And from the puzzle of memory, an old, leathery, white-bearded face, the lips opening to whisper: Live free.
He sat up on his haunches and realized then that he had been lying not in his bed but on the cold stone floor before the fireplace. A few embers drowsed in the darkness, waiting to be stirred. He stood up, his body naked and muscular, and walked to the high bay windows that overlooked the wild hills of northern Wales. The March wind was raging beyond the glass, and scattershots of rain and sleet struck the windows before his face. He stared from darkness into darkness, and he knew they were coming.
They had let him alone too long. The Nazis were being forced toward Berlin by a vengeful Soviet tide, but Western Europe-the Atlantic Wall-was still in Hitler’s grip. Now, in this year of 1944, great events were in motion, events with great potential for victory or terrible risks of defeat. And he knew full well what the aftermath of that defeat would mean: a solidified Nazi hold on Western Europe, perhaps an intensified effort against the Russian troops and a savage battle for territory between Berlin and Moscow. Though their ranks had been thinned, the Nazis were still the best-disciplined killers in the world. They could still deflect the Russian juggernaut and surge again toward the capital of the Soviet Union.
Mikhail Gallatinov’s motherland.
But he was Michael Gallatin now, and he lived in a different land. He spoke English, thought in Russian, and contemplated in a language more ancient than either of those human tongues.
They were coming. He could feel them getting nearer, as surely as he sensed the wind whirling through the forest sixty yards away. The world’s tumult was bringing them closer, to his house on this rocky coast that most men shunned. They were coming for one reason.
They needed him.
Live free, he thought, and his mouth curled with the hint of a smile. There was some bitterness in it. Freedom was an illusion, in the shelter of his own house on this stormy land, where the nearest village, Endore’s Rill, lay more than fifteen miles to the south. For him, a great part of freedom was isolation, and he had come to realize more and more, as he monitored the shortwave broadcasts between London and the Continent, listening to the voices speak in codes through the blizzards of static, that the bonds of humanity had chained him.
So he would not refuse them entrance when they arrived, because he was a man and they would also be men. He would listen to what they had to say, might even consider it briefly before he refused. They had come a long way, over rough roads, and he might possibly offer them shelter for the night. But his service to his adopted homeland was done, and now it was up to young soldiers with mud-grimed faces and nervous fingers on carbine triggers. The generals and commanders might bark orders, but it was the young who died carrying them out; that was the way it had been throughout the ages, and in that respect, the future of warfare would never change. Men being what they were.
Well, there was no keeping them away from his door. He could lock the gate, way up at the end of the road, but they would find a way over it, or cut the barbed-wire fence and walk in. The British had a lot of experience in snipping barbed-wire. So it was best just to leave the gate unlocked, and wait for them. It might be tomorrow, or the day after that, or next week. Whenever; he would still be here.
Michael listened to the song of the wild for a moment, his head cocked slightly to one side. Then he returned to the flagstone floor in front of the fireplace, lay down and curled his arms around his knees, and tried to rest.
2
“He picked a damn lonely place to live, didn’t he?” Major Shackleton lit a cigar and cranked down the glossy black Ford’s rear window on his side to let the smoke seep out. The cigar tip glowed red in the gloomy twilight of late afternoon. “You Brits like this kind of weather, huh?”
“I fear we have no choice but to like it,” Captain Humes-Talbot answered. He smiled as politely as he could, his aristocratic nostrils flared. “Or at least accept it.”
“Right.” Shackleton, a United States Army officer with a face like the business end of a battle-ax, peered out at the gray, low clouds and the nasty drizzle. He hadn’t seen the sun for more than two weeks, and the chill was making his bones ache. The elderly, stiff-backed British army driver, separated from his passengers by a glass window, was taking them along a narrow pebbled road that wound between dark, cloud-shrouded crags and stands of thick pine forest. The last village they’d passed, Houlett, was twelve miles behind them. “That’s why you people are so pale,” he went on, like a bulldozer through a tea party. “Everybody looks like a ghost over here. You ever come to Arkansas, I’ll show you a springtime sun.”
“I’m not sure my schedule will allow it,” Humes-Talbot said, and cranked down his window a turn and a half. He was wan and thin, a twenty-eight-year-old staff officer whose closest brush with death had been diving into a Portsmouth ditch as a Messerschmitt fighter screamed past seventy feet overhead. But that had been in August of 1940, and now no Luftwaffe aircraft dared to cross the Channel.
“So Gallatin served with distinction in North Africa?” Shackleton’s teeth were clenched around the cigar, and the stub was wet with saliva. “That was two years ago. If he’s been out of service since then, what makes your people think he can handle the job?”
Humes-Talbot stared at him blankly with his bespectacled blue eyes. “Because,” he said, “Major Gallatin is a professional.”
“So am I, sonny.” Shackleton was ten years the British captain’s senior. “That doesn’t make me able to parachute into France, does it? And I haven’t been sittin’ on my tailbone for the last twenty-four months, I’ll guaran-damn-tee you that.”
“Yes sir,” the other man agreed, simply because he felt he should. “But your… uh… people asked for help in this matter, and since it’s of benefit to both of us, my superiors felt-”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s yesterday’s news.” Shackleton waved the man quiet with an impatient hand. “I’ve told my people I’m not sold on Gallatin’s-excuse me, Major Gallatin’s-record. His lack of field experience, I ought to say, but I’m supposed to make a judgment based on a personal meeting. Which isn’t the way we work in the States. We go by the record over there.”
“We go by the character over here,” Humes-Talbot said, with a bite of frost. “Sir.”
Shackleton smiled faintly. Well, at last he’d gotten a rise out of this stiff-necked kid. “Your secret service might have recommended Gallatin, but that doesn’t swing a shovelful of shit as far as I’m concerned. Pardon my French.” He snorted smoke from his nostrils, his eyes catching a gleam of red. “I understand Gallatin’s not his real name. It used to be Mikhail Gallatinov. He’s a Russian. Right?”
“He was born in St. Petersburg in 1910,” came the careful reply. “In 1934 he became a citizen of Great Britain.”
“Yeah, but Russia’s in his blood. You can’t trust Russians. They drink too much vodka.” He tapped ashes into the ashtray on the back of the driver’s seat, but his aim was off and most of the ash fell on his spit-shined shoes. “So why’d he leave Russia? Maybe he was wanted for a crime over there?”
“Major Gallatin’s father was an army general and a friend of Czar Nicholas the Second,” Humes-Talbot said as he watched the road unreel in the yellow gleam of the headlights. “In May of 1918, General Fyodor Gallatinov, his wife, and twelve-year-old daughter were executed by Soviet party extremists. The young Gallatinov escaped.”
“And?” Shackleton prodded. “Who brought him to England?”
“He came by himself, working aboard a freighter,” the captain said. “In 1932.”