The Lincoln Conspiracy

by Timothy L. O'Brien

  “An entire army, the mightiest and deadliest ever assembled, marches through Washington in two days and then disappears forever into the citizenry,” Stanton said. “A million men of war turned into men of peace in only forty-eight hours.”

  “Four years and forty-eight hours,” Temple said. “With the Union preserved.”

  “The South is subdued, not conquered. There is still mighty work to be done to bring our Southern brethren into the fold, and it will be all the more daunting with President Lincoln away from us.”

  “Pardon my impatience, Mr. Secretary, but why have you kept me here for so prolonged a time? Isn’t our business straightforward?”

  “In good time, Mr. McFadden, all will become apparent. I want you to consider what stands between the end of this war and a reconstructed South of a fit with the nation that surrounds it. What stands in the way, sir?”

  “The Southerners themselves, I would imagine.”

  “To a point. They will stand in the way of the Negro and the rights of the freedmen. They will resist rule from the North. They are bitter and will be so well into the future. There is all of that. But there is also our new class of industrialists in the North made robust and wealthy by the engines of this war and the inventiveness of our citizenry. They have designs on the western territories, and they would be content to force our politicians to bargain for fewer concessions from a defeated South—if the Secesh are willing to cede the expansion of the West to the railroad interests, and to permit a new railroad to be built through the South and Texas.”

  “I am at a loss as to how this involves my letter to you,” Temple said. “I have abided this delay today in the hope that I would gain more than a tutorial.”

  Stanton shook his head. He was a man whom the war had made rough as bark and who had come to understand things he had never wanted to consider. He reached into the pocket on his vest, made tight by the pressure of his girth, and withdrew the note Temple had left for him at the Willard. He unfolded it, then waved away his bodyguards as he read from it in a whisper that only he and Temple could hear: “ ‘Dear Mars: The Booth diary speaks of you, in conjunction with Patriot, Avenger, Tyrant, Goliath, Wise Man, and Drinker. Mrs. Lincoln’s diary speaks of misery, of course, and of the railroads. I would like an interview with you. Please send your men to fetch me tomorrow morning in front of the Capitol building. I am identified by my cane, my wayward hobble, and my height. If your men do not arrive for me I will register you as uninterested and go on my way.’ ”

  Stanton folded the note again and slipped it back into his vest pocket.

  “You have a strong, confident script. It speaks well of you.”

  “Who are these people, Patriot and the rest?” Temple asked.

  “Mr. McFadden, I have chosen not to answer your questions today. My men here are going to take you into custody.”

  “I don’t have the diaries with me.”

  “I’ve kept you here these long hours today so you wouldn’t cause any interferences in Swampdoodle, which is where, I believe, the diaries are, yes? In safekeeping with Jack Flaherty—‘Nail’ to his friends and to you, but a boodler and a thug to the rest of us. You are a worthy man, but you’re interfering and in an arena beyond your scope and abilities.”

  “You’re wrong about the diaries.”

  “About one of them, you mean? Of course. Only one is in Swampdoodle. The other is with your wife and Mrs. Lincoln on her private rail cars to Chicago.”

  Temple stumbled back a step, dizzied, trying to calculate how long it would take him to get back to Swampdoodle. And where, between Chicago and here, Fiona might be. His breathing started to come in rushes and he tightened his grip on his cane, looking away from Stanton and trying to decide where on Pennsylvania Avenue he could secure a horse.

  “I can see your thoughts revolving, but there isn’t any time left for you on this. Robert Lincoln will intercept his mother’s diary, and no one is going to take the widow at her word about her scribblings in a journal. Everyone considers her quite mad. I imagine Robert will have to have his mother institutionalized on some coming date,” Stanton said, shaking his head. “And, as I’m also sure you know, Lafayette Baker has a long list of resentments and injuries cataloged against you and Mr. Flaherty, and he has shared them with me. You’ve seriously injured a number of his men and embarrassed him in the fields around Augustus Spriggs’s handsome new home, and Mr. Flaherty even shot one of Mr. Baker’s marksmen from the trees. These men were and are agents of our government, and you have intruded upon their work. Mr. Baker has ventured into Swampdoodle today and I am sure shots have been exchanged, but with all of the rifle fire accompanying our parade, I doubt anyone heard them. I am sorry this has taken such an ugly and unfortunate shape. I truly am.”

  Temple saw regret trace its way across Stanton’s face, but he had no time to consider the matter further. He pivoted on his cane, his mind spinning as he skittered down the aisle, away from Stanton. The war secretary nodded to his guards, who closed in on Temple from either side. Temple cracked his cane across the knees of the first soldier and then clubbed him in the jaw as he dropped. The soldier behind him had his bayonet drawn, but Stanton ordered him to take Temple alive; the soldier hesitated, and Temple turned on him and sliced his cane into the side of the man’s head and then butted him in the stomach with it as he collapsed. But Temple never saw the two guards vaulting over the bleachers toward him from several rows above, and when they reached him, one of them threw his arms around him in a bear hug. The other slammed his gun into Temple’s head, snapping his neck sideways and causing his vision to blur.

  Comrades mine, and I in the midst, and their memory

  ever I keep for the dead I loved so well;

  For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands …

  and this for his dear sake;

  Lilac and star and bird, twined with the chant of my soul,

  There in the fragrant pines, and the cedars dusk and dim.

  Temple slumped back unconscious, a fine tendril of blood spiraling down from his scalp.

  “Take him to the Old Capitol Prison,” Stanton said.

  A FEW HOURS earlier, Nail was napping in his warehouse, fresh ink stains on his hands and forearms and fresh sheets of cogniacs drying and gently flapping on the wall above him, when a series of rifle shots awoke him. It must be the Grand Review, he thought before rolling back on his side. But a scattered round of subsequent shots were not at all like the measured rounds of a military volley, which would have charged off in sequence: pause, fire, pause, fire. No, not like that at all. This was a gunfight. A battle.

  The noise he heard next was new and strange. It sounded like a series of metal hammers pounding away at a wall and creating little explosions each time they landed. He heard screams of the sort he had never heard in Swampdoodle before. He heard fear.

  Nail pulled one of his shotguns from beneath his cot and grabbed a pistol lying on a nearby table. They were both always loaded, but he checked again to make sure. Before he got to the front door of the warehouse, it was flung open in front of him. One of his men, bloodied across the front of his shirt, was staring at him wild-eyed. He was stuttering, unable to speak, and pointing with a forefinger back over his shoulder.

  “What is it?” Nail shouted.

  But the man couldn’t get a word out. Nail slapped him hard across the cheek, and the man corralled himself.

  “There’s a good one hundred of them, and they came right over the bridges with guns. They killed the women and the dogs at the entrance to Swampdoodle, and they rolled over any of the children who got in their way. And then they just mowed the men down, Nail, with a horrible thing. Three of them. Horrible and large.”

  “Three men?”

  “No, three guns. They spin and they spit bullets and they’re a terror.”

  By the time Nail emerged from the warehouse, a wide semicircle of his men, forty to fifty strong, had formed in front of the warehouse, armed with cl
ubs, guns, and knives. The noon sun was high over their heads when the first of the three wagons appeared—huge wooden arks, each pulled by two horses and arriving in single file. Drivers sat atop the wagons, and behind each of the drivers knelt three sharpshooters. They began picking off Nail’s men, one by one, to protect the drivers until all three wagons had passed across the rickety, splintered bridges and into the expanse before the warehouse.

  Behind the wagons marched five-score men, all wearing the long black frock coats common to Lafayette Baker’s men. As the group moved in, the drivers wheeled the wagons around so that their blank backsides faced the warehouse and the horses now faced Baker’s own men, an oddity that caused some of Nail’s people to look back at him, puzzled. He shrugged, unable to provide an answer.

  As the wagons settled, Baker shouted out to Nail from behind one of the wagons. “Give us what we came for and this needn’t be bloodier than it already has been.”

  “If it had been a rainy day, you never would have gotten those wagons across our swampland,” Nail shouted back from the steps of the warehouse.

  “It’s not a rainy day,” Baker replied.

  Nail lifted his pistol and shot one of the wagon drivers through the back of his head. Before he could lower his arm, a sniper’s bullet tore through his shoulder and his gun fell from his hand. The sniper took the reins of the wagon from the dead driver as Baker shouted out again.

  “Last chance, fingerlickers. Drop your arms and give us what we came for.”

  “Answer him, men!” Nail shouted.

  A round of fire erupted from the semicircle, and splinters of wood blasted from the sides of the wagons. Two of the marksmen fell from the wagons, and some of Baker’s men behind the wagons dropped. Nail’s men roared, raised their clubs, and began to charge across the thirty yards separating them from Baker’s private army.

  Tall, thick doors swung open on springs in the back of the wagons, and from each of them three long, chubby, gleaming steel guns emerged. Each bore six barrels that rotated around a central shaft, spun by a man turning a large wood and metal crank while another fed rounds into a hopper above the contraption. Each of the three guns began firing six hundred rounds a minute—sounding just like a series of metal hammers pounding explosively at a wall, Nail thought—and they shredded his men like paper dolls in front of his eyes. Bone fragments and chunks of flesh showered the field, shrouded in eruptions of blood and laces of red mist. Those who weren’t killed were left writhing and screaming on the ground, pieces of jaw and cheek missing, limbs chewed into strands, fist-sized crevices where eyes had been, parts of heads sheared off. When the guns stopped, Nail stood alone on the steps, everyone else around him dead.

  Baker stepped out between two of the wagons. The bandage covering the wrist that Temple had broken was as white as snow in the sunlight. In his good hand he was dragging two of Swampdoodle’s boys by the scruff of their necks.

  “My guns are a wonder, aren’t they?” he shouted to Nail. “Developed for our army by Richard Gatling and ready to go into service sometime next year. A killing machine, as you can see.”

  Nail hopped down the steps, choking back dust and bile, and raced toward the wagons, hoisting his shotgun with the only good arm he had left.

  “Take him down,” Baker commanded.

  Three shots rang out from the marksmen; one separated Nail’s left hand from his shotgun while the others spun into each of his legs and forced him to crumple. He flopped forward onto his chest and face.

  When Baker reached Nail, he kicked him in the side and rolled him over on his back, then turned Nail’s head toward him with his boot. Baker let go of both boys—neither was more than five years old—and the pair stood there shivering with fear. He pulled his LeMat from his belt and pounded the butt against the head of one of the boys, toppling the child across Nail’s torso.

  “I’ll kill both of these tots unless you tell me where the diary is.”

  Nail spat onto Baker’s boot, and Baker shot him through the shoulder.

  “Tell me. I have plenty of men here and they’ll search the place once you’re dead. Tell me.”

  Nail began laughing.

  “It wasn’t here more than a night, and we’ve moved it. You’ll never find it, and whatever you do to me won’t matter, you silly, buggering arsehole, because my friend Temple is smarter than all of you.”

  “Your friend Temple isn’t likely to last the day, either.”

  Nail spat at him again. Baker put his Colt to Nail’s head and blew his brains out the back of his skull in a moist pile of bone splinters and flesh that turned the ground crimson.

  Baker brushed droplets of blood off the front of his coat and stuffed the LeMat back into his belt. He dragged the first boy off Nail’s body and stood him next to the other; the pair looked away from him, quivering.

  Baker reached down and patted one of them on the cheek.

  “I’m not the kind who would kill either of you boys. You’re both going to grow up in a country that has a little more order to it. Run along.”

  He watched the pair stumble away from Nail’s body and then break into a slow, winding trot as they headed back into the shacks of Swampdoodle.

  “Move out across this shithole now,” he shouted to his men.

  “We’re hunting for a diary.”

  PART THREE

  MAESTRO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  THE HANDOFF

  Swinging her arms until they felt like they would loop back upon themselves, Fiona tossed the only piece of leather luggage she had ever owned from the back of Mrs. Lincoln’s train shortly before the locomotive rumbled into Defiance, Ohio.

  Buckles on the bag’s sides flickered in the sunlight as it tumbled end over end into a mound of grass alongside the tracks, ten feet away from Fiona, then twenty, then thirty, as the train, exhaling clouds of steam from its underbelly and barking three shrill blasts from its stack, slowed to a stop. Fiona made a short leap from the last step on the back of the train, clutching her medical bag under her right arm and extending her left to catch her balance as she landed.

  Her luggage—scuffed and shrouded in gravel powder—rested reliably, indeed loyally, she thought, beside a blackened steel rail. The train had made the same brief, odd pause in Defiance as it had in every other station along its route so far. It took on no passengers and had no need to stop anywhere at all given the unusual and celebrated trio still riding inside it, yet at each station its engineer paused only long enough, it seemed, for local onlookers to marvel at industrial progress paying a noisy and unexpected visit.

  Mrs. Lincoln’s train departed Defiance within minutes. As Fiona bent down to retrieve her luggage, she cocked her head sideways to contemplate the train’s caboose growing ever smaller in the distance. She was certain Robert Lincoln would be the first to notice that she was missing from the train. He would notice long before Mrs. Lincoln, who had barely emerged from the delirium she had so unfortunately entered after pitching her diary at her son. And she believed that Robert Lincoln would notice her absence even before Lizzy Keckly, who had been monitoring Mrs. Lincoln by her bedside with unwavering and steadfast attention.

  Fiona had wanted to give Lizzy a proper and grateful farewell, but Temple had told her not to pass beyond Defiance and by no means to continue on to Chicago because, sure as the day was long, there would be men waiting for her there. They would be men, Temple surmised, in league with Robert Lincoln and without sympathy for his mother. They would want the diary and they would want Fiona, and they would do whatever was necessary to extract any information they needed from her.

  He had made it clear: leave the train in Defiance.

  Fiona knew a train would be bound east from Defiance only thirty minutes to an hour after the Lincoln cars pushed through, and so she would be on her way back to Washington before Robert was any the wiser. Should he want to raise an alarm, his best bet would be to get off at the next station, Auburn Junction, to telegraph his handle
rs in Chicago and Washington—if in fact there was a telegraph in Auburn Junction. If he managed to do that, then all would still be well, because Fiona would be changing trains one more time on her return to the District, in Wheeling, from which she could then travel to Cumberland. In Cumberland, Alexander would meet her with horses and they would eventually slip back into the District at night. Temple had mapped all of this out with her before they ever went to the B&O to board Mrs. Lincoln’s train, and now, standing with her luggage in her hand, her medical bag under her arm, and a light veil of perspiration on her forehead, Fiona was ready to turn back toward home.

  The station was a humble and empty clapboard assemblage, nearly as passive and commodious as a warehouse. Only two people were in sight, and neither of them paid mind to Fiona, just as they had not even furrowed a brow when her luggage arced out from the back of the imperious mass of iron, smoke, and speed that was changing and absorbing the good people of Defiance despite their best efforts to preserve—in their town, their churches, their homes—what they had always preserved.

  A faro dealer peeled out cards onto an empty table in front of him, waiting and preparing for a small group of optimists who would inevitably gather around him later in the day so that he could empty their pockets. As Fiona mounted the platform, he eyed her curiously but made no effort to bring her into his game. A young, chestnut-haired woman with a lovely cerulean petticoat peeking out from beneath her skirt sat on a bench minding her knitting and saying nothing as her hands bobbed in and out of her skein, the edges of a blanket forming around her needles. Just two people and utter silence, save for a breeze winding among the leaves at the top of a nearby row of buckeyes and inciting them to applaud gently. Or perhaps the buckeyes were snickering? Fiona thought on that possibility but chose to ignore its implications and strode with purpose to an indoor waiting room on the side of the station.