The Pinkerton Files Five-Book Bundle (28 page)

If the hoodoos were involved, I did not want them to get their hands on
Harris. He seemed a good fellow. I knew what they would do to him.

“What should we do?” I asked Webster.

The corpse's irises floated in dead eyes. It was a kind of answer.
Looking into the ghastly face gave me an idea. I remembered things about the
hoodoos. Hard as it was to face those memories, I had a notion of how to help
Harris.

I turned the cart and pushed it back to the center of town. Being with
Webster made me calm. He had my back in a way. He would protect me. It occurred
to me that this was his final case.

I followed the commotion down to the waterfront. The scene that greeted
me was hard to understand. A crowd was gathered outside an office building near
the docks. Harris and a remaining handful of soldiers stood firm with guns
drawn. He was trying to convince a mixed group of dock workers, sailors, slaves
and even a pair of businessmen to disperse.

Harris yelled at crane operators to stop lifting a section of the
office building away from its mooring. He was trying to get the situation under
control and looked like he was caught off guard by the immediate hostility of
the locals.

The crane was braced against a wall, pulling a kind of temporary annex
off the main structure of the office building. Operators continued to lift
despite his order to stop. The annex looked like a transport container dressed
up as a rickshaw apartment. Harris' soldiers fired a warning shot at the
control station.

The pair of businessmen stamped their feet in protest. One looked to be
on the brink of death. His skin was a disgusting shade of yellow and brown. The
other was tall and fit. He made a bigger show of pointing fingers. Harris was
having none of it. He turned a pistol on them and took steady aim. The men in
suits found their courage depleted and stepped carefully away.

With that, Harris took charge and his soldiers surrounded the crane.
The brief conflict looked to be over. I had half a mind to wheel Webster back
to the cemetery.

At that point, more men came running from the docks. They were ready
for real trouble. Each came armed with a gun and powder. They formed a tight
line in front of the Confederate deserters. Harris and his soldiers were in no
position to sustain or return fire.

There was a pause. Neither side knew what to do.

The woman I saw in Shreveport emerged from the crowd. She was dressed
in prim southern fashion, all frills and chiffon. Sure enough, she was the same
hoodoo witch I watched pull a vial of poison from inside the torso of a slave
in Shreveport. She oversaw the operation down there and was now in Wilmington,
presumably to ensure those barges full of slaves were delivered. That was a
dangerous lady.

She ordered her men to open fire. They responded without hesitation.
Three of Harris' unit fell in the first brutal volley. This left only a pair of
terrified soldiers standing next to Harris to fend off the attack. They were
pinned, trapped between the crane and the annex being lifted away. If I was
going to do what I planned, now was the time.

I looked at Webster. Again, his grisly face gave me a boost of
confidence.

I walked down the street in full view. As I approached the office
building and crane, the crowd bearing down on Harris shifted its attention. Men
stopped loading their guns. The two businessmen stood dumbfounded with their
mouths hanging open. The woman in charge turned and her eyes opened wide at the
sight of me.

I was naked above the waist. The melee gauntlet was on my right arm but
my chest was bare. This gave everyone a full view of my hoodoo ritual scars.

I got those scars a long time before. I was just a boy. I had a boy's
sense of what was smart and what was stupid. I followed a girl into a bad
crowd. I dreamed of being a raindrop running down the nape of her neck. I
thought I was in love. How else do people get into trouble in this world?

The scars form a crescent and a cross that stretch across my chest
between the shoulders. The crescent point ends below a puncture wound in my
armpit where a shaman tried to insert a tube into my heart. If the narcotic
they tricked me into breathing had not lost its potency, and I had not thrashed
for my life in that reeking cellar, they would have turned me into something
other than a man.

Anyone familiar with hoodoo ceremony would recognize those marks. They
would also understand the challenge I yelled at the crowd.

“Sango.”

They froze. I held my arms over my head.

“Sango!”

I had no real idea what I was doing. I wanted to give Harris and his
soldiers a reprieve to gather their wits before the gunfight resumed. I
expected a reply to come from the woman I saw in Shreveport. Instead, it came
from a hushed and girlish voice near the back of the crowd.

“Sango Bodagris.”

The woman fell to her knees. In her place, a tiny slave girl stepped
forward to face me. This was the high priest of their hoodoo cult.   

I am not fool enough to say that dark spirits pressed on me at that
moment. I am no believer. But I was intimidated. That little girl scared me.
She shook her open palms. I think she was casting a spell.

I responded in kind. This was my moment. As she conjured spirits
against me, I reached behind and lifted Webster's body into the air with the
gauntlet. Hoodoos prize one thing above all else. To them, mastery over the
dead is the highest power a human can achieve. I held Webster. I showed them.
This is what I brought to the fight.

Only Harris recognized my display as a stalling tactic. He knew I was
no mystic. Harris climbed the side of the crane and aimed his pistol square in
the operator's face. The crane stopped with a jolt. The annex swayed in limbo.

A glance from the little girl is all it took to get it moving again.
The operator did not want to get shot in the face. Whatever the high priestess
held in store for betrayers must have been worse. Harris screamed at him to
stop but the annex continued to rise. If Harris had been a proper fighting
soldier, he would have shot the man without a thought. He was not a solider. He
was a border guard.

“Shoot him in the shoulder,” I yelled.

Harris fired. The crane bucked and the annex dropped back. With that,
men from the docks opened fire again. The last of Harris' troops dropped. He
would not last much longer.

No one fired at me. They were too afraid of the dead. I did not wait to
see how long my luck would last. Holding Webster as a shield, I ran to the
crane. Harris took cover behind me. The only safe place for us was on top of
the annex.

I put Webster down and used the gauntlet to toss Harris. He spun into
cables hanging from the crane then crashed onto the roof. With Webster over my
shoulder, I climbed the scaffold to join him.

I could see all the way to the harbor. Slaves shipped in barges from
Shreveport were now headed out to open sea. It did not make sense. The boats
were headed north. They would be snared by Lincoln's blockade for sure. It was
typical southern hoodoo craziness.

Two of the boats shoving off from the Wilmington harbor did not carry
any slaves. The only items loaded onto those ships were furnaces. Twenty sets
of turbines came from the smelting plants and lumber yards. There may have been
more.

“What now?” Harris asked.

Gunmen formed lines below. We were not as safe as I hoped. Bullets
sliced the lip of the annex. Once shooters got their bearings, we would be cut
down. They were already pushing us back.

“Inside,” I said.     

One last idea came to mind. It made me feel awful but I could not see
any other way to stall the gunfire. I lifted Webster's body and, holding it at
arm's length, I walked to the edge. From the ground, all they saw was Webster.
The shooting stopped instantly. The crowd gaped at the dead man, dripping gore.

I let go. Webster tipped over the side. The sight of him falling sent
people into a screeching panic. His body turned as it dropped. Those glassy
eyes looked back at me one last time.

Godspeed, Timothy Webster. 

I used the gauntlet to tear a hole in the annex roof. A smell of
incense wafted up through the opening. Harris was the first to jump down. I
heard a woman scream inside then a dull thud and crash. I followed. My feet
landed on soft carpet. The interior looked like the den of a small apartment.

Kate Warne stood in front of me, clenching a baton. She looked about
ready to knock my head off. Two men were unconscious on the floor beside her.
One was Harris. I did not recognize the other.

“Stark?”

“Darling, your husband is arrived.”

*   *   *

Repository Note:

I thought it would be harder to hand my whole life over to police. I
braced myself for probing questions, embarrassing admissions and so on. I
thought there would be layers to peel back. Instead, it was a simple matter of
signing a few papers and writing down a couple of passwords. With that,
everything they wanted to know about me came spilling out, easy as cracking an
egg.

It's better this way, I guess. I can't concentrate anymore. After I got
the call from the hospital, I spent the better part of a day locked in my
bedroom sobbing and hating myself. One of my people died. He was my intern. He
opened the bomb, thinking it would be helpful to sort my mail. The explosion
cracked his skull. Doctors tried to bring the swelling down in his brain. I
can't think about it.

The death changed things for police. It shifted the bombing into a new
category. Now they're asking for access to confidential personnel records from
the Library; anyone who ever touched the Pinkerton archive. I refused but
Hirsch told me the request was just a courtesy. Cops could just get a warrant.
All they wanted were new leads and connections. No one was being accused. I
believed him. Still, I made them get the damned warrant.

The investigation isn't getting anywhere. Rather, it just keeps
circling back to the same place, over and over. Who was the man in New
Carthage? How did he come to possess those Pinkerton records and why share them
with us? I didn't have those answers. I never even met him face to face.

Hirsch told me they wanted more. Could I remember anything else? He
seemed embarrassed to be pressing me so hard. I asked what was going on. Hirsch
told me police intercepted a letter. It was addressed to me and came from New
Carthage. The cops had kept it from me and even opened it without my consent.
The letter was from
him
and it had to do with the bombing.

—Diane Larimer, Chief Archivist, United States Library of Congress

*   *   *

Robert Pinkerton
December, 1861

Dr. Lowe brought the Protocol out of cloud cover and we coasted above
rolling hills where the battle of Bull Run took place. Everywhere, remnants of
that terrible fight were in plain view. Deep burrows carved into the earth by a
Confederate trench cutter slashed and bisected the terrain. Those underground
trenches allowed southern soldiers to march beneath, and emerge behind, Union
lines. Northerners were caught off guard. Bull Run was a complete slaughter.

I looked down at iron footings where Confederate forces mounted the
trench cutter. I had stood at that very spot after jumping from a dirigible
owned by an Agency client, the PWB railway company. Fugitive outlaw William
Hunt had conspired with PWB and New York Police Superintendent John Kennedy to
supply the machine. Kate saved me from a vain attempt to destroy it, then she
knocked an airship clean out of the sky to prevent Robert Anderson from joining
the battle. For all those efforts, she was accused of treason and I was left
with a shattered body.

Debris from Anderson's airship was in view beneath me as well. It was
one pile of rubble among many. What I could not see were bodies. So many men
died yet every single body had been carried away. That added to the eeriness of
the place. It is clear that something awful happened there but the real toll
has been wiped clean.

I was scanning the hills, remembering that eventful and bitter day,
when the PWB dirigible came into view. I was astounded. The whole idea seemed
so impossible. Once I saw it up close, however, there was no room for doubt.
That was the same dirigible I had flown to Bull Run. Its loading bay doors were
still open. I had jumped from that platform down to the battlefield.

Before jumping, I used a switchbox device salvaged from the Golden
Circle case to control the dirigible and hold it in position over Bull Run.
That device had been extremely useful, able to process vast amounts of data and
even make impromptu adjustments to minute calculations. We would never have
prevented the assassination attempt against President Lincoln or uncovered the
trench cutter without the switchbox. I grudgingly accepted that it would be
destroyed along with the PWB dirigible.

Yet here it was. Dr. Lowe had the notion of testing a new weapon system
by destroying the seemingly aimless dirigible. It was to be his target
practice. I convinced him to board it instead so we could see what became of
the switchbox.

That was an obvious problem. My surgeries were extreme. Dr. Lowe and
his surgeons stitched bones in my face together with filament wire. Tendons
near my elbow were extended with leather bands. These were too thick to be
packed under my skin so were stretched over my forearm then connected to
fingers on my hand. Fragments of a compacted shin were removed and reconfigured.
Bits of steel were melted into the cracks like solder. When those doctors told
me it would be weeks before I could walk, I believed them. Crossing from the
Protocol to the PWB dirigible in midflight was beyond me.