Sion Crossing (16 page)

“Indeed?” Latimer acknowledged her memory politely. That she was no Civil War expert herself was reassuring, even though it precluded further questions about the historical details in the papers. But maybe that was also just as well; and, in any case, he was much more interested in the more recently deceased than in the old dead of Rock Island … And even more interested in the living, who would by now be jetting somewhere between Paris and Rome on his whirlwind European fact-finding tour.

But she was looking at him questioningly.

“Yes … well—” He sorted quickly through what little he knew about ‘dad’, which amounted to little more than
governmental service, long illness
and this diversion from Iowan military history to a mystery at Sion Crossing “—your father was obviously a considerable scholar. But … I’d guess … not a professional historian?”

“No. But the Civil War had always been his hobby, for as long as I can remember.” Her expression, although well-controlled, hinted at a mixture of happy and sad recollections. “I used to visit him … not very often. But we went on trips—mostly to places I don’t remember. Except Gettysburg, once.”

“Gettysburg.” Even before his crash transatlantic course in the Civil War, by courtesy of Penguin Books and Professor Bruce Catton, Latimer had heard of Gettysburg: Abraham Lincoln had made a speech at the war cemetery there, which had been poorly received at the time and immortal thereafter. “Of course. ‘Government of the people, by the people, for the people’.”

“Yes.” She drew a breath. “He read that to me there. He wanted me to learn it by heart. He said every American should know it.”

“And did you?” She was softening up nicely.

“Did I heck! Not then—” She caught herself. “Oliver … learning speeches on holiday—and touring old battlefields … maybe that’s okay for little boys, but it surely doesn’t wow little girls, I tell you!” She cocked her eye at him. “You don’t have any little girls by any chance?”

“Perish the thought!” The question caught him by surprise. “Neither little nor big—I’m not a married man—” In his turn he caught himself: to be a middle-aged bachelor these days invited the worst sort of suspicion in some people, which those words would seem to confirm. “Not that I’m against either variety—quite the contrary—
absolutely
the contrary … But I do see that … ah … battlefields might not be to every little girl’s taste. No—” Out of nowhere he remembered suddenly that David Audley had once boasted irritatingly of how much his daughter enjoyed being dragged across battlefields, and through castles and abbeys. Damn the man! And damn the daughter!

“You’ve just remembered one,” said Lucy.

Latimer blinked. “One what?”

“Little girl.” She gazed at him sadly. “She must be remarkable. But I wasn’t.”

Grr
! thought Latimer. “I was thinking more of her father, actually.” He sweetened his face to contradict his feelings.

“A friend of yours?”

“A colleague.” He experienced a curious mixture of guilt and exultation. Audley would have enjoyed this little job, for it fitted him like a glove. And it should have been his, too! But for once he had taken something that was Audley’s.

“But you like him—I can see that.” She misread his smile wonderfully.

“He’s a remarkable man.” The unpalatable truth quite suddenly offered him an undeserved reward. “In fact, he’s probably rather like your father was—a natural scholar in the government service.” That made the next question equally natural. “What did your father do in the government service, exactly?”

She waved a slender hand. “Oh … something in research—something to do with selecting people for voluntary service overseas I think. One of these Washington agencies with lots of letters spelling a word that isn’t in the dictionary—I never could get the hang of it. But he was darn good at it … until he got sick.”

Latimer experienced a pang of disappointment. It was no good, that avenue: either she knew better, but wasn’t telling, or she didn’t know, and couldn’t tell. Yet there was still a far more intriguing question remaining which she could answer, and by wrapping it up inside an unimportant one he was perfectly placed to ask it quite innocently.

“Yes, I know just the sort of thing you mean.” He nodded as though satisfied, and then gestured to the Sion Crossing papers. “And those tell me that he was good at whatever he did. There’s nothing like a man’s research notes for revealing the quality of his mind—it’s like listening to him thinking.”

She gave him a pathetically grateful look.

“Yes.” He was encouraged to lay on the praise to an extra thickness. After all, apart from the gratitude it would undoubtedly inspire, it was substantially well-deserved: if the man could achieve this in the extremity of a terminal illness, he must have been quite something in his prime. “He had a keen mind, did your father.” That was thick enough, coming from a stranger; anything more might be disbelieved, for although she was vulnerable where her dead father was concerned, she wasn’t stupid. “And this … was part of your inheritance, was it?”

“Not part of it.” She swayed, giraffe-like. “Poor old Dad … he didn’t have much to leave. He just had his pension … and he felt bad about that. Although, heaven only knows—Mother was loaded, and Tom wouldn’t touch a cent of that, naturally … And he’s always trying to give me more.” She smiled wanly. “So this was all of it, Oliver. The family fortune—if I could find it, you might say.”

That was perfect, thought Latimer, inflating “Tom” to the man he had met in the Oxbridge, the Chairman of the President’s new defence committee, for whose favour he had come all this way; she had led him to that crucial question herself.

“Yes, I can understand that, too.” He nodded understandingly. “It’s the same with us. ‘On Her Majesty’s Service’ is not exactly the quickest route to treasure on earth … so he tried to find a short-cut for you.” He smiled at her, only slightly discomforted by that familiar twinge of self-knowledge and self-contempt. “‘Tom’ being your step-father, I take it? But how did he come into this?”

She looked at him doubtfully.

“You don’t have to tell me if it’s private.” He shook his head. “I’ve no axe to grind—this is just a favour I’m doing him, and it’s none of my business. So you can trust me—but, by the same token, I don’t need to know everything, if it’s private.”

If that didn’t fix the hook, nothing would!

“It’s just … he knew … Dad knew, towards the end, that he wasn’t going to be able to unravel everything, you see.” She pointed to the papers. “It’s not all there, is it?”

Latimer considered the papers in their neat piles, and then thought for a moment. “Well … not quite, perhaps.” He could put the whole thing together much better now, he realized: the man had not been mobile, and correspondence was no substitute for face-to-face interrogation. But, much more important than that, he must have been dogged by the fear that he would betray what he was really seeking to his correspondents—

“Not quite.” Suddenly he looked at her with a brand-new certainty. He had written memoranda to intelligence sections, and departments, and agencies, dogged by exactly the same fear—that they would be prematurely alerted to his line of investigation. “But the signposts are there, sure enough.”

“They are?” She frowned. “But … but, Oliver—all those questions—about the division of Georgia counties, and how the volunteer units were raised in the Civil War—? And all that nonsense?”

Latimer grinned, and turned to the table to find the sorted pile of material which he regarded as important, in which the specks of gold glinted in the midst of rubbish.

There it was—
Rabbit-trap, Bear-hug, Hound-dog, Sugar-tit, Wolfskin
— “places holding court are generally called ‘law-grounds’”—and the Wolfskin Rifles, the 184th Georgia Volunteers, had boasted that they pinched their sweethearts’ cheeks until they squeaked, and took their liquor straight, and chewed tobacco with the right jaw, and could beat a negro at double-shuffle, and ate red pepper for breakfast and drank gunpowder for supper.

And much more. Starting from those exhaustive lists of Iowan regiments and musterings and personnel, the author had appeared to march southwards, following his Iowans through sickness and health as well as skirmishes and battles and sieges—Arkansas Post and Shiloh, Corinth and Vicksburg, Snake Creek Gap and Kennesaw Mountain, Ezra Church and Lovejoy Station—until the veteran survivors and replacements had finally massed in the ruins of Atlanta for Sherman’s bombing raid on the Confederacy, the march to the sea.

But by then the researcher’s interest seemed to have expanded to embrace not only the whole of Sherman’s army, but also the motley Georgia state militia which was now all that opposed them—an immense pile of facts, out of which in the end the tiny vital clues about the Sion Crossing had naturally surfaced here and there; which had first trapped his interest accidentally, and then roused his curiosity more as he extracted them and united them together, and finally had taken over the whole book, like a cuckoo in the nest.

Well … that was what he had thought until a moment ago,
but he had been wrong
!

Sion Crossing had been the beginning and the end of the whole thing, and everything else had been an elaborate blind designed to deceive his scholarly correspondents, and anyone else who might look at all this research without the one vital piece of knowledge which the author had bequeathed to his daughter—that, in the hijacking and dispersal of the loot,
the best part of it had been overlooked and abandoned
!

Latimer squinted at the papers in his hand, and wondered if he himself would have come to that exact conclusion if he hadn’t known from the start what he was looking for.

Would he?
He had to be honest with himself about this—

“Oliver?” Lucy was tired of being stared at.

“I’m sorry. I was just thinking.” He tried to focus on her, but the question nagged at him.

“Thinking about what?” She was being more polite to him than she would have been to most people, in different circumstances, he decided.

“About your father.” He would have got it in the end, given a lot more time, because that was what he was trained to do, but also because his mind worked that way, and because he liked doing what he was doing.

“What about my father?” She was nearly at the end of her tether of politeness.

“He worked for your Central Intelligence Agency—or the Federal Bureau … didn’t he?” Since this wasn’t a matter of state security, American or British, he could be honest with her without indiscretion.

That made her frown—as well she might, whether she was very clever, and wanted to deceive him, or not so clever, and knew no better.

“I don’t know.” She thought for a moment. “But—maybe he did … I don’t know, Oliver.”

That sounded like honesty. And she had no reason to be dishonest, that he could imagine—not when her step-father was involved. For he would never involve the British in any sort of security indiscretion: that was the real safeguard and guarantee in this curious affair.

“But I know. Because I know what he was trying to do now—and how he was trying to do it.” He lifted the papers in his hand, and then put them back on the desk. “Because I would have done the same, I suppose … But I still can’t really work out where your step-father comes in, that’s all.” Holding to the objective was what it was all about, not simply in peace and war but in life itself. Everything else was self-indulgence.

She studied him with a strange intentness. “I think … I think maybe you won’t like it, Oliver.”

Latimer thought that, if she thought that, she was probably right. But he was committed now. “Try me.”

“All right.” She nerved herself to it. “Dad knew this man—this Englishman … He worked with him, in the old days, you see …” She trailed off, with the slightest shade of extra colour touching her well-made-up cheek-bones. But, of course, an ex-model would know how to apply all that stuff they put on their faces—

And then,
of course and of course and of course
, he knew what she was trying to say!

“David Audley?”

“Yes.” The well-made-up cheek twitched. “Dad didn’t actually
like
him—he said he was an arrogant bastard—a big clever arrogant bastard …”

“Yes?” That was a very fair description of David Audley, as economical as it was accurate.

“But he said he was good—” she baulked momentarily “—good at his job, and good at finding things.”

Also accurate. “Yes?”

“Yes.” She swallowed. “And he also owed Dad a favour, apparently.”

If that was accurate it was interesting. But it still rang true: Audley was a great one for favours, it was very much how he operated. And, after all, that was how he himself was operating now, however belatedly.

She indicated the papers. “Dad wanted him to take them over. He knew … he knew I couldn’t make anything out of them—which is true. But … he wasn’t
sure
Audley would help me—” her eyes widened “—do you see?”

Latimer saw, and to the uttermost part. Although this was exactly the sort of conundrum which would have tempted Audley, that in itself might not have been enough, particularly since the man had been in hot water more than once for indulging his private curiosities in defiance of the rules. It had been the prospect of doing the Chairman of the Atlantic Defence Committee a favour which had made it at once respectable and irresistible to them both.

“Yes, I do see.” He nodded. “Your father suggested you should enlist your step-father.”

“Right. He knew Tom was the chairman-elect of this new committee. And that meant a European trip pretty soon, with all the hassle over there about the new missiles, he said.” She paused. “And … well, he knew Tom wouldn’t refuse me, once he was sure it was all above board—not illegal, or anything. And he said Audley wouldn’t refuse Tom.”

Latimer nodded again. That was the final reassurance, on which he’d relied from the start even without knowing all this. And presumably it had only been because the Senator was perhaps a little sensitive about mentioning his wife’s first husband—the more so if that man was ex-CIA—that he’d been inhibited from complete frankness in London.