Conflagration (22 page)

Argo was first on his feet. “Shall we make a move?”

All round them, the party in the restaurant car was starting to break up. The stewards were clearing tables and those who lingered had broken up into conversational or even conspiratorial groups. Jack Kennedy and Governor Branson were already on their way out. With a single backward glance at Kennedy, and a reluctant sigh, Jesamine followed Argo, Windermere, and the others back into the corridor that led to the rear coaches. At the door of their compartment, Windermere stepped to one side, and allowed The Four to go in first, but then politely waylaid Jane Tennyson. “I think I can take it from here, Commander.”

Tennyson obviously didn’t like being excluded, but stiffened to attention as though receiving an order from a superior. “As you wish, Colonel.”

“Thank you, Commander. If you could send a steward along to take our orders, I’d be extremely grateful.”

With that, Windermere stepped into the compartment and closed the door behind him. The deftness with which Windermere had moved Tennyson out of play led Jesamine to believe there was a lot more to this man than met the eye, and she was far from sure that she trusted him.

RAPHAEL

“It takes all kinds to make a war. One man’s freedom fighter is another’s gangster.”

Raphael raised an eyebrow. He was far from sure if he trusted this strange English colonel. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend?”

Windermere nodded. “As long as one accepts the limitations.”

Jesamine’s expression was bleak. “Phaall, the Teuton, liked to use the expression.”

“It’s the classic Teuton justification.”

“Except he never accepted the limitations.”

Windermere sipped his gin. “And that will be the Teutons’ ultimate downfall.”

When the colonel had first sat down opposite them, he had lowered himself stiffly into the seat. “An interlude with the Zhaithan rather messed up my leg.”

Cordelia had blinked. “With the Zhaithan?”

“They caught me somewhere where I wasn’t supposed to be.”

“So you are a spy?”

“Perhaps. Although hardly of the common or garden variety.”

“Jesamine and I were once prisoners of the Zhaithan.”

Windermere had nodded. “I know.”

“You know?”

“It probably seems like an intrusion, but I’ve read your dossiers.”

The Four exchanged glances. Then Cordelia turned on her smile again. “So how did the Zhaithan get you?”

“It was my own fault. I lingered too long in this saloon of especially ill-repute, showing card tricks to the harlots.”

He glanced at Jesamine. “It was in Cadiz, incidentally. A joint called the El Matador. Maybe you knew it?”

Jesamine colored and her jaw clenched hard. Windermere knew what she was in Cadiz and it made her angry. “I’ve heard of the El Matador. Damp sheets, bad booze, and cheap tricks. I never went there.”

Windermere shrugged. “Whorehouses are part of the territory. The most effective placement of agents can be in the brothels. Invisibility is built in, and a lot of secrets get spilled on the damp sheets after the bad booze.”

Raphael wondered why Windermere was going to such lengths to demonstrate that he knew their histories. Did he think it gave him some kind of control over them? He did not like the way the English colonel was treating Jesamine, and was about to say something, but Argo beat him to it. “You seem to know all about us, Colonel. Perhaps you’d like to tell us something about yourself and this ES Section.”

Windermere nodded. “That seems only fair.”

“So?”

At that moment, the steward arrived with drinks, and Windermere waited until he was through before answering. Windermere’s drink was a clear, colorless liquid in a conical glass with an olive on a toothpick in it. Cordelia stared at it curiously. She didn’t seem to share the others’ distrust of the man. In fact she seemed quite enamored of him. “What’s that?”

“It’s a martini.”

“What’s a martini?”

“A new invention. A lot of gin, a lot of refrigeration, and very little else.”

Cordelia looked down at her own aquavit as though regretting its lack of sophistication, but Raphael had no more time for pleasantries and chat. “You were about to explain the ES Section.”

Windermere nodded. “The ES Section is one of those units that the rest of Military Intelligence wishes didn’t exist. We deal in the metaphysical, the stuff you can’t see until it suddenly appears. We make the regular soldiers very uncomfortable. You’ve probably run into the same kind of discomfort yourselves. Am I right?”

Raphael and the others nodded. At least this Windermere could be direct when he so desired. “The regular Norse army wishes it didn’t have to come to terms with the possibility of big balls of paranormal gelatin bouncing around the battlefield, eating whole companies of infantry.”

Raphael scowled. “We’ve seen big balls of paranormal gelatin bouncing around the battlefield. Also little ones.”

Argo nodded. “Whole formations of them.”

Jesamine pursed her lips and Raphael saw she took some pleasure in reminding Windermere that they were hardly novices in paranormal combat. “We have also faced them down and destroyed them.”

Windermere looked down at his boots. Raphael reflected that he probably had a batman or servant who shined them to their deep chestnut gloss. Maybe the Norse were not all that different from the Teutons. A lock of hair fell in Windermere’s face and he brushed it back as he looked up. “I’m sorry. Forgive me. I’ve offended you with my flippancy.”

Maybe there was a difference. Teutons did not ask to be forgiven. Cordelia stopped treating Colonel Windermere to her sultry look for long enough to be serious for a moment. “The NU are not actually at war with the Mosul Empire.”

Jesamine backed her up. “That’s right. We’ve been in the shit, close up, and very personal, Colonel.”

Windermere continued to be placating. “Exactly. And that’s why I was so anxious to meet you. We may not be in a shooting war with desperate Mamalukes, but it is a war all the same.”

Windermere paused, waiting for any of The Four to speak. They didn’t, so he continued. “It’s a war that being fought with wraiths in the dark of night, apparitions in back alleys, and the murderous emanations of Quadaron-Ahrach, and Her Grand Eminence, his loathsome sister.”

Cordelia raised an eyebrow, but allowed Windermere to continue. “It’s a war being fought all over Europe and the Middle East. It’s fought by the continual resistance in the occupied territories. This resistance can take many forms. Everyone has heard the stories of soldiers starving while food rots in the boxcars of trains that have been directed to the wrong railway line or parked in the wrong siding. Sometimes it’s just Mosul inefficiency. Stuff fucks up naturally, all the time, in a totalitarian theocracy, but the fuck-ups can be eased along and made more destructive. Paperwork can be misplaced, supplies can be wrongly routed, and private secrets accidentally revealed. Sometimes these actions are more bold; a poisoning, an assassination, a High Zhaithan dies in his sleep and his concubine is nowhere to be found.” He glanced briefly at Jesamine. “It’s a war that produces strange alliances; Hispanian streetwalkers, Turkish opium runners, and the Romany underground; washer women who are clandestine witches, and who hide the tattoo of Morgana’s Web. It’s the Secret Mandrakes, the Carpathian Legion, the Black Hand, and Il Syndicato…”

Jesamine leaned forward. “In Cadiz we had Il Syndicato, but they were just thieves and pimps and smugglers.”

Raphael agreed with her. “I heard about Il Syndicato in Madrid. They were supposed to be degenerates and cutthroats.”

Windermere smiled. “Like I said earlier, one man’s freedom fighter is another’s gangster.” Then his face turned serious. “There are a lot of people, in the lands across the English Channel, risking their lives and worse to bring the Mosul Empire to ruin, and it falls to units like ES Section to give them what help and support we can. That includes balancing all the idiosyncrasies.”

“Hence the devil-may-care attitude.”

“It’s sometimes the only way when you’re making deals with devils.”

ARGO

The thought hardly made any sense, but, although he had no doubt that Colonel Gideon Windermere was wholly and totally human, something about him reminded Argo of Yancey Slide: the lazy posture that occasionally verged on insolence, the uncertainty about what he took seriously and what he treated as a joke, a strange and languid distance in the way he talked. Argo also did not know how much of this was good and how much of it was bad. “Are we more of the devils with whom you have to deal?”

Windermere laughed, seemingly not offended by Argo’s tone. “Quite the reverse. I’ve been very anxious to meet to you. As Jesamine said, you all have been in the shit close up. You have put Jeakqual-Ahrach to flight. I and my people have a lot to learn from you.”

“Is Jane Tennyson one of your people?”

Windermere blinked. “Good grief, her? Heavens no. She’s from naval public relations. Stiff and martial as they come. Don’t let the uniform fool you. The boys and girls of ES Section are neither of those things.”

During the exchange, Argo had been thinking. “You said you had a lot to learn from us.”

Windermere nodded. “That’s right.”

“I was wondering what we get in return.”

“In return?”

“You learn from us. What do we get from you?”

Windermere looked at Argo as though properly assessing him for the first time. “I though we were all in this for the overthrow of Hassan IX.”

Argo took a sip of his scotch. “It’s been my experience that, in war, even among allies, things are frequently transactional.”

“You want to know what’s in it for you and your friends? Is that what you’re saying, Major Weaver?”

“That’s what I’m saying, Colonel Windermere.”

“Well now…” Windermere pondered for a moment. “I imagine what I would do for you is to assist you however I can with your mission.”

Argo looked sideways at the Englishman. “Our mission?”

“We all know that you have an objective over and above just being here as part of Jack Kennedy’s goodwill visit, don’t we?”

“We do?”

Windermere eyes twinkled with a sly illusion. “That’s what Yancey Slide led me to understand.”

If Windermere’s objective was to take The Four totally by surprise, he more than achieved it. They looked at each other in amazement and then back at him. “Slide? He was here? When?”

“Just two days ago. He arrived on the
HMS Constellation
.”

“And you spoke to him?”

“Of course I spoke to him. Slide wouldn’t come to the NU without getting in touch. He and I go back a very long way. He claims it was in multiple timestreams.”

Argo knew he would be a whole lot happier if Slide was with them. “He’s here now?”

Windermere shook his head. “No, he stayed long enough to meet up with me and fill me in, and then he moved on. I assume he went to Oslo, but you never quite know with Slide.”

Argo was disappointed but found himself more ready to accept Gideon Windermere. He did resemble Slide. He had that same world-weary look, old beyond his years from too much premature experience; the air of someone who has been there and done that, maybe too much and maybe too often. And was perhaps only surviving or, at least, remaining, by keeping up an amused detachment. Raphael, on the other hand, was still mistrustful. “He filled you in?”

“That’s what I said.”

Jesamine also held on to her suspicions. “What exactly did he fill you in on?”

“He filled me in on your urgent need to know as much as possible about these White Twins, these apparent new creations of Jeakqual-Ahrach.”

This statement stopped all conversation. Even Cordelia was staring at Windermere in disbelief. “You know about the Twins?”

Raphael held up a hand. “I think we should stop this talk right now. We don’t know what he knows, and we don’t know what we might be giving away.”

Windermere finally seemed to be running out of patience with Raphael and Jesamine’s skepticism. “There has to be a point when we start marginally trusting one another.”

Jesamine scowled. “We’re the ones with the most to lose.”

“Would it help if I told you the decision I should work with you was made days before Slide embarked on the
Constellation
? Or that the plan was approved by T’saya, Miramichi, The Lady Gretchen, and Magachee?”

Jesamine swallowed hard. “Magachee was never in on this. She would have told me.”

“Would she?”

Jesamine sighed. It was war and she had to be realistic. “No, probably not.”

“So don’t you think that you should either grant me a measure of trust, or at least admit one thing?”

“What one thing?”

“That if I’m the enemy, and I know as much as I do, then you, my dears, are wholly and totally fucked.”

CORDELIA

Cordelia was using all of her considerable powers of self-control to contain herself. Gideon Windermere was adorable. After he had stopped Jesamine in her tracks, the lock of hair had again fallen in his face, and as he had casually blown it out of his eyes she had almost groaned out loud.

“If I’m the enemy and I know as much as I do, then you, my dears, are wholly and totally fucked.” No only was Colonel Gideon Windermere adorable, but his logic was irrefutable. They had to trust this bizarre character from the NU intelligence community, or they were basically going nowhere. Cordelia wanted the mystery of the White Twins resolved, and she wanted Windermere. She had no reason to think that the two objectives could not be combined. The Twins liquidated and Windermere possessed; the goals were in no way mutually exclusive. The others might start giving her the look if she took up with Windermere, but she really didn’t care. There was a war on and she wanted him. Jesamine was fucking Jack Kennedy, so she was without even a foot on the moral high ground, and the boys were only boys, and therefore didn’t count. Gideon Windermere made Cordelia think of a swashbuckler pretending to be a college professor, but one who had done enough swashbuckling to know what lay behind and beneath the romance.