Free Live Free

General Buck Whitten

The witch burst into the cockpit like a panther. “What thing is this! You have betrayed me, betrayed us all!” She whirled on Free and dropped to her knees. “And you, Master, you live! This traitor told me you were dead.” Barnes followed her in, Candy lumbering after him.

Free said, “Sit down. Some of you, anyway.”

Stubb had taken the copilot’s seat. There were two more at the rear of the cockpit, apparently intended for a navigator and an engineer. The witch and Candy sat there.

The witch hissed, “Inside the wing, you said, and I see you here. You would speak with the Master behind me!”

“I’ve never crossed a client yet,” Stubb told her. “When we were looking for Mr. Free here, you never said you didn’t want me to talk to him unless you were there. If you had, I wouldn’t have agreed to it.”

“You told me you were going in the wing!”

“Sure, and I did. It was dark as hell in there, but I got far enough to see there were steps inside those things that held the engines so the mechanics could go down and work on them in flight. By then the matches I’d gotten from Ozzie were running out, so I went back.”

“And we were gone,” Barnes said. He was standing behind the witch’s seat.

“Right. So I figured you had probably headed toward the front of the plane, and I went that way too. I’ve got most of this worked out, I think.”

Free said, “You recognized me when you saw me here, but you had not recognized me on the ground. I suppose that was only a few hours ago.”

Stubb nodded. “Yeah, I should have, but you were younger and you had a clean shave, and it was too crazy. Of course that girl, Kip, had blown smoke in my eyes with the story about the twins. Is she really your daughter? She looks a little like you.”

“Yes, my only child. Eventually she will kill me, I suppose.”

Stubb stared at him.

“She reported to me; you must have realized that. Even then I had begun to suspect that Benjamin Free had been myself.”

Barnes said, “Wait a minute. You were the man in the duffel coat?”

The witch murmured, “The Master will tell us everything, if he will. Perhaps first of all, his name.”

“No,” Free said. “Not first. First I want to hear how Stubb deduced my identity. I apologize for calling you Short, by the way. I was playing drunk.”

“I knew it,” Stubb told him. “That’s why I didn’t mind.”

“And the deductions?”

“Hell, there was so much of it. For a long time I didn’t believe it, but it all pointed the same way. To start with, Kip’s gun.” He fell silent.

“Go ahead,” Free said. “It hurts less to talk of it than to think of it, and I have thought of it a great deal.”

“It was a Colt New Service, one of the biggest, heaviest pistols ever made. Colt built them for the Army in the First World War, because they couldn’t make enough forty-five autos. You still see a few around, and I suppose they’ll last forever; you couldn’t break one with a sledge. But why would a small girl like Kip carry a heavy, old-fashioned gun like that?”

“I taught her to shoot with one,” Free said. “I had a Woodsman too, but a revolver is safer for a beginner.”

“Then when we met you, you had a Thompson. With the round magazine, yet, like you were Al Capone. Those things are in museums. Then you let me keep your flask, figuring that if we each had a jolt it might loosen us up a little when we went upstairs. It had an art deco design and a bottom that said, ‘Tiffany and Company, Fifth Avenue, New York.’ Just like that. Everybody puts the state and zip on now. Sure, maybe it was an antique, but it pointed the same way as the guns.”

The witch demanded, “And in what way was that? You men, you are so maddening.”

Candy added, “I’ll say!”

“Leave me out,” Barnes told them.

Free asked, “Then you knew when we put you on the plane?”

Stubb shook his head. “I was thinking about it, but I couldn’t accept it, it was so crazy. Then the plane looked funny to me, but what the hell do I know about airplanes?”

“And on the plane?”

“I guess the first thing was the cigarettes. The copilot got them out and gave one to everybody who wanted one, which was damned nice of him. They were Camels, my regular brand, and the package was almost exactly like I’m used to, only not quite. Then I got the matches from Ozzie. Matches are the oldest, corniest clue there is, you know what I mean? The Great Detective looks at the matches in the third reel, and they’re from the Club Boom-Boom. So he goes there, and it turns out the guy is a regular. Anybody who’s done any real investigating knows you can’t trust them. A guy goes into a place, buys cigarettes, and picks up a folder of matches. He’s been inside maybe three minutes and nobody remembers him for shit. Then he gives them to his buddy, who leaves them on some bar, and somebody else takes them. Sure, you follow them up, you follow everything up, but nine times out of ten it goes nowhere.”

“I see,” Free said.

“But look at these.” Stubb reached into his pocket and produced the matches. “They’re from the Stork Club. It went out of business in the sixties; but the paper hasn’t yellowed, and the matches work just fine.”

Free nodded. “So then you knew.”

“Just for laughs, I like to watch those old Sherlock Holmes flicks,” Stubb told him. “You know, with Basil Rathbone and what’s-his-name.”

Free smiled. “I used to enjoy them myself.”

“And in one of them Sherlock says to eliminate the impossible, and then you’ve got to go with what’s left. Of course, the problem is, what’s impossible? People coming here from some time when the Stork Club was still open, when that flask was new, when people with serious business would still use those guns—was that impossible? Or was it impossible that everything would point that way but mean something else?”

Candy asked, “Is he saying what I think he’s saying, Mr. Free?”

Free nodded again, and Barnes said, “Well, blow me down!”

“It is I who should have guessed,” the witch said. “We know such things are not impossible.”

“That’s how we got onto it in the beginning,” Free told her. “Please understand, all of you, that I’m going to have to explain from my own point of view. I couldn’t do it from yours even if I wished to.”

“Go ahead,” Stubb said.

“Let me start with Bill Donovan. Does that name mean anything to you?”

Stubb shook his head.

“I met Bill Donovan when we were both hardly more than boys. We were in a home-town National Guard cavalry troop together. Real horse cavalry—it’s the simple truth.”

Free paused, stroking his beard. “Bill was a lawyer, an Irish Catholic whose mother had pushed him to go to college and make something of himself. I was a wealthy young man-about-town. That was what we called it then, the town being Buffalo, New York and wealthy being rich the way we thought of rich in Buffalo around nineteen fourteen.”

Stubb darted an I-told-you-so glance at the witch.

“I’d had the advantage of a governess as a kid, a nice, perfectly batty little Frenchwoman I called Madame du Betes. She had taught me conversational French and German, and I used to show off in restaurants and so on. As it turned out, Bill never forgot that.

“The Great War came and we both went in as officers; Bill, who had that Irish charm, because we had elected him captain of our troop, and me because just about anybody with a degree from Princeton could get a commission then. After the war, Bill left the Army with a hatful of medals and went back to his law practice. I stayed in because I had nothing better to do and had sense enough to see that it was the only way I could keep on flying. In nineteen thirty-seven, I retired as a brigadier general. My father had died, and I wanted to take over the family business. We make glass, by the way; some of the finest crystal in the world.”

Stubb asked, “How old were you?”

“Forty-eight. Don’t ask me how old I am now, because I don’t know. Somewhere between sixty and seventy, I think.

“Anyway, to fill you in on some things I only learned later, Bill had a partner who knew President Wilson and did some globe-trotting and fact-finding for him. Eventually Bill did some of that too. I think Bill himself knew Roosevelt back when; he was practising law in Buffalo, remember. He must have gone to Albany often, and Roosevelt has been mixed up in state politics all his life. Anyway, when Roosevelt decided America should have something like the British Secret Intelligence Service, guess who he picked?”

The witch nodded. Barnes was too rapt to nod. Candy stared at the rectangular panes that made the big cockpit seem almost a small greenhouse; she might have been half asleep. Stubb said, “And Donovan picked you.”

Free nodded. “One among many, of course. The business had been almost shut down by the war, and I had a manager who could take care of what little there was as well I could. I was getting a lot of pressure from the Army to come back, and I knew that if I did, I’d probably end up in charge of a training field in Texas—not exactly my cup of tea. This was the summer of forty-two, by the way.

“High Country had already been built, and the top men in the nation were on her. Donovan felt the Office of Strategic Services ought to have somebody up here too, and I got the job, I think mostly because I’d been one of General Mitchell’s supporters. Supposedly, I was just coming to High Country temporarily, but my confidential orders were to stay as long as I could.”

Barnes said softly, “I wouldn’t have believed something this big could fly.”

“Neither could I,” Free told him. “And if it had been aluminum and steel, it wouldn’t have. It’s a matter of weight, really—the weight-to-lift ratio. The plywood has a layer of cedar on the outside for rot resistance, then alternating layers of balsa and spruce. When they found out it worked, they had Hughes Aircraft build one that was all spruce. You couldn’t get balsa from South America any more, you see. But that one didn’t fly. It was too heavy.”

Stubb said, “You mentioned that plane when we were on the ground.”

“Did I? Sorry, but you have to remember it’s been a few years for me.”

The witch interrupted. “You said it was the occult that led you to what you found. I have waited and waited to hear how that is so.”

“Hitler believed in it,” Free said. “And Hitler had been extremely successful. When he joined the National Socialists, he got membership card number seven—the Nazis literally had only a half dozen members. In a few years he was Chancellor of Germany. In a few more he was walking over the French army, supposedly the best in Europe. Nobody knew then that his luck would run out in Russia and Africa.”

The witch said, “Those with whom he leagued himself destroyed him when he had accomplished their purposes. It is ever so with them—they break their tools.” Almost in a whisper she added, “We went into the death camps too, though only we remember.”

Free said, “They thought Hitler might be able to look into the future, and they thought there might be some way to duplicate that mechanically and reliably. They found out—well, you know what they found out.

“There was a tremendous effort being put into weapons development then, so one of the obvious things was to try to anticipate the result. That was my first real job—to go ten years ahead and grab the best I could and bring it back. I think you can guess what I got.”

Barnes whispered, “Nuclear weapons.”

“Not everything, but a lot. Enough to speed up development to the point that we had an atom bomb in less than three years. But when I’d been flown back here, back to High Country, I’d noticed a lot of the people were gone. I couldn’t ask about that, you understand. The men on that level could have swatted Bill Donovan like a fly. I kept my mouth shut and my eyes open and went back to my own period.”