The Forever Engine Page 10

  “I didn’t see it until we were in the chart room of the Intrepid and I looked at their large globe. Because of the projections used, large-scale flat maps distort straight-line distances, but on a globe you can see them more clearly. We know there was an energy source at one end of this effect—the Wessex collider in my time. What if there was one at the other end as well?”

  “But the other incident was here in Bavaria,” Thomson said.

  “The other reported incident was in Bavaria, but what if the real effects were at two power sources with an echo effect in the center? The Allgäu Alps are on a straight line and exactly centered between Wessex and Serbia.”

  Gordon snorted in derision. “You expect us to believe you reasoned all that through based only on two explosions?”

  “No, but it was enough to make a guess. My first pick was southern Bavaria and my second was Syria, like yours. But if Syria and the Alps were out, Serbia was worth a shot.”

  “That was very logical,” Gabrielle said.

  “Do you mind, my dear?” Thomson held his pipe up for Gabrielle to see. She shook her head and drew on her cheroot. Thomson began packing tobacco into his pipe, and behind me Gordon lit one of his own cheroots. I supposed this sharing of smoke was a step toward a sharing of information, and perhaps even international peace and harmony, which were all good things, but it was getting hard on my lungs.

  So we were back to the question of whether Gabrielle Courbiere would accompany us. The problem, in the end, was one of trust. How could we trust Gabrielle’s information to be sufficient to warrant her inclusion unless she shared it with us? But once she did, how could she trust us to take her along? It was the sort of problem best solved by repeated and generous infusions of distilled alcohol, but all we had was one bottle of dry sherry, and Gordon put about half of that down just to take the edge off his hangover. At least after that he stopped shouting so much, which made the negotiations go easier.

  “Okay, here’s what I suggest,” I said. “Mademoiselle Courbiere, tell us what you know about the Old Man except how to find him. If the information’s good enough to convince Dr. Thomson to bring you along, you’re in. If you don’t trust us to deliver on that promise, tell us what we need, as we need it, to find him. What do you say?”

  “Oui,” she said without hesitation. “If this is acceptable with the doctor, for me it is good.”

  Thomson drew on his pipe and looked intently at her.

  “Forgive me asking, Mademoiselle, but . . . are you really a spy?”

  “Oui, Doctor. For three years now I have been the agent of Le Direction Centrale des Renseignements Généraux, the DCRG.”

  “But . . . how?”

  “Oh, it is simple. I am quite intelligent, and men find me attractive. They will often tell me almost anything for the possibility to mate with me, even if later that possibility it is not realized.”

  Thomson and I must both have stared at her for a moment, he in shock and me in puzzled admiration.

  “Lass,” Thomson finally said, “for a spy you’re disarmingly honest. The truth is, the more I think on this mission, the less prepared I feel to accomplish anything. We do need help. If what you tell us now is useful, I’ll take you with us and accept any additional assistance you can provide.”

  She nodded firmly.

  “Bon. We have a considerable dossier on this man who calls himself le Vieil Homme de Montagne. He takes this name to cause fear, oui? He has assassinated over thirty men that we know of. His agents use the hashish, like the Hashassiene in the Holy Lands during the Crusades, but he is an ethnic Serb born in Austrian Croatia.”

  “Born when?” I asked.

  She pursed her lips and looked up. “On 10 July, 1856.”

  She had a pretty good memory for numbers.

  “So he is what? In his early thirties? Younger than I would have thought,” I said.

  “Young, oui. Perhaps le Jeune Homme de Montagne, n’est-cepas?” She looked at us and smiled, then added, “I made the joke.”

  We smiled back at her, but it wasn’t exactly a knee-slapper.

  “We know little about his early life,” she continued, “but he studied the electrical engineering at the Polytechnique Autrichien in Graz. We first began collecting information on him six years ago when he moved to France.”

  “He lived in France?” Gordon shouted from his chair by the window. “Why in God’s name didn’t you arrest him when you had the chance?”

  “We did not know his identity as le Vieil Homme de Montagne until recently. He had broken no laws when he lived in France, mon Capitaine. We do not arrest people simply for being disagreeable. You, for example, would be quite safe there.”

  I chuckled at that, and Thomson suppressed a smile of his own.

  “While in Paris he worked for La Compagnie d’Edison, then in 1884 he traveled to your country, Professor Fargo, but a year later there was a dispute with Monsieur Edison and he returned to Europe. It was not long after his return that the first attacks by le Vieil Homme de Montagne took place.”

  I shot Thomson a look and saw him bite through his pipe stem in surprise, then spit out the end.

  “Good God, you can’t mean Nikola Tesla!” he exclaimed.

  “Ah, you have heard of him.”

  THIRTEEN

  October 4, 1888, Aboard Her Majesty’s Aerial Ship Intrepid,

  Aloft over Bavaria

  When we reboarded Intrepid the next morning and Captain Harding learned our party now included a representative of the DCRG, he did not react well. After a number of loud and intemperate words, Gabrielle Courbiere, looking every bit as lovely as I remembered from the previous evening, but that day wearing a dark purple riding habit, found herself installed in the crew’s mess hall with an armed Marine guard at the door for company. She was not a prisoner, certainly not, not by any means. She was simply under no circumstances to leave the mess hall. About an hour after we were airborne, Thomson and I looked in on her. Gordon sniffed at the idea but came along anyway.

  We found her enjoying tea served in a white porcelain navy mug. When we sat at her table, she raised her hand and called the mess steward.

  “Jerome, would it be a trouble to bring my friends some tea? Ah, bien. Merci, Jerome.” She smiled at him as he brought our mugs, and he floated back to the galley, soaring on the thermals of that smile. Give her a week and she’d be running the ship.

  “Lass, I appreciate your assistance in this,” Thomson said once we’d sipped our tea and settled back. “But I have to wonder why. What is your official charge with respect to our mission?”

  “None,” she said. “Officially I am not here. There would be much discord in the Chamber of Deputies were it known the DCRG was cooperating with British military intelligence. The same with the House of Commons, n’est-cepas? But my immediate superiors ask me to do this thing, and I say oui.”

  “Just out of the goodness of their hearts?” Gordon demanded. “I’ve followed the Old Man’s campaign of assassinations and terror, and I’ve never heard of any of his attacks being directed at France.”

  “That is true,” Gabrielle answered. “The majority of them have been in Great Britain, Germany, and Austria-Hungary. There have also been four assassinations in Turkey, two each in Italy and Bulgaria, and single assassinations in five other European countries. Those are Greece, Wallachia—”

  “Yes, yes.” Gordon cut her off. “I know all that. The point is, none in France. So what interest does your agency have in this matter?”

  “Your country and Germany attempt to isolate us,” she said. “Well, not the entire countries. We have many friends in both places, but Lord Salisbury’s government in your country and Chancellor Bismarck’s in Germany oppose us. Very well. So now we reach out to Austria-Hungary and Turkey as friends. The attacks against them, while we remain unattacked, complicate this friendship. I am to help uncomplicate it.”

  Well, that was clear enough. Apparently the Commune was as capable of realpol
itik as the next guy.

  “You might have uncomplicated it sooner if you’d thought to tell us Tesla was behind all this,” Gordon said. “He was just in England a week past. We could have arrested him and been done with it.”

  “I would have been very surprised,” Gabrielle answered. “For all your enthusiasm, your department is not very successful at making the arrest.”

  “What are you talking about?” Gordon demanded.

  “Two years ago, through private channels, we tell your department we know who killed Sir Henry Bessemer. Do you make the arrest? Non. You tell this English gentleman the French are attempting to slander him and he should retain the solicitor. Instead he disappears. Ah! Now we are more careful what we tell you.”

  “A different matter altogether. Tesla is hardly a gentleman,” Gordon said.

  “It is hard to know who is, n’est-cepas? Tell me, Capitaine Gordon, why would Lord Chillingham, the man who amassed his second fortune by purchasing the patents to the Bessemer process from the heirs of the murdered inventor, have cause to allow the murderer to disappear? Hmm? Can you think of a reason?”

  “I won’t dignify that with an answer,” he said and turned away.

  Gabrielle shrugged and sipped her tea.

  “I have a question that’s been bothering me, Mademoiselle,” I said. “Maybe you can help. This Old Man of the Mountain apparently has an extensive network of agents and sympathizers and has been assassinating people all over Europe. Why? What does he want?”

  “What difference does it make what he wants?” Gordon demanded. “He’s a madman.”

  Gabrielle frowned at that, but I answered before she could. “It matters for two reasons. First, knowing what he’s after may help us anticipate his next moves. Second, I talked to one of his guys. You did, too, Gordon. That fellow Grover was someone who believed in something. Understand the beliefs, or goals, which Tesla shares with his followers and we have an insight into his operation.” Gabrielle nodded in agreement.

  “Oui, this is so. He adheres to the revolutionary syndicalist movement, although his methods are so violent he is no longer embraced by the former leaders of that movement.”

  “Former leaders?” I asked.

  “Since the Association Internationale des Travailleurs disbanded in 1871, following the success of the Commune in France, there has been no one centrally organized international movement. Some syndicalists centered their efforts in France and the surrounding countries. I know many of those organizers, of course. But those who reject the state as the inevitable enemy of workers followed Mikhail Bakunin.”

  “Yeah, I know something about Bakunin,” I said. “Not exactly a happy guy, as I recall.”

  She looked puzzled, as if wondering what his happiness had to do with anything.

  “I never met him,” she said, “but he does not smile in his photographs. Since his death twelve years ago, there can hardly be named a single dominant leader of the movement. Le Vieil Homme de Montagne emerges as perhaps the most influential of those who see violence as a necessary tactic to achieve their ends. He perhaps has the ties to the German labor movement through Wilhelm Liebknecht. Liebknecht denies this, of course.”

  She paused to sip her tea and frowned in thought. I had the impression she was assessing the likelihood of Liebknecht’s denial being truthful, and that she had made a similar assessment many times and had never been completely satisfied with the result. Absorbed as she was by her thoughts, I sensed she had, for the moment, become oblivious to the world around her, unaware we were even there, and it made me feel like a voyeur looking at her, as if I spied on her through a bedroom window. She looked up at me, and I felt my ears flush, but how much from embarrassment and how much from arousal I couldn’t say.

  “He also has contacts to the more radical elements of the British trade unionist movement,” she continued, “through Johann Eccarius, who also broke with the Commune.”

  “Eccarius?” Gordon put in. “You’re sure of that?”

  “Oui, but I must tell you we have no proof that Monsieur Eccarius is an active part of his network of agents. I am sorry. I know how enamored you are of arrests.”

  I saw a sparkle of humor in her eyes then, and Gordon sat back with a scowl.

  “Yeah, okay,” I said. “But what are their ends?”

  “Oh. An end to state and private ownership of the means of production. Its replacement with syndicats, unions of workers who produce goods to meet needs, not to enrich owners. Trade negotiation directly between syndicats rather than between states.” She shrugged.

  “So,” I said, “a seeker after utopia.”

  “Oui, I believe so. His methods are objectionable but his ends well-intentioned, n’est-cepas?”

  “Non, ce n’est pas ainsi,” I answered, and her eyebrows rose slightly in surprise. “L’idée là sont des forces naturelles qui animent le monde—” I began but glanced at Thomson and Gordon and saw their faces blank with incomprehension.

  “The idea there are natural forces,” I began again in English, “which drive the world toward peace and harmony and plenty, and the only things standing in the way of that perfect world are wrongheaded obstructionists—that thinking always ends in blood, and not much else.”

  “You do not believe the world can be improved?” Gabrielle asked.

  “Sure I do. I just don’t think it can be perfected. I think the world gets better by affirmative works. It doesn’t get better on its own by just killing bad people, but that’s what utopianists always come down to. Like most extreme religious movements end up in crusades or jihads or witch burnings. Just kill enough heretics or infidels and God’s plan will succeed.”

  Gabrielle shook her head. “Le Vieil Homme de Montagne is not a man religious.”

  “No, but all those guys have blind faith in something—an unshakable belief in whatever magic mechanism they think drives the world, whether it’s God’s will, dialectical materialism, racial superiority, or the free market. This Tesla guy’s no different. What’s his plan? Murder obstructionists. If he just kills enough Tyndalls and Rossbanks, he figures the syndicalist worker’s paradise will burst into glorious bloom on its own. It’s bullshit.”

  “I have to agree with the lad,” Thomson said, “if not his choice of language. It doesn’t seem like a very constructive program by itself.”

  “Non, perhaps not,” Gabrielle said. “But it raises the interesting questions. It was your James Madison who said government is formulated to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority, n’est-cepas? The question is whether the state, if denied that ability to protect the wealthy few from the many, then has a remaining useful function.”

  “It’s hardly as simple as that, lass,” Thomson protested.

  “I should say not!” Gordon echoed in rare agreement with the Scotsman. And they were off and running.

  I’d said my piece, and I had no dog in this fight, so I mostly listened. Thomson and Gordon argued with passion and enthusiasm; Gabrielle spoke in a simple tone which never seemed to vary in intensity. Her grasp of detail was incredible. The logic and consistency of her arguments were unassailable, provided you accepted the premises upon which they were based. But most importantly, she was tireless. She simply wore Thomson and Gordon down, without appearing to realize that’s what she was doing. When an hour into the argument Intrepid’s captain sent word requesting Thomson’s presence on the bridge, I think it came as a relief to all of us except Gabrielle. Gordon and I bid her farewell at the same time and accompanied Thomson, although Gordon left us as soon as we were away from her.

  * * *

  “Ah, hello, sir,” young Ensign Conroy greeted Thomson as we entered the wheelhouse, and then he nodded to me as well. “Captain’s compliments and he’s occupied at the moment, but we’re getting close to the destination and he thought you might like to see the approach.”

  Conroy handed Thomson a pair of binoculars, but space was at a premium along the broad window at the front
of the wheelhouse. I pointed to the portside hatchway, and Thomson nodded. We made our way out onto the open railed platform they called the bridge wing.

  “Quite a formidable young lady,” Thomson said once we were under open sky. “Badly misinformed, of course, but that’s hardly her fault. I think it would take weeks to untangle all of her misconceptions, and who has the time for that now?”

  “Or the energy,” I added, and he nodded. Even if he could muster the necessary stamina, I wondered who would end up tangled at the end of those weeks, and who untangled, but I kept that to myself.

  “Craft ahead,” the lookout above the wheelhouse called out. “Bearing green zero-one-five, climbing from twenty degrees down-angle. Range four thousand and closing.”

  Ensign Conroy and another officer I didn’t know came out onto the bridge wing to have a better look. Thomson offered me the loaned binoculars, and I took them gratefully. It took a few seconds to find it. It looked like a zeppelin to me—black gas bag with some sort of structure slung underneath. As it was climbing and pointed almost directly at us, it was hard to see much else about it. The lookout had a good pair of eyes; the black gasbag was almost invisible against the dark backdrop of the Alps behind it.

  “One of the old L Zed Fives,” Ensign Conroy said.

  “Bavaria flies one or two of them, as I recall,” the other officer answered. “Probably an escort. Afraid we won’t be able to find Kempten on our own, I imagine. Better call the captain, Mr. Conroy. He may want to exchange honors.”

  “Action stations, sir?” Conroy asked. The other officer hesitated and then shook his head.

  “Captain’s prerogative.”

  Conroy disappeared into the wheelhouse.

  The zeppelin was already noticeably closer. Four thousand yards was only a little over two miles. We were cruising at about twenty knots, and if he was coming on at the same speed, we were closing the distance at almost a mile a minute. Captain Harding emerged from the wheelhouse. He must have been in the chart room right behind it to get here this quickly.