The Transatlantic Conspiracy

by G. D. Falksen

  “You’re mad!” she shouted. “Mad!”

  Charles grabbed her hands to stop her, as gently as he could.

  “I’m not mad,” he grunted as she squirmed. “It has to be done. And don’t you think that if Bauer was willing to murder Cecily, there’s a damn good reason for our wanting to do it?”

  Rosalind finally wrenched herself away and backed off. Her lungs were heaving. “Bauer?” she gasped. “He killed Cecily?”

  “Perhaps not himself, but he must have ordered it,” Charles said. “He’s an agent of the Prussian Secret Police. They sent him and his men to protect the tunnel from us. One of them recognized me in Hamburg before we boarded . . .”

  “The man with the mustache,” Rosalind whispered.

  He nodded. “That’s why I had to disappear. But I hadn’t realized they suspected Cecily as well. I’d never have allowed her to go if I’d known.”

  “You’ve got a right to feel guilty about that,” Rosalind said, still seething. “They may have killed her, but it’s your fault she’s dead. And why would you want to blow up my father’s tunnel?”

  Charles took a few steps toward her, limping slightly. He tried to touch her shoulder, but Rosalind jerked away. “It’s not about you or your family, Rose,” he said. “It’s about England and Germany. This tunnel . . . It’s not only for passengers. It’s meant to give Germany a lifeline to America in the event of a war with the British Empire.”

  He sat back on a crate and rested his hands on his knees. He winced again. She’d really hurt him.

  Well, good. He deserved it, Rosalind thought.

  “The facts speak for themselves,” Charles said. “The tunnel is meant to safeguard the German supply line in the event of war against a superior naval power,” Charles continued. “That means Britain. If war with Germany comes—and I’m certain it will—the Royal Navy will blockade them.

  “But with this tunnel, Germany has a solution. They can run trainloads of supplies and munitions back and forth, month after month. We won’t be able to stop them. Germany will be free to warmonger unchecked.”

  “My father would never agree to that,” Rosalind protested.

  Charles’s face darkened. “It was your father’s idea. How do you think he sold the Germans on the project?”

  Rosalind looked away and thought it over. Was that possible? Could her father be conspiring with Germany? Not out of political allegiance, of course, but for money? Did he see war coming as well and plan to make yet another fortune supplying it? Of all the terrible secrets she’d uncovered about people she thought she knew, this one, sadly, was the least surprising.

  Behind them, Rosalind heard the door to the carriage open. She and Charles both spun around. Charles drew a revolver from his pocket.

  Rosalind gasped.

  “Alix?”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Rosalind found it increasingly hard to breathe. Alix quietly entered the carriage and closed the door behind her. In one hand the girl held a revolver, similar to the one Charles carried—not that Rosalind was any expert on pistols. She’d rarely seen one until this very night.

  “Hello, Rosalind,” Alix said, her voice calm and even. “I thought I would find you here.” She smiled at Charles. “I overheard your friend here, ranting just now. You know, I find it a little tiring the way that the British go on and on about German empire building, as if we were the only people in Europe ever to have attempted such a thing. Your country controls a quarter of the globe and claims hundreds of millions of people as its subjects without asking their consent. Hypocritical, don’t you think?”

  Rosalind shook her head, suddenly very afraid. She couldn’t tear her eyes from Alix’s pistol. The girl was clearly at ease with it.

  “You’re mad,” she whispered. “You killed Erich.”

  “I did, yes,” Alix admitted. “But Rosalind, you must understand, it’s not what you think.”

  Charles turned to Rosalind. “Who is Erich?” he asked.

  “A gentleman we met on the train,” Rosalind said, her voice rising. “A very nice gentleman. And you murdered him. He was going to help me and you murdered him! With a hat pin—”

  “Erich was not a gentleman, Rosalind,” Alix said. “He was an enemy.”

  Charles narrowed his eyes at Alix. “Do I know you?”

  She turned to him. “You don’t recognize me? It has only been three years, Charles. I may have been just a slip of a girl at the time, but surely you recognize your sister’s old school friend.”

  His jaw dropped. “Alix von Hessen!”

  “As God made me.” She gave Charles a polite curtsey, though never once turning her pistol away from him.

  “You’re a . . . German spy?” Charles whispered.

  “I am not a German spy,” Alix barked. “That is to say, I am German and I am a spy, but I am not a spy for Germany. I have far more important things to do than serve one petty empire or another.”

  Charles shook his head. He took a step toward her. “Rosalind is right. You are mad. Now why don’t you put that gun down?”

  Rosalind swallowed, thinking of the eagles at the Brandenburg station, thinking of how she and Cecily had joked about German pride. Alix had been the only one not laughing. Yet she was laughing now.

  “Charles,” Alix said after a deep breath, “I need Rosalind’s father’s marvel of a train to keep running. When war comes—and it will come, within twenty years, I expect—the British cannot be allowed to starve their enemies into submission.”

  Charles sniffed. “What would a spoiled little schoolgirl know about the winds of war?”

  “I know many things,” Alix said. “For example, I know that there is another tunnel. Below this one.”

  Rosalind blinked at her. “Of course there isn’t . . .”

  “Why? ‘Of course there isn’t,’ because your father didn’t tell you?” Alix mocked.

  “I’ve seen all his plans and sketches. If there were a second tunnel—”

  “You’d be the last to know,” Alix finished. “You’re his daughter. I almost didn’t learn of it. But my sources are clearly better than yours, Englishman,” she added, addressing Charles. “So you see, there is no point in your intended sabotage. It will slow the shipments, but it will not stop them.”

  Charles kept smiling, but Rosalind saw his jaw twitch. “You’re bluffing.”

  Alix shrugged.

  “Tell me something,” he said. “Did you kill my sister? You did, didn’t you? Like a viper slithering through the flower beds—”

  “How very descriptive and also completely wrong,” Alix snapped. “I did not kill Cecily. I would never have killed Cecily. She was my dear friend.” She looked at Rosalind. “Erich killed her, so I killed him.”

  Rosalind’s insides turned to ice. Time seemed to freeze. Erich was Cecily’s murderer? It couldn’t be true. But if it was . . . She had trusted him, confided in him, told him of her suspicions, and all the while he had been the one?

  “Impossible,” Rosalind whispered.

  “Is it?” Alix countered. “You’re a bright girl, Rosalind. Think. He was an agent for Bauer. I suspect he either tried to interrogate her or was caught searching her compartment for information. In either case, he disposed of both Cecily and poor Doris. I am certain.”

  “You have proof?” Rosalind demanded.

  “Of a kind. He knew too much about the official story, but he insisted on gossiping with us about the matter. I think he was trying to trick us into revealing what we knew, or what we suspected. I spent a whole day prodding Jacob for information about his friend. According to him, nobody gossiped at breakfast about the crime, as Erich reported. Jacob is quite the gossip himself; he would have remembered it. And that was when I knew. Erich was going to go with you to meet Charles and then kill you both.” Alix smiled wickedly. “I warned him that
if he was ungentlemanly toward you, I would kill him with a hatpin. He thought I was joking. I was not.”

  And suddenly it made sense.

  “You were the one hiding in the bushes,” Rosalind said.

  Alix nodded.

  Rosalind looked at her with growing understanding—a mutual understanding, it seemed.

  “And who is Jacob?” Charles asked.

  “Don’t start being possessive of Rosalind, Charles,” Alix teased. “You can’t abandon a girl in a strange place and expect her to welcome you back with open arms.”

  Charles raised his revolver.

  Rosalind held out her hands. “Could we perhaps put the guns away?” she said, fighting to keep her voice even.

  “I will after she does,” Charles said.

  “And I will after he does,” Alix mimicked.

  Rosalind’s shoulders sagged. “So much for being reasonable . . .”

  “Being reasonable won’t protect the British Empire,” Charles declared, straightening.

  “I am surprised an Englishman even knows the meaning of the word,” Alix taunted. “Besides—”

  The train shuddered. Rosalind felt her footing slip for a moment. Alix fell back against the closed door.

  “Are we gaining speed?” Rosalind cried.

  “We bloody well are,” Charles confirmed.

  The speakers in the carriage crackled to life: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. Our most sincere apologies, but owing to some small problems of a purely technical nature, we will be accelerating to maximum speed and completing our journey well ahead of schedule. Unfortunately, this makes it impossible for us to stop at Columbia Station as planned. For your safety, please remain in your compartments. Remain seated whenever possible. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

  The train shook again.

  Charles limped wildly, nearly losing his balance. But at least he and Alix had shoved their guns in their belts, if only to remain standing. The sound of the locomotive and the clanking of the wheels grew louder. Rosalind half feared that they would derail.

  “That wasn’t part of the plan,” Charles said, bracing himself against one of the shelves.

  “What plan?” Alix asked. “To destroy the train?”

  “Only the tunnel,” Charles snapped. “Unlike you, I’m not a murderer.”

  “Quiet!” Rosalind shouted. “We have a problem. I think Bauer’s men found Erich’s body. That’s why we’re accelerating. They don’t want the killer to have a chance to escape at the station.”

  “Smart girl,” Alix said.

  “Dammit.” Charles limped over to a large leather case sitting alone on one of the bottom shelves at the back of the car.

  “That’s your bomb, isn’t it?” Rosalind asked.

  For a moment, Charles looked as if he might lie about it, but then he nodded. “Yes, it is, though it’s not really my bomb.”

  “King Edward’s bomb then, or Britannia’s bomb, whatever you care to call it.” Rosalind was in no mood to mince words.

  “No, I mean it’s Cecily’s bomb,” Charles explained. “Infiltration I can manage. Shooting I’m quite good at. Drugging a guard’s coffee, I’m your man . . . But with bombs, I just set the dials the way they tell me to.”

  Rosalind was almost tempted to laugh again. “You don’t really mean to say that Cecily built a bomb?”

  “Of course,” Charles said. “She’s dashed good at it . . . Was dashed good at it.” He scowled. “She built the thing.”

  “I do not believe it,” Alix agreed. “Cecily?”

  “You didn’t think she was really that foolish, did you?” Charles said. “I mean, she was my sister after all.”

  At the doorway, Alix glanced through the window and said, “Rosalind, you’re right. We do have a problem. Four armed men in the next carriage. And Bauer is one of them.”

  Rosalind rushed to the door and peered into the next car. She ducked away before Bauer was able to catch her terrified stare. She recognized the other three men, too: the man with the mustache, the sour man who’d posed as the librarian, and the waiter who’d served her breakfast. All armed.

  “That man with the mustache . . . Bauer told me that he was in custody for Cecily’s murder,” she hissed.

  “Of course he did, Rosalind,” Alix said calmly. “It was all a farce. They’re all on the same side. Bauer wanted to silence us, to hush the whole thing up. So he gave us a guilty party. I suspect the man was going to conveniently escape and go missing once we arrived in New York—that is, assuming they even carried the pretense that far.”

  Rosalind tried not to panic. She turned back to Charles.

  He was fiddling with the catches on the case. She rushed across the room and grabbed for him.

  “Don’t you dare!” she shouted. “Don’t you dare arm that thing . . .”

  Charles pulled away from her and snapped, “I’m not going to arm it. I’m going to disarm it! Remove the explosives! With how fast the train’s moving, I can’t trust when to release the baggage car. And I don’t want anyone getting hurt. That was never part of the plan.”

  The train shook again and teetered sideways as it started to go around a wide curve. At a normal pace, the movement wouldn’t have been noticeable, but at the train’s current speed it swept them up with its force. Rosalind fell into Charles, Charles tumbled into some crates—and the luggage shelf broke free from its supports, tipped over, and crashed to the floor in a heap of wood and metal and baggage.

  “Oh, bugger,” Charles grunted.

  He bounded to his feet, wincing in pain, but he hesitated long enough to help Rosalind stand. Alix struggled toward them. He tried in vain to reach the bomb, but it was buried at the very bottom of the pile. He strained and strained but he simply could not reach it. The train began to straighten and shimmy less. The car quieted.

  Rosalind froze. She caught the faint but unmistakable sound of . . .

  “Do you hear ticking?” she asked him.

  Charles’s face went white as a sheet. “Bugger, bugger, and bugger.”

  “It’s the bomb, isn’t it?” Rosalind asked, her throat dry, already knowing the answer. She began tugging at the pile harder than ever, though very little of it seemed to budge.

  “It’s been activated,” Charles said. His voice shook.

  Alix dashed back to the door. “You fool. Leave it to an Englishman to build a bomb he can’t control—”

  “Cecily built it,” he growled. “But it’s all clockwork.” He and Rosalind struggled in vain to dislodge the debris. “When it hit the floor, the catch must have released and started the timer.”

  Rosalind grabbed Charles by his collar. “How long is the timer set for?” she asked.

  “Thirty minutes . . .”

  Thirty minutes?

  Alix looked away from the window and called to them, “Bomb or no, I wager we have about another thirty seconds before Bauer and his men finish with their carriage and check this one.” She looked again and gritted her teeth. “Forget it. Time’s up. He’s spotted us.”

  Rosalind spun around. “Alix, do something!” she cried. “Charles, help me move this damn shelf.”

  In horror, Rosalind stared as Alix pulled the door open a crack and fired two shots toward Bauer and the other men.

  Rosalind had no idea if they hit their targets or not. Bauer started shouting in German, so she guessed not.

  Charles moaned, struggling against the shelf, and the crates that pinned the bomb in place. “It’s no use,” he said, gasping for breath. “I can’t move it. And if I can’t move it, it’s not moving until the bomb goes off.”

  “What are we going to do?” Alix called. “They ran for cover but I can’t hold them off forever.”

  Rosalind just had to think. There had to be a solution. Something.

>   The speakers crackled to life once more. When the captain spoke this time, his voice betrayed unease, if not outright fear. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain . . . We will shortly be passing through Columbia Station, though we will not be stopping. We encourage you to look out your windows and admire the view as it passes by. Again, we apologize for any inconvenience.”

  Rosalind narrowed her eyes. A germ of an idea began to form in her head. “New plan,” she announced. “We decouple the baggage car at Columbia Station, hit the manual break, and escape on a submersible. All in favor?”

  Charles blinked at her. He shot another glance at the bomb.

  “That’s . . . not half bad, as horrible ideas go—”

  “I like it,” Alix interrupted. She leaned against the door with her pistol raised, breathing heavily. “It is a good plan. In it, we do not die.”

  “I have always regarded that as one measure of a good plan, yes,” Rosalind muttered.

  “How do we do this?” Charles asked. “The cars are joined by the connecting passage. Someone will have to go out there, pull up the false floor, and unhitch the car.”

  “I think the choice is obvious,” Rosalind said.

  Charles nodded. He straightened his collar. With a shrug, he limped toward the door. “For King and Country,” he said. “If I fall—”

  “Not you!” Rosalind exclaimed, grabbing him by the jacket. “Me. I need you and Alix to shoot at them so they don’t kill me.”

  “Ah, of course.” Charles hesitated, but he did not argue. He smiled. “For the Stars and Stripes?”

  “For Women’s Suffrage,” she replied without thinking, unable to keep from smiling back. “But mostly for survival.”

  She pulled open the door and threw herself onto the floor of the passage. Gunfire erupted—loud and scattershot and terrifying, echoing with the cracks of impact on the walls and baggage. Amid the noise, she heard Alix call after her, “Rosalind! I am so very glad that we have become friends! Please do not die!”

  I hope I don’t.

  Rosalind’s heart pounded in her ears. Bullets whizzed back and forth over her head. Good thing she had paid some attention to her father’s sketches: she knew exactly where the heavy metal pin was located—the one she needed to remove. Keeping as low to the ground as she could manage, she pulled up the floor panel to reach the coupling that connected the two cars. Holding her breath, she reached down, wincing in anticipation at each bump and bounce of the train. Then, with as much desperation as courage, she yanked the metal cylinder free.