by Anna Elliott
“One of the club members here was shot, just as we were coming out of the front entrance.” His eyes had a kind of dazed look. “I was standing just beside him when it happened. A shot from an unknown gunman across the street, we must assume, but … a few inches to the right, and I might have been the one …” His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “They’re just loading him into an ambulance and taking him away to hospital now.”
The sick feeling in Flynn’s stomach had grown a whole lot worse. “One of the club members? Do you know his name?”
The question seemed to bring the toff back to himself and make him remember who he was and the fact that he might pay Flynn a half shilling to polish his boots for him, but that was all.
He peered down at Flynn through his monocle. “Really, I fail to see how that can be any business of yours. Now be off with you!”
He made a shooing motion with one gloved hand, then turned away.
Flynn gritted his teeth. He would have picked the blighter’s pocket, but he was too busy trying to get a look through the crowd, to where he now could see an ambulance carriage drawn up at the foot of the wide granite front steps.
As Flynn kept pushing his way forwards, the people in front of him parted just enough that he got a better look at what was happening. A bulky, familiar form was being loaded onto a stretcher. Flynn got a look at the man’s face and pulled in his breath.
It was Mr. Mycroft. Not that he hadn’t been almost sure all along, but it was worse, somehow, seeing him with the shoulder of his coat all bloodied and his face looking pale as death.
Unless he really was dead?
Flynn’s heart started trying to pound out of his chest at that thought, and he started shoving through the crowd harder. He got some dirty looks, but he ignored them. Don’t be dead, please don’t be dead …
Just as the stretcher was being loaded into the back of the ambulance, Flynn saw Mr. Mycroft’s eyelids flutter a bit, and his hand move. Not much, but he was still alive.
Flynn’s breath went out in a rush. But then he saw something else, something that made him feel like he’d not only been kicked in the gut, but had a bucket full of ice water dumped down the back of his neck, too. The driver of the ambulance wagon was a big chap with broad shoulders, and the hands that held the horse’s reins were huge and strong-looking. He gave the reins a flick and the horses started to move, pulling the wagon away from the Club. The man looked back—and that was when Flynn’s heart stopped, because he’d seen the man before.
Tall and strong, with blond hair.
He hadn’t been able to give Mr. Holmes much of a description before, but now that he was seeing the man again, he was certain of it: the ambulance driver was the same man who’d met with Farooq at the place where the Sons of Ra had cached their weapons.
CHAPTER 21: WATSON
“You are witnessing the greatest construction enterprise ever undertaken by mankind,” said Lord Kitchener.
His voice rang with pride and even awe. Handsome-featured, with his dark hair parted at the centre, he wore a walrus moustache and maintained such a rigid posture that he put me in mind of a child’s carved wooden nutcracker soldier, though a far more serious and imposing one.
Lucy and I were standing with Kitchener on an observation platform above the waters of the mighty Nile River, looking towards its opposite bank, more than a mile away from us and too far for us to see.
“An enormous enterprise,” Lucy said.
“The work will take two or three more years,” Kitchener went on, with a trace of an Irish accent. “It will dwarf the pyramids, the great wall of China, and all the seven wonders of the world.”
In Cairo, before our departure, Holmes had directed us that upon our arrival at Aswan, we were to meet Kitchener at the site of the great dam that was being built here, but he had not told us why.
This morning we had obtained rooms at the Old Cataract, the newly opened hotel Thomas Cook had built atop a high granite cliff within a short walk of the city of Aswan. But inquiring at the desk had revealed no messages for either Lucy or me.
I could only assume, however, that Holmes thought the incomplete dam was a likely point of attack for Sonnebourne and the Kaiser’s forces. And what Kitchener was saying seemed to confirm this assumption.
At age 49, Kitchener had earned his baronial title by ruthlessly suppressing the Sudanese invasion in a conclusive victory barely one year ago. Now, as British military commander for all Egypt, he fairly brimmed over with suppressed energy as he continued, his head held high.
“Indeed, at least two million pounds and all Britain’s prestige are at risk here in this remote river valley. If we fail, Egypt will be lost, and with it the Suez Canal and England’s control of the entire Mediterranean.”
“Stunning to contemplate,” Lucy said.
She gestured downwards, towards the tumult of construction activity below. There, easily one hundred fifty feet below us, thousands of men and dozens of great machines were carving an enormously wide and open channel into the great riverbed.
The width of the channel itself was stunning enough, for it spread out before us for nearly two hundred feet. The yawning chasm was crisscrossed with wood-slatted footbridges, sloping downwards from the near edge and then upwards to the opposite edge, each footbridge supporting workmen in their travels down into the great pit beneath and back up again. But the depth of the great gorge was still more unsettling.
I made the mistake of looking down to the bottom, and felt a dizzying surge of vertigo. Lucy caught my arm.
“Steady on,” she said quietly, holding me upright.
My pride would not permit me to look away just then, but I was grateful for her support.
Below us, men appeared almost as small as insects as they swarmed over the dun-coloured surface of the exposed earth, raising clouds of dust. Each man was active, pounding or digging or cutting into the dirt and granite bed rock, or moving newly cut granite blocks, or shifting dirt and mud into baskets and wheel barrows.
White robes and white Egyptian caps predominated among the men, while here and there Europeans were visible in their white pith helmets and khaki attire. All were engaged in forcing a trench through the granite bed rock and building up a new wall within it.
Finally, I stepped back from the edge of the platform.
“Mind your footing, Dr. Watson,” Kitchener said. “You don’t want to be falling onto those fellows, and they don’t want you down there.”
I nodded, still trying to take in all the myriad of activity before me. It was difficult to believe what I was seeing with my own eyes.
On our left a great wall of timber rose up from a foundation of concrete, crushed stone, and gravel held together with Portland cement. At the base of the timber and concrete, granite blocks were being set into place by workmen with winches and tackle.
On our right was an even higher wall, with an enormous high platform built upon great tall timbers, like supporting columns inside of a high cathedral. Atop this platform, the towers of three gigantic lifting cranes hung over the great trench like a giant’s fishing-poles over a dry river. Between the platforms, and creating a nearly palpable din, were three steam shovels. Two were scraping and lifting the residue from the dry river bed. The third manoeuvred new loads of crushed rock newly deposited from the buckets of the lifting cranes. Billowing coal smoke rose from these huge mechanical beasts. Their loads, when dumped, added to the din with a booming crash, punctuated by cries and shouts from the men working along the floor and up and down the cliff-like reddish-pink granite rock.
Lucy’s gaze moved from top to bottom of the great crater. “Reminds me of a painting I once saw—an artist’s vision of Dante’s Inferno,” she said.
“Not for long,” said Kitchener. “In a month, what you see between the timbers will be a solid mass of concrete and granite, a wall one hundred fifty feet deep and one hundred fifty feet thick. At the base, of course. That base goes down fifty feet into the
granite bed rock. Three hundred Italian stone cutters do that work.”
“What happens after a month?” I asked.
“After the concrete has hardened and the sluice gates are functional, we move on. First, we extend the earthen protective barrier—that huge pile of dirt you can just see beyond that wall on your right. Without that protection, no further excavation is possible. But once that protection is in place, we can push forward. A hundred yards at a push, and so onward and onward. We will not stop until we have gone all the way to the eastern bank, which you can barely see, since it is more than a mile away.”
“Dizzying to contemplate,” said Lucy. Evidently, she was also having thoughts about an attack from Sonnebourne, for she asked, “Has there been any trouble with the Egyptian part of the work force? In Cairo, we heard some talk of rebellion.”
Kitchener raised one shoulder. “No more than is to be expected. Ten thousand men work here in this small space. Some are skilled, like the three hundred stonecutters, and relatively civilized and obedient. Most are not. There are fights, and there are always those troublemakers who instigate hatred for the British.” His lips quirked in a wry smile. “But so far their efforts have not been sufficient to overcome the desire to earn an honest wage.”
“And the soldiers under your command keep order?” Lucy asked.
“They do.”
“Could an enemy dynamite the earthen barrier?” Lucy asked.
Kitchener gave her a quizzical look. “I doubt very much that they would succeed in doing much damage. The natural tendency of the rift would be for gravity to heal it. The earth would simply cave in to plug the gap. I must ask whether you have any information that would suggest such a plan of attack?”
I was uncertain what reply Holmes would wish me to make to that question; he had not specified whether anyone—even a man so highly placed as Kitchener—ought to be taken into our confidence.
Remembering the carnage I had witnessed in Afghanistan, I asked, “What of a cannon of some sort? A howitzer? A machine gun?”
Kitchener gave me a look that was at once sympathetic and condescending. “You were at Maiwand, weren’t you?” he asked.
“I was.”
“I respect your service, Doctor. But I assure you that an artillery attack is precisely the offense that my men are trained to prevent. No weapon of that size could be smuggled into Egypt, in the first place, and there is no position here where it could be installed that is not under our constant scrutiny. You can rest easy on that point.”
“One other question,” Lucy said. “Have you had any difficulties with snakes? Do you have a need for antivenin?”
“Not much worry about snakes. The Egyptians are used to them and the others of us have boots. Actually, our chief difficulty here is with socks.”
Lucy’s brows edged upwards. “Socks?”
“They don’t wear well in this hot dusty climate. The men have trouble. You know Napoleon said an army travels on its stomach, but they all need to use their feet. And when the socks go bad, the feet follow. And so goes the man.”
“For want of a nail, the horse was lost, and so on,” said Lucy.
Kitchener seemed delighted with her observation. “Same principle exactly! Horses and men are similar.”
“Will the men work as usual Christmas Eve?” Lucy asked.
“Best to keep them busy.”
“So on the 24th all those men—”
“Will be down there, working. They are here to bring home their pay to their families.”
Lucy asked, “And will there be work performed on the Christmas holiday?”
“We shall observe the holiday on Christmas. We will have a celebration at the barracks. There’s a time for celebration, as the Good Book says. A time for every purpose under the heaven. You are most welcome to come.”
“If we have something to celebrate, we will,” I said. “Thank you for your time, Lord Kitchener.”
We turned away, making our way across the dusty path that would eventually lead us back to the point where we had tethered the hired donkeys who had carried us to the construction site.
“Well, that was informative,” Lucy said. Her cheeks were flushed with the heat, and she sounded more discouraged than I had yet heard her. “It’s unlikely that Sonnebourne could destroy the dam with a bomb or attack the workers with a direct show of force, and even snakes don’t seem to present much of a problem. Unless he plans to steal their supply of socks, I don’t see that we’re any further along in the investigation than before.”
I could not help but agree, but I said, attempting to speak cheeringly, “Let us return to the hotel. Perhaps Holmes will have sent a message by now.”
“We ought to have a look around the area, as well,” Lucy said. “According to what Dr. Olfrig told us, Lord Sonnebourne planned to journey to Aswan. But so far, we’ve seen no sign of him.”
Inquiries at the hotel and amongst the porters and souvenir-sellers who thronged the banks of the river had produced no reports of a man answering Sonnebourne’s description, or of a dahabeeyah that might have been hired by him.
We had heard nothing of Zoe, either. Lucy did not say as much, but I was certain the thought was in her mind.
“If he does intend mischief here, he would hardly sail boldly up to the city and book a room at a Thomas Cook hotel,” I said.
“No.” Lucy glanced back over her shoulder at the organised chaos of the construction site we had just left behind. “We have to find him. You heard what Kitchener said about the outcome if the project fails—England will lose access to the Suez Canal, and our position of strength in the whole Mediterranean will be demolished. Can you imagine anything that the Kaiser would like more?”
CHAPTER 22: FLYNN
Becky caught up to him before he’d gone more than a dozen yards.
“Why are we running after the ambulance?”
“The driver—saw him—met with Farooq.” Flynn hadn’t got the breath to say any more and still run fast enough to keep the ambulance in sight.
Becky’s eyes widened, and then she was pelting down the street in step with him.
Turn—turn again—luckily the streets were crowded with people doing last-minute Christmas shopping, and he and Becky could blend in with the crowds. They got a lot of dirty looks from people they accidentally bumped into, but Flynn didn’t think the blond-haired ambulance driver had noticed them.
Up ahead, the carriage turned again to drive through Mayfair.
“Where are they taking him?” Becky gasped.
Flynn shook his head. His lungs were on fire and his feet felt like they were going to fall off if he had to run another step. But then a block or so up ahead of them, the ambulance slowed down, turned, and drove through the tall, curly wrought-iron gates of a big brick place that stood on the corner of Hertford Street.
Flynn looked at Becky, questioning, and she nodded.
They walked towards the place, trying to look casual about it.
This area of London was even more posh than the Diogenes Club, filled with places that looked like palaces and were big enough to fit a hundred families inside and still have room to spare. There was a short drive up to the house, with trees on either side. The wrought-iron fence went all the way around the property, as far as Flynn could see.
“Sonnebourne has a nasty sense of humour, if he’s the one who organised this,” Becky said.
“How d’you mean?”
“He probably suspected Mr. Holmes staged that accident in Piccadilly—and now he’s just kidnapped Mr. Holmes’ brother with another fake ambulance. Like the one Mr. Holmes had Lucy and Dr. Watson drive to get him away.” Becky turned, looking up and down the street. “We need to find out exactly what this place is.”
It was starting to snow: big fat white flakes that landed on Flynn’s face, stuck in his eyelashes, and dripped cold down the back of his neck.
But there was a delivery boy a few doors down, carrying a heavy stack of parcels.
“Oi!” Flynn jogged over to him.
The other boy turned around, blinking through the dark and the snow.
“What’s that building there?” Flynn pointed at the big brick house behind the gates. “Do you know who owns it?”
The delivery boy shrugged. “Dunno who owns it, but it’s a place for folks as have gone batty.”
“Loonies, you mean?”
“That’s right. Only since they’re rich folks, they call ’em nerve patients,” the delivery boy said. He shifted his load of parcels awkwardly. “That all? ’Cause I’ve got to be getting along.”
“That’s all. And thank you,” Becky said.
“We need to go to Scotland Yard,” Flynn said, when the boy had gone off. “Tell your brother about this, or some other copper if he’s not there.”
Becky gave him a disbelieving look. Flynn wouldn’t have believed he’d actually be suggesting going to a police station, either, if he hadn’t heard the words just come out of his mouth. But he was scared. He didn’t often admit that, even to himself, but there was a cold, tight feeling in his chest, like a thread about to snap.
“You’re right,” Becky said. She looked scared, too. “But one of us should stay here. You know, just in case they move Mr. Mycroft somewhere else.”
“I’ll stay. They know you at Scotland Yard,” Flynn said. “They’re more likely to listen to you.”
“All right.” Becky looked up and down the street again, which was unhelpfully empty. Flynn would stick out here like a sore thumb. “Let’s go around the back. We’ll find a good spot for you to hide and then I’ll go.”
Flynn shoved his hands in his pockets and tried to look like he was just out for a morning stroll—which wasn’t easy when he was half frozen and the pavement was already half an inch deep in slush.
They walked around the corner. “Why do you think they’d bring Mr. Mycroft here?”
Becky blew on her hands. “I suppose it makes sense. They shot him before kidnapping him, so they’d need to take him someplace where they could make sure he got medical treatment. Because they didn’t want to kill him.”