“A little bit of that bastard’s in every one of us,” Taft said. “The point of the exercise is not to let him out.”

“Well, Senator, we’ve found one more thing we agree on.” Flora held out her bloodstained hand. Taft clasped it in his.

The telephone on Clarence Potter’s desk rang. He picked it up. “Potter here,” he said crisply.

“Hello, Potter there,” Jake Featherston rasped in his ear. “I need you to be Potter here, fast as you can, so get your ass on over right now.”

“On my way, sir.” Potter hung up. He grabbed his hat, closed and locked the office door behind him, and went upstairs to get a motorcar. From the War Department to the Gray House on Shockoe Hill shouldn’t have taken more than five minutes. In fact, it took more like fifteen. The U.S. air raid the night before had cratered several streets on the most direct routes.

“Sorry, sir,” the driver kept saying as he had to double back. Potter suspected the President would make him sorry, too, but he didn’t take it out on the luckless young soldier behind the wheel. When he arrived, he hopped out of the Birmingham, showed his ID to the guards at the entrance to the battered Confederate Presidential residence, and was escorted below ground to the enormous bomb shelter in which Jake Featherston operated these days.

New York City had skyscrapers. Potter wondered how long it would be before men built twenty, thirty, even fifty stories underground to keep from getting blown up when bombers came overhead. He laughed. That wouldn’t work in New Orleans, where the cemeteries were on top of the ground because of the high water table. Such details and anomalies aside, the picture seemed scarily probable.

Saul Goldman sat in the waiting room. Potter nodded to the director of communications. “Am I after you in line?” he asked.

“I don’t think so, General,” Goldman answered. “I think we go in together.”

“Do we?” Potter kept his voice as neutral as he could. Goldman was good at making propaganda, but the Intelligence officer didn’t want to be part of any propaganda, no matter how good. He’d had that argument with the President before. He hadn’t completely lost it, which only went to show how good his case was.

Featherston’s secretary stuck her head into the room. “Come with me, gentlemen.” Goldman caught Potter’s eye and nodded. Sure enough, they were an entry, like 3 and 3A at the racetrack.

When Potter came into the President’s sanctum, Featherston fixed him with a fishy stare and barked, “Took you long enough. What did you do-walk?”

“Sorry, sir. Bomb damage.” Potter had been braced for worse.

And Featherston let him off the hook after that, which also surprised him. “We need to get down to brass tacks,” the President said. “You’ve both heard about these people bombs up in the USA-Mormons strapping on explosives and blowing themselves to hell and gone as soon as they can take a raft of damnyankees with ’em?”

“Yes, Mr. President,” Saul Goldman said. Potter nodded. Goldman went on, “We’ve been working on ways to play them up-to show the Yankees are so low and evil, people will kill themselves before they live under them.”

That sounded like a good line to take to Potter, but Jake Featherston shook his head. “I was afraid you were gonna do somethin’ like that,” he said heavily. “That’s how come I called you in here-to tell you not to. No way, nohow. Not a word about ’em out of us, and jam the Yankees hard as you can when they talk about ’em. You got that?”

“I hear you, sir, but I don’t understand.” Goldman looked and sounded pained. Clarence Potter didn’t blame him. Had he been in the communications director’s shoes, he would have been pained, too.

But Featherston repeated, “Not a word, goddammit, and I’ll tell you why.” He went on, “I don’t want the damn niggers to hear anything about people bombs, you hear me? Not one fucking word! Coons are enough trouble as is. You don’t reckon some of those bastards’d blow themselves to the moon if they could take a raft of decent white folks with ’em? I sure do.”

“But-” Saul Goldman began. Even starting the protest took nerve; not many people had the nerve to squawk to Featherston’s face.

Here, though, Potter agreed with the President. “I’m sorry, Mr. Goldman, but I think he’s right,” he said. “We’d better keep the lid on that one for as long as we can, because the niggers will make us sorry if we don’t.”

“Damn straight,” Featherston said.

The director of communications still looked unhappy. “Since you’ve made up your mind, sir, that’s the way we’ll do it.” He plainly thought the President was wrong to have made up his mind that way.

Jake Featherston just as plainly didn’t care. “Make sure you do. And pick up the jamming on the damnyankees, too. We will be sorry-we’ll be sorry as hell-if we can’t keep this quiet.”

“I’ll do my best, Mr. President. If you’ll excuse me…” The little Jew left the President’s office very abruptly.

As soon as the door clicked shut behind Goldman, Jake Featherston let out a long sigh. “I don’t like making Saul do like I tell him instead of like he wants to. He’s good-he’s damn good. You need to give a man like that his head. This time, though, I just don’t reckon I’ve got much choice.”

Potter nodded. “I think you’re right, Mr. President. I said so.”

“Yeah, you did.” Featherston eyed him. “You’re not one to do something like that just to make me wag my tail, either.”

Remembering the weight of the pistol in his pocket as he rode the train up to Richmond in 1936, Potter nodded again. “No, sir. Whatever else I am, I’m no yes-man.”

“Son of a bitch. I never would’ve known if you hadn’t told me.” Maybe Jake Featherston was remembering that pistol, too. He drummed his fingers on top of his desk. “Got a question for you, Mr. Straight Answer.”

“Go ahead,” Potter said.

“Those fucking Mormon people bombs-did any of your men give ’em the idea, or did they come up with it all by themselves?”

“Mr. President, our people did not have thing one to do with that,” Potter said positively. “Nobody in the CSA-no white man in the CSA, anyhow-is that crazy. The Mormons came up with it on their own.”

“All right. I believe you. But if I ever find out you’re lying to me about this one, I’ll have your head,” Featherston said. “People bombs hurt the damnyankees, yeah, but they can hurt us a lot worse. And you know as well as I do that Saul won’t be able to clamp down on the news forever. One way or another, this kind of shit always comes out.”

“I knew that, sir. I wasn’t sure you did,” Potter answered. People who weren’t in the intelligence business often had an exaggerated notion of how easy keeping a secret was.

Jake Featherston laughed at him. “I never went to a fancy U.S. college, General, but I reckon I may know a thing or two anyways.”

“That’s not what I meant, Mr. President,” Clarence Potter said stiffly.

Featherston laughed some more. “Yeah, likely tell.” But amusement didn’t live long on his face. It never did, not that Potter had seen. The President of the CSA always had to be angry at something or worried about something. And today he had something to be angry and worried about. “Damn niggers are gonna start blowin’ themselves up, sure as hell they are. Damfino how much we can do about it, either.”

“Massive reprisals,” Potter suggested. “Kill ten coons for every white a people bomb blows up, or twenty, or a hundred.”

“That won’t stop ’em,” Featherston predicted morosely. “There’ll always be some bastards who think, Who gives a damn what happens after I’m dead? And the ones who go after us without counting the cost are the ones we’ve got to be afraid of.”

He knew what he was talking about. The Freedom Party had always gone after its foes without counting the cost, whether those foes were Whigs and Radical Liberals, Negroes, or the United States. Potter said, “Yes, sir. You’re right-we’ll still have trouble even if we do that. But I think we’ll have less. We’ll make some niggers think twice before they turn into people bombs. And we’ll make the niggers who don’t want to blow themselves up think twice before they help or cover up for the ones who do. They’d better, anyhow, if they know they’re going to get shot after a people bomb goes off.”