“They just brought ’em back?” Davis Pike said, crossing over to where Joe Beers was standing. “Just like that? I find that hard to believe, Joe.”
“Well, they sure did. Way I understand the thing, what I hear is the sheriff here went on down there to Nuevo Laredo and had a little talk with them Mexicans. He and Homer there, just the two of them. Took a lot of guts, you ask me. You can thank your sheriff and his deputy now, any you people got any damn manners.”
Davis Pike knelt and cradled Homer in his arms, wiping off some of the blood running from his nose and mouth.
“Homer?” Franklin said, kneeling also. “Can you walk?”
“I believe I can, yessir.”
Franklin and Davis managed to get Homer on his feet. They each got an arm around him, supporting him, and they started for the door. Men were falling all over each other getting out of their way, looking stunned and averting their eyes.
“You killed my boy, you son of a bitch!” Rawls cried out. “I’m going to get you, you hear me?”
“Sometimes I wonder whose side you’re on, J.T.,” Dixon said, pausing at the door to look at him. “Texas? Or Mexico?”
“What the hell do you mean by that?”
“You know what I mean.”
After that, nobody said a damn word.
20
QUARTERDECK
T he course of history, as Sir Winston Churchill so presciently remarked, is always being altered by something or other—if not by a horseshoe nail, then by an intercepted telegram. Churchill was referring, of course, to the Zimmermann Telegram intercepted and decoded by our Room 40 chaps back in the year 1917.”
“Ah, yes,” C said to Ambrose Congreve, “Room 40. Every schoolboy in England knows that stirring spy saga. Isn’t that right, Alex?”
“I seem to remember hearing something about it, yes,” Hawke said, prying his eyes away from the wintry scene beyond the window to regard his two companions with a faint smile. He was tired all the time since his escape and return to England. He slept a good deal, more than required, but felt unrestored by it. There were demons lurking and they’d have to be dealt with soon.
Ambrose, who had the floor, paused, took a sip of his whiskey and smiled at Alex. Hawke, who had seemed distracted if not downright somber since their arrival at Sir David Trulove’s home, was perched on a window seat overlooking a dense thicket of woodland. Something was troubling him and Ambrose had no idea what it might be.
C, his sharp eyes bright and alert as always, was in his favorite high-backed chair near the crackling fire. Sir David was suffering some form of bronchial infection and now sat with a black cashmere scarf swaddled round his neck and had his feet encased in woolen slippers. Despite his occasional coughing fits, he was now in the process of lighting one of his poisonous black cheroots.
A sleeting rain was chattering against the high windows in C’s library where the three men had earlier sought refuge from the gathering storm.
Half an hour or so earlier, under sunny skies, Hawke had swung the long bonnet of his Bentley off the A30. From there it had been a leisurely ten minutes or so on some twisting back roads through the pine woods. Then the Bentley slipped across the Windsor-Bagshot Road and shortly thereafter they arrived at the unimposing stone gateway that led to the house known as Quarterdeck.
A lone sentry, most likely a plainclothes detective sergeant from the Met working a rotation shift, waved them inside the gate. There was, of course, a good deal more security on these grounds, but this unobtrusively armed man was the only face the public was ever allowed to see. The neighbors, who were distant in every sense of the word, had no inkling about who lived at the end of the lane.
It was not by any stretch a large house, but it was very handsome. Sir David Trulove’s Regency manor house was quietly situated on the edge of Windsor Park, and the flinty bachelor had lived there in comfort and privacy for many years. As they left the beautifully maintained gravel drive and pulled into the car park, Hawke realized why he’d always admired the house. Simplicity. Quarterdeck was a plain rectangle of Bath stone that had weathered over the years to a lovely shade of greenish gray. An ancient wisteria climbed above the shallow portico and encircled a small first-floor balcony, on to which the windows of C’s bedroom opened.
An invitation to call upon C at home was most unusual. Originally, C had invited Hawke and Congreve to lunch with him outside on his sunny terrace. It was to be a working repast, he said, an informal chat covering a range of topics. But Hawke knew that C especially wanted to hear about the prior day’s visit to the Tunbridge Wells hospital. The chief of MI6 wanted to hear firsthand what had been revealed to Ambrose yesterday by the late Ambassador Zimmermann.
Hands clasped behind his back, the happy detective had been striding back and forth in front of a small fire laid against the afternoon chill. He was dressed in his favorite suit of tweeds and was wearing, like his fashion idol, the late lamented Andrew Devonshire, bright yellow cable-stitched socks. He had now relayed to C some, if not most, of what had spilled from the dying German’s lips.
Suddenly, Ambrose stopped in midstride. He stood in the middle of the faded Persian carpet, a perfect ring of blue smoke wafting above his head, waiting for some reaction from Alex Hawke.
There was none.
A semi-reclining Hawke stared wistfully down at the mist-shrouded forest, the thick trunks and bare limbs etched black against the stormy gray sky. A dense plantation of pine, beech, silver birch, and oak grew on three sides of the house. Forests had been magic for him as a child, and, he realized, they still were. Finally, he looked up and smiled at Congreve.
“Sorry. You were speaking of Room 40,” Hawke said from his window perch. “Tell me about those fellows again? Kept a low profile, did they not?”
“Yes, Ambrose,” C said, taking a long puff of his cheroot. “You might refresh both our memories. I think we’ve got a few more minutes until luncheon is served.”
“It was the most secret room in all of Whitehall,” Congreve said, resuming his brisk pacing before the fire. “Masked under the deliberately guileless name of Room 40, a pair of civilians had been diverted there to do cryptographic work. One morning, at a very low point of the war, they intercepted a German wireless transmission in a code no one had ever seen before. But the two chaps, Montgomery and de gray were their names, were determined. They ultimately broke the code and, in doing so, discovered the key to the whole thing.”
“What, pray, was the whole thing?” Hawke said, his mind elsewhere but his interest piqued. “I remember learning about this in school but I’m afraid it’s been a while.”
“Why, the stalemate, of course,” C said. “The dreadful deadlock that gripped both armies in the trenches along the Western Front.”
“And the key?”
C said, “The key to unlocking this stalemate was finding some way of convincing President Woodrow Wilson that the Krauts were coming after the Yanks’neck, too. It was vital to convince Wilson to get the Yanks into the bloody war. This Zimmermann Telegram, sent from Germany to their station in Mexico City, revealed the German duplicity. And, Mexico’s desire to get into the war on Germany’s side.”
“Yes,” Congreve added, “it did the trick. Once the contents of the telegram were published in the American newspapers, there was a huge shift in American public opinion against the Germans. There was now no way Wilson could keep the Yanks out of the war.
“The Americans suddenly had the duplicitous German and Mexican treachery laid out for them in black and white, right there at the breakfast table.”
“And over they came. Thus this Zimmermann Telegram saved England’s bacon at the last hour,” Hawke said, his eyes following a ragged squadron of geese skimming the distant treetops.
“Indeed,” C said, expelling a gray plume of smoke. “None of us likes to admit it, of course, but there you have
