Wood chips flew. He smashed at the frame again, and again. Without warning, he broke through into a hollow cunningly concealed in the very heart of the oak. Wires ran from a timing device to a large sausage of explosive a couple of inches away. He reached in and tore their connections loose. That done, he lifted out the timer. It was based on a small alarm clock. He glanced down to see the hour for which the clock had been set, then pulled out his pocket watch.
He wasn’t the only one looking from the face of one timepiece to that of the other. “Cutting it close,” Ted Kittridge remarked.
“Five minutes, I make it - all the time in the world.” Bushell got to his feet. He caught Kittridge’s eye.
“Let’s hang it back up so His Majesty can finish his speech.”
The door to the interrogation room at RAM headquarters opened. Horace Bragg came in. Without being told to, he sat down in the hard chair reserved for prisoners. The pyjama-like suit of coarse cloth with the broad arrow on it hung like a tent from his gaunt frame.
From under bushy brows, he stared across the table at Thomas Bushell. Something - the vital spark was gone from his eyes. Bushell had seen that before, in other prisoners who had given up.
“Hullo, Tom,” Bragg said. Something had gone out of his voice, too. He sounded as if he saw the hangman’s noose looming large in his future - and he had reason to sound that way.
“Hullo,” Bushell said, and then formally, for the record: “As you have indicated of your own free will the wish to speak, I must inform you that this is not required, and that what you say may be used against you in a court of law.” A colored clerk recorded his words and Bragg’s; he wondered if the Negro’s presence was salt on his friend’s - his former friend’s - wounds.
A bit of impatience came into Bragg’s voice: “I ought to know that rigmarole, Tom; I helped revise it, after all. Go on. Ask your questions.”
“Then you also know I’m required to go through it with you,” Bushell answered. We don’t want any possible errors a smart barrister might exploit. He didn’t say that out loud; Bragg would be able to figure it out for himself. Instead, he did as Bragg had said and asked his questions: “Where were you when you claimed to be visiting your dentist?”
“Where do you think I was?” Bragg tried to smile, as if that were no more than light badinage, but he managed to keep the corners of his mouth pressed upward for only a couple of seconds.
“I think you were with Comte Philippe Bonaparte,” Bushell answered. “We’ve found a waiter in a cafe just off Embassy Row who says he saw the two of you together there at times when you were supposed to be in the chair getting your crown.”
“If you already know the answers, why ask the questions?” Bragg said, a little sullenly.
“Because sometimes they give us new answers,” Bushell said. “Suppose you had assassinated the King-Emperor? What then? What did you hope to gain from all this?”
“Freedom,” Bragg said. “A new chance to make America what it was meant to be, not tied to the apron strings of an island full of busybodies far across the sea. In the chaos, we would have seized the moment and - “
“Lost,” Bushell put in.
“When the risings began - “
Bushell interrupted again: “What risings? Who on earth besides your handful of fanatics ever wished the Empire and the NAU anything but good?”
“Risings for freedom, all across America,” Bragg said. “We’ve endured this tyranny for two centuries and more, endured its robbery for a century and a half.”
“Robbery? A century and a half ago?” Bushell scratched his head. Then his eyes widened. “Good God, Sam was right all along - you are still angry the Crown freed the slaves way back then, even if your however-many-times-great-grandfather got paid off for them.”
“It was robbery,” Bragg insisted. “Yes, he got a pittance for the Negroes, but how could he go on working his land without them? How the family suffered afterwards -“ He waved a scrawny hand. “But that isn’t what you asked. Of course there would have been risings. Some the Sons would have aided, yes, but others, hundreds of others all across the land, would have erupted and spread like wildfire. From Drakestown to Victoria - “
“You would have been hunted down like dogs,” Bushell said. “Oh, there would have been risings, all right - risings against the regicides.” He wondered how the mining country would have gone, but refused to give Bragg the satisfaction of saying so out loud. There would have to be changes in Pennsylvania and Franklin and Virginia; he’d realized that much. And in almost all the NAU - “There wouldn’t have been enough constables and RAMs to keep the mobs from lynching every Son they could catch.”
“We would have had help,” Bragg said. “The Holy Alliance would have - “
“Lost,” Bushell said again. “And even if you’d won, you wouldn’t have got free. You’d have been a Franco-Spanish cat’s-paw instead of a piece of the British Empire. Damned if I can see any improvement there.”
Horace Bragg let out a long sigh. “No, I suppose not. I had such hopes for you, Tom. You always seemed so - American, so ready to be free. But you never would take off the King-Emperor’s dog collar, not even when you were left all alone after you divorced Irene. That bloody well drove me mad, let me tell you.” He shook his head. “Finally I had to send you away.’
Bushell stared at him. New answers indeed! Had Bragg seduced Irene to try to wreck his marriage and make him more vulnerable to recruitment by the Sons of Liberty? Bushell wouldn’t ask that with the clerk listening; he didn’t need it in evidence. But it made more sense than any reason he’d come up with till now. As for the other - “You had to send me away? Why? For fear I’d notice what you were up to?”
“Of course,” his former friend answered, eyes widening as if no other reply were imaginable.
“How long have you been working toward - not this exact scheme, maybe, but something like it?”
“My whole life,” Bragg said simply.
Bushell wondered if he’d ever really know the man on the other side of the table at all. He got to his feet and walked out to the two RAMs who waited in the hall. “I’m done with him,” he said. “Take him back to his cell.”
When Bushell was summoned to America’s Number Ten now, it was not to the Green Room, nor to confer with Sir David Clarke. A servant in the livery of the previous century conducted him to Sir Martin Luther King’s administrative office.
If Governor Burnett’s desk back in New Liverpool had been a dreadnought, aeroplanes might have landed or taken off on the surface of the one Sir Martin Luther King used. The governor-general rose from behind it to shake Bushell’s hand.
“Just take a seat here, Colonel,” he said, waving to a velvet-upholstered chair with elegant Chippendale lines. “I expect my other guest to arrive shortly.”
About five minutes later, the same servant escorted into the office Comte Philippe Bonaparte. The Franco-Spanish ambassador was wearing a suit of Savile Row cut, but a Savile Row tailor would sooner have sliced his wrists with a pair of pinking shears than turn out a suit of crimson velvet with gold embroidery on the lapels and collar of the jacket. The worst thing Bushell could find to say about the ambassador’s cravat was that it made the rest of the outfit conservative by comparison.
“Good day to you, Sir Martin,” Bonaparte said in fluent if accented English, half bowing to the governor-general. He turned to Bushell with a broad, friendly smile. “And here we have the man of the hour! It is an honor to see you again, Colonel.”
“Comte Bonaparte,” Bushell said with the same expressionless tones he might have used to begin an interrogation.