Bushell shook his head. “If it’s true, and if she does know, she’ll deny it to her dying day. She thinks the sun rises and sets on Sir Horace. And if we do ask her, it’s sure to get back to Bragg.” He listened to himself in surprise once more. He’d never spoken - he’d never thought - of Sir Horace by his unadorned surname.
“Sir Martin ought to know about this,” Kathleen declared.
“So he should,” Bushell said. “There’s a problem, though. If I ring up America’s Number Ten, or even if I hop in a steamer and go over there, they won’t just escort me into the Green Room or wherever Sir Martin happens to be. I’ll have to get past the top flunky, who happens to be - “
“Sir David Clarke,” Samuel Stanley finished for him.
Kathleen winced, but said, “You’d better do it.”
“You’re right, worse luck,” Bushell said with a sigh, and picked up the telephone. He rang the governor-general’s residence, asked to be connected to Sir Martin Luther King, and, sure enough, found himself talking to Sir David.
“Yes, Colonel?” Clarke said coolly. “I trust this is of some importance?”
“I think so, yes,” Bushell answered, fighting understatement with understatement. In an abstract way, he was tempted to tell Sir David what Irene had told him - Clarke might have worried about Sir Horace Bragg from time to time, but never, Bushell was sure, in that way. But the public good sometimes meant forgoing private pleasure, and so he stuck to business: “I need to speak to Sir Martin at once - I have new evidence about who is, or may have been, leaking information to the Sons of Liberty.”
Sir David Clarke asked the question Bushell had known he would ask: “And that person is -?”
“I’ll tell Sir Martin. I won’t tell you,” Bushell said. Clarke was still a suspect in his own right, which meant that, if Bragg was involved, too, they might have been working together. Alerting Sir Horace was the last thing Bushell wanted.
“You’re going to tell him it’s me,” Sir David said. “No matter what I try to do to convince you I am no traitor, you refuse to believe me, and you carry on this vendetta as if you were from the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, not the NAU. Deny it if you can.”
“I -“ Bushell shut up. Even denying it would have given Sir David enough information to let him draw his own conclusions - if he didn’t reckon the denial an outright lie.
After the silence had stretched for half a minute or so, Clarke said, “Good day, Colonel,” and hung up the telephone.
“I knew this was going to happen. I couldn’t tell him,” Bushell said, recounting the conversation for Samuel Stanley and Kathleen. “I couldn’t. He does remain our principal suspect at the moment.”
“Right now, Chief, I’d say we have two principal suspects,” Stanley remarked.
“And I’d say you may well be right,” Bushell craved a drink. If Sir Horace was in league with the Sons of Liberty, that was a betrayal worse then Irene’s. “But if Bragg is working with the Sons,” Bushell went on, thinking aloud, “why is he so willing to shut up the Russian embassy when the King-Emperor gets into Victoria? I’d worried about him before, but you know that set my mind at ease again.”
“True,” Stanley said, drumming his fingers on the desktop.
“But what if the Russians haven’t got anything to do with the theft of The Two Georges?” Kathleen Flannery said. “I know both of you have been focusing on the Russians since Tricky Dick got shot, but look what they found in the house where they arrested his killer. Maybe the Holy Alliance planted the other evidence to make you look away from France and Spain.”
“Mm - maybe,” Bushell said. “That’s as much as I’d give it.” He glanced over to Sam Stanley, who nodded. Having concentrated so long and hard on the Russian connection, both men were reluctant to abandon it without overwhelming evidence to prove they should.
“Where do we go from here, though?” Stanley said. “We can’t trust Sir Horace, who’s over us, and we can’t trust Sir David, who’s between us and Sir Martin. What does that leave? Not bloody much, if you ask me.”
“Oh yes, it does,” Bushell said. “It leaves us. All right - we can’t trust anybody over us. But I can think of a couple of people here I’d trust: that Major Manchester, for one. The way he jumped on those warrants I pulled out of my briefcase was a joy to watch. Williams, too - the fellow with the beard and the scar. Remember how he wondered about a leak here at RAM headquarters? They’ll know others we can count on, too.”
“Sergeant Kittridge,” Stanley said, his face lighting up. “Always ask a sergeant about officers if you want a straight answer.”
“We’re forming a cabal,” Kathleen said in tones of wonder.
“That’s just what we’re doing,” Bushell said, and picked up the telephone. Major Manchester was the first one to get to the office they were using. Bushell would have been surprised had it worked out otherwise - Manchester, whose Christian name proved to be Walter, seemed to rush headlong into everything he did. He fidgeted impatiently when he had to wait for his two colleagues to arrive.
Sergeant Kittridge (his first name, Bushell learned on asking, was Ted) arrived next. Whatever he was thinking, his face showed none of it. Bushell wouldn’t have wanted to play cards against him. He took out a cigar case, used his eyebrows to get permission from Kathleen Flannery, and lit up a cheroot so vile that Bushell wished she hadn’t granted it.
A minute or so later, Major Williams walked in. He nodded to Ted Kittridge, whom he evidently knew well, and introduced himself as Micah to Major Manchester. Then he rounded on Bushell, asking, “Well, what’s all this?”
Bushell got up and shut the door before answering. That bit of theatrics earned him stares from all three newcomers. Then he borrowed Kathleen Flannery’s word: “This, gentlemen, is a cabal.”
More stares. Walter Manchester found his tongue first: “What kind of cabal?”
“One to get The Two Georges back in spite of everything,” Bushell answered.
“What’s everything?” Williams asked, at the same time as Manchester was saying, “Why do we need a cabal for that?” Sergeant Kittridge, who spoke as if he had to pay a shilling for every word he used, stood quietly, smoking and listening.
Bushell explained, telling the Victoria RAMs of the evidence that pointed toward Sir David Clarke Williams already knew some of that - and what he’d just learned about Sir Horace Bragg. As he set it out before strangers, it seemed much less substantial than it had when he was hashing it over with Sam and Kathleen. He finished, “As far as I can see, we can’t trust either one of them. Let’s go on as if they weren’t there anymore and do this job the way we know it ought to be done.”
He waited. Having thrown the dice, he had no idea what he’d do if they turned up a losing number. After three of the longest heartbeats of his life, Major Manchester said, “I’m with you, Colonel. When you came up with those warrants after the judges had gone to chambers, I knew you were somebody who could get things done.”
“Count me in, too,” Micah Williams said. “That operation we ran against the Sons last week - that was a shame and disgrace, nothing else but. And we’ve just been running around since. If we can’t do better than this, we don’t deserve to find The Two Georges.” When he frowned, his scar pulled one corner of his mouth out in a sinister grimace. “Count me in, but there’s not much time left.”
Everyone looked at Ted Kittridge. The sergeant stubbed out his cheroot, then said, “Captain Higgins and Lieutenant Custine will lend a hand, I expect.”