corner of a destroyer’s gun deck with seven hundred filthy and exhausted British soldiers wasn’t particularly conducive to napping, even under the best of circumstances. The steady cannonade of shellfire and strafing hadn’t helped, nor had the unencouraging sight of slate-colored water, littered with hawsers, oil slicks, fragments of mined ships, and floating bodies visible every time he turned his head to glance over the rail.
But on the whole, it was better than the hell of exhaustion and death he’d left behind him on the Dunkirk beach.
And there on the docks at Dover, among all those nice British ladies with cups of tea and elderly blue-clothed policemen saying Step along this way now... had been Colonel Hillyard, tired, unshaven, and grimy as any of the troops, but with that old businesslike glint in his dark eyes as he’d said, “About time you showed up. I have a car.” Tom had barely had time to change and shave—he’d slept on the way up.
And now they were asking him to do... What?
He blinked, rubbed his eyes, and picked up the photograph. The reproduction was grainy. The building in the background might have been one of those big mansions rich folks built up the Hudson from New York a hundred years ago—heavy granite walls, peaked gables, crenellated ornamental turrets on the corners and pseudo-Gothic traceries on the windows—except that, judging by the number of men in SS uniforms standing around and the little swastika flags on the hood of the car in the foreground, it was obviously somewhere in Germany. A civilian was standing near the car: a bearded, tired-looking little man of forty or so with curly hair long and unruly and steel-rimmed glasses concealing his eyes.
“His name is Sligo,” Mayfair said in a voice crusty and plummy as eighty-year-old port. “Professor Rhion Sligo.”
“Sounds Irish,” Hillyard remarked from the depths of his armchair. “Gaelic form of Ryan, maybe.” He ran a hand over his sun-browned bald scalp. “Any Irishman working for the SS these days would be using the Gaelic form, of course.”
“Perhaps,” Mayfair agreed. “We have no record of anyone of that name graduating, teaching, or publishing at any university or college we have checked; but then, a false degree is as easy to assume as a false name, and both are rather common in occult circles.” He sipped his tea, which a secretary had brought in a few minutes before.
Tired as he was, Tom had to smile a little at the teacups. In an American office they would have been those thick white mugs reminiscent of every cheap diner from Brooklyn to Bodega Bay. Here they were somebody’s second-best Spode that had gotten too chipped for company. The office, in one of those politely anonymous terraced squares so typical of London, likewise had the air of having been donated by a Duke in reduced circumstances. It had clearly started life as somebody’s parlor, with faded pink wallpaper framing a stained plaster mantel and a fireplace prosaically tiled over and occupied by an electric grate. The whole setup was straight out of Thackeray. The faded draperies were firmly shut over the bow window, the blackout curtain beyond them cutting out any possibility of a view. Now and then a car would go by outside with a soft swishing of tires, or he would hear the swift clip of hurrying shoe heels on the pavement. But few, Tom thought, would be abroad tonight.
Somewhere in the building, someone had a radio on. Tom couldn’t make out the words, but he didn’t need to. So many ships safely returned to Dover with their cargos of beaten, exhausted, wounded men—so many shelled to pieces or sunk by mines in the channel. And still more men trapped on the beaches, between the advancing German army and the sea.
No sign yet of an air attack on London.
No sign yet of landing barges setting out with German troops.
No sign yet.
Sitting here in this quiet, lamplit office, Tom experienced a sensation of mild surprise that he was alive at all. Twelve hours ago he would have bet money against it.
Mayfair’s voice called his attention back. “...arrangements made, as you know, three weeks ago to transfer you from your unit in Belgium. What was important then, when the entire question was an academic one of if and when, is doubly important now in the light of an imminent invasion.”
Tom looked from the bent, grizzled old man behind the desk to the lean, browned one in the dull khaki uniform, and