I was marking Reilly’s — Number 7’s — payment in my ledger book with disgust. He had drawn over sixty-five pounds in the past seven months, which is an indication of the lavish lives these field agents lead.
“He doesn’t spend it on himself, Oaks,” the Captain said, reading the thoughts behind my facial expression. “He buys information, he snoops, he lives at the edge of his life.”
“For five pounds, he well should! Do you know what five pounds would buy in New York City right now?”
He sighed impatiently — nay, in sufferance. “Oaks, you have an irritating love of coin but a lack of true enterprise. Here sits before you a man whose head is worth twenty thousand pounds. Why not slip out of here some night and collect the bounty from the Tories?”
He wasn’t being cruel or challenging my loyalty. He just revels in the fact that the enemy would pay more to see him dead than Washington himself, and he loves to proclaim it.
I stuck to the issue. “Five pounds must have bought you a veritable trove of information.”
His face softened to that grin that always perplexes me. It is the face of a wise child bearing some family secret best left untold.
“Or a pack of lies, my old son.” He gave forth a huge sigh. “That’s the problem with this spione business.”
“You think Reilly is a turncoat?”
“No.” He chuckled. “He hasn’t the guile. It is the information that bothers me.”
“All I know is that some Americans are prisoners aboard a prison hulk, which hardly seems like information.”
“Let me complete the tapestry for you. Come, sit, for God’s sake. Dump that beer and pour yourself some Knock. You’re going to need it, lad.”
And so Cork began that meticulous step-by-step assemblage of facts that ends in a pyramid of deductions coming to a concise top point. By Jupiter, that fine head is worth much more than twenty thousand pounds. It’s priceless when put to a problem.
“You will recall Dispatch Number Four-oh-three?”
“Of course. It’s in Volume Six of the Black Books. I’ll get it.”
“No need. I retain its substance. All right, then you know that our people in France have been urging support for our cause in a more open manner. Now, new facts in which you had no purview — don’t look offended, Oaks, it was a verbal message from Jay.”
I was. offended, by God! Jay has a code number, Cork has a code number, a lout like Reilly has a code number, but I don’t. Heaven forbid Wellman Oaks should know what’s going on. All I seem to do is hand out five pounds here and six pounds there and file dispatches. There isn’t even a price on my head. What’s the sense of living in danger when no one knows about it except yourself?
By “our people in France,” he meant, of course, Franklin, Silas Deane, and Arthur Lee, the American commissioners who were desperately trying to convince Louis XVI to come openly into the war as our ally. Old Louis had balked at an open confrontation with England, but I wasn’t taken in by all the gibberish in previous dispatches about the commissioners “buying supplies” from the Hotalés Company of Paris, which just happened to be run by Beaumarchais, the playwright. I didn’t have to be an expert in spione to deduce that the money came from Louis’s coffers, but Whitehall seemed too stupid to figure it out.
Cork went on. “Some weeks ago a clandestine plan was proffered by us to the French, and an agent was dispatched to present their response to the Congress. He was put aboard the cutter Angel off the Azores, and that was the last heard of both The Angel and the agent until Number 7 showed up here today. The ship was taken, so he tells me, by the royal frigate Downs, its crew transferred to a capital ship bound for the American patrol, and then sent aboard the Wallabout hulks.”
“Won’t our people in France dispatch another courier once they learn of The Angel’s capture?”
“There isn’t time, damn it. For the loss of two words, a campaign is in jeopardy.”
“Two words? Oh, forgive me—” I feigned humility “—that would be a breach of security.”
“Stop cavilling. It’s a code system I worked out for Franklin’s use in sending messages to Congress. Four proposals were presented at the Quai d’Orsay, but only Franklin and the courier know which one was accepted. Two damned words!”
“Perhaps he will effect an escape.”
“Very few have been successful. The inner Wallabout shoreline is heavily patrolled, and it’s a long exhausting swim to the other side of the river for a man weakened by starvation rations.”
Cork got to his feet, crossed the room to the window, and stared out at the water without seeing it. He was living in his head.
“What do you plan to do, Captain?”
He snapped back to the present, turned to me, and said casually, “I’ll just have to go and fetch him.”
Now there you have Cork in all his simple directness. Waste not one iota of logic on the proposition that, if escape was nigh impossible, so was entry. Mere details have no residence in Cork’s neighborhood.
He sat down at the table again and sipped Apple Knock most of the morning. I kept my silence and waited for that sign I know so well. It came around noon. His blue eyes began to twinkle and he stopped stroking his chin, then his long fingers snapped like a flintlock. He had it! Or thought he had.
He started out of the house and headed toward the small dock that ran out into the water. At its far end was a dilapidated storage shed once used by fishermen for nets and tackle and such. God knows what Cork uses it for — it’s his private preserve and he is strict about its sole use. I threw caution to the winds and followed in his wake.
He seemed not to notice me until he reached the shed door and then, to my surprise, he said over his shoulder, “Well, man, don’t dawdle. Time is our enemy.”
I was so shocked by his allowing me into his inner sanctum that its interior was momentarily lost on me. Not for long, however, and when my senses were to rights, they were immediately numbed again.
“Wonder of wonders!” I exclaimed. “What devil’s doing is this?”
There before me was what appeared to be the upright product of some fabulous bird. This fantastic wooden egg, about eight feet high and easily as much around, was banded by iron straps in the barrel-stave manner. From one side projected a rudder-like apparatus; on the other was a corkscrew propeller with another projecting from the top. It looked much the same as Bushnell’s concoction except for a strange paddlewheel affair affixed above the rudder.
“The Turtle!” I cried. “It’s a large version of Bushnell’s submersible.”
“Vastly improved. It’s called The Tortoise.”
So the sly dog was off on his own again, despite Washington’s orders. The original Turtle was the creation of a Connecticut gadgeteer named David Bushnell, who had the ingenious idea of affixing mines to the bottom of enemy ships with a detachable auger device. On September sixth back in ’76, Washington approved its use in a daring underwater attack on HMS Eagle. This 64-gunner was singled out because it was the flagship of Admiral Lord Howe. It was hoped that both the Eagle and old Black Dick himself would go to the bottom. It failed for a number of reasons — mostly because of an inexperienced diver and an auger that couldn’t penetrate the Eagle’s hull. After two more failures, Washington abandoned the idea.