Shadows of Annihilation Page 40

  “Permanent staff and a cat of your own. You must be thinking of settling down!” he said to Luz.

  Luz shot him a glance, and her smile had a certain wryness to it.

  “It’s a good thing our enemies can’t read me as well as you, Uncle Teddy!” she said. “Lemonade? Wine?”

  “Lemonade would be pleasant, thank you,” he said.

  Ciara poured, careful of her left arm in its sling; the fruit was fresh-squeezed from the trees in the gardens, in a jug of frosted glass beaded with condensation, coolly tart-sweet and perfect for a summer’s evening.

  Wilkie and the two women all took glasses of chilled white wine instead. A few minutes passed chatting and discussing how little Safira’s name matched her sapphire eyes, and nibbling at chicharrónes—crisp pork rinds—little balls of fried sweet plantain, and various bocaditos.

  “In point of fact, Uncle Teddy,” Luz said with the directness he’d always admired, “Ciara and I do have a favor we’d like to ask. And ask of John, too, of course, since it’s related to our duties.”

  “Ask,” he said. “And it shall be granted!”

  John nodded. “After what you two have done on your last three missions—all in the past twelve months!—there isn’t much you’re not due,” he said, and Roosevelt signaled assent.

  One of the benefits of knowing someone really well was that you could anticipate them. He knew that he could make the promise without qualifiers because he wasn’t going to be asked for anything he couldn’t give. Luz was too sensible. And Wilkie was entirely right—they had both earned anything he could in good conscience deliver. One of the many reasons he enjoyed power was that he could reward those he considered deserving.

  I might even swing a Cabinet post for her, he thought whimsically. If it weren’t for the fact that Luz would rather be sentenced to a lifetime breaking rocks!

  “Well, first, I don’t anticipate that . . . the war will be doing anything very dramatic in the next little while,” Luz said delicately. “Am I right?”

  Wilkie nodded, but reluctantly. Roosevelt did the same, and kept his teeth from grinding with a sudden flush of frustration and rage by an effort of will; one of the disadvantages of power was that it taught you just how powerless even those in the highest places could be.

  In fact, they were probably going to be announcing an armistice before the end of the year, and then would come the negotiations . . . not for a real peace, but at least for the absence of open war, on the basis of uti possidetis. He detested the thought of letting everyone get up from the table with what they held, and the country would be bitterly disappointed that Germany wasn’t beaten into dust no matter how Croly’s propagandists labored to put a favorable gloss on it, but the current grinding stalemate was killing men and sinking ships and taking food from the mouths of hungry children all over the world to no great purpose.

  Avoiding political embarrassment or the facing of hard truths was just not worth that.

  “It’s a stalemate,” Roosevelt growled. “Time to admit the truth, though I’m not looking forward to the reaction.”

  He snapped his fingers. “I know! When we make the announcement, we’ll abolish rationing on the same day and move ex–Food Director Hoover over to . . . oh, some foreign famine relief agency we’ll create for him. He’d like that, and be good at it. God knows the world has enough places that need it.”

  “That’ll be popular,” Wilkie observed. “And Hoover isn’t. Everyone hates those meatless days—there wouldn’t be so much black marketeering if they didn’t. Thank God you quashed that idiotic proposal to prohibit alcohol; enforcing that . . .”

  He shuddered. Roosevelt looked at Luz as a sudden thought occurred to him. He knew she wasn’t overly scrupulous about legalities—she was a spy and secret operative, after all—but he had to be more careful.

  She laughed. “Personal-use exemption, not the black market,” she said, reading his unspoken question. “All the rationed materials in dinner tonight are from the gardens here, except that the meat’s from the people who lease the ranch we own over in the Santa Ynez Valley. Even Hoover knows better than to try controlling what farmers put on their own table from their own fields.”

  “Ah, thank you,” Roosevelt said. “And incidentally, Hoover knew better than to try that . . . after I told him so.”

  “So we may not be urgently needed in the field again for a while?” she continued.

  Wilkie nodded again—and again, reluctantly. Roosevelt sympathized, since the head of the Black Chamber didn’t want to deprive himself of valuable assets, but they had earned anything within reason. Knowledge that you were considered valuable—and wouldn’t be asked for sacrifices unless they were actually necessary—helped preserve morale. Besides being the right thing to do in return for brave and selfless service to the country. Loyalty had to work both ways or eventually it didn’t work at all.

  “We’d like to be put on the home-service list for a while, then,” Luz said. “Not permanently, but for a while. Several years, preferably.”

  “I’d like to do a degree program at Stanford,” Whelan said earnestly. “I don’t think it would take me more than two years, but there are things I need formal classroom tuition for, and I need more hands-on experience under experts in experimental work. I’ll be more valuable to the country and the Chamber then, Mr. President.”

  Wilkie chuckled dryly. “It may interest you that the head of the Technical Section recommended just that to me for you, Miss Whelan,” John said.

  Whelan blushed to the roots of her hair—not all that hard for a redhead like her with skin pale as a cloud—and her eyes went wide.

  “Really?” she squeaked, and put her right hand to her throat in a display of hero worship that made Roosevelt smile.

  Brilliant was an accurate description of Tesla, but eccentric was a kindly euphemism.

  “Really?”

  “N said”—and they all knew the Director meant Nicolai Tesla—“that even the remarkable Miss Whelan could go only so far with self-education, and that it would be a crime to waste any potential part of such a talent. He was impressed yet again that you deduced the guidance system of the Alberich device so quickly and improvised a solution.”

  Roosevelt nodded. “Those air torpedo things are going to be a bad problem . . . and we’re working on making our own, too, of course. As of Thursday, the Germans are launching dozens at British targets every night . . . with conventional warheads, but a reminder of what they could do with horror-gas . . . and they’re building ships to carry them. You gained us some time and useful information there too.”

  The blush turned crimson, and Whelan looked down and swallowed.

  “And while Ciara’s studying, I can too,” Luz said. At his raised brows: “No, not the sciences—the cobbler should stick to her last. I speak fair Japanese, but it’s a Hiroshima Prefecture peasant version from a generation ago I picked up from family friends as a child.”

  She smiled impishly before she went on:

  “In English the equivalent would be . . . Suh, mah lill’ ca-yt heah ain’ nohow no respektah o’ pussons, a-clawin’ an’ a-carryin’ own laak tha-yt ’roun yo’ faahn presahdenshul feets.”

  Soberly, though they were all smiling in turn at the perfect Mississippi gumbo dialect:

  “I think having native-quality standard Japanese might be an asset a few years down the line, for a field operative. And I need to fully master the script and pick up a good deal else. Besides, I want to read the Tale of Genji in the original. Plus it might be useful to look into Chinese. Everyone says it’s very difficult, but that is my area of expertise and here in California it’s easy to find people to practice with.”

  “You always were sharp, Luz,” Roosevelt said. “Yes, everyone’s going to be dipping their spoons in the Asian stewpot, probing and subverting, and we certainly can’t leave our side’s sh
are of that completely to the British, even if the Imperial Secret Service do have more experience there. The Japanese are stretched thin . . . though agents who can pass as Japanese are going to be a problem.”

  “There are a couple of people here named Taguchi I could recommend who might be interested; you met them and their brother and parents briefly when you were here at New Year’s. They’re very bright, and their loyalty is beyond question. I’ve known Fumiko and Midori since I was a child. And Station Chief Reiter in San Francisco is always on at me to help with the training program; I could do that too.”

  “Make a note about the Taguchis, John; it could be important,” Roosevelt said, and then gave her a keen look. “That’s what you’d like? Leave to attend university so you can both extend your talents? Working on the training program? Not really what I’d call much of a favor, Luz!”

  Luz cleared her throat and raised her eyes a little. “Ah, mas o menos, Uncle Teddy. But you know there are many types of obligations, and . . . well, you also know we’re not . . . the marrying kind.”

  Whelan looked as if she’d like to melt and ooze through the cracks in the tile floor. Silence fell for a long moment, and he cleared his throat in turn to fill it.

  “Yes,” he said shortly. “I’m aware of that.”

  He knew, and he disapproved . . . but found there wasn’t much heat in it, under the circumstances. His strongest regret there was that it meant that their germ plasm would be lost to the nation . . . the American people . . . since they were both individuals of extraordinary fitness in their different ways. Not to mention that his old friend and comrade Patrick O’Malley and the woman the comrade loved more than life wouldn’t have their bloodline preserved, to go down through the future of the nation.

  If there was one thing that gave him the most joy in his personal life, then after Edith and the fact that all his sons had survived the war it was the growing passel of grandchildren his six offspring had furnished him. Even young Quentin was engaged—he was barely twenty, but being a fighting scout pilot wasn’t an occupation for men who hesitated—to a young lady named Flora Whitney whom Roosevelt liked a good deal. Even if she was a granddaughter of that old pirate Cornelius Vanderbilt and her parents were reactionaries of the first water who gargled with throttled rage at the mention of the Roosevelt name.

  Luz spoke into the loaded pause: “Well, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t . . . adopt, though. Study and training here in California is compatible with caring for very young children in a way field service isn’t.”

  “Oh,” he said; there were certainly enough orphans in the world, and that was better than nothing, but . . .

  And then he said: “Oh!”

  In a completely different tone as the nature of the euphemism sank in, helped along by the significant hesitation, a raised raven-black brow and inclined head. And by Whelan’s agony of embarrassment as she nodded while visibly willing her vital functions to shut down.

  Wilkie blinked a moment later as he realized they meant a more . . . Roosevelt supposed natural was the most appropriate word . . . form of reproduction than raising orphans. And one that would require prolonged holidays before returning with infants who would then go through the solemn legal formalities of adoption to give them names and official status as heirs. He dredged his memory for the statutes: California was one of the states that had legal adoption—not all did quite yet, and when he’d been born in 1858 only one or two had—and the paperwork wouldn’t be very difficult.

  “Yes, I see that could be . . . time-consuming,” he said. “But there is a eugenic duty to the nation, as well, and to one’s own bloodline.”

  Logically, I can’t object to someone solving what I myself considered a problem.

  “Yes. John, in your official capacity, make whatever arrangements these operatives need. And put it under most secret.”

  Luz leaned forward and put her hand over his, gripping firmly with slim callused fingers whose strength always surprised him. He returned it.

  “Thank you, Uncle Teddy, for both our sakes. And for my mima and papá.”

  “Thank you, Mr. President,” the younger woman whispered. “For my father as well . . . My brother died so young, there’s only me . . .”

  Silence stretched, this time not uncomfortable but not without awkwardness either. It was broken in laughter as he started and swore at the feel of tiny needle-sharp claws in his leg as Safira started to climb to his lap. They passed the little creature around, and she played with ferocious enthusiasm and devoured offered bits of pork rind as nothing less than her royal-princess due before collapsing into rag-doll limpness with sudden sleepiness, yawning, blinking, smacking her lips, and curling up as Roosevelt laid her on the cushion of his chair.

  “I warn you, human infants are a lot more work than that!” he said, to general laughter. “And Miss Whelan, Mr. President is a little formal—why not Colonel, if you must use a title? You’ve fought under my command, after all, in a sense—and fought well.”

  A bell rang, and they formed up to go into dinner, each of the men extending an arm; there was a tantalizing scent of garlic and hot tomato sauce in the air.

  “And Uncle Teddy,” Luz said. “Think of it this way: another set of children for you to visit, and play Bear with in front of the fire, the way you did with me.”

  He mock-groaned. “I’ll be too stiff for that by then!” he said. “Have mercy on an old man only fit to sit in the sun and dream of the past!”

  In fact, he was grinning at the prospect, a show of teeth nobody here found very alarming, though Ciara Whelan blinked and was probably surprised at how closely it resembled the caricatures that had followed him since his days as police commissioner in New York City nearly . . . he blinked himself in startlement at the thought . . . twenty-five years ago.

  And in a way, he was smiling at the thought of doing one last favor for Patrick O’Malley’s memory, as well as for his daughter.

  “Too old to play Bear and tell your stories? Never!” Luz said. “Not while you’re breathing, at least!”

  S. M. Stirling is the author of many science fiction and fantasy novels. A former lawyer and an amateur historian, he lives with his wife, Jan.

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