The Game - Laurie R. King [72]
Suddenly, Nesbit caught himself, and his handsome face flushed. “Sorry, I’m not used to strong drink at these altitudes.”
“I do know what you mean about O’Hara,” Holmes reassured him. “Did you ever meet the old Pathan horse-dealer?”
“Mahbub Ali? Of course.”
“He told me that the boy was a steel whip, although he gave far too freely of the truth. He said the lad could bend and contort into all sorts of shapes, but he always returned to himself, and he would only be broken when forced to break his word. Mahbub intended that as a criticism, I believe.”
“No doubt. In any event, this map is the work of O’Hara’s hand, and accurate down to the last stream and serai. And if you study it for a bit, you will begin to see the strategic potential of the kingdom of Khanpur.”
I had been studying it, while the two men exchanged their eulogies of the lost Survey agent, and could well see what he meant. The state was a long, narrow strip, mountains in the north giving way to a broad central plateau, where the capital city straddled a river. Four or five miles north of the city was a dark square marked “The Forts”; far beyond it, at the state’s northern tip, a pair of reversed brackets marked a pass, beside which was written “9400 feet.” Khanpur city was perhaps sixty miles from its southern neighbour and the city of Hijarkot, where the railway ended, but a scant fifteen from the country’s eastern boundaries; the square marking The Forts was even nearer the border, perhaps six or eight miles. Beyond the country’s eastern boundaries an uneven square marked a British encampment, but my eyes strayed to the strategic, relatively low pass at the northern end. The brackets were less than two hundred miles from the southernmost point of the Russian railway system: by aeroplane, perhaps two or three hours.
As if he had seen the direction of my gaze, Nesbit said, “That pass was actually a fairly late discovery, not on the maps at all until the late eighties. There used to be a lake there, with sheer mountain sides, until the big Kashmir earthquake of 1875. It brought an enormous flood down the valley, hundreds killed, but it wasn’t until three years later that a Scottish botanist wandered up there looking for new flowers and before he knew it, found himself in Afghanistan.”
“And suddenly Khanpur is of strategic importance,” I remarked. “Captain Nesbit, it’s been a long day and Holmes and I have spent far too much time on the road already. Why are we here?”
“Um, yes,” he hesitated, and finally decided to meet bluntness with bluntness. “You came here to search for O’Hara, inadvertently bringing me this conundrum of the American Thomas Goodheart. I do not know if the two cases are at all related—as I told you in Delhi, it is more than likely that O’Hara is living in a hill village somewhere, growing rice and raising a family. But I do know that Khanpur and its maharaja have suddenly become an urgent concern. Let me ask you this: Do you believe that Goodheart’s costume on the boat, dressing as a stage Sherlock Holmes, was a coincidence, or a deliberate statement?”
The question was odd, but the intent was clear. Holmes answered him. “If you are asking, does Thomas Goodheart know who I am, I can only say that if he does, he’s a better actor than he is a political analyst. I am constitutionally opposed to the idea of coincidence, but I spent the better part of two weeks in his company, and he never let his mask slip.”
“So you would say that he does not regard you, or Miss Russell here, as the enemy?”
“Apart from our unwillingness to commit to the Socialist cause, no.”
“Very well. You two are in a unique position, one that would take a Survey agent months to duplicate. I realise that you have spent the last weeks in perfecting your travelling-magician disguise, but I would like to ask you to drop that disguise and take up your friendship with the Goodheart family.”
“No,” Holmes said flatly.
“What friendship?” I said simultaneously.
“Acquaintance,