“I didn’t think we’d learn anything much there,” Kathleen said as Sergeant Kittridge drove her, Bushell, and Sam Stanley back to the William and Mary.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Bushell answered thoughtfully. “I found out a thing or two about myself, which is worth doing.”
“Ah, but will it help you solve the case?” Stanley asked.
Bushell made a sour face. “That’s another question altogether, worse luck for me.”
RAM headquarters and the streets of Victoria and Georgestown by day. The glittering social whirl of the embassy circuit by night. A little sleep, stretched by endless cups of tea and coffee and a great fragrant bonfire of cigars. A dot on the newsprint Atlantic, moving inexorably closer to the Chesapeake Bay and the capital.
“They’re a step ahead of us, maybe two,” Bushell said wearily, pouring milk into yet another cup of Irish Breakfast. “We’ve only got a couple of days left, and they’re still ahead of us.”
“No ransom demand yet,” said Samuel Stanley, whose own cup of tea sat gently steaming in front of him. He shook his head. “When you haven’t got much in the way of good news, you look hard for the silver lining, don’t you?”
“That you do.” Bushell sipped at his tea. “Maybe they won’t ransom it after all. Maybe they’ll pour paraffin on it in front of America’s Number Ten and light it off. Or in front of the All-Union Art Museum, say, when His Majesty’s in there giving his address in front of a blank wall.”
“What a horrid idea,” Kathleen said. She didn’t have a desk in the office she shared with the two RAMs; Sir Horace took the position that granting her such a boon would in some way force him to recognize that she was there. Bushell had liberated a table no one seemed to be using. She had papers piled high on it. Sir Horace, in his mercy, had not complained about her using official Royal American Mounted Police foolscap and pencils.
The telephone on Bushell’s desk rang. He tensed. Any message right now was liable to be bad news. Maybe the Sons of Liberty wanted their fifty million pounds after all. He picked up the handset. “Hullo, Bushell here.”
“Colonel Bushell? This is Operator Perkins, down in Communications. I have a long-distance call for you from New Liverpooclass="underline" a Captain Macias. Shall I ring him through, sir?”
“By all means.” Bushell covered the mouthpiece with his hand and spoke to Sam and Kathleen: “It’s Macias.” Both of them showed the same relief Bushell felt. No ransom demand, not yet, nor news even worse.
After a couple of clicks and a loud pop, Jaime Macias came on the line. Across a continent and a static-filled telephone line, his excitement came through loud and clear: “We’ve got him, Tom! We dropped on the villain not half an hour ago. And with everything we found when we did, Mr. Zachariah James Fenton will hang higher than Haman.”
“By God!” Bushell said. He spoke again to his colleagues. “He’s pinched the villain who shot Tricky Dick.” Kathleen let out a war whoop; Stanley slammed his hand down on his desk, making a noise like a gunshot. Through the racket, Bushell returned to the telephone: “You have the weapon, too?”
“We have a Nagant we think is the weapon, at any rate,” Macias said. “Ballistics will let us know about that before long: before the day is out, with luck. But that’s not half - that’s not a tenth part - of all we have.”
“Tell me,” Bushell urged, but then broke in before Macias could speak. “No. Wait. Let me guess. You’ve got boxes with lots more Nagants in them, enough Russian roubles to start up what would be about the third-largest bank in New Liverpool, and maybe, if God is kinder to us than He has been lately, a proved connection to the Okhrana. Stinking Russians - “
“Exactly what I was expecting to find when we served the warrant and made the arrest,” Captain Macias said. “Not exactly what we found, though. No, not exactly.” He sounded like a stage magician distracting his audience with a clever line of patter so they’d be surprised when he pulled a rabbit out of his hat.
“All right, Jaime, I’ll bite,” Bushell said, willing to be surprised. “What exactly did you find?”
Over the wire, he heard shuffling-paper noises; Macias was going to tell him exactly what he’d found. The New Liverpool constable said, “We found ... let me see . . . forty-eight Lebel revolvers, thirty-five Eibar revolvers, and twenty-seven Astra Modelo 200 pistols, each with its appropriate ammunition in large quantities - I’m assuming you don’t need the precise number of boxes and rounds for each, or I would give them to you. We also found twenty-nine Lebel military rifles with bayonets and three Chauchat light military machine guns, again with large quantities of the cartridges those two weapons share.”
“You found enough for a small war - no, a medium-sized war,” Bushell said, almost dazed. “And all Franco-Spanish stuff?” He scratched his head. “That doesn’t fit in with anything else we’ve turned up.”
“Everything in that house but for the one Nagant and the unexpended rounds in its magazine is from the Holy Alliance,” Macias said. “And I’m not done with the list, either. In gold and silver currency, we found the sum of £219,827,15 shillings, ninepence, ha’penny, most of said currency being in the form of livres d’or or pesos: again, from the Franco-Spanish Empire.”
“Two hundred twenty thousand pounds?” Bushell let out a low whistle. Sam Stanley jerked in his seat and stared at him. Kathleen sprang to her feet. Bushell waved her down - by the sound of things, Macias still wasn’t through. “What else have you got?”
“Subversive literature in large quantities, both the usual sort the Sons turn out and some in Spanish calling on people who’ve come to New Liverpool from the Franco-Spanish provinces of Nueva España to rise and restore the land to its rightful owners and the true faith - “
“I wouldn’t have thought you’d find both those kinds of documents in the same house,” Bushell observed.
“I wouldn’t have thought it, either, but find them I did,” Macias said. With the air of a man producing a fifth ace, he said, “And I also found 943 pounds, 8% ounces of purified extract of coca leaf, number one quality, shipped into the NAU in sealed coffee tins from the province of Nueva Granada.”
“Haifa ton of coca extract?” Bushell whistled again. So did Stanley, the second he heard. “That’s enough to keep half the coca-sniffers in New Liverpool happy for - a long time, anyway.” Some people used coca extract like snuff, the only trouble being that it wasn’t mild like snuff, and had been illegal in the NAU since the early days of the twentieth century. Coca-sniffers would pay through the nose to get it, though, which probably explained a lot of the money Macias had found.
“Half a ton,” Macias confirmed. “And all the firearms. . . I’ve never imagined the Sons having such good connections with the Holy Alliance. They . . aren’t usually what you’d call fond of Franco-Spaniards in general and Nuevespañolans in particular. I’m not fond of them, either,” he added. Bushell wondered whether he was speaking as a constable or as a man of Nuevespañolan blood. That didn’t matter. What did matter was the news Macias had. “Anything else?” Bushell asked.
“Nothing yet,” Macias answered. “Fenton and his common-law wife are denying everything at the top of their lungs - they had no notion any of that stuff was in the house, they say.” The constabulary captain snorted. “They won’t convince a jury with that tale, not for a minute they won’t. But so far they’re refusing to say anything till they’ve spoken with a solicitor, and we’re going to hold them for the full legal forty-eight hours before we let them do that. If they do decide to open up while we’re grilling them, you’ll be the first outside New Liverpool to hear.”