“Here!” he exclaimed. “It’s dated 18 June - no address, though, worse luck. Just the message - listen to this, Sam: ‘Stop sending rifles at once; repeat, at once. No point to drawing unwanted attention to ourselves.’ And it’s signed, ‘Joe.’“
Stanley slammed his fist down on the tabletop. “We’re on the right track.” He looked up to the bare bulb as if it were the naked face of God. “At last.”
“Amen,” Bushell said: it was, for him, an answered prayer.
Bushell approached the telephone in Lieutenant Commander Woodbridge’s office in Port Clements like a man walking to the gallows, each step more difficult than the one that had gone before. When he sat down at the desk, he felt as if the hangman had slipped the hood down over his head. He picked up the phone, and in his mind heard and felt the trap fall out from under his feet. To the operator, he said, “I’d like to ring the offices of the Royal American Mounted Police in New Liverpool, Upper California, please. The number there is BLenheim 1415, and my name is Thomas Bushell.”
“Sir, your call will need a little while to put through,” the operator warned, surprise in her voice. He’d expected that. He wondered how long it had been since anyone in the Queen Charlotte Islands had telephoned New Liverpool. “Do whatever you need to do,” he said, and settled down to wait, the telephone handset against his ear.
The Port Clements operator relayed the call to Skidegate, the Skidegate operator to Prince Rupert across the Hecate Strait. That connection took a while to make; listening to the clicks and pops in his ear, Bushell wondered if the call was going by wire or swimming over the waves. At last Prince Rupert acknowledged the existence of Skidegate, but then had to pass the call on to Prince George. From Prince George, probably by a roundabout route paralleling the railroad tracks, it reached Wellesley on the Puget Sound.
After that, as if relieved to be returning to civilization, the call moved rapidly south. Almost twenty minutes had passed before the Port Clements operator told the RAM switchboard, “I have a long-distance call for you from Mr. Thomas Bushell.”
“Yes, have him go ahead,” the RAM operator said, and then, to Bushell, “How may I help you, Colonel?”
“Is that you, Jonathan?” Bushell said. “Put me through to Lieutenant General Sir Horace Bragg, please.”
“I’m sorry, Colonel, but I can’t,” Jonathan answered. “His train departed for Victoria this morning.”
“What’s that?” Bushell said. “He told me he was going to stay in New Liverpool for a couple of weeks, maybe longer.”
“Yes, sir, that’s what he’d been saying up until yesterday,” the RAM operator answered. “But Sir Martin Luther King and his staff headed back for the capital last night. I don’t know this for a fact, sir” Jonathan’s voice went low and conspiratorial as he shared his gossip - “but they say Sir Horace was going on about not letting Sir Martin and some of the people who work for him out of his sight for any longer than he could help.”
“Was he?” Bushell replied with interest. Sir Horace had suspicions, then; Bushell wondered how closely they marched with his own. “Get me Gordon Rhodes, then.”
“Colonel Bushell! I’m so glad to hear from you,” Major Rhodes exclaimed when the call went through. Before Bushell could answer, Rhodes went on, “We’ve finally tracked down the newspaper whose headline the Sons of Liberty used in the photograph they sent us and the press along with their ransom note.”
“Have you?” Bushell said. That was important enough that he needed to know it, so he held off giving his own news, most of which he was less than eager to pass on in any case. “Tell me.”
“Yes, sir.” Rhodes took a deep, portentous breath. “It’s from the Doshouieh Sentinel, the chief English-language newspaper in the Six Nations. Isn’t that remarkable? Who would have thought the Sons of Liberty had penetrated the Iro-quois chiefdom?”
“Up until an hour ago, no one,” Bushell said. That discovery fit all too well with his own, and had been won at far less cost.
Full of his own concerns, Rhodes failed to pay close attention to his superior’s reply. He continued, “It’s a pity Captain Oliver had to return to Victoria with Sir Horace. She did some outstanding work for us here, identifying that headline, and I want to be certain she gets the credit she deserves.”
He sounded so enthusiastic, Bushell wondered whether Patricia Oliver had been as outstanding off duty as she had while at RAM headquarters. He scowled down at Lieutenant Commander Woodbridge’s desk. It wasn’t his business. Better he didn’t know, in fact.
Gordon Rhodes said, “And how are things up in the Queen Charlotte Islands, sir? Do you know, I had to check in the Times Atlas of the British Empire to be sure where you and Captain Stanley and Lieutenant-Colonel Crooke were going.”
“So did I, before we set out,” Bushell answered. Once he’d said that, though, he had to tell the rest: the Sons of Liberty shooting Felix Crooke as he tried to persuade them to surrender, the gun battle that followed, the casualties among both the Sons and the Royal Marines.
“Good God, sir!” Rhodes said when Bushell paused in the dismal narrative. “A RAM gunned down like a bandit down in the Nuevespañolan mountains?” He sounded shocked to the core. Bushell did not blame him. He was shocked, too; he’d seen it happen instead of hearing about it over fifteen hundred miles of wire. When the news spread, flags would fly at half staff in front of every RAM office in the NAU.
Mechanically, Bushell went on to summarize the evidence he and Samuel Stanley had found after the shooting stopped. “We need to notify the RAMs in Doshoweh at once,” he said. “I doubt The Two Georges is still there - the Sons would have moved it as soon as they posted their pictures - but we may be able to keep them from operating out of the Six Nations anymore.”
“I’ll take care of that, sir,” Gordon Rhodes said. “We’ll have to deal with the local Iroquois constabulary, too; the Six Nations being as they are, we have rather less authority there than elsewhere in the Union.”
“That’s right,” Bushell said. One more thing to complicate my life ran through his mind. “We’ll have to manage as best we can, that’s all. Oh - when you call Doshoweh, tell them one more thing, will you?”
“Whatever you like, sir,” Rhodes said, and waited expectantly. When Bushell didn’t answer right away, he asked, “Er - what is it?”
“Tell them Sam and I are on our way.”
Getting off the Queen Charlotte Islands wasn’t as easy as Bushell had hoped. He and Lieutenant Green both spoke to Commander Hairston by telephone from Port Clements, but, in a case with half a dozen men dead by gunfire and more wounded, that was not of itself an adequate response.
“I’ll need formal depositions from you and Captain Stanley, Colonel,” Hairston said. “I want to wrap up the case against this Goldsmith so tight, there’ll be not a chance of his wriggling free of the noose.”
“But, Commander, Captain Stanley and I have to go back to the mainland to follow the leads to The Two Georges we discovered,” Bushell protested.
“No, sir,” Hairston said. “That case is a theft. This one is a homicide, so it takes precedence. You and your adjutant are not going back to Prince Rupert till you tell me everything you know about what happened at Buckley Bay. The faster you do that, the faster you get what you want.”
He was right. After a moment’s anger, Bushell realized as much. He also realized it wouldn’t have mattered had Hairston been wrong: the man had the authority to hold him here, if not indefinitely, then long enough to play havoc with the investigation. He sighed. “All right, Commander. When we get back to Skidegate, we shall be at your service.”