Ghost of a Chance

by Dan Willis

  Each elevator had a shining steel door with a simpler relief of the tower on them, power rays and all. His guide pushed the elevator’s call button and another hair-raising burst of magical energy washed over Alex. The simple amount of power used just to make sure the right person pushed an elevator button made Alex jealous. If he had that kind of magical power, he reasoned there wasn’t anything he couldn’t do.

  Before he had time to dwell on that, a chime sounded, and the doors slid open. The big man leaned in and pressed a button inside the car, then moved back so Alex could enter.

  “Someone will meet you up top,” he said.

  A long elevator ride later, Alex stepped out into an elegantly appointed waiting room. There were couches and tables laden with the latest fashion and engineering magazines scattered tastefully around. A bank of phones, in dark wood privacy booths, stood along one wall, and a bar of the same dark wood stood opposite. A dapper young man in a red-velvet waistcoat stood behind the bar, polishing a glass, while dozens of bottles of liqueur lined shelves behind him.

  Hallways exited the area to the right and left and Alex could hear the staccato rhythm of typewriter keys being struck emanating from the right side.

  At the far end of the waiting area was a single elevator door. Next to it was a wooden podium like a maître d’ might stand behind when greeting guests at a high end restaurant. A black telephone stood on the podium and a man in a black tuxedo stood behind it.

  “Bickman?” Alex said as he approached.

  Gary Bickman, formerly Ernest Atwood’s valet, stood with a wide smile on his face.

  “I really owe you one, Alex,” he said, shaking Alex’s hand. “I never would have thought you had such friends in high places. The Ice Queen...uh, that is, Ms. Kincaid knew Mr. Barton was looking for a new steward so she got me on here. I can’t thank you enough.”

  “That’s great,” Alex said.

  Bickman’s face went a little sour and he didn’t release Alex’s hand.

  “I, uh, I won’t get paid till the end of the week,” he said, his voice quiet. “Even then, the missus and I have got to get new lodgings, so it might be some time before I can pay you.”

  Alex hadn’t expected Bickman to get a job this fast in the first place, so he just smiled and patted Bickman on the shoulder.

  “I know you’re good for it,” he said.

  “I did recommend you to Mr. Barton, though” he said. “He needed a detective and I thought the job would get you through till I can pay up.”

  Alex had wondered why the Lightning Lord had wanted to see him. He’d seen the man once, or rather his image, when Sorsha warned him about the plot to kill four of the New York Six, but Barton hadn’t seen him. As far as Andrew Barton knew, Alex didn’t exist. He’d thought maybe the article in the Sun had something to do with it, but he seriously doubted a man like Barton read tabloids.

  “Thanks, Bickman,” Alex said with a genuine smile. “I appreciate that.”

  Gary smiled back at him and then straightened up, tugging his coat to make sure it was in place.

  “Right,” he said. “Mr. Barton said to bring you up as soon as you got here, so right this way.”

  He stepped to the elevator and pressed the call button. Once again a burst of magic radiated out and the doors slid open immediately.

  This time, Bickman rode the elevator with Alex, and a few moments later they emerged directly into a magnificent office. Towering glass windows filled the north wall, rising up over two stories and looking out over the city and the park. Bookshelves, cabinets, and cases lined the left wall with a massive mural of the history of the industrial revolution leading up to the modern age on the right.

  A desk that was longer than Alex’s office was wide stood beneath the massive windows and was covered in papers, rolled blueprints, mechanical models, and bits of equipment. Two long couches sat facing each other over a low table in the center of the room and a truly impressive rollaway bar stood beside them.

  Behind the desk, an older man with silver hair and a handlebar mustache paced back and forth with the receiver to a telephone pressed to his ear. He wore a gold-colored waistcoat over a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. In his free hand, he held a lit cigarette, waving it around as he punctuated his conversation.

  “I don’t care about other thefts,” he was saying. “Things get stolen all the time, but not from me.”

  He paused and kept pacing.

  “No,” he almost yelled. “You go down there personally and tell whatever desk jockey they put on this to get his ass out there and find my motor.”

  With that he slammed the receiver down into the phone’s cradle and took a long drag on his cigarette.

  “Idiots.” He said the word like a curse. “What do they think I pay taxes for?”

  Bickman cleared his throat forcefully and Barton looked up.

  “It’s about time,” the sorcerer said. “Where were, you? Brooklyn?”

  Alex wasn’t sure how to answer that, so he just put on his most genial smile and shrugged.

  “If you wanted to get hold of me, you should have just called my office.”

  Barton scowled, the ends of his mustache turning down.

  “I did,” he said. “Your secretary said you’d gone home.”

  He made a point of looking up at a massive clock hanging over the bookcases, it read four-forty-five.

  “Those are some banker’s hours you keep,” Barton went on. “Is that your idea of a work ethic?”

  Alex bristled at that. Most days he was on the job till late and some days he didn’t get any sleep at all. Still, it was never a good idea to bait a sorcerer, so he just froze his smile in place.

  “I had to pick up some things for a client,” he said, holding up the wooden crate of glassware as evidence. “I was on my way to deliver this when your men located me.”

  “Gary,” he said to Bickman. “Call a courier up here for Mr. Lockerby’s delivery.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Alex said, setting the crate down on the richly carpeted floor. “It’s something I need to handle myself. Now, what can I do for you, Mr. Barton?”

  The sorcerer cast a critical eye over Alex for a long moment. He lingered on Alex’s snowy white hair before moving on. Finally he nodded to himself, obviously making up his mind.

  “Gary here tells me you’re a damn good private eye,” he said, nodding at Bickman. “Seems to think you can help me.”

  “I guess that depends on your problem, Mr. Barton,” Alex replied.

  Barton laughed at that.

  “You aren’t willing to commit to anything until you know the score,” he said, nodding. “Smart. Irritating, but smart. I like that.”

  He picked up a silver cigarette case with a green, tortoise-shell inlay on it. He flipped it open with his finger and offered one to Alex.

  “I like a man who knows his business,” Barton said as Alex took a cigarette. He flipped the case closed and set it back on the desk as Alex reached into his pocket for his matchbook. Before he could complete the gesture, Barton pointed his index finger at Alex and a spark of blue energy snapped between the outstretched finger and the end of the cigarette.

  “My business is electricity, Mr. Lockerby,” he said, picking up one of the mechanical models from his desk. It was roughly rectangular and seemed to have a lot of delicate parts. “This is a scale model of my new Etherium Capacitor, the Mark V. When it’s built, it’ll be about the size of a delivery van.”

  Barton paused as if he were waiting for Alex to ask him a question, but Alex just nodded attentively. He’d learned a long time ago to keep his mouth shut when he had no idea where a conversation was going.

  “The Mark II generator is what powers Manhattan,” Barton went on. “It takes up five full floors of the tower, and there are twelve of them.”

  Alex whistled. He was starting to see why the newer, smaller capacitor was a big deal.

  Barton put the model back on his desk and turned to
look out the window at the city beyond.

  “This entire building is a prototype, Mr. Lockerby,” he said. “I plan to make cheap, radiant power available to the whole city in the next five years.”

  He turned back and picked up another model, this time of a crawler.

  “Right now, I’m working with Rockefeller to extend the crawler network all over the city.”

  “How?” Alex asked, forgetting to keep his mouth shut. Crawlers were faster than cars and rode better; their only problem was that they lost power if they left the radiant field of Empire Tower. As a result, they mostly served the Core and the Inner and Middle-Rings, leaving a huge chunk of the population outside their operating area.

  Barton smiled at Alex’s interest.

  “We thought about putting an electric rail along the ground, but it was too hard to shield it. Anyone could just walk up and electrocute themselves. So we’re going to raise the rail up above the street and add a second one. Rockefeller’s marketing a new crawler that will run along the rails, right over the top of the traffic. It’ll be even faster, and we’ll tie the rails directly to the tower here, so there won’t be any power problems.”

  As he spoke, Barton’s words got faster and faster, like a kid explaining his favorite show at the pictures.

  “Sounds great,” Alex said. “What’s the problem?”

  Barton’s exuberance faded and he sighed.

  “Nothing with that,” he said. “We’ll have the new line to Brooklyn running by New Years. My problem is that I’m dreaming much bigger than that, Mr. Lockerby. I’m not just going to send crawlers out into the city, I’m going to power it all. Everything.”

  He picked up the model of his Mark V generator.

  “These generators aren’t cheap to build,” he said. “This is my company, but I still have a board and investors to answer to. People who were with me in the beginning.”

  “And they don’t want you providing cheap power?” Alex asked.

  “It’s not that,” Barton said. “I can put sixty-four of these capacitors in the space of one Mark II. That means I can power the entire state, maybe multiple states, right from here.”

  He set the model back on his desk.

  “I just have to prove the Mark V works...and I have to have a factory that can build a lot of them.” He picked up a roundish model with gears visible through a cutout and tossed it to Alex. “For that to happen, I need someone else to order a whole bunch of my Mark V Etherium Capacitors.”

  “And that’s what this is for?” Alex asked.

  “That is a model of a traction motor,” Barton said. “It’s a special kind of electric motor that’s designed to pull trains.”

  Now that Alex knew what it was for, he still didn’t see how it could pull a train. It took enormous, coal burning boilers to build up enough steam pressure to move something so large and heavy.

  “The B&O railroad has been experimenting with these,” Barton explained. “They hook them up to enormous diesel engines. They generate the electricity needed to move the wheels. It’s powerful enough, but you still have to carry your fuel.”

  “And you want to put one of your new Etherium Capacitors on the train instead,” Alex said, figuring out where Barton was going.

  “Sorsha said you were smart,” Barton said. “There’s a contest next week down in Baltimore,” he went on. “A bunch of companies will be showing off their traction motors to the B&O and the winner gets a million-dollar prize.”

  “And you need the money to build your capacitor factory?”

  “I don’t give a fig about the money,” Barton said. “The winner will get to build the new diesel engines for the B&O railroad. It’s the contract I want. My Mark V capacitor isn’t ready yet, but in a year, it will be. If I’m the guy building the diesel locomotives, it will be easy to convince the railroads to convert to my new capacitor. If GE or some other company gets it, they aren’t going to cut me in and by then they’ll have already built hundreds of diesels.”

  He took the traction motor back from Alex and held it up.

  “This electric motor is twice as strong as anything my competitors can make, and it’s ready right now.”

  “But it was stolen,” Alex said, remembering Barton’s phone conversation.

  “Right off a truck at my factory,” Barton fumed. “I need you to find it, Mr. Lockerby. I need you to find it yesterday. All my plans for the future, cheap power for the state, everything, depends on me winning that contest and getting the contract with the railroad. If I get orders for the Mark V capacitor I can build Etherium towers all over the world. No one will be without electricity. No one will freeze to death in winter because they couldn’t afford coal to heat their houses. Think about it.”

  “So you’re just a misunderstood altruist?” Alex said, managing to keep the sarcasm out of his voice by sheer force of will.

  Barton actually laughed at that, a hearty, genuinely amused laugh.

  “Of course not,” he said. “I said cheap power, not free. Even at one or two percent profit, I’ll be richer than Solomon inside ten years. That’s business, kid. The world gets limitless electricity and I get rich.”

  “So why are you telling me all this?” Alex asked.

  Barton actually looked surprised at that.

  “Isn’t that how finding runes work?” he asked. “The more you know about the missing object and the people and causes it’s connected to, the better the rune works?”

  That was exactly how finding runes worked but Alex was surprised that Barton knew it. Most sorcerers dismissively referred to alchemists and runewrights as Lessers.

  “All right, Mr. Barton,” Alex said. “I’ll find your missing motor for you. I’ll need to get my kit.”

  “You don’t have your tools of the trade with you?” Barton asked with an admonishing tone.

  Alex pointed to the wooden crate of glassware still sitting on the carpet.

  “I was on a different case when your boys picked me up,” Alex said, pulling a piece of chalk out of his trouser pocket. “But don’t worry, this and a bare patch of wall are all the tools I need.”

  Barton perked up at that; apparently he knew about runewright vaults too. He showed Alex out into a hallway off the office where several secretaries were busily transcribing documents and filling out the mountain of paperwork that kept large businesses running. Alex saw Bickman’s wife, Marjorie, among them and he waved at her.

  When Alex opened his vault, Barton insisted on being shown around and spent ten minutes poking into all the shelves and cupboards, asking about the various tools, inks, powders, and oils used in the runewright trade.

  “Fascinating,” he said when Alex finally closed the steel door and it melted away, leaving only the wall and the chalk outline behind.

  With a grin, Barton reached into thin air and pulled a white cloth into his hand. He passed it to Gary Bickman and then repeated the move with a bottle of cleaning solution. Alex couldn’t help but be jealous. He’d first seen sorcerers do this when Sorsha had pulled a notebook from the empty air when she interviewed him about the Archimedean Monograph. She’d done it casually and without fanfare, yet it was more than Alex could do on his best day.

  “Showoff,” he said with a grin.

  “Make sure that chalk outline is completely gone, Gary,” Barton said, handing the cloth to Bickman. “I don’t think Mr. Lockerby could use it to gain entry to my office, but there’s no sense taking chances.”

  Despite the explanation, Alex knew full well that Barton had done it to emphasize the difference between their relative abilities. Still, Alex took some pleasure in the fact that Barton needed him and his finding rune to get his motor back.

  Iggy’s finding rune, he reminded himself.

  Back in Andrew Barton’s cavernous office, Alex cleared off a large space on the desk. A lot depended on this finding rune, so he took his time setting up. He took the green powder and the beeswax candles from his kit, pouring out a thin line of the po
wder in a hexagonal shape. He added a candle to each joint of the hexagon, then put a ceramic tile with another rune carved in it in the exact center.

  Pricking his finger, Alex added a drop of his own blood to the rune on the tile and he felt it activate.

  “What’s all that?” Barton asked.

  “Stabilizing rune,” Alex explained. “It helps the finding rune get a clear connection.”

  That done, Alex carefully laid out the map of New York City on top of the stabilizing rune, then put his battered compass in the center.

  “Is this model accurate?” he asked, picking up the little traction motor.

  “Exactly accurate,” Barton said.

  Alex took out one of Iggy’s finding runes from his jacket pocket and folded it up, then laid it on the compass with the model of the motor on top of it. He took a breath to focus his mind and then ran through everything Barton had explained about his plans and how they all rested on the missing traction motor. Flicking the ashes of his cigarette into an ashtray on the desk, Alex lit the flash paper.

  The rune exploded to life, flipping the little model off the compass. The orange rune hung in the air, spinning like Alex expected. Gradually it slowed, and the compass needle began turning, catching up to the rune and matching it. Alex waited, but the rune didn’t fade, it just hung there in the air with the compass needle spinning lazily in parity with it. There wasn’t a spinning ring orbiting the map this time, but that was the only difference.

  “What’s wrong?” Barton wondered, reading the look on Alex’s face.

  “It isn’t making a connection with the motor,” he said.

  “So it didn’t work?” Barton said, annoyance creeping into his voice.

  Alex shook his head.

  “No, it worked,” he said. “But something is preventing the rune from linking the compass to the motor.”

  “Preventing?” Barton said. “You mean like a shielding spell?”