"I'll give it my best shot, sir," the driver said resignedly.

It took more work than he'd expected, for the fragment that got the trunk had torn into the spare tire and inner tube. The driver had to wait till a cop came by, explain his predicament to him, and wait again till the policeman came back with a fresh tire and tube. They didn't get moving again till well after midnight.

As Dowling fitfully dozed in the back seat, he hoped the driver wasn't dozing behind the wheel. The Ford didn't crash into another auto or go off the road, so the driver evidently managed to keep his eyes open.

More problems with the road stalled them outside of Washington. The driver did start snoring then. Dowling let him do it till things started moving again. They didn't get through the de jure capital of the USA until after dawn. That let Dowling see that Confederate bombers had hit it even harder than Philadelphia. Still, it wasn't the almost lunar landscape it had been after the USA took it back from the CSA in the Great War.

The Confederates had knocked out the regular bridges over the Potomac. Engineers had run up pontoon bridges to take up the slack. The Ford bumped into what had been Virginia and was now an eastern extension of West Virginia.

Daniel MacArthur made his headquarters near the little town of Manassas, scene of the first U.S. defeat-but far from the last-in the War of Secession. As Dowling, wet and weary, got out of the motorcar, he hoped that wasn't an omen.

Waiting for the first big U.S. attack to go in wasn't easy for Flora Blackford. If it succeeded, it would bring the war back to something approaching an even keel. If it failed… She shook her head. She refused to think about what might happen if it failed. It would succeed. It would.

Ordinary business had to go on while she waited along with the rest of the United States. Studying the budget was part of ordinary business. If you looked long enough, you learned to spot all sorts of interesting things.

Some of the most interesting were the ones that were most puzzling. Why was there a large Interior Department appropriation for construction work in western Washington? And why didn't the item explain what the work was for?

She called an undersecretary and tried to find out. He said, "Hold on, Congresswoman. Let me see what you're talking about. Give me the page number, if you'd be so kind." She did, and listened to him flipping paper. "All right. I see the item," he told her. Close to half a minute of silence followed, and then a sheepish laugh. "To tell you the truth, Congresswoman, I have no idea what that's about. It does seem a little unusual, doesn't it?"

"It seems more than a little unusual to me," Flora answered. "Who would know something about it?"

"Why don't you try Assistant Secretary Goodwin?" the undersecretary said. "Hydroelectric is his specialty."

"I'll do that," Flora said. "Let me have his number, please." She wrote it down. "Thanks very much." She hung up and dialed again.

Assistant Secretary Goodwin had a big, deep voice. He sounded more important than the junior functionary with whom she'd spoken a moment before. But when she pointed out the item that puzzled her, what he said was, "Well, I'll be… darned. What's that doing there?"

"I was hoping you could tell me," Flora said pointedly.

"Congresswoman, this is news to me," Goodwin said. She believed him. He seemed angry in a special bureaucratic way: the righteous indignation of a man who'd had his territory encroached upon. She didn't think anyone could fake that particular tone of voice.

Tapping a pencil on her desk, she asked, "If you don't know, who's likely to?"

"It would have to be the secretary himself," Goodwin answered. "Let's see which one of us can call him first. I aim to get to the bottom of this, too."

The Secretary of the Interior was a Midwesterner named Wallace. The first time Flora tried to reach him, his secretary said he was on another line. Goodwin must have dialed faster. "I'll have him call you back, if you like," the secretary added.

"Yes. Thank you. Please do that." Flora gave her the number and returned the handset to its cradle. She did some more pencil tapping. Were they just passing the buck? Her mouth tightened. If they were, they'd be sorry.

She jumped a little when the telephone rang a few minutes later. Bertha said, "It's Assistant Secretary Roosevelt, Congresswoman."

"Oh!" Flora said. She'd been expecting the Secretary of the Interior. She wondered what Roosevelt wanted. More propaganda? She shrugged. Only one way to find out. "Put him through, please."

"Hello, Congresswoman." As usual, Franklin Roosevelt sounded jaunty. No one who didn't know would ever imagine he couldn't get out of his wheelchair. "How are you this lovely morning?"

It wasn't lovely; it was still raining. Even so, Flora couldn't help smiling. "I'm well, thanks," she answered. "And you?"

"In the pink," Roosevelt said. "I just had a call from Hank. He thought I might be able to tell you what was going on."

"Hank?" Flora echoed with a frown. "Hank who? You're a step or two ahead of me."

"Wallace," Roosevelt told her. "You've been talking to people about that Washington State item in the Interior Department budget. It's no wonder nobody over there knows anything much about it. It really has more to do with my shop, if you must know."

"With the War Department?" Flora said. "Why isn't it listed under War Department appropriations, in that case?" Curiouser and curiouser, she thought.

Roosevelt coughed a couple of times. He sounded faintly embarrassed as he answered, "Well, Congresswoman, one reason is that we didn't want to draw the Confederates' notice and make them wonder what we were doing way out there." He laughed. "So we drew your notice and made you wonder instead. Seems we can't win."

"So you did," Flora said. "What are you doing way out there? Something large, by the size of the appropriation you're asking for."

"I'm sorry, but I can't tell you what it is," Roosevelt said.

"What?" Now Flora really did start to get angry. "What do you mean, you can't? If you don't want to talk to me here, Mr. Roosevelt, you can answer questions under oath in front of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. Now-what sort of boondoggle has the War Department got going on in Washington State?"

"We don't believe it's a boondoggle. We wouldn't be working on it if we did," Roosevelt answered. "And you can summon me to the Joint Committee, no doubt about it. But if you do, I will lie like Ananias. That will be the best possible way for me to serve my country. I will be convincing, too. Your colleagues, or enough of them, will believe me. And, of course, I will deny we ever had this conversation."

He meant every word of it. Flora had dealt with a lot of recalcitrant bureaucrats. Once in a great while, one of them would dig in his heels and refuse to move. Plainly, that was what was happening here. Flora didn't understand why, though. "What could possibly be so important?" she asked.

"I can't tell you that, either," Roosevelt said. "I will tell you that it is more important than my job. If you want to send me to the calaboose for contempt of Congress, I will cheerfully go. It is that important. It is so important, I am going to ask you to let me sell you a pig in a poke and trust me without asking any more questions. If you do, I will thank you. If you don't, Jake Featherston will. Up to you."

He meant every word of that, too. Whether he was right or wrong was a different question-and he didn't want to give Flora any clues that would let her decide. She said, "You don't make this easy, do you?"

"Few things in wartime are easy. Figuring out whether to keep this secret is one of them," he answered.

"If you turn out to be wrong, Mr. Roosevelt, there is no place in the world you can hide from me," Flora said.