Dark Full of Enemies(3)

Barnes’s exchange with the corporal ended, and Phelps handed back their identification. The two guards stepped back and, with one hand still on their Thompsons, swung the gates wide and waved the car forward into the sweep. Barnes idled through, flicked the headlights on, and continued. The gates closed behind them.

McKay felt suddenly tired—before the briefing had even started. Tired but restless, keyed up. He found himself checking the guards for weakness and inattention—the guards on his own side. And he had assaulted that drunken Aussie in the pub… He saw the crumpled body, a cord of blood that found a track in the tile and followed it, probing outward, and a vein that pulsed in the back of the man’s neck. Alive. He had felt a second of relief at that, and then panic again. Thank God for Heyward and Barnes. He shook his head, closed his eyes, took a deep, quiet breath, and held it until the car stopped.

The mansion, as Heyward and most of the other lower echelon staff called it, was a small, run-down manor house—the kind of country estate that McKay imagined common to the middling gentry of Jane Austen—with a carriage house and a few outbuildings sagging in the frost. The house had stood unlived in since before the First World War, and its owners, having long ago moved into the city for business, found the ancestral home a burden they were willing to rent to the Yanks for undisclosed purposes.

Three jeeps and a staff car already stood in the sweep when Barnes stopped at the carriage house and the three of them got out. Barnes stepped into the carriage house, where enlisted staff reported, and McKay followed Heyward to the front door of the main house. Two British sergeants stood smoking beyond the door with another American MP, and McKay noted the markings on the staff car—British. He wondered who the guest lecturer might be. Heyward opened the door for him and they stepped inside.

The Major stood in the foyer, conferring with the corporal at the desk by the door. He looked up when they entered. He was tallish, dark-haired, middle aged, and fatherly, with a faint Arkansas accent, and always led McKay into his briefings.

“Ah, Captain McKay,” the Major said. “That was quick, Lieutenant.”

“Yessir,” Heyward said. “Had to smooth things over with a sorry Australian tommy at a pub, but we got the Captain here as fast as we could.”

The Major raised an eyebrow. Heyward grinned.

“Saw the whole thing, sir,” Heyward said. “Cold-cocked him, right in the head. Knocked his lights out for a couple minutes.”

The Major looked at McKay but said only, “That’ll be all, Lieutenant.”

Heyward blushed, still grinning, said “Yessir,” and was gone.

“This way, Captain.”

They walked up the staircase on faded scarlet carpet, worn through at the edges of the steps and in blackened spots where discarded cigarettes and cigars had landed. They turned at the top and approached a set of paneled doors.

“Anything I’m going to have to paper over with the Colonel, McKay?”

McKay felt ill again. “I hope not, sir.”

“That’s not really an answer.”

“Yes, sir. I punched a tommy, sir. At the pub.” The Major stopped at the doors and looked hard at McKay. His eyes moved back and forth across McKay’s face, assessing. “To be honest, Major, I don’t know what happened. He was drunk, I think. I couldn’t sleep, so I went down there to do some reading. He grabbed me by the shoulder and before I knew what I’d done I’d laid him out.”

The Major looked at McKay a moment more, thought about it, and nodded. “I’m sure Heyward took care of it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Let’s go.”

He opened the door.

McKay had never been sure what purpose the briefing room had once served the mansion’s owners, those middling gentry. The paneled walls reached twelve feet to a ceiling with dusty and soot-tarnished gilt moulding. A fireplace, much too large, kept the room much too hot. Ceiling-height windows faced outward, toward the drive and the woods, but these now stood taped and hung with velvet blackout curtains.

The room was dark. The only light came from the fire in the grate and the hooded lamps on the Colonel’s long desk. The desk stood off-center in the room, near the curtained windows—the Colonel didn’t like the fire roaring at his back all day. The desk looked to McKay like the bar at some grim tribunal—long enough for two men to sit behind, with a third at the far corner, tall enough for men to look more than a little like judges behind it.

The Colonel sat at the middle of the desk, head down, writing. To his right, nearest the black drapery on the windows, stood the Major’s chair. Most of the folders, envelopes, and papers, as well as the only telephone in the upper floor of the house, stood on the desk before the Major’s seat. To the Colonel’s left, with one dark blue pant leg visible around the end of the desk, sat a British officer, a Royal Navy Commander.

The Colonel looked up and McKay came to attention and saluted.

“Come in, Captain,” the Colonel said. “Have a seat.”

McKay sat in the old yellow chair before the desk. The Major shut the doors behind them and came around the desk, sat, and busied himself with folders.

“Just a moment, Captain,” the Colonel said.

“Yes, sir.”

The Colonel returned to his memo. For a minute the room stood silent. Only the logs settling in the fire and the dull scratch of the Colonel’s pencil made any sound. The Colonel wrote with furrowed brow and a fast, heavy hand. He bore down heavily while he wrote—McKay had seen him tear word-shaped holes through the paper when agitated. The Colonel was a career Army officer, bald, gruff, with hooded eyes and a gravelly voice. He wore glasses but did not like to be seen in them—they lay before him near the edge of the desk—and so hunched and squinted over his work. He was thorough and fastidious, a stickler for detail and protocol, and like most career sticklers, irritable, impatient with incompetence or failure. McKay was flattered to know that this man liked and trusted him.