That was really all the details there were about O'Hara's vanishing. Within a dozen words he was talking jestingly and then calling Tournant in sudden alarm. And changing course. And then those final words: "—but I'm not—getting away—"
On the tenth of March Colonel Tournant arrived unexpectedly in London and the Observer sent me to interview him. He'd had a splendid record with the Patrol and was considered the coming man in it, quite probably its next Vice Marshal. The Observer did not need to send me—nothing in London except the Bureau of Security itself could have kept me from seeing him. He received me in his rooms at Claridge's, and after we shook hands, he indicated a well-laden liquor cabinet.
"You should find something there you like," he said. "Let me help you. You—ah—you knew Captain O'Hara?"
"From childhood," I replied. "My best and perhaps my only friend."
Colonel Tournant smiled quickly. He was a small and dapper man—what I should have considered the raw material for a martinet—thickly mustached, brown-eyed, and with the dark tan of most men in the Patrol, a very nervous, brittle manner, a pacer. "Yes, you'd think that," he said. "O'Hara gave everyone that impression. I can tell from the way you speak, though—you're also an émigré, aren't you? Descended from O'Hara's Yanks? Some of the words you and he use, some of the inflections. He was my best friend, too, though not from childhood. How old do you suppose I am?"
The question startled me. There seemed to be no connection. "Forty-five," I guessed.
He flicked his fingers through his hair. "Gray enough for it," he said, his smile a little forced. "It happens that I'm thirty-two, six years older than O'Hara was. And here I am in London for my terminal—I'm utilized."
"You're utilized! But we supposed—"
"I know," he snapped. "You supposed that you were interviewing the next Vice Marshal of the Patrol. The truth is I'm finished. At thirty-two, I'm finished."
"That's news with an upper-case N," I pointed out. "Am I permitted to disclose it?"