The Empire of Night

61

By reckoning from the verging sun, whose disk I glimpsed briefly through a scrim of clouds, I struck out to the southeast. At one point early on, I skirted a copse of pine but I diverted into the trees. I found a downed and rotted trunk and stuffed the parachute into a hollow beneath it.

It felt to be a long while because of the uncertainty of my path and the fading light, but in fact I made pretty good time to a stone wall at the eastern edge of a pasturage, beyond which I found a graveled road.

I followed it south, though it was angling me back to the southwest, and I ended up walking into the little town of Liebour, where a crowd had gathered around its central fountain in the town square.

They’d assembled half a dozen wagons and were calling out for volunteers to board them.

I knew what this was about.

The nearby calamity.

They were heading to the place of the crash.

I figured the active gas was dissipating, but they would find clear evidence of the phosgene.

I stayed back from the crowd, striding with purpose around the outer edge of the square. Those who noticed me started and stared or shrunk back or saluted.

I ignored them and pushed on, and I reached the road sign leading away from Liebour. I was very glad to recognize two choices. One to Uckendorf, from which I could find the road east toward Spich that passed half a mile from the air base. The other choice, which angled farther east, led to Stockem. I’d studied Jeremy’s portfolio of maps well enough in our long trip to remember this town lying on the same Uckendorf-Spich road but closer to Spich. A shortcut.

I struck off in that direction, walking fast, and thinking hard, now that I knew where I was going. I tried to figure out why Jeremy had arranged for Stockman’s bomb to succeed. Which raised the question of why he did so with such an elaborate first two acts in his little play, their elaborateness difficult to explain.

I didn’t have an answer for that. Not right away.

I knew only that something was rotten.

And it occurred to me: maybe the explanation was not quite so difficult if our Erich Müller — stage name Jeremy Miller — was working for the German secret service. Not so difficult if they approved the attack but wanted Stockman out of the picture. Albert had control of his bombshell design, and maybe part of his selling price was for him to be directly involved in the mission. All this drama could have been intended to deflect Stockman and still use his device to attack London. They could blame the American secret service, in cahoots with the Brits. And with Jeremy appearing to help in such an elaborate way — secretly setting up the failure of the British-American plan at the last minute, with the simple failure of the time bomb to be blamed — he would effectively preserve his own central secret, that this dynamic English secret service agent was, in fact, an agent for the German secret service. The rococo acts one and two were the solution.

Was I thinking clearly?

It all seemed very complex.

But what seemed simple was the logical end of Act Three of this play. The Germans wanted Stockman alive. Of course. He was a member of Parliament, after all. Inside eyes and ears. If they’d wanted him dead, this would have been a much simpler play. Jeremy had never intended to let me kill Stockman. He was going to have to prevent that now. And through Jeremy, the Germans knew that my mother was also an American spy. They knew it from the outset. So in the climax of Act Three — for a German audience very satisfying in its Aristotelian inevitability — we would have a poisoned London and two dead American agents.

I was afraid one of them was dead already.