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these days, were bifocals. That had annoyed him when he first got them. By now, he was used to them and took them for granted.
    A telephone on his desk rang. “Potter speaking,” he said briskly. His accent was clipped and Yankeelike. He’d gone to college at Yale, and the way of speaking up there had stuck. That made some of his fellow Confederates look at him suspiciously. It also made him and those like him valuable in intelligence work. The CSA and USA spoke the same language, with minor differences in accent and vocabulary. A man from the Confederate States who could sound as if he came from the United States made a valuable spy.
    A man from the United States who could sound as if he came from the Confederate States . . . was somebody else’s worry to hunt down, though Potter had been the one who first realized such a man might pose problems.
    “Good morning, General. Saul Goldman,” said the voice on the other end of the line.
    Potter came alert at once. “What can I do for you, Mr. Goldman?” he asked. The little Jew held an innocuous-sounding title: Director of Communications. But he was a force to be reckoned with in the Featherston administration. He shaped the news that went out over the wireless, in newspapers, and in cinema newsreels. His wireless station here in Richmond had helped Jake Featherston rise, and Featherston, who never forgot an enemy, also never forgot a friend.
    The only problem being, he hasn’t got many friends. Considering what a charming fellow he is, it’s no surprise, either,
Potter thought. He didn’t count himself among that small group. Five years earlier, he’d come to Richmond with a pistol in his pocket, intending to rid the CSA of Jake Featherston once for all. Instead, he’d ended up shooting a black frankfurter seller who had the same idea but who sprayed bullets around so wildly, he endangered everybody near him—including Potter.
    Memory blew away like a dandelion puff on the breeze as Goldman answered, “I would like to know how I can give your outfit the attention it deserves. I want the people to understand we’re doing everything we can to find out what the Yankees are up to and to stop it.”
    “You want to give us the attention we deserve, eh?” Potter said. “Well, I can tell you how to do that in one word.”
    “Tell me, then, General,” Goldman said.
    “Don’t.”
    “But—” Saul Goldman wasn’t a man who usually spluttered, but he did now. “We need to show the people—”
    “Don’t,” Potter repeated, this time cutting him off. “D-O-N-apostrophe-T, don’t. Anything you tell us, you tell the damnyankees, too. Now you may want Joe Dogberry from Plains, Georgia, to be sure we’re a bunch of clever fellows. That’s fine, when it’s peacetime. When it’s war, though, I want the United States to be sure we’re a pack of goddamn idiots.”
    “This is not the proper attitude,” Goldman said stiffly.
    “Maybe not from the propaganda point of view. From the military point of view, it sure as hell is.” Potter didn’t like defying the director of communications. But, Intelligence to his bones, he liked the idea of giving away secrets even less.
    Unlike the swaggering braggarts who made up such a large part of the Freedom Party, Saul Goldman was always soft-spoken and courteous. When he said, “I guess I’ll have to take it up with the President, then,” a less alert man might not have recognized that as a threat.
    “You do what you think you have to do, Mr. Goldman,” Potter said. “If President Featherston gives me an order . . .” He decided not to say exactly what he’d do then. Better to keep his choices open.
    “You’ll hear from me—or from him. Good-bye.” Saul Goldman hung up.
    Potter went back to work. Since the war started, his biggest worry was how to hear from his agents in the United States. Postal service between the two countries had shut down. So had the telegraph lines.
Where there’s a will, there’s a