Sion Crossing (29 page)

Audley looked at his watch again. “I can try to change Jack Butler’s mind, but I don’t rate my chances. Because that would mean writing off Oliver St John Latimer at Sion Crossing, and I don’t think he’ll stand for that—from me.”

“How long have we got?” Mitchell allied himself to Audley with the pronoun. “When’s your flight?”

“Two hours and thirty-one minutes, I’ve got.” Audley half-smiled. “You’ve got until ten-thirty, Rome-time, tomorrow morning. But as for Oliver—poor old Oliver’s probably run out of time by now—”

There was a note for him in the guards’ cage—not an official slip, with its flimsy filed for future reference, but a sheet of white notepaper in James Cable’s nervous scrawl, in a private envelope.

“PLM—”

He couldn’t read the first word after his initials: there was no word in the English language resembling
Brediably
, which was what it looked like, more or less—

“PLM—Brediably, the FCO is still useless”—
that elongated snakelike squiggle had to be “useless”, on the basis of David Audley’s own description of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s performance in moments of crisis—

Predictably!

Mitchell looked up from the scrawl. The duty-man in the guards’ cage was dutifully noting the time of Dr Mitchell’s arrival and the delivery of the message from Lieutenant-Commander Cable to him, to no possible purpose.

“PLM—Predictably, the FCO is still useless. And, what’s worse, they’ve now begun to react to our inquiries about TC”—

TC was Senator Thomas Cookridge: once you got into James’s hieroglyphics they were just about decipherable, and a Rosetta Stone was not required.

“—about TC. So, instead of help, we’ve received an order not to prejudice Anglo-American relations by investigating his private life, pending ministerial clearance”
—

Blast
! thought Mitchell. They should have thought of that contingency. But maybe Jack Butler
had
thought of it—and had chanced his arm nevertheless, balancing Oliver St John Latimer’s well-being against the possible repercussions …

And, in Butler’s place, what would he have done? It wasn’t even as though the FCO was really being unreasonable: even Howard Morris had been scared of Cookridge; and … which was perhaps the final irony … no one much liked Oliver St John Latimer, who had brought all this on his own head, anyway!

“—pending ministerial clearance. Which order I have temporarily scanned with my blind eye—”

God! James had faced a more immediate dilemma, and had applied Nelson’s famous rule of disobedience—

“—blind eye, leaving it in my own pending tray, and going off duty—”

But why—?

Suddenly the scrawl had all his attention: for James, of all people, to flout the rules—to
Engage more closely
when the plain order was
Disengage
—

The next word was unreadable—

No, it wasn’t: it was “
because
”—

“—because I have the contact we need. Meet me at my mother’s flat off the Park, and we’ll brief you. If you’re not there by 2030 I’ll go to see her myself—”

Mitchell took two steps and punched the lift button.

The lift took an unconscionable time, and the duty-man was looking at him.

“I’ve got a date with a lady, sar-major,” said Mitchell.

“Ah!” The duty-man sat down, and started to enter Dr Mitchell’s time of departure.

Mitchell looked at the message again, and then at his watch.

Lady
was right. But what the devil had James Cable’s mother got to do with Senator Cookridge and Sion Crossing?

“SHUDDUP!” SAID THE
Confederate soldier again, not very eloquently. But the steadiness of the rifle made up for his lack of eloquence: Latimer had never in his entire life had any sort of firearm pointed at him for real, and his third attempt to argue with it died on his lips, still-born.

The first time had not been much better—it had been even more inadequate, for he had not been able to get out any meaningful words before the Confederate soldier had behaved as though he really existed.

“Oh—!” What did one say to a figment of the imagination? How did one address an impossibility? “Hullo—” Was it morning or afternoon? It felt swelteringly hot and deathly cold at the same time, beyond rational calculation. “Good afternoon—”

“Shuddup.” The illusion spoke, and it was no longer a figment of imagination: it gestured with its rifle. “Move.”

Latimer moved: whatever the thing with the rifle was, the rifle was not to be argued with.

He swung round, towards the continuation of the inadequate path through the ruins, automatically pushing aside the leaves which impeded his advance with his stick. But then, two steps further on, he couldn’t believe in what he was doing.

He turned back, hoping that it wouldn’t be there. “I’m sorry, but what—”

“Drop it!” The thing
was
there—the rifle
was
there, pointing at his chest. And he could feel everything around him, as it had been before: the trees and the chimneys, weight of his coat on his arm … even the oppression of the heat and the stillness of the woods … it was all there, even though it was incomprehensible.

“Drop it!”

His hand released the stick: it
was
a Confederate soldier—yet it was
real
—

“G’warn
—
move!”

Latimer moved again. Whatever the man was—and he couldn’t be a Confederate soldier, for that was against reason—the implacable will behind the rifle was real: he could almost feel the bullet inside it, straining against the pressure of the finger on the trigger and the propellant in the cartridge—the imagined force of that was too strong for argument.

The path led him down from the ruins; and then it continued through the woods, offering him no choice, meandering between the trees.

Where was he now? The marked path on the sketch-map had not continued past the ruins, so although there had been other features on the map beyond that point, he had not bothered to memorize them. All that was certain was that they had left the line of the creek somewhere behind them. Perhaps if he could look at the map again … but somehow he didn’t think that fumbling in his pocket at this moment would be an advisable action.

And yet … and yet all this was
crazy
—the Confederate soldier, with his little grey képi crushed on his head and that nakedly hostile expression on his face—even his own instinctive certainty that the man’s levelled rifle was no joke, any more than it would have been for one of General Sherman’s Iowans—it was not merely crazy—it was
impossible—

The rifle?

He slowed down deliberately, and turned back towards the Confederate with exaggerated care, holding his coat in one hand and spreading the palm of the other to show his peaceful intention.

“Look—I think there must be some mistake—”

“Shuddup!”

No more argument. The rifle had been rock-steady, and as ready to kill as the look which went with it. But Latimer had seen what he wanted to see.

It was a modern rifle.

He was not dreaming, and he was certainly not in some science-fictional time-warp triggered by the lingering vibrations of the explosion of violence and fear and pain which these quiet woods had once experienced, the pulse of which he had almost imagined he had felt as he had approached the ruins of the Sion Crossing house. That had always been no more than a malignant trick of the mind played on him by the unfamiliarity of his situation and his foolish actions.

The Confederate soldier was a real man—and he had to stop thinking of him as a
Confederate
: he was no more than a man in fancy dress—

Oddly, that was almost a relief. But it was only a relief for an instant. Because the rifle
was
real: it was not a military weapon … it was no more a modern military weapon than it was an ancient Springfield or Enfield, or whatever the Confederates had once carried: it was a light hunting rifle of some sort, complete with a telescopic sight—the weapon of a man who meant business.

But what business? What conceivable business, ancient or modern, could a man in fancy dress have here in the woods of Sion Crossing which required the gun-point hold-up of a perfect stranger?

Two related answers at once presented themselves, neither of which was particularly reassuring: he had chanced upon a lunatic who affected fancy dress (and the man had certainly not looked very bright) … and this was America anyway, where even cultured academics were armed to the teeth, so why not lunatics?

But then another explanation occurred to him.

He had been asking himself all along why Senator Cookridge had gone to such trouble to recruit an Englishman to unravel his mystery treasure-hunt, and had come up with all sorts of excuses and explanations. But he had known in his gut all along that there had to be more to it than that—and he had let himself be bamboozled and deceived, against his better judgement—

Where there was treasure, there would always be other treasure-hunters
—
that was a childishly simple piece of logic.

There had even been straws in the wind, which he had shrugged off: Kingston had lied to him at Atlanta airport, pretending that he’d arrived late when he’d actually been watching him covertly for half an hour—possibly to identify others interested in his arrival?

Even … even from Lucy Cookridge’s father’s papers he could deduce another clue, which he had stupidly ignored. Because … there had been more straws in the wind in them … to suggest that someone else had been researching Sion Crossing not merely from the documents, but in the field: there had been two or three gaps in the narrative sequence—tell-tale gaps in retrospect, indicating unlisted but very precise first-hand observation—

Either, someone had been in Sion Crossing before him
…
or someone had come close to it, and hadn’t liked the odds: because
—
by God!
—
he’d seen reports like that from agents in the Soviet Union, who’d stumbled on intelligence which was out of their class and too hot to handle
—

In this case, the analogy was ridiculous … but the rule was the same:
Pull out the small man to safety, and cut the contact; move in a bigger man from a different direction, unconnected with the small man, and let him pick up the threads for himself, if the dividend justified the risk
—

But that couldn’t be the case here—the analogy was altogether ridiculous: Senator Cookridge might be a new man on the Anglo-American scene, but he surely wouldn’t hazard a senior British intelligence officer on some crazy private enterprise of his—the Anglo-American scandal of that would surely ruin him if it went wrong, and there was no conceivable dividend which would justify the risk, surely—

Surely?

He had been telling himself that from the start. But that rifle was pointing at his spine now, even more surely.

Christ almighty! There was another Confederate soldier, who had risen up from nowhere, beside the path ahead of him!

Not a rifle, this time: with this Confederate they were moving from hunting rifles to machine-pistols of the smallest and most lethal variety—and to a two-way radio in the hand which did not hold the weapon.

The new fancy-dress man said something into his radio, as he circled to the right, presumably to give himself a clear field of fire.

“Ah gott’m,” the original fancy-dress man informed his comrade unnecessarily in a broad Southern accent.

“Where?’

“Down by the ol’ place. He ain’t from round here, Joe.”

The second fancy-dress man studied Latimer for a moment. Then the transmitter came up to his face again, “kay—sure … White— maybe five-eight, five-seven … say ’bout one-seventy … age … maybe fifty … hair brown—got that?”

“Joe—”

“Shuddup, Willy.” The man Joe kept his eyes on Latimer as he listened to the radio. “No—ah said
five-eight, five-seven
—
one-seventy
… What?” He frowned at Latimer. “Hell no! Hair brown—no glasses … Like ah said—he’s short an’ fat … an’ he looks scared like he’s set to shit himself.”

The name of the machine-pistol came to Latimer. It was an Ingram, like those supplied to SAS Special Squads. And where the first man’s hunting rifle could kill him from afar an Ingram would cut him in two at this range.

Joe was still watching him. “He say who the hell he is, Willy?” It sounded as though he was relaying a question.

There was a moment of tongue-tied silence. “He ain’t said.”

“My name’s Latimer,” said Latimer quickly. “Oliver St John Latimer … I—”

“Drop the coat.”

Latimer let go of his coat. The Ingram was pointing at the ground in front of his feet, which allowed for the upwards movement if it was fired one-handed: it would cut him in half vertically in that case, with its rate of fire. Released from the weight of the coat his hand automatically raised itself.

“Move away—
not that way
,
goddam’ it
—”

Latimer froze.

“Other way … easy now …
stop
.” Not for a second did Joe take his eyes off him. “Willy—see what he’s got.”

Latimer moistened his lips. He wanted to say something, but his mouth had dried up. But he had to get his brain into gear first, in any case. Not his mouth.

“Hey—he’s got a map, Joe!” Willy spoke as though he’d struck gold in finding the sketch-map.

Joe said nothing.

“An’—an’ he’s got cash money—twenties—fifties … shit—he’s got maybe three-four-hundred bucks—”

Joe’s jaw tightened. “He got a name?”

“What?”

“Try the inside pocket. He’ll have credit cards.”

“Credit cards?”

“Look for a name, Willy—anything with a name.”

“Sure—okay …
Hey
!”

“What you got?”

Latimer knew what Willy had got.

“Man—
he’s British
—hell, ah
thought
the way he talked was funny—”

“What you got?”
Joe controlled himself. “Jus’ tell me what you got, Willy.”