The Baltic War(236)

"Ah." Langscarr's puzzled expression disappeared. Actually, he thought Sir Francis was being excessively harsh. Langscarr himself had found Lady Simpson quite pleasant to deal with, as a rule. Her behavior today had been untypical—not that he could blame her, given the circumstances.



More importantly, like many people who spent most of their time in the Tower, he'd come to respect the young American woman's medical knowledge. Even some of the mercenaries had started taking their injuries and ailments to her for healing. Whatever that mysterious bakeria was that her devices were monitoring, he was quite sure she knew what she was doing, even if she couldn't pronounce the Latin properly.



Or perhaps it was Greek. Hard to say. Her accent really was atrocious.





"You did good, hon," said her husband soothingly.



But he, too, held his hands up in that fending-off gesture. No loving embrace there, ha!



"I stink," Rita hissed at him.



"Well, yeah, you do," Tom allowed. "Reek to high heaven, in fact. But it's nothing a good long bath won't fix."



The dark expression on his wife's face didn't lighten a bit. "Yeah, right. A good long seventeenth-century plumbing so-called 'bath.' "



"Oh, come on, it isn't that bad."



She gave him a sweet-looking smile that would have looked appropriate on the face of a tarantula, if spiders could smile. "Really? In that case, I'm sure you won't mind scrubbing my back."



"Well . . ."





"She did it!" Harry exclaimed gleefully, slapping his hands together after he set the walkie-talkie down on the kitchen table. "I will be good goddamed."



"Probably," said Andrew Short. "Though not damned by the Almighty. But I'd recommend you keep your distance from Lady Simpson, once we're all piled into the boat. Or you'll likely find yourself swimming back to the Continent."



Harry grinned. "Yeah, I'll just bet she's spitting mad by now. But that's okay. Rita's like her brother Mike. They both got a temper—every Stearns I ever met does—but they don't actually hold grudges."



The two men who'd worked together to design and build the explosive devices Rita had placed under the White Tower's staircase were also smiling, in the way skilled craftsmen will when a difficult job is finished.



One skilled craftsman, rather—Gerd Fuhrmann, the wrecking crew's acknowledged demolitions expert. Jack Hayes, still only nineteen years old, had a natural aptitude for the work, not to mention an avid interest. But you couldn't really consider him more than a promising apprentice in the Art of Boom.



Despite his youth, he was the one member of the Hamilton-Short clan whom Gerd had deemed worth training. As tough as they undoubtedly were—the women, in their own way, as much as the men—the talents of the rest of the male members of the clan ran toward more personal forms of mayhem. You needed to have a finicky streak, working with explosives and incendiary materials. Jack was the only male member of the extended family who possessed that quality.



"That's it, then." Harry pulled out his chair and sat back down. "Two windfalls in a row, by damn. I didn't really think Gerd and Jack would be able to manage their job, either."



Fuhrmann shrugged. "You can thank Jack for that, really. The charges were straightforward enough, just like the ones that are sitting under the stairs of the White Tower. The real problem was the same. How do you plant the bloody things without being spotted?"



Gerd jabbed his thumb at the smallish young man sitting next to him, who was grinning with a combination of pride and embarrassment. "But he managed it, as neatly as you could ask for."



"It's because I look younger than my age," Hayes said modestly. "People don't think much of a youngster scampering where he shouldn't be."



Julie Mackay shook her head. "Naw, Jack, it's the freckles. I don't know what it is about freckles, but the minute people see 'em they figure the owner's an innocent fellow." She jabbed her own thumb at her husband, sitting next to her. "I can't tell you how many times I've seen that trick work for Alex. It's why I fell for him, prob'bly, until I learned what a devious mind lurked beneath. But by then, it was too late."



Alex Mackay arched his eyebrows but made no other comment. Not to Julie, at any rate. To Harry, he said, "Do keep in mind that if you set off those charges at the wrong time, a lot of innocent people are likely to be hurt. Killed, some of them. Deaths at the Tower, especially those of mercenary soldiers, won't matter. But killing a dozen civilians just going about their business is a different proposition altogether."