Airship Hunters (9 page)

We may be able to walk in and walk out of this easily
, Valiantine mused to himself. He’d never visited Detroit previously, but so far as he’d seen, the city wasn’t going to top his personal list of favorites. The assignment’s culmination would help him place it.

They rounded a corner onto the street they sought. Across it and a hundred feet away stood a long wood-slat fence, some six feet high. Beyond it sat a two-story brick building with two large smokestacks standing like sentinels on either side of it. In the middle of the length of fence was a gate. It was closed and padlocked.

In front of the gate, and spilling out into the cobbled street, a throng of men in suits and hats milled about. In all, Valiantine counted at least twenty of them.

“Reporters,” he said grimly. “It had to be reporters.”

The duo stood where they’d stopped at the corner of a building across the street from the compound and assessed the small crowd in silence. Valiantine noticed the agitation that flitted about the group and wondered at it. Competition would cause that, of course, but there seemed to be an extra layer of unrest present. He turned to Cabot.

“Word’s gotten out, apparently. This will make things more difficult.”

“Carnavon doesn’t appear to have satisfied their curiosity,” Cabot remarked. “Can’t really blame him. Nasty creatures.”

He appraised Valiantine with a raised eyebrow. “Back entrance?”

“My thought exactly,” the lieutenant said.

They turned and walked back the way they came, making a circuit around the block and coming up on its far side. From their new vantage point they could see a small alleyway that bordered Carnavon’s place, down which the high wooden fence continued.

Crossing the street quickly yet still casually, they entered the mouth of the alley and made their way down it, looking for another way into the compound.

“I suppose the reporters have already tried this,” Valiantine grumbled. He hoped all their missions would not be like this. He could see what was coming: roadblocks and hurdles. The writing was on the wall.

“My guess is that they have,” Cabot said, “but perhaps they’ve been told they must wait outside the main gate.”

“There.” The lieutenant pointed up ahead of them to a break in the length of fence. Sure enough, when they approached it, they saw it led to a small door in the side of the building. The door was metal, with one window set into it at eye level and darkened with crepe paper.

Valiantine made a mock-graceful gesture at the portal. “After you,” he said to the Treasury man. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

Cabot strode up to the door and applied a confident knock to it. Behind him, the lieutenant brushed lint off his coat and trousers.

They waited a full minute before knocking again. Finally, the sound of someone approaching the door from inside came to them. A muffled voice called out.

“Front gate! Not going to tell you again!”

Cabot turned his head slightly to Valiantine and nodded, as if to say,
I told you so
.

“Federal agents with credentials,” the young agent called out in return. “Please open this door.”

After the sound of latches being thrown and a bolt pulled back, the door swung inward and a face materialized from the darkness beyond. It was a bespectacled man, his features sweaty and grimy. He blinked at the two agents, clearly confused.

Both Cabot and Valiantine held up their new badges. The man squinted at them, trying to read the words embossed upon them.

“Department A-13,” the Treasury man said soberly. “Aero-Marshals. We’d like to speak to Mr. Carnavon.”

“He’s not seeing anyone at the moment,” the man said with a shake of his head. “I’m sorry, but I have it directly from him.”

“And why would that be?” Cabot asked.

“Why,” the man said as he blinked convulsively, “he’s about to speak, of course!”

Back out on the street, they joined the crowd of reporters, feeling relatively certain they wouldn’t stand out much.

Chewing on his distaste for the press, Valiantine discovered one pleasant surprise in the throng: a woman.

Before he could study her comely features beyond a glance or two, a man came out from Carnavon’s building and, reaching between the gap between the gates, unlocked the padlock and removed the chains that held the gates in place.

The lieutenant received an even greater surprise when another man stepped away from the building, approached the crowd, and introduced himself as Andrew Carnavon.

“What the hell...” Valiantine hissed, and began to move forward, shouldering past a reporter in front of him.

Cabot’s hand shot out in the blink of an eye and caught his partner’s arm. His grip was tight, but only enough so to force the lieutenant to pause and think.

“Steady, old man,” Cabot said. “What’s it all about?”

Valiantine’s head shot around to glare at him. “I know him. I know the bastard!”

Andrew Carnavon was a dead ringer for Awanai, the Indiana bandit.

The Treasury man did not release his grip on his partner. “Wait a moment. Let him speak.”

Carnavon sauntered up to the open gates and stopped, holding up his hands in a gesture to ask for silence. He was dressed in a simple suit with a large, white coat over it. The coat was smudged with oil and grease and other substances.

“I thank you for your interest, gentlemen,” he said, raising his voice to be heard, “but I beg you to be patient with me. I regret that I am not yet prepared to make a full accounting of my discoveries.”

A collective moan arose from the reporters. They all looked at each other with various degrees of disappointment and disgust.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Carnavon said, frowning. “I... might have been a tad... premature in my initial release, but I never assumed that it would cause such a stir. Again, I appreciate that you all have a job to perform, but you must indulge me and wait a while longer, if you can.”

“What are you on about, Mr. Carnavon?” a voice called out from the throng. Others echoed it.

“Gentlemen, gentlemen,
please
...” the engineer pleaded, becoming visually flustered.

One rough-looking fellow stepped forward, brandishing a notepad and well-chewed pencil. “Are you behind the airships, sir?” he asked in a gruff, accusatory voice.

Valiantine and Cabot perked up. The question sizzled in the air around them.

Carnavon smiled. Crossing his arms in front of his chest, he rocked back and forth on his heels.

“I’m not that wealthy,” he said.

“What do you mean by that?” the reporter asked, screwing his mouth up in a grimace. “You’re smart enough, ain’t ya? Got the degrees for it, eh? What’s wealth got to do with it?”

The two agents glanced at one another, ensuring the other was listening closely.

Carnavon cleared his throat. “I thank you for the compliment, but please apply some rational thought to it. If these ‘airships’ are real, and I have my doubts, it would take a great deal of money to make one, let alone the veritable fleet that supposedly haunts the skies above us.”

Some of the reporters tittered at that.

“I do believe that the technologies needed for such a craft exist today,” the engineer continued, “but no one has yet to pull it all together and make it work... work efficiently, that is. So, it would be a combination of both an incredible leap in thinking and a tidy fortune to make it happen. That’s not me, gentlemen.”

“You say,” another pressman called out, “that it’s possible, sir. But these things are doing amazing, impossible things in the skies. Silent, deadly silent. And fast, with turns that would rip apart a balloon. Amazing things!”

“Only in that rag you write for, Jack!” one of the man’s fellows shouted. The crowd roared with laughter.

Inwardly, Valiantine agreed with the joke; however humorous its intent, it spoke to his growing suspicion that the newspapers were behind much of the airship flap.

“But it all began out west, in California,” Carnavon insisted, his face reddening slightly. “No, I assure you that my path is different! If you will just wait and hear what I have to say, when I’m ready, I—”

Overlapping shouted questions suddenly drowned him out. Valiantine bit his tongue so as not to shout them all down and demand the man be heard. To the lieutenant’s chagrin, Carnavon spat on the ground, turned on his heel, and marched quickly back to his building. Behind him, his man swung the gates shut again and secured them with the chains and padlock.

The reporters cried foul and surged toward the gates, jeering and mocking the engineer.

“The side door,” Cabot said, jerking a thumb toward the alley. Valiantine nodded once and together they flew down the street and into the alleyway.

“You say you know him.” The lieutenant noted Cabot had not phrased it as a question.

“Yes,” he said as they approached the side door. “You read the report of my last assignment? The trip to Indiana? This Carnavon resembles the man called Awanai, the bandit who has terrorized that state of late. I’d swear in a court of law that it’s the same man.”

Cabot took a step back. “Then perhaps you should do the talking this time.”

After rousing the bespectacled man once more, they waved their badges and demanded to see the engineer.

Within a minute, Carnavon appeared in the doorway.

“Can I help you, gentlemen? My assistant says you represent a federal agency?”

Valiantine made sure the light was good around him, good enough for the man to see him clearly. Up close, there was no doubt in his mind he faced the same bandit who he drank with in the woods, who most likely drugged him. He had the same average build, the sandy-colored hair and short beard, and the Oriental slant to his eyes. The only thing that seemed absent was the patchwork of scars across his forehead.

“You know me, sir?” the army man asked in steady voice.

The engineer leaned forward an inch or so, looking him over.

“No, I don’t believe I do. Should I?”

“Dammit—” Cabot caught his arm again and interrupted his partner.

“We have a few questions for you, Mr. Carnavon,” Cabot said. “About your discoveries.”

The man’s temper flared suddenly. “I don’t need to answer to you. I don’t need to answer to anyone. You’ll hear it when everyone else hears it. Good day to you!”

And the metal door slammed shut in their faces.

Taken aback, Valiantine swore under his breath. “Well, I cocked that one up, didn’t I?”

Cabot shook his head. “Never mind that. He’s definitely hiding something. He flew into a rage as swiftly as yourself... no slight intended, Valiantine.”

The lieutenant smiled grimly. “None taken. You were right to restrain me.
Both
times. It won’t happen a third.”

He began to walk back down the alley, talking.

“We need to expose him and whatever his game is, but we need more information. Here’s what we’ll do...”

Minutes later, the lieutenant stood at the edge of the crowd of reporters outside Carnavon’s compound, marveling at their stubbornness and gazing up at the clear blue sky. A breeze had whipped up, but overall it was a beautiful day.

“Are you armed?” he asked his partner, glancing at him. The weight of his own pistol in his pocket provided him with a sense of security.

Cabot patted a pocket on his own coat, his expression serious. “Yes, Mother.”

Valiantine resisted the urge to smile at the good-natured ribbing; back in Virginia Beach, Eileen had told him more than once that he tended to be a “mother hen.” Was Cabot’s barb a sign it was working out with the man? Were they meshing?
Too early to tell
, he thought, but trust itself would not come easy to the partnership. There were too many unanswered questions about it to suit him.

The Treasury man nodded once and slipped away from the crowd, surreptitiously heading back to the alleyway that ran along the side of the compound.

A subtle scent of perfume touched Valiantine’s nostrils, making him think once more of Eileen. He turned from watching Cabot’s departure to find himself under scrutiny by the woman he had spotted earlier among the reporters. She stood not three feet from him, the ghost of a grin dancing around her appealing cerise lips.

“Starla Ashton,” the woman said, extending one gloved hand to him. “You’re new.”

Valiantine hesitated, mildly surprised by her forwardness, but then grasped her hand briefly with his own.

He told the woman his name was Thomas Vines, a name he’d used on multiple previous occasions in the field. The lie came easily to his tongue; he hoped it meant his abilities had not deserted him, but lay there, just under the surface, waiting to be used.

She was almost as tall as he was, with dirty blonde hair done up in a bun and a small hat of modest design perched on her head. Her skirt and coat were also of unassuming quality, but clean and presentable. Her shoes, what Valiantine could see of them, were scuffed. He reasoned that she did a lot of walking.