The Trojan Icon (Ethan Gage Adventures Book 8)

by William Dietrich

  Then I barred myself inside the cathedral again.

  The luminescence of foxfire allowed me to check my pocket watch, a necessary gift from Czartoryski. I’d consumed an hour.

  More burglary followed. I picked the lock to the bell tower door and began portaging my equipment up steep, ladder-like steps, obsessively keeping track of time. The carillon would ring at 7:30 a.m. to wake the fort and city for prayers, just enough before winter dawn to make my scheme feasible. I counted at least fifty carillon bells, stacked and ranked to churn out coordinated clamor, and was glad I’d thought to bring stuffing for my ears. Then I ascended to a higher chamber that displayed the gearing of four tower clocks that faced the compass points. They were pointed near midnight.

  I was now high above the fortress walls, but went still higher. As architectural plans had promised, a ladder led to a platform above the clocks that served as staging area for maintenance of the needle spire. Louvered doors gave access to the outside.

  I’d no need to ascend all the way to angel and cross; I was already three hundred feet above the frozen river. I opened the louvers that faced east and peered out. Snow sifted down, so I waited for my eyes to find form in the void. Yes: I could barely make out the rear of the cathedral. Beyond was the squat treasury building with its brick domed roofs like snowy hillocks.

  While it seemed like an elaborate detour to break into one building to enter another, I’d given the matter great thought. The treasury was always guarded. The cathedral was not. The treasury’s windows were bricked, while the cathedral’s glass could be opened. The treasury was impenetrable, while the church invited entry.

  I couldn’t very well ask for admission to Russia’s vault, or storm it, or chip a hole in the side. A thousand Russian soldiers were sure to object. But what if I came silently from the sky? And then didn’t enter at all?

  I’d purchased in St. Petersburg some spliced Cossack lariat, thin and strong, and a small deck windlass of the kind used on a fishing schooner to crank in an anchor. Clay jugs held hydrogen gas that Astiza and I had liberated by pouring sulfuric acid on iron, as Jacques Charles had done when making the world’s first hydrogen balloon in 1783. Peasants attacked that inventor’s flying machine with pitchforks when it came down fourteen miles from Paris, but Franklin had concluded that hydrogen was more reliable than heated air.

  I later acquired ballooning experience of my own in Egypt and France, making me a reluctant aeronaut. I also needed a reliable wind, a good shot, and some luck with fortress masonry. As my reward, Czartoryski would convince the tsar to give me respectability that I could pass onto my son.

  Such was the plan, anyway.

  Astiza had sewn two contraptions. I carefully laid and smoothed the first, the skin of a small balloon. We’d neither time nor resources to build one big enough to lift a man, and that would be too conspicuous anyway. The steeple provided an alternate way to climb. I braced the windlass, readied my tools, and settled down to study my watch. Periodically I’d stand to windmill my arms and squat my legs to keep warm, my breath a white cloud. Then I’d sit down to wait yet again.

  At seven, the day still dark, I suspended the balloon skin out the louvered opening and began to inflate it with hydrogen, using a copper spigot from the jugs I’d pumped full of gas. It was dark, wet, cold, my fingers were numb, the wind was pesky, and the balloon fidgeted as it swelled. I used a bowline to tie my lariat to a grappling hook, lashed this to the underside of the balloon, and tied the other end of the rope to the windlass, which would serve as reel. I wound the line onto the drum and readied my new Bavarian hunting rifle. It’s a pretty piece with a silver patch box, engraved trigger guard, and raised cheek-rest, but the German custom to shorten the barrel for portability crimps its accuracy. I didn’t entirely trust it.

  Despite the cold, I was sweating. I checked my watch again. Time! The world already had a grayer cast that rumored dawn. Now I could make out the far end of the treasury building, a barren tree, and even the faint line of the fort’s snowy parapet. Minutes ticked. There was a creak and thud from the church door below. I crawled across the narrow tower to peek out the other direction. A trail of fresh prints marked where priests had filed to the cathedral for the dawn bells.

  Time to stopper my ears with cotton.

  I began unreeling the rope. At first the balloon bobbed aimlessly, but then the steady Baltic breeze caught the orb and carried it east toward the treasury as planned. Rubberizing the silk had left the balloon a dull red, which helped as I squinted to follow its progress. Onward it danced, to the treasury and then over it, bucking back and forth. I feared a shout, a bugle, or a thunder of alarm drums, but who looks upward in the snowy dark? Maps had given me the precise distance to the far end of the repository, and mathematics the angle downward to its roof, letting me calculate the necessary reach of rope. Silk ribbons marked every fifty feet of line.

  If my geometry was off, I was dead.

  As each rope ribbon played out, I made chalk marks on the louver sill. Finally the balloon had sailed the necessary eight hundred and fifty feet. The weight of the unreeling line had dragged the sphere lower, toward the far eave of the treasury.

  I picked up my rifle and aimed.

  Half past seven. True dawn an hour away.

  Time to awaken fort and city. There was a faint cry of priests from below, a jerk of bell rope, and the carillon began to move.

  Sound exploded.

  Church bells are all very well from a mile away, but in my little echo chamber the music sounded like a broadside at Trafalgar. I winced but the clamor would mask my gunshot, so this moment had dictated everything else.

  I aimed at the bobbing orb and fired.

  Had the balloon jerked?

  I reloaded and watched for long, agonizing seconds, waiting for confirmation I’d punctured the bag. The globe wobbled frustratingly aloft. Could I have missed? Was I that rusty? Damn this German gun, I longed for my old Pennsylvania longrifle. I began to hastily aim again. If the carillon stopped, I couldn’t risk shooting in the quiet.

  But then the leaking balloon began to sink as planned, until it disappeared beyond the far edge of my target. The rope sagged in a long curve to the brick domes.

  On and on the clanging bells pounded, as heavy as a hammer, and then finally stopped. My head throbbed.

  With the gong still echoing in my skull, I used the windlass to reel my rope. The slack lariat lifted off the Treasury roof, and I began dragging the emptied balloon back toward me.

  Its grappling hook snagged the repository’s eave, far away and far below. I winched tighter. Now a straight line extended from cathedral steeple to treasury roof, like the hypotenuse on a right triangle. I reeled more, stretching the rope until it was taut as a bowstring, and finally hitched it tight. I took out my next invention, a two-foot-long dowel with a metal eye in the middle that I fastened on the line. This would be my trapeze.

  When attempting something daring it is advisable to think long and hard when planning, and to stop thinking to do. So I did.

  I donned my pack, strapped my rifle, slipped mittens onto my hands, grasped the handle, and rolled out the louvered window to drop, dangle, and gasp. My breath huffed out in a cloud.

  Then I began to slide down the rope, snow stinging my face.

  Too fast! I wasn’t traveling, I was hurtling.

  At least the lariat hasn’t broken, my brain managed between a mental mix of profanity and prayer. At least no one is shooting at me yet.

  I swooped like a wounded hawk, aimed to crash into the far end of the treasury. It hadn’t occurred to provide a brake.

  Can’t think of everything.

  It was my own weight that saved me. As I descended the line stretched and sagged, lessening the angle of decline and slowing my plunge. In moments I went from fearing a collision to fearing a humiliating halt in midair.

  But
no, I skipped across one dome, drooped some more, and splatted with a thump onto another, skidding over its swell in a belly flop that jammed my mouth with snow. I spat, let go of my trapeze, and caught my breath while resting between two domes as white as igloos.

  By the dueling pistols of Aaron Burr, my scheme had worked.

  I waited for cries of alarm.

  Nothing. The weather was foul, the morning still dark, and every sensible man, from prisoner to commander, was snugged inside.

  I cut the line, letting it fall against the back of the bell tower where it was unlikely to be noticed until full daylight. In the other direction I heard a soft thump as balloon and grappling hook lost tension and fell onto a drift.

  My own boot steps were muffled as I scrambled across the roof to the last dome in line, as Astiza had instructed. I scraped the snowy coverlet from the keystone at the dome’s peak.

  The blocks in a dome get their solidity from falling against each other as gravity squeezes them tight. But should the uppermost keystone be removed, the rigidity begins to weaken.

  From my pack I took another flask, this one filled with hydrochloric acid for the mortar joints. I poured and watched them bubble as chemistry went to work, a trick I’d used before. Hammer and chisel cracked the weakened bond and I pried the brick out. There was another layer beneath. I boiled and cracked more joints, prying out bricks to excavate a hasty hole in the dome’s peak about a foot in diameter.

  A cannonball might bounce off. A patient thief did not. I soon had chipped bricks scattered all around me.

  The day kept lightening. Time, time! My burrowing had been as quiet as it had been swift. I dared not pause to look at my watch. Would Harry wait?

  The slim hole revealed only blackness in the unlit chamber below. Out came the magnet, tied to another cord. I lowered it like a fishing line.

  There was a metallic clang. I pulled. A sword came up, its point glued to the massive magnet by nature’s mysterious force. The weapon was tarnished and looked quite ordinary to me, except for a gilded hilt and a small insignia of the White Eagle of Poland on the blade. I pried it loose and lowered the magnet again. Nothing. The other sword must have slid sideways as I fished out the first. I carefully rotated the line, giving the magnet a slow orbit. Precious seconds ticked by. Finally—clang! I hauled up the second Grunwald trophy, congratulating myself on my genius.

  I slid down the dome to rest a moment and then tie the swords to my back. It’s hell-fired difficult for the lowborn to become a prince, I reflected, and yet a night’s perilous work might just have made me one.

  “And if not a noble, at least rich from Polish reward,” I reflected. I stood. Dawn was near, but no alarm had been raised. Nobody had looked up. With luck, my theft wouldn’t be discovered for hours.

  “A pity no one saw my daring.”

  And then a shot rang out, kicking up a feather of snow. I heard a shout in German, and then in French that Russian officers might understand.

  “C’est l’ ingérence américaine. Tuez-le!”

  “It’s the meddling American! Kill him!”

  CHAPTER 7

  I leaped from the roof to a drift and rolled, the sounds of shots, alarm, bells, and bugle momentarily muffled. Then up, white as a snowman, the fortress a disturbed anthill. Soldiers were boiling out of the treasury and nearby barracks, guardhouse, and prison. Priests were running like stampeded cattle. Prussian rogues were in a cluster near the river gate, their muskets smoking. Their guns slammed butt down and ramrods plunged and lifted like Fulton’s pistons as the Germans reloaded.

  With those shots, my ambitions were dashed. What were the Prussians doing in Peter and Paul Fortress a day earlier than planned? And how did they recognize me as the “meddling American” from one hundred yards through falling snow? I’d been betrayed, and if betrayed then news of my role would reach the tsar. I’d go from dvorianstuo to bandit and spy, with no title, no estates, and no friends. I was once again ruined and likely to be executed if my emergency escape didn’t work.

  Yet what use is frustration? Napoleon taught that no plan survives the first gunshots, and that a good general plans for every eventuality. I’d test his maxim.

  Fortunately, the light was still dim and flakes were still falling, so obscurity was an ally. Guards collided, or slipped on ice. Shots went wild. I gallumped through snow to the perimeter fortress wall and bounded up icy steps, hearing more cries as I was spotted again. Bullets pinged off stonework. Tufts of snow erupted. Then I was up on the parapet and dashing toward the Neva side of the fortress like a shadowy target on a shooting range. The Winter Palace on the far shore was a blur. The frozen ships in the Neva loomed like offshore rocks. Shots whizzed and hummed with hot trajectories that left flakes dancing in their wake.

  The outer wall sloped slightly to lend stability against bombardment. Even as a line of Russian soldiers scrambled up the interior fortress stairs to intercept me, I vaulted the parapet lip and skidded down the outside wall to another drift. The tumble at the bottom twisted my ankle, but the pain was clarifying. Harry!

  I squatted on the ice of the frozen river edge and unfurled Astiza’s other handiwork, a small chute of silk.

  “There he is!” Shouts above. The bang of more muskets. A chip flayed my cheek and irritation intruded. Why can’t I have a career more suitable to my talents, like paramour to a bored princess, or court jester, or perhaps ambassador to an obscure nation where nothing ever happens?

  The wind snapped the silk taut and jerked me forward, my boots skidding across river ice. I sailed out onto the Neva on heels and rump, teeth gritted against the sore ankle and my chute dancing madly in the wind.

  Now the Prussians were running back out of the Nevsky gate, leaping onto the river ice to chase me. Several slipped and fell. It would be a comedy if not so perilous.

  I clung desperately to my chute, skidding before the wind and kicking up a rooster-tail of snow. As I picked up speed I allowed myself to hope that the most disagreeable part of my mission might be unnecessary. Perhaps I could just slide away into the fog of early morning.

  But then I heard the clatter of horseshoes on ice.

  I looked back. Several mounted men had bounded from pier onto the frozen river, their horses slipping and then finding purchase on the brittle surface. The animals neighed in consternation and excitement.

  Meanwhile the wind began to drag me awry, sending me up the river instead of across to the frozen ships and St. Petersburg. Our invention had gained me precious minutes, but I had to rendezvous with my son.

  I let it go.

  The chute whirled away like a leaf. I coasted to a regretful halt and stood, wincing. Damnation! I didn’t relish the last part of my plan, but choice was shrinking as the horsemen spurred.

  I set off at a limping trot, too pained and unsure of my icy footing to run flat out. Behind, the sound of pursuit was like knives rapping on marble.

  “There he is! Halt, rogue, or we cut you down!”

  I panted, struggling painfully to the place I’d carefully sawn the night before we crossed the river with the casket. Despite recent snow, my disturbance had left a slight depression in the snow.

  My pursuers were closing. I had to give the Prussians pause.

  I un-shouldered my rifle, turned, took quick aim at the lead horseman, and fired. He jerked and pitched backward, his horse sprawling hard. Other animals swerved and tumbled, skidding across the ice. Germans cursed and howled. Now the empty gun was an anchor, but I had gained a few seconds.

  Of dread.

  If the river ice had refrozen too firmly where I’d sawn before joining Gregor and the coffin, I’d either be sabered or spend my last days in the fortress prison. But if it was still sufficiently fragile …

  The remaining cavalry circled, the animals kicking up a surf of snow. Saber blades made a whooshing sound as excited Prussians and
Russians slashed back and forth in the air, treating the chase like sport.

  A hobbling run. Just yards away.

  “Lance him!” A spear point came down and leveled.

  “No, I’ll finish him.” It was Von Bonin’s voice and I glanced back to see the Prussian taking aim with the appendage on the stump of his arm. His sleeve was up, exposing the flint mechanism, and the muzzle hole was aimed square at my back.

  I grimaced, leaped headfirst for the spot I’d prepared with my rifle as spear, and took a huge breath.

  The arm’s gun went off.

  As I crashed through the ice, a bullet seared my scalp.

  The cold water was a shock. First the pain of falling through brittle blocks, and then the bite of the bitter Neva. The river jolted like electricity. I plummeted, the swords on my back another anchor, and for a moment I feared they’d carry me straight to the bottom.

  But my clothes had trapped some air, neutralizing my descent. The devil’s luck, again. I let go of my pretty rifle, steadied, kicked, and looked up. I could just make out faint cracks of light against the morning sky where I’d sawn to weaken the ice. There was a longer line I’d cut to point out my necessary direction. Swim that way! Doing so in winter clothing with two old swords was as ridiculous as dancing in a grain sack, but terror works miracles. I stroked for my life.

  The river’s current sucked at me, and I had to take care it didn’t pull me too far downstream.

  I’d already imagined the scene above. A pathetic fugitive, about to be spitted or sliced, has an even more ignominious end when he falls through a weak spot in the frozen river. Horses skid to a halt, their riders fearful of plunging themselves. The posse gingerly dismounts and surrounds the icy hole, waiting on the unlikely chance that their quarry might resurface through broken floes. And when ten minutes pass with no sign, the obvious is concluded. Ethan Gage’s thievery carried him straight to the Neva mud, and he will not surface until the spring thaw, if then. Salvage sailors might eventually drag in hopes of snagging the old swords, but would eventually conclude I’d been washed out to the Baltic, the military relics washed with me.