The cold wind rustled what leaves were left on the enormous ancient maple trees. “Maggie, you’ve a brave, loyal, strong Briton, despite that accent of yours. What you’ve done—are incredible accomplishments. You should feel proud.”
“I got distracted,” Maggie said, admitting her secret guilt. “I didn’t like Louisa and I let that color my perception of her. You were right all along—she wasn’t an exemplary human being, but she never did anything wrong. And I was so convinced she had, that I let my feelings trump logic.” She gave a sharp laugh. “I did that with my father too. I was so mad at him for abandoning me, that I let it cloud my judgment—and lead me to suspect him of being a double agent.”
“The file was incriminating.”
“No,” Maggie snapped. “It was inconclusive. I let my emotions cloud my judgment.” Then, in gentler tones, “I miss maths—two plus two always equals four.” Maggie thought for a moment. “Although, as Kurt Gödel theorized, there’s a vast difference between the truth and the part of the truth that can be proved.”
“Er, what?”
“Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem tells us that it’s impossible to fulfill Hilbert’s wish to find a complete and consistent set of axioms for all of mathematics. In other words, we’ll never be able to prove everything. We might know something to be true, or we might want something to be true, need it to be true—but we may not ever be able to prove it.”
“Let’s take this back to the practical—you had theories and you followed them.”
“I wasted valuable time on Louisa, when I could have been looking for the real threats: Gregory and Audrey. And I missed the connection between Lily and Gregory. She called him Le Fantôme. Then she hid the decrypt in Le Fantôme de l’Opéra. It was plain as a nose on a face! How on earth did I miss that?”
“It’s easy to see these things after the fact.”
Maggie snorted.
“Personally, when I think of intelligence, I like to think of Sherlock Holmes. Not the hot-on-the-trail-of-the-killer Holmes, but the man sitting quietly at his desk, putting two and two together. It’s not glamorous in the least—it’s hard, boring, often exasperating work. You need to organize the facts, assess them, dismiss the irrelevant. Then, using induction and deduction, you come to a conclusion.”
“I know—”
“But you’ve got to do this without emotion, or prejudice or even hope clouding your judgment.”
“It was so much easier when it was just maths. You throw all these people into the mix—”
“It’s hard, yes. But now you know. You have experience. And I know you—you won’t make the same mistake again.”
“That’s for certain.” Maggie looked off across the lake. After a few moments of silence, “Thank you.”
“We’re partners, Maggie. And friends. And … more. I’d do anything to help you.”
“I know.”
Prime Minister Winston Churchill was in his large Victorian bathtub in the Annexe when his butler, Mr. Inces, showed in Peter Frain.
The P.M., plump, rosy, and naked as a cherub, was immersed in steaming water, smoking a cigar, glass tumbler of brandy and soda balanced on the edge of the tub.
“Prime Minister,” Frain said.
“Sit down,” Churchill growled. Then he shouted to Mrs. Tinsley, seated outside the bathroom door with her noiseless typewriter propped on her lap. “We’re done, Mrs. T.! Go away!”
“Yes, sir,” she said serenely, picking up the typewriter and her papers and making her way downstairs.
Frain sat down on the wooden chair placed in Churchill’s bathroom specifically for meetings. He tried not to stare at the large, pink form. “Sir.”
The P.M. splashed like a child, then a shadow passed over his face. “Inces!” he bellowed.
The beleaguered butler appeared in the doorway. “Sir?”
“I believe the temperature of my bath has dropped below one hundred and four degrees, Inces. Check. Now.”
The butler entered the bathroom and went to the tub. He knelt, rolled up one sleeve and reached into the water, pulling up a thermometer that was attached by a thin chain to the faucet.
“Well?” the P.M. demanded, chewing on the end of his cigar.
“Ninety-nine degrees, sir. Shall I add more hot water?”
“Damn it, yes! Do I need to tell you everything?”
“No, sir,” Inces said mildly as he turned on the hot water tap.
Frain permitted himself a small smile, thinking of the rest of Britons with their five-inch water mark and limited supplies of hot water. Rules just never seemed to apply to Winston Churchill.