Gossamer Wing

by Delphine Dryden

  “You look like a rebellious young girl,” Murcheson said in surprised disapproval when he saw her attire. Perhaps, Charlotte later reflected, that sentiment was behind his ordering her to proceed to the station instead of joining the agents who were already mustering near the factory.

  “I can take the Gossamer Wing to those coordinates and be there before—”

  “And be seen by every security guard or late-working longshoreman from here to the estuary? You’ll stay at the station, where I can at least ensure you’ll be safe, and you won’t present Coeur de Fer with an additional target.”

  “Where I’ll be out of the way, you mean,” Charlotte snapped, feeling very much the part of the thwarted youth. She didn’t care. She was frantic, her heart pounding, desperate to do anything to get to Dexter. Nothing else mattered, and the need was so paramount it crowded out all other thoughts in her mind.

  I have to get to him . . .

  Murcheson scowled at her, and she lifted a hand to her forehead, pressing against the temptation to cry. She knew it wouldn’t help her case if she did, but a voice in her head was screaming for action.

  It can’t end this way, I was stupid, so stupid . . .

  “I have to do something.”

  “You’re far too emotionally invested to be objective in this matter, Lady Hardison.”

  Charlotte didn’t attempt to deny it. An idea had started to form in her mind. She closed her mouth and listened in brooding silence as Murcheson briefed his men; then she allowed herself to be escorted down to the tram and into the station with no further protest.

  Admiral Neeley barely noticed her arrival, more concerned with an ongoing training exercise than with one off-duty agent at loose ends. He noticed her departure from the bridge still less, and nobody batted an eye at the sight of Lady Hardison making her way down to the miniature submersible’s docking bay. She’d spent so much time there already, after all.

  Charlotte felt bad about tricking the young technician, but it had to be done. She milked him for the status of the fuel tank, a last few bits of information regarding the navigation system, and then she asked him very sweetly if he could possibly find her a decent cup of tea. It was cruel; she knew the boy was smitten, and she took advantage of him even though she knew he would surely be reprimanded for dereliction of duty. But she needed that submersible. She waited two minutes after he left the lab, then ducked into the Gilded Lily and took the little craft down and out into the dark, murky waters of the channel.

  Her plan had solidified once she heard the report of where Coeur de Fer had taken Dexter. The agents traveling overland were at a decided disadvantage, Charlotte had realized during the debriefing. They were in steam cars, which ran far slower on average than the speeds the sub was capable of in calm waters. They had to travel on the convoluted byways of the quays of Le Havre, and they were beginning from the Murcheson factory well north of town. From the station, though it was farther away, Charlotte could steer the submersible in nearly a straight line to the dock and the hulk of a decommissioned cargo freighter that Martin was evidently using as a base. What’s more, she could use the sub’s specialized listening devices to pinpoint their location on the freighter. She might even hear something that could help them take Martin without risking Dexter’s life.

  The main challenge, as Charlotte saw it, would be maintaining her sanity in the claustrophobic confines of the tiny submersible long enough to get to the docked ship where Jacques Martin was holding Dexter hostage. Once she survived that, she reasoned, the rest of the rescue would seem easy in comparison.

  Twenty

  LE HAVRE, FRANCE

  ICY WATER SPLASHED over Dexter’s head, waking him with shock, and he blew the salty, stinging stuff from his mouth and nose as he tried to get his bearings.

  His stomach lurched and he choked back vomit, struggling to breathe, panic setting in as he began to remember his circumstances.

  “Bastard!” he sputtered, finally realizing he was no longer gagged and could speak again. Coeur de Fer was standing a few yards away from him, an empty tin bucket next to his leg. “Where’s Charlotte? What have you done with her?” Dexter rocked back and forth on the chair to which he was bound, accomplishing nothing but nearly falling over.

  The question seemed to surprise his captor. “I have done nothing with her, monsieur. Have you misplaced her?”

  “What?”

  They stared at each other, both confused now. Coeur de Fer finally broke the silence by coughing weakly. He shook his head and repeated, “I have done nothing with Lady Hardison, monsieur. I took only you. She will come to no harm, as long as you agree to assist me.”

  What the hell would you want with me? Dexter couldn’t help but think. Despite recent events, he knew he was no spy. Unless Jacques Martin was interested in recent technological advances in seismology, or desperately required a specialized weapon harness or custom-made machinery, Dexter didn’t know what he could possibly do for the man. He feared what Martin might ask, knowing that his probable inability to provide whatever it was would most likely result in his death. Everybody knew that was how it worked: when the deranged killer no longer had need of you, he killed you. Usually not in a quick, merciful way.

  “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 breathing 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.