Though the Zepps would not drop a bomb on Sir Albert’s house, though we were their beacon, their allies, though we were Albert’s big show, my hands pressed hard against the stone of the parapet with a terrible realization. These vast flying machines hammering our way, invisible against the dark and carrying a ton of incendiaries, these were the ghosts of future warfare, death from the sky, death that one day could reach to every home, every parlor, every crib, in every nation on the planet. This was mankind’s fate pounding its way toward us on a moonless night.
All these things were what my hands knew as they clung futilely to a rock.
And now I felt a quick stirring of the air as a dark mass drew very near, its palpable invisibility pressing against my eyes, and I began to lift my face as it came, no more than a hundred yards above where I stood, and it was quick, it was over the beach and then the cliff and then I was looking up, up, and the air was thrashing, sucking the breath from me, and I was looking directly up as the sky vanished in a grimy dark and then a gondola with lit windows slid over me and the engines combusted in my head and the propellers clacked, and the Zeppelin passed over the castle and passed and passed and passed, as long as a steamship on the Atlantic, and the rear gondola drew its lights over me, and I turned to watch, and the flag was lifting a bit in the currents of the Maybachs, as if the Union Jack were actually thinking of waving for this infernal machine. But it was Stockman’s Union Jack, of course.
And the band stopped playing abruptly and there were cries from the green and now another pounding, behind me, and I turned and a second Zeppelin was approaching, slightly to the north, and I could see the lit windows of the commander’s gondola as it passed and I could see figures moving there.
Wind structure and the system of British weather and the path to London along the Thames. This was what Sir Albert Stockman was about. These machines. And the second Zepp droned on by and the orchestra started up playing. I recognized the tune. “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” The song the newspapers all reported the Titanic’s salon orchestra played as the ship sank. Courage is an odd thing. In this case, given the actual circumstances, it could seem a foolish thing, a hysterical thing, a cheap imitation, a grimly ironic joke. Except these boys didn’t know the circumstances. They were trying to calm a crowd’s panic in the face of disaster. It was probably irritating the hell out of Stockman, whose carefully prepared, courageous oratory was being drowned out by some hired musicians stealing his thunder with a hymn.
I needed to rouse myself from all this. The time was right to get downstairs as fast as I could and slip into the crowd during all the uproar.
I crossed the tower, entered the stairwell, circled downward. I caught myself rushing. I couldn’t put haste over caution. I slowed as I neared the bottom platform, made my footfalls soft. I stepped back and away as I pulled open the door from the wardrobe. Gently.
I was glad I did.
I heard voices.
I pocketed my flashlight and drew my Mauser.
Muffled still, these voices. Not moving. I drew back one side of the curtain to the inner darkness of the wardrobe. I did not trust the wooden floorboard to take my weight silently. I leaned in as far as I could, turning my ear to listen.
Martin’s voice.
Jeremy’s voice.
They were both speaking German.
13
The button to release the Mauser’s safety sat right beneath my thumb. I pushed it.
Joe Hunter may have to die so that Kit Cobb has a chance to live. I’ll shoot my way out.
The button and the thought happened instantly, simultaneously, before I could make out the German words being spoken.
Then there was a scuffling of feet.
The voices were closer.
Jeremy said, “You and I are on the same side.”
He’d said the same thing to me, in English. I tried to decide in which language it sounded true.
Martin didn’t seem to be buying it. “Let’s look upstairs,” he said. “Through the wardrobe. Move.”
The words and the tone made it clear he’d disarmed Jeremy and was holding a pistol in his back. If Jeremy was indeed working for the Huns, he was covert enough that Martin hadn’t been apprised. But maybe Jeremy was like me. He had this skill. He knew German. I’d tell the same lie if Albert’s henchman got the drop on me while I was trying to delay him.
I backed out of the curtain, softly slid it shut, closed the door. I went up. Quietly. Quickly. To the tower room? There was nowhere to hide in there. There was no way to take out Martin when they entered without almost certainly losing Jeremy anyway. And Jeremy said not to intervene. I’d promised not to intervene. Rightly, given his mission and mine. But I wasn’t comfortable with that either. Still, the wireless room was a losing hand.
And if Jeremy was telling the truth to Martin about working for the Germans, in the wireless room I’d have to figure that out in some very unpleasant way I could not control.
I went up farther, all the way to the telephone booth — size access enclosure on the roof. I stepped into the space beside the door and listened down the stairway well.
Footsteps on the stairs. No attempt to move quietly.
Martin didn’t seem to expect to find a cohort up here.
He wanted to check to see if anything had been disturbed in the wireless room. Signs that Jeremy had been in there.
Footsteps now on the landing below, a door opening, no sound of a door closing, a muffled shuffling of feet receding into the room, a brief murmuring of voices.
I straightened, leaned back against the stone wall.
If Jeremy was truly working for the Huns, he would’ve done something other than what he did when he’d caught me. He had his pistol in my gut. He sent me on my way. It was his confrontation with Martin that was a problem for him.
I had to assume Jeremy was Buffington’s man.
But there was nothing I could do to help downstairs.
He expected that I was escaping right now, with Martin diverted into the wireless room.
I should have been. But that choice had passed.
If the two went back down the steps from there, I could wait for a time and then slip out. I’d have to let Jeremy manage his own fate, as he’d signed up to do, as he’d insisted I let him do.
Martin clearly had the drop on Jeremy.
I realized how little I actually knew of Buffington’s operation. Or, of course, Stockman’s. Trask probably knew less than he thought, as well. Maybe Stockman had let Jeremy this far into his operation in order to trap him. His fate might already have been sealed.
In which case, Martin could be bringing him to this roof to take care of things. At least to hold him till the crowds went away.
I had no play down the stairs.
I thought of the roof.
I became aware of the wall I was leaning against.
And now voices rose through the stairwell.
“Up we go,” Martin said. In English.
Jeremy didn’t respond.
I unlatched the door to the roof, the sound masked in the clatter of their footsteps, and I stepped out and closed the door behind me. I circled around to my right and pressed my back against the outer wall of the enclosure. I laid my shooting hand against my chest, the Mauser barrel lying upon my heart.
I waited.
The Zeppelins were barely audible now, flying away up the Thames. The crowd was silent. Stockman was probably orating. I just hoped the music would resume.