The Victorious opposition

IX

The Manitoba prairie seemed to roll on forever. Above, puffy white clouds drifted across the blue sky. Mary Pomeroy watched a hawk circle in lazy spirals high overhead. The hawk would be watching, too, for rabbits or gophers. To it, a picnic on a farm wouldn't mean a thing.

Mary couldn't watch the hawk for long. She had to watch her own son like a hawk. Alexander Arthur Pomeroy's first birthday was the occasion for the picnic. He'd just figured out how to put one foot in front of him without falling down, which made him all the more dangerous to himself. Alexander didn't know that, of course. To him, walking was the most wonderful thing in the world.

Something went into his mouth. Mary tossed the drumstick she'd been gnawing onto a plate and grabbed her son. "What have you got there?" she said sharply.

"Mama!" Alexander said. Then, as her forefinger snaked into his mouth, he let out an indignant wail. Something there… She fished it out-a blade of grass. Not so bad, she thought, wiping her hand on her checked skirt. She'd taken a used match and a dead fly out of his mouth at one time or another. She didn't want to think about the things he might have swallowed. None of them seemed to have done him any harm, anyhow.

Maude McGregor watched her daughter with a faint smile on her face. "I don't know how many times I had to do that with you," she said. "Then there was the pearl button I found in your diaper."

"Was there?" Mary said, and her mother nodded. Mary glanced toward her husband. Mort Pomeroy was doing his polite best to pretend he hadn't heard, but he turned red all the same. Of course, he'd grown up in town, not on a farm. Mary had dealt with droppings of one kind or another ever since she learned how to walk: talking about them didn't faze her.

Her older sister, who still lived on a farm, was the same way. "I've had a surprise or two changing my kids, too," Julia Marble said. She lay on a blanket on her side, propped up on one elbow. Her belly bulged; another chip off the Marble block was due in about six weeks. Her husband, Kenneth, and mother-in-law rode herd on her children. She couldn't move fast enough now to do it herself.

Mary remembered that beached-whale feeling from her own pregnancy. "Don't you wish it was over?" she asked Julia.

"Oh, Lord, yes," her sister answered. Their mother nodded at that, too, and so did Beth Marble, Kenneth's mother.

"Hand me another beer, would you, dear?" Mary said to her husband. Mort pulled a Moosehead from the picnic hamper. He opened it with a church key and gave it to her. "Thanks," she told him. Nothing went better with fried chicken than the intense hoppiness of beer. She smiled. "That's nice."

He nodded. "It is, isn't it? We get some Hamm's at the diner, too, because Yanks will order it when they eat, but I wouldn't bring it here."

"I hope not," Kenneth Marble said. "I've had Yank beer. They strain it through the kidneys of a sick horse and then bottle it, eh?"

Mort started to nod again, then blinked and made a peculiar noise, half snort, half giggle. Beth Marble laughed out loud. So did Mary, who was always ready to say or hear unkind things about the USA. So did her mother, which surprised and pleased her; Maude McGregor didn't find a whole lot to laugh about these days.

Fried chicken. Homemade potato salad. Deviled eggs. Fresh-baked bread. Apple pie. Mary made a pig of herself, and enjoyed doing it, too. She changed Alexander's soggy diaper and cuddled him, then set him down on the blanket when he fell asleep.

After a while, the picnickers headed back to Maude McGregor's house. Mort carried Alexander. Mary carried the hamper, which was much lighter than it had been when they put it in the motorcar back in Rosenfeld. Julia said, "Mary and I will take care of the dishes."

"That's all right," Mary said. "I can do them. You should stay off your feet."

"I don't mind, even if I have to run to the outhouse all the time now," her sister said. "We can talk while we do them. We don't get the chance much any more, not the way we used to when we both lived here."

"That's sweet," Beth Marble said. "I was going to tell you I'd help, but now I won't. I'll be lazy instead." She laughed at that. So did Julia. Her mother-in-law was one of the least lazy people around.

Before Mary got married, she'd taken working the pump handle every so often while she did dishes for granted. Now she had to remind herself to do it, and it made her shoulder ache. "Running water's spoiled me," she said sheepishly.

"Well, you're living in town now," Julia said. "We always knew it was different."

"It sure is. We didn't know how much," Mary said. "Electricity… It beats kerosene all hollow."

"I bet it does," Julia said. "Like I said, a lot of things are different in town. I know that." She lowered her voice and added, "But I'm afraid some things haven't changed at all."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Mary asked, scrubbing at a frying pan. The breading and chicken skin at the bottom didn't want to come off. She used more elbow grease.

In that same quiet voice, Julia answered, "I think you know. I almost died when I heard somebody put a bomb in the general store. I think Ma probably did, too. If anything happened to you, I don't think we could stand it, not after Alexander and Pa."

"I don't know what you're talking about," said Mary, who knew perfectly well. "Besides, that was a year and a half ago now-more than a year and a half ago. Nobody ever thought I had anything to do with it till now."

Her sister set a glass in the dish drainer. In the front room, Mort was telling a joke. Mary recognized his tone, though she couldn't make out the words. That ought to mean nobody in the front room could make out what she and Julia were saying. "You're lucky," Julia told her. "And like I said before, the two of us don't get the chance to talk like we used to."

"If you're going to talk about things like this…" Mary said.

Julia's smile was anything but amused. "I know you. So does Ma. You've hated the Yanks since you were this high." She set a hand where her waist had been. "And you know what Pa did. The Americans never found his tools. Did you?"

"Even if I had, I wouldn't say anything," Mary answered. "People who know things can tell them. That's how the last uprising got betrayed. Some folks blabbed, and they're rich and happy. And other folks hanged on account of it."

"Do you think I would do anything like that?" Julia asked indignantly.

"No, dear. Hand me that platter, would you?" Mary scrubbed at it. "But it doesn't matter, because I haven't told you anything. There isn't anything to tell. Nobody knows where Pa hid his tools. If the Yanks couldn't find them, you don't think I could, do you?"

After that, they worked together in tense silence for some little while. Julia said, "I never thought the day would come when my own sister lied to me."

That hurt. Mary scrubbed away, her head down. "I didn't lie," she said in a low, furious voice. "I told you there was nothing to talk about, and there isn't. And if you call me a liar, there won't be anything to talk about, not ever."

"Tell me you didn't put that bomb in the general store, then," Julia said.

"I didn't put it there," Mary said. Julia's jaw dropped. Mary added, "And if you don't believe me, you can go to the devil."

She lied without hesitation. Her family was and always had been sternly Presbyterian. Here, though, she had no compunctions. She'd seen her father, a man of somber rectitude if ever there was one, lie the same way. Some things were too important to trust to anyone but yourself. Other people, even a sister you loved, could let you down. Better not to give them the chance.

And the lie worked. Julia put her arms around Mary. Because of her bulging belly, the embrace was awkward, but Julia plainly meant it. "I'm so sorry, dear," she said. "I did think you had something to do with it, and it left me petrified. Ma, too. We've talked about it, though I don't think she'd ever get up the nerve to say so."

Mary didn't think so, either. When her father was making bombs, her mother had never asked him about it. She'd known. She'd known full well. But she'd kept quiet. That had always been her way. As the older sister, though, Julia had always thought she could poke her nose into Mary's business whenever she felt like it. That was how it seemed to Mary, anyhow. She never stopped to wonder if it looked any different to Julia.

They finished the dishes. When they went into the living room, Mort asked, "What were you two gossiping about in there?"

"Men," Mary answered.

In the same breath, Julia said, "Horses."

"How to tell the difference between them," Mary said. That got a laugh from Julia and their mother and Beth Marble. Mort and Kenneth Marble didn't seem to think it was quite so funny.

On the drive back to Rosenfeld, Mary held Alexander on her lap. He put up with that for a while, but then started to fuss. He wanted to crawl around in the auto. No matter what he wanted, Mary didn't let him. Who could guess what kinds of fascinating things he'd find to stick in his mouth down there?

"It's a different world, your mother's farm," Mort remarked as he pulled to a stop in front of their apartment building.

"I've thought the same thing," Mary said. "No running water, no electricity… I didn't know what they were like till I married you."

"No indoor plumbing, either. And that privy…" Her husband held his nose. Alexander thought that was funny. He tried to hold his little button of a nose, and almost stuck a finger in his eye.

"I didn't even think about it when I lived there," Mary said. She'd had to use the privy while she was there, though. The stink was enough to make her eyes cross. It wasn't so bad in the wintertime-but during the winter, you didn't want to expose any part of your anatomy to the cold.

"What we've got here is better," Mort said. "A lot better."

"Of course it is," Mary said. "We've got each other." That made Mort smile, which was what she'd had in mind. She didn't talk about what Canada didn't have: freedom, independence, its own laws, its own people running its shops, its own police in the streets, its own soldiers guarding the frontiers.

Mort knew his country lacked all those things, too. But Mary didn't want to remind him about them, lest he wonder if she'd put the bomb in the general store. It wasn't that she didn't trust him. If she hadn't trusted him, she never would have married him. But some burdens, she remained convinced, had to be borne alone. This was one of them.

She carried Alexander Arthur Pomeroy up the stairs. Her brother's name went on. So did her father's. And so did the quiet war they'd waged against the USA.

Election Day brought Hipolito Rodriguez into Baroyeca to vote. It also brought him in to make sure things went the way they were supposed to. He thought people had learned their lessons during the election of 1933, when Jake Featherston became president of the CSA, and from the revenge on the Freedom Party's foes that followed. But 1933 was four years gone by now. Sometimes people forgot lessons… or needed to be reminded.

Rodriguez's trip into town this year was different from the ones that had gone before. With him strode Miguel and Jorge. Both of his older sons had finished their time in the Freedom Youth Corps. Now they were strong young men, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, hard-muscled, both of them several inches taller than their father. They weren't old enough to vote yet, but they were old enough and tough enough to knock heads if heads needed knocking.

A new set of poles marched down from the mountains, parallel to the ones that had brought the telegraph into Baroyeca for generations. Those were spindly and sun-faded; they leaned now this way, now that. The new poles, by contrast, were perfectly spaced. They were thicker than the poles that held the telegraph wire, and every one stood perfectly straight. Even the wire on them, wrapped in its heavy coat of black insulation, seemed altogether stronger and tougher than the wire for the telegraph.

Pointing to the line of new poles, Miguel said, "We did that." Pride rang in his voice.

"I know you did," Hipolito Rodriguez answered. "And I'm proud of you. Who would have thought Baroyeca would have its own electricity?"

A falcon spiraled down and perched on a power pole a couple of hundred yards away. It didn't stay long. As the Rodriguezes drew near, it flew off again, screeching shrilly. It landed on a telegraph pole, but flew up at once when the pole shifted under its weight.

Jorge said, "Somebody's going to have to take care of those telegraph poles one of these days before too long."

His father had a pretty good idea who those somebodies might be. The Freedom Youth Corps was made for projects like that. It always had plenty of eager, active bodies, and it didn't pay any of them very well. When he got into Baroyeca, he saw boys from the Youth Corps, working under the direction of a master mason from another town, laying bricks for a new town hall and jail. They labored like men possessed, with a rhythm alien to Sonora, where things generally found their own pace. Not here; this was a breath of businesslike Virginia or North Carolina set down at the far end of the Confederate States.

Miguel and Jorge watched the youths with a mixture of scorn for those younger than themselves and respect for what they were doing. Miguel said, "They may be clumsy, but they aren't lazy." He spoke in English. It was the language of the Youth Corps, and seemed to be the language he and Jorge always used these days to think and talk about work.

The two of them weren't lazy now that they'd come back to the farm. They pitched into chores with an enthusiasm Hipolito Rodriguez found almost frightening. They ate them up and went looking for more. His own natural pace was slower. He used maсana to mean one of these days, when he got around to it. They used the word scornfully, to mean something that would never get done. He stopped using the word so much. The Youth Corps attitude began rubbing off on him.

This year, the polling place was in the alcalde's front room. Several Freedom Party stalwarts stood just outside. They waved to Hipolito as he came up. Carlos Ruiz had a list in his hand. Pointing to it, Rodriguez asked, "Did any of those fellows try to vote this time?"

"Only one," Ruiz answered. "We gave him a set of lumps and sent him home."

Rodriguez walked inside to cast his ballot. He voted the straight Freedom Party ticket. The way the ballot was printed, that was easy. Voting for the Whigs or the Radical Liberals was much harder. He put the completed ballot in the box. "Hipolito Rodriguez has voted," intoned the clerk in charge of the box. Hearing his name spoken so seriously always made him feel important. Another clerk wrote a line through his name on the registration roster so he couldn't vote twice.

He wondered how much difference that made. The people who would count the ballots were Freedom Party men. Back in the days when Sonora had been in the Radical Liberals' pockets, Rodriguez had often wondered how much announced counts had to do with real ones. He still did. The Freedom Party seized advantages whenever and however it could.

After voting, he took his sons to Freedom Party headquarters. Robert Quinn had seen them before, but not lately. "Por Dios, Seсor Rodriguez, you did not tell me you were raising football players," he said in his deliberate Spanish. "Where did you get these enormous young men?"

Miguel and Jorge both stood even taller and threw back their shoulders to make them look wider. They liked the idea of being football players. The new U.S.-style game, with forward passing, had really caught on in Sonora since the Great War. Some open ground, goal posts, and a ball were all you needed.

Miguel said, "All the good food we got in the Freedom Youth Corps helped us finish growing." He'd said the same thing to Rodriguez not long after coming home, and in the same-English-words. Rodriguez guessed he'd heard it a lot in the Corps. Hastily, though, Miguel added, "We eat well at home, too," and Jorge nodded. Their mother had been hurt when they praised the food they'd eaten in the Freedom Youth Corps.

Quinn nodded now. "I'm sure you do," he said, still in Spanish. He bent over backwards not to seem to be ramming English down anyone's throat. In that, he and other Freedom Party men in Sonora were the opposite of a lot of English-speakers Rodriguez had known. The Freedom Youth Corps operated mostly in English, but the younger generation was already more at home in the language of most of the Confederate States. Quinn went on, "And what will you do now that you've been discharged from the Corps?"

"Help Father on the farm for now, sir," Jorge said.

"I wish we could do something more for the country, though," Miguel said.

"It could be the day will come when you can," Quinn answered smoothly.

Miguel wants to be conscripted. That's what he's saying, though he doesn't even know it. The realization struck Rodriguez like a thunderbolt. And Jorge was nodding. I'll talk with them, their father thought. He hadn't wanted to be conscripted. But when his time came, during the war, the government was shooting young men in Sonora who refused to report. He'd gone in and taken his chances with Yankee lead. He was still here, so he supposed he'd done the right thing.

Robert Quinn went on, "Meanwhile, of course, doing things for the Partido de Libertad is almost the same as doing things for los Estados Confederados. Your father is a good man, a patriotic man. You'll follow in his footsteps, eh?"

Miguel and Jorge both nodded then. Rodriguez said, "I will tell you what I am. I am a man who is lucky in his sons."

"There is no luck better than that," Quinn said. "Do you want to grab a club and take the afternoon shift on watching the polling place? Bring your boys along; let them see how it's done. Then come back here. Now that we have electricity, I've got a wireless set to let us hear returns." He pointed to the box on his desk.

"Good," Rodriguez said, nodding to the wireless almost as if it were a person. "We will see you here, then, after the polls close. Come on, boys."

Out they went, and back to the alcalde's house. When Miguel and Jorge saw that one of the men outside the polling place with their father was Felipe Rojas, who'd shown them the ropes when they joined the Freedom Youth Corps, they were very impressed. When they saw that Rojas didn't roar at their father like the wrath of God, but treated him as an equal and a friend, they were even more impressed. Rodriguez carefully concealed his amusement.

And then his amusement dried up and blew away, for here came Don Gustavo, his old patron, straight for the polling place. Don Gustavo's name was on the list Felipe Rojas held. He came up to the Freedom Party men as if he were still a great power in the land, the power he'd been before 1933. His white shirt and string tie, his sharply creased black trousers and wide-brimmed black felt hat, his silver belt buckle and patent-leather shoes, all declared that he was no peasant, but a person of consequence. So did his thin little mustache and his prominent belly.

"Buenos dнas," he said, affably enough. "Excuse me, please, for I am going to vote." He had nerve. He'd come without bodyguards. More than once, the men loyal to him had come up against those who followed the Freedom Party. They'd come off second best every time, and paid a heavy price in blood. Now Don Gustavo was doing his bold best to pretend none of that had ever happened.

No matter how bold that best was, it wasn't going to get him into the polling place. "Freedom!" Felipe Rojas said in English. "You would do better, seсor, to go home and stay there in peace."

Don Gustavo's nostrils flared angrily. "You speak of freedom, and yet you say I am not free to vote?" He stuck to Spanish, and Spanish of almost Castilian purity. His face was fiery red. Scorn came off him in waves. His hand slid toward his pocket. By the way the pocket sagged, a small pistol hid there.

Hipolito Rodriguez tightened his grip on his club. "Don't do that, seсor," he said. "You may shoot us. You may even march in there and vote. But if you do, you are a dead man. Your family will die with you. The Partido de Liber-tad knows how to take revenge. Do you doubt it?"

He waited. Slowly, the high color faded from Don Gustavo's cheeks and forehead, leaving him almost corpse-pale. He'd seen how the Freedom Party struck back. "Damn you," he said. The Party men answered not a word. Don Gustavo's shoulders sagged. He turned and walked away.

"ЎBueno, papa!" Jorge said softly. Hipolito Rodriguez was only a peasant doing his best to make a living from a farm that could have been bigger and could have been on better land, but for the moment he felt ten feet tall.

Felipe Rojas took a pencil from a trouser pocket and checked Don Gustavo's name off on the list of those who weren't going to vote. The tiny sound the pencil point made on the paper was the sound of a system centuries old, a system that had endured under the flag of Spain, the flag of Mexico, and the flag of the Confederate States, falling to ruin.

"He backed down, did he?" Quinn said when the Freedom Party men returned to Party headquarters. "He's not a hundred percent stupid, then, is he? He knows things have changed in Sonora, and changed for the better, too."

The sound of the wireless set was another sound of change. The announcer, who spoke mostly English, but an English larded with Spanish words and turns of phrase, told of one Freedom Party victory after another in Congressional races and in state and local elections. The whole Confederacy lined up behind President Featherston and the party he'd built.

Well, almost the whole Confederacy. Rodriguez said, "He does not talk about the elections in Louisiana."

Robert Quinn frowned, as if he wished Rodriguez hadn't noticed. "Louisiana is… a problem," he admitted. "But the Freedom Party solves problems. You can count on that."

The Remembrance was a great ship. Her displacement matched that of any battleship in the U.S. Navy. All the same, the storm in the Atlantic flung the aeroplane carrier around like a toy boat in a bathtub also inhabited by a rambunctious four-year-old. Sam Carsten was glad he had a strong stomach. Plenty of sailors didn't; the air in the ship's corridors carried a faint but constant reek of vomit.

Somewhere off to the east lay the coast of North Carolina. The Remembrance and her aeroplanes were supposed to be keeping an eye on what the Confederates were up to. In weather and seas like this, she could neither launch aeroplanes nor land them once launched. About all she could do was pick up this, that, and the other thing in the wireless shack.

When Carsten wasn't on duty, he spent a fair amount of time hanging around in the shack finding out whatever he could. A lot of the wireless traffic coming out of the CSA was in Morse, which he understood only haltingly. A lot of it was in code, which not even the sailors taking it down understood. But every now and then they tuned in to stations from Wilmington or Elizabeth City or Norfolk up in Virginia. Those fascinated him. Up until about the time his father was born, the USA and the CSA had been one country. Half an hour of listening to Confederate wireless was plenty to show him they'd gone their separate ways since the War of Secession.

Oh, the music the Confederates played wasn't that much different from what he would have heard on a U.S. station. Even there, though, the Confederates' tunes often had wilder rhythms to them than any band in the USA would have used. Carsten had heard people say that was because a lot of musicians in the CSA were Negroes. He didn't know if it was true, but he'd heard it.

In between songs, the advertisements were all but identical to their U.S. equivalents. That made perfect sense to him. People trying to separate other people from their money probably sounded the same regardless of whether they were speaking English or Italian or Japanese or Hindustani. A hustler was a hustler, no matter where he lived.

But when the news came on, Sam knew he was hearing voices from another country. For one thing, all the stations carried the same stories, word for word. Sam had thought so, and the men in the wireless shack confirmed his impression. The broadcasters were all getting their scripts from the same place. And, by the way things sounded, that place was a Freedom Party office somewhere in Richmond.

As far as the wireless was concerned, the Freedom Party could do no wrong. Jesus might have walked on water, but, if you listened to the smooth-voiced men in the wireless web, Freedom Party officials from President Featherston down to Homer Duffy, the dogcatcher in Pig Scratch, South Carolina, walked on air, and choirs of angels burst into song behind them whenever they deigned to open their mouths and let the masses benefit from their godlike wisdom.

That especially held true when the announcers introduced a speech by Jake Featherston. To listen to them, Moses was coming down from Mount Sinai to enlighten an undeserving and sinful people. It wasn't just an act, either, or Carsten didn't think it was. They meant it, and they expected everybody listening to feel the same way.

"I'm Jake Featherston, and I'm here to tell you the truth," the Confederate president would say in his harsh accent, and then he'd spew out lies and hate. If he spoke in front of an audience, people would go nuts, whooping and hollering and cheering to beat the band. If he was by himself for a talk, the broadcaster would sugarcoat it afterwards.

"Do the Confederates really believe the crap that guy puts out?" Sam asked after a particularly virulent tirade from Featherston about colored terrorists.

One of the yeomen in the wireless shack shrugged. "If they say they don't, sir, they end up slightly dead," he answered. "Or more than slightly."

"Besides," the other yeoman added, "they can't say anything against the government, not in public they can't."

"Is it a country or a jail?" Carsten asked.

"Near as I can tell, sir," the second yeoman said, "it's a jail."

The more time Sam spent in the wireless shack, the more he was inclined to agree with the man who monitored signals coming out of the CSA. The other thing he noticed was that everybody on the wireless sounded happy about being in jail. If people in the Confederate States were unhappy about anything that was going on in their country, they didn't say so where any large number of other people had the chance to hear them.

When Carsten remarked on that, one of the yeomen said, "You're close, sir, but you're not quite right. When you hear 'em talk about Louisiana, you'll think the devil lives there."

Little by little, Sam discovered the man was right. It took a while. The men who read the news didn't like talking about Louisiana, any more than Sam's mother had liked talking about the facts of life. Sometimes, though, they couldn't help it. They sounded as if they were gloating when they noted how the state militia there was having trouble putting down Negro uprisings within its borders. Whenever Governor Long made a speech the broadcasters couldn't ignore, they went out of their way to heap scorn on it. They even seemed to celebrate when the New Orleans Tigers, the number-one football team in the state, lost to elevens from Atlanta or Richmond.

"Why do the rest of the Confederate States hate Louisiana?" Carsten asked in the officers' mess one day at suppertime.

"You've noticed that, have you, Lieutenant?" Commander Dan Cressy said.

"Uh, yes, sir," Sam replied, more than a little nervously: Cressy was the Remembrance's executive officer, answerable to no one aboard the carrier except Captain Stein. Attracting his attention could be good or could be anything but, depending on why you attracted it.

"Anyone else here notice it?" Cressy inquired, sipping his coffee. He had a long, thin, pale, highly intelligent face, and a pair of the coldest gray eyes Sam had ever seen. Like any good exec, he acted like a son of a bitch so the skipper didn't have to. A lot of people said he wasn't acting. Rumor had it that he translated Latin poetry in his quarters. Carsten had no idea if that particular rumor was true. Commander Cressy waited, but none of the other officers in the mess said anything. He set down the thick white china mug and nodded to Sam. "Very good, Lieutenant. You're dead right, of course; Louisiana is the pariah of the CSA. How did you come to realize that?"

Why didn't the rest of you notice that? bubbled just below the surface of his voice. Three or four officers sent Sam resentful looks. He was the least senior man in the mess except an ensign just out of Annapolis-and that smooth-cheeked ensign had a much brighter future in the Navy than a middle-aged mustang. Picking his words with care, Sam answered, "That sure is the way it sounds on the wireless, sir."

He wondered whether Commander Cressy would land on him like a ton of bricks for listening to the wireless. But Cressy didn't. His eyes stayed cold- Carsten didn't think they could warm up-but the light in them was undoubtedly approval. "Good," he said. "The more ways you can find out about the enemy, the better." Formally, of course, the Confederate States weren't the enemy. But among the fruit salad on Cressy's chest was the ribbon for a Purple Heart. He'd got a broken ankle aboard a U.S. destroyer torpedoed by a C.S. submersible in 1916. After another sip of coffee, he went on, "But you asked why, didn't you?"

"Uh, yes, sir," Carsten said.

The exec nodded again. "That's always the right question, because everything else comes out of it. Not what. Not how. Why. Know why, and what and how and often when and where and who take care of themselves. This time, why is pretty easy. Louisiana is the only Confederate state the Freedom Party doesn't own lock, stock, and barrel. Long, the governor there, is a Radical Liberal, and he's pulled off the same kind of coup inside the state as the Freedom Party has in the rest of the CSA. Outside of Louisiana, what Jake Featherston says, goes. Inside Louisiana, it's what Governor Long says."

Carsten nodded. That told him what he needed to know, all right. It also raised another question: "Can he get away with it?"

Before Commander Cressy could answer that, the general-quarters klaxon started hooting. Cressy and Carsten and all the other officers sprang to their feet. The exec said, "We'll take this up another time, if you like. Meanwhile…" Meanwhile, he was the first one out the door, trotting toward his station on the bridge.

Sam was only a step behind Cressy. As he hurried to his own post down in the bowels of the Remembrance, he wondered how many times he'd gone to general quarters, either as a drill or during real combat. He wouldn't have cared to give a precise number, but it had to be up in the hundreds.

He also wondered whether this was a drill or the real thing. You always did, if you had any sense. He heard sailors asking one another the same question as they clattered up and down iron staircases and rushed along corridors. Nobody seemed to have an answer, which was par for the course.

He was panting a little when he got to his own post. Too goddamn many cigarettes, he thought. They're hell on the wind. Thinking of them made him want one. But the smoking lamp went out during general quarters. The pack stayed in his pocket.

"What's up, sir?" asked one of the sailors in the damage-control party.

"Beats me," Sam answered. "Here's Lieutenant Commander Pottinger, though. Maybe he knows." He turned to the officer who headed the damage-control party. "You know what's going on, sir?"

"I think so," Hiram Pottinger said. "Don't know for a fact, but the scuttlebutt is, somebody spotted a periscope off to port."

That produced excited chatter from the sailors in the party. One of them, an enormous redhead named Charlie Fitzpatrick, asked the cogent question: "Whose?"

"Subs don't usually fly flags on top of their periscopes," Pottinger said dryly. "In these waters, though, that boat isn't awfully goddamn likely to be Japanese."

The sailors laughed. But then somebody said, "The Confederates aren't supposed to have any submersibles," and the laughter stopped. Everybody in the U.S. Navy was convinced the CSA had quite a few things the armistice at the end of the war forbade. Carsten remembered those sleek aeroplanes with confederate citrus company painted on their sides. They hadn't been armed-he didn't think they had, anyhow-but they'd looked mighty ready to take guns.

"No way to know the submarine is Confederate," Pottinger said. "It could be British or French, too."

That didn't make Sam any happier. The British, who'd been beaten but not crushed, had been allowed a few submarines after the war. The French hadn't. But Kaiser Bill's Germany wasn't pushing them about that. For one thing, the Kaiser was an old, old man these days. For another, the Action Franзaise regime, like the Freedom Party in the CSA, wanted to do some pushing of its own. And, for a third, Germany kept looking anxiously toward the Balkans, where restive South Slavs were making Austria-Hungary totter the same way they had a quarter of a century before.

Fifteen minutes later, the all-clear sounded. Carsten warily accepted it. But, as he headed up to the flight deck, he couldn't help wondering how long things would stay all clear.

The southbound train hurried through the night. Anne Colleton had done a lot of traveling, and a lot of sleeping in Pullman cars. She had trouble sleeping now. Here in Mississippi, she couldn't help wondering if machine-gun fire would stitch its way along the side of the train, or if a charge of dynamite buried in the roadbed would blow the engine off the tracks. The Confederate Army was doing its best to put down the simmering Negro uprising, but guerrillas weren't easy to quell. As soon as they hid their guns, they looked like any other sharecroppers. And plenty of blacks who wouldn't go out bushwhacking themselves would lie for and conceal the ones who did.

This wasn't a revolt like the one in 1915. That one had hoped to topple the Confederacy, and had come too close to success. This was more like a sore that didn't want to heal. Anne feared Jake Featherston and the Freedom Party had pushed blacks too hard after taking power-pushed them too hard without being able to crush them if they did rise up. Now the country had to pay for that lack of foresight.

Eventually, she did doze off. When she woke, the sky was getting light. Nobody had shot up the train. She yawned enormously, trying to drive away sleep. A few minutes later, a colored steward came by with a pot of coffee. She all but mugged him to get her hands on a cup. Even as she drank it, though, she wondered if the man had any connection to the guerrillas. You never could tell. She'd found that out the hard way.

She knew to the minute when the train passed from Mississippi down into Louisiana. Billboards with Jake Featherston's picture and Freedom Party slogans disappeared, to be replaced by those with Governor Long's picture and his slogans. Long called himself a Radical Liberal, but in fact he was just as much a strongman in Louisiana as Featherston was in the CSA as a whole. He'd learned a lot from the way the Freedom Party had risen, learned and applied the knowledge in his own state.

Fortified by that cup of coffee, Anne got dressed and went to the dining car for breakfast. She was just finishing when the conductor came through, calling, "Baton Rouge! Next stop is Baton Rouge!"

She went back to her compartment, threw her nightclothes into a suitcase, and waited for the train to stop. A porter came to collect the luggage: another Negro, and so another man to wonder about, no matter how fulsomely he thanked her for the tip she gave him.

Flashbulbs burst in a startling fusillade when she got down onto the platform from the Pullman car. "Welcome to Louisiana, Miss Colleton!" boomed a pudgy, dark-haired man in his mid-forties: Governor Huey Long. He swarmed forward, first to shake her hand, then to plant a kiss on her cheek. More flashbulbs popped. The papers in Louisiana were as much in his pocket as those in the rest of the Confederacy were in Jake Featherston's.

"Thank you very much," Anne answered, slightly dazed. "I hadn't expected such a fancy reception." She'd expected to be met by a driver and possibly bodyguards, and to be whisked from the station to the state Capitol.

But Huey Long didn't operate that way. "Anything worth doing is worth overdoing," he declared, and turned to play to the crowd on the platform. "Ain't that right, folks?"

People burst into noisy applause. "You tell 'em, Kingfish!" a woman called, as if to a preacher. Long lacked some of President Featherston's fiery intensity, but he seemed a more likable, more human figure. They both got what they wanted-people did as they told them to-but by different roads. That ain't was a nice touch. Huey Long had a law degree; such language wasn't part of the way he usually talked. But he brought it out naturally, using it to connect with the crowd.

"Come on," he told Anne. "Let's get on over to the statehouse and talk." She nodded. That was what Jake Featherston had sent her to Louisiana to do.

The governor's limousine was a Bentley with a hood as long as a battleship. Featherston would never have set foot in such a flashy motorcar. He had, so to speak, risen from the ranks, and didn't want to lose the common touch. Governor Long, by contrast, reveled in luxury.

Motorcycles ridden by state troopers preceded and followed the limousine. So did police cars with red lights flashing and sirens blaring. Long turned the short trip from the station to the Capitol into a procession. More photographers were waiting for him and Anne as they went up the steps into the impressively domed building.

Hard-faced guards surrounded them going up those steps. More guards waited at the entranceway. Still more patrolled the corridors. However much Huey Long posed as a friend of the people, he didn't trust them very far. A horde of sweepers also patrolled the hallways, and kept them spotlessly clean.

"If I'm rushing you, just sing out," Long told Anne. "You want to go to a hotel and freshen up, maybe even take a day to rest, it's all right by me."

"Thank you, but I'm fine," she said. "I'm here now. We may as well talk now, don't you think?"

"However you want it, that's how it'll be," he said grandly. "Suppose you go on and tell me why you're here."

"That's simple, Governor: I'm here to deliver a message for President Featherston," Anne answered. "You must understand that, or you wouldn't have given me such a… splendid reception."

"Well, now, I want you to know it was my pleasure," Long said, and then, as if relishing the phrase, repeated it: "My pleasure. I'll be glad to listen to this here message, whatever it is, even though I have trouble seeing what sort of a message the president of the CSA would want to send to me. I'm just minding my business here in Louisiana, and I reckon he ought to do the same outside my state."

"That's… part of what the message is about," Anne replied, much more nervous here than she'd ever been while dealing with Action Franзaise. If Governor Long didn't like what she had to say, she might not get home to South Carolina.

He nodded now, though, all graciousness. "Go on, then," he told her.

"You understand that this is unofficial," Anne said. "If you quote me, the president will either call you a liar or say I wasn't speaking for him." Long nodded impatiently. He'd trumpet what came next anyhow, and Featherston would disown it. But now the formalities of things unofficial had been observed, so Anne went on, "You could call this a warning, Governor. If you don't bring Louisiana into line with the rest of the CSA, you'll be sorry."

Huey Long scowled. "Bring it into line, you say? What's that supposed to mean? Knuckle under to the Freedom Party? Pardon my French, Miss Colleton, but I'll be damned if I'll do that."

You'll be damned if you don't, Anne thought. Aloud, she said, "The president is concerned about the direction you're taking Louisiana in."

"I'm not doing anything he hasn't done," Long said.

He was right, of course. But he'd started later, and had only a state to work in. That wasn't enough, not when he was up against the rest of the country. If he didn't see that… If he didn't see that, maybe he was too full of himself to see it. Anne said, "You'd do better not to get all stiff-necked about this, Governor. The president is very determined."

"What's he going to do? Invade my state?" Long snorted, ridiculing the mere idea. "If he does, we'll fight, by God. I'm just as good a Confederate patriot as he is any day of the week."

Despite his threat, he didn't take the idea seriously. Anne did. One thing she was sure of: Jake Featherston would tolerate no threats to his own authority. She said, "I don't know what he'll do. Whatever it is, do you really think you could stop it? This is only one state, after all."

"I'll take my chances," said the governor of Louisiana. "We haven't seen much freedom since the Freedom Party took over. But Featherston can't run again in 1939; it's against the Confederate Constitution. I think maybe I can whip anybody else in the Party. Willy Knight?" He gave a contemptuous shrug. "If he hadn't climbed onto Featherston's coattails, he'd still be a loudmouthed Texas nobody."

He wasn't wrong about that, either, or about the single six-year term to which the Confederate president was limited. More than once, Anne had wondered what Jake Featherston intended to do about that. What could he do? She didn't know. To Huey Long, she said, "That's all, then. I've told you what I came here to tell you. I have a reservation at the Excelsior. May I go there?" It wasn't an idle question; Long might want to hold her hostage. "Just so you know, the president won't pay ransom or anything like that to get me back."

"Oh, yes. I know. Run along," Long said. "You're not a big enough centipede in my shoe to get excited about."

That stung. Of all the things Anne least wanted to be called, small-time ranked high on the list. Smiling as if he knew as much, Long escorted her to the limousine. The driver put the car into gear without asking where she was going. Five minutes later, he pulled up in front of the Excelsior. "Here you are, ma'am."

"Thank you." She tipped him. A colored bellboy put her suitcases on a cart and wheeled them into the hotel. Anne went to the front desk. After fuming while she waited in line, she gave her name to the clerk.

"Oh, yes, Miss Colleton. Of course. And how are you this lovely afternoon?"

Anne hesitated a split second before answering. She'd expected to hear that precise question, but not so soon. "Tired," she told him. If she'd said, Just fine, the world would have been a different place. She didn't know how, not for certain, but one response meant one thing, the other something else.

The clerk's face showed none of that. With a sympathetic smile, he said, "You take it easy here. We've got fine rooms, and the best restaurant in town, too."

"All right. I'll try it." She collected her room key and went upstairs, the bellboy trailing along behind her. She tipped him and the elevator operator, then unpacked and indulged in the luxury of a bath before going down to the best restaurant in town. It lived up to the desk clerk's description. She soon saw why: a lot of the plump, prosperous men who ate there were Louisiana legislators. Talk of power and of business filled the air.

The restaurant gave a view of Roselawn, the street that led north to the Capitol. Anne was about halfway through an excellent plate of lamb chops when chaos suddenly erupted outside. Sirens screaming and red lights blazing, police cars and ambulances raced toward the statehouse.

Several of the important men in the restaurant wondered what was going on, some of them loudly and profanely. A telephone in the corridor that led to the place jangled. A waiter hurried from the corridor to one of the tables full of prominent people. A handsome, gray-haired man went back with him.

A moment later, curses as explosive as any Anne had ever heard filled the air. The gray-haired man rushed back into the room, crying, "Governor Long's been shot! Shot, I tell you! Nigger janitor was carrying a gun! Goddamn nigger's dead, but Governor Long, he's hurt bad!"

Pandemonium filled the restaurant. Men sprang to their feet shouting frightful oaths. Women screamed. A few men screamed, too. Anne went right on eating her lamb chops. She was supposed to get out of town tomorrow, and hoped the state authorities would let her leave. If they started wondering what connection she had to a desk clerk and a desperate janitor… All she knew about was one code phrase. No. She knew one other thing. When Jake Featherston gave her this assignment, she'd known better than to ask too many questions.

"You can't do this to me," the silver-haired lawyer insisted. "It violates every tenet of the Constitution of the Confederate States of America."

Jefferson Pinkard shrugged broad shoulders. "If I had the time, I could tell you there's martial law in Louisiana, and so whatever the Constitution's got to say doesn't matter worth a hill of beans. If I had time, I could do that. But I don't have time. And so-" He slapped the lawyer in the face, then backhanded him with a return stroke. Then he punched the silver-haired fellow in the pit of the stomach. The man tried to double up, but the guards who had hold of him wouldn't let him. In friendly tones, Pinkard asked, "See what I mean?"

He wondered if the lawyer would say something stupid and need another dose. Some of these people did. They'd run things in Louisiana for a long time, and had trouble figuring out they weren't in charge any more. They ran their mouths off, and they paid for it. Oh, yes, they paid plenty.

This one, though, seemed smarter than most. He also needed half a minute or so to catch his breath before he could say anything at all. "I get it," he choked out, his face gray with pain.

A little disappointed, Jeff jerked a thumb toward the interior of the camp. "Take him away," he said, and the guards did. Jeff laughed. He wondered if the men who'd voted to build camps in Louisiana ever imagined they'd wind up in them. He doubted it; people didn't work that way.

But, whether people believed it or not, things changed mighty easily. Huey Long had imitated in miniature Jake Featherston's system of running up prison camps to hold people who might cause trouble for him. With Long dead, with the president declaring martial law in Louisiana "to deal with the vile terrorism of black insurrection," the Freedom Party and all its apparatus had swooped down on the state like a hawk swooping down on a plump chicken. Men who'd defied the Freedom Party since long before 1933 were finally getting what was coming to them.

The swoop came so hard and fast, state officials hadn't had any chance to resist. President Featherston declared martial law the minute he heard Governor Long was dead. Soldiers and Freedom Party guards and stalwarts swarmed into Louisiana from north, east, and west. So many of them had been in Texas and Mississippi and Arkansas, so very close to the border, that Pinkard wondered if they hadn't waited there for Long's assassination. He wondered, but he kept quiet. Men who shot off their mouths about things like that didn't run prison camps; they got locked up in them. And besides, Jeff was more inclined to see this whole operation as good planning than as an invasion.

Long's wardens had used a little more imagination on the names of their prisons than the Freedom Party bothered with. This one, just outside Alexandria, was called Camp Dependable. That amused Jeff, not least because the fellow who had been in charge of this place was now an inmate here.

So was one of Huey Long's brothers. The other had suffered an unfortunate accident shortly after the forces necessary for martial law began entering Louisiana. Jeff had heard-unofficially, of course-that the "accident" involved a burst of machine-gun fire. That wasn't in the papers or on the wireless. He couldn't prove it was true. But he wouldn't have been surprised, either.

He went out to the perimeter of Camp Dependable. Freedom Party stalwarts were strengthening it with more barbed wire. It already had more machine-gun emplacements than Long's people had been able to afford. Martial law had been declared to put down the Negro insurrection in Louisiana. That insurrection still simmered, and still needed defending against. Somehow, though, just about all the inmates in the prison camp were white men who'd backed Huey Long to the hilt.

"Everything tight?" Pinkard asked a helmeted Freedom Party guard who manned a machine gun.

"You bet, Warden," the man answered. "Tight as a fifty-dollar whore's snatch."

Pinkard laughed. "That's the way it's supposed to be," he said, and continued on his rounds. "Freedom!" he added over his shoulder.

"Freedom!" the machine gunner echoed. That greeting hadn't been heard much here since Huey Long seized the reins. With martial law in place, though, with Louisiana being brought into line with the rest of the Confederate States, Freedom! here now had the importance it deserved.

A few hundred yards away, motorcars rolled along the highway that ran down to New Orleans. Governor Long had done a lot for the roads in the state. Building roads meant lots of jobs. Out in the rest of the CSA, President Featherston's dam-building program did the same thing.

Only after he'd trumped the entire perimeter did Pinkard relax a little. He'd got into the habit down in the Empire of Mexico. There, he hadn't been able to rely on the guards as much as he would have liked. If he didn't see things with his own eyes, he couldn't know for sure how they were going. He still remained convinced he had a better chance of heading off trouble if he kept an eye on everything himself.

With a couple of guards, he also strode through the interior of Camp Dependable. Having an escort was part of regulations. Where he didn't make the rules, he followed them. Making people follow the rules was the point of a prison camp, after all. But, rules or no rules, he didn't much worry about being taken hostage. New prisoners had tried that once with another warden, a couple of days after Governor Long died. The ensuing massacre showed what they could expect if they tried it again.

"Hey, Warden!" somebody called. "Can we get better food?"

"You'll get what the regulations say you get," Pinkard answered. "And you'll be sorry if you whine about it. You understand?"

The prisoner didn't answer. He wore his striped uniform-regulation in Louisiana-with an odd sort of pride. He'd sounded like an educated man when he asked the question. Jeff wondered what he'd been before Huey Long's rule collapsed. A lawyer? A professor? A writer? Whatever he'd been, he was only a prisoner now. And he hadn't really figured out how to be a prisoner, or he wouldn't have kept quiet when the warden asked him a question. Pinkard nodded to the guards. He needed to do no more than that. They fell on the man and beat him up. He howled, which helped him not at all. The other prisoners nearby watched, wide-eyed. None of them said a word or tried to interfere. They were learning.

When the beating ended, the guards stepped back. They weren't even mussed. Slowly, painfully, blood running down his face, the prisoner struggled to his feet. "You understand?" Jeff asked him again.

"Yes, Warden," he choked out.

"Stand at attention when you speak to the warden, you worthless sack of shit," a guard growled.

The prisoner did his best. It wasn't very good, since he could hardly stand upright at all. Here, though, making the effort counted. "Yes, Warden," he repeated, and then, warily, he added, "Sorry, Warden."

"Sorry doesn't cut the mustard," Pinkard snapped. "What are you?"

"What-?" The prisoner frowned. One of the guards snarled in hungry eagerness. He snarled a little too soon, though, and gave the man a hint. "I'm a worthless sack of shit, Warden!" he blurted.

Pinkard answered with a brusque nod and a handful of words: "Grits and water-ten days."

He waited. If the prisoner protested, if he even blinked, he would be a lot sorrier than he was already. But he only stayed at attention and tried to look as if he'd got good news. Pinkard nodded again and walked on. He would have less trouble from here on out with everybody who'd watched and listened.

No one gave him any more lip till he got to the infirmary. Then it came not from a prisoner but from a white-coated doctor. "Warden, if these men keep getting rations of hominy grits and a little fatback and nothing else, you'll see more cases of pellagra than you can shake a stick at."

"What else am I supposed to feed them?" Jeff asked.

"Vegetables. Fruits. Wheat flour," the doctor said. "They haven't been here very long, but some of them are already starting to show symptoms."

"Feeding 'em that other stuff'd cost more money, wouldn't it?" Pinkard asked.

"Well, yes," the man in the white coat admitted. "But pellagra's no joke. It will kill. It's only the past few years we've found out that something missing from the diet causes it. Do you want to burden yourself with a lot of disease you can easily prevent?"

Jeff shrugged. "I don't know about that. What I do know is, these people are enemies of the Confederate States. They don't deserve anything fancy. We'll go on the way we have been, thank you very much."

He waited. He couldn't punish the doctor the way he'd punished the prisoner. The doctor was only trying to do his job. He was supposed to be politically sound. He took a look at the guards standing behind Pinkard and visibly wilted. "All right," he said. "But I did want to keep you informed."

"Fine," Pinkard said. "I'm informed. Freedom!" This time, the handy word meant, Shut up and stop bothering me.

"Freedom!" the doctor echoed. He couldn't say anything else.

Barbed wire separated the warden's office and quarters and the guards' quarters from the prisoners' barracks. Pinkard nodded to himself when he passed out of the area where the prisoners lived. They were nothing but trouble. That was even more true here than it had been in Alabama. There, Whigs and Rad Libs had guessed for a long time what would happen to them once the Freedom Party came out on top. Not here in Louisiana, not after Long got in. The Rad Libs here had thought they'd stay on top forever.

As Pinkard went up the stairs of the mess hall to grab himself a snack (he had a lot more choices than grits and fatback), a flight of aeroplanes buzzed by overhead. They were painted in bright colors. Instead of the C.S. battle flag, they had confederate citrus company painted on wings and fuselage. But they meant business. When Confederate forces entered Louisiana after Governor Long was gunned down, a few state policemen and militiamen had tried to resist. They didn't try for long, not after those confederate citrus company machines bombed and machine-gunned them from the sky. And the aeroplanes had been useful since, too, pounding Negro guerrillas who hid in swamps and bays inaccessible except from above.

The Confederate States weren't supposed to have aeroplanes that carried bombs and machine Runs. That was what the United States had been saying since 1917, anyhow. President Smith had sent President Featherston a note about it. Jeff remembered hearing about that on the wireless set in his quarters. And President Featherston had written back, too, saying they were armed only for internal-security reasons, and that the CSA would take the weapons off as soon as things calmed down again.

So far, the USA hadn't said anything more. It had been two or three weeks now since the first protest. As far as Jeff could see, that meant his country had got away with it. He grinned as he went into the mess hall. The damnyankees had been kicking the Confederate States around for more than twenty years, but their day was ending. The CSA could walk proud again. Could… and would.

A colored cook fixed him a big, meaty roast-beef sandwich with all the trimmings. He got himself a cup of coffee, rich and pale with cream and full of sugar. Mayonnaise ran down his chin when he took a big bite of the sandwich. Life wasn't bad. No, sir, not bad at all.

Every time Clarence Potter put on his uniform, he looked in the mirror to see if he was dreaming. No dream: butternut tunic, a colonel's three stars on each collar patch. The cut of the tunic was slightly different from what he'd worn in the Great War. It was looser, less binding under the arms, and the collar didn't try to choke him every time he turned his head. Whoever'd redesigned it had realized a man might have to move and fight while he had it on.

Going to the War Department offices in Richmond seemed a dream, too, although he'd been doing it for a year and a half now. The sentries outside the building stiffened to attention and saluted when he went by. He returned the salutes as if he'd done it every day since the war ended. The first few times he'd saluted, though, he'd been painfully, embarrassingly, rusty.

More visitors to the War Department walked up the stairs near the entrance or paused to ask the sergeant sitting at a desk with an information sign where they needed to go. The

sergeant was plump and friendly and helpful. Few people went down the corridor past his desk. Another sign marked it: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

The friendly sergeant nodded to Potter as he strode by. He went halfway down the corridor with the intimidating sign, then opened a door labeled supplies amp; requisitions. With careful, even fussy, precision, he closed the door behind him.

Three more guards stood on the other side of that door. Instead of bayoneted Tredegars, two of them carried submachine guns: short, ugly weapons good for nothing but turning men into hamburger at close range. The third guard had a.45 instead. He said, "Your identification, Colonel?"

As always, Potter produced the card with his photograph on it. As always, the guard gave it a once-over to make sure photo matched face. Satisfied, the man with the.45-who'd been careful not to get in his comrades' line of fire-stepped back. He pointed to the log sheet on a table past the guards. Potter put the card back in his wallet, then logged himself in. He looked at his watch before adding the time: 0642. He'd had to get used to military hours again, too.

Stairs led down from the door marked supplies amp; requisitions. The room where Potter worked was in a subbasement, several stories below street level. Down here, fans whirred to keep air circulating. It felt musty anyhow. In the summer, it was air-conditioned like a fancy cinema house; it would have been unbearable otherwise.

Potter sat down at his desk and started going through U.S. newspapers, most of them a day, or two, or three, out of date. Know your enemy had to be the oldest rule in intelligence work. Papers in the USA talked too much. They talked about all sorts of things the government would have been happier to see unsaid: movements of soldiers, of barrels, of aeroplanes, of ships; stories of what was made where, and how much, and for how much; railroad schedules; pieces about how the bureaucracy worked and, often, how it failed to work. Papers in the CSA had been the same way before the Freedom Party took over. They offered much less to would-be spies now.

Every so often, Clarence Potter remembered he'd come up to Richmond to assassinate President Featherston. He knew why he'd come up here to do it, too. He still believed just about everything he had during the 1936 Olympics. But he wasn't interested in shooting Featherston any more. He had too many other things going on.

He'd known Featherston was shrewd. But he hadn't realized just how clever the president of the CSA was, not till he saw from the inside the way Featherston operated. After shooting the Negro who'd opened fire on Featherston before he could himself, Potter could have been patted on the back and then suffered a dreadful accident. Instead, Featherston had done something even nastier: he'd given Potter a job he really wanted to do, a job he could do well, and a job where who his boss was didn't matter a bit.

"Oh, yes," Potter murmured when that thought crossed his mind. "I'd want revenge on the USA no matter who the president was."

Featherston hadn't used him in the subjugation of Louisiana. Potter hadn't even known that was in the works till it happened-which was, all by itself, a sign of good security. There were all sorts of things he didn't need to know and would be better off not knowing. The people who'd planned and brought off the Louisiana operation didn't know what he was up to, either. He hoped like hell they didn't, anyhow.

He was banging away at a typewriter, putting together a report on U.S. Navy movements out of New York harbor, when his nine o'clock appointment showed up ten minutes early. Randolph Davidson's collar tabs bore the two bars of a first lieutenant. He was in his late twenties, blond, blue-eyed, with very red cheeks and a little wisp of a mustache. Saluting, he said, "Reporting as ordered, Colonel Potter."

Potter cocked his head to one side, listening intently, weighing, judging. "Not bad," he said in judicious tones. "How did you come to sound so much like a damnyankee?" He sounded a lot like one himself; the intonations he'd picked up at Yale before the war had stuck.

"After the war, sir, my father did a lot of business in Ohio and Indiana," Davidson answered. "The whole family lived up there, and I went to school there."

"You'd certainly convince anyone on this side of the border," Potter said.

The younger man looked unhappy. "I know that, sir. People don't trust me on account of the way I talk. I swear I'd be a captain now if I sounded like I came from Mississippi."

"I understand. I've had some trouble along those lines myself," Potter said in sympathy. "Now the next question is, could you pass for a damnyankee on the other side of the border?"

Davidson didn't answer right away. Those blue eyes of his widened, and became even bluer in the process. "So that's what this is all about," he breathed.

"That's right." Potter spoke like one of his Yale professors: "This is what happens when two countries that don't like each other use the same language. You can usually tell somebody from Mississippi apart from somebody from Michigan without much trouble. Usually. But, with the right set of documents, somebody who sounds like a damnyankee can go up north and be a damnyankee-and do all sorts of other interesting things besides. What do you think of that, Lieutenant?"

"When do I start?" Davidson said.

"It's not quite so simple," Clarence Potter said with a smile. "You've got some training to do." And we've got some more checks to do. "But you look good. You sound good."

"Thank you very much, sir," Davidson said, where most Confederate citizens would have answered, Thank you kindly. Potter nodded approval. The younger man's grin said he knew what Potter was approving.

"I will be in touch with you, Lieutenant," Potter said. "You can count on that."

"Yes, sir!" Davidson also knew dismissal when he heard it. He got to his feet and saluted. "Freedom!"

That word still rankled. It reminded Clarence Potter of what he had been. He didn't care to think about how the man who'd redonned Confederate uniform had come to Richmond with a pistol in his pocket. He wanted to pretend he hadn't heard the word. He wanted to, but he couldn't. Lieutenant Davidson was definitely a man who spoke with a Yankee accent. That didn't mean he wasn't also a Freedom Party spy checking on the loyalty of a suspect officer.

I'm old news now, Potter thought. If anything happens to me, it won't even show up in the papers. I can't afford to make people worry about me. The calculation-one he'd gone through before-took less than a heartbeat. "Freedom!" he echoed, not with the enthusiasm of a stalwart but in a crisp, businesslike, military way.

Davidson left the underground office. Potter scribbled a couple of notes to himself. They both had to do with the background checks he'd have to make on the officer who'd gone to school in Ohio and Indiana. Some of those checks might show whether Davidson was reporting back to the Freedom Party. Others might show whether he was reporting back to U.S. Army Intelligence headquarters in Philadelphia.

Potter muttered under his breath. That was the chance he took when running this kind of operation. Somebody who sounded like a damnyankee was liable to be a damnyankee. The CSA spied on the USA, but the USA also spied on the CSA. If the United States could slide a spy into Confederate Intelligence, that could be worth a corps of ordinary soldiers when a second round of fighting broke out. Facing a foe who spoke your language was a two-edged sword, and could cut both ways. Anyone who didn't realize that was a fool.

"I hope I'm not a fool," Potter muttered as he went back to plugging away at his paperwork. "I hope I'm not that kind of fool, anyhow."

How could you know, though? How could you be sure? During the Great War, Potter had worried more about the tactical level than the strategic. This new job was more complex, less well defined. Here, he couldn't write something along the lines of, Interrogation of U.S. prisoners indicates an attack in map sector A-17 will commence at 0530 day after tomorrow. What he was looking for was subtler, more evanescent-and when he thought he saw it, he had to make sure he wasn't just seeing something his U.S. opposite number (for he surely had one) wanted him to see.

"Damn you," he said under his breath. That was aimed at Jake Featherston, but Potter knew better than to name names. Someone might be-someone almost certainly was-listening to him.

The trouble was, Featherston had known exactly what made Potter tick. I solve puzzles. I'm good at it. Point me at something and I will get to the bottom of it. Tell me it helps my country-no, let me see with my own eyes that it helps my country-and I'll dig four times as hard to get to the bottom of it.

Above Potter's head, the fans in the ventilation system went on whirring. The sound got to be part of him after a while. If it ever stopped, he'd probably exclaim, "What was that?" The vibration had made his fillings ache when he first came here. No more. Now it seemed as basic, as essential, as the endless swirl of blood through his veins.

A major walked past him. "After twelve," the man said. "You going to work through lunch, Colonel?"

Potter looked at his watch in amazement. Where had the morning gone? He'd done more plugging than he thought. "Not me," he said, and got to his feet. Intelligence had its own mess hall-the secret lunchroom, he thought with wry amusement-so men who dealt in hidden things could talk shop with no one else the wiser.

He got himself a pastrami sandwich-a taste he'd acquired in Connecticut, and not one widely shared in the CSA-and a glass of Dr. Hopper, then sat down at a table. He had it to himself. Even after a year and a half, he was still new here, still not really one of the gang. A lot of the officers in Intelligence, the elite in the C.S. Army, had served through the lean and hungry times after the Great War. They had their own cliques, and didn't readily invite johnny-come-latelies to join. They were still deciding what to make of him, too. Some of them despised Jake Featherston. Others thought him the Second Coming. With one foot in both those camps, Potter didn't fit either.

And so, instead of gabbing, he listened. You learn more that way, he told himself. A Yankee spy would have learned a lot, especially hearing the way names like Kentucky and Houston got thrown around. Potter had suspected that much even before he came back to Intelligence. As anyone would, he liked finding out he was right.