“He needs to learn something about the hotel business. You’re not supposed to have to lock up your customers to get ’em to stay,” Moss said. Nick Cantarella thought that was funny as hell. Moss would have, too, if he’d been on the other side of the barbed wire.

For quite a while after rejoining the Confederate Army, Brigadier General Clarence Potter had worked underground, in War Department offices that officially didn’t exist. Intelligence tended to get quartered in places like that. For one thing, it was supposed to be secret. For another, if you didn’t have to look at spies, you could use what they gave you and still pretend to yourself that your hands were clean.

When he got the wreath around his three stars that meant promotion to general’s rank, he also got his unfortunate predecessor’s upstairs office. Being able to look out at Richmond instead of just walls was very nice. That is, it had been very nice till U.S. bombers started coming over Richmond in large numbers.

These days, only the foolhardy and those who had no choice worked above ground in the heart of the city. A lot of War Department operations had moved to the suburbs. Those that couldn’t had gone underground. Potter’s new office was only a few doors down from the one he’d had as a colonel. Returning to the subbasement, he’d displaced a captain, not the colonel who had the old room. As long as the electricity kept working, he could get the job done.

He stared at the papers on his desk through the bottoms of his bifocals. He was an erect, soldierly-looking man, nearer sixty than fifty, with iron-gray hair, a stern expression, and the same style of steel-rimmed glasses he’d worn as a major in Intelligence in the Army of Northern Virginia during the Great War (they hadn’t been bifocals then). The spectacles softened what would otherwise have been some of the coldest gray eyes anyone ever owned.