The Old Vengeful by Anthony Price

Author:Anthony Price [Price, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780753828267
Amazon: 075382826X
Publisher: Phoenix
Published: 2013-01-19T05:00:00+00:00

IX

“YOU SEE, ELIZABETH, this is a research project with a difference— or a whole lot of differences … like time, for a start, obviously.”

“You mean, we don’t have much of it?”

“Maybe we don’t have any of it. I don’t know. I only know that I’ve taken years to reconstruct days … and your father, Elizabeth—he bumbled along after the Vengeful escapers for months and months, enjoying himself in the best hotels and the Michelin restaurants, picking up the odd fact here and there, but mostly useless information. But he wasn’t worried about time, anyway.”

That was Father to the life in his later days, thought Elizabeth: in spite of the doctor’s advice he had been convinced that the whisper of his heart in his ear was only a false rumour.

“But we have other things that he didn’t have.” Paul half-smilfcd at her. “Because, when you think about it, an intelligence department is well-equipped for this sort of enterprise: we have the manpower— trained researchers, who know how to ask questions, and how to interpret the answers—and we have the resources—“

“Huh!” Aske snuffled to himself. “If the tax-payers could see us now! Or are we going to publish this time? A Festschrift for Dr David Audley—1812: Defeat into Victory? Will that balance the books?”

“And the contacts—manpower, and resources, and contacts—“

“Professor Emeritus Basil Wilson Wilder, no less!”

“Aske—“

“Sorry, old boy! A moment’s weakness … But Wilder is a contact—at least, if this is what your Dr Audley wants to know, he is … And that’s still ultra-secret, is it?”

Looking from one to the other, Elizabeth almost smiled; because they were Lucan and Cardigan at Balaclava, re-enacting history, with the one hating the other so much that he’d never let himself be stung into admitting that he too didn’t know why he was doing what he was doing. But since she was in this particular Light Brigade charge it was no real smiling matter.

“So you’re not interested in the Vengeful any more, Paul? It’s only the escapers now?”

He nodded. “That’s what your father was concerned with, Elizabeth. You were right.”

“After Miss … Miss Cookridge’s letter?” Here, coming down off the Chemin des Dames ridge, Miss Irene Cookridge was no more incongruous than Julian Oakenshaw and Danny Kahn in the roll-call of names.

“Not just her letter, but the Conversations book as well. David had people working on it half the night, and me working on what they came up with this morning.”

“Doing what, Paul?”

“Plotting the route they took after they broke out of the Lautenbourg Fortress.”

Aske half-turned, then his mouth closed on his unasked question and his eyes returned to the road ahead. But Elizabeth knew what was still plaguing him, because it plagued her equally; the only difference being that she knew that Paul himself didn’t know the answer to it, and Aske thought he was being frozen out from the truth.

Why?

“And that was a minor epic in itself—a classic Colditz-style job,” continued Paul. “Because they were shut up tight in an old barracks between

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