The Forever Engine (16 page)

“A lot of nutcases think that.”

“Nut case?” she asked and then nodded. “Ah, you mean the crazy person. But is he crazy because he has the different ideas?”

“No, Gabi. He’s crazy because he sends clockwork mechanical spiders and assassins high on hashish to kill people who disagree with him. I’ve met him. Odd guy.”

“I have only seen photographs of him. Do you think he misses his sisters?”

I blinked at the conversational sharp right turn, but before I could answer there was a loud pounding on the door.

“Fargo, are you in there?” Gordon shouted from the corridor.

“There’s trouble,” I told Gabrielle and then raised my voice to answer him. “Yeah, I’m in here. Come on in.”

“Is
Mademoiselle
Courbiere with you?” he shouted.

“
Oui
, I am here,” she answered.

“May I come in?” he shouted.

I couldn’t help but smile. There he was, steaming mad out in the corridor, and still impeccably polite, asking permission from the lady to enter her quarters, and asking it at the top of his lungs.

“
Oui
, you may enter.”

“Are you decent?” he shouted.

My grin got bigger as Gabrielle frowned in confusion.

“I believe so, but sometimes I do not think everyone agrees,” she called back.

“He means are we dressed,” I explained.

“Ah! We have on the clothes,” she called out.

There was a moment of silence, and then Gordon opened the door and stepped in, red-faced with anger or embarrassment or both. He made a little bow to Gabrielle before turning on me.

“Thank you,
Mademoiselle
. You are most kind. Fargo, what the bloody hell were you thinking, insulting Harding like that on the bridge? Don’t you know we need his help to carry this off?”

“Relax, Gordon. Have a seat.”

“I will not relax, and I prefer to stand when dressing someone down.”

Gabrielle turned to me, confused again.

“This ‘dressing down,’ it has again to do with the decency? And why did you insult Captain Harding?”

“Yes, we’d both like to know that,” Gordon said.

“So sit down and I’ll tell you.”

He stood fuming for a few more seconds, but when I showed no sign of budging he looked around the tiny cabin, pulled the single straight-backed chair out from the writing desk, and sat facing us. I turned to Gabrielle first.

“Harding insulted you. I didn’t like it, but that’s not the reason I insulted him.”

I turned to Gordon.

“I insulted him because we need his support and cooperation, and we were not going to get it any other way.”

“Just how, in that twisted, convoluted brain of yours, did you imagine this would increase his chances of helping us?”

“He insulted me?” Gabrielle said, curious rather than angered. “What did he say?”

“He called you a trollop. You aren’t a trollop.”

“
Non
, certainly not. A trollop is a woman promiscuous, or who exchanges sexual favors for money, neither of which am I. You were right to disagree with him. And how did you insult him?”

I told her.

She started laughing, harder than I’d ever seen her laugh. She covered her mouth with her hands and leaned back against the wall behind the bunk, laughing so hard tears came to her eyes. Lightning flashed outside the cabin and thunder shook
Intrepid
, and for a moment she froze, eyes wider, and then she started laughing again, even harder than before, laughing at the lightning too, or her fear of it. I laughed as well, and after a moment Gordon’s anger melted away and he joined us.

“Oh God!” he said as our laughter began to subside. “
Rum, sodomy, and the lash?
I don’t believe I’ll ever forget that.”

“I can’t claim it. A young British Army officer, alive right now, so I won’t tell you his name, will go on to become First Lord of the Admiralty and eventually Prime Minister, at least in my world. He’ll say it. He had a way with words.”

“I dare say. But really, Fargo, what were you thinking?”

“Yes, Jack,” Gabrielle said. “Harding is not a very interesting man, but his good feelings are important to us,
oui
?”

“
Non, cheri.
His good feelings are meaningless. What is important is his cooperation. Gordon, I as much as threatened to kill him if I got back from this, and I did it in such a way that everyone on the ship is going to hear about it.”

“Precisely, old man. That’s rather the point.”

“Yeah. So what happens if we
don’t
come back? People will say Harding sabotaged the mission to keep me from making good on my threat. They will whisper that, whether it’s true or not, and Chillingham will hear the whispers. That’s what I meant when I asked him who he was more afraid of, me or Chillingham. Trust me, Harding’s not afraid of me.”

Gordon rubbed his chin and scowled.

“Still too damned much of a gamble. More flies with honey than vinegar, that sort of thing. You need to look before you leap, Fargo, or better yet leave all this sort of thing to me. You’re just the translator. It would be best if you remembered that.”

“This Lord Chillingham, he is a very bad man,” Gabrielle said, reasserting her right to change the subject.

“You’ve met him?” I asked.

“No, but Renfrew has told me enough.”

“Interesting,” I said. “So we’re all in agreement on that point, including the royal family.”

“Not so much the queen, from what I understand,” Gordon said. “Not that she likes him—too aristocratic for her tastes, I would imagine. But she’s not willing to move against him.”

“He’s too aristocratic for
my
tastes,” I said, “but a queen’s? That’s a little hard to get my head around.”

Gordon leaned forward, and for the first time I saw a hint of fire in him, other than just anger.

“You have to understand, Fargo, the old aristocracy, people like Chillingham who own probably four-fifths of the land in England, look down on the royal family. Really they do. They see them as a pack of
nouveaux-riches
German bog-runners, Johnny-come-latelys the lot of them. To Chillingham’s way of thinking, when his family won its coat of arms, the queen’s family was still cutting peat on Luneburg Heath, and they have no business telling
proper
Englishmen how to run their country. But for all that, the queen won’t stand up to him.”

“What can she do, anyway?” I asked.

“The one real power the monarchy retains: create lords. She could flood the House of Lords with her own people, but she won’t. God knows how the old aristocracy would react, and she’s not willing to chance it.”

“Her son will,” Gabrielle said.

Gordon nodded but seemed to grow angrier as he did so.

“Yes, the Prince of Wales will, once he’s king and assuming he lives that long. Fargo, he’s the one man in Europe with the guts and brains to stand up to Chillingham and perhaps come out on top,
and you’ve decided to roger his mistress!
What in God’s name were you thinking?”

“I am not Renfrew’s mistress!” Gabrielle exclaimed. “We are friends, sometimes we are allies, but not lovers. He is currently enamored of the Countess Warwick,
n’est pas
? And who is this
Roger
?”

Hearing those words from Gabrielle made me feel light in the chest, but that made no sense. Our relationship was based on mutual physical attraction without promise, or even prospect, of a deeper emotional commitment from either of us. Friends with benefits, we’d say in my time. Gabrielle couldn’t understand falling in love, let alone do it, and as for me, I didn’t want to even think about that, or where this entire quest was inevitably headed. So her words shouldn’t have mattered.

But they did.

When I told her people were strange, I meant it, present company included.

TWENTY-THREE

October 8/9, 1888,

Aboard Her Majesty’s Aerial Ship Intrepid,

Aloft over Turkish Bosnia

Harding might have been an asshole, but he was a righteous navigator. He dropped us right down through the storm into the valley of the Drina River. The river’s surface, visible in the glare of the bow searchlight, danced in angry whitecaps. Wind gusts made
Intrepid
shudder and sideslip, and sheets of rain slammed into the glass windows of the bridge.

As bad as it was down here, it was certainly worse aloft, which is why Harding brought
Intrepid
down as soon as he did. Another reason was the lightning, crackling and exploding all along the banks to either side, as ferocious a display as I’d ever seen in my life.
Intrepid
was struck three times, but as soon as Harding had seen the water, he had dropped the ship’s ground cable and raised its lightning masts. All three strikes had grounded into the river below us.

Gordon and I declared an uneasy truce and returned to the wheelhouse as we approached our landing area. It looked like hell out there.

“How are you going to return in all this?” Gordon asked. “You can’t go up into those thunderheads, surely.”

“We’ll follow the river back north,” Harding answered. “It flows into the Sava near the Austrian frontier. With luck we will have a break in the weather and can make the run to Ujvidék from there. It’s only fifty miles. If the weather doesn’t break, we’ll have to follow the Sava west to Zagreb.”

That would mean not being back at Ujvidék by morning, possibly alerting Tesla’s informants to the threat, but there was no point in belaboring the obvious.

“We’re going to have to change the plan anyway,” I said. “We were going to camp in a meadow down there while Gordon and I contact the Turks in Višegràd. That won’t work in this weather.”

“What’s wrong, Fargo. Don’t fancy getting your dainty feet wet?” Harding asked.

“The plan made sense because there are no villages down there in the meadows. They’re all up in the foothills, so not much chance of anyone stumbling across us at night.”

“And?” he demanded.

“And there’s a reason there are no villages on the meadows. It’s the same reason they call those meadows ‘flood plains.’ With this rain, by morning there’s going to be a couple feet of water over all that ground and anything not tied down is going to be twenty miles downriver. And no, I don’t fancy getting
that
wet.”

Harding scanned the riverbank for a while and scowled, trying to come up, I imagined, with a good reason not to agree with me. But facts were facts.

“Very well. If we are going to drop you closer, we may as well take you to the bloody city gates. Mr. Jenkins, take us down to wave-top level, if you please.”

“Wave-top level, aye, aye, sir.” Jenkins replied. “Trimsman, one per cent negative buoyancy.”

“In this weather any sensible person will be indoors, and the lunatics may think we’re a riverboat,” Harding added and glared at me, daring me to disagree. I returned his look until he turned away.

“Captain Gordon, I’ll let the others know about the change in plans,” I said.

“Very well. I will join you when we arrive.”

I left the bridge into the driving rain, slid down the ladder to the superstructure level and then down the adjoining ladder to the main deck. One of the naval ratings had shown me how, feet on the outside of the handrail using friction to slow me, and I was getting pretty good at it. I opened the hatch into the superstructure just abeam of the midship port gun mount and ducked out of the rain.

The group was assembled in the crew’s mess, with the tables pushed against the walls to make room. I looked them over and shook my head. They were probably all in civilian clothes, but nobody seemed to think about their overcoats. All twenty Bavarians wore identical field gray greatcoats while the twelve Marines wore identical blue-gray coats. Von Schtecker was chatting with Gabrielle, but he bowed to her and crossed the room to meet me.

“We are ready,” he announced. “We should be nearing the landing ground,
ja
?”

“Yeah. Slight change of plans:
Intrepid
is taking us right into Višegràd.”

“
Sehr gut.
Bad weather for marching, even though the men are well-equipped.”

“Yeah, pretty snappy greatcoats.”

“
Ja
. All insignia removed, as you said. You see?”

“That’ll fool everyone, no doubt.”

He looked at me and smiled condescendingly.

“I see,
Herr Professor.
You believe our party of thirty-four men, all of military age and bearing, who speak only English and German and who carry the latest military rifles, would fool everyone if only we had thought to wear different colored coats. I think not, and I must tell you, speaking as a
military
man, that there are advantages to the peasants knowing we are capable of taking care of ourselves. Bandits infest these hills, but they attack only the weak.”

He was right. The lack of insignia wasn’t so much intended to fool people as to give the two governments what in my time we called “plausible deniability.”

I left von Schtecker and joined Gabrielle. Her gear was again at her feet, but I took a closer look this time. A rucksack that looked about three-quarters full. A long blanket roll wrapped in a rubberized canvas ground cloth, with the two ends of the roll tied together. She’d wear that over one shoulder and across her body. She had a canvas haversack for over the other shoulder, a good-sized canteen also on a long shoulder strap, a brown leather gun case, and a leather bandolier with big, thick ammunition pouches on it. Her headgear was a grayish-white cloth-covered cork sun helmet, stained and worn. None of her gear looked new except for the leather gun case.

“You’ve done this before,” I said. “What are you packin’?”

“Many things. Spare stockings and underwear, one clean blouse, some concentrated—”

“No, I meant what’s in the gun case?”

“Ah. It is the shotgun. I find that more useful than the rifle in most cases. I used to carry the twenty-gauge with two barrels, but this is a new gun from your country, designed by
Monsieur
John Browning. Have you heard of him in your time?”

“Now and then. May I?”

She nodded, and I unzipped the case and carefully slipped the shotgun out.

“Oh, baby!”

She had a Winchester Model 1887 twelve-gauge lever action, and it was like new. What was I thinking? It
was
new. They’d only been making them for about a year.

“You like?” she asked.

“Shit, yeah. Only thing is, I’m beginning to feel undergunned with just a Webley. The magazine holds five and one in the action?”

“I do not carry it with a round in the chamber. I do not think that safe, but yes, five cartridges in the magazine. The twenty-gauge was adequate for most purposes, but ammunition was sometimes difficult to find. Also the number five buckshot is too light, I think, if the target is a man. The double-zero shot of the twelve gauge is better.”

That was certainly true, if a little cold-blooded. Hard to beat double-ought buck for taking down a person.

“You ever shoot a man?”

“
Non,
but nearly so. I have had to threaten to do this thing.”

“Think you could put the trigger if you had to?”

“
Oui,”
she answered simply, and I believed her.

“So what made you point a shotgun at someone?”

“Bandits threatened to steal the supplies of our expedition. There were eight of them,
très féroce.”

“Eight of them, and you with only two rounds. That why you decided to go with a lever action?”

“Perhaps, although against the bandits there were two of us, and Jeanne had both the revolver and carbine, so really we were quite adequately armed.”

“Your friend Jeanne sounds like . . .” I started but then I stopped, remembering a famous engraving of a woman with a revolver and carbine facing eight Persian bandits. A surge of excitement went through me.

“
I have fourteen balls at your disposal; go find six more friends,
” I said.

Gabrielle laughed and shook her head.

“Jeanne never said that, but they put it on the picture anyway. They did not put me in the picture, I suppose because I was simply a helpless woman.”

“But Jeanne Dieulafoy was—
is
a woman as well. My God, Gabi, you were on the Dieulafoy expedition to Susiana?”

I sat down on the chair next to her, partly because I felt a bit light-headed.

“Yes, it was my first real adventure. And yes, Jeanne is a woman, but no one would consider her helpless or defenseless. You have heard of the expedition?”

“
Heard
of it? I’m an ancient historian. My specialty, other than Roman coinage, is Achaemenid Persia. Jeanne Dieulafoy’s photographs of the inscriptions and architecture at Susa are still one of our key resources. Hell, half the books on the Persian Army have her photograph of the Frieze of the Immortals on the cover. Most of those buildings and artifacts were gone by my time, either destroyed or badly degraded by the elements, so all we have is her photographs. Anyone serious about Achaemenid Persia owns a portfolio of her work.”

“It would please her very much to hear that. You should meet her when . . .” She stopped, and the excitement left her face. “Oh, you cannot. After this, you will be gone.”

We unloaded at the waterfront in lashing rain and then trudged the two hundred yards through scattered warehouses and sheds to the city gates, which were closed and secured. It took another fifteen minutes of shouting and finally a couple shots from my Webley to rouse someone, then another ten minutes before they got someone who spoke Turkish. The garrison was nominally Turkish, but this was Bosnia. Bosnian, along with all the other Slavic languages, was not part of my repertoire.

We got an angry Turkish officer next, shouting at us through the postern window to go away and come back in the morning. It was well after midnight, and he’d probably been sound asleep.

“Tell this scoundrel to open the gate at once, unless he wants my fist in his nose,” Gordon ordered.

“Captain Gordon of the British Army sends his respects to the garrison commander,” I translated. “The commandant has been told of our coming and will be anxious to see us. We are on an important mission for the Sublime Porte.”

The Sublime Porte, the grand gate at Topkapi Palace in Istanbul where the sultan’s vizier traditionally greeted representatives of foreign governments, had come to mean the Turkish foreign ministry. The Turkish officer hesitated.

“Look for yourself,” I added. “Do we look like a band of wandering gypsies? These are soldiers on a secret mission. We are going to fight the Serbs, with Allah’s blessing and your commander’s help.”

I took a chance mentioning the Serbs, but it sealed the deal. The officer stuck his head out a bit and looked the company over, then nodded and withdrew. We heard a barked order and in a few seconds heard the heavy beam withdrawn from the gate. Then it opened onto a courtyard.

My first view of Višegràd was not very impressive, but it’s hard for any town to wow you in the middle of a thunderstorm. The courtyard was no more than thirty yards square, lined with a couple small one-story brick buildings. Lightning flashed, and I saw the suggestion of taller buildings beyond them.

“We need accommodations for our party for the night, somewhere out of the weather,” I told the officer.

“My commander will decide that.”

“What is your name,
Effendi
?” I asked.

“Lieutenant Kadir Malak.”

“Lieutenant Malak, I ask you to think for a moment. Your commandant is asleep. He will wish to rouse himself and prepare a reception for us, but will be embarrassed to make us wait while he does so. May I suggest you send a runner to him now, and that you see to our billeting, giving him time to prepare for us without embarrassment?”

Malak nodded thoughtfully, even as I was speaking, then sent one of the small group of soldiers milling around running into the heart of the town.

“I know of a stable near here where you may stay. You have silver to pay the proprietor?”

* * *

An hour later, Gordon and I entered the office of the commandant, a middle-aged officer, slender in the face and limbs but large in the belly. He rose and smiled in greeting as Lieutenant Malak escorted us in. I saw a clutter of telegrams on his desk and suspected he had been catching up on his orders as to how to handle us. There was also a pen and ink, writing paper, sealing wax, and two folded and sealed letters, the wax seals on them probably still warm.

“Gentlemen, peace be upon you,” he said in Turkish.

“And upon you,” I answered in Turkmen. “May I present Captain Gordon of Her Most Britannic Majesty’s Service.”

“Staff Major Cevik, at your disposal. Please be seated. I have ordered refreshments. Please.”

I translated the introduction, and we all sat in straight-backed chairs, Gordon and I in front of his desk, Malak against the wall.

“Forgive me,” I said, “if my Turkish is poor. I speak Turkmen.”

“Ah, yes, it sounded unusual. Your accent, it is up-country, we would say, but understandable.”

“Your rank—
Erkan-ı Harb Binbaşısı
—it caused me a moment’s pause. Do I address you as pasha or bey?”

A major was normally addressed as
Effendi
, the lowest of the three forms of respectful address, but I wasn’t sure for a “staff major.” Throwing in the possibility of
pasha
was pure flattery. I can kiss ass when the situation calls for it.

Cevik chuckled.

“Bey. Only very exalted men—generals and governors, are pashas.”

One servant brought in a silver ice bucket with a bottle of champagne and another brought a tray with three glasses. I had expected coffee, not alcohol. The servant popped the cork and began pouring. Cevik Bey must have seen my look and laughed again.

“You are surprised to see me serve champagne? I am a good Moslem, I assure you. I follow all the teachings of the prophet. But also I love champagne. So I thought long about it. I prayed for guidance, and this is the thought Allah sent to me: champagne did not exist in Mohammed’s time, so he cannot have said it was a sin to drink it. You agree?”