The Trojan Icon (Ethan Gage Adventures Book 8) (5 page)

“Adam Czartoryski’s dream.”

“And Prussia’s nightmare. So these swords in Von Bonin’s hands mean turmoil, while their disappearance gives a chance for reconciliation and restoration. Besides, they belong to Poland. My Adam’s idea is to seize them and secrete them until his nation rises again.”

My Adam.
One wondered, of course, why this former German princess was prepared to foil her husband to serve the foreign minister. “You still love Czartoryski,” I ventured. “Despite Captain Okhotnikov.”

“Captain Alexis gives me pleasure. Adam inflames my heart. Isn’t it amazing how easy it is to forget debts, and how difficult to forget old lovers? It’s awkward now that he’s foreign minister, but feelings don’t conveniently disappear. So I offered to recruit you. Have I succeeded?”

“Tsarina—Elizabeth—I don’t see how Ethan can steal these. They’re buried in a treasury in the biggest fortress in St. Petersburg, surrounded by a thousand men, with no way in but a succession of locked doors.”

“Yes. And yet your husband has a reputation for finding his way into all kinds of improbable places with the help of his ingenious wife. Perhaps you can work your magic and he his science. Will you at least ask him?”

No good could come of this, yet how could I deny our benefactress? And how I longed for a home! “If you insist.”

“You have three days. On the fourth, the Prussians intend to transfer the swords to Berlin.”

“Three days!”

“The swords must vanish. No one must attach their disappearance to you or me.”

Once more I felt we were in a black underground river, reaching for a last gasp of air. “And if we fail?”

“If by some miracle you aren’t killed or arrested, you’ll have to flee Russia. So it’s high risk, but high reward as well.” She took my cold hands in hers again. “If you succeed, I promise that Adam will find a way to persuade the tsar to reward Ethan Gage for his military advice.”

“Reward him how?”

“By giving you a palace in which you can finally raise your son in peace and safety.”

CHAPTER 5

Harry

I
t’s too cold where we live now, but I get to play with a boy named Ivan. And I get to help Papa.

This city is better than the dark place where Mama and I had to stay in the bad days. We killed the bad people, and then we came here.

When I play with Ivan I don’t think about the smelly place. We play soldiers or wooden animals, or sometimes we go outside in the snow. I like snow. Ivan lives in our building and there is a courtyard where we build forts and snowmen until the horses trample and poop too much. Sometimes Papa helps, and then Mama makes hot milk with sugar when we come inside. Ivan doesn’t speak French or English, but he’s taught me Russian words. Snow sounds like sneg.

Sometimes I have bad dreams, so Papa moved my bed next to theirs. My old room is where I help him with his inventions.

The inventions smell again. Grownups do stinky things.

Papa is very smart. He said he learned everything there is to know from an old man named Ben Franklin, who is dead. But Mama may be even smarter because she reads books all the time. I can already read many words. My parents say that if I keep reading I can learn everything there is to know in the world. And they say that if the inventions work, we might live in a palace.

I wouldn’t like to move away from Ivan.

They also say winter will end and it will get warmer, but every day in Russia seems colder to me.

I had to promise not to tell Ivan about our inventions, but here is what we did.

Papa showed me rubber, which is dark and soft. We put this in turpentine, and I liked that smell. The rubber slowly melted and disappeared. Then Mama used the muddy turpentine to paint silk. She said we are making a balloon.

Papa also built a big copper hat with a tube that curled out the top. Then he poured smelly acid over old metal, which made fumes. The hat collected the fumes, but we still had to open the window. Snow blew in while Papa used a pump to fill brown jugs.

Mama said it was that big word she likes, alchemy.

Papa said it was science.

Mama said they were the same.

Papa said they weren’t.

Then they kissed.

Then he made a machine he said could produce invisible lightning. I’m scared of storms, but Papa said this is a tame storm, like a pet. I got to crank the handle. Some wires led to a bar of metal.

“Now comes the magic, Harry,” Papa said. “We’ve made a magnet.”

He held the metal bar over loose nails and they jumped to it like fleas.

I wanted to show Ivan. Papa said I couldn’t.

“Not until summer,” Mama said.

Mama and Papa are very smart. But I don’t know if summer will ever come.

CHAPTER 6

I
hope that Count Stanislaus Podlowski, who fell afoul of mad Tsar Paul and died in the tsar’s island prison, is looking down to appreciate his role in the cause of Polish independence. Prison deaths require a steady stream of plain wooden coffins to be shipped to the Peter and Paul Fortress, and Czartoryski and I used the count’s demise as a way to transfer our strange supplies. I didn’t know the late nobleman, but apparently Podlowski had spoken too openly about Poland and been jailed for his opinion. Cold, disease, and confinement had done the rest.

Now we’d make his sacrifice meaningful.

The patriot’s widow was required to pay for her husband’s casket, as a tax on treason. So she eagerly gave foreign minister Czartoryski permission to use the box for our secret cause. I disguised myself as a Russian laborer, brought along sullen house-servant Gregor to help lift and interpret, filled the coffin with what I needed for my adventure, and fell in with a sleigh convoy delivering eight of the caskets to the prison. It was foggy and the desultory procession took no particular note of us since everyone was busy using ropes, pulleys, and profane grumbling to slide the sledges down to the Neva and across the river to the brooding fort. Then chanting serfs carried the coffins through the Nevsky Gate. Bored sentries offered no help.

Gregor and I stacked the casket marked for Podlowski near the fortress cathedral, at a spot where brief last rites would be recited for the latest dead criminals. The deliveries created a knot of confusion as peasants, priests, soldiers, and bureaucrats mingled for the delivery. I ducked behind the mint, draped a cassock over my clothes, and came back to pay off my servant. I’d given Gregor one extra ruble to reward this special labor, and now gave him another to ensure his silence. I hardly needed to spend it since the truculent servant rarely spoke, but it was a trivial expense from my newly fat purse. Conspiracy comes cheap in Russia.

He grunted what might have been thanks and trudged away to re-cross the frozen river, glowering at all creation.

Disguised as a priest, I edged the other direction and darted briefly inside the cathedral for some necessary mischief. Then I hid in the privy of the cathedral garden, unused in winter when few worshippers visit. It was a two-hole bench uncomfortably sheened with ice, so I consoled myself with the palace I’d soon win. Count Ethan! I recited as I waited. Prince Gage! Life often pokes me with the little end of the horn, as they say, but from descent in Bohemia I’d ascend in Russia, and at some point take my title back to America.

My countrymen positively fawn over nobility, now that we don’t have any. I’d study pretension and dress up my wife.

I listened to the wind blow snow off the Baltic and periodically shifted, so as to not be permanently frozen to my throne. Soon enough it would be dark at this latitude, and I’d set to work.

Mine was a reckless, perilous, intricate, inventive, and risky plan, and thus typical of the ones I come up with. I must not only commit a noble crime, but also prevent any investigation of said crime by vanishing. Success required a conjunction of weather, time, and science worthy of an astronomer, plus no small amount of luck. If I failed I’d probably be imprisoned. Then tortured. And finally either shot, beheaded, or hanged; I wasn’t sure of the Russian custom.

All for antique cutlery! And I had to retrieve the swords tonight, because Lothar Von Bonin was scheduled to take them to Prussia in two days. It was word of his planned retrieval and departure that forced our own scheme in hasty motion. The swords must be well away from St. Petersburg before anyone noticed them missing.

“The transfer is a state secret so the loss won’t be announced,” Czartoryski assured me. “Success will prove God is on Poland’s side.”

“This is more what the devil would come up with, but I’ll take miracles from either party.”

Our St. Petersburg apartment had become a makeshift laboratory, my wife the collaborating scientist, and my son a sorcerer’s apprentice. The lad is as clever as his mama, and while he’s seen more of the world’s underbelly than I’d prefer it has made him a precocious adventurer. Like any boy, Harry ordinarily just wants to play and read, but he’s proud to help Papa and is cursed with his parents’ curiosity. More than once, with some guilt and a great deal of self-justification, I’ve pressed him into risky tasks. He’s big enough to be brave, old enough to follow instructions, and small enough to squirm into tight places. Wretched lad! He’ll make a fine treasure hunter one day.

Harry was waiting for me right now. It was imperative he not be jailed, so my strictest instruction was that he stay in his hiding place only until full morning and then, if I didn’t appear as promised, sneak back home.

Which meant that my operation had to advance as inexorably as a lighted fuse.

The Peter and Paul Cathedral closed at dusk. I peeked out. Doors were locked by black-clad Orthodox priests who marched back to their fortress rectory like a procession of bulky crows. I froze in my privy an additional hour, to make sure no one lingered or returned, and then crept to a church window overlooking the marble tombs inside. I hauled up the sash I’d unlatched in my brief visit hours before. I crawled through, locked the window, turned, and confirmed I had the church to myself. Pale light sifted from the snowy gloom outside.

The cathedral was a baroque masterpiece, with enough gold, marble, porphyry, jasper, serpentine, onyx, alabaster, and crystal to make anyone a Christian. A soaring ceiling promised Heaven to the stark royal tombs below, each marble sarcophagus badged with a horizontal bronze Orthodox cross. I shivered at the magnificence, crossed myself just in case, and then lifted a bar on a side door, cracking it to peer for sentries. They were all in shelter. I scampered out, burrowed in the snow to my coffin and its supplies, and left the container empty for poor Count Podlowski. By dawn, wind and fresh flakes would cover my disturbance.

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.