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Front.
    Richard Bunsen had been that man. And not only had he survived, he appeared to be one of those rare men who’d had
a good war:
Despite injury and long service, he’d come through with his wits, his nerves, his body, and, most particularly, his reputation intact.
    And now, eight years after the war ended, thirty-two-year-old Richard Bunsen, decorated officer and passionate advocate of the working man, had managed to snare the daughter of one of the highest families in the land as his mistress. On the surface, an admirable sort of fellow, as was this enigmatic Captain Grey whom Stuyvesant would cross the country to see. Stuyvesant could only pray he didn’t actually come to like either man. It had happened before, that he liked his enemy, but it always made things tough.
    And in the other corner of the ring, he thought, Aldous Carstairs: behind-the-lines Intelligence major, whose mouth suggested debauchery and whose handshake spoke of distaste. A man Scotland Yard didn’t care to acknowledge. A man who for some inexplicable reason relished the idea of using force on Captain Bennett Grey. And the man who was, apparently, to be Stuyvesant’s confederate on these shores.
    He’d met men like Carstairs before, men who came to the world of Intelligence for the power. And occasionally, for the pleasure: During the War, Intelligence meant interrogations. In the years since, Stuyvesant had done his share of questioning, hard interrogations with weighty consequences. Enemies, as Carstairs had said, who were serious and without qualms. He’d used his fists when he had to—hard men required hard treatment, and sometimes the only way to get their respect was to beat it into them. But he’d never permitted one of his interrogations to descend into outright torture.
    And he’d never taken any pleasure from the process. He’d never enjoyed seeing a man broken. He’d never felt bigger or happier or fulfilled when his opponent gave way.
    However, he’d seen men who did. Law enforcement, especially Intelligence, could provide a haven for such men.
    Men like Aldous Carstairs.
    In a lifetime of having to overlook the means in the interest of the end, he couldn’t remember ever having less enthusiasm about a colleague.



Chapter Five
    T HE INVADER CAME UP THE HILLSIDE TRACK, contemptuous of the mud clinging to its flanks and the fresh crumple in its left fender, souvenir of an encounter with the close-laid rock wall. Wheels that had begun the morning pristine from a garage-hand’s cloth wallowed through muck-filled ruts; a crack was spreading from the lower edge of the driver’s side wind-screen.
    The walls grew higher, the track narrower, every minute. An onlooker—say, someone standing before the lonely white building where the track came to its end—might think the motorcar headed for a final resting place, like a cork down the neck of its bottle: primitive green Cornwall tightening around this incongruous black manifestation of the Jazz Age.
    As though confirming the suspicion of its fate, the car vanished behind some trees. For a time, the only signs of life on the ancient green patchwork of fields were three ambling cows and a two-legged figure in red, moving rapidly down a slope half a mile away. The fitful sea breeze dropped; the eternal grumble of the nearest tin-mine workings emerged from the hush, punctuated by a snatch of sweet-voiced birdsong and the bawl of a calf.
    The verdant countryside into whose maw the car had apparently dropped was just about the end of the world as far as England was concerned—maps showed Land’s End proper a few miles to the south, but the track’s goal would meet the description for anyone but a surveyor: a small whitewashed stone cottage and its outbuildings, nestled into the breast of the last hill before the Atlantic.
    The whitewashed cottage was a very long way from anywhere.
    After a moment, the breeze picked up and the motorcar reemerged, shaking itself free of the copse.