He sat in one corner of a small green canvas tent smelling of dampness and mildew. Inside were a table and a couple of wooden chairs sinking into the soil. The flap of the tent opened, and another Long’s Legionnaire peered in. “You Miller?”
“Yeah,” he said, not wanting to see again in his mind’s eye a man murdered to prove a point. That was all. A man dragged from his home today, accused of God only knew what, and because he was last in line and easy to grasp, he was shot dead.
“Your prisoner is coming,” the Legionnaire said.
The guard seemed to be in his early twenties, with close-cropped blond hair and Legionnaire’s uniform complete with Confederate-flag pin on the lapel. The look on his face seemed to indicate he would be equally comfortable in the uniform of the SS, just like his shotgun-wielding partner. “You the same Miller who saved the President?”
“I am,” Sam said, looking out at the mass of prisoners.
“Then it’d be an honor for us to buy you a drink or six when the day is through, if you don’t mind.”
Sam fought to keep a friendly smile on his face. “That sounds great, but my schedule’s pretty packed. I tell you what, you tell your friends here that I said hello. Okay?”
“Sure,” the Legionnaire said, and then another arrived, holding a man by the elbow. The man had on a light brown tweed suit but no necktie. His shoes had no laces. His hands were cuffed, and the second Legionnaire said, “The cuffs are comin’ off, boy, but you best behave. You got that?”
The man whispered, “Yes,” and Sam noticed his left eye was bruised and swollen. The prisoner rubbed at his wrists as the cuffs were removed, and both Legionnaires left.
“Hello, Walter,” Sam said.
“Sam, what a pleasant surprise.”
“Have a seat.”
The former science professor sat down in one of the chairs, breathed an apparent sigh of relief. “It feels good to be in a real chair. The interrogations… sometimes they ask you question after question and make you stand for hours… it doesn’t sound like much, but do it for hours, and you’ll see what kind of torture it is.”
“I can imagine,” Sam said.
Walter shook his head. “No, you can’t. Unless you’ve been here or someplace similar, you can’t.”
Sam looked to his wrist, where the hidden numeral was tattooed into his skin, was. “Walter, I’m not here to debate.”
His former tenant smiled wanly. “Of course, yes, of course. How in the world did you get in here? Lawyers and family are all being kept out while we stumble through our version of Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives. Remember that, back in the ’30s? It was decided it was time for Hitler to kill or jail all his opponents, and they did. Oh, that was a time—”
“Walter, for once, will you shut the hell up?”
Walter did just that. Sam said, “I got in because I called in a favor from the Secret Service. Told them I needed to see you.”
“I take it you’re not here to free me.”
“Hardly. I’ve got two things I want to talk to you about. Remember the night I was called out for the body by Maplewood Avenue?”
“No, not really.”
“Of course you do. I had to come upstairs and unclog your sink. Who told you to do that, Walter? A couple of weeks earlier you had pulled the same stunt, clogging the sink with potato peels. You’re scatterbrained but not that scatterbrained. So who told you? Was it Sarah?”
Walter blinked. “She asked me to do something to get you upstairs for a while.”
“Did she say why?”
Walter squirmed in his seat, and Sam went on. “Sarah had a guest coming, right? Someone to go in the cellar, someone she didn’t want me to know was there. And she wanted me upstairs at a certain time so she could sneak the man in.”
“That’s what I surmised.” He wiped at his bruised eye with a soiled hand. “She didn’t say it so plainly, but yes, I believe that’s what she wanted. So who was that dead man?”
“Not your place to ask questions,” Sam said curtly. “Only to answer them.”
From his coat pocket he took out the papers the medical examiner had given him. “Take a look these, tell me what they mean.”
Walter looked puzzled, but he did as he was told. He unfolded the sheets and examined each one, sometimes holding them close to his undamaged eye. “There are some serious mathematical formulas in here. Even with my teaching background, I’m not sure I can puzzle them out.”
“You better try. I need for you to look at those equations and tell me what they mean.”
“I’m not sure I can do that,” Walter insisted, his voice plaintive.
“Then, dammit, tell me why they’re important. Tell me why someone would be willing to die to protect these pages.”
Walter stared at him a moment. Then he bent again on the pages, pursing his bruised lips. Finally, he gathered the pages together and pushed them back across the table. “Can I ask you where you got these?”
“No.”
“Some research facility? A physics laboratory of some sort?”
“Walter…”
He moved in his chair, winced from something paining him. “A guess, that’s all. An educated guess.”
“I’ll take that. Tell me.”
And Walter told him.
Sam shoved the papers back in his coat, tired and cold and feeling as if he were climbing the slope of a mountain that kept on getting steeper and steeper. Walter put his hands together and said, “What now?”
Sam said, “I go back to work, and I’m sorry, you go back to your interrogators.”
Walter shivered. “They caught me as I was driving up to Maine, Sam, trying to get to the Canadian border. I suppose a brave man would have raced through the roadblock, but I’m not. And later, when they brought me here, I had illusions of trying to resist, trying to be strong, trying to hold out as long as I could… I held out for five minutes before I started crying and answering every question they asked me. Do you want to know how they did it?”
“No, I don’t,” Sam said.
Walter ignored him. “They put you on a board, tie your hands and feet together, and then tip you back, put a wet cloth across your face, and pour water over you. They laugh as you think you’re drowning. A nice little treat they learned from the Nazis. It worked, but still, the questions keep on coming.” Walter cocked his head. “Is it true, what I’ve heard? That you got to Hale before he got to Long? That you shot Hale, and he blew himself up, but not close enough to hurt Long?”
“True enough,” Sam said.
“You son of a whore. Do you have any idea what you did in preventing that monster’s death?”
Sam got up, thinking of his tattoo and of his nameless camp companions, alive and spread out across the nation, thought about that dead businessman out there, dead on a muddy playing field, all because of him. “Yeah, Walter, I think I do.”
When he left the tent, a young Legionnaire stood waiting, his red hair closely trimmed, patches of wispy orange hair about his chin.
“Mr. Miller?” the Legionnaire asked. “Somebody needs to see you right away.”
The man took Sam’s left arm, and Sam angrily shook it off. He thought about striding out of the camp, ignoring this young punk, but with all the shotgun-toting Legionnaires and angry-looking FBI agents about, how far could he go?
“All right,” Sam said. “Take me there, but keep your damn hand to yourself.”
The Legionnaire glared at Sam but kept quiet, and Sam kept stride with him as they went to a larger tent. “Right in there, sir,” he said. Sam hesitated, then ducked his head and walked in. This tent had a canvas floor,
