He walked into the little kitchen down the hall from the main entrance. They had a coffeepot there, too, along with hot water for tea. He was anything but surprised to find Samuel Stanley pulling a cardboard cup from the box between the hot-water dispenser and the coffeepot. Beneath his brown skin, Stanley looked gray. He normally favored tea, as did Bushell, but not today.
“You’d better leave some of that for me, Sam,” Bushell said.
“Depends on how much I need.” Stanley yawned enormously. “Way things worked out, I’m just as glad Phyllis had to drive me here today. I was so deep underwater, I probably would have crashed the steamer.” He poured cream into his coffee, stirred it with a wooden stick. “I haven’t been that tired since the last time we had a baby in the house.”
“When I was what they called a flaming youth, I’d stay up till all hours and be fresh the next morning,” Bushell said, reaching for the coffeepot when his adjutant put it back on the hotplate. “No more.”
“Lord, no.” Samuel Stanley blew on his coffee, then drained half the cup. “When I was in the army, nights I got leave I’d be drinking and playing the piano and watching the sun come up. I just wanted to do things all the time. If I lose that much sleep now, I’m a dead man the next day.”
Bushell didn’t say anything about his own aborted tries at slumber. There wasn’t enough difference between one hour of sleep and three hours’ worth to talk about. You were a shambling wreck either way.
The coffee burned his mouth when he gulped it down. He didn’t care. If he drank enough, he could build a brittle crust of energy over his exhaustion. That might get him through the day, and, if he was lucky, he’d go home and collapse when evening came. He poured the cardboard cup full again. Samuel Stanley was right behind him. “What’s first on the list, Chief?” he asked, as he held the cream pitcher over his cup.
“I’m going to tell the public information officer to arrange a press conference for me in the afternoon.”
Bushell sighed. “I’m looking forward to that. Then I want to ring up the Victoria office and get everything they have on Kathleen Flannery and the rest of the people who were traveling with The Two Georges.”
His adjutant nodded. “Makes sense to me. The Sons of Liberty would have had an easier time of it with inside help.”
“Just what I’m thinking,” Bushell said. “After that, I think I’ll pay a call on Independence Party headquarters - ”
“They’ll deny everything,” Samuel Stanley said.
“Of course they will. Has to be done, though. There’s always that one-in-a-hundred chance. And then,” Bushell said, as much to get things straight in his own mind as to keep on talking with Stanley, “I’ll pull the files on some of the Sons of Liberty and see what we can pry out of them. We’ll visit them warrants in hand, I think. Every so often, they get sloppy and we learn something. Make sure we have the papers we need, will you? Judge Huygens cooperates with us pretty well.”
“Yes, I’ve gone to him before. That sounds good to me,” Stanley said. “If I may make a suggestion . . .?” He waited for Bushell to nod, then went on, “You might do well to have me or one of our other colored RAMs along when you question the Sons of Liberty. Just because they look down their noses at us, they might let something slip that they’d keep a secret from a white man, because they’d assume we wouldn’t notice it anyway.”
“That is a devilish notion,” Bushell said with a slow smile, “and I shall take you up on it. If the foe offers us his petard, the least we can do is hoist him on it.” He drank the last of his coffee, crumpled the cup, and chucked it into the rubbish bin by the door. “And now, off to public information.”
The public information officer was a young lieutenant named Robert Thirkettle. “When would you like to take questions from the press, sir?” he asked.
“When would I like to? Ten years from Tuesday strikes me as a good date,” Bushell said. Lieutenant Thirkettle looked pained. If he’d had his way, Bushell would have spent so much time talking with reporters that he’d have got precious little actual work done. Sighing, Bushell said, “Set up the conference for late this afternoon - three would be fine, four would be better.”
“Four won’t let your remarks get into most editions of the afternoon dailies,” Thirkettle pointed out.
“Oh? What a pity.” Bushell strode out of the public information officer’s cubicle without giving him a chance to reply.
On his way up to his own office, he paused to light a cigar. His hand quivered as he brought the lucifer up to the tip of the tobacco tube. That told him how much coffee he’d poured into himself. He got the cigar going and gratefully sucked smoke. It relaxed him and left him alert at the same time. The Jameson in his desk couldn’t match that. Pity, he thought.
He couldn’t lock the world away from him now, as he had the evening before. He set his sword on the closet shelf, took the trousers and tunic of his dress uniform out of the carpetbag, and set them on top of a file cabinet. If they were someplace where he could see them, maybe he’d remember to take them down to be cleaned if he had a spare moment.
He telephoned the RAM headquarters in Victoria and asked for Sally Reese, Lieutenant General Sir Horace Bragg’s longtime secretary. “Everything’s all in a twitter here today, Colonel,” she said; Bushell wondered whether she’d borrowed the phrase from Bragg or the other way round. “How can I help you?”
“I assume you people have compiled full dossiers on Dr. Flannery and the others traveling with The Two Georges ,” he said.
“Oh, yes,” Sally Reese answered at once. “Scotland Yard wouldn’t let any colonials” - she sniffed - ”get within ten yards of the painting till they’d been fully vetted.”
“Good. Do you have those where you can get your hands on them?”
“Oh, yes,” Sir Horace’s secretary repeated. “Wait there just one minute.” Bushell duly waited. He heard a faint thump, as of a thick pile of manila folders landing on a desk. Sally Reese returned to the line:
“Here they are. Now what do you want me to do with them?”
“Two things,” he said. “First, skim through them and tell me over the phone anything that makes you think of a connection to the Sons of Liberty.”
“I can do that,” she said. “It’ll take a while, but I can do it.”
“You’re a sweetheart,” Bushell told her, which made her giggle. “After you’ve done that, send carbons or your originals, if you don’t have carbons - to me by military aeroplane. Sometimes speed does matter. I want them here tomorrow, or next day at the latest.”
Now doubt filled her voice: “Oh, I don’t know about that, Colonel. It’s not normal procedure at all.”
Sally Reese was a spinster but, like a great many secretaries, wedded to routine. Bushell said, “These aren’t normal circumstances, either. And when I spoke to Sir Martin last night, he promised me all the cooperation the NAU could give. If that doesn’t include an aeroplane to carry important documents, it isn’t worth much, is it?”
“I don’t know .. .” Sally Reese said again. Bushell wanted to shake some sense into her, but couldn’t, not across the continent. At last she said, “All right, Colonel, since it’s you that’s doing the asking. You and Sir Horace have been friends for so long, I know he’d want me to do whatever I can for you.”
“Thank you, darling,” Bushell breathed. “You’re doing the right thing.”
“I hope so,” she answered, not altogether convinced despite the endearment. “Here, let me give you some of this over the wire now.”