirming that precious few people listened to him. When he’d declared his identity once more, the man said, “Colonel, I have Sir David Clarke on the line for you.”

“The devil you say!” Bushell exclaimed. He was hard-pressed to think of anyone less likely to want to talk to him. “Ring him through, ring him through.”

“Colonel?” Yes, that was Sir David’s pleasant baritone. Bushell admitted he was himself. Clarke went on, “Colonel, why have a squadron of RAMs been tapping at the typewriters in the governor-general’s residence for the past hour? I don’t think they’ve missed a one of them.”

“Good,” Bushell answered. “They’d better not. As for why -“ He hesitated, weighing the pros and cons of telling Clarke what he’d found. To see what reaction he’d get, he explained. A long silence followed. At last, Sir David said, “Colonel, I’ve given you reason to dislike me.” He sighed. “Good God, I’ve given you reason to hate me, and I know it.” He paused, waiting for Bushell response. Bushell didn’t say anything. Sir David sighed again, then went on, “I will be damned, sir, if I know what reason I’ve given you to think me a traitor to my country.”

In Clarke’s shoes, Bushell would have said exactly the same thing in exactly the same tone of voice. Was the chief of staff a good enough actor to put that injured outrage into his words? Did Bushell dare think he wasn’t?

Telephoning him had taken more nerve than he’d supposed Clarke owned. Damn it, he didn’t want to paint the man who’d taken Irene from him in any color but black. He tried to strike a businesslike note, saying, “You understand, Sir David, that, having found the lead, we must pursue it.”

“Colonel, my first thought was that you had planted that lead, intending to use it to destroy me,” Clarke answered.

Bushell looked up at the ceiling. “Had I thought of it, and were the matter on which it bore less urgent, I might have done just that.”

“The second part of your explanation is the one that matters,” Sir David Clarke said, and Bushell found himself nodding, as he had for Jaime Macias. Agreeing with Sir David was a new and disagreeable experience. The governor-general’s chief of staff went on, “I believe you are willing to put your country above personal animus, as I am, so I also believe you when you say you are not trying to frame me. But someone is, by heaven. I held the date of the King-Emperor’s arrival in strictest confidence until its release was authorized. Think of me as you like, but that is the truth.”

“Let everything be exactly as you say,” Bushell replied. “Once I found the piece of paper in Phineas Stanage’s file cabinet, I’d still have to see whether it matched a typewriter to which you had easy access.”

“I suppose you have someone out burglarizing my home even as we speak,” Clarke said bitterly. Since Bushell did - or at least hoped he did - he kept his mouth shut. Sir David sighed once more, then continued, “All right, Colonel, I see your point. But I remind you that I am not the only one with access to that information. Even if you didn’t frame me, someone else certainly has.”

“We’ll look into that possibility, too, I assure you,” Bushell answered. He’d meant that to come out cool and matter-of-fact, but it sounded more sincere than he’d thought it would. He drummed his fingers on the nicked wooden surface of the desk. He couldn’t quite figure out how he’d come to believe Sir David Clarke, but he had. “We’ll look into everything, or as much of everything as we can in the time we have left.”

“Irene has always said you were evenhanded to a fault,” Sir David said. It was the first time he’d ever mentioned Irene to Bushell save to bait him. “I suppose I shall have to hope she was right.” He hung up. After a moment, so did Bushell. He sat staring at the telephone for a few seconds, then got up and went off to see Sir Horace Bragg. The commandant listened to his summary of the conversation with Sir David Clarke and dismissed it with a wave of his hand. “What do you expect him to say, Tom?”

“What he said,” Bushell admitted. “Not a word different. The way he said it, though - I’ve done a lot of interrogations, and if he’s a liar, he’s a bloody good one.”

“He’s a politico. Of course he’s a good liar,” Bragg said, which was hardly a thought alien to Bushell.

“We’ll check the typewriters first,” he said. “That will tell us something, even if not as much as we’d like.” He re-gathered his enthusiasm. “It isn’t really what I came in here to talk about, anyhow.” He told Sir Horace of what he’d learned from Jaime Macias. “We may get help from that side of the case, sir.”

Bragg’s bristly eyebrows came down in a fearsome frown. “Good God in the foothills, Tom,” he burst out, “I might have thought you had more important things to worry about than who blew the head off Honest Dick the Steamer King. It’s a goddamn sideshow: that’s all it is, nothing else but. You’ve been moaning how you haven’t got time for this and you haven’t got time for that, but somehow you have got time for something that hasn’t got anything much to do with where The Two Georges is. Drop it, that’s all I can tell you. Let the New Liverpool constables do their job. You do yours.”

Bushell stared at the RAM commandant. He couldn’t remember the last time his old friend (who’d laid his wife - but there was a piece that didn’t fit into the jigsaw puzzle) had been so flustered by a case. Sir Horace didn’t slip back into the North Carolina accents of his youth unless he was very upset. Cautiously, Bushell said, “Sir, it looks to me as if what they’re doing back in New Liverpool is liable to be important to what I’m doing here.”

“It doesn’t look that way to me,” Bragg declared. “Even if they do catch Tricky Dick’s killer, that’s not going to give us The Two Georges. Do you hear me?”

“Yes, sir, I do -“ Bushell began.

Before he could say anything more, Sir Horace seemed to deflate before his eyes, like a balloon with a coronium leak. Bragg leaned forward and buried his face in his hands for close to a minute. When he straightened, he seemed more himself. “I’m sorry, Tom,” he said. “I shouldn’t have flown off the handle like that. Trying to come up with that miserable, stinking painting has taken twenty years off my life, I swear it has. I haven’t slept. I’ve been eating like a pig, too, trying to make up for it.”

That sounded like the Horace Bragg Bushell knew. The RAM commandant was, if anything, skinnier than ever.

Bragg went on, “I did mean what I said, though. The murder case isn’t your responsibility; it belongs to this Munoz - “

“Macias,” Bushell corrected automatically.

“Whatever his name is,” Sir Horace said with an impatient wave. “You have more important things to do. Seeing whether Sir David Clarke is a traitor to the Crown springs to mind, for instance.”

Most of the time, Bushell would have risen to that like a trout to a fly. Now - “I’ve got that well under way, sir,” was all he said. Bragg nodded, apparently satisfied. Bushell himself was rather less so. Some of the triumph of proving the man he hated a villain had evaporated in the conversation he’d had with Clarke. And Sir David turned out not to have been the only man with whom Irene had betrayed him. Sitting across the desk was another one.

Sir Horace proceeded down the track of his own train of thought: “If we can disgrace Sir David or show that he’s a villain, maybe Sir Martin will listen to a man of sense instead.”

“That’s possible, sir,” Bushell agreed. “Sir Devereaux Jones seems to have a good deal of common sense buried under the politico’s exterior he wears.”

“Perhaps.” By the way Bragg said it, Sir Devereaux Jones was not the man of sense he’d had in mind. In grudging tones, he admitted, “I suppose anyone would be better than that scoundrel Clarke. After what he did to you - “

“Yes, sir.” Bushell got to his feet. “If you’ll excuse me -“ He managed to smile at Sally Reese as he went past her, but it wasn’t easy. How could Bragg tax him about Sir David’s iniquity when his own matched it? Simple, Bushell though. He doesn’t think I know about his. The dining room of the William and Mary was so packed, anyone should have had an easy time getting close enough to spy on someone else. But it was also so noisy, no one at one table could make sense of what anyone at the next table said. You had trouble enough hearing what anyone at your own table said. Over crab cakes and sweet potatoes in a glaze of molasses, cinnamon, and ginger, Bushell took advantage of that relative anonymity to say, “I don’t know what’s wrong with Sir Horace. His heart just doesn’t seem to be in this case. If he were a musician, he’d always be coming in a beat late.”

He didn’t say anything about Irene. What had happened there was relevant to his friendship with the RAM commandant, but not, he thought, to tracking down The Two Georges.

“I’ve noticed the same thing, Chief,” Samuel Stanley said after swallowing a bite of crab. “I kept my mouth shut, doubting I could be just. But if you see it, too, I’d say it’s really there.”

“I’m afraid it is,” Bushell said. “When I tried to tell him about what Captain Macias is digging up out in New Liverpool, he told me to leave Macias alone and concentrate on what’s going on here in Victoria. That’s not like him, Sam; he’s always been one for sweeping in all the evidence from wherever it shows up. He taught me that, for heaven’s sake.”

“Maybe the safety valve is stuck on his boiler,” Kathleen Flannery said. “Sometimes, if too much piles onto people, they do blow up. This isn’t the best time for him to do it, though.”

The understatement there was enough to make Bushell raise the glass of Jameson to his lips. “You’re right, of course,” he said. “Sam and I have known Sir Horace for - a long time now, and I don’t think either one of us has ever seen him act anything like this.”

“Not even close,” Stanley said emphatically. “Either the steam pressure in there is way too high, or else he’s playing some game of his own.”

Bushell realized what Stanley meant was, Or else he’s a villain. The suggestion should have shocked him more than it did. Also speaking obliquely, he said, “I know how we can find out.”

“Good,” Stanley said, and turned the subject. “What news about Sir David Clarke?”

“He called me this afternoon and denied everything,” Bushell answered, “but I wouldn’t have looked for him to do anything else, not after a swarm of RAMs took typewriter samples from America’s Number Ten. As best we can tell, though, none of those samples matches up with the one on the note we found at Phineas Stanage’s home. Neither do samples from the typewriters at Sir David’s residence. A couple of points for him, but nothing conclusive.”

“How did you get typewriter samples from Sir David’s home?” Kathleen asked. Bushell paused to take another bite. After he’d swallowed, he said, “I may have had better crab cakes in Baltimore, but I wouldn’t swear to it. These are pretty tasty.” He sipped his drink. When Kathleen realized that was all the reply she’d get, she started to say something angry. Bushell raised his hand in warning, just a little. She looked thoughtful. Then her face cleared. “Oh,” she said.

“That was unofficial, then.” Bushell still didn’t answer, but she seemed to have found out what she wanted.

Later that evening, lying beside Bushell up in his room, Kathleen said, “Why won’t you talk about what your people do unofficially?”

“Because if I did, I’d have to admit we do things unofficially,” he answered, “and if you admit to doing things unofficially, they almost become official.”

“But it’s only me,” Kathleen said. “If you can’t talk about unofficial things with me, with whom can you?”

“Don’t wheedle,” he told her, and watched her eyes kindle. Before either of them could take it any further, the telephone rang. “Saved by the bell,” Bushell said, and reached across her to answer it. His arm brushed her bare flesh, distracting him as he picked up the handset. “Hullo? Bushell here.”

“Tom?” A woman’s voice, familiar but He stiffened. “Irene.” Her name came out altogether flat. Kathleen’s eyebrows flew up. “What do you want?”

“Were some of your men here this afternoon?” she asked. “David told me what they were doing at the residence then, and what - what you suspect him of.” She spoke in low, hurried tones; he got the idea Sir David didn’t know she’d rung him. “Were they here, Tom, checking the same thing? I can’t prove it, but I’d swear I left the study window latched, and some of the papers by the typewriter there look neater than they ought to.”

“Searching a home without a warrant is illegal, Irene,” he said.

Kathleen nodded at him, apparently conceding the point that some unofficial business stayed unofficial for a reason. Then she found a way to be very distracting. Stop that, he mouthed at her. She shook her head and kept on.

“Pooh,” Irene said; in his mind, the part that wasn’t being distracted, Bushell could see the flip of her hand that would accompany the word. She went on, “Don’t forget, I used to be married to you. I know RAMs don’t admit to everything they do.”

“Then you should know I won’t admit to any of this,” Bushell answered. He wasn’t likely to forget they’d been married, either, however much he sometimes wished he could. Irene was doing her best to pretend they hadn’t flayed each other at the Russian embassy, which was more sensible than the way she often acted.

Irene said, “David hasn’t done any of the terrible things you think he has, Tom. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. He loves the Empire with everything that’s in him. I know you don’t see eye to eye with him about policy. And I know -“ She sighed. “I know you hate him, and I know why you hate him. I can’t do anything about that, not any more. But if you go after him because you hate him and not because you’ve got evidence against him, you’ll waste effort you ought to use tracking down the real villains.”

She still knew how to put the argument so it would hit him hardest. Absently, he wondered if she had the same knack with Sir David. Picking his own words with care, he said, “We have some evidence that looks as if it may be against him. We’re trying to find out if it really is. We have to do that. I’m not treating him any differently because he is... who he is... from the way I would if . . if you and I were still married to each other.”

“All right,” Irene answered after a moment’s hesitation. No doubt she regretted that fight now. So did Bushell. What she’d flung at him then complicated his life in ways he didn’t have time for. She paused again, then said, “I believe you. I’ve always said - when I’m not angry I’ve always said - that, whatever else you are, you’re a just man.”

“Yes, Sir David told me as much this afternoon.”

“Did he?” Irene said. “He didn’t tell me he’d spoken directly to you. Well, you are, Tom. It wasn’t enough for me, but it is still true.” She paused once more, then used a quick whisper to say, “I’ve got to go now. He’s coming.” Her voice got louder: “Yes, of course I’ll ring you tomorrow, Madge. Good night.” She hung up.

Bushell had to shift to do the same. “Enough,” he said to Kathleen. This time, she listened to him. He laughed. “Of all the doings I’ll never be able to put in the memoirs I’m never going to write, the past few minutes go to the top of the list.”

“That’s nice,” Kathleen said equably. “Time shouldn’t just pass; things should happen.”

“On the whole, I agree with you,” Bushell said. “I could have done without several of the things that have happened over the past few weeks, though.”

“Well - possibly,” Kathleen said. “But would we have ended up together without them, and, if we wouldn’t have, would you have done without them?”

The only way to answer that was by avoiding it, a course Bushell took without hesitation: “If you want to play with might-have-beens, find one of the hacks who churn out those scientific romances the Sons love so well. Me, I have enough trouble figuring out what’s real to waste time worrying about what isn’t.” She took a deep breath. He saw she wasn’t going to let him get away with that. To forestall her, he said,

“Now I have a question for you.”

“Do you, now?” she said. She was probably most dangerous when she sounded most Irish. “And what might that be?”

“This: when you left me that note yesterday, you blacked out a word in front of your name. What was it?”

She sat up and drew away from him. That they were naked together on the bed suddenly seemed irrelevant; it was almost as if they’d just met for the first time. “I didn’t expect you to ask me that,” she said quietly. “The word was love.” She thrust out her chin, as if to say, What do you make of that?

“I thought so,” he answered. “Why did you black it out?”

“Because you’ve used it twice, once when you were drunk and once for a joke, and it frightened me both times,” Kathleen said. “Because I’ve seen you still carry scars from . . . your former wife. Because after I wrote it, I was afraid that if you saw it, it would scare you away.”

“It’s safe enough now,” Bushell said. “We’re in my hotel room, so I can’t very well run.”

But sometimes you couldn’t hold up a quip for a shield and expect it to ward you from all human feeling. Bushell wished he had a bottle of Jameson handy. Had he had one, though, he probably would have crawled into it. He’d been shocked and horrified at Buckley Bay. Now he was frightened. He knew what kind of wounds he was risking, how deep they cut, how long they lasted. He looked at Kathleen, who was warily looking back at him. She knew about those wounds, too - oh, maybe not to the full bitter extent he did, but enough. He could wound her, if he chose to. She’d given him the chance, and now she sat waiting to see what he would do with it.

“We made love before we said we were in love,” he said slowly. “Bodies, sometimes, are simpler than brains. They just do things; they don’t have to try to understand what things mean. And when, before, with other people, things didn’t mean what we thought they - “

He ran down in the middle of his sentence, something he rarely did. After a moment, he saw it didn’t matter. He’d agreed they were in love, he hadn’t been joking, and he hadn’t run out of the hotel room though he hoped Kathleen never found out how tempted he’d been.

“Now we see where we go from here,” Kathleen said.

Bushell nodded. This felt different from what he’d been like when he first met Irene: less ferocious, less giddy. But he got the idea it could indeed go places. As for what those places might be - “If we don’t find The Two Georges, we can head into exile together.”

She looked at him. “If we don’t find The Two Georges, will we want to have anything to do with each other . . . afterward?”

“Now there’s a question.” He got up, walked over to his jacket, and took his cigar case from the inside pocket where it rested. He made a ritual of getting the cigar started. Only when surrounded by wreaths of fragrant smoke did he turn back to Kathleen and remark, “You know, I had reasons enough already to want to get the bloody thing back.”

He’d hoped she would laugh. Instead, she answered, “One more never hurts.” He thought that over, then nodded again.

Sir Horace Bragg looked up from the papers that, piled high on his desk, seemed to build a wall between him and the outer world. He smiled his lugubrious smile across that wall and said, “Good morning, Tom. You look ready to whip your weight in tigers today. I wish I could say the same.” “What now, sir?” Bushell asked.

“Stanage’s solicitor got him out on a writ yesterday evening.” Bushell made a face. “So that was his safety-deposit box password, eh? I wonder how long it has been. I’d give you long odds the judge never asked.” He and Bragg silently commiserated about the unfathomable ways of judges. Then he went on, “I had a good idea last night, or I think so, anyhow. I want to hear how you like it.”

“I’m all ears,” Sir Horace answered, reaching up to touch one of the rather fleshy protuberances in question. He wasn’t saying anything about Bushell’s conversation with Jamie Macias or his own reaction to it. Probably trying to pretend it never happened, Bushell thought. He said, “All the evidence we’ve developed in this case makes the Russians look to be the people feeding the damned Sons of Liberty gold and guns, doesn’t it, sir?”

“Can’t argue with you there,” Bragg said. “We’ve been over that ground again and again. Haven’t come up with anything I know of to make us suspect the Holy Alliance or somebody more unlikely like the Prussians or Austrians.”

“No, sir,” Bushell agreed. “Not a scrap. But one of the things we’ve been worried about is whether stealing The Two Georges was an end in itself or part of a bigger plot, one that would endanger the King-Emperor when he gets to Victoria.”

“As a matter of fact, Sir Devereaux Jones rang me up with that very concern not ten minutes ago,” the RAM commandant said. “He seemed genuinely alarmed, and he’s not a man to concern himself with trifles.”

Bushell had said the same thing the day before, but let that go. He’d succeeded in putting a flea in Sir Devereaux’s ear, all right. “It occurred to me that, if there will be an attempt on the person of Charles III, the Sons of Liberty may well need to get some weapon or piece of apparatus from the Russian embassy at the last minute. One way to keep that from happening would be to seal off the embassy grounds for the duration of His Majesty’s visit, let no one in or out during that time.”

“Duke Orlov would scream blue murder,” Sir Horace observed. “That’s not the sort of slight a diplomat will take lying down.”

“To hell with diplomacy,” Bushell said, not the first time he’d voiced such a sentiment. “Keeping the King-Emperor safe counts for more, if you ask me.”

“Oh, I agree with you,” Bragg said. “Don’t mistake me for a moment. All right, we’ll do it that way, and let Sir Martin or the foreign secretary pour oil on troubled waters. I won’t be sorry not to have the Russians sneaking around during the imperial visit, and that’s the God’s truth.”

“That’s very good, sir.” Bushell hoped the glad surprise he felt didn’t show in his voice. He dismissed as foolishness his fear that the RAM commandant was somehow involved in the theft of The Two Georges and whatever plot might be hatching against Charles III. The Russians, he was convinced, were part and parcel of that plot; if his old friend was part of it, too, he would have come up with any number of good reasons to leave the Russian embassy open. Instead, he’d agreed to close it down. Sir Horace had passed the test. It was the best news Bushell had had for days. The only problem with it was, it left the leak to the Sons of Liberty unaccounted for. He made a mental note to go after that leak, not that he had much hope of finding it unless the villain, whoever he was, made a mistake: when you asked a leaker if he was leaking, he wasn’t likely to say yes.

Bragg must have been following that same melancholy train of thought. His forehead corrugated into a badland of wrinkles. “I wish to heaven I could find out how the devil the Sons got word of our raids. When I do - if I do - someone’s head is going to go on the block, and that’s the God’s truth, too. If the Sons have infiltrated the RAMs, nothing and nobody is safe anymore.”

“I know,” Bushell said; glad once more to find Sir Horace thinking along with him. “How’s your tooth, sir?” he asked sympathetically.

Bragg rolled his eyes. “Don’t speak of it. I may have to go back to that quack of a Pendleton sometime in the next few days to get the nerve killed. That doesn’t sound so bad, does it, not when they put it that way? What they don’t tell you is that it means drilling a good, deep hole in your head. I think half the torturers in the Okhrana started out as dentists.”

Bushell, who had been through the procedure, nodded vigorous agreement. He said, “Have you got any idea who the turncoat might be?”

“I wish I did,” the RAM commandant answered, his voice even more melancholy than usual. “And speaking of turncoats, have they managed to match that note from Stanage’s to a machine handy for Sir David Clarke? Safety-deposit box password, my -“ His snort said his opinion of that was the same as Bushell’s.

“No, sir,” Bushell answered. “From what Captain Oliver says, it doesn’t seem to be any of the ones in America’s Number Ten.”

“Maybe one he has at home, then,” Sir Horace suggested.

“Neither of those, either,” Bushell said. “Unofficially speaking, of course.”

“Really? You do sail close to the wind, don’t you, Tom? And I’ve said that before, haven’t I?” Bragg sighed, then held out his hands, palm up. “It doesn’t signify, anyhow. Sir David could lay hands on a fresh typewriter as easily as he could lay hands on -“ He didn’t take that any further.

“So he could.” If Bushell’s voice came out cold, Sir Horace would attribute that to his still-smoldering anger at Sir David Clarke. And that anger was there, and likely would be for as long as Bushell lived. But now he was angry at Sir Horace, too, not only for bedding Irene but also for trying to manipulate him. He looked across the desk at the man he’d long thought his friend. I’ll work with you till we get The Two Georges back. After that, we’re quits. Had Sir Horace shown the slightest reluctance to shut down the Russian embassy while the King-Emperor was in Victoria, they would have been quits already. Bragg’s eyes were deep and dark and moist: sad spaniel eyes. If you looked into them, you’d swear you could see all the way down to the bottom of his soul. Bushell had thought he’d done just that. Only went to show you couldn’t tell by looking.

“One way or another, things will work out,” Bragg said. “We’ll whip the villains yet.”

“Yes, sir,” Bushell said. After that, we’re through.

XV

Every day, the wireless brought word of the progress of the yacht Britannia. The dailies printed front-page maps that showed nothing but the mother country, the eastern coastline of North America, and a dot on the Atlantic Ocean. Every day, the dot moved closer to the coastline. The Jack and Stripes of the NAU normally fluttered from a plethora of poles all over Victoria. Great Britain’s Union Jack was far from rare, either. In the days before Charles III reached the North American capital, workmen spread red-white-and-blue bunting, either striped or in crosses, over every available vertical surface. If a man had to stand too long waiting for an omnibus, he risked being decorated.

Hawkers with trays or handcarts sold little flags and other allegedly commemorative items on every other street corner. One hair salon offered to dye patrons’ locks in the colors and pattern of the Union Jack. From what the papers said, it stayed open almost around the clock to keep up with demand. Bushell viewed the story with amused tolerance: mankind kept coming up with new foibles. (The first time he saw one of the dye treatments, a couple of days after the story broke, he viewed the results with amazement, but that was another matter.) He took a slightly dimmer view of the hawkers, many of whom were petty grifters who probably wouldn’t be averse to picking a customer’s pocket if opportunity beckoned.

And he worried about the swarms of workmen prettying up Victoria, and especially the routes along which the King-Emperor would travel. “Damn it, Sam,” he burst out as he and Stanley combed through papers seized under search warrant, “how the devil are we supposed to keep an eye on all of them?

Some of them have to be Sons. They could be planting bombs behind the bunting, they could be picking the manhole cover from which a rifleman will pop out, they could be doing - anything.”

“That’s true,” his adjutant said, and then paused for the ritual of lighting a cigar. “And do you know what you can do about it?” he went on once he’d puffed out a good cloud of aromatic smoke. “Nothing, near enough, not by yourself. They’ve got plenty of other RAMs to worry about things like that, Chief. You can’t carry the whole world on your shoulders.”

“No, eh?” Bushell said with a wry grin. “When did they go and change the rules again?” After that, though, he buckled down and attacked the papers once more. But, for all he gleaned from them, they might as well have been written in Hindustani.

That evening’s reception was at the Austrian embassy. The Hapsburgs’ ambassador to the NAU, Graf Friedrich-Maria von Hotzendorf, was a short, thin, weary-looking man with impressive mustachios, a stiff brush of iron-gray hair, and eyes even more sorrowful than those of Sir Horace Bragg.

“I wish you good fortune, Colonel, in your quest to recover your missing imperial treasure,” he told Bushell in fluent but gutturally accented French as the RAM went through the reception line. “In your large realm here, the miscreants who absconded with it have all too many places in which to keep it concealed.”

“As I know all too well,” Bushell replied.

Only after he’d passed on to bow over the hand of the ambassador’s wife did he fully appreciate the longing Hotzendorf had packed into large realm. Austria was a European power but, because of its position on the map, would never be a world power. It intrigued against the Holy Alliance in the Italian states, and against the Franco-Spaniards, the Prussians, and the Russians in the Germanies, but its only real avenue for expansion, toward the southeast, was blocked by the British protectorate over the Ottoman Empire. When Hotzendorf contemplated a nation that stretched from Atlantic to Pacific and was but a part of a larger empire, he had to contrast that with the straitened horizons of his own homeland. No wonder he looked sad.

Duke Alexei Orlov and Comte Philippe Bonaparte had gone into the Austrian embassy by the time Bushell, Stanley, and Kathleen Flannery arrived. Envoys from the minor German states danced attendance on the two powerful envoys; the Bavarian minister, for instance, hung a pace and a half to the left and rear of Bonaparte, as if he were a wife following her husband in some backward part of India or China.

As they had at the Russian embassy, diplomats gave Bushell their sympathies and good wishes. All the same, he got the feeling that here they thought more about their ancient, almost ballet-like maneuverings against one another than they did of the affairs of a latecomer to the game like the NAU. Kathleen Flannery saw the same thing. “We won’t learn anything here tonight,” she said.

“Not from the ambassadors, anyhow,” Bushell agreed. “You never can tell what our own people might give away, though.”

He was watching Sir David Clarke being charming to the wife - the young, pretty wife - of the chargé

d’affaires from some minor German principality. As people sometimes will, Sir David sensed that eyes were on him. He kept glancing around till he spotted Bushell. He smiled: a wide, political smile made to conceal whatever was going on behind it. Bushell’s answering upturn of lips should have displayed a hunting tiger’s fangs, not merely human teeth.

Sir Horace Bragg came up, a glass of white wine in his hand. “By God, Tom,” he said, “I shouldn’t want to be on the other end of that look.”

Sir David evidently did not like it, either. He gulped down his drink and purposefully headed toward Bushell. “You see,” Bushell murmured to Kathleen.

Then he nodded to Clarke, affably enough now, waiting to learn whether the governor-general’s chief of staff was far enough gone to create a scandal in front of most of Victoria’s diplomatic corps. If he wasn’t, Bushell intended to give him a helping hand.

Clarke thrust out a forefinger, saying, “Have you discovered anything entitling you to stare at me in that fashion, Colonel?”

The question was too much to the point. Bushell hadn’t - nothing, at least, pertaining to The Two Georges. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Irene come back into the room, perhaps wondering what had detained Sir David. Spotting him with Bushell, she hurried in their direction, alarm on her face. Before Bushell could say anything, Sir Horace spoke in his place: “A man who has covered his tracks may look innocent, but that doesn’t prove he is.”

Sir David’s eyes widened slightly. “ Et tu, Brute?” he said to Bragg. “I thought you shied away from slander yourself.” He turned to Bushell. “As long as I’m flinging Latin about, here’s a tag you ought to remember: quis custodiet ipsos custodies!”

Sir Horace understood the thrust of that as well as Bushell did. His sallow cheeks went red. “ ‘Who will watch the watchmen’?” he growled. “I’ll watch you, you son of a -“ He took a step toward Clarke. Bushell got between them in a hurry - this wasn’t the scandal he’d had in mind starting. Irene reached them just then. Bushell thought of how the scene had to look through her eyes: her ex-husband keeping her former lover from hauling off and punching her husband. The absurdity of it hit him harder than Sir Horace had wanted to hit Sir David. In spite of himself, he started to laugh. Bragg and Clarke both stared at him as if he’d taken leave of his senses.

“We’re all letting this rot our brains,” he said. “Let’s have a drink and try to remember we’re supposed to be on the same side.”

Sir Horace Bragg calmed himself at once. “You’re right, Tom,” he said sheepishly. “The strain is telling on everyone, me included.”

“It must be,” Sir David Clarke said. “Without it, I can’t imagine Colonel Bushell inviting me to have a drink with him.” His eyes flicked to Bushell. “If I sound surprised, Colonel, it’s only because I am.”

Thinking about it, Bushell was surprised, too. He shrugged. “I said it, Sir David,” he answered. “I’m not going to back away from my word.” He raised an eyebrow and raised his voice: “Unlike certain politicos I could mention.” He’d said things like that before, commonly with intent to wound. Now he was joking, and made that plain.

Irene was not only surprised but also, by the look on her face, greatly relieved. “What has come over you, Tom?” she asked.

He set a light hand on Kathleen Flannery’s arm. “Must be love,” he answered, not joking at all. Kathleen stiffened. She couldn’t have been easy about being used as a weapon against his ex-wife. Bushell realized he’d also told Sir Horace Bragg what he’d asked a couple of days before. The RAM commandant’s shaggy eyebrows flew upward.

Irene saved the moment, saying, “I hope you’ll be happy together,” sincerely enough that, if it happened not to be the complete truth, no one could call her on it. Then she had another inspiration: “What about that drink?”

Bushell hadn’t said anything about drinking with her. Having agreed to drink with Sir David, though, he could hardly get up on his high horse now. “Onward!” he said, as if leading a cavalry charge on the Northwest Frontier, and headed off in a soon-successful search for the bar. None of the gossip he soaked up along with several drinks over the course of the rest of the evening amounted to much. With detached amusement, he watched Sir David start another conversation with that German chargé’s attractive young wife, and watched Irene draw him away from the woman with an ease that bespoke considerable practice.

“I didn’t think we’d learn anything much there,” Kathleen said as Sergeant Kittridge drove her, Bushell, and Sam Stanley back to the William and Mary.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Bushell answered thoughtfully. “I found out a thing or two about myself, which is worth doing.”

“Ah, but will it help you solve the case?” Stanley asked.

Bushell made a sour face. “That’s another question altogether, worse luck for me.”

RAM headquarters and the streets of Victoria and Georgestown by day. The glittering social whirl of the embassy circuit by night. A little sleep, stretched by endless cups of tea and coffee and a great fragrant bonfire of cigars. A dot on the newsprint Atlantic, moving inexorably closer to the Chesapeake Bay and the capital.

“They’re a step ahead of us, maybe two,” Bushell said wearily, pouring milk into yet another cup of Irish Breakfast. “We’ve only got a couple of days left, and they’re still ahead of us.”

“No ransom demand yet,” said Samuel Stanley, whose own cup of tea sat gently steaming in front of him. He shook his head. “When you haven’t got much in the way of good news, you look hard for the silver lining, don’t you?”

“That you do.” Bushell sipped at his tea. “Maybe they won’t ransom it after all. Maybe they’ll pour paraffin on it in front of America’s Number Ten and light it off. Or in front of the All-Union Art Museum, say, when His Majesty’s in there giving his address in front of a blank wall.”

“What a horrid idea,” Kathleen said. She didn’t have a desk in the office she shared with the two RAMs; Sir Horace took the position that granting her such a boon would in some way force him to recognize that she was there. Bushell had liberated a table no one seemed to be using. She had papers piled high on it. Sir Horace, in his mercy, had not complained about her using official Royal American Mounted Police foolscap and pencils.

The telephone on Bushell’s desk rang. He tensed. Any message right now was liable to be bad news. Maybe the Sons of Liberty wanted their fifty million pounds after all. He picked up the handset. “Hullo, Bushell here.”

“Colonel Bushell? This is Operator Perkins, down in Communications. I have a long-distance call for you from New Liverpool: a Captain Macias. Shall I ring him through, sir?”

“By all means.” Bushell covered the mouthpiece with his hand and spoke to Sam and Kathleen: “It’s Macias.” Both of them showed the same relief Bushell felt. No ransom demand, not yet, nor news even worse.

After a couple of clicks and a loud pop, Jaime Macias came on the line. Across a continent and a static-filled telephone line, his excitement came through loud and clear: “We’ve got him, Tom! We dropped on the villain not half an hour ago. And with everything we found when we did, Mr. Zachariah James Fenton will hang higher than Haman.”

“By God!” Bushell said. He spoke again to his colleagues. “He’s pinched the villain who shot Tricky Dick.” Kathleen let out a war whoop; Stanley slammed his hand down on his desk, making a noise like a gunshot. Through the racket, Bushell returned to the telephone: “You have the weapon, too?”

“We have a Nagant we think is the weapon, at any rate,” Macias said. “Ballistics will let us know about that before long: before the day is out, with luck. But that’s not half - that’s not a tenth part - of all we have.”

“Tell me,” Bushell urged, but then broke in before Macias could speak. “No. Wait. Let me guess. You’ve got boxes with lots more Nagants in them, enough Russian roubles to start up what would be about the third-largest bank in New Liverpool, and maybe, if God is kinder to us than He has been lately, a proved connection to the Okhrana. Stinking Russians - “

“Exactly what I was expecting to find when we served the warrant and made the arrest,” Captain Macias said. “Not exactly what we found, though. No, not exactly.” He sounded like a stage magician distracting his audience with a clever line of patter so they’d be surprised when he pulled a rabbit out of his hat.

“All right, Jaime, I’ll bite,” Bushell said, willing to be surprised. “What exactly did you find?”

Over the wire, he heard shuffling-paper noises; Macias was going to tell him exactly what he’d found. The New Liverpool constable said, “We found ... let me see . . . forty-eight Lebel revolvers, thirty-five Eibar revolvers, and twenty-seven Astra Modelo 200 pistols, each with its appropriate ammunition in large quantities - I’m assuming you don’t need the precise number of boxes and rounds for each, or I would give them to you. We also found twenty-nine Lebel military rifles with bayonets and three Chauchat light military machine guns, again with large quantities of the cartridges those two weapons share.”

“You found enough for a small war - no, a medium-sized war,” Bushell said, almost dazed. “And all Franco-Spanish stuff?” He scratched his head. “That doesn’t fit in with anything else we’ve turned up.”

“Everything in that house but for the one Nagant and the unexpended rounds in its magazine is from the Holy Alliance,” Macias said. “And I’m not done with the list, either. In gold and silver currency, we found the sum of £219,827,15 shillings, ninepence, ha’penny, most of said currency being in the form of livres d’or or pesos: again, from the Franco-Spanish Empire.”

“Two hundred twenty thousand pounds?” Bushell let out a low whistle. Sam Stanley jerked in his seat and stared at him. Kathleen sprang to her feet. Bushell waved her down - by the sound of things, Macias still wasn’t through. “What else have you got?”

“Subversive literature in large quantities, both the usual sort the Sons turn out and some in Spanish calling on people who’ve come to New Liverpool from the Franco-Spanish provinces of Nueva España to rise and restore the land to its rightful owners and the true faith - “

“I wouldn’t have thought you’d find both those kinds of documents in the same house,” Bushell observed.

“I wouldn’t have thought it, either, but find them I did,” Macias said. With the air of a man producing a fifth ace, he said, “And I also found 943 pounds, 8% ounces of purified extract of coca leaf, number one quality, shipped into the NAU in sealed coffee tins from the province of Nueva Granada.”

“Haifa ton of coca extract?” Bushell whistled again. So did Stanley, the second he heard. “That’s enough to keep half the coca-sniffers in New Liverpool happy for - a long time, anyway.” Some people used coca extract like snuff, the only trouble being that it wasn’t mild like snuff, and had been illegal in the NAU since the early days of the twentieth century. Coca-sniffers would pay through the nose to get it, though, which probably explained a lot of the money Macias had found.

“Half a ton,” Macias confirmed. “And all the firearms. . . I’ve never imagined the Sons having such good connections with the Holy Alliance. They . . aren’t usually what you’d call fond of Franco-Spaniards in general and Nuevespañolans in particular. I’m not fond of them, either,” he added. Bushell wondered whether he was speaking as a constable or as a man of Nuevespañolan blood. That didn’t matter. What did matter was the news Macias had. “Anything else?” Bushell asked.

“Nothing yet,” Macias answered. “Fenton and his common-law wife are denying everything at the top of their lungs - they had no notion any of that stuff was in the house, they say.” The constabulary captain snorted. “They won’t convince a jury with that tale, not for a minute they won’t. But so far they’re refusing to say anything till they’ve spoken with a solicitor, and we’re going to hold them for the full legal forty-eight hours before we let them do that. If they do decide to open up while we’re grilling them, you’ll be the first outside New Liverpool to hear.”

“Thanks, Jaime,” Bushell said, and hung up. He looked to Sam and Kathleen. “A break at last - and a big one.” He frowned. “I wish I knew what it meant, though. After all the Russian connections we’ve unearthed, this one doesn’t fit.”

“It probably also doesn’t get us any closer to The Two Georges,” Kathleen said. “I know it’s important for us to catch the man who shot Honest Dick, but that’s not the half of the case we need right now.”

“You’re right,” Stanley said in mournful agreement. “They’re too smart to have told the shooter much, I’m sure.”

“Yes, that’s so.” Bushell rubbed at his mustache. “It must be why Sir Horace didn’t want me to spend time on the Tricky Dick end of things. Even if it did crack open, it might not help us soon enough. But this is still something he has to hear straightaway.”

He dialed Bragg’s office number. “I’m sorry, Colonel,” Sally Reese blared in his ear. “You can’t talk with Sir Horace right now. He’s gone to the dentist again this morning - that crown just isn’t right. He said he didn’t sleep a wink last night, and he’s getting it seen to.”

“This is important, Sally,” Bushell said.

“I understand that, Colonel, but I can’t make him be here when he isn’t, now can I?” Bragg’s secretary laughed her loud, scratchy laugh.

“No, you can’t do that,” Bushell admitted. He rubbed his forehead. Bragg had mentioned the dentist’s name a few days before, he was sure of it. He snapped his fingers in triumph. “He goes to Dr. Pendleton, doesn’t he?”

“Yes, he does,” Sally Reese laughed again. “I think he swears at him more than he swears by him, but he’s kept going back all these years.”

“Give me Pendleton’s telephone number, then,” Bushell said, reaching for the pencil he’d used to make notes on what Jaime Macias had told him. “If Sir Horace isn’t under general anesthetic, he needs this news now.”

“Well, since it’s you as asks,” Sally said. “Let me go through my pile of cards here. I’ll have it for you in a jiffy, yes I will.”

“You’re a sweetheart, Sally,” Bushell said with all the charm he had in him. In his ear, Bragg’s secretary giggled like a schoolgirl. From behind her table, Kathleen Flannery made as if to retch. Bushell stuck out his tongue at her.

“Here it is,” Sally Reese said, ignorant of the byplay on the other end of the line. “It’s AGincourt 4873.”

“Unless he’s unconscious, Sir Horace will want to know what I’ve got to tell him,” Bushell assured her.

“And if he is unconscious now, he’ll be sorry he was when he wakes up.”

“All right, Colonel. You sound like you know what you’re talking about.” Sally Reese slammed down the phone. She did even that with unnecessary vigor. Before he rang the dentist’s office, Bushell paused a moment to dig a finger into his ear. Kathleen looked puzzled. Samuel Stanley, who’d had more dealings with Bragg’s longtime secretary, chuckled softly.

Bushell dialed the number Sally Reese had given him. A woman’s voice came on the line: “Offices of Dr. Spencer Pendleton, member of the Royal North American College of Dentists and Oral Surgeons. How may I help you?”

The best way for her to have helped a man with a bad toothache, Bushell thought, would have been to shorten the introduction. He let that alone, though, merely giving his own name and title and saying, “I need to speak to Lieutenant General Sir Horace Bragg immediately.”

He waited for the receptionist to tell him Bragg was trapped in the chair and unavailable. He’d settle that in short order. But the woman answered, “I’m sorry, Colonel, but Sir Horace isn’t here.”

“Really?” Bushell said, sitting up straighten “Has he already left? That means he’ll be back at the office soon.”

“I’m afraid you misunderstand, sir,” the receptionist said. “He’s not been in this morning. He has no appointment scheduled, he has not asked to be seen on an emergency basis, and, if you’ll forgive me, I’ve no notion why you believe he would be here.”

“Why?” Bushell said. “To get something done about the crown Dr. Pendleton put on him last week. He’s done nothing but complain about it ever since.”

“Sir?” If that wasn’t honest bewilderment in the receptionist’s voice, she belonged in front of a cinema camera. “Sir Horace wasn’t in here last week to have a crown fitted or for any other reason. Let me check to be absolutely certain -“ Bushell heard flipping pages, presumably from Dr. Pendleton’s appointment book. The receptionist came back on the line: “No, sir, the last time Sir Horace saw Dr. Pendleton was last February 19, to have him replace a filling that had fallen out of a bicuspid. He’s not been here since.”

“You’re sure of that?” Bushell demanded.

“Sir!” The receptionist remained polite, but unmistakable frost came into her voice. “Our records are most exact, I assure you. If there’s nothing more -“ When Bushell didn’t answer, the woman hung up as emphatically as Sally Reese at her best.

Bushell gently replaced in its cradle the handset he was holding. He sat staring at the telephone. Samuel Stanley, of course, had heard only his side of the conversation with Dr. Pendleton’s receptionist. “Sir Horace is on his way back here?” he said. “When did he leave the dentist’s?”

“He didn’t,” Bushell answered. “He wasn’t there. He hasn’t been there since February, as a matter of fact.”

Stanley and Kathleen exclaimed together at that. “Where the devil has he been, then?” Sam burst out.

“If I knew, I would tell you,” Bushell said. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

“Do you suppose he keeps a mistress?” Kathleen asked.

Samuel Stanley burst into rude, raucous laughter at that idea. Flustered, Kathleen looked down at the table. Bushell held up a hand. “It’s - not as unlikely as you think, Sam,” he said slowly.

“Oh yes, it is,” Stanley said, laughing still. “That miserable, dried-up -“ He cut himself short, no doubt remembering - a couple of words too late - Bushell’s friendship with Sir Horace. But Bushell hadn’t spoken to defend Bragg. “It’s not as unlikely as you think,” he said again, and then did something he’d thought he’d never do: he repeated what Irene had said at the Russian embassy about Sir Horace.

“Good God,” Kathleen whispered.

“Good God is right,” Sam Stanley said in an altogether different tone of voice. “I was at that party, Chief. The nerve of the man - not just for doing it, but for doing it there. I wouldn’t have guessed he had it in him, not in a thousand years.” He probably would have elaborated on that theme had Kathleen not been in the room, and had Bushell’s ex-wife not have been involved in the affair.

“I wouldn’t have, either,” Bushell said. “I didn’t. But then, Irene turned out to be ... susceptible to men with titles. I didn’t find out about that till later on, either.” Sounding dispassionate about the breakup of his marriage came easy by now; he’d had practice. Not having to hide internal anguish, though, was new.

“What do we do now?” Kathleen asked. “Come up to him when he does get here and say, ‘We know you didn’t go to the dentist, so where were you?’“

“If he’s visiting a kept woman at a time like this, he ought to be horsewhipped,” Stanley said, sounding as if he wouldn’t mind being the fellow cracking the whip. Then he looked thoughtful. “Do you suppose Sally knows? If she does, would she tell us?”

Bushell shook his head. “If it’s true, and if she does know, she’ll deny it to her dying day. She thinks the sun rises and sets on Sir Horace. And if we do ask her, it’s sure to get back to Bragg.” He listened to himself in surprise once more. He’d never spoken - he’d never thought - of Sir Horace by his unadorned surname.

“Sir Martin ought to know about this,” Kathleen declared.

“So he should,” Bushell said. “There’s a problem, though. If I ring up America’s Number Ten, or even if I hop in a steamer and go over there, they won’t just escort me into the Green Room or wherever Sir Martin happens to be. I’ll have to get past the top flunky, who happens to be - “

“Sir David Clarke,” Samuel Stanley finished for him.

Kathleen winced, but said, “You’d better do it.”

“You’re right, worse luck,” Bushell said with a sigh, and picked up the telephone. He rang the governor-general’s residence, asked to be connected to Sir Martin Luther King, and, sure enough, found himself talking to Sir David.

“Yes, Colonel?” Clarke said coolly. “I trust this is of some importance?”

“I think so, yes,” Bushell answered, fighting understatement with understatement. In an abstract way, he was tempted to tell Sir David what Irene had told him - Clarke might have worried about Sir Horace Bragg from time to time, but never, Bushell was sure, in that way. But the public good sometimes meant forgoing private pleasure, and so he stuck to business: “I need to speak to Sir Martin at once - I have new evidence about who is, or may have been, leaking information to the Sons of Liberty.”

Sir David Clarke asked the question Bushell had known he would ask: “And that person is -?”

“I’ll tell Sir Martin. I won’t tell you,” Bushell said. Clarke was still a suspect in his own right, which meant that, if Bragg was involved, too, they might have been working together. Alerting Sir Horace was the last thing Bushell wanted.

“You’re going to tell him it’s me,” Sir David said. “No matter what I try to do to convince you I am no traitor, you refuse to believe me, and you carry on this vendetta as if you were from the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, not the NAU. Deny it if you can.”

“I -“ Bushell shut up. Even denying it would have given Sir David enough information to let him draw his own conclusions - if he didn’t reckon the denial an outright lie.

After the silence had stretched for half a minute or so, Clarke said, “Good day, Colonel,” and hung up the telephone.

“I knew this was going to happen. I couldn’t tell him,” Bushell said, recounting the conversation for Samuel Stanley and Kathleen. “I couldn’t. He does remain our principal suspect at the moment.”

“Right now, Chief, I’d say we have two principal suspects,” Stanley remarked.

“And I’d say you may well be right,” Bushell craved a drink. If Sir Horace was in league with the Sons of Liberty, that was a betrayal worse then Irene’s. “But if Bragg is working with the Sons,” Bushell went on, thinking aloud, “why is he so willing to shut up the Russian embassy when the King-Emperor gets into Victoria? I’d worried about him before, but you know that set my mind at ease again.”

“True,” Stanley said, drumming his fingers on the desktop.

“But what if the Russians haven’t got anything to do with the theft of The Two Georges?” Kathleen Flannery said. “I know both of you have been focusing on the Russians since Tricky Dick got shot, but look what they found in the house where they arrested his killer. Maybe the Holy Alliance planted the other evidence to make you look away from France and Spain.”

“Mm - maybe,” Bushell said. “That’s as much as I’d give it.” He glanced over to Sam Stanley, who nodded. Having concentrated so long and hard on the Russian connection, both men were reluctant to abandon it without overwhelming evidence to prove they should.

“Where do we go from here, though?” Stanley said. “We can’t trust Sir Horace, who’s over us, and we can’t trust Sir David, who’s between us and Sir Martin. What does that leave? Not bloody much, if you ask me.”

“Oh yes, it does,” Bushell said. “It leaves us. All right - we can’t trust anybody over us. But I can think of a couple of people here I’d trust: that Major Manchester, for one. The way he jumped on those warrants I pulled out of my briefcase was a joy to watch. Williams, too - the fellow with the beard and the scar. Remember how he wondered about a leak here at RAM headquarters? They’ll know others we can count on, too.”

“Sergeant Kittridge,” Stanley said, his face lighting up. “Always ask a sergeant about officers if you want a straight answer.”

“We’re forming a cabal,” Kathleen said in tones of wonder.

“That’s just what we’re doing,” Bushell said, and picked up the telephone. Major Manchester was the first one to get to the office they were using. Bushell would have been surprised had it worked out otherwise - Manchester, whose Christian name proved to be Walter, seemed to rush headlong into everything he did. He fidgeted impatiently when he had to wait for his two colleagues to arrive.

Sergeant Kittridge (his first name, Bushell learned on asking, was Ted) arrived next. Whatever he was thinking, his face showed none of it. Bushell wouldn’t have wanted to play cards against him. He took out a cigar case, used his eyebrows to get permission from Kathleen Flannery, and lit up a cheroot so vile that Bushell wished she hadn’t granted it.

A minute or so later, Major Williams walked in. He nodded to Ted Kittridge, whom he evidently knew well, and introduced himself as Micah to Major Manchester. Then he rounded on Bushell, asking, “Well, what’s all this?”

Bushell got up and shut the door before answering. That bit of theatrics earned him stares from all three newcomers. Then he borrowed Kathleen Flannery’s word: “This, gentlemen, is a cabal.”

More stares. Walter Manchester found his tongue first: “What kind of cabal?”

“One to get The Two Georges back in spite of everything,” Bushell answered.

“What’s everything?” Williams asked, at the same time as Manchester was saying, “Why do we need a cabal for that?” Sergeant Kittridge, who spoke as if he had to pay a shilling for every word he used, stood quietly, smoking and listening.

Bushell explained, telling the Victoria RAMs of the evidence that pointed toward Sir David Clarke Williams already knew some of that - and what he’d just learned about Sir Horace Bragg. As he set it out before strangers, it seemed much less substantial than it had when he was hashing it over with Sam and Kathleen. He finished, “As far as I can see, we can’t trust either one of them. Let’s go on as if they weren’t there anymore and do this job the way we know it ought to be done.”

He waited. Having thrown the dice, he had no idea what he’d do if they turned up a losing number. After three of the longest heartbeats of his life, Major Manchester said, “I’m with you, Colonel. When you came up with those warrants after the judges had gone to chambers, I knew you were somebody who could get things done.”

“Count me in, too,” Micah Williams said. “That operation we ran against the Sons last week - that was a shame and disgrace, nothing else but. And we’ve just been running around since. If we can’t do better than this, we don’t deserve to find The Two Georges.” When he frowned, his scar pulled one corner of his mouth out in a sinister grimace. “Count me in, but there’s not much time left.”

Everyone looked at Ted Kittridge. The sergeant stubbed out his cheroot, then said, “Captain Higgins and Lieutenant Custine will lend a hand, I expect.”

“Good choices,” Major Williams said, nodding. He turned back to Bushell. “We can come up with men who’ll want to be turned loose against the Sons - no doubt of that, Colonel. But how are we going to get search warrants on the quiet?”

Walter Manchester let out what sounded alarmingly like a giggle. He pointed to Bushell’s briefcase. “The man is armed - and dangerous.” Williams lifted a questioning eyebrow. Bushell opened the briefcase and displayed the warrants he’d been carrying since New Liverpool. Both of Micah Williams’s eyebrows rose then. Sergeant Kittridge lighted another cheroot. This one sat at a much jauntier angle than its predecessor had.

“If we can get the men, we can legally do the job,” Bushell said. “Well, legally enough, anyhow. The other question is, what job do we do? I haven’t got an unlimited number of these” - he pointed to the warrants - “and we ought to hold a couple in reserve to follow up on whatever we find in our first sweep. We have to make that one count.”

“You know what I’d do if it was up to me?” Williams said. “I’d go back to a lot of the places we hit last week. Those buggers - beg your pardon, ma’am - they had to know we were coming. We only found what they wanted us to find, not one thing more. If we hit’em when they aren’t looking for us, though - “

Bushell weighed that. After a few seconds, he nodded. “We’ll do just that, then. I wouldn’t mind finding out what Phineas Stanage really has in his files, I’ll tell you that.”

“But that paper I found taped to the file-cabinet drawer - “ Kathleen began.

“May mean exactly what it says, or may have been planted there to make us think it means what it says,”

Bushell said. “By the end of today, if we’re lucky, we’ll have some idea which.”

“If we haven’t got some ideas by ten o’clock in the morning, day after tomorrow, it won’t matter anymore,” Samuel Stanley said. “That’s when the King-Emperor gets here.”

Sergeant Kittridge drove Bushell, Stanley, Kathleen Flannery, and Lieutenant Toby Custine back to Phineas Stanage’s house. “Can’t wait to have a go at this blighter,” Custine said, for the third or fourth time. “Can’t wait.” He was very young, very blond, very enthusiastic. Bushell thought Kittridge had made a shrewd choice with him. Point him at a target, turn him loose, and he’d bring it down. When Bushell knocked on the door to Stanage’s, the same maidservant who’d answered before opened it. She drew back in dismay when she recognized him. “Oh, dear sweet suffering Jesus, not again,” she moaned. “We’re just starting to get picked up from the last time.”

Bushell displayed the warrant. “Afraid so, Miss. Now if you’ll stand aside and let us do our job - “

“I can’t stop you,” the woman said bitterly, “but Lord, I wish I could.”

The RAMs swarmed into Stanage’s house. Bushell wondered how long they’d have today till the brewing magnate showed up in full wrathful glory. Or maybe, hearing the RAMs were back again, he’d flee instead.

One advantage of searching a place for the second time was that you had some notion of where things were. Bushell headed for the file cabinets up on the first floor. They were locked. Toby Custine produced a little leather case from an inside coat pocket. Out of the case he drew some highly specialized metal tools.

Glancing over to Bushell, he said, “I wanted to be a safecracker when I was a boy, but my dear old father convinced me that, while I’d take long holidays with a trade like that, they wouldn’t be at places I much fancied visiting.”

“Your dear old father was a man of sense,” Bushell said solemnly.

“So he was, so he was,” Custine replied. “That once, anyhow, I listened to him.” He got to work with his lock picks. In moments, the file cabinet opened. Whether or not he’d fancied larceny as a career when he was young, he would have been good at it.

“Hullo!” Sam Stanley said, reaching in and snatching out a folder. “This wasn’t here last time we came calling.”

“Are you sure?” Bushell asked. “He had a lot of Independence Party material then, too.”

“Yes, and that’s how all of it was labeled - INDEPENDENCE PARTY, I mean,” Stanley said. “Not a folder in the bunch just said INDEPENDENCE.”

Lieutenant Toby Custine muttered something pungent under his breath. Aloud, he said, “Looks like you were right, Colonel. If this wasn’t here the last time you came through the place, somebody’d tipped Stanage off beforehand.”

“Let’s see what we’ve got,” Bushell said. Samuel Stanley set the folder on a nearby table and flipped it open. Staring up at him was a scribbled note from Eustace Venable to Stanage. The note was headed PHIN and had nothing to do with cabinetry, nor was the tone that of artisan to client: It’s ready and waiting. I’ll be heading up to Boston tomorrow to talk things over with Joe. He and the boss have cooked up three or four different ways to play it. I want to know for certain which one they intend using. Will inform you when I learn.

“Not much there you could take to court,” Custine observed.

“That’s true,” Bushell said, “but it puts old Phin in the picture all the same - and if Joe isn’t Joseph Kilbride, who is he?”

“Who’s the boss?” Custine asked.

Sam Stanley started going through papers. “Maybe these will tell us.”

But they didn’t. Phineas Stanage’s correspondents had been maddeningly - and, in their shoes, sensibly

- elliptical. Nowhere was there an overt mention of The Two Georges: the letters talked about it and the thing.

One of those letters came from Michael O’Flynn in Charleroi. Bushell clicked his tongue between his teeth. “I hope Chief Lassiter has him locked up good and tight. Have to make sure about that - in a bit. First things first.”

“I know what happens next,” Stanley said. “We head off to Stanage’s brewery and find out he’s not there. He’ll have left for Astoria twenty minutes before we show up, and he’ll be back in six weeks.”

“Not this time, Sam,” Bushell predicted. “He won’t go far from the capital, not two days before Charles III gets here.” Toby Custine nodded vigorous agreement. Of course, Bushell realized after the words were out of his mouth, for Stanage to be in and around Victoria was not necessarily the same as his being in his office waiting for the RAMs to scoop him up. He tried to pretend he hadn’t had that thought things were starting to go his way now, after so long favoring the villains. He went downstairs. Ted Kittridge proved to have an unexpected talent for devastation; Stanage’s living room looked as if a Cossack cavalry voisko had galloped through it. Kathleen Flannery was lending spirited help, using a sharp little knife to slit furniture linings so she could peer inside. Stanage’s servants stood watching and wringing their hands.

“Anything we need to know about?” Bushell asked. Kittridge and Kathleen shook their heads. “Let’s go then,” he said, and turned to Stanage’s domestic staff. “Thank’s for your help this morning.”

“You took a big chance there, Chief,” Stanley said as they piled back into the RAM steamer. “If old Phineas had some Nagants that we didn’t find stashed in his basement, one of the footmen might have shot you.”

“Mm, something to that, I shouldn’t wonder.” Bushell checked a sheet of stationery he’d taken from the home. “The Josiah Stanage Brewing Company, Ltd. is on Tilden Way. That’s not far from here, is it, Sergeant?” He’d been away from Victoria long enough to make him distrust his memory for directions.

“Fifteen minutes,” Kittridge said, and put the motorcar in gear.

It turned out to be more than twice that long; a nasty accident snarled Tilden Way only a mile or so from the brewery. Constables were busy taking statements from those in a condition to give them. Red lights flashing, an ambulance sped off with a couple who weren’t. Wreckers labored to pry apart the vehicles that had come together. Firemen spread sand on spilled paraffin.

Bushell drummed his fingers on his thigh as they crawled along. They’d got trapped in traffic before they discovered how bad the wreck ahead was. “Nothing we can do but wait,” Stanley said. Bushell grudged every second that sped past; he knew he had none left to spare.

Once past the wreck, Sergeant Kittridge practically flew to the brewery, a large brick building with advertising signs painted on all four sides:

JOSIAH STANAGE CO.

PROUD BREWERS OF BALD EAGLE ALE, YANKEE STOUT, AND FREEDOM BEST

BITTER.

“Bilgewater,” Kittridge declared. Bushell didn’t know whether he meant the political sentiments proclaimed by the brand names or the quality of the beers produced inside those walls. The rich, nutty odor of malted barley clogged the air. Stanley laughed. “You can get a buzz just breathing,” he said, and inhaled deeply.

A guard in a red-coated uniform that looked a lot like a RAM’s stood in front of the entrance. “Help you gents?” he asked, adding, “And you, ma’am?” a moment later.

Bushell and his male companions flashed their badges. As had often happened before, their display of glittering metal blinded the guard to the fact that Kathleen bore no such talisman. The not-quite Redbreast touched a forefinger to the bill of his cap in a not-quite salute and held the door open so the newcomers could enter the brewery.

A series of questions to employees within led them to Stanage’s office. Bushell would have guessed that to be on the topmost floor, so the magnate could look out a window and savor the view - or perhaps just watch lorries hauling barrels of nice, profitable beer off to be quaffed. Instead, though, Stanage quartered himself in the basement. His secretary, a gray-haired woman who looked even sterner than Sally Reese, glared at people with the temerity to interrupt her typing. “No, you can’t see Mr. Stanage now,” she snapped, and started clattering away at a letter once more.

“It’s urgent,” Bushell said, showing his badge again.

“I don’t care,” the woman said. “You still can’t see him.” She paused. He got the idea she hoped he’d shout at her, so he didn’t. Faint disappointment in her voice, she went on, “Reason you can’t see him is, he’s not here.”

Samuel Stanley grunted. Bushell had heard that same sound of surprise from a soldier hit by a rifle bullet: it was the sound you made before you felt the pain. He already felt it, and asked, “Well, where is he?”

Maybe he’d been wrong. Maybe Stanage had decided to get out of town. But the secretary said, “He’s up in Georgestown, across the river. There’s a gathering of commercial travelers today.” She sniffed in loud, sharp disapproval. “Excuse for a pack of nasty men to get together, tell filthy stories, and pour down the demon rum, if you ask me. I’m a good Christian woman - I’ve told Mr. Stanage as much, right to his face I have.”

Bushell didn’t doubt it. He knew a first bit of sympathy for Phineas Stanage. Stifling it, he said, “Where is this gathering being held?”

“I told you: in Georgestown.” When that wasn’t enough to send Bushell on his way, she grudgingly pawed through a file cabinet. “Here we are: the Worshipful College of Victuallers” - she pronounced it as it was spelled, not the right way - “at 427 Amritsar Way. Ugly name for a street.”

“Thank you for your unsolicited opinions,” Bushell said. He hadn’t more than half turned before she was pounding away at the typewriter again.

They got back into the battered blue Reliable that Kittridge was driving. Bushell pulled out his pocket watch. “It’ll be after one o’clock when we get there,” he said unhappily. “Less than two days now before His Majesty’s yacht comes into the harbor.”

“Less than half a day from the ransom deadline the Sons set when they took The Two Georges,”

Kathleen added, even more unhappily.

“If they were going to ransom it, we would have heard by now,” he said, and hoped he was right. “They have something else in mind. They must.”

“Burning it in front of the All-Union Art Museum, for instance,” she said. “You were talking about that before, and I’ve feared something like it all along.”

He shook his head. “I don’t think they’d throw over the chance at fifty million pounds for the sake of a gesture.”

“They’re fanatics,” Kathleen said bleakly. “What do fanatics care about money?”

The steamer rolled onto the Long Bridge as Bushell answered, “Of course, a lot of the Sons are fanatics. But the leaders of this scheme are plenty shrewd. Fifty million would let them pay for any number of outrages. If that’s not what they’re after, then they have good reason to think they can get something more.”

“Or, of course, they might be holding off the ransom demand to the last possible moment to give us less chance to set a trap for them,” Samuel Stanley said. Bushell nodded. It wasn’t how he read the situation, but it was far from impossible.

Traffic on the bridge slowed down as the steamer neared the checkpoint on the Maryland shore. “Bulk tobacco?” a green-uniformed inspector asked Kittridge. Maryland had a hefty tobacco tax; Virginia didn’t. The revenue inspectors searched motorcars at random to discourage smuggling. Kittridge showed his badge. The inspector nodded, drew back, and waved him through. Kittridge reached into the glove box for a map to guide him to Amritsar Way. They got to the Worshipful College of Victuallers at 1:07. Toby Custine pointed to the building across the street: an Independence Party headquarters. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?” he said.

Another steamer that had seen better days came down Amritsar Way from the opposite direction and parked in front of the headquarters building. A burly man with a beard that didn’t quite cover his scar got out of it. “That’s Major Williams,” Bushell and Stanley said together. Kittridge pulled over to the kerb. Everyone got out of the motorcar he was driving. Lieutenant Custine called to Williams and his companions. “What are you people doing here?” Williams demanded. “You come to shake down this place, too?” He jerked a thumb toward the Independence Party building.

“No, we’re after Stanage at the victuallers’ hall,” Bushell answered, pointing toward his own target.

“Had some luck, did you?”

“I should say so!” Williams boomed. “The stinking Sons hadn’t a clue we were coming, not this time. Now I’ve got clues - so many of ‘em, I wish I could be four places at once.”

“Same here,” Bushell said. “What’s going on with the charming Independence Party people? They aren’t in the habit of going out on a limb.”

“Well, they bloody well have now, or at least this batch of ‘em has,” Williams said. “All sorts of lovely correspondence between them and proved Sons about it and how they were going to exploit it - not a word of what it is, worse luck, or where it is, either, but I’ve drawn my own conclusions, and now I’ll see if I can’t get these people to color ‘em for me.”

“Sounds like what I’m doing with Stanage and his crowd.” Bushell thumped Williams on the shoulder.

“Let’s go get ‘em.” He had another thought: “If we make arrests, we’ll take ‘em to the Georgestown gaol. The less we alert the powers that be, the better.”

“Right,” Williams said. “Colonel, I wasn’t sure anything was rotten in Denmark till I went out this morning. Now - I don’t want anyone over you getting wind of any of this.” He laughed, down deep in his throat. “If you hadn’t been the one who put me on to it, I wouldn’t tell you about it, either.”

“Good,” Bushell said. He rounded up his companions by eye, then headed across Amritsar Way to the Worshipful College of Victuallers.

The fellow who greeted him there certainly hadn’t lacked for victuals. The white linen suit he wore had enough material for a four-man tent, or maybe two of them. His pink, pink skin was fine as a baby’s.

“Help you folks?” he asked, then wheezed in another gulp of air.

“Phineas Stanage and the party from the Stanage brewery works,” Bushell said.

“Dining room two,” the fat man answered, pointing.

Dining room two was a raucous place, full of well-hopped good cheer. Bushell understood at once how Stanage’s secretary had acquired her distaste for such gatherings. The room was blue with cigar and pipe smoke, and bluer with coarse language. His head swiveled this way and that. He didn’t see the man he was after. He tapped a commercial traveler in an ugly houndstooth jacket. “Where’s Stanage?”

“Phin?” The man didn’t take him for a police officer. “He stepped out a few minutes ago. Not for lunch, by Jesus!” He patted his abdomen, as if to say no sane man would leave the victuallers’ hall for food or drink.

“Check the jakes,” Bushell told Lieutenant Custine. “Check with that human airship out front, too, and see if he’s left the building.”

Custine hurried away. Bushell wished he had more manpower with him. If he could have descended on this place with a host of RAMs instead of an earful... he was all too likely to have given the game away. But he heard cursing down the hall that was altogether different from the genial sort accompanying the commercial travelers’ tales of conquests over customers or pretty girls. One corner of his mouth quirked upward as he recognized the style: Phineas W. Stanage was unhappy with his world.

“Crackbrained idiotic fornicating Cossack Okhrana inquisitors!” he bellowed as Toby Custine led him back into the dining room. The RAM lieutenant had clapped manacles around his wrists.

“Here, what have you done to good old Phin?” one of the commercial travelers shouted. An angry chorus rose from the company.

“Arrested him,” Bushell answered. The chorus grew louder. In a few seconds, some half-drunk fool would lead a charge to rescue good old Phin. Bushell hadn’t the men he’d need to stop such a charge. Before it could start, he went on, “For conspiracy to steal The Two Georges, and for conspiracy to commit murder by firearm.”

“It’s a lie, a filthy, stinking, goddamned lie,” Stanage roared, sounding very much like a man who’d boxed for pay for a while before taking up the family business. But the men who sold his brews were suddenly silent. Some of them might have sympathized with the Sons of Liberty, but most were probably Tories: commercial travelers were seldom inclined to embrace innovation of any kind.

“Take him away; get him out of here,” Bushell muttered to Custine, who started Stanage down the hall. Stanage tried to kick him in the shins. Custine skipped out of the way and shoved the brewing magnate, hard. Stanage almost went over on his face. To his sales force, Bushell said, “This day’s festivities are over. You’ve had your luncheon and you haven’t had to listen to all the speeches that were coming up. Count yourselves ahead on the bargain: instead, you’ve got the rest of the day off. Enjoy it.”

He waited. If he wasn’t lucky, he’d have a riot on his hands. Well, he told himself, that would get the Georgestown constables over here in a hurry. But luck, for once, was with him. The first commercial traveler who spoke up said, “I hope you get the painting back, pal. If Phin knows somethin’ about it, go on and make him sweat.” A new chorus rose, this one of agreement. If anyone in the dining room held a differing opinion, he made sure he held it close.

You had to have discipline if you were going to survive traveling from town to town and drumming up sales wherever you could. Once it became clear to the assembled multitude that no one was going to try breaking Stanage free of the RAMs, the men gulped down a last few bites, upended their pint pots, and started filing out toward Amritsar Way.

Most of them were chattering about what they’d just seen, and most of those were professing loud and sometimes profane (though not so ingeniously profane as Phineas Stanage) hope The Two Georges would soon be back in proper hands. In that milieu, the strapping, black-haired fellow who kept quiet and kept his head down while he tried to edge away from Bushell succeeded only in making himself conspicuous. Bushell might not have paid him any mind he had tramped along with his comrades. As it was, he took a second look.

“Mr. O’Flynn!” he exclaimed gleefully. “You’ll come along with us, too.”

The miner from Charleroi tried to bolt, but a commercial traveler half his size leveled him with a tackle that would have drawn a red card on any football pitch in the Empire. Bushell jumped on him and manacled his hands behind his back.

As Phineas Stanage had, O’Flynn tried to kick. “Naughty,” Bushell said, and bounced his face off the tile floor of the hallway, not so hard as he might have done. “As I said, you’ll come along with us.” He yanked the miner to his feet.

Because of the struggle, he didn’t get out to the street as fast as he might have. When he did, Major Micah Williams greeted him with a glad cry. “Thanks for the bonus,” the bearded, scarred RAM said. “I never expected Christopher Cole to walk by me bold as brass. I was going after him later on.”

“Who’s Christopher Cole?” Bushell said, and then, “Never mind. He was a villain masquerading as a commercial traveler, was he?” Williams nodded. Bushell went on, “I nabbed one of those, too. Nice little gathering Stanage had here, wasn’t it? And a nice cover, too; he could meet the other Sons and plot anything he liked with no one the wiser.”

“He could write it off his taxes, too,” Samuel Stanley said. “If that’s not adding insult to injury, I don’t know what is.”

“One more charge to throw at him,” Bushell agreed. “Something will have to stick.” He turned to Williams. “How’d you do?”

“Got my man,” the major answered. “Cameron Moffett is another one we’ve suspected for years without being able to lay hands on proof. I found it earlier today, and now I’ve found him.” His face darkened with anger. “The Sons must have had a pipeline into our office for years, too, same as they did down in Richmond. This time, thanks to you, we really did catch them napping.”

Several man had emerged from Independence Party headquarters to argue with the RAMs who’d come with Williams. Bushell glowered at them. They were all plump, prosperous, middle-aged, with the sleek look of solicitors to them. He could understand why a Michael O’Flynn might wish the NAU different from what it was. But the Union and the British Empire had done things for these men, not to them. Where was their gratitude?

The breeze picked up; it flipped the homburg off one of the Independence Party men, then flung awry the few straggling strands of hair he’d combed over a wide expanse of scalp. That floating, wispy hair was what drew Bushell’s gaze to him. One eyebrow rose. “Well, Major,” Bushell said softly, “I think you’ve just returned the favor you say I did you.” He raised his voice: “Mr. Johnston! How good to see you again.”

Morton Johnston started. If the Independence Party leader from New Liverpool thought it was good to see Bushell, his face didn’t know it. For a moment, before the lawyerly mask dropped over his features, he looked uncommonly like a boy caught with his hand in the biscuit tin. Bushell waved to him. “Why don’t you come over here, Mr. Johnston, and tell me what you’re doing three thousand miles from home.”

Johnston did come over, gathering himself as he did so. “I haven’t got to tell you a bloody thing, sir, as you know very well. But I shall tell you: I am here to help my colleagues plan protests against the tyrant’s visit to our shores.”

It was a plausible answer, plausibly delivered. But Johnston hadn’t been glad to see Bushell, not even slightly, and it was the day before the deadline the Sons of Liberty had given for ransoming The Two Georges, two days before Charles III arrived. Bushell asked, “If I ring up your headquarters in New Liverpool and ask them where you are, what will they tell me?”

Had Morton Johnston been in Victoria on legitimate Independence Party business, he would have told his fellow enthusiasts exactly where he was going, and why. He might have told them where he was going, but lied about his reasons. But when he took a couple of seconds too long to come up with any sort of answer, Bushell concluded he hadn’t told them even part of the truth.

“I shall make that telephone call, Mr. Johnston,” he said happily. “Meanwhile, you can come along to the station and answer some questions for us.”

“Am I under arrest, and if so, on what charge?”

Lieutenant Toby Custine had ducked into the Independence Party building. He came out in time to hear Morton Johnston’s question. In a studiously neutral voice, he remarked, “Three of the clerks in there say Phineas Stanage visited you this morning, and that the two of you spent some time alone together.”

“Vile, treacherous dogs!” Stanage roared. Johnston said nothing, but the glare he sent though the plate-glass window was homicidal in intent if not in effect.

“On a charge of conspiracy to aid in the commission of a felony, namely the theft of The Two Georges,” Bushell answered.

Now Johnston found a bellow to match Stanage’s: “You’ll never hang that on me!”

“Maybe I will, maybe I won’t,” Bushell answered, “but I’ll have fun trying.” He turned to Ted Kittridge:

“Ring up the Georgestown constables, Sergeant, and have them send some motorcars here. We’ve gathered in a bigger haul than I thought we would.”

“Right,” Kittridge said, still speaking as if words were at a premium. Bushell had expected him to go back to the Worshipful College of Victuallers and use the telephone there. Instead, he strode into Independence Party headquarters. The clerks and functionaries there were going to get an earful of the doings of their superiors. Bushell hoped they enjoyed it.

Enough RAMs were on the scene to make sure the prisoners didn’t try to escape. Bushell took Lieutenant Custine off to one side and said quietly, “Those Independence Party people are fanatics. How the devil did you get three of them to point the finger at Stanage and Johnston?”

“It was simple,” Custine said with a wink: “I didn’t. But the reactions we got from those two were most satisfactory, don’t you think?”

“You’ll go far, Lieutenant,” Bushell predicted. He thumped the younger man on the back. Custine grinned from ear to ear.

Within a couple of minutes, several Georgestown constabulary steamers rolled up. The constables who got out of the gold and black checked motorcars stared in considerable curiosity at the crowd of RAMs and suspects waiting for them. “What the hell is going on here?” demanded a burly fellow with a lieutenant’s pips on the shoulder boards of his khaki uniform.

“These charming individuals” - Bushell pointed to Stanage, Johnston, O’Flynn, and the rest - “are charged with conspiracy to abscond with The Two Georges, among other things. We’d like to interrogate them and hold them at your gaol, Lieutenant - “

“Hammond. Maxwell Hammond,” the Georgestown constable said. Bushell introduced himself. After the formalities, Hammond said, “See here, Colonel, why don’t you just take them back to Victoria and grill them over your own fire?”

“Come along with me, Lieutenant.” Bushell walked slowly down Amritsar Way. Hammond followed, his heavy features frowning and suspicious. When they were effectively alone, Bushell went on in a low voice, “I’m not taking them back because I don’t want my superiors or the politicos at America’s Number Ten to know I’ve got them. If I have to draw you a picture, I will.”

Maxwell Hammond stared at him. “Good God,” he said, also quietly. “What is the world coming to?”

“Whatever it thinks it’s coming to, I don’t aim to let it,” Bushell answered. “Are you with me, or not?”

“Oh, I’m with you, all right.” Hammond rumbled laughter. “Never thought I’d help a RAM put one over on his own people. Like a dream come true, this is.” Local and provincial constables often envied RAMs their resources and authority. Taking advantage of them now had to feel sweet to Hammond, who labored almost in the shadow of the NAU headquarters for the Royal North American Mounted Police. Far from allergic himself to tweaking the nose of authority, Bushell said, “Enjoy it.”

“Oh, I shall. I shall.” Hammond turned and hurried back to his men. By the grins that broke out on their faces, he was telling them what Bushell had told him. They hustled the prisoners into their motorcars and sped away. The two steamers full of RAMs followed.

“Better not lose ‘em,” Sergeant Ted Kittridge muttered under his breath. “Damned if I remember where the Georgestown constabulary station is at.”

It proved to be a grimy building in a grimy part of town, far from the elegant district where Sir David Clarke made his home. Kittridge’s call had alerted the constables at the station, and they awaited the newcomers’ arrival with obvious impatience. The gaoler, a tall, skinny Negro named Olmsted, patted down the prisoners, turned out their pockets, and put their personal effects - including belts, shoes, and cravats - in paper bags. He required them to sign itemized receipts he’d prepared.

“This is an outrage!” Morton Johnston cried.

“Law doesn’t say you have to be happy about it,” Olmsted answered imperturbably. He’d heard it all, no doubt more times than he could count. “Law does say you have to sign, so we can show the court we kept all your goods safe.”

“I know the law, you -“ But Johnston stopped there. He might know the law, but he’d never before been in its clutches. He was smart enough to see that antagonizing a man who meted it out here was less than wise.

Bushell turned to the gaoler. “Put them in separate cells. In fact, can you keep them far enough apart from one another that they won’t be talking back and forth?”

“Oh, yes, sir, we’ll take care of that,” Olmsted answered. “Gaol’s not what you’d call crowded right now. Maybe the usual lags are on their best behavior.” He laughed to show how likely he thought that was. “Or maybe they’re waiting for more toffs to show up when His Majesty comes into Victoria so they’ll have more fine stuff to steal.”

The paperwork that went with arrests was mind-numbing. Here the forms were even more complicated than usual, precisely because the RAMs were using constabulary facilities under the jurisdiction of the sovereign city of Georgestown to house prisoners arrested not because of city ordinances but as a result of the violation of All-Union statutes. By the time the last i was dotted and the last t crossed, twilight was settling outside.

A constable went out and came back with a pasteboard box full of greasy, newspaper-wrapped packets of fish and chips. “This side has vinegar, the other one doesn’t,” he said, pointing to show which was which. “Take your pick.”

After all the fine meals Bushell had eaten lately, vinegar-sour fried fish and potatoes were like a slap across the face with a cold, wet towel. He gulped them down, then lifted a mug of strong tea in salute.

“To dyspepsia!” he said.

He rang up the William and Mary and asked if any messages had come in for him. “Yes, sir,” the hotel operator said. He heard papers being shuffled. “One from Sir Horace Bragg . . . another from Sir Horace Bragg . . . and a third from - Sir Horace Bragg. The last was not fifteen minutes ago. Do you require the number for a reply?”

“No.” Bushell hung up. So Bragg wondered what he was up to? Well, he wondered what Bragg was up to, too, and wouldn’t ring him right back. Instead, he dialed RAM headquarters and asked to be connected to Major Walter Manchester.

“I’m sorry, he’s not at his desk,” the RAM operator answered. “Who’s ringing, please?” Warily, Bushell gave his name. “Oh, very good, Colonel,” the operator said. “He gave me a number where you could reach him: it’s FLodden 2127.”

“Thanks.” Even though he hadn’t been in Victoria for some years, he knew what that number was: the central station for the Victoria city constables. Major Manchester must have made arrests of his own, and must have been as leery as Bushell of bringing his prisoners back to RAM headquarters. Bushell rang the FLodden number and spoke briefly with Manchester, letting him know where he could be reached. “We did catch ‘em napping,” the major said, as Micah Williams had. “I’ll ring you directly I squeeze anything worth knowing out of these chaps.”

“Right. I’ll do the same for you.” Bushell set the phone down. He wondered if he’d done the right thing by telephoning into RAM headquarters. Word that he’d done so was liable to get to Bragg. Still, no one there knew how to reach him. If the men he’d recruited into the cabal - and the men they’d recruited kept quiet, they could operate unsupervised a while longer. God willing, they wouldn’t need much more time. Under his breath, Bushell muttered, “We’d better not.”

The only thing left to do was use the time he’d bought as best he could. The interrogation room had old, battered furniture and walls that needed painting. It stank of stale sweat, stale tobacco, stale coffee. In his expensive tweeds, Phineas Stanage looked out of place there, like a petunia in an onion patch.

“Let me call my solicitor,” the petunia growled.

“We can hold you forty-eight hours first,” Bushell said, “as I’m sure you know perfectly well.” Stanage grunted. Bushell said, “What were you doing, meeting with Michael O’Flynn?”

“Who?” Stanage said. “Never heard of him.”

“How did a Charleroi coal miner get invited to a gathering of commercial travelers from your brewery?”

“Since I never heard of him, how can I tell you that? For all I know, he sneaked in for a pint or two and a bite to eat.”

Bushell glowered. He’d feared Stanage would be tough. “What was Eustace Venable talking about when he said he was going up to Boston to see Joseph Kilbride about it?”

“Probably a cabinet I’d ordered from him,” Stanage answered in offhand tones. “And who’s this Kilbride item? I don’t recall Venable’s ever mentioning anyone by that name.”

The note the RAMs had found referred to Joe. Bushell glowered harder. Stanage was tough. Contemptuously, Bushell said, “Don’t play stupid games with me. You tell me you don’t know Kilbride and I’ll call you a liar to your face. The two of you ran in the same pack.”

“Well, what if I have heard of him? So what? I don’t know that Venable was going up to Boston to see him. If he was, I don’t know why. And I haven’t a clue about what it is.”

“It’s The Two Georges, Mr. Stanage,” Samuel Stanley said, his voice quiet, reasonable. “We know that. You know we know that. Why not make it easy on yourself and tell us what you know?”

Stanage laughed at him. “You dumb smoke, I’ve had enough nosy police officers poke their snouts into my business to know when I’m getting whipsawed between the rough one and the sweet one. Go peddle your papers.”

Stanley walked over to him and backhanded him across the face. “Which one am I now?” he asked, quiet still.

Phineas Stanage’s head snapped back. His cheek glowed red. “I’ve had tougher louts than you work me over, too,” he snarled. “Try some more. Maybe you’ll bugger the job and leave marks my solicitor can see and take to a judge.”

“You may as well give it up,” Bushell told him. “Sir David Clarke’s spilling his worthless guts at RAM

headquarters right now.” An artillery unit would sometimes let fly a few shells to see what response they drew. Firing for effect, the gun bunnies called it. Bushell was firing for effect now. Stanage shrugged. “I’ve not done anything, so he can’t hurt me.”

Like a dreadnought’s armor, he turned every question fired at him. The hands of the loudly ticking clock on the wall went round. It chimed the hours, one by one. When midnight came, Samuel Stanley said,

“This is the deadline the Sons gave us. Still no word, though - I hope.”

XVI

“No word we’ve heard, anyhow.” Bushell didn’t want to call back to RAM headquarters to confirm that, or to America’s Number Ten, either. “So we go on.” He turned to Lieutenant Hammond. “If nobody else is grilling Michael O’Flynn, fetch him in here.”

“Right,” Hammond said, and, to Stanage, “Come along, you.” The brewing magnate went with him. He looked as worn as Bushell felt, but hadn’t yielded anything. Maybe that was because he didn’t know anything, but Bushell didn’t believe it for a minute. For once in his life, he wished he were an Okhrana man, to feel easy about using more than a slap in the face to squeeze answers from prisoners. Michael O’Flynn looked sleepy and rumpled when Hammond brought him into the interrogation room. He nodded to Bushell, then glanced around the room at the other RAMs and constables. “One of me and a lot of you this time,” he remarked to Bushell. “All right, have your innings.”

Bushell nodded back, not quite happily. Down a quarter-mile under Charleroi, O’Flynn and the other miners could have done anything to him; if they all told the same story afterward, they might well have got away with it, too. They’d let him do his job and go back above ground. Did he owe O’Flynn anything for that? Nothing he would ever have admitted. Even so ...

“What are you doing in Georgestown?” he demanded.

“Visiting my cousin,” O’Flynn answered. “His name’s Dermot Coneval; he sells ale for Stanage Brewery.”

They could check that. Bushell had the bad feeling it would turn out true. The Sons had shown enormous skill at nesting their lies in defensible truths. He said, “You just happened to be here now, the same way you just happened to have driven Joseph Kilbride to the Charleroi train station.”

“That’s right,” O’Flynn said. “Pure chance, every bit of it.”

“That’s your story?” Bushell stood up and stepped closer to the miner, leaning over him and staring down. O’Flynn waited for the hand or the fist or the sap he so plainly expected. Go ahead, his eyes said. Renege. Both Bushell’s hands stayed by his side. “I say you’re a liar.”

“You can say it,” O’Flynn answered. “I’m not calling the shots here.” He laughed wryly. “Not hardly, not me.”

“I say you’re a liar,” Bushell repeated, “and I say I can prove it. You don’t understand the fix you’re in, O’Flynn. We haven’t just netted up you little fish. We’ve got Sir Horace Bragg himself.” Fire for effect.

“He’s down at RAM headquarters, leaking like a cheap roof in the rain.”

“Who?” O’Flynn said. “I never heard of any Sir Horace Whoozis.” Bushell thought he was telling the truth again, but had trouble being sure. Everything the Sons of Liberty did fit into intricate patterns, and when you tried sorting out what was true and what wasn’t, as with O’Flynn’s cousin, you found yourself wandering bewildered after something briefly glimpsed in a maze of mirrors.

“Why did you try to run away from me, then?” he asked. On something like that, he had hope of a straight answer.

O’Flynn looked at him as if he’d just come out of the - what did they call the local bedlam house? - the Yellow Brick, that was the name. “Wouldn’t you?” the miner demanded.

“Not if I hadn’t done anything,” Bushell replied.

“The more fool you,” O’Flynn said. “You should see poor Percy McGaffigan after Chief Lassiter and his bully boys got done pounding on him. He’s lost four teeth, the sorry devil, and he’s limping still. I’ve got a family, too, I do. I didn’t want to go home to ‘em all crippled up.”

“Who’s this Lassiter?” Lieutenant Hammond asked, and then let out a huge yawn.

“Charleroi constabulary chief,” Bushell told him. He shook his head, not just tired but also frustrated. O’Flynn was answering too well. No matter how well he answered, though, he was in too deep to be believable. Bushell swung back to him. “You’re telling me you happened to know Joseph Kilbride, and you happened to know Phineas Stanage - “

“I never told you I knew Phineas Stanage,” O’Flynn shot back. “I told you my cousin works for him, and he does.”

“And you just happened to be there with Stanage, and on the day Stanage went over to talk with another damned Son?” Bushell shook his head. “It won’t wash, O’Flynn. Not a jury in the world would buy it, even for a minute.”

“Then they’ll put the broad arrow on me, but not for anything you can prove I deserve,” Michael O’Flynn replied. Like Hammond, he yawned. “Can you let me go back to my cell now? I was asleep when your Cossacks came and got me.”

“He talks like a Son,” Sam Stanley observed.

“So he does,” Bushell said. “He’s had more sleep then either one of us, too.” As he had with Stanage, he hammered away at O’Flynn. The coal miner projected an air of stubborn ignorance. Without getting rough, Bushell had no hope of penetrating it. Finally, when the noisy wall clock showed it was nearly six, he gave up and sent O’Flynn away.

He walked into the hallway himself. Kathleen Flannery sat dozing in a chair. Ted Kittridge was sitting, too, working on a cheap cigarillo and yet another cup of coffee. No matter how strong and black Bushell drank it, he could feel it wasn’t helping him hold his eyes open any more. If he didn’t sleep a little now, he’d collapse soon. Stanley looked to be in the same straits.

Bushell sat down next to Kathleen. He started to close his eyes, then jerked them open again. “Turn on a wireless, somewhere where the Sons can’t listen to it,” he told Lieutenant Hammond. “If word comes that The Two Georges is ransomed, we’ll - hell, I don’t have the faintest idea what we’ll do, but I want to know.” Hammond nodded. Bushell’s eyes did close.

Next thing he knew, someone was shaking him. He jerked in startlement and almost fell off the chair.

“I’m sorry,” Kathleen Flannery said. “Here. Try some of this.” She held a mug full of coffee under his nose.

The rich, earthy smell filled his nostrils. “An angel of mercy, only slightly disguised,” he said, taking the mug. “No wonder I love you.” Even in the dim light of the hallway, he saw Kathleen flush. He gulped down half the mug. It was as bad as constabulary-station coffee usually is, but it was hot and strong, which also counted. He finished it in another couple of long swallows, then said, “What time is it, anyhow?”

“A little past ten,” Kathleen said.

Bushell got up. An ache in the small of his back said he’d been sleeping in that awkward position for a while. He rubbed at his eyes. If Kathleen hadn’t wakened him, he might have gone on sleeping quite a while longer. “Any word of anything?” he asked her.