Gossamer Wing Read online

  “So you say,” Dubois grunted. “We should be keeping a closer eye on your former agency colleagues, Martin. Perhaps they are slipping in and out of the factory unnoticed by your team? Negotiating in secret on behalf of their turncoat masters? It wouldn’t be the first time.”

  Those turncoats are the ruling party now, Martin thought. And my former colleagues are already as close as you might wish. Why, young Marguerite sat right outside Dubois’s door each day, and a great deal closer than that on occasion, earning her keep on her back as Dubois’s “secretaries” had always done and relaying everything she learned back to the Égalité spymasters who were her true employers. Martin had recognized the girl for what she was very early on. It amused him to think that the Égalité still thought Dubois merited that sort of attention. Dubois had no idea he was under such close surveillance. He had always had a blind spot when it came to female agents. Even after Simone . . .

  “Monsieur Martin?”

  The girl’s soft voice startled Martin, who glanced away from the gray sky outside the window to see her bland, unremarkably pretty face just a few feet away. She was holding a cup of tea toward him, and he wondered how long she’d been standing there with it as he woolgathered.

  “Thank you.”

  He took the cup and waited until Marguerite turned her back. Then he poured the tea into the soil of the large potted fern by the window, as he always did. He didn’t trust the little agent not to poison him, to get him out of the way. Sometimes Martin wondered whether he was the one being spied upon, not Dubois. He wouldn’t put it past his former employers to keep a watch on their not-so-lost lamb.

  “Hardison isn’t spending all his time meeting with Murcheson,” Martin offered up, ready to give up a piece of his carefully hoarded knowledge if it meant a few days’ respite from Dubois’s sniping. “He’s using one of Murcheson’s boats, and leaving from a little-used dock near the factory. He and his new baroness have been spending quite a lot of time sailing on the harbor, it seems.”

  “In this weather? Why?”

  “It’s their honeymoon. Who knows why they’re doing anything? Perhaps they simply enjoy fucking on boats in the rain. You know how odd Americans can be.” Martin looked out the window again, noting that the rain had died down once more. A hint of blue peeked through the oppressive clouds here and there, and even the occasional beam of sunlight. He had always enjoyed the view of the harbor from this window, but today it seemed too exposed for some reason. Tiny hairs on Martin’s back rose as he registered a growing sense that he was being watched by unseen eyes.

  Marguerite. He turned to catch a glimpse of her face looking in his direction, barely visible through the open door between Dubois’s office and the anteroom where the girl sat at her desk. She looked away instantly, but not before Martin saw the open curiosity, the sharp intelligence, the face she hid from them every day as she pretended to be a secretary with loose morals.

  “I don’t want you here when Gendreau arrives tomorrow,” Dubois said, reclaiming Martin’s attention. “He might recognize you, and that would make him uneasy. He’s certain to suspect you’re still working for the government, no matter how I reassure him. Never mind that nothing could be further from the truth, eh?”

  “Why is he coming to see you here? It seems too public.”

  “He swears he’s turning legitimate,” Dubois replied with a snort. “He even traveled back to the country under his real name. He’s already run through all the money he earned from skimming and bribes and side contracts during his years as a public servant. Now he wants a chance to do the same thing in private industry. He comes on bended knee, for all he pretends to be a powerful man. He claims to have a business partnership in mind, but he has little to offer. He’s all but destitute, and the market for his more specialized trinkets is nonexistent where he is. My man in Portugal says he’s spent all his remaining capital on a workshop, but it’s useless to him at the moment. Gendreau was never more than a middling tinkerer himself, his real talent was in finding and hiring geniuses who lacked the common sense to realize he’d steal all the credit for their work. “

  “I see,” Martin nodded. His own contacts had already suggested as much. He had learned never to rely on Dubois’s information alone. “Then why are you agreeing to see him?”

  “He still knows people. I think this engine design of his is unpromising, but he may have made progress with other inventions during the war. And he still has some powerful friends who may be useful in encouraging the new steamrail minister to show preference to the local bidder.”

  “These friends of Gendreau’s are the same people you supported before the Treaty of Calais was signed? The ones who didn’t want the treaty at all, and would be just as happy to see it violated? If those are Gendreau’s friends he may be more dangerous than useful in the current political climate, monsieur.”

  Dubois’s piggy little eyes narrowed even more as he glared at his pet spy. His fingers strayed as if instinctively to the jacket pocket where he kept the remote control that determined whether Martin lived or died. “I’ve warned you before, Martin, not to talk politics. I don’t pay you to see eye to eye with me, I pay you to do what you’re told.”

  He liked it, Martin knew, when he could throw Martin’s Égalité loyalties back in his face. Dubois might act offended, but he enjoyed the fact that Martin despised everything he stood for. Not that Dubois stood for anything on principle; it was all self-interest with him, and always had been. Martin often wished he’d learned that about Dubois a bit sooner.

  “My only concern is your safety, naturally,” Martin demurred, pretending to ignore Dubois’s smirk. “I’ll be out of sight for the meeting, but never too far away.”

  * * *

  THE AFTERNOON FLIGHT was riskier because of the sun’s relative position in the sky, and Charlotte felt the tautness of her nerves as a vague discomfort in the harness, an overawareness of her movements as she controlled the Gossamer Wing. She usually did it all without thinking, as though the airship were an extension of her body.

  This is when mistakes happen, she told herself, and wished she could turn around instead of continuing to waft along an updraft leading north and east to the coast. But she had a job to do, so she focused her helmet optics on the now-familiar window below.

  Her heart began to thump when she saw the profile and realized who was in that office, meeting with the philandering industrialist. It was indeed Maurice Gendreau. Murcheson’s suspicions were confirmed.

  Charlotte tweaked the little knob that fine-tuned her sonic amplificator, and nudged the direction indicator slightly to focus in on the window.

  She heard a snatch of French, a wave of interference from the glass, and then a clear stream of words as the onetime spy approached the window.

  “Mother of—” A sudden gust stole the words from Charlotte’s lips and she struggled to level the Gossamer Wing against the buffeting. The sound connection cut in and out, and she nudged her jaw to the right to zoom the ocular device in on the window. It was too far for her to even attempt lip-reading, however.

  Determined to gather as much information as possible, Charlotte curled her fingers around the altitude control, pondering whether to risk getting closer. She knew the Gossamer Wing might be seen if she ventured too low, but the urge to learn more was nearly overwhelming. A catch like this would secure a future for the dirigible, and Charlotte, in the Agency.

  Just as she began to pull the handle she caught a glimpse of something, a flash of light, on the rooftop of the office building. Jerking her hand away from the controls, she refocused from the window to the area the flash had come from.

  Another flash hit her directly in the eyes. Banking sharply to change her angle, she thanked the heavens for Dexter’s foresight in supplying the oculars with special photoreactive shielding against glare. Even with the shielding, she was all but blinded for a few moments.
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  Was it a piece of broken glass, or perhaps a skylight catching a stray sunbeam? When her dazzled eyes began to clear she wiggled her chin and perused the area once more, in time to see a tall, thin figure disappear behind the roof access door. He had something in his hand, a slender brass tube with a horribly familiar look to it.

  * * *

  “YOU DON’T KNOW for certain it was a spyglass,” Dexter reasoned for perhaps the third time since they had turned the boat back toward Honfleur.

  “But we have to assume it was,” she explained, also for the third time, “because that’s the worst-case scenario. And before you start in again, we cannot assume he was up there spying on a pretty clerk one block over. Or the handsome butcher’s boy, or a rival shipping agent. The glass reflected off the sun that was roughly behind me. We have to assume he was looking for me. And that he found me.”

  “Fine,” he capitulated. “What do we do next, if that’s the case? Do you resign from the mission? Get on the next ship back to New York?”

  Charlotte pressed her hands over her eyes, still suffering a headache from the harsh sunlight and harsher reflection. The glare off the water didn’t help. “We tell Murcheson, and probably proceed as though nothing had happened until we know more. We’ll also need to search the room thoroughly and if we find nothing, we assume the bugs are there but we simply haven’t found them. And we remain alert.”

  “Are you all right, Charlotte?”

  “Are you mad? Of course I’m not all right. Murcheson is sure to scratch my real mission now, if he doesn’t send me home outright. Three days into my first real assignment and I’ve already been—”

  “I meant your eyes. You look as though you have a headache.” His voice was a little too level, too placid. Charlotte did not especially want to be appeased or pacified. She hated the idea that he was humoring her.

  “I do, but I’ll survive it.”

  “When we get back to Atlantis I’ll ask Smith-Grenville to hunt down some headache powder.”

  “Dexter, the headache is the least of my worries. It should be the least of yours.”

  He frowned, flexing his fingers over the rudder of the little craft then gripping tightly enough for a moment that the wood creaked ominously. Then he relaxed and shrugged. “It’s the only worry I can do anything about.”

  * * *

  THEIR MEETING WITH Murcheson ran longer than usual that afternoon. They relayed the limited intelligence Charlotte had gathered—the fact of the meeting with Gendreau if not its substance—and Charlotte reluctantly added her concerns about the dark figure on the rooftop. Despite the furor over her possibly being spotted, Murcheson and the station head, Admiral Neeley, asked her to remain and discuss the prospect of a recruiting push for other female pilots, while Dexter joined his team in the bowels of the station.

  When Charlotte finally left her meeting and found Dexter, he was embroiled in some fierce physics argument that couldn’t be stopped midstream. She wandered back down to the submersible laboratory to wait for him, and spent a troubled hour attempting to convince herself that the minuscule craft wasn’t really that small after all.

  It was nearly sunset when they reemerged from the inconspicuous side door in the nondescript factory building. When Charlotte lifted a gloved hand to shield her eyes from the sudden unexpected glare, she realized the white kid was ruined with dark smudges of lubricant and inexplicable black scuff marks from handling the newly built equipment in the sub. She made a mental note to ask for some coveralls next time, and to remove her gloves before entering the vessel. She might as well outfit herself properly for the sub, since it seemed her tenure as an aerial surveillance expert was due to end abruptly; if she didn’t quickly make herself indispensable in some alternative way she’d be shipped back to the Dominions before she knew it. Not that the submersible would have been her choice if she had any other alternative at all.

  Coming out again into daylight was disorienting, like leaving a matinee and being startled to find it still light outside. When Dexter offered his arm she took it, stepping briskly to keep up with the men. Mr. Murcheson was back in his jovial factory-owner mode, and spouted a vast number of sales statistics that Charlotte ignored as they returned to the steam car.

  “And finally, my dear Baroness, a gift. Something to charm you and perhaps inspire your husband to broaden the scope of his own work.”

  Through the open window of the car he handed her a curio box, an oddly heavy cube of carved teak with a delicate marquetry pattern of shaded woods and mother-of-pearl on each side. Brass gleamed at the corners, but there was no other hardware in evidence. Charlotte turned the box over and over, finally looking back up at Murcheson with a skeptically arched eyebrow.

  “I thank you, sir.” She wondered if the present was meant to soften a parting blow. Murcheson had declined to give her a definite yes or no on whether she would still be sent on her mission to retrieve the weapon plans.

  “I’ll be interested to learn how long it takes you to open it, my lady. And Hardison, I look forward to hearing what devious new uses you think up for it. We’re already planning to outfit our surveillance teams with your modified cable crawlers.”

  He rapped smartly on the roof of the car, and the driver shifted from idle to get the vehicle rolling. Charlotte could see Murcheson waving, until the car turned back down the long drive that led away from the factory, back to the road to Honfleur.

  “May I?”

  Dexter pried the box from her hands without waiting for an answer. Charlotte chuckled at his obvious eagerness. “By all means. Tricksy, isn’t he? I suspect the box is just for added veracity, since I’ve made such a fuss about them. Either that or he’s deliberately trying to confuse me, just for sport.”

  “Mmm.” His fingers, long and thick, were nevertheless dexterous; he handled the little trinket as delicately as an egg. Charlotte suppressed a shiver at the sight, and admonished herself for the inappropriate reaction.

  Best to simply let it slide into the past. With her mission now literally and figuratively up in the air, Charlotte needed all the focus she could muster.

  “Have you solved Murcheson’s mechanical problem yet? I gather they expected you would have it all sorted out the first day you arrived.”

  “Their problem is not, strictly speaking, mechanical,” Dexter muttered, his mind seeming more attentive to the problem in his hand than the one back at the submersible station. “It’s geological.”

  She waited for him to clarify that, but he offered nothing, simply continued to examine and delicately prod the box. She was sorely tempted to demand it back.

  Instead, she turned her mind to the submersible with which she’d just spent an afternoon further acquainting herself. The Gilded Lily was a little jewel-box of a vehicle, each part beautifully, even lovingly, constructed. An engine not unlike that of the tunnel tram gave it a surprisingly long range with very little noise. Built to echo the lean lines of a shark, it would slice through the water like a keen-edged blade.

  It’s precisely my cup of tea, she told herself sternly.

  For all its wonders, however, Charlotte couldn’t bring herself to enjoy piloting it. She could barely bring herself to contemplate getting in the thing again. Her mouth grew dry as she remembered the experiences of that afternoon.

  When the technician had offered to take her for a short trip, she had been excited only until the hatch closed over their heads. From that moment on, she’d been nearly frantic to escape the close, suffocating atmosphere within the cabin of gleaming metal and reinforced glass. The water had seemed heavy and threatening, as though she could feel every bit of the pressure that weighed on the tiny craft. Minutes had passed like hours, and she had practically sobbed her relief when the Gilded Lily resurfaced in the docking bay and she could open the hatch and breathe again.

  Charlotte was chagrined at how thoroughly fear had ruled her today.
Her response made her all the more determined to give the sub another try and get the better of the dread.

  “As good as your airship?”

  “What?” She turned her head sharply, irritated at having her reverie interrupted. Dexter was staring at her, the curio box apparently no longer of interest.

  “The submersible. Will it be as good as your airship? Get you out and away from the things of man? It might be a ready substitute, if Murcheson and his men decide the Gossamer Wing is too risky after today’s incident. You could move from field-testing one to the other. Dubois’s office is close enough to the water that you might not even have to change targets.”

  She couldn’t quite tell if he was teasing her. His brown eyes were warm and kind, but then they usually were. The subtle crinkles at the corners were always there, whether he was joking or not, as if he’d spent too many hours squinting at tiny device parts. The corners of his mouth turned up too, sometimes with a wry curl but usually seeming predisposed to good humor. Now was one of the wry times.

  Charlotte bit her lower lip against the impulse to place a kiss right there, at the slightly sarcastic corner of Dexter’s mouth. Returning her gaze to his eyes, she found, did nothing to make her feel more in control. This was a small space and he filled it, as he had a propensity for doing. She could not have him filling her spaces this way.

  “Not here,” she said, nodding toward the front of the carriage. The car might be Murcheson’s, the driver his employee, but that hardly meant he needed to hear everything they had to say. Their room too was almost certainly compromised. Dexter would have to search it for bugs before they slept that night.