The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller (13 page)

Several pieces of wide, heavy paper, rolled together, were lying on their side near where they’d no doubt been sitting on end, beneath the table. I picked them up, spread them carefully in the light on the tabletop.

They were three contiguous ordnance survey maps, tracking the Thames River from the Isle of Thanet, County Kent, to London.

No marks.

Precious little else here.

I rolled the maps together once more and placed them standing on the floor beneath the table where I reckoned they’d been.

I returned to the chair, set it in its previous place, put my hands on the top of its cane back, and leaned a little against it.

Had I missed something in this room? I looked around. It was bare but for the two tables. I imagined Stockman sitting in this chair alone, shut off from the world, high above the sea, in this circle of pale yellow light, in his wooden chair, reading. These books. Other books that were gone now. Deciphering telegrams from Berlin. Happy in the quiet. Fussily keeping the edges of things straight. Planning. Planning what?

Winds and weather didn’t quite add up.

If there was nothing more than this, I could think on these things later. I needed to go. Joe Hunter needed to be protected.

I switched off the stand-up lamp.

I moved to the eastern loophole, unhooked it, opened it, as it was when I arrived.

Though it was still a very small sound, I heard it at once. Coming through the loophole from the east, from out in the strait.

The sound of an engine.

From
over
the strait, I realized.

I could hear the distant drone of gasoline engines. I was willing to bet they were Maybachs, two-hundred horsepower each, attached in fours to Zeppelins. Stockman’s bravado at the torch lighting buzzed into my head along with them. He knew they were coming. They knew where he was. He was lighting their way into the mouth of the Thames.

I went out of the tower room, but I did not descend. I went up the inner staircase and emerged through an upright metal door set in a stone enclosure built into the courtyard corner of the parapet. I moved toward the eastern wall, passing beneath my daylong landmark, the massive Union Jack. I looked up as I went by. The flag hung straight down, barely stirring. It was a perfect night for the Zepps. No moon, a high ceiling, the air gone almost still.

I stood at the parapet and looked into the thin gruel of the night. I could hear the orchestra again, distantly, from up here in the open. It was directly behind me, playing “There’s a Long, Long Trail.” Mother was still working on the wartime standards. She hadn’t even begun to encore.

She and the crowd were about to get a fright.

I strained to hear the engines above the music. And there they were. Nearer now. The drone had become a hammering, the piston fire itself almost distinguishable. I strained to see them. And then the stars were moving and then I realized with a quick grab in my throat just how low the Zeppelins were and how near, and they were rushing this way, still only a few dollops of light, perhaps from their undercarriages, but also a vast thickening of the dark above.

Though the Zepps would not drop a bomb on Sir Albert’s house, though we were their beacon, their allies, though we were Albert’s big show, my hands pressed hard against the stone of the parapet with a terrible realization. These vast flying machines hammering our way, invisible against the dark and carrying a ton of incendiaries, these were the ghosts of future warfare, death from the sky, death that one day could reach to every home, every parlor, every crib, in every nation on the planet. This was mankind’s fate pounding its way toward us on a moonless night.

All these things were what my hands knew as they clung futilely to a rock.

And now I felt a quick stirring of the air as a dark mass drew very near, its palpable invisibility pressing against my eyes, and I began to lift my face as it came, no more than a hundred yards above where I stood, and it was quick, it was over the beach and then the cliff and then I was looking up, up, and the air was thrashing, sucking the breath from me, and I was looking directly up as the sky vanished in a grimy dark and then a gondola with lit windows slid over me and the engines combusted in my head and the propellers clacked, and the Zeppelin passed over the castle and passed and passed and passed, as long as a steamship on the Atlantic, and the rear gondola drew its lights over me, and I turned to watch, and the flag was lifting a bit in the currents of the Maybachs, as if the Union Jack were actually thinking of waving for this infernal machine. But it was Stockman’s Union Jack, of course.

And the band stopped playing abruptly and there were cries from the green and now another pounding, behind me, and I turned and a second Zeppelin was approaching, slightly to the north, and I could see the lit windows of the commander’s gondola as it passed and I could see figures moving there.

Wind structure and the system of British weather and the path to London along the Thames. This was what Sir Albert Stockman was about. These machines. And the second Zepp droned on by and the orchestra started up playing. I recognized the tune. “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” The song the newspapers all reported the
Titanic
’s salon orchestra played as the ship sank. Courage is an odd thing. In this case, given the actual circumstances, it could seem a foolish thing, a hysterical thing, a cheap imitation, a grimly ironic joke. Except these boys didn’t know the circumstances. They were trying to calm a crowd’s panic in the face of disaster. It was probably irritating the hell out of Stockman, whose carefully prepared, courageous oratory was being drowned out by some hired musicians stealing his thunder with a hymn.

I needed to rouse myself from all this. The time was right to get downstairs as fast as I could and slip into the crowd during all the uproar.

I crossed the tower, entered the stairwell, circled downward. I caught myself rushing. I couldn’t put haste over caution. I slowed as I neared the bottom platform, made my footfalls soft. I stepped back and away as I pulled open the door from the wardrobe. Gently.

I was glad I did.

I heard voices.

I pocketed my flashlight and drew my Mauser.

Muffled still, these voices. Not moving. I drew back one side of the curtain to the inner darkness of the wardrobe. I did not trust the wooden floorboard to take my weight silently. I leaned in as far as I could, turning my ear to listen.

Martin’s voice.

Jeremy’s voice.

They were both speaking German.

13

The button to release the Mauser’s safety sat right beneath my thumb. I pushed it.

Joe Hunter may have to die so that Kit Cobb has a chance to live. I’ll shoot my way out.

The button and the thought happened instantly, simultaneously, before I could make out the German words being spoken.

Then there was a scuffling of feet.

The voices were closer.

Jeremy said, “You and I are on the same side.”

He’d said the same thing to me, in English. I tried to decide in which language it sounded true.

Martin didn’t seem to be buying it. “Let’s look upstairs,” he said. “Through the wardrobe. Move.”

The words and the tone made it clear he’d disarmed Jeremy and was holding a pistol in his back. If Jeremy was indeed working for the Huns, he was covert enough that Martin hadn’t been apprised. But maybe Jeremy was like me. He had this skill. He knew German. I’d tell the same lie if Albert’s henchman got the drop on me while I was trying to delay him.

I backed out of the curtain, softly slid it shut, closed the door. I went up. Quietly. Quickly. To the tower room? There was nowhere to hide in there. There was no way to take out Martin when they entered without almost certainly losing Jeremy anyway. And Jeremy said not to intervene. I’d promised not to intervene. Rightly, given his mission and mine. But I wasn’t comfortable with that either. Still, the wireless room was a losing hand.

And if Jeremy was telling the truth to Martin about working for the Germans, in the wireless room I’d have to figure that out in some very unpleasant way I could not control.

I went up farther, all the way to the telephone booth–size access enclosure on the roof. I stepped into the space beside the door and listened down the stairway well.

Footsteps on the stairs. No attempt to move quietly.

Martin didn’t seem to expect to find a cohort up here.

He wanted to check to see if anything had been disturbed in the wireless room. Signs that Jeremy had been in there.

Footsteps now on the landing below, a door opening, no sound of a door closing, a muffled shuffling of feet receding into the room, a brief murmuring of voices.

I straightened, leaned back against the stone wall.

If Jeremy was truly working for the Huns, he would’ve done something other than what he did when he’d caught me. He had his pistol in my gut. He sent me on my way. It was his confrontation with Martin that was a problem for him.

I had to assume Jeremy was Buffington’s man.

But there was nothing I could do to help downstairs.

He expected that I was escaping right now, with Martin diverted into the wireless room.

I should have been. But that choice had passed.

If the two went back down the steps from there, I could wait for a time and then slip out. I’d have to let Jeremy manage his own fate, as he’d signed up to do, as he’d insisted I let him do.

Martin clearly had the drop on Jeremy.

I realized how little I actually knew of Buffington’s operation. Or, of course, Stockman’s. Trask probably knew less than he thought, as well. Maybe Stockman had let Jeremy this far into his operation in order to trap him. His fate might already have been sealed.

In which case, Martin could be bringing him to this roof to take care of things. At least to hold him till the crowds went away.

I had no play down the stairs.

I thought of the roof.

I became aware of the wall I was leaning against.

And now voices rose through the stairwell.

“Up we go,” Martin said. In English.

Jeremy didn’t respond.

I unlatched the door to the roof, the sound masked in the clatter of their footsteps, and I stepped out and closed the door behind me. I circled around to my right and pressed my back against the outer wall of the enclosure. I laid my shooting hand against my chest, the Mauser barrel lying upon my heart.

I waited.

The Zeppelins were barely audible now, flying away up the Thames. The crowd was silent. Stockman was probably orating. I just hoped the music would resume.

Footsteps rasping now onto the stone floor of the enclosure.

I held my breath.

The door latch clacked.

I lifted my Mauser.

Over the past few minutes my eyes had grown accustomed to the dark. I turned my face to the left.

I heard the door open and close.

“Go that way,” Martin said. “No quick movements.”

And Jeremy appeared, moving off to the right at an angle heading inward onto the roof, toward the flagpole.

Now Martin followed, his right hand lifted into Jeremy’s spine. I saw the side of his face from a sharp angle to the rear.

I turned away from the wall and made one quick, soft step forward and another and I pressed the muzzle of my Mauser against Martin’s occipital bone.

“No movement at all,” I said.

He stopped.

Jeremy did not give him time to figure out the situation. He spun off from the pistol and grabbed Martin’s shooting wrist while I pushed the Mauser at the Hun’s head just for good measure. Albert’s boy wasn’t going to do anything stupid, even if he cared about his mission. He was figuring Jeremy and I would have our hands full downstairs. Which we would.

Jeremy had Martin’s pistol now and he stepped back in front of him.

I kept my Mauser where it was.

Martin still hadn’t gotten a glimpse of me, but I regretted letting him hear my voice. At least I should have spoken German. He probably knew who had the drop on him. I had to assume he did. Which was why I was supposed to have simply slipped away into the night.

Jeremy gave me a look. He shifted the pistol to his left hand, and he drew back his right leg, his body angling that way into a boxer’s stance. I knew what was next.

I pulled my pistol away.

And Jeremy threw a hell of an overhand right into Martin’s jaw.

The Hun flew back hard and was out cold even before he slammed down in front of the door.

The salon orchestra began to play.

Jeremy and I both briefly turned our faces to it.

“This will make things a little easier for you,” he said, lifting his chin toward the music.

“And for you.”

“We shall see,” he said.

He looked my way again, and I said, “Nice right hand. Were you a pro?”

He nodded a small, slow nod of regret.