Gossamer Wing 1

by Delphine Dryden

  “Are you after the documents?” It was the only thing Dexter could think of.

  “Do you have them?”

  “No.”

  The former spy shrugged. “I suppose it was worth asking.”

  Dexter looked at Coeur de Fer more closely, noting for the first time that he seemed not so much deranged as exhausted, like a man at the end of a badly frayed rope.

  “What did you want them for?” he asked, figuring that if he was to die, at least he might clear some things up first. “Were you already working for Dubois before the treaty?”

  Martin slumped back, letting the wall support his shoulders. “In all this time, Whitehall really never worked it out? Moncrieffe’s death was even more pointless than I supposed, if so. I wasn’t working for Dubois back then, monsieur, I was using the plans to pay him. For these.”

  He waved his mechanical hand, then used one artificial “finger” to tap the shiny device that replaced his ear. Dexter winced at the unnatural clinking sound.

  “Not for the post-royalists? Not . . . not for a return to the old French regime?”

  Coeur gave an odd, humorless chuckle. “No. I’m not especially political. If anything, I lean Égalité.”

  “But you’re working for Dubois now.”

  “No,” Coeur de Fer corrected him. “I have been working for myself for days now. Dubois went too far. I may be a monster, but I do have some limits. I put Dubois down like the dog he was. France is better for his absence. Perhaps I’m a patriot after all.”

  Dexter knew he was just forestalling the inevitable, but he didn’t want to ask Martin the reason for his abduction. Once he asked, it was just a short step from Martin realizing Dexter was no use to him. But the man seemed willing enough to converse, even if Dexter was having some trouble following Coeur de Fer’s train of thought. He wondered if Charlotte had noted his tardiness. Perhaps she would contact Murcheson if she grew concerned; then they would discover he was missing. If I can just keep him talking long enough . . .

  “How did Dubois go too far?” The second after he asked, Dexter thought perhaps he should have first said something more conciliatory, like taking issue with Martin’s description of himself as a monster. Fortunately, the monster in question seemed to take Dexter’s query in stride.

  “He was growing nearly as bad as he was during the war, killing indiscriminately to accomplish his goals. In war, this is one thing. In business, it is quite another. He was very put out that none of his attempts on Murcheson succeeded, you know. I thought it was . . . unseemly.”

  “The factory. And the steam car!” Dexter brightened. “It really was all targeted at Murcheson because of his business, then. Charlotte was right.”

  “You sound relieved.”

  “It wasn’t you, then?”

  “No,” Martin confirmed. “Those were both Dubois. I learned about them only after the fact. He would have been just as happy to rid himself of you, however, with the steam car. And I would have gladly killed Lady Hardison to get those plans. Don’t feel too relieved.”

  * * *

  CHARLOTTE HAD ENSURED the fuel was topped off, but she hadn’t asked whether the air supply was adequate. The oxygen meter read as near full, but Charlotte was convinced it must be broken because the air in the minuscule cabin was growing more stale and stifling by the minute.

  “Almost there,” she encouraged the little craft and herself, consciously loosening her death grip on the steering assembly.

  The red proximity light flashed, and Charlotte made out a great black mass looming close in the dark water. The breakwater. She slipped between the seawalls, breathing a shallow sigh of relief as the water calmed all around the Gilded Lily. A cargo ship was heading out of port, and she navigated downward to avoid it until her little craft was nearly skimming the sandy floor of the harbor. The ship passed over and out as she traveled under and in, toward the slip where a lone agent waited for backup while a killer threatened the love of her life.

  Charlotte stuffed that thought deep down into the recesses of her mind, focusing every scrap of her attention on slow, careful breathing and the navigation instruments before her.

  A few minutes later—though it felt like hours—Charlotte steered past a trio of docked freighters and around another breakwater into a smaller, less traveled channel. It was also shallower, and with her hands already shaking on the controls it was all she could do to keep the craft level and avoid any unexpected obstacles. Only the knowledge that she was almost at her destination kept her from breaching the surface and throwing the submersible’s hatch up to gasp for air.

  There it is. She double-checked all the instruments and her map against the coordinates and topographical sketches she’d jotted down during the briefing, while Murcheson’s attention was elsewhere. The decrepit freighter, destined for the slag heap soon, didn’t merit a slot at Dubois’s primary docks. It was moored by itself in this less convenient byway, and it made the perfect hideout for Coeur de Fer.

  As she neared the old ship, Charlotte considered what to do next. Slipping her craft beneath the freighter, she observed the layout of the dock before maneuvering to one end of it and coming closer to the surface. Despite the risk of being seen, she raised the periscope and surveyed the dock and the freight yard beyond, hoping for something to confirm she was in the right place.

  Right there. The periscope, more sensitive than the human eye, picked up the outline of a man crouching between two shipping containers. Charlotte fiddled with the focus and gave her eyes a moment to make sense of the dark scene; after a short time, she was able to make out more details. A pair of binoculars aimed at the ship, a portable radio communicator slung over the man’s shoulder on a broad strap.

  As she watched, he took a tiny spider-car from a pouch, then whipped a weighted cable around his head like bolas, finally letting it fly in an arc toward the ship. A moment later, he sent the car zipping up the line. Charlotte assumed it carried a beacon or transmitter of some kind.

  The memory of Dexter showing her the gadget’s prototype made her throat tighten, and Charlotte had to force her mind back to the dilemma at hand. Lowering the periscope, she spent a minute trying to visualize the interior plan of a cargo ship before tilting her sub down again and swinging underneath the massive hull.

  “All right, Jacques Martin. If I were an insane former spy bent on wrongdoing, where on this thing would I hide my prisoner?”

  After picking a possible location more or less at random, Charlotte set out to recall how to operate the sub’s listening system. The trick was to place the “ear” in such a way that it attached to the hull silently—a matter of the proper finesse with the controls for the automatonic arm on which the microphone was attached—and then used the hull itself as a sort of speaker, channeling sound from within the vessel.

  Charlotte had watched the technician demonstrate the controls for the listening device’s extension arm, but it was harder than it looked. At first she couldn’t get the arm moving at all, then she found herself confused about up and down, and ended up shooting the thing straight out and into the hull.

  She winced and waited, praying that the acoustic padding on the ear’s exterior kept it from clanging when it struck the ship.

  A minute went by, then two, and when nothing happened she gingerly took the controls and tried again.

  This time she managed to position the arm properly and bring the ear to lie flat against the hull as the technician had shown her, but the telephonic earpiece inside the ship remained silent but for a few creaking noises.

  Charlotte tried tweaking the volume and sensitivity controls, but all she accomplished was half-deafening herself with the same echoing creaks.

  Another spot, then. She retracted the arm and turned back to the sub’s instrument panel. Her hands trembled and she had to put her head down on the steering rig for a moment while a wave of dizzy fear swept over her. She was hyperventilating again, she realized, and forced herself to control her breat
hing until the tingling, numb lightheadedness passed and she could once again handle the controls.

  Time was passing, and Dexter was inside that ship somewhere with a madman, and so far she had been no help at all.

  * * *

  MARTIN HAD PLANNED to beat Hardison first, to assert his dominance and apply a healthy dose of pain and fear. It was a crude method of establishing control, and not his first choice, but he knew he was on a short timetable.

  When it came time, however, he was mortified to realize he was far too weak to do the thing at all, much less do it properly. And Hardison was a brute, a big village blacksmith of a man, not an effete aristocrat; he would take more than the standard beating, unless Martin missed his guess. A few taps wouldn’t affect him at all.

  The last of the tranquilizer was wearing off too, Martin could tell. Hardison’s questions were growing more pointed and he was alert, scanning his surroundings when he thought Martin wasn’t looking. He’d given up his earlier effort to force his way out of the knots, but from the slight movements of his arms Martin deduced he was still working at his bonds as he spoke.

  The knots would hold, Martin wasn’t concerned about that. But Hardison was dangerous, even lashed to a chair. Martin needed leverage, which he didn’t have.

  “What do you want with me?” the man finally asked.

  “Once we get to our destination,” Martin said, making a show of checking his watch, “I’ll be taking you to a medical facility where my men will supervise as you do some maintenance on my arm. We should arrive in a few hours.”

  I’ll use my last dose of tranquilizer on you, move you to the cargo bay where the operating theater is set up and hope Claude and Jean-Louis show up when they’re supposed to.

  “Maintenance?” Hardison sounded skeptical. “Implants are hardly my specialty. I’m not a surgeon-engineer.”

  “This will be simple,” Martin assured him. “Merely removing something that never should have been there in the first place. Nothing integral to the function of the arm.”

  Perhaps he really can do it. Take the poison vial out but leave the arm in place.

  “You’re ill,” said his prisoner bluntly. “Too ill to take anesthetic.”

  Martin clenched his teeth. The man was no doctor, how would he know? “It’s an infection. A reaction to the implants. Not uncommon.”

  “Your face, your hand . . . they’re bright pink, you know. The skin on your palm is peeling. You’re in a constant sweat, and you can barely stand. In the past few minutes you seem to have started struggling for air,” Hardison pointed out. “Your speech is beginning to slur. This is no infection, nor is it a reaction to the implants. I think we both know what this is, and that there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”

  The man seemed to realize only after the fact what a risk he’d taken, detailing the situation to Martin that way. His chin came up, belligerent, daring his captor to take issue with what he’d said.

  Martin looked down at his hand, turning it over and examining the palm where, just as Hardison said, skin was peeling off in flakes and translucent white curls. He was dying by inches, disintegrating one very thin layer at a time.

  “We both know what this is? Suppose you tell me, monsieur.”

  He knew what he would hear before the Makesmith Baron spoke.

  “Poison. Mercuric cyanide, if I had to guess. I saw a chemical metallurgist die of it once, although in his case it took months. All from a single accidental drop on his skin. The symptoms were the same, however, and they’re quite distinctive. I’m . . . I’m sorry for you.”

  He was sorry, Martin could tell. Naïve though the sentiment seemed, it made a difference. Martin hadn’t believed Dubois, hadn’t even quite believed himself. He believed Dexter Hardison, though, about both the poison and the sympathy.

  It really is over.

  “This was more than just a drop, I suspect,” he said softly, with a wry smile.

  * * *

  THE NEXT ATTEMPT to place the listening ear had gone more smoothly than the first, but Charlotte still heard nothing when she bent to the earpiece. It made the sound of the ocean, nothing more.

  “Damn it!”

  The craving to pilot the sub upward again, crack the surface and swing the hatch up, was almost too great to resist. The cabin seemed so small she could barely move inside it now. The atmosphere was thick and heavy with fear. Her fingertips tingled constantly, buzzing with tension from her taut shoulders and her ongoing struggle to keep from hyperventilating into unconsciousness. Her head was throbbing, stomach churning, and Charlotte thought if she ever escaped the submersible she would never, never allow herself to be put into such a tiny enclosure again. She would live on her front lawn, if need be, weather and elements be damned.

  Closing her eyes, she tried to imagine herself on the Gossamer Wing. Soaring through open air, the whole world below like a picture from a storybook, a chill but bracing breeze on her face.

  Soon, she promised herself. Dexter first.

  She would make one more attempt. One more try at finding them, getting a read on the situation, anything she could learn to tell the agents speeding to Dexter’s rescue, to make it safer for him when they went in.

  Really, she just wanted to reassure herself that he was alive.

  Charlotte piloted the craft down the length of the ship and stopped midway before turning and cranking the handle to maneuver the extendable arm out once more.

  Thinking about it less, and barely looking at the viewfinder, she had better luck. The ear pressed flat against the hull and sealed itself there on the first attempt, and a startled laugh bubbled up as Charlotte leaned down and twisted the earpiece toward her ear.

  “If I’d known it was that easy I would have just tried doing it blind from the start,” she muttered to herself. Then she stopped breathing as she heard a voice from the earpiece.

  “Even if I could remove it, there’s no antidote for . . .”

  Dexter!

  The connection was feeble, and Charlotte turned the volume higher once more, straining to catch as much as she could; she didn’t dare risk attempting another placement of the listening device.

  “Was in a vault in his office. He claimed to have destroyed it.”

  That was Coeur de Fer’s voice, she supposed. He spoke remarkably clear English.

  “He was lying,” Dexter replied. “There’s no known antidote for mercuric cyanide. It kills some fast, some more slowly, depending on the victim and the dosage. But either way it’s death, and not a very nice one. Taking the arm off now wouldn’t do a thing to help.”

  “I should have known. He never did have any honor.”

  “Look, I know this ship isn’t really moving, there’s no engine vibration. We could just go ashore right now. If you went to a hospital they might be able to make you more comfortable,” Dexter suggested.

  Coeur de Fer chuckled. “Good effort, my friend, but I think not. I do not care to spend my last few days—”

  “Hours,” corrected Dexter.

  “Or even my last few hours—in a jail cell as a murderer and a traitor.”

  “Understandable. Are you going to kill me?”

  Charlotte gasped to hear Dexter’s direct question. Don’t put ideas into his head, she thought.

  “Probably not,” the dying spy conceded. “I don’t think I have the strength. You can tell my story after I’m gone, I think.”

  “What version would you like me to tell?” Dexter inquired, his dry humor coming through even over the earpiece in the submersible. Charlotte smiled, touching a finger to the device. He wasn’t even attempting to trick his kidnapper, to plead or lie or wheedle his way out, she thought with a hint of pride. He was just . . . being Dexter.

  “One that finally gives Simone Vernier the recognition she deserves, and that casts Dubois as the fiend of the piece.”

  “From what I gather that wouldn’t be too difficult. I’d only have to tell the truth, then, wouldn’t I?”


  She was astonished. A joke. There he was, being held captive on a derelict freighter in a remote by-water by a rogue agent who very likely planned to murder him, and Dexter was making jokes with the man. Amazing.

  Martin didn’t seem to mind. “It was all just about money to him, you know? Dubois. He claimed to care about France, about pushing the British out. But that was never the true reason. He just wanted to make the war go on, so his contract would go on too and he would make more money. Always more. That’s why he wanted to kill Murcheson, to eliminate his competition for the steamrail project. He didn’t do it for any noble cause, not for France; he did it for himself. He made a traitor of me too, which saddens me. I would not have had my life end in this disloyalty.”

  After a pause, Dexter spoke again. “Perhaps it doesn’t have to. I think we might be able to reach an agreement.”

  Twenty-one

  LE HAVRE, FRANCE

  CHARLOTTE FINALLY LIFTED the hatch to the submersible to find a row of pistols pointed at her from the dock.

  “Lady Hardison?” one of the men asked, clearly in shock.

  The weapons wavered then lowered as she clambered from the sub to the dock with the help of the agent who had recognized her first.

  “You need to get back, ma’am. If you take cover behind one of the shipping crates, that should—”

  “Put your weapons away,” she demanded. “I don’t need to take cover. I think they’re about to come out.”

  “Lady Hardison,” another of the agents said, “our priority is to take down Jacques Martin. We need to take that ship. We’ll do everything we can to avoid collateral harm, but you really must—”

  “No, I mustn’t,” Charlotte insisted, alarmed. “I heard Dexter and Martin talking. Dexter is in no danger from him right now, but that could change if Coeur de Fer is threatened by a bunch of hotheaded idiots waving guns in his face.”