Sion Crossing

by Anthony Price

Well … it might be so. But it was much more likely that dear old James would now want to do The Right Thing—that he would scorn leaving the responsibility to his friend Mitchell (with James it wouldn’t be a matter of taking the credit, that would never even occur to him), and would therefore take the responsibility himself.

  And that, in turn, would mean … what?

  The lift shuddered, and Mitchell stared for a moment at the closed doors, which were about to open.

  In Cable’s place he’d be on the blower now to Colonel Butler, at the very least to get a sight of what was in that envelope, to find out what Fatso was up to, this fine Saturday morning.

  And, of course, that might reveal absolutely nothing. Or, worse, something absolutely innocent.

  In which case, it would be on poor old James’s head, for he would never peach on his old friend Paul—his old friend who had, anyway, insisted on taking the responsibility!

  So his old friend Paul would be in the clear there. Which would be just as well, because his old friend Paul was already regarded by the Colonel with a slightly jaundiced and equivocal eye as an acolyte and graduate-pupil of the egregious David Audley. Mitchell grimaced at himself—at the faint, distorted reflection of himself—in the polished doors. And then they opened.

  He stepped out into the passage.

  However badly he felt about himself on occasion, and about the way doing-the-right-thing-for-the-wrong-reason didn’t trouble his conscience one bit, he had the most intense feeling that this was one of the times when he wasn’t wrong.

  It was almost a physical manifestation. Not a chest pain, or a creeping cold up the back between the shoulders, and least of all the pricking of the thumbs, which David Audley always quoted at him. It was nowhere, and it was everywhere at once.

  And it was quite ridiculous, quite irrational. But he had fought it once, and someone he loved had died for that error. So he wasn’t going to fight it now, even though it was that plump, hostile, self-satisfied slug Oliver St John Latimer that was its subject.

  Sergeant-Major Gammon was still on the door, picking winners from the newspaper in his little cubicle.

  Gammon looked up. “Still here, Mr Mitchell? An’ on a Saturday?” He shook his head, mock-disapproving.

  “A-serving of Her Majesty, Mr Gammon.” He could never quite pluck up enough courage to address Gammon as ‘Sar-Major’, as both Butler and Audley did from the eminence of their military service. “The ceaseless, sleepless watch, you know.”

  “Oh yes?” Gammon studied the duty book. “But … you’re not on until Sunday midday—?” He looked up again at Mitchell, curious as always about deviations from routine; for that, after all, was one of the things he was paid to do. “How’s that new book of yours comin’ on, then? The 1915 one?”

  Mitchell shook his head. “I don’t think much of that is going to get written this weekend.” He felt in his pocket for the paper he had prepared. “This is where I’ll be the next twenty-four hours, where I can be contacted quickly. Okay?”

  “Right you are, sir.” Gammon slid the paper under his bulldog clip, his curiosity satisfied, which was neither vulgar nor idle, but purely professional and quite unconcerned.

  The thing was done, thought Mitchell again. Now nature had to take its course, for better or worse.

  Chapter Four

  Latimer in America: The Promised Land

  IT WAS HOT as hell in Atlanta.

  And, worse than hot, it was humid—was hell humid? wondered Latimer morosely. Probably it was, since it must be designed for maximum discomfort, and that was a combination undoubtedly achieved here, besides which the very worst that England could manage was laughably temperate. Except that the effort of laughing was beyond him in such an oven.

  The heat enveloped him, and three breaths of it were enough—one in disbelief, one in realization and the third only forced on him by the time required to retreat back into the terminus.

  From the relative comfort of the interior he took another look around, outside and inside, trying to impose the wretched woman’s face from memory on to any of the faces within range. The snapshot had revealed only head and shoulders, so he didn’t really know whether she was tall or short, thin or fat. Neither plain nor pretty, and certainly neither ugly nor beautiful, was all memory gave him back … although there had been cheekbones … ? High cheekbones, somehow suggesting height and thinness?

  He swivelled around, looking for cheekbones, and hoped that she wouldn’t be too tall, to the extent that she would be able to look down on him. There were certainly women enough to choose from, all shapes and sizes and ages, some of them quite good-looking, and some of them—more of them, in fact—decidedly plump, even undoubtedly fat. And the men too … there were some comfortingly tubby men around, beside whose circumference his own excess inches were unremarkable, if not insignificant—

  Damn! He was not meant to be studying men (but there was another splendid fattie; and the way that tall, heavily armed, uniformed guard filled his immaculate uniform suggested that he was also heading for spectacular bulk)—no, it was a woman—

  The guard started to turn, and Latimer decided to give up his search before he became a suspicious foreign loiterer, the old instinct for unobtrusiveness asserting itself out of the distant past.

  He walked meekly to the nearest bench and sat down, tucking his travelling case beside him. Something had gone wrong, but it was nothing to worry about: simply, the wretched daughter—stepdaughter—was late, and as this was a big airport, with all the traffic which big airports generated (and, no doubt, this being the home of the automobile, even more traffic here, hard though that was to imagine after Gatwick) there was nothing remarkable in that. And, anyway, even if she never turned up, it was of no real importance, for this wasn’t work, and was therefore not important. It was, after all, only a favour.

  His eye rested on a portly couple chivvying two identically T-shirted children, and wondered what the slogan “ATLANTA BRAVES” meant. Atlanta had certainly braved General William Tecumseh Sherman, and had been burned to the ground for its pains. But as he could not read the small print on the shirt, the present danger it was braving was lost on him.

  Perhaps it was the temperature outside: that would have to be braved sooner or later. Indeed, if that was the seasonal norm for Georgia in late August and early September, then here was an extra insight into what he had been reading about on the plane, which none of his historians had thought to point out. For it had been just about now—the city had fallen on September 6—that the bone-headed General Hood had contested the place with that egregious hypocrite Sherman, who hated war but was in the direct line from Scipio Africanus at Carthage, via Tilly at Magdeburg and Cromwell at Drogheda, to Hitler at Rotterdam and Coventry and the Allies at Dresden… . But, regardless of his vestigial memory of historical crimes, if that was typical Georgian weather outside, 1860s and 1980s alike, the siege of Atlanta must have been a truly hellish business for the farm boys in blue and grey, from North and South, Union and Confederate … Except that they must at least have been acclimatized from birth to it, with only the fittest surviving—this was Darwin’s own lifetime, after all, and he must have observed nineteenth century human beings long before he had set eyes on those Galapagos finches and turtles… . But … it was one thing to plough and sow, and reap and mow—the blue-coated Northern boys from Illinois and Iowa and Michigan in Sherman’s armies would have done all those things; presumably, some of the boys from Georgia and Carolina had had negroes to do the cotton-picking, but there must have been many more who had done their own hard work… . But, whatever they did, none of them had been trained to march and fight and kill each other in such hellish weather, surely?

  That was the mystery which had long eluded him, though not with these strangers from Georgian plantations and Senator Cookridge’s endless corn-belt, but with his own slightly older peers, and their immediate European ancestors: what was it like, what was it really like, to get out of the tren
ch and to stand up amongst the bullets? And what had nerved them to do it, in that last second, when the legs took chargé, pushing them upwards and forwards against higher reason and lower commonsense alike?

  Well … it was something he would never know, even if he dared to make someone tell him, and they tried to do so. For it was not something that could be told, only a thing to be experienced; and he was now past the point, both in years and in seniority, where he would ever acquire such trench-truth. In fact, to be bleakly honest with himself, safely past, since he had no great confidence in his physical courage, but only the gravest doubts—

  Stand in the trench, Achilles, flame-capped, And shout for me

  —that was a proper sentiment for brave, younger men, but not for him now, if ever.

  And for thinner men, too. He peeked around again surreptitiously, only half-looking for the woman, and felt a small inner glow of satisfaction—even felt, against bitter experience, the beginnings of approval of America. Disapproval of those extra inches in the wrong direction had always been unfair, the more so as in three-quarters of the world a certain fullness of the figure was the hallmark of success and importance and superiority, not of self-indulgence and lack of self-restraint. It had been just his bad luck to live in the other quarter, where fatness was a crime.

  But here, at least, he was safe—and doubly safe, because even if the silly woman didn’t turn up at all, and the whole trip proved abortive through no fault of his own, it would be of no consequence to his career. It simply didn’t matter: that had been the final calculation in his decision, the final safety factor which had stilled the small voice of caution, with the Senator himself merely confirming matters …

  The Senator had been disingenuous, naturally. It was more than that, he wanted: he wanted the miracle itself, just that and no more. Because, if Oliver St John Latimer was allegedly so good, Senator Thomas Cookridge was undoubtedly a winner, and he wanted the lost treasure of Sion Crossing very badly indeed to go to such eccentric lengths to find it.

  And that was where the really interesting questions started for Oliver St John Latimer. It no longer surprised him that he had the job, because that was due to a series of wholly explicable accidents in which he had played a starring rôle.

  Very simply, David Audley was the perfect and natural choice, not so much because he was a historian, and a foreigner who would bring a fresh approach to an old mystery or even because of his well-known weakness for weird assignments (Audley’s overweening curiosity was his Achilles heel: Howard Morris would know that as well as anyone) … but simply because he had a proven track-record as a finder of things long-lost. And he, Latimer, was probably only here in Atlanta now because Howard Morris, in his extremity, had led the Senator to believe that, since Audley and Latimer were the brains of Research and Development (which was true), then Latimer and Audley were a team (which was palpably and laughably untrue).

  No … but teams and laughter aside (though it was a good joke—and all the better for being at Audley’s expense for once) … no, what was truly interesting was the as-yet unanswered question of why Senator Thomas Cookridge needed the Sion Crossing treasure.

  He had promised a full and frank answer after Latimer had reported back, but Latimer had long experience of unfulfilled promises and deviously sketchy answers in the aftermaths of assignments, successful or not. However, since he had almost equally long experience of finding answers for himself, for his own satisfaction if not for his advancement, that was not particularly worrying.

  In any case, at least it had nothing to do with the hypothetical treasure’s intrinsic value. For what little research he had been able to carry out on the Senator, in default of being able to go back to R & D and with time pressing hard, had revealed one thing for certain: the Senator was a very rich man, as secure financially as he was politically. So the vulgar corruption of the profit motive was not something to be feared.

  So there must be some other sort of profit involved, in some other and very different currency—

  He shivered suddenly, and knew that it was not because of the contrast between the air-conditioned coolness of the terminal and the memory of those breaths of hellfire-heated-air outside. It was the knowledge that the other currencies included among them notes bearing higher ‘promise-to-pay’ legends, in exchange for things which mere money couldn’t buy. And … and some of those things were very dangerous indeed, equally if you needed them or if you had them for sale … So—

  “Mistah Lateemah, sah?”

  Latimer focussed on the very clean and well-polished floor of the terminal, at which he had been staring but not seeing a fraction of a second before; and also saw, on the edge of his vision on the floor, a pair of huge and very clean and well-polished and expensive shoes.

  He thought … no woman had a voice that deep, never mind feet that size, to fill those shoes … and looked up from the floor slowly, controlling his reaction. And up. And up—

  The man was very black. And very thin. But, even more than black and thin, he was very, very tall. He was so tall that it was quite understandable he should be stooping slightly beneath a ceiling ten feet above his head. And he had a huge grin on his face.

  It wasn’t true that all black men looked the same to white men, just as all Europeans and Chinese were supposed to look the same as each other to each other: he had seen this black man ten minutes before, lounging head-and-shoulders against a wall somewhere—where?

  Here, obviously. The question gyrated inside his brain, sweeping all others aside. They could wait—

  “Mister Lateemah?”

  “Latimer.” Whatever was about to happen, it must not be permitted to happen to anyone named Lateemah.

  “Mister Latimer.” The black giraffe’s accent changed, transformed in that instant from Deep South to British.

  “Yes.” Latimer frowned before he could stop himself, too many new unanswered questions crowding him. Absurdly, he felt that he had somehow given himself away.

  “I’m sorry, sir—I missed you, sitting here.” The black man reached out with an impossibly long arm. “Your bag, sir?”

  “Yes.” Latimer looked down quickly to the hand closing on his bag’s handle, then back upwards, conscious that he would still be looking upwards when he had stood up himself. “Who are you?”

  “Kingston, sir.” The black man lifted the bag effortlessly, straightening himself towards the ceiling. “From Kingston, Jamaica. If you think of Kingston from Kingston then you’ll never forget my name, sir.”

  Latimer stood up and continued to look up. But he was done with being stupid. “I was expecting Miss Cookridge. Where is she?”

  Miss Cookridge. For a step-daughter that wasn’t right, but perhaps the Americans had different conventions—that, both in general and in this particular detail, he had not been able to establish, to his present regret.

  “Yes, sir—Miss Cookridge.” The black man was already moving towards the exit on legs even longer than his arms, so that Latimer had to hurry unbecomingly to keep up with him. “She is waiting for us, at the car … We were a little late, sir—on the inter-state, there was this pick-up had an argument with a sixteen-wheeler, and we were de-layed somewhat, you see.”

  The British accent was not quite perfect, but very nearly so—

  Then the blast of super-heated humid air, with most of its life-giving cool oxygen boiled away, buffeted Latimer into speechlessness. All he could hope for now was that Miss Cookridge and the car were not far away.

  Lucy Hennebury Cookridge: he had turned the Senator’s snapshot over, and that had been written on the back of it. And although “Hennebury” was neither a particularly memorable or melodious name, never mind recognizable in any historical context, it was at least not actively outlandish, like William Tecumseh Sherman and General the Right Reverend Leonidas Polk, the Confederate warrior-bishop who had stopped a cannon-ball fired by one of Tecumseh’s gunners on the retreat-to Atlanta—

  God Almighty! He
was back to marvelling that anybody in his right mind had been able to conduct military operations in such ridiculous weather conditions as this! But that was the other singularly unpleasant thing about military operations down the ages: they had all too frequently been blithely conducted in ridiculous conditions—the mud of Petersburg and Passchendaele, the snows of Moscow and the Ardennes, the humid jungles of Guadalcanal and Kohima, and the egg-frying heat of the Western Desert. They had all agreed on a fine disregard for any sort of day-to-day human comfort, apart from the overriding general discomfort of being killed outright, if not maimed and jolted back to be blood-poisoned by some over-worked drunken surgeon in a cloud of flies. So this, across a few yards of Atlanta car-park, was no more than par for the usual battlefield course, give or take a hundred years of progress.

  There was a female standing up beside a very battered and quite breathtakingly hideous car—a car hideous even by the standards of cars he had passed already, which all had consumer durable written all over them, being plainly designed for the scrap-heap as quickly as possible, their durability rusted and dented and consumed.

  Damn! He was letting the heat and his doubts about Mr Kingston of Kingston get to him, fed by his anti-American prejudices! Naples on a bad day could be almost as bad as this; and Kingston was more British than American, judging by that accent; and if his own British car was so much better than all those around him, why wasn’t this car park full of British cars—instead of American … or Japanese?

  The woman, though—

  God! She was tall, too!

  And thin—

  He paused, suddenly irresolute because the tallness and thinness of Miss Lucy Hennebury Cookridge was really no more than an extrapolation from that one quick glance at the Senator’s snapshot, and on slightly closer scrutiny this woman didn’t particularly resemble that one: that one’s hair had been fluffed-out in some no-doubt-fashionable style, and this one’s was pulled severely back; and this one’s collar-bones were apparent, when that one’s had been decently covered; and, above all, this one’s cheekbones were hidden behind huge sunglasses, which also blacked out the candid, half-amused eyes which Miss Lucy Hennebury Cookridge had turned on the photographer.