William Dietrich - The Emerald Storm

I’m nothing if not opinionated, and right more often than I’m listened to.

Another ball punched a hole in our coach, the hole as round as a trollop’s lips, its appearance jerking me out of my civic reverie. The other confederate hanging on our stern fired a pistol in reply. We were being chased.

“Gage, I’m told you’re something of a shot?”

“With an American long rifle. Mine, alas, was lost to a dragon in Tripoli.”

Frotte raised his eyebrows but decided not to pursue this history. He thrust the musket into my hands. “Can you slow them while I reload the shotgun?”

I don’t think I’m so much an expert marksman as a sensible one, so I picked up the piece, leaned out my window, looked back, and considered the situation. At least three men were atop a coach chasing us: the driver and two renegade policemen struggling to reload their own guns. I figured my first shot was critical, since I might not get another. Yet muskets are notoriously inaccurate, and even more so from a bouncing platform.

I could aim for the coachman.

Or, his propulsion.

“Take a corner!” I shouted.

I felt our speed dangerously slacken to make a turn into another twisting lane, our pursuers whooping as they closed the distance. Then we scraped the side of a house, hub squealing, sparks flashing, and with a cry and crack of whip we accelerated again. I leaned farther out. Our foes were making the same turn, their driver swearing. At the moment their horses and harness had made the corner, but the coach had yet to follow, I fired at my biggest target, a lead animal. The horse fell in its harness, dragging its companion sideways, and by doing so the coach crashed where we’d scraped. The frame exploded, and occupants flew. A mess of horse, harness, wheels, and men tumbled into the street.

Frotte pounded my shoulder. “Perfect shot, Gage!”

“It was perfect, because it was easiest,” I said modestly. I peered back. The coach’s disintegration was particularly satisfying after my torture, and no one else seemed to be following. So I flopped against the seat back and watched Frotte finish loading his own gun, the ramrod chattering as our vehicle rattled and he tamped down buckshot.

“Who are those rogues?”

“Renegades, Jacobins, freebooters, and pirates.”

That seemed to cover most mischief I could think of. “And now, what of my wife, son, and emerald?”

“We’re going to meet her in a house outside the city and set you on a course to retrieve not just the stone, but more treasure than you’ve ever imagined.”

“More treasure?” Was this bunch lunatic, too? “But I’ve retired.”

“Not anymore. You’re working for England now.”

“What?”

“We’re your newest friends. Gage, your proper alliance is with Britain. Surely Bonaparte has taught that by now.”

“And the cost of this alliance?”

“Breaking the King of Saint-Domingue out of Napoleon’s grimmest prison, and solving a mystery that has baffled men for almost three hundred years.”

Any man is flattered by a job offer, not stopping to think he’s probably being asked to do something the employer prefers not to do himself. So I’d felt for a moment that maybe I was lucky after all, until Frotte made clear he’d saved me for what sounded like certain suicide. We pulled our coach into a barn at a farm outside Paris, hiding it from pursuing police, and came into a stone house with plank floors, hand-hewn beams, and a blaze in a fireplace big enough to roast a goat. Astiza was impatiently waiting, anxious and angry, and our son was nowhere to be seen.

“Where’s Harry?”

The trouble with love is that it exaggerates other emotions as well, from lust to disgust. Now she looked at me with an expression of agonized loss and frustrated regret that cut to the quick. Happiness had turned to horror in an instant. I was taken aback, and felt guilt without thinking myself entirely guilty. Imagine a painting of paradise that you could magically step into so that a viewer identifies you with all things sweet and serene. This magic happens to lovers, in lovely places, all the time. Now imagine a painting of hell. It was as if Astiza were studying damnation, and I’d wandered into her view.

It was unfair, and yet why did I, the father, have to ask her where my own son was? I felt the shame that comes from miscalculation, and the emptiness that drops the bottom out of your chest when you lose a child. Yet I wouldn’t express my fear, lest I make it true. “Is he still at our hotel?”

Her eyes had the same blaze as the fire. “The renegade gendarmes kidnapped him,” she said. “When I ran to our inn, the maid was tied and gagged, and Harry was gone. The girl said men seized him shortly after we set out for Nitot’s shop.”

My God. I’d lost my son once before to the Barbary pirates, and now this? I mislaid my boy as easily as a bookmark. Being dipped upside down in a tub is nothing compared to the monstrosity of making a child a pawn in a game of nations. I silently cursed Leon Martel. He’d regret not killing me.

Nor could Astiza keep a mother’s accusatory tone out of her voice. She’d urged me to be prompt, and I’d procrastinated. She’d had a hunch to stay with Horus, and I’d insisted she come along so I could show how clever I was. She’d wanted to retire to her studies, and I’d wanted to play a hand in the disposition of Louisiana.

The Greeks, I believe, called it hubris.

“And you?” My voice was a little strangled.

“I ran from one band of spies into the hands of another: these men.” She was impatient. “Instead of pursuing the French bandits, they’ve held me here while finding you. Ethan, what if Harry is dead?”

“Not dead, madame,” Frotte tried to reassure. “A hostage, surely.”

“How can you know that?”

“Because while alive, he can be used to manipulate you. For us to rush a rescue without planning is the one error that would assure he dies. You don’t want your boy in a gun battle.”

This new spy confirmed to me that Astiza had been rescued by English scoundrels, trading one band of hooligans for another. The worst people pursue me, as persistent as gulls after a fishing smack. I felt sick. I’d lost my son for a piece of green glass.

A stone that would have fed my family forever.

“This is the worst luck,” I managed. “The French took our only child?”

“To control you, not to do harm,” Frotte reassured.

“And you saved my wife?”

“To manipulate you, again.”

At least he was candid. Spies understand spies, and Frotte was confident his foe’s motive mirrored his own. Agents depend on one another to be nefarious masters of calculation and the double-cross, lest they all become unemployed. “How?”

“We British need your desperate daring to rescue Toussaint L’Ouverture, the Black Spartacus of Saint-Domingue, from an icy French prison. We believe L’Ouverture may know the truth about the fabled treasure of Montezuma, and that we can use his secrets to find it ourselves. At that point, we can negotiate with Martel for your son and the emerald, ransoming both while keeping a truly important secret out of French hands. You’ve unwittingly become necessary again, Ethan Gage-the key to France and England.”

What bitter honor. “But I was practicing being unnecessary. I should tie strings to my arms. Ethan Gage the puppet! And now you want me to rescue a condemned Negro? How?”

“The plan is to make an escape with a flying machine, a birdlike contraption called a glider.”

Ridiculous. “I’ve flown once before, in a French balloon. It was more terrifying than a ministerial meeting on tax reform, and more disastrous than a mistress wanting to discuss a relationship’s future. Astiza fell into the Nile, and I crashed into the sea. I can assure you, men don’t have wings for good reason. God’s intention is that we stay on the ground.”