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picked a damn lonely place to live, didn’t he?” Major Shackleton lit a cigar and cranked down the glossy black Ford’s rear window on his side to let the smoke seep out. The cigar tip glowed red in the gloomy twilight of late afternoon. “You Brits like this kind of weather, huh?”
    “I fear we have no choice but to like it,” Captain Humes-Talbot answered. He smiled as politely as he could, his aristocratic nostrils flared. “Or at least accept it.”
    “Right.” Shackleton, a United States Army officer with a face like the business end of a battle-ax, peered out at the gray, low clouds and the nasty drizzle. He hadn’t seen the sun for more than two weeks, and the chill was making his bones ache. The elderly, stiff-backed British army driver, separated from his passengers by a glass window, was taking them along a narrow pebbled road that wound between dark, cloud-shrouded crags and stands of thick pine forest. The last village they’d passed, Houlett, was twelve miles behind them. “That’s why you people are so pale,” he went on, like a bulldozer through a tea party. “Everybody looks like a ghost over here. You ever come to Arkansas, I’ll show you a springtime sun.”
    “I’m not sure my schedule will allow it,” Humes-Talbot said, and cranked down his window a turn and a half. He was wan and thin, a twenty-eight-year-old staff officer whose closest brush with death had been diving into a Portsmouth ditch as a Messerschmitt fighter screamed past seventy feet overhead. But that had been in August of 1940, and now no Luftwaffe aircraft dared to cross the Channel.
    “So Gallatin served with distinction in North Africa?” Shackleton’s teeth were clenched around the cigar, and the stub was wet with saliva. “That was two years ago. If he’s been out of service since then, what makes your people think he can handle the job?”
    Humes-Talbot stared at him blankly with his bespectacled blue eyes. “Because,” he said, “Major Gallatin is a professional.”
    “So am I, sonny.” Shackleton was ten years the British captain’s senior. “That doesn’t make me able to parachute into France, does it? And I haven’t been sittin’ on my tailbone for the last twenty-four months, I’ll guaran-damn-tee you that.”
    “Yes sir,” the other man agreed, simply because he felt he should. “But your… uh… people asked for help in this matter, and since it’s of benefit to both of us, my superiors felt-”
    “Yeah, yeah, that’s yesterday’s news.” Shackleton waved the man quiet with an impatient hand. “I’ve told my people I’m not sold on Gallatin’s-excuse me, Major Gallatin’s-record. His lack of field experience, I ought to say, but I’m supposed to make a judgment based on a personal meeting. Which isn’t the way we work in the States. We go by the record over there.”
    “We go by the character over here,” Humes-Talbot said, with a bite of frost. “Sir.”
    Shackleton smiled faintly. Well, at last he’d gotten a rise out of this stiff-necked kid. “Your secret service might have recommended Gallatin, but that doesn’t swing a shovelful of shit as far as I’m concerned. Pardon my French.” He snorted smoke from his nostrils, his eyes catching a gleam of red. “I understand Gallatin’s not his real name. It used to be Mikhail Gallatinov. He’s a Russian. Right?”
    “He was born in St. Petersburg in 1910,” came the careful reply. “In 1934 he became a citizen of Great Britain.”
    “Yeah, but Russia’s in his blood. You can’t trust Russians. They drink too much vodka.” He tapped ashes into the ashtray on the back of the driver’s seat, but his aim was off and most of the ash fell on his spit-shined shoes. “So why’d he leave Russia? Maybe he was wanted for a crime over there?”
    “Major Gallatin’s father was an army general and a friend of Czar Nicholas the Second,” Humes-Talbot said as he watched the road unreel in the yellow gleam of the