“New York City,” Cantarella replied at once.

With his accent, that didn’t surprise Moss at all. Still casually, the fighter pilot asked, “How soon do you expect to see it again?”

Cantarella didn’t answer right away. He scratched his cheek. Whiskers rasped against his fingernails; he was a man who got five o’clock shadow at half past one. Then he said, “Well, sir, I hope I don’t have to sit out the whole goddamn war here.”

“Who doesn’t?” Moss agreed. “Let me know if you have any other thoughts along those lines.”

“I’ll do that, Major,” Cantarella said. “You can count on it.” Off he went. He gave the impression of still being very much in the war even though he was hundreds of miles behind the lines and on the wrong side of the barbed wire and machine-gun towers. Moss looked after him. How long did he intend to stay on the wrong side of the barbed wire? Will he take me with him when he goes? That was the question that mattered most to Moss.

“Hello, General,” Brigadier General Irving Morrell said, walking up toward the frame house that held Brigadier General Abner Dowling’s headquarters.

“Hello, General,” Dowling replied. “Good to see you again, and it’s high time you had stars on your shoulders, if anybody wants to know what I think.”

“Thanks. Thanks very much,” Morrell said. “They do make me think I haven’t wasted the past thirty years, anyway.”

“I know what you mean,” Dowling said, and no doubt he did: he’d been in the Army even longer than Morrell had before trading his eagles for stars. He went on, “How are you feeling?”

“Sir, I’ll do,” Morrell answered. His shoulder chose that moment to twinge. He did his best not to show how much it hurt. It would sting him if he tried to move it too far-to move it as if he weren’t wounded, in other words-or sometimes for no reason at all: certainly none he could find. With a wry chuckle, he continued, “One of the so-called advantages of my new exalted status is that they don’t expect me to push back the Confederates singlehanded.”

Dowling snorted-a rude noise to come from a general. “You can’t fool me. I’ve known you too long. First chance you get, you’re going to climb back into a barrel. Five minutes later, you’ll stick your head out of the cupola, because you can’t see a damn thing through the periscopes.”

“Who, me?” Morrell said, as innocently as he could. Both men laughed. Dowling had him pegged, all right. Morrell added, “I don’t know that I like being so predictable.”

He’d thought Dowling would go on laughing, but the fat officer sobered instead. “You probably shouldn’t be that predictable, as a matter of fact. If you are, the Confederates are liable to take another shot at you.”

Morrell grunted. The other general might well be right. Morrell said, “It’s an honor I could do without. I never minded getting shot at because I was a U.S. soldier. I minded getting shot, that time in Sonora-it hurt like blazes, and it left me flat on my back for a hell of a long time. But it was one of those things that happen, you know what I mean? But if they’re shooting at me because I’m me… That’s assassination. It isn’t war.”

“They’re doing it,” Dowling said.

“I know they are,” Morrell answered. “We’ve lost some good people because they’re doing it, too-lost them for good, I mean, not just had them wounded the way I was.”

“Unofficially-and you haven’t heard this from me-we’re doing it, too,” Dowling said.

That made Morrell grunt again. “Well, I can’t even tell you I’m very surprised,” he said at last. “It’s the only thing we can do, pretty much. If they hit us like that, we have to hit back the same way, or else they get an edge. But I’ll be damned if I like it. It makes this business even filthier than it has to be.”

“Personally, I agree with you. You’ll find those who don’t, though.” Dowling paused, ruminating on that. After a bit, he went on, “When you were in Ohio, you met Captain Litvinoff, didn’t you?”

“The skinny fellow with the little mustache that looked like it was penciled on? The poison-gas specialist? Oh, yes. I met him. He gave me the cold chills.” Now it was Morrell’s turn to pause. He let out a long, sorrowful sigh. “All right, General. You made your point.”

“Over in Richmond or wherever they keep them, the Confederates have men just like dear Captain Litvinoff,” Dowling said. Morrell realized the other general liked the poison-gas expert even less than he did. He hadn’t imagined such a thing was possible. Dowling went on, “Now we’re finding assassins under flat rocks. And things are liable to get worse before they get better.”

“How could they?” Morrell asked in honest perplexity.

“Well, I don’t exactly know. But I can tell you something I heard from somebody I believe,” Dowling said.

“I’m all ears.” Morrell liked gossip no less than anyone else.

“You ever hear of that German scientist named Einstein? You know-the Jew with the hair that looks like steel wool in a hurricane?”

Morrell nodded. “Sure. Who hasn’t heard of him? He’s the one they always make absentminded professor jokes about. What’s he got to do with the price of beer, though?”

“He’s a hell of a sharp man, no matter how absentminded he is.”

“I never said he wasn’t. You don’t get to be famous like that if you haven’t got a lot on the ball. But what about him?”

“He’s disappeared,” Dowling said portentously. “Not disappeared as in his apartment building got hit by a bomb while he was in the bathtub. Disappeared as in fallen off the map. Quite a few of the other high-forehead fellows in Germany and Austria-Hungary have quietly dropped out of sight, too.”

“They’re working on something.” Morrell didn’t phrase it as a question. He’d been in the Army a long time. He recognized the signs. When a lot of people who did the same kind of work quietly dropped out of sight, something-probably something big-was going on behind the scenes. He pointed a finger at Dowling. “Do you know what it is?”

“Not me,” Dowling said. “When I need to count past ten, I take off my shoes.”

He was sandbagging; he was nobody’s fool. Morrell paused one more time. Then he asked, “Whatever the Kaiser’s boys are working on, are we working on it, too?”

Dowling had started to light a smoke-a Confederate brand, no doubt captured or confiscated here in Virginia. He froze with the cigarette in his mouth and the match, still unstruck, in his hand. “You know, General, I asked my… friend the very same question.”

“And? What did he tell you?”

“He told me to mind my own goddamn business and get the hell out of his office.” Dowling did light the cigarette then. He took a long, deep drag, as if he wanted to escape the memory of his friend’s reply. “So you can take that any way you want to. Either we aren’t or we are and we don’t want to talk about it-really don’t want to. You pays your money and you takes your choice.”

“You sound like that colored band that got away from the Confederates,” Morrell said. “They put them on the wireless enough, don’t they?”

“Oh, you might say so.” Dowling’s voice was dry. “Yes, you just might. But propaganda is where you find it.”

“And isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Morrell looked west from Culpeper, the town where Dowling presently made his headquarters. The Blue Ridge Mountains sawtoothed the horizon. The mountains didn’t worry Morrell so much. What the Confederates might have lurking in them did. “Is Patton going to try to hit us from the flank again?”

“He’s welcome to, by God. He’ll have even less fun than he did the last time,” Abner Dowling growled. “But things seem pretty quiet off to the west. If what the spies say is true, the enemy’s pulled some forces away from there.”

“Where have they gone, then?” Morrell asked the immediately obvious question-not only was it obvious, it was important.