by David Luchuk
- Diane Larimer, Chief Archivist—United States Library of Congress
Copyright
Copyright © 2010 by David Luchuk. All rights reserved.
Published by Audio Joe Inc.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
FIRST DIGITAL EDITION
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication information is available upon request
ISBN 978-0-9867424-2-2
THE PINKERTON FILES, VOLUME 4:
The Sleepwalker and the Spy
David Luchuk
Repository Note:
For 50 years, the Library of Congress has tried to make sense of records buried in the archives of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. It’s been a chore. Since taking over, I’ve reminded my team many times that answers are hidden in the mess. We would be the ones to find them. Against the wishes of our own Justice Department, we’ve released thousands of documents to the public. There have been startling discoveries along the way:
Agency founder Allan Pinkerton claimed that, during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln refused to use steam weapons against Confederates. That would shock most Americans if it turned out to be true. Pinkerton took credit for saving Lincoln from an assassination attempt spearheaded by outlaw William Hunt. Accounts from the era cite New York Police Superintendent John Kennedy as hero of that affair. The rift between Pinkerton’s papers and the historic record goes deeper. He claimed that Major Robert Anderson was a break-away mutineer intent on using advanced Union munitions to destroy the Confederacy. Strangest of all, the Pinkerton files suggest that Timothy Webster, executed as a double agent at the end of the war, was in fact a detective who died before the fighting started. Either Allan Pinkerton was a liar, maybe a delusional old man, or the things we think we know about our country’s history are simply wrong.
I was sure this was just the beginning. I guessed that the old detective hid his notes more carefully after war erupted, after his son Robert and the disgraced Kate Warne intervened at Bull Run. Their bungling cost hundreds of lives and handed a crucial victory to southern rebels. Allan Pinkerton receded from public view after that event. His detectives became spies for President Lincoln. I expected to find more but the secret cache of case files never resurfaced. After so much hard work, we were getting nowhere.
That was when I received the invitation, practically on cue. It was more than a simple invitation, of course. A diplomatic travel visa was authorized. Security screens were pre-approved. My travel was even booked. There was no mystery as to who opened this door for me: surely the same man who spent a small fortune taking the Justice Department to court, blocking their attempt to shut down our Pinkerton project. Years later, just as we gave up looking for case files in the Pinkerton archive, he invited me to New Carthage.
The republic is a truly foreign place. I knew the same basics as everyone else. It is an artificial land mass, built on iron plates and foundations that reach down to the ocean floor. It extends almost 300 miles into the Atlantic and now runs the east coast of the United States, top to bottom. It was constructed as a temporary colony for the relocation of slaves after the Civil War. But it became a great deal more. The metal island, tiny and isolated in unfriendly open water, expanded to become a country unto itself.
Technologies that have been illegal for a century or more in America have flourished and evolved in New Carthage. Nowhere was this more striking to me than in the mechanized library where I met my host. Met is the wrong word. We never stood face to face. I only heard his voice, following me through the library, always quietly by my side, broadcast on a chain of speakers in the tables, the floors, the walls, the bookshelves. He was right next to me yet nowhere to be seen. Amid rotating stacks of books, folders, loose papers, drawings and artwork of all sorts, he guided me to sound recordings made by the Pinkertons. I was skeptical. After a short time, though, I recognized the agents. I knew them well enough. The audio was authentic. It picked up where our files ended.
Because I travelled on a diplomatic visa, on behalf of the government, I was required by law to include these items in our Pinkerton collection. I knew they would cause trouble once released. How could they not? The first entry is undated. I can’t say where it fits in the rest of the sequence. The others map onto a rough timeline that centers on Allan Pinkerton in New York during the great fire. What was he doing there?
An angry public debate is gathering force. No one wants to revisit that painful moment from our past. With every new release from the Pinkerton archive, the tone of this debate gets darker, more threatening. Maybe we aren’t ready to hear the things Allan Pinkerton has to tell us. Maybe this is what my host in New Carthage intended all along.
- Diane Larimer, Chief Archivist, United States Library of Congress
* * *
Corporal, we have reached the end. Bring the light forward. There is a hatch on this wall. It will take us to the lead transport. Bring the candle.
Corporal! You bloody stupid man. Is there not enough at stake? What good is a soldier if he can’t even be counted on to help break things?
There. I am through. It is even darker up here. Corporal, follow my voice. Are you still behind me?
Mercy, I hear them. They are coming.
I am installing the transmitter. There is so little time.
Can anyone hear me? This is Kate Warne. Acknowledge. I am transmitting from the Potomac canal. We are en route to Washington. You must destroy these vessels. Acknowledge, damn you!
I am Kate Warne. Whoever is listening: destroy these vessels!
* * *
Allan Pinkerton, Principal
December, 1861
New York City glows beneath me. I am standing in a weapons laboratory aboard the airship Protocol. From this vantage, I see currents of fire swallowing the streets. Rebels mounted turbine furnaces in matched pairs throughout the city to blast sheer walls of pressurized and oxygen-rich air into the Manhattan grid. The blaze is out of control.
We do not know where the turbines are located. Dr. Thaddeus Lowe is trying to deduce their positions. My son, Robert, is presumably trying to help. I hope he is not hindering Dr. Lowe’s progress.
Rebels ignited the turbines without warning. They gave civilians no chance to escape. Once the first spark was struck, fire swept into the streets. Temperatures are so extreme that buildings not only burn, they melt.
My view from the laboratory window is shifting now. Navigators are moving the Protocol further away. This heat is a danger to the airship, I imagine, even from a distant position over the river.
Dr. Lowe created the Protocol as a test facility, a proving ground for new innovations. When businesses in the Union north need a piece of equipment that cannot be purchased, or which does not exist, Dr. Lowe invents it for them on this vessel.
The main body of the Protocol is comprised of nine round modules. Each is a dirigible in itself, big enough to occupy an entire hangar. They are bound to each other in a web of cables as thick as sewer pipes. The modules hold together in flight by orbiting around one another in a shifting and counterbalancing array. Pulleys at the center of each module extend and contract the cables. Every module uses tension created by the others to sustain its own momentum.
Dr. Lowe devised the array and set it in motion not knowing whether it could sustain flight. Since he could not say whether it would fly, he never stopped to ask how it might land. At present, that remains an open question. Dr. Lowe has kept the Protocol afloat and lived on board ever since.
An exterior h
ousing was initially designed and mounted to protect the whirling modules. With no way of landing, however, Dr. Lowe has never been able to complete the installation. The result looks like fingers of a hand reaching out to grab, without quite capturing, nine massive modules from behind.
The Protocol is the only facility of its kind. Scientists and craftsmen live with their families on board. They peddle in radical ideas but, for all their creativity, neither Dr. Lowe nor anyone on his team can imagine a way to slow down the inferno below.
How did it come to this? Is it possible that my one act of betrayal, a single unremarkable lie, lead to the burning of New York City?
Confound it! The sound of my own voice in this contraption is ridiculous. What I would give to have my proper case files. I might make sense of these events. It is a curse to rely on Robert’s damned audio device.
We cannot trust machines. They never face consequences. A machine has a function. It may be reliable, or it may fail, but it cannot betray. That is what makes us human. We can breach a trust and we must face consequences. I fear Robert may never understand this, even if I swing by the neck for what I am about to do.
The message from Major Robert Anderson is in my hand. I will read it aloud by the light of New York on fire then I will destroy it. The note is unsigned. Its origins are impossible to verify. I could invent a hundred stories to explain how I came to possess it. I do not invent stories. That is not the legacy I will pass on to my sons. This is for them. If the worst comes to pass, let it be known that the note reads:
Warn Lincoln: it is a trap. Move the Army north. Commit every resource to New York.
The paper flares in a gas burner, turns to black ash and cools brittle in the air. I was a fool. I thought we were ready to be spies. We did not know the first thing.
Major Anderson knew what was coming. He arranged for that note to be placed in my hand, tasked me with helping the President prevent a catastrophe. Now the note is destroyed and the city of New York is ablaze.
Does that make me a traitor? It makes no difference.
Madness. I have lived to see a day when being a traitor or not is beside the point.
Only one month has passed since this all began, since I stupidly believed we were ready for the business of war. How can so much have happened in such a thin splinter of time? One month ago, I was standing in the White House, preparing to lie to the President during my first official function as a Union spy. Lincoln introduced me to a kind of inner circle; the sort of men who knew about cold brutality. Among that group was Lafayette Baker, Lincoln’s Chief of Domestic Security.
Baker is aboard the Protocol with me. As soon as we reached New York City, he seized Superintendent John Kennedy based on my account of his role in the Golden Circle case. Baker is holding him as a prisoner and a suspect in the outbreak of this fire.
Superintendent Kennedy is well known to me. He arrested my son and conspired with William Hunt to kill President Lincoln in order to bring down the government. It is a travesty that Kennedy remains a respected public figure. The policemen’s union and a legion of New York lawyers blocked every attempt to bring charges against him.
Lafayette Baker is not impressed by unions or lawyers. The rule of law is an annoyance to him. Prior to the war, Baker was an army truant officer. All he possessed was narrow mindedness. Never has a soldier, leaving his post to tend to a dying relative, received less pity. War has a way of making zealots seem like achievers. His lack of empathy made him an asset. The President handpicked him to spy on other northerners.
Despite his elevated station, Lafayette Baker still looks like a highwayman. He wears his rusty hair in a matted crop. Every strand is cut the same length, even on his beard. Baker has eyes like a blind man. They do not focus. He watches the world in peripheral vision. Behind that gaze, he seems utterly absent.
Finding John Kennedy was no great achievement. Where else would the Superintendent be in a time of crisis? He was at police headquarters. Still, Baker bounced on his heels when he brought Kennedy aboard the Protocol. You would have thought he unmasked the Count of Monte Cristo. His body jittered with excitement. His eyes registered no emotion.
Baker took the prisoner to a lecture hall. I watched with mounting alarm as he went about his work. Guards strapped Kennedy to a chair. At the far end of the hall, the carcass of a hog was propped in a matching seat.
Baker told me he tried variations of this technique with live hogs. He found that dead ones worked better. He believed the struggle of a living animal elicited more pity than fear. A carcass was more impactful. The hog’s snout was turned up, as though sniffing. Baker fed a hose into its windpipe. He strapped a leather mask over its mouth and nose. The airway was sealed.
We sat in silence. It was impossible to take our eyes off the hog.
Baker signalled to the operator of a steam chamber out of view. The hog jerked. Its little arms quivered. Its chest and belly filled with air. I thought the beast might float away. The hog shook so hard that the chair rattled then its carcass came to pieces with a dull pop. Slabs of bloodless meat thumped against the wall. Legs and haunches remained in the chair. The nub of its spine poked up.
John Kennedy understood the meaning behind this display. He could be tortured by degrees. It was a simple matter of adjusting pressure in the steam chamber. He could be made to suffer without pause.
Body parts were cleared away. Baker went so far as to bring the leather mask close enough that Kennedy felt air leaking from the hose. That was as hard as Baker needed to press. Kennedy’s resolve came apart like the quarters of that hog.
Baker asked where the turbines were located. Kennedy did not know. He knew part of the rebel plan but not the details. Rebels no longer trusted him. Witnessing his capitulation to Lafayette Baker, I understood why.
Kennedy wept. He did not realize they meant to burn the city. His wife lived in New York and was pregnant. They were to have a family at last. Her whereabouts were still unknown at the time of his capture. Kennedy told Baker as much as he knew. It amounted to this: rebels would not negotiate. They would not turn off the turbines. The city would be destroyed.
Baker got us no closer to stopping the fire. We knew that whoever started the blaze would not put it out. We might have guessed as much without exploding a pig.
Lafayette Baker is the sort of cretin that finds a perch in wartime. I ought to have seen right away that my operatives were not equipped to collide with men like that. Instead, I thought we could outwit them. I made so many wrong choices.
My first decision was the worst. I should never have sent Kate Warne into the Confederate south.
After she and Robert intervened at Bull Run, Kate Warne was accused of treason. This was an insane over-reach from military lawyers but the accusation stuck in Washington. The charges were a blessing in disguise. Or so I thought. They gave her a reason to flee to rebel territory, and gave me an excuse to send her.
Kate Warne was to be my informant. At the time, we had an open case in Wilmington, Carolina. The plan was simple. She was to pose as an exile fleeing from the Union government, which was true enough. She would contact our client and solve the murder of a man named George Gordon. With her credibility established, Kate would then begin providing me with information from the south.
I had misgivings about the case, of course. Our Agency was contacted about the murder while still dealing with William Hunt and the plot to bring down Lincoln. The timing seemed dubious. I told Kate to be on guard.
There was also a political angle. The murder victim, George Gordon, had campaigned against slavery. The case would surely be more than it appeared at first.
I
did not trouble her with stories about the oddball mysticism that remains so prominent among southerners. She did not need me to fill her head with such nonsense.
She left for Wilmington just as I prepared to meet with President Lincoln and his advisors. To no one’s surprise, the President asked me what I would do if Kate Warne were arrested and brought to court on the charge of treason. It was a test.
I lied and told the President that she would have to face justice like any other American. In truth, she was already on her way to Confederate territory.
I thought I had been so clever. Instead, I played straight into the hands of our enemies. I lied to the President and now New York City is burning to the ground. Those two facts are connected even if I cannot see how.
What in the world is happening?
Black smoke outside the laboratory window is swirling. A platform has taken shape, made entirely of steam, like a drawbridge reaching toward the city. An aircraft is emerging from the Protocol. It is flat and round. The hull appears to be made of woven steel. It spins on the platform as though someone threw a dinner plate at the fire.
Robert is inside that flyer. I am sure of it. Some part of me has come to expect this sort of thing from my son.
Dr. Lowe. I know you are listening to me. I am alone in this module but you are listening, aren’t you? Robert gave me this audio device. Surely you make use of similar contraptions throughout the Protocol. Tell me what I am seeing.
