The Blue and the Gray Undercover

by Ed Gorman

  “And there are twenty-five packages here. Fifty thousand dollars, as we agreed.”

  The captain tore open the end of each package to be certain it contained currency, then returned it to the carpetbag. When he was satisfied he closed the bag and snapped it shut. “It sounds as if there are troops in the street,” Cranston said suddenly.

  Captain Hines hurried to take a look. “I see nothing.”

  “I must have been mistaken. Will you be heading north from here?”

  “I go where they send me.” He picked up the carpetbag.

  “Aren’t you forgetting my ten thousand dollars?”

  “Of course.” Hines reached into an inner pocket and brought out a thick packet of Union currency. “I think you’ll find it in order.”

  The money was all in fifty-dollar bills. There were two hundred of them. “It’s been a pleasure doing business with you, Captain.”

  Hines was almost out the door when he turned, as if with a suddenly remembered thought. “My spy investigation is ended. The guilty party was executed within the last fifteen minutes.”

  Cranston froze where he stood. “What?”

  “It was young Valland. He sent the enciphered message in Chicago. The substitution cipher was in the cuff of his pants.”

  “Executed?”

  “I ordered it, my men carried it out. There was no way to transport him back to Confederate fines with the fighting raging.”

  “You’re a hard man, Captain.”

  “We have a war to win.”

  * * *

  Cranston and Maggie caught the next steamboat north, which sailed within the hour. “What did it cost you to get us free?” she asked him as the boat pulled away from the dock.

  “I think you did that,” he told her, “and the cost was young Valland’s life.”

  “They found his body in an alley back of the hotel. I had no way of knowing—”

  “You went to Hines’s room last night, didn’t you? And told him that the cipher was hidden in the cuff of Valland’s pants. You knew you were signing his death warrant.”

  Her face was impassive against his attack. “Valland admitted killing a militiaman during the draft riots. You haven’t forgotten that, have you?”

  “So you were his judge. And executioner, too, in a way.”

  “We’re two of a kind, Cranston. You’re a counterfeiter and I’m a schemer.”

  “I’m no counterfeiter.” He opened the carpetbag he still carried and showed her the packages of money inside. “I suppose it would be more accurate to call me a confidence man. I showed Hines some real Confederate money and convinced him the bills were perfect counterfeits. Then I sold him fifty thousand dollars’ worth for ten thousand.”

  “That’s all real money?”

  “Only the top bills. The rest are poor counterfeits. It didn’t matter because I switched carpetbags on the captain while he was looking out the window for a second. This went under the bed and he took a duplicate full of my dirty clothes. I had two, you’ll remember. I’d left one at the hotel and taken the other with us in the buggy.”

  “A confidence man?” she asked. “Then what does that make me?”

  “A Union spy,” he answered simply. “You planted that cipher in the cuff of Valland’s pants when you borrowed them for the ride back to Memphis. The real cipher system you kept in plain view all the time, but no one realized it. One of the ciphers used by the North has a fanlike system of wooden tablets, each with a different ciphertext alphabet on it, with a keyword for choosing the proper alphabet. I noticed the alphabet letters on your fan the first time we met, but I didn’t realize I was looking at the cipher system you used.”

  “What are you going to do about it?” she asked with the hint of a smile.

  “It’s a long trip back to Chicago,” Cranston told her. “I’ll think of something.”

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch won the Locus Award for best short fiction for her novella, The Gallery of His Dreams. Her body of fiction work won her the John W. Campbell Award for best new SF writer. She has been nominated for several dozen fiction awards, and her short work has been reprinted in six Year’s Best collections. She has published twenty novels under her own name, and has sold forty-one total, including pseudonymous books. Her novels have been published in seven languages. She has written a number of Star Trek novels with her husband, Dean Wesley Smith, including a book in the Section 31 series called Shadow. She is the former editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, winning a Hugo for her work there. Before that, she and Smith started and ran Pulphouse Publishing, a science fiction and mystery press in Eugene, Oregon. She lives and works on the Oregon Coast.

  Here, in a tale based on the lives of real people, she reveals how betrayals during the Civil War could extract a terrible price years, even lifetimes, later.

  THE DEAD LINE

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  JUNE 17, 1911

  Nathaniel Garrison gripped the silver handle on his walking stick and cursed the unsteadiness of his legs. After three days, he should have had his sea legs. The Olympic was the largest ship ever built and, as a result, was steadier in the water than most. He had spent a fair number of years on ships—both before and after the war—and he had never had so much trouble walking on a deck.

  Of course, in those days he hadn’t been recovering from a bout of pleurisy that had nearly taken his life. He hadn’t been this thin since those horrible years in Andersonville, years he was still amazed he had survived.

  The afternoon weather was balmy and he couldn’t stay confined to his stateroom. He was supposed to remain indoors—all that outdoor air was supposed to be bad for him, not that he cared. He had not made it seventy-four years by believing everything other people told him. His body craved light and air and exercise. By gum, he’d have them.

  The Boat Deck was filled with people. Many were sitting in lounge chairs, blankets at their feet, staring across the railing at the surprisingly calm Atlantic. Others were gathered at tables, having animated conversations. Rich people, of which he was one. Captains of industry, their wives, children, and mistresses. People he did not socialize with unless necessity forced him into it.

  He supposed he would find a great deal of entertainment among the luminaries on this ship. It was the Olympic’s maiden voyage and, as a result, he found himself in a floating party. The party was a big do, complete with reporters hired by the White Star Line to capture the grandeur, and allowed access to all the first-class berths, so long as they did not bother the passengers.

  Sometimes he wondered how difficult that was. In addition to him—a man who never gave interviews because he despised the influence of the scandal sheets—there were several other well-known men, including J. P. Morgan, who was here, of course, to monitor his investment. Several members of the British peerage were on board as well, many on vacation and some, like Lord Reginald Seton, to do business in New York.

  If Garrison had been a reporter, he would have interviewed them all. What would the crew have done, after all? Thrown him off for violating his agreement? He suspected a number of journalists were taking notes, and the very thought of it kept him away from the public areas most of the time.

  He rested his arms on the deck’s wooden railing and stared at the gray Atlantic which stretched as far as the eye could see. The sky above it was bluer than the ocean but they still blurred at the horizon. Out in the middle of nowhere, going somewhere fast.

  He looked down. Even though he’d been on the Olympic for three days, he still couldn’t believe the size of her. Here, on the Boat Deck—“A Deck,” as the brochures called it—he was as high as he could get: seemingly miles above the frothing water, as if he were watching from the balcony of one of London’s tall buildings overlooking the Thames instead of from the deck of a ship. A floating palace, the ads had called it, and that was probably true.

  A floating palace filled with the usual sycophantic and self-absorbed courtiers, all of whom thoug
ht they were more important than they were.

  Behind him, a woman laughed. The laugh was fluted, trilling up and down the vocal register like a diva’s playful attempt at a scale. The hair rose on the back of his neck.

  He hadn’t heard that laugh in nearly fifty years.

  Surely he was mistaken. He was short of breath and just getting over being ill. He had spent too much time alone, and whenever he did that, he thought of the war.

  He thought too much of the war.

  Then he heard the laugh again, closed his eyes, and saw her, just as he had that first night.

  She had taken his breath away then.

  Much as she was doing now.

  JUNE 17, 1861

  Lieutenant Nathaniel Garrison placed his cap under his arm and nodded crisply to the Negro butler who opened the massive oak door. The man before him had to be at least eighty; his dark skin was lined with wrinkles, his curly hair a pure white. The man took his hat and his card and issued him inside.

  Garrison had an odd feeling that he had suddenly stepped across the Mason-Dixon line. But he knew that wasn’t so. It wasn’t legal to own slaves up here. The butler had to be a free man.

  But it still made Garrison uncomfortable. Despite Lincoln’s denials that this was a war fought over slavery, slavery was the issue that had caused the South to secede. Even the appearance of it here, in the nation’s capital, made him more uncomfortable than he dared say.

  The air was cool inside, despite the awful heat. The entry was large and mostly made of oak. A wide staircase led to the upper stories. On the banister, an iron gas lamp rose, carved in the shape of Cupid.

  Garrison had never been inside the Cunliffe house before, and had no real idea how to act. It was his first society party and he was here only because he was on General Scott’s staff, not because he was important in his own right.

  His summer dress uniform was still too hot for the heat and humidity of official Washington. A trickle of sweat ran down his back despite the coolness of the entry.

  The butler had hung his cap somewhere and was opening the pocket doors that led into the main part of the house. “This way, sir,” he said, bowing before Garrison.

  Now Garrison could hear voices and the soft music of a string quartet playing Mozart. The sound wafted in from the verandah, but there were people in the drawing room as well, holding glasses filled with champagne and plates covered with hors d’oeuvres.

  He caught snatches of conversation as he moved into the room.

  “… when Tennessee seceded…”

  “… President Lincoln isn’t acting as if we’re in a war…”

  “… General Scott isn’t just old. He’s senile. We’re—”

  That last conversation stopped as the speaker, a young man who wore a cream-colored summer suit, saw Garrison. Garrison took a flute of champagne from a tray offered him by a Negro waiter, and walked toward the verandah.

  President Lincoln wasn’t the only one who wasn’t acting as if there were a war. Half of Washington’s military was here, eating finger foods and discussing secession as if it were a parlor game.

  Garrison didn’t want to be here himself. He had a lot of work ahead of him drilling the ninety-day militia units and trying to form the new three-year volunteer units into a coherent army. None of them had had any real training. Many were simply young men who wanted to fight. And even though Washington was now ringed by military camps, organized units and fancy uniforms did not make an effective fighting force.

  Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, who was general-in-chief, had planned to spend the first year of the war preparing. Even if the plan hadn’t leaked, Garrison thought it wouldn’t have worked. The cries that started with the firing on Fort Sumter had risen in May when Richmond had been chosen as the capital of the Confederacy, and were now hitting a fever pitch.

  Richmond wasn’t that far from Washington, after all, and most people thought the war would be over quickly if only the United States quashed the Rebels in their capital. Garrison was worried that the Rebels might try to do the same to Washington—a fear he shared with General Scott. Either way, the war would escalate from small skirmishes to a large battle soon enough. The only question was when.

  The champagne flute was made of crystal and he had to hold it delicately as he made his way to the verandah. Here, even more people stood. The air smelled of the small smoke-fires burning in bowls at the rim of the property to keep the mosquitoes away. Several more servants, holding large fans, waved them up and down so that the thick air moved.

  It wasn’t yet twilight, though that hour wasn’t far away. The longest day of the year was fast approaching and sometimes it seemed to Garrison that the days would never be long enough.

  Across the yard, he finally saw his hostess, Mrs. Evangeline Cunliffe. Mrs. Cunliffe was a widow whose husband had died of a fever several summers ago. She was known for holding the most important society functions in all of official Washington.

  When General Scott heard Garrison complain about the invitation, Scott pushed him to go. Old Fuss-and-Feathers was never one to turn down an important social function. His political nature was too honed—perhaps from the days when he was the Whig candidate for president, days he rarely talked about, since he had lost so badly to Franklin Pierce.

  Garrison was not a social man. He would thank his hostess, mingle for a few moments after that, and then disappear into the house. Without making his apologies, he would be on the road back to camp within the hour.

  Behind him, a woman laughed. The laugh was fluted, trilling up and down the vocal register like a dancehall girl’s playful attempt at a scale. In the days before his father had forced him to go to West Point, Garrison had fancied himself a musician. His father had sent him away precisely to destroy that ambition and had succeeded, for the most part.

  Except when something caught his ear, as this laugh did now. He turned, looking for the source of it. Women in wide hooped skirts stood on the lawn, their shoulders bared, revealing cleavage, and their hair in ringlets that seemed too girlish for most of them.

  The laugh came again, and he turned again, finally catching the last note of it. The woman who made the sound was wearing pink, but on her the color seemed natural. She had black hair and eyes equally as dark, against skin the color of alabaster. The pink dress had no ornamentation—no lace, no frothy ruffles designed to enhance the bosom. Even though the woman was petite, her features small and foxlike, she filled out the dress nicely, naturally, as if the style had been created just for her.

  She wore diamonds around her neck—or what appeared to be diamonds—small ones that caught the light. They added radiance to her face, but he was already captivated. He had never seen such delicate beauty before, delicate beauty that added to, and did not try to hide, strength.

  The cloying scent of perfume overwhelmed him, and he suppressed the urge to sneeze. A hand slid through his bent arm and gripped it tightly.

  “Lieutenant Garrison.”

  He looked down at Mrs. Cunliffe. Her long black hair had been pulled to the back of her head and was held in a snood. She still wore black even though her husband had been dead for years, but the dress whispered as she moved. Silk, and from the look of it, expensive silk at that.

  “Mrs. Cunliffe. I was just coming to pay my respects.” His voice sounded foreign to him, stiff, formal, and unnatural, in a way it usually never was.

  Her smile brightened her face. She lacked the beauty of the woman he had been watching, but she made up for it in personality. Even he could understand why so many men in Washington discussed her with such open admiration—and he was at least fifteen years younger than she.

  “Come now, Lieutenant.” Her voice had a soft Virginia accent that somehow made her seem even more feminine. “We both know you were not looking at me.”

  To his surprise, he felt a flush rising in his neck. He was not a man who blushed—but then, he was not a man who usually got caught unawares.

  �
��If I had been looking at you, ma’am,” he said, “I would have been more welcoming as you approached.”

  She laughed, deep-throated and rich, a woman who no longer had need of feminine games. “You are as charming as they say, Lieutenant.”

  “Who says?” he asked.

  She shrugged and gestured with her free hand. “All of Washington. You’re one of the city’s most eligible bachelors, you know. Rumor has it that you’re going to whip old Fuss-and-Feathers’s troops into shape long before he realizes there’s a war going on.”

  To hear Scott’s nickname come from a civilian startled him almost more than her disrespect had. “General Scott is aware of the war,” Garrison said quietly. “He simply believes we must prepare for it.”

  “Admirable,” she said, “if we were going to fight a prolonged war.”

  He wasn’t going to get into a political discussion with his hostess. He’d been raised in the country, but even in the hinterlands he’d learned enough about decorum to know that politics and parties did not mix.

  She took his champagne flute and set it on the flat top of the wooden railing. Then she led him off the verandah and down the stairs to the lawn. “What, Lieutenant? No opinion? Or would you rather seem loyal to your commander by keeping your silence?”

  He smiled. She was good. “I’m merely a lieutenant, ma’am,” he said. “My opinions do not matter.”

  “I suspect that as a lieutenant who is out in the field every day—”

  “If you call the perimeter of the city a ‘field,’ ma’am.”

  “—your opinions are probably more accurate than those of General Scott. I hear he’s not as sharp as he used to be. Is that true?”

  He was sharp enough to order me to this damn thing, Garrison thought, but did not say. “General Scott has a long history of military leadership in our country. That he is old and that the press has ridiculed his preparations does not mean that he has diminished capacity.”

  Even though Garrison had seen evidence of it. The shaking hands, the sometimes befuddled look in Scott’s blue eyes. Occasionally the man forgot he had given an order, or forgot which day of the week it was. Other times he was so quick that Garrison felt he could never outthink the old man. It varied from day to day, and in degree and measure.