"No, what?" Jake rasped.
"No to all your demands," Voorhis answered. "President Smith has made his position very clear. He does not intend to change it. The United States will not return any further territory ceded to us by the CSA. You agreed to abide by plebiscites and to make no more demands. You have broken your agreement. The president does not consider you trustworthy enough for more negotiations, and he will yield no more land. That is final."
"Oh, it is, is it?" Jake said.
"Yes, it is." The U.S. ambassador stuck out his chin and gave back a stony glare.
Featherston only shrugged. "Well, he'll be sorry for that. As for you, Ambassador, I'm going to give you your walking papers. As of right now, you are what they call persona non grata here. You have twenty-four hours to get the hell out of my country, or I'll throw you out on your ear."
Voorhis started to say something, then checked himself. After a moment's pause for thought, he resumed: "I was going to tell you you couldn't do me a bigger favor than sending me back to the United States. But I'm afraid you're doing no favors to millions of young men in your country and mine who may be shooting at each other very soon."
"That's not my fault," Jake said in a flat, hard voice. "If President Smith was ready to be reasonable about what I want-"
"My ass," Jerry Voorhis said, which was not the usual diplomatic language. Maybe he thought the rules changed for expelled ambassadors. Maybe he was right. His bluntness made Jake blink. And he went on, "If the president gave you everything you say you want, you'd just say you wanted something else. That's how you are." He didn't bother hiding his bitterness.
And he was right. Featherston knew it perfectly well. Knowing it and admitting it were two different beasts. He pointed toward the door. "Get out."
"My pleasure." As Voorhis turned to go, he added, "You can start a war whenever you please. If you think you can end one whenever you please, you're making a big mistake."
Jake thought about saying something like, We'll see about that. He didn't. The damnyankee could have the last word here. Who got the last word once the balloon went up-that would be a different story.
An hour later, the telephone rang in his office. "Featherston," he snapped.
"Mr. President, the ambassador to the USA is on the line," his secretary said. "He sounds upset."
"Put him through, Lulu." Jake could guess what the ambassador was calling about.
The Confederate ambassador to the United States was a Georgian named Russell. Jake never remembered his Christian name. All he remembered was that the man was reasonably smart and a solid Freedom Party backer. When he heard Featherston's voice on the line, he blurted, "Mr. President, the damnyankees are throwing me out of the country."
"Don't you worry about it," Jake answered. "Don't you worry about it one little bit, on account of I just heaved Jerry Voorhis out of Richmond."
"Oh." Russell sounded relieved, at least for one word. But then he said, "Holy Jesus, Mr. President, is there gonna be another war?"
"Not if we get what we want," Featherston said. "Get what's ours by rights, I ought to say." As far as he was concerned, there was no difference between the one and the other.
"All right, then, Mr. President. I'll see you back there soon," Russell said. "I sure as hell hope everything goes the way you want it to."
"It will." Jake never had any doubts. Why should I? he thought. Everything's always gone good up till now. It won't change. He spent a few more minutes calming the ambassador down, then hung up the phone on him.
No sooner had he done that than Lulu poked her head into his office and said, "General Potter is here to see you, sir."
"Is he?" Jake grinned. "Well, send him right on in."
"Good morning, Mr. President," Clarence Potter said, saluting. He carried a manila folder under his left arm. Tossing it onto Featherston's desk, he went on, "Here are some of the latest photographs we've got."
"Out-fucking-standing!" Jake said, which produced an audible sniff from Lulu in the outer office. "These are what I want to see, all right. If you have to, you'll walk me through some of them."
Some of the pictures that Potter brought him were aerial photos. Getting reconnaissance airplanes up over the USA wasn't that hard. Every so often, Featherston wondered how many flying spies the United States had above his own country. Too many, probably. The photographs Potter brought him were neatly labeled, each one showing exactly where and when it had been taken.
"Doesn't look like there's a whole lot of change," Jake remarked. "Everything still seems out in the open."
"Yes, sir," Potter answered.
Something in his tone made Jake's head come up. He might have been a wolf taking a scent. "All right," he said. "What's different in the stuff they don't want us to see?"
He almost laughed at the way Potter looked at him. The Intelligence officer didn't want to respect him, but couldn't help it. Yeah, sonny boy, I run this country for a reason, Jake thought. Potter said, "If you'll look at some of these ground shots, Mr. President, you'll see the Yankees are starting to move up into concealed forward positions. They should have done it sooner, but they are starting."
"How did we get these ground photos back here so fast?" Featherston asked. "Some of 'em are from yesterday morning."
"Sir, we're still at peace with the USA," Potter replied. "If a drummer or a tourist crosses back into Kentucky from Illinois or Indiana or Ohio, who's to say what kind of prints are on his Brownie? They're only just now starting to wake up to the idea that we might really mean this." He couldn't resist adding, "It might have been better if we'd left them even more in the dark."
Nobody criticized Jake Featherston to his face and got away with it. "Listen, Potter," he snapped, "the damnyankees'll get more surprises from me than a fellow does from his doctor after he lays a fifty-cent whore." The other man guffawed in surprise. Jake went on, "You don't know all my business, so don't go making like you do."
He waited to see if Potter would get angry or get sniffy. The other man didn't. Instead, he nodded. "All right. That makes sense. Does anybody know all your secrets? Besides you, I mean?"
"Hell, no," Jake answered automatically. "There are things I could brag about-but I won't." If he hadn't checked himself, he might have started boasting about what was going on down in Louisiana, for instance. But the whole point of knowing things other people didn't was to be able to use what you knew against them and to keep them from using what they knew against you.
Clarence Potter, he saw, got that. Well, Potter was in Intelligence. If anybody could see the point of secrets, he was the man. And he nodded now. "When I first got to know you, you would have run your mouth," he said. "There's more to you than there used to be. That's why I'm here, I expect."
"Instead of still being a goddamn stubborn Whig and wanting to blow my head off, you mean?" Featherston asked.
Potter nodded. He smiled a crooked smile. "Yeah. Instead of that." The smile got wider. Now he was waiting-waiting to find out if Jake would send him off to a camp for admitting it.
And Jake wanted to. But Potter, damn him, had made himself too useful to be jugged like a hare. And from now on he'd be too busy to worry about blowing the head off of anybody who wasn't wearing a green-gray uniform. Jake jerked a thumb at the door. "All right. Get the hell out of here, and take all your pictures of naked women with you."
"Yes, sir." Chuckling, Potter scooped up the folder of reconnaissance photos and started out. He paused with his hand on the doorknob. "Good luck," he said. "You've done everything you could to get us ready, but we'll still need it."
"I'll put in a fresh requisition with the Quartermaster Corps," Jake said. Potter nodded and left. Jake shook his head in bemusement. He might have made stupid jokes like that with Ferd Koenig and a couple of other old-time Party buddies, but not with anybody else. So why make them with Potter?