Robert Butler - The Empire of Night

I looked back to Stockman.

His eyes grew steady. He found his voice. He said, “If you are who you say you are, you must put your weapons away at once, you must accord Madam Cobb and me the dignity of our privacy, and you must instantly call your superiors. Ask them to contact Colonel Max Hermann Bauer of the General Staff. He will put you straight.”

Though the words themselves were measured enough, he had mustered his full umbrage and toughness for these instructions. He paused now for them to have their effect.

I smiled faintly at him and made my own words sound sickly sweet in tone. “Surely, Sir Albert, you are not under the illusion that Colonel Bauer received higher authorization for your little escapade. Even as we speak, he is also being detained.”

Stockman had no answer for this. Once again his mind began to grind behind restless eyes.

I said, “Did you really think you could poison the ancestral home of the Kaiser’s English mother and grandmother and expect him to approve, even after the fact? It is a matter of blood, Sir Albert.”

I gave that line a moment of silence to play in his head.

Then I invoked his own invented word from our first discussion of blood. “ Der Überglaube ,” I said. The overarching belief.

And his restless eyes grew still.

Had he just capitulated?

It was his own argument. Albert knew the risk he’d taken. Like the manly university swordsman he admired and wished he’d been, he seemed to stand straight and lower his saber and accept the wound. That odd respect I’d occasionally felt for him nibbled at me for a moment.

Only for a moment.

“I will leave you now,” I said. “Sir Albert, I think you know Major Ecker. He worked for you briefly.”

Stockman finally took his eyes off me. He turned his face to Jeremy. He looked at him closely for the first time since we burst in. He recognized him. “You were the one,” he said, the killing tone of his voice reminding me that Stockman had actually wept for his man Martin. He glared at Jeremy, though he seemed to address me: “So does the officer corps of our Foreign Office tolerate a common murderer?”

“That’s quite enough, Albert,” I said. “The Foreign Office is more concerned with uncommon murderers.”

Stockman shifted his glare to me.

But he said nothing.

“Make yourself comfortable, Baronet,” I said. “Major Ecker will sit with you, and he is authorized by the highest Foreign Office authorities to shoot you dead if he deems it necessary.”

Stockman sniffed and turned his face away.

He understood.

I looked at my mother for the last time in this scene. “I do not mean to alarm you, Madam Cobb. And surely it will be unnecessary. But he has the same authorization regarding you.”

She straightened a little in the torso and played a defiant heroine worthy of her Duchess of Malfi: “He may shoot me if he chooses, but I will follow Sir Albert to the end.”

I had no idea what part act, what part truth was in this declaration. I doubted that even she knew.

I made no reply.

I turned my back on her.

Jeremy and I exchanged a nod and I passed into the sitting room. I gathered up my lock-picking tools and I put them in my pocket and then I was striding down the hall, wrenching my mind away from the fact that there was one more confrontation to come with Albert Stockman and his lover.

I leaned into the Torpedo and lifted the dispatch case from the floor of the tonneau. I stepped out, holding it close. I opened the passenger door and laid it gently on the seat.

Inside the case was the ticking of the clock, but I could not hear it. The ticking was muffled into silence by the cotton wool and the tin.

I looked at my Waltham.

It was five minutes to four.

The matter of Stockman and my mother had taken too much time.

I started the engine and drove away fast.

At the air base I was tempted, because of the time, to drive up to the place where the colonel’s driver had parked this morning. But if something went wrong, if the bomb went off with the Zepp still on the ground — by a delayed takeoff perhaps — I wanted the car in a place away, a place I could run to and not have to throttle and spark and crank while phosgene rolled immediately over me.

So I stopped in a stand of birch trees near the entrance to the air base grounds, just off the road to Uckendorf. There was no security out here and the camouflaged Torpedo was inconspicuous among the trees.

I hung the bag over my shoulder and walked away from the Torpedo, taking my watch out to see the time and hearing it tick — the Waltham had a loud tick, muffled by my watch pocket but audible in the open air — and I thought of the ticking in the bag, and it was five minutes past four o’clock.

I hustled on, wanting to jog the half mile to the hangar area, but slowing myself to a brisk walk for the sake of the bomb under my arm, its delicate wired connections. I reached the administrative building in a little less than ten minutes.

Ziegler was in his outer office, on his feet, and he spun to me, strode to me at once. “Good,” he said. “Come.”

I followed him out of the administrative building and into the hangar through the same side door we’d used this morning.

LZ 78 loomed instantly above me. And against me, its gray vastness feeling like a palpable weight upon my eyes, my face, my chest. It staggered me, made me work hard to steady myself on my feet. It made the thing hanging from my shoulder feel dangerous only to myself.

“The commander is forward,” Ziegler said.

I dragged my body away, moved my legs, followed Ziegler along the length of the ship, the upwind doors wide open now, the sky going pale white from a thin spew of clouds, a breeze funneling into the hangar and into my face.

The breeze made me think: The Torpedo was well away from here, but it was downwind. Gas released in the launching zone would roll my way. I would have to run fast, if it came to that. I would have to start the car fast.

But if the flight went off on time, I would surely have time to get away.

Where exactly would LZ 78 be at seven minutes past five?

“Colonel,” I said, “are we still on schedule for a five o’clock launch?”

“From what I gather,” he said.

“Good,” I said.

All along the airship’s length there was the bustle of ground crew, in gray shirt sleeves and soft caps, unfurling the handling lines.

The lines were slack. The hangar ballast was still on board.

We reached the control cabin, a long, boat-shaped, enclosed gondola suspended a man’s body-length beneath the great gas-packed hull. An exposed aluminum ladder went up from the gondola and into the keel walkway.

“Here we are,” the colonel said.

He stopped at the foot of a rope ladder leading to the forward compartment of the gondola.

He motioned for me to go up. “I’ll leave you here. They don’t want extra weight. They’re expecting you.”

We snapped off a simultaneous salute to each other.

He said, “When you’ve finished, would you care to join me at my office to watch the launch?”

“Of course, Colonel,” I said.

And I went up the ladder into the major’s command area.

The place felt unfinished, with the web of aluminum braces visible overhead and along stretches of the lower walls. The focal working parts were prominent panels under the windows at the front and along the sides, holding gauges and instruments for heading and for incline, for altitude and for speed, for hydrogen pressure and for fuel level, and standing before the panels were wheels and levers for rudder and elevator and ballast.