Carolyn Jourdan - Nurse Phoebe 02 - The School for Mysteries

by Carolyn Jourdan

  Three young people were already there, engaged in rapid conversation. They were holding either gigantic phones or teeny tablets. Phoebe wasn’t sure which.

  One of them was getting a hot drink from an extraordinary machine that looked like something out of a steampunk Starbucks. “Would either of you like something?” he asked. Nick asked for a black coffee. Phoebe wanted a hot chocolate.

  Phoebe casually moved closer to a window and peered out, still trying to discern where exactly they were in relation to the vast and eccentric design of the chateau. She could tell that the room jutted out from the main structure and was four or maybe five stories off the ground. She suspected it was in the top of the central spire, perhaps above the main entrance.

  Although there was no door giving access to it, there was a narrow balcony around the outside of the room with an intricately carved stone balustrade. She wondered why anyone would want to be out there. Was it just part of the French Renaissance decoration or was it some sort of medieval fire escape?

  She leaned closer to the glass and looked down. People were coming and going directly below her. They looked very small from this distance. She felt herself getting dizzy and turned around to face into the room. Phoebe hated heights.

  X introduced them to the half a dozen young people now assembled and said they were an emergency referral from the Archangel. That certainly got the staff’s attention. All chitchat and fiddling with electronic devices stopped instantly.

  They convened around a coffee table on the couches and overstuffed chairs. A girl who looked too young to be in charge of a meeting of anything but a squad of cheerleaders looked at Nick and said, “Okay, so give me your elevator pitch.”

  Her request was greeted with befuddled silence.

  “Your sound bite?”

  Nick remained unable to speak. The request obviously baffled him. Twelve years working alone in his frigid basement home office in Cleveland apparently made it difficult to condense his findings into a single sentence. Of course he’d had no time to prepare, he’d been heavily drugged quite recently, was agoraphobic even on a good day, and he’d had very little time to recover from a harrowing near death experience of skydiving sans parachute.

  Phoebe tried to help. “As I understand it,” she said, “he’s discovered a root cause of war.”

  Several of the media team nodded as they typed on tiny keyboards or used stylish styluses to scribble on screens. “Go on,” urged X.

  Phoebe looked at Nick, hoping he’d pick up the ball, but he didn’t.

  “He knows how to prevent wars in the future, too,” Phoebe said. “It has something to do with taxes.”

  “Tariffs,” Nick corrected.

  Phoebe could feel the interest level plummet. It was as if the room temperature had suddenly dropped forty degrees. Before they were all rendered insensible by the cryo-freeze of boredom she rushed to add, “He’s apparently right because people are trying to kill him.”

  The room warmed up again immediately, and erupted with excited responses, “Fantastic. That is so cool!”

  Phoebe gave the team a quick overview of the previous twenty-four hours. Her story was received at face value with unquestioning acceptance. Dropping the name of the Archangel was apparently the secret password to being taken very seriously indeed, no matter what you were talking about.

  Chapter 23

  When Phoebe finished, all heads turned toward Nick. He managed to pull himself together enough to stutter out the basics. Then, once he got going, his speech smoothed out. “The American Civil War was not fought over the issue of slavery,” he said. “It was fought for the purpose of vastly increasing the wealth of a handful of very powerful northern industrialists.

  “U.S. iron and steel works and garment makers were not able to compete effectively on the open world market. The British could produce better goods at cheaper prices. Because of this, certain U.S. manufacturers wanted taxes to be placed on imports so their prices would seem competitive.

  “This is why the Republican Party was formed.”

  There was some mumbling under the breath at this, but nobody interrupted Nick.

  “People in the South, however, relied on an agricultural economy. The South didn’t want tariffs because, to the extent that tariffs went up, cotton prices went down.

  “This was because the British came to the U.S. to sell their products—and with the money they made from that—they bought cotton to take back to England.

  “The money that tariffs took out of British pockets gave them exactly that much less money to spend on cotton.”

  Gosh, thought Phoebe, she could actually understand what he was saying now.

  “The country would never have gone to war to prop up a few floundering mills in the North, though, so the robber barons had to find an appealing cover story.

  “The first assaults on southern agriculture weren’t successful. So they shifted tactics and went after the Masons because the opposing presidential candidate was a Mason. When that didn’t work either, they attacked the Catholics because the Catholics tended to vote overwhelmingly against them.

  “For years, northern factory owners funded media propaganda campaigns to sway the public against the slave states, Masons, and Catholics to try to shift the balance of political power away from the anti-tariff Democrats. They didn’t really mean to go to war over it, they just wanted the power to raise taxes.”

  The media team was scribbling and typing furiously.

  “Lewis Tappan, a fellow who had owned stock in woolen mills, was the northern ringleader. Some of the leading politicians didn’t perceive the real objective of the scheme at first. When it first started, in 1819, Senator Harrison Gray Otis of Massachusetts, for example, had been puzzled at the sudden flurry of anti-slavery talk in the House of Representatives.

  “Why all this fuss over a matter of little or no importance?, he wondered. It came to him later in a flash of insight while he was traveling. I woke as if from a trance, he said, when he finally recognized what the rhetoric was all about. Anti-slavery agitation was a useful propaganda tool to get the political power to control taxes—the sceptre, he called it.”

  A stillness came over the room when Nick said that. Nobody had ever heard anything like that in a Civics or American History class.

  “Abraham Lincoln sent Steve Hurlbut, an old political friend, to study the political situation in the South. Hurlbut investigated and reported back to Lincoln. They have not gone out over slavery, he told Lincoln. He explained to the President that the southern people believed in free trade and their reason for wanting to secede was because they were seeking the material prosperity they believed would come with free trade.

  “Lincoln didn’t think free trade was a very good idea. Although he knew he didn’t fully understand it all, his party didn’t want free trade and he was pledged to support the party platform.”

  Nick was clearly on a roll now. He had more than a decade of pent up frustration over this issue.

  “There was a stalemate in Congress because even though the slave states were a minority, enough free-traders in the North joined with them to oppose tariff legislation. Every time the North got a tariff bill going, the South would kill it. Then things began to get ugly. If the South wouldn‘t vote for tariffs, the North would foment anti-slavery agitation and vote for abolition.

  “Many people in the South were terrified that northern anti-slavery propaganda might cause a slave revolt. Two-thirds of the population of Haiti had died during the Haitian revolution a few years earlier. The whites who didn’t flee the country were eventually executed by the former slaves. Tappan was sending mass mailings of anti-slavery propaganda to the South. He invested large amounts of money printing pamphlets for distribution by his agents.

  “In one instance a southern Postmaster re
ad one of those pamphlets and seized it to try to prevent violence. A mob burned the mail sacks. Many of the abolitionists didn’t want bloody violence and they pulled back from this sort of thing. But Tappan was determined to forge ahead in his crusade to limit southern political power. He didn’t mind fomenting chaos and wasn’t concerned about the potential for bloodshed.”

  Nick stopped and took a drink of coffee. He had everyone’s full attention at this point.

  “Despite all the revisionist history to the contrary, the reality was that the American Civil war was not fought about slavery. The actual chance of abolition was close to zero. Knowledgeable southern leaders didn’t actually fear abolition. There was no chance of it occurring, because it would’ve required a Constitutional Amendment.

  “And there was no majority who would vote for it. There wasn’t even a significant minority in Congress who were proposing actual abolition. The politicians were simply getting on the Congressional Record with a lot of rhetoric aimed at restricting the westward expansion of southern slave agriculture. The real reason they did this was because they didn’t want the South to get two more senators who could obstruct tariff legislation.

  Lincoln was well informed that southern leaders were using the anti-slavery hysteria as a propaganda tool to fire the southern heart and drive the masses toward secession for tariff reasons. He knew this must be true since he and the Republican Party had always said they had no intention of interfering with slavery in the states where it actually existed.

  “They didn’t want to actually free the slaves in the southern slave states because that would’ve entitled the South to additional tariff-obstructing representatives on the floor of the House. So nobody was going to bring the issue of slavery out for a vote.

  “If not for the destructive tariff and the anti-slavery agitation, the southern states would almost certainly have extinguished slavery on their own—as did nearly all other countries around the world. The issue would’ve been resolved peaceably. Astute southern leaders recognized that the anti-slavery agitation from the North had probably set back the cause of emancipation by half a century.”

  This was a new idea for Phoebe. And it was sickening. All the suffering had been unleashed by a handful of Yankees wanting to make a few bucks.

  “The U.S. was an anomaly in that we had a war over slavery. A million men were killed or wounded and the South was devastated and slandered. The South has never recovered. Its people have suffered under the propaganda ever since. They’ve never been allowed to recover from the stink of the lies.

  “So the truth is that a lot of the so-called bad guys in history turn out to be good guys. And vice versa. The records got destroyed or falsified retroactively and, as usual, the winners’ version is what made it into the history books.”

  Xander was nodding at this.

  “I have detailed charts that show the relationship between tariffs and cotton prices. Within a week of a tariff being imposed, cotton growers suffer financial losses. They can’t pay off their loans, and the value of the product they are selling plummets. At the same time their overhead increases because everything made of iron and steel, like plows and nails, has become more expensive.

  “These aren’t subtle or vague economic tendencies, but ironclad relationships. There is a direct and immediate correlation between wealth for a few families in the North being generated in this particular fashion and financial ruin for the entire South.

  “Lincoln began to understand this at the end and realized how he’d been used. That’s why he had to die.

  “And that’s why they want me dead.”

  There was absolute silence in the room.

  “I’m here because no one has ever done enough research to be able to make the proofs before. It’s taken me more than a decade to do it. The current generation of industrial looters wants all the documents destroyed. And me with them.”

  Nick hadn’t had much time to reflect on what had been happening to him in the last thirty-six hours, but as he’d spoken he’d begun to get an idea who might’ve leaked his materials and why. He’d given a summary of his findings to a Nobel Prize winning economist. Nick had asked the man specifically what he thought would happen when the Chinese began to sell cars in the U.S. and the laureate had fobbed him off.

  The American automotive manufacturers were already struggling. The threat of competition from China had to be terrifying, especially since the poor U.S. economy was making people less and less able to afford major purchases like cars. Nobody in their right mind would want a war with China, so he added these surmises and concerns to his previous comments.

  “Free trade prevents wars,” he said. There, he’d finally come up with his sound bite.

  The team erupted again into rapid crosstalk using a lot of incomprehensible terminology. The girl in charge had a couple of follow-up questions, and adroitly managed to extract what she needed from Nick. She was so pleased at having coaxed him out of his stupor, she leaned over and patted his knee when she was finished.

  That made two strangers who’d done that to him in a single day.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, “You’ve given us the hooks we need. We’ll be able to find an angle that will work well for you. We’re very good at our jobs.”

  “You don’t have everything yet,” Nick said. “You’ll need to get in touch with my pizza guy.”

  That got everyone’s attention.

  “His name is Tommy Bell. He works at the de Medici Pizza place next door to the Cleveland Clinic, the main hospital downtown, in Ohio. He has the flash drive. It’s got the draft manuscript on it. It’s the only copy left, I think. They took all the others, as well as all the underlying research materials and notes.”

  Chapter 24

  The media team’s various electronic devices had been playing a muted symphony throughout the meeting, but something Xander saw on the screen of his phone made him stand up suddenly and say, “Meeting’s over. You have to leave now.”

  Phoebe and Nick didn’t need to be told twice. They headed for the door. “No, no, no!” shouted X. “Not that way! You’ll have to go out the other way.”

  “Other way?” Nick said, confused.

  X pointed to a window. He crossed the room quickly and opened it. Nick and Phoebe looked out at the narrow stone balcony. Xander reached for Phoebe, as if to help her, but she backed away, shaking her head. “I’m afraid of heights. Really afraid.”

  “Out here, now,” X insisted, “go, go go!”

  Phoebe balked, “I can’t.”

  Nick scrambled out the waist-high window and onto the balcony. He turned back to face Phoebe and said, “Come on,” in a commanding voice. He held out his hand to her and she felt herself gravitating toward him. “Close your eyes,” he barked.

  Their roles were suddenly reversed. Phoebe couldn’t bear to climb out the window, but then she imagined herself being thrown from it instead when they were caught by whoever was on their way up. That was the extra motivation she needed to move.

  She didn’t have time to wonder where Nick’s new take charge personality had come from before she was manhandled through the opening by Xander on the inside and Nick on the outside. “Sorry,” Xander said, “Obviously they had surveillance on this facility.”

  Phoebe took one last longing look into the room and saw the media team frantically manipulating sections of the bookcases that lined the walls of the room. They were tossing their notes and electronic gear into storage areas that were hidden behind rotating sections of the wall. A woman dressed in a maid’s costume burst though the door, and breathlessly announced, “Incoming.”

  Nick and Phoebe were standing shoulder to shoulder on a balcony so tiny, when they turned their backs to the outside wall of the chateau, their heads rested against the lower edge of the massive slate roof. Now Phoebe could s
ee exactly where they were. They were at the roof level of the highest spire on the house.

  Phoebe glanced down and saw a shuttle bus stopped below, discharging visitors at the main entrance directly beneath them. She felt her knees start to give out and knew she was going to faint. Nick took her by the upper arm and held her in a surprisingly strong grip.

  “You must leave,” X said, through the window, “we’ll buy you as much time as we possibly can.”

  Phoebe thought they had left. Nick glanced around, equally baffled.

  “Your best shot is to try for the observation platform,” X said, pointing to a railed deck that wasn’t more than three or four feet away horizontally, but was separated from the tiny balcony by a terrifying vertical abyss. Then X closed and locked the window behind them.

  As soon as Phoebe steadied herself, but before she had time to say anything, Nick swung one leg over the stone balustrade and reached out and took hold of a nylon-coated stainless steel cable that ran atop a line of stone molding. It was a security cable attached to one of the gargoyles on the roof. He stepped off the balcony and onto a slender ledge of decorative stone molding. He held on to the cable and tiptoed around the jutting corner of the building. Phoebe lost sight of him and totally panicked. But then he poked his head back around the corner so she could see him.

  “Look at me,” he ordered Phoebe in a forceful tone. “Just keep your eyes on me.”

  Nick held out a hand to her, but Phoebe didn’t budge. Then she heard a loud crashing sound in the room behind her, and shouting. She knew she had to move.

  She was shaking so hard she didn’t know how she could possible maintain a hold on the cable, but she grabbed it, stepped over the balcony railing and onto the narrow ledge, and went toward Nick. Rather than trying to leap across the gap from a precarious standing start, they were taking the long way, which was about ten feet horizontally on a ledge that was barely a toehold and the drop was … something she couldn’t allow herself to think about.