Free Sion Crossing by Anthony Price Page B

waiting for us, at the car … We were a little late, sir—on the inter-state, there was this pick-up had an argument with a sixteen-wheeler, and we were de-layed somewhat, you see.”
    The British accent was not quite perfect, but very nearly so—
    Then the blast of super-heated humid air, with most of its life-giving cool oxygen boiled away, buffeted Latimer into speechlessness. All he could hope for now was that Miss Cookridge and the car were not far away.
    Lucy Hennebury Cookridge : he had turned the Senator’s snapshot over, and that had been written on the back of it. And although “Hennebury” was neither a particularly memorable or melodious name, never mind recognizable in any historical context, it was at least not actively outlandish, like William Tecumseh Sherman and General the Right Reverend Leonidas Polk, the Confederate warrior-bishop who had stopped a cannon-ball fired by one of Tecumseh’s gunners on the retreat-to Atlanta—
    God Almighty! He was back to marvelling that anybody in his right mind had been able to conduct military operations in such ridiculous weather conditions as this! But that was the other singularly unpleasant thing about military operations down the ages: they had all too frequently been blithely conducted in ridiculous conditions—the mud of Petersburg and Passchendaele, the snows of Moscow and the Ardennes, the humid jungles of Guadalcanal and Kohima, and the egg-frying heat of the Western Desert. They had all agreed on a fine disregard for any sort of day-to-day human comfort, apart from the overriding general discomfort of being killed outright, if not maimed and jolted back to be blood-poisoned by some over-worked drunken surgeon in a cloud of flies. So this, across a few yards of Atlanta car-park, was no more than par for the usual battlefield course, give or take a hundred years of progress.
    There was a female standing up beside a very battered and quite breathtakingly hideous car—a car hideous even by the standards of cars he had passed already, which all had consumer durable written all over them, being plainly designed for the scrap-heap as quickly as possible, their durability rusted and dented and consumed.
    Damn! He was letting the heat and his doubts about Mr Kingston of Kingston get to him, fed by his anti-American prejudices! Naples on a bad day could be almost as bad as this; and Kingston was more British than American, judging by that accent; and if his own British car was so much better than all those around him, why wasn’t this car park full of British cars—instead of American … or Japanese?
    The woman, though—
    God! She was tall, too!
    And thin—
    He paused, suddenly irresolute because the tallness and thinness of Miss Lucy Hennebury Cookridge was really no more than an extrapolation from that one quick glance at the Senator’s snapshot, and on slightly closer scrutiny this woman didn’t particularly resemble that one: that one’s hair had been fluffed-out in some no-doubt-fashionable style, and this one’s was pulled severely back; and this one’s collar-bones were apparent, when that one’s had been decently covered; and, above all, this one’s cheekbones were hidden behind huge sunglasses, which also blacked out the candid, half-amused eyes which Miss Lucy Hennebury Cookridge had turned on the photographer.
    And, in any case … he converted his doubt into a turnback toward Mr Kingston of Kingston, who was no longer ahead of him—who was no longer even beside him—
    Mr Kingston of Kingston was performing a strange angry dance ten yards behind him, swinging the case (which was a lot heavier than it looked, with all the books in it which were compressing his two-three days’ change of linen)—swinging all that weight wildly as he stamped and twisted.
    “Shit!” exclaimed Mr Kingston, angrily.
    Latimer stared at the dancing negro. Of course, negroes did dance. They sang and they danced, and in the former times of Generals Sherman and