I had seen enough.
I stood up.
I turned my back on all that.
The air smelled faintly of malt.
Nearby was a stack of barley straw bales.
Stockman’s bomb was dead.
But that was all I knew for sure.
61
By reckoning from the verging sun, whose disk I glimpsed briefly through a scrim of clouds, I struck out to the southeast. At one point early on, I skirted a copse of pine but I diverted into the trees. I found a downed and rotted trunk and stuffed the parachute into a hollow beneath it.
It felt to be a long while because of the uncertainty of my path and the fading light, but in fact I made pretty good time to a stone wall at the eastern edge of a pasturage, beyond which I found a graveled road.
I followed it south, though it was angling me back to the southwest, and I ended up walking into the little town of Liebour, where a crowd had gathered around its central fountain in the town square.
They’d assembled half a dozen wagons and were calling out for volunteers to board them.
I knew what this was about.
The nearby calamity.
They were heading to the place of the crash.
I figured the active gas was dissipating, but they would find clear evidence of the phosgene.
I stayed back from the crowd, striding with purpose around the outer edge of the square. Those who noticed me started and stared or shrunk back or saluted.
I ignored them and pushed on, and I reached the road sign leading away from Liebour. I was very glad to recognize two choices. One to Uckendorf, from which I could find the road east toward Spich that passed half a mile from the air base. The other choice, which angled farther east, led to Stockem. I’d studied Jeremy’s portfolio of maps well enough in our long trip to remember this town lying on the same Uckendorf-Spich road but closer to Spich. A shortcut.
I struck off in that direction, walking fast, and thinking hard, now that I knew where I was going. I tried to figure out why Jeremy had arranged for Stockman’s bomb to succeed. Which raised the question of why he did so with such an elaborate first two acts in his little play, their elaborateness difficult to explain.
I didn’t have an answer for that. Not right away.
I knew only that something was rotten.
And it occurred to me: maybe the explanation was not quite so difficult if our Erich Müller — stage name Jeremy Miller — was working for the German secret service. Not so difficult if they approved the attack but wanted Stockman out of the picture. Albert had control of his bombshell design, and maybe part of his selling price was for him to be directly involved in the mission. All this drama could have been intended to deflect Stockman and still use his device to attack London. They could blame the American secret service, in cahoots with the Brits. And with Jeremy appearing to help in such an elaborate way — secretly setting up the failure of the British-American plan at the last minute, with the simple failure of the time bomb to be blamed — he would effectively preserve his own central secret, that this dynamic English secret service agent was, in fact, an agent for the German secret service. The rococo acts one and two were the solution.
Was I thinking clearly?
It all seemed very complex.
But what seemed simple was the logical end of Act Three of this play. The Germans wanted Stockman alive. Of course. He was a member of Parliament, after all. Inside eyes and ears. If they’d wanted him dead, this would have been a much simpler play. Jeremy had never intended to let me kill Stockman. He was going to have to prevent that now. And through Jeremy, the Germans knew that my mother was also an American spy. They knew it from the outset. So in the climax of Act Three — for a German audience very satisfying in its Aristotelian inevitability — we would have a poisoned London and two dead American agents.
I was afraid one of them was dead already.
62
I hit the macadam road from Spich to Uckendorf with the light beginning to dim. I turned east and pressed on and soon the land to the south of the road was denuded of crop and tree and animal. The air base’s thousand acres. A wire fence took up, and then, ahead at last, was the stand of birch. I turned in at the road leading to the hangar and entered the trees.
With the light fading and the Torpedo’s camouflage working, I was stopped cold at my first glance ahead. I thought the car was gone. But I stepped and stepped again, looking more closely, and there it was and I rushed to it.
I opened the driver’s side door.
Upon the seat lay a Luger.
I pulled back.
Before I could even start to think rationally about this, Jeremy’s voice said, “It’s mine.”
I spun around.
He was standing only a few paces away.
His hands were raised. As if I were holding a pistol on him.
I wasn’t. I put my hand to my own Luger, but he was not moving and he even lifted his hands higher. I did not draw.
“I have no other weapon,” he said.
I looked at him closely. He was still buttoned up tight as a German officer.
He nodded down to his tunic. “They don’t make provisions for concealed weapons, do they.”
I said nothing.
“You did it,” he said.
“You sound surprised,” I said.
“As you know.”
“As I know,” I said. I drew my own Luger now. Calmly, slowly.
I pointed it at the center of his chest.
“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised,” he said. “They all think highly of you in London and Washington, and I could see why all along.”
“They think highly of you too,” I said. “In London and Berlin.”
“No,” Jeremy said, instantly and ardently. “Not Berlin. Not the way you mean it.”
In the silence now I pondered his tone. I understood performance. It was the gift of my upbringing. He sounded real.
“Our little bomb,” I said.
“Our little bomb,” he said. “We came to Spich. We took our rooms at the inn. We slept. We ate breakfast and I assembled the bomb. Nothing had changed. It was to go as we both had expected.”
“Your telegram,” I said.
“My telegram.”
He paused.
Okay. True enough so far. But. I said, “It wasn’t the Brits who ordered you to allow the poison gas attack on London.”
Jeremy hesitated. He looked away. Not to prepare for a lie. Not an aversion of the eyes. He flipped his face a little to the side and his mind worked at something and he squared his gaze around to me again. As if I’d slapped him across the face and even though he was a man trained to counterpunch, he accepted it as just.
His hands were still up and he seemed utterly oblivious to the fact. They were natural there.
“Not the Brits,” he said.
“You pulled a Stockman,” I said. “You were the one dropping the gas bomb.” I heard my vehemence. I’d once liked this guy.
He gave a single sharp nod, casting his eyes down.
And then he looked at me straight.
“I work for the English,” he said, “but only when their goals are the same as the goals of my own country. I am German. But the Kaiser is not my country. Hindenburg and Moltke and Falkenhayn are not my country. None of the Kaisers. None of the generals. My Germany wishes to be like your country. A country governed by the people and protecting the people — all the people — from their government and from themselves. A republic.”
I believed he was speaking the truth about himself.
I said, “And what of the people of London tonight?”