Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

Unless one of Colonel Rice’s Guardsmen carrying handguns or Agent Drummond’s marksmen with rifles saw and shot Lucan Adler before he struck.

Holmes knew they wouldn’t.

His watch, which he had laid on the floor in the narrow strip of light coming in, said precisely eleven o’clock when the orchestra played “Hail to the Chief” as President Cleveland climbed the stairs to the speakers’ platform. Curled and cramped because of the massive insulated wires filling so much of the space in the steel base, Holmes kept his vigil through the slit but saw no movement. The president was now an easy target for Lucan’s ’93 Mauser—if that’s what he chose—from a hundred other places surrounding the open square massed with people. Holmes guessed correctly from the noise of the applause given the president’s arrival and the first of the speakers—voices barely audible to Holmes—that the crowd must be lining both sides of the Lagoon all the way back to and possibly through the Peristyle, spilling out into every side street and out onto the pier itself.

Holmes knew the schedule to the second, so that he knew they’d already fallen at least three minutes behind schedule when the crowd quieted as a blind chaplain gave the Opening Day blessing.

After the debacle of the previous autumn’s endless (and freezing) Dedication Day Ceremony, Daniel Burnham and the other Fair directors had decided to keep this opening ceremony as short as possible. But almost a full hour had passed between the president’s arrival on the speakers’ platform—Holmes heard faint echoes of badly written Odes to Columbus and other time wasters—and Director-General Davis rising to speak briefly and then introduce the president.

Through his east-facing slit, Holmes could see the supposedly locked door of the base of the searchlight at the far east end of the Observation Deck swing open silently. Lucan Adler uncurled himself from the dark space, reached in, and pulled out a long, cloth-covered object. He shook off the black cloth and, even from this distance, Holmes could see that it was indeed the ’93 Mauser with the five-round clip and an attached 20X telescopic sight.

Holmes kicked his own door open, got to his feet, and began walking straight toward Lucan.

For two hours Henry James stood near the inoperative elevator and heard would-be president-seers express their anger and frustration at not being able to travel to the Observation Deck promenade. But now the president was about to be introduced—the huge hall had emptied out around him and James could faintly hear voices through the opened doors—and James stood alone near the elevator.

Until a few minutes before noon, that is, when a well-dressed woman perhaps in her early forties, a woman with auburn hair, a strong chin, high cheekbones, and violet eyes, came up to him and said, “Are you by any chance the writer Henry James?”

Blinking at being recognized in public, not something that happened to him in America, James said, “Why, yes, I am.”

He was about to tip his hat to her when the woman took an ugly-looking and obviously heavy revolver pistol from her cloth handbag and aimed at James’s belly.

“Take out the key,” she said. “Open these two gates. And then take me up.”

James hurried to comply although he almost fumbled and dropped the key at the outer gate and fussed too long with the elevator cage door as well. She all but pushed him into the lift cage and stepped in behind him, the pistol still trained on him.

“Take me up,” she said. “Quickly.”

James jerked the lever too far to the left, causing the car to lurch up like a rocket, and then he compensated too far to the right, causing it to slow to a near stop only forty feet above the floor.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” snapped the woman, moved James aside, and pushed the lever left so that the elevator hurtled upward.

Lucan Adler, even leaner and more aquiline in profile than his famous father, had settled in against and partially behind the large searchlight, the Mauser braced on one of the light’s metal ridges. Squeezed in between the Observation Deck’s fence and the searchlight as Lucan was, Holmes doubted whether he offered a clear target to any of Drummond’s men, even if they’d caught his brief movement out and up.

Lucan finished adjusting the telescopic sight with a tiny screwdriver he set back into his shirt pocket—he was wearing no jacket of any kind—and held the Mauser aimed at the president who was in the process of being introduced. But Lucan was also watching Sherlock Holmes approach and was smiling.

When Holmes was about twenty-five long paces away, Lucan swung the rifle in his direction and said, “Stop.”

Holmes stopped.

“I can get off three rounds in less than two seconds,” said Lucan Adler and Holmes was surprised by the metallic sharpness of his voice. Nothing like his mother’s voice. Perhaps more like his father’s, Holmes could not be sure.

“Two into the fatboy president’s chest and the third round into your belly before you get five feet closer,” added Lucan. “If you move your hands toward your jacket or any pocket, I’ll kill you first and put two or three rounds into the president before anyone looks up to see what the first noise was.”

Holmes knew that he could and would do precisely that. He stood very still.

The president had not begun his short address, but Director-General Davis’s introduction was winding down. Holmes knew, and Holmes knew that Lucan knew, that when Davis had introduced Cleveland and the oversized president actually stood at the podium, there’d be a full 90-seconds of “Hail, Columbia” being played and the added time and noise of the audience’s loud approval.

The rifle shot killing Holmes during that time wouldn’t be heard by anyone down there in the din and probably not by Drummond’s sharpshooters either.

Holmes looked at the guy wire that ran from the post at the corner where Lucan hid himself and ran almost three hundred feet out to the warning beacon in the lake. He’d known that Lucan would rig some device there, but the simplicity of it was impressive: just a flywheel atop the wire within a welded unfinished square of metal to hold the wheel on the cable, with a modified bicycle handlebars, completely covered with rubber grips, hanging below it.

“Elegant,” said Holmes, nodding toward the escape apparatus. He was sure that a fast powerboat was waiting at anchor next to that tiny beacon island of concrete. “But the police and Secret Service already know about the Zephyr .”

Lucan Adler shrugged and smirked. “The Zephyr was always meant to be a distraction.”

Davis introduced the president and the band and chorus launched into “Hail, Columbia” as the president came up to the low podium. Holmes did not turn his head to look over his right shoulder to see it.

Lucan Adler raised the rifle higher, sighting it on Holmes’s chest. “Use just your left hand,” Lucan said, just loud enough to be heard over the roar of noise below, “and take off your jacket, waistcoat, and shirt. Quickly! If you don’t have them all off in thirty seconds I’ll shoot.”

Holmes’s left hand fumbled with buttons and clasps. But before thirty seconds were up—just a third of the scheduled time for the music and pre-presidential jubilation below—Holmes was standing naked from the waist up.

Lucan continued looking through the sight. “Two exit wounds. Nice cluster for the distance. Turn around. Now .”

Holmes turned and looked back toward the searchlight under which he’d hidden for the past six hours.

“Oh, that third entry scar looks very nasty, Mr. Holmes,” hissed Lucan. “Is that bullet still in there? No, I think not. Did some humble Tibetan shepherd gouge around with a rusty spoon to dig it out? My, that must still be painful. Turn around and look at me! Now .”