The Diamond Conspiracy: A Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences Novel (26 page)

From underneath its bright sheen, lights faded in and out as the device reported,
“We have successfully secured forty-two percent of artefacts, prioritizing those identified as hazardous. Shelves between 1840 and 1862 are completed.”

“Very good. Make sure to store this by central command,” Sound ordered, passing the large suitcase over to the thing. Wellington found it quite unsettling as the doctor, on account of the automaton’s reflective surface, appeared to be addressing himself. “Then return to your duties with the Archives. We still have no inkling how much time we have remaining.”

“Yes, sir,”
it replied before quietly floating away with the item Sound had rescued from his office.

Wellington watched in fascination as the hovering device descended the stairs, suitcase clutched in one metallic claw-like hand. It then ducked under the low clearance of the open hatch and disappeared. Moments later, two others emerged from . . .

It was the Restricted Area. That’s where these things were coming from.

“Doctor Sound—” Wellington began, wishing his eyes could pierce the metal hatch to discern whatever was behind it.

“I’m over here, Books,” he replied drily.

Wellington started, and something about seeing Doctor Sound in front of him dissipated the wonder that had overcome him.

Yet it still made no sense. “Doctor Sound, what—” He stammered out again, “What—” And all he found himself capable of was motioning around him. “What—?!”

“This is the contingency I spoke of back in Whiterock. I can assure you, the Staff are handling the Archives with the utmost care.”

“I’m sure that’s part of Wellington’s concerns,” Eliza said gently as if she were translating from another language. “I, for one, would love to know what the hell these things are! The Mechamen Havelock had at his estate were amazing, but these are astounding!”

“Yes!” blurted Wellington. Leave it to Eliza to verbally slap him back to coherency. “What
are
these things?”

“I told you: the Staff,” Sound answered. Wellington went to demand more, but the director held his hand up. “Now is not the time. I need you to secure your work area . . .”

“So many secrets!” Wellington turned to see Eliza glaring at the director. He had seen his partner arguing with Sound before, but something about this whole scene in the Archives appeared to have shaken her. He’d been too busy with his own concerns to consider Eliza’s emotions. “When are you going to let us in on them?”

“I have no idea what you are talking about,” Sound said, blinking at Eliza as if she were some raging schoolchild.

“I am talking about what you said to Prince Edward,” Eliza continued, drawing herself up to her full height. “You told him you were going to tell his mother he was dead, and it’s obvious you didn’t do that.”

Wellington was surprised to see the usual kindly expression dissolve from the director’s face. His eyes became as still and dark as stones. “I sometimes have to tell people what they need to hear. Bertie wanted to be assured he was safe, and the Queen . . . Well, I needed her to be off balance.”

Wellington and Eliza stared at their director as if for the first time, but it was the New Zealander who recovered first. “You’re not the jovial fat man everyone thinks you are,” she said quietly.

Sound pressed his lips together for a moment before
answering. “You have no idea, Miss Braun, you have no idea.” Then, just like a switch had been turned, he smiled and clapped his hands together. “Now, if memory serves, there is a small incinerator attached to your analytical engine. I promise you, any remaining mysteries will be explained to you, but at a later date. Now, if you will excuse me . . .” and Sound gave a tip of his cap—which looked a little odd as it was still the tattered headwear of a fisherman—before heading for the Restricted Area.

Wellington felt paralysed from head to foot—even his vocal chords seemed to have been effected. His questions were answered, but only led to more questions. This was his domain. His Archives. What in God’s—

“You heard the director,” Eliza said with a sigh, seemingly resigned to the menial task ahead. “Despite it all, we have a job to do.” She paused, her jaw clenching for a moment. “We’ll have to trust that Sound has all this under control.”

The Restricted Area was even more tantalising, though. Wellington for the first time could simply walk to the end of his Archives and look to the other side of the hatch. Yet duty called.

Shooting one final, lingering glance in that direction, Wellington joined Eliza at their shared desk.

The logical part of his brain knew that the effrontery and violation of Sound’s odd technological wonders removing his work from their particular places was but a trifle compared to how many agents had been killed by the Department. However, the emotional part of him was screaming in horror. Wellington took his glasses out of his pocket, wiped them on his jacket’s sleeve, since it was all he currently had to hand, put them on his nose, and stared about one last time, taking it all in: the partners desk that he had been forced to share with Eliza only a year or so ago, the spot where the analytical engine he’d created had rested, the door from which he had first seen the mess that had been left by the last archivist, and the distant storage room where he’d led Eliza to an array of cold cases.

All these details suddenly held extra significance, and he found a strange little knot in the back of his throat. Clearing it, Wellington flipped a switch on the housing of the analytical engine, and the lid to the secondary heating element that doubled as an incinerator slid open. He and Eliza began going
through the desk drawers, unlocking them and sifting through any of the papers left behind.

Most of them immediately were fed to the flames. Significant amounts of what he found on his side had already been entered into the analytical engine, but he also found his very first report to the director about the Archives. It contained some rather jaded remarks he had written about his predecessor, Augustus Whitby—the bounder who had abandoned his post without any notice.

Considering the disarray of the Archives,
he had written,
Whitby must have been an utter prat.
He gave a tiny snort at that.
I should burn this,
he thought,
in case the Department releases these notes to the public and Whitby comes after me with a solicitor in tow.

He folded the copy of his report and stuffed it into his coat pocket. A little memento.

“Eight years,” he whispered to himself as he dropped the paper into the incinerator. “It was eight years ago, and this place changed me.”

“It changed us both,” Eliza said, looking up from her side of the desk. It almost sounded as if it were a reluctant admission. “Coming down those stairs, I thought this place would be the end of my career.”

“It wasn’t?”

“No,” she said with a warm smile. “It was the beginning of something better.” After keeping her gaze on him for a moment, she opened one of the last drawers and gasped. “There you are.” She lifted up a throwing knife that was, apparently, in her side of the desk. “Remember this?”

Honestly, all of Eliza’s sidearms, save for her pounamu pistols, were hardly distinguishable. That knife, however, Wellington recognised straightaway. “The knife that forever robbed us of the Lost City of El Dorado.”

“Perhaps some things are best left in mystery,” Eliza replied with a shrug and a smile.

“Perhaps . . .” Wellington said, his thoughts trailing off as he caught sight of the automatons Doctor Sound referred to as “the Staff” trundle off more crates into the Restricted Area. “What do you suppose is back there?” he asked Eliza, indicating with a slight jerk of his head in that direction.

Eliza shot him a sharp look. “Well, my, my, my . . . look who is all curious now? I thought that was my area of expertise?”

“Whatever do you mean, Miss Braun?” It was easy to fall back into old habits in the middle of the Archives.

She waggled her finger at him. “Think of all the times that I asked you about what could possibly be back there, and you told me in varying ways to mind my own beeswax.” He felt a blush steal over his face at that. She blew him a kiss. “I do wonder what you care about more, me or your beloved Archives.”

“It depends on the hour of the day or night,” he replied with a wink. Being around Eliza was quite beginning to lighten his mood, even in this dark time when everything seemed out of sorts.

She poked out her tongue at him, passing two handfuls of paper to him for the incinerator. “Well, I am sure I cannot guess what we might find there. I thought Blackwell and Axelrod were creating the most dangerous items back there.” She glanced at the Restricted Area. “I could have been wrong . . .”

Both of them were interrupted from their musings when Doctor Sound appeared out of the hatch, followed by an automaton and one of the spheres. Eliza shared a glance with Wellington, hastily checking the back of the final drawer of her side of the desk before observing their impending arrival.

Doctor Sound reached them just as Eliza was stretching her back. “So, how go my intrepid archivists?” he asked, patting the spot where his pocket watch rested.

Wellington felt himself straighten ever so slightly, as if Sound were one of his superior officers in the cavalry. “We are almost done here, Director. Most of this paperwork has been previously catalogued in the engine. Except for—” Wellington pulled out the desk’s small extension that had his list of codes for the analytical engine. He gave the extension a yank, and it snapped off in his hands. “This. I should have this on hand at Whiterock.”

“Well done.” Sound looked over to the accompanying automaton and motioned to the desk. “So, Miss Braun, I am in need of your talents.”

The automaton gently placed a strange silver box on the desk and pressed a solitary button that opened the crate with a hiss that resembled a steam release, but Wellington was convinced from its odour it was a different sort of gas. A platform
from the bottom of the case rose to the top, and Eliza’s eyes widened in delight.

Two blocks, similar to the size of bricks, only grey in colour, sat on the platform. Embedded in the blocks were small mechanical devices of a fashion. The third device was some sort of hub with a numeric display and a small numeric keypad.

It was the design that gobsmacked Wellington. He had never seen this sort of aesthetic before. It was so . . .
minimal
.

“Miss Braun, I need these incendiaries placed at crucial points of the Archives wall.”

Eliza looked back at the far wall, then went pale. “You’re going to submerge the Archives?”

“And, if I have calculated this properly, Miggins Antiquities as well.”

Wellington thought his heart was trying to leap into his throat. The Thames River was just on the other side of the brickwork, and powered the whole of the Ministry. Now he suspected it was not for that fact alone that this location had been chosen. The hard expression on the director’s face told Wellington this had always been part of the contingency.

The archivist wanted to protest, wanted to say that this place was as precious as the British Library, but he held silent. This was the price of belonging to a clandestine organisation.

Despite the presence of the director, Eliza moved to his side and took Wellington’s hand in hers. She said nothing, offered no comforting words, because there were none to give in this situation. He was about to become an archivist with no Archives. The thing that he had pinned his entire being on was being ripped away from him, and the sacred place he had built up from the ashes of incompetency destroyed.

“If this is what must be done,” Wellington said, gathering his resignation around him as best he could.

It was then the archivist noticed the strange new echo in the near-empty chamber.

The sound made Wellington deeply sad. He was the last in a line of archivists that had kept the history, the mystery, and the finds incredibly secret and safe. The last person who would have heard this echo was the first archivist of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences, Rowan Clayworth, as he was filling the
shelves. Wellington despised the thought that he was the omega to Clayworth’s alpha.

Eliza looked at him, her lips pressed together, undoubtedly fighting the urge to interrupt.

“This place has been the repository for all number of strange, arcane objects from everywhere on the globe,” Sound said, running his eyes over the vast and near-empty space. The melancholy tone in his voice said this was a hard moment for him as well. “Unlike Research and Design which, I have no doubt Blackwell and Axelrod saw to, could be sterilised, we cannot leave anything to chance with the Archives. The Staff has been thorough—”

“Fifty-four percent secured, Agent Books,”
the automaton offered.

“Thank you,” Sound said, his eyebrow crooking at the automaton. His expression softened on returning to Wellington and Eliza. “but any stray notes or wayward item could be catastrophic.”

“What do I need to do, sir?” Eliza asked.

“Find the two ideal points that would insure structural failure if explosives were applied.”

She looked at the odd explosives. “That entire wall? With only two bombs?”

“Trust me, my dear Eliza D. Braun,” he said, with a twinkle in his eyes that unsettled Wellington a bit. “Two will be all that you need. This,” he said, referring to the keypad, “is a timer tied to the detonators. Minutes and seconds. Enter your desired time here. Once you press the green key, the timer will begin.”

She picked up the hub to inspect it closer. The sphere hovering over them chirped as if an agitated robin trying to ward off Audubons from its nest. “Tamper proof?”

Sound nodded. “If the timer stops prematurely, the detonators trigger.”

“Impressive,” Eliza said with a nod and glanced at the wall. “I will probably have to pick two high points. Do we have a ladder?”

“Of a fashion,” Sound chuckled.

The automaton’s square-shaped base extended a small platform, and it offered her a hand. Eliza, giggling like a small
child watching an illusionist, stepped onto the platform. With barely a sound, the automaton began to float into the air.