“Well, it’s not flying exactly—”
“Ah, thank you kindly in any case, Mr. Jeffries. But I don’t think I will.”
Jeffries nodded.
“But would you be so kind — you stopped at a meeting with the Prime Minister. Would you be kind enough to go along?”
Jeffries continued.
Cashel listened and made notes, thinking about the hovercraft. He had never seen one; he had no curiosity to see one. But if Toolin wanted to kill Lord Slough, why did he go to America to do it? Why not take a pop at him at Liverpool with all the mucks about, launching his great new ship?
Absently, Cashel felt in his pocket for his pipe and just as absently filled it. He lit it as Jeffries finished.
“Ah, it’s a puzzle isn’t it, Mr. Jefferies?”
“What, Chief Inspector?”
“How poor old Toolin found his way t’America with him being on the dole fer a year and got himself a shiny new gun in Quebec City t’knock off his Lordship — beggin’ yer pardon. Why, Mr. Jeffries? Why would he go all that way? T’kill a man who is here and will be here?”
Jeffries watched him smoke his pipe. He did not comment.
“It don’t make sense.”
Jeffries nodded.
They sat then in silence, sipping tea and claret, and waited for Lord Slough’s leisure.
The thing shuddered into life, whining and then howling until the cold dawn stillness was shattered into a million irretrievable pieces of echo. Shaking and screaming like a beast in rage.
The man they called Captain Donovan, though he was not a captain, stood on the apron which led gently down into the Mersey. Forty feet away from him, the beast shook and roared. Donovan wore special ear protectors because of the sound.
The immense hovercraft finally lifted itself off its dry pod and struggled into the water. But she was no more at home there; the waves beat back from her giant fans as though terrified; the giant propellers on her stacks created a gale across the enclosed deck which splashed into the water behind, leaving a trough of depression. Then it began to move more quickly, bellowing with rage, plunging into the white-capped foam of the gray, sickly Irish Sea.
Donovan smiled. His heart almost felt light. He loved the beast, loved the ungainly beauty of it that was no ship’s beauty or no airplane’s beauty but the beauty of monumental rage. It was Donovan’s rage, too; he bellowed with the craft as it tore into the sea and turned back the waves from its bow.
She turned sharply beyond the harbor wall and headed back toward the apron. Thump, thump, thump over the breasts of the waves, shaking and screaming in the wind — louder than the wind, and that made Donovan cheer her. Oh beauty, he thought. Oh beauty.
It was the second week of trials.
There had been problems with the steering mechanism at first, but Donovan — as engineer — had finally found the trouble in a pair of loose bolts along the shaft.
They had taken her out every day and every night, into every sea there was. She had even bucked the force-ten winds two days before. The waves had crashed into the breakwater of the harbor at heights of ten feet, but the Brianna, with its newer design, had cut into them and ridden above them, smoothing them down to manageable size so that the forward speed could be maintained.
And what speed.
He watched her now, cutting into the empty harbor faster than a motorboat, her great fan propellers chopping at the air.
She would be ready December first.
In a Liverpool warehouse, there were two cases of gelignite, waiting to be cargoed aboard the Brianna.
Everything was perfect, including the craft.
No, beauty, no, we won’t hurt ye. We’ll collect our ransom and we’ll take ye t’Dublin and we’ll be gone. I’ll miss ye, beauty, but we won’t hurt ye.
He crooned to the craft bearing down on him and on the apron. He had never felt such love before, for any ship he had sailed or for any man or any woman; the others laughed at her, hated her, hated her cowlike clumsiness. Captain George. He said it wasn’t a proper ship. Bloody English bastard. Not a proper ship. She was more.
Almost anticlimactically, the craft lifted itself on the apron and settled down on its bottom like a lady adjusting her skirt. The whining of the engines cooled down; the wind suddenly shrieked louder.
She would be ready. In time. That was nearly certain. Donovan pulled off his ear protectors and listened to the wind and the whisper of the craft’s dying howl. She stopped shaking. Donovan started across the apron to her.
They would all be ready. In time.
Green stood at the window and watched the first snow fall on the narrow street beyond the window of Blake House. He had no idea that the snow was coming too early for London’s climate. He only knew it sparked a remembrance within him.
He had loved the snow when he was a boy in Ohio. But that snow had been very different from the polite English snow now falling slowly and picturesquely on the slanted roofs of the London houses: This snow was like the snow in paperweights, which seemed to fall almost with majesty. The Ohio snows were life-killing, blinding, gouging snows, shivering down the streets, coming in the blackness of night, blowing across two thousand miles of flatland before they struck. And yet, the savagery of it had thrilled him when he was a child.
Green turned from the window as the housekeeper entered the library.
“It’s the Section,” she announced. She was an unpleasant woman with an unpleasant face and a bad odor; Green nodded and went past her, out of the book-lined room, into the soundproof room where the double scrambler sat in a black box.
He picked up the telephone. The voice from Washington came through the double scrambler, faintly at first.
“I can’t hear you,” Green said.
“Is this better?”
“Yes, thanks.”
“Damned thing.” Hanley’s annoyed voice came over clearly.
Green nodded and was quiet. Idly, he wondered if it was time yet to have a drink. He had become very careful about that recently. He wouldn’t drink before noon. Then he would go out of the house, to the club. Quietly. Away from that old woman who undoubtedly spied on him as he spied on her. It was all routine, all for the reports that were sent back to the Section every month.
“We haven’t heard from our man in Ulster.”
Green said, “Nothing at this end.”
“Damn him.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I want a call as soon as he makes contact.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Not a word?”
“Is he supposed to contact me? The house?”
“I don’t know. We didn’t make that clear. He hasn’t contacted anyone. He had requested information, we sent it by open cable. We know he received it. Or someone received it. I don’t want to call that hotel. On an open line. Why doesn’t he make contact?”
Green stared at the black box before him. “Perhaps there’s been difficulty.”
“Yes,” said Hanley. “Perhaps. But everything’s botched now with—” Pause. “Well, Green. Dammit. I want immediate contact from you when he makes—” Another pause. Green smiled. He knew that Hanley did not want to say “contact” a second time. Finally: “When he makes contact.” Green continued to grin. What a fool Hanley was.
Replacing the receiver finally, Green sat for a while, staring at the telephone and the black box. He conjured up the image of Devereaux in his mind, and wondered what Hanley meant by “botched.”
When he left the room, he closed the door and then automatically gave it a tug, to make certain it locked. The old grandfather clock in the hall began its song for noon: First the sixteen notes of the Westminster chimes and then a pause and the faintest of clicks and then the first bell struck and the second and the third…