Iron and Blood (18 page)

The elevator buttons only showed the upper levels of the headquarters. Lars flipped open a concealed control panel, revealing the means to reach the subterranean levels that housed Tesla-Westinghouse’s confidential and experimental projects. When the elevator doors opened, Lars swept out an arm toward the lab. “Enjoy your visit.”

Adam Farber was waiting for Rick. He was dressed in a white lab coat that hung off his lanky frame like a scarecrow.

“Good to see you, Rick,” Adam said, grinning broadly as he shook Rick’s hand. “Glad you could come by, I’ve missed you. But I know you’ve got a lot going on. Sorry about all that.”

Rick grimaced and shrugged. “Yeah. It hasn’t been a good week. But you saved our butts at the cemetery. And I can’t stand not knowing about your latest grand projects. Sorry I haven’t been by sooner.”

Adam ushered Rick into a wide expanse filled with tables covered with half-completed projects, strange metal casings and tangles of wires and tubes. Scattered throughout were empty coffee cups, Farber’s fuel for the long hours he spent tinkering in the lab. Adam poured himself a fresh cup of coffee from a nearby urn as they passed by.

“Want a cup?” he asked, fairly vibrating from caffeine even before he downed the liquid in a gulp.

“No thanks, I’ll pass,” Rick said with a chuckle. He sobered, remembering the blond man in the waiting room. “I saw a guy named Thwaites up in the lobby. Pushy sort. He was at Thomas Desmet’s funeral. Who is he?”

Adam’s face fell. “Again?” He muttered a curse under his breath. “That’s Richard Thwaites. Rich as Croesus, and used to getting his way.”

“I figured as much,” Rick said. “What’s he here for?”

Adam sighed. “Me.”

“Huh?”

Adam led Rick over to a large worktable and pulled out a chair, before collapsing into a second one. He set down his empty cup and reached out to grab another, half-finished cup from the table. “Thwaites wants to hire me to work on some kind of project for his new plaything, the Vesta Nine coal mine.”

Rick raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t look like the mining type to me.”

Adam chuckled. “I doubt he’s ever stepped out of his carriage onto the mine’s property. But Vesta Nine is the largest coal mine in the world, and rumor has it, the deepest, too. You know guys like Thwaites—got to have the biggest toys. He’s got a partner, but I don’t know his name. Anyhow,” he said, tossing off the cold coffee and looking around for another cup, “the last time Thwaites was here, he wanted to know whether I could build him enough
werkmen
to run the mine.”

“Can you?”

Adam rolled his eyes. “Aside from the fact that it would take me years to construct them by myself, I doubt even Richard Thwaites is rich enough to pay for it. And besides, I don’t trust him.” He dropped his voice. “Fair bet he’s Oligarchy.”

Rick nodded. “I was thinking the same thing.” He paused. “Think your boss will give in? Because we need you to work up some new pieces for us rather urgently, given what’s been going on.”

Adam reluctantly set aside his empty coffee cup. “I don’t think my boss will give me up; at least, not just yet. But if Thwaites keeps asking, or if he goes high enough up the ladder, I won’t have a choice.”

“You can always come work for Brand and Desmet,” Rick said. “Solid funding, private lab—pretty much free rein as long as we get first pick of the goodies you dream up.” His tone was light, but Rick was serious. It was a discussion they had every time they met, and so far, Adam had managed to deflect a commitment. Now he looked as if he might be considering it.

“Let’s leave that door open, shall we?” he said. “In the meantime, what did you have in mind?”

Rick grinned. “First off, we’re all still in awe of the contraption you used at the cemetery. Kovach and I actually agreed on something, for once, and we’re hoping you could make an even more portable version. He’d love to get his hands on something like that, if it could be toted around in a carriage instead of taking up a whole building.” He gave Adam a conspiratorial glance. “And I expect Cullan Adair will want something he can use from up in an airship, too.”

“Working on it,” Adam said. “Power source is always a problem. The steam tanks take up enough room as it is; creating a furnace makes it unwieldy. The Tesla cells help store energy, but they’ve got their limitations, too.” He stood up, swept the coffee cup to the side, and rummaged in the chaos of the worktable until he emerged with a small stone in his hand the side of a marble.

“Do you know what this is?” Adam asked, staring at the greenish, opaque stone as if it were gold. When Rick shook his head, Adam turned the stone in the light. “It’s tourmaquartz. Very rare—and fabulously expensive. Most people have never heard of it. Can’t find it many places, but here’s what’s special about it. A small shard of tourmaquartz, contained properly, can power a boiler as effectively as a whole hopper of coal.”

Rick let out a low whistle. “Wow. And by ‘fabulously’…?”

Adam shrugged. “Enough that for most purposes it’s not worth it. The small shard still costs much, much more than the hopperful of coal.”

“So it won’t put the coal mines out of business any time soon. But I bet guys like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick could come up with some uses for it.”

Adam nodded. “Believe me, they already have. But it’s hard to get more than a few shards at a time. I had to pull some strings to get the bits I have—and I’d be grateful if you didn’t mention it to anyone.” He glanced around at the nearly empty lab. “We’ve had enough problems as it is.”

“Oh?”

Adam hurried to fill another cup of coffee, drank half of it on the way back, and plunked down in his seat again. “A couple of shipments have gone missing, a few of them government projects. The Department of Supernatural Investigations is severely annoyed, to say the least.”

“Seriously? The Department?” Rick said, shaking his head. “Those guys just don’t give up. They’ve been trying to bring Brand and Desmet into their fold for years, get us to use our connections to spy for them. I don’t trust them.”

Adam nodded. “I like some of their people more than others, but I don’t trust the Department itself farther than I can throw it. On the other hand, they’re always asking me to build them strange stuff, and they pay well.” He grinned. “Almost as strange as the stuff I build for you.”

“Speaking of which,” Rick said, “I’ve got a couple more things on my wish list and I’m hoping you can make them happen.”

“Try me.”

“All right. How about something that isn’t much bigger than a shotgun, but that shoots something that doesn’t create a spark? I don’t know, maybe some kind of energy that pushes things away instead of shooting a hole in them. Jake and I have been in a couple of tight spots where we didn’t want to shoot the place up or cause a fire, but we needed to be able to stop thugs at a distance.”

Adam peered at Rick over his glasses. “You and Jake have an odd way of doing business.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

Adam pondered for a few moments, staring into space. “All right,” he said. “I think I can come up with something. What else?”

“Could you come up with a pair of goggles that would help us see better in the dark? Sometimes, it would be handy not to need a light.”

Adam looked thoughtful, drumming his fingers on the worktable as he thought. “Maybe. That’s a little harder. On the bright side, I’ve been working on something similar for a while. Let me work on it some more, and see what I can come up with.”

“Just let me know if you need money for materials,” Rick said. “Beyond the regular budget.”

“Will do.”

Rick paused as something Adam had said earlier came back to him. “What you said about the shipment going missing—do you know where in the process the boxes went astray? I’m trying to track down some missing crates of our own. Now I wonder if there isn’t something bigger going on.”

Adam shrugged. “They left here just fine, on the right wagons. I saw to it myself,” he said. “And our wagon men delivered the crates fine and dandy to the railway station. But DSI never got them. And no one on the train says they saw anything amiss.”

“Let me know if you find out anything,” Rick said. He patted his jacket pocket. “My father put together a list of shipments of ours that we’re trying to chase down, to see if we can figure out what the people who killed Jake’s dad were after when they broke into the warehouse.”

“Your father doing all right?” Adam asked.

Rick sighed. “Yes—and no. Thomas was a lifelong friend as well as a business partner. Father’s taking it pretty hard. Especially since someone keeps trying to kill the rest of us, and right now, we don’t know why.” He stood up. “Actually, I’ve got to go see him next. He’s moved into another house with plenty of Miska’s guards until all this blows over. But I’m helping him go through business records to see if we can figure out what was so important that someone would kill Thomas over it.”

Adam stood as well. “Good luck. And let me know if you need to borrow some equipment.”

Rick chuckled. “That’s a dangerous offer—you know I’ll take you up on it.”

The whirr of the elevator interrupted them. Adam glanced over his shoulder in alarm. “Damn. That’s probably Thwaites. You’d better get out of here. I think it best for you to stay out of his sight.”

“How?”

“This way,” Adam said. He led Rick through a pair of doors at the rear of the lab, down a wide corridor and to a service elevator.

“You don’t need a key to open the door upstairs from this side,” Adam said. “It’s the freight entrance. I’ll lock up after Thwaites leaves. Just use the lever to start and stop, and try not to jam it. It gets temperamental sometimes.”

“Great,” Rick muttered under his breath.

“Go!” Adam said, and in the distance, Rick could hear a man calling for the inventor. Adam pushed Rick into the elevator, reached in and shoved the lever down, and got his arm back before the cage doors shut. Before Rick could say a word, Adam was sprinting back toward the lab, his white coattails flapping as he ran.

“Y
OU SURE YOU
want to go out there, bub?” The man gave Drostan Fletcher a sidelong look. “The place is full of nutters, you know.”

“Going to visit an unfortunate acquaintance,” Drostan lied, with a half-smile he hoped was convincing.

The wagon driver shook his head. “I’ll take your coin to drive you there, but I don’t want nothing to do with that place myself. Folks say it’s haunted, as if it those poor, damned souls needed any more problems.”

Drostan climbed up to the passenger side of the buckboard wagon, and watched the countryside go past as they headed out. He had taken the trolley line as far as it would go, then hired a wagon to take him the rest of the way. All the way out to Kilbuck County, to the Department of the Insane. Local folks called the place ‘Dix Mountain’, or just ‘Dixmont’, after the reformer, Dorothea Dix. Some just called it ‘Nutter Hill’.

It took a lot for Drostan not to nod off, despite the bumpy road. His dreams had been troubled, and he was tired enough that memory and dreams tended to blur. Scotland was heavy on his mind. He’d seen butchered bodies in the alleys of Edinburgh and Glasgow from murderers who fancied themselves the next Ripper. Crimes like that could break men, and it did, sending many of Drostan’s colleagues to drink or the madhouse, or early death. And unlike Drostan, they couldn’t see the ghosts the slayers left behind.

The wagon driver did not try to keep up a conversation, for which Drostan was grateful, and a generous tip assured that the man would be back to return Drostan to the trolley station in two hours. But despite the pay, the driver would go no closer than the end of the gravel driveway leading to the insane asylum.

With a sigh, Drostan hefted his rucksack over one shoulder and started up the long carriageway, watching as the huge, brooding complex that was Dix Mountain came into view. Nearly two thousand poor souls were housed in the sprawling brick buildings that spread across the hillside. The main building loomed high, four stories tall with a cupola on top, with granite pillars framing the entrance and long windows, the better to take in the breezes from the valley.

“Dr. Haverton is expecting you, Mr. Fletcher,” the receptionist said when Drostan gave his name at the front desk. “Just have a seat and he’ll be with you shortly.”

Drostan was too antsy to sit. The foyer was large and scrubbed clean, smelling of antiseptic and lemon. Uniformed orderlies and nurses in starched dresses with pristine caps bustled through doors and exited into other corridors. Most people felt uncomfortable in hospitals or asylums, and did not know why. Drostan knew, and the knowledge did not make him feel any better.
The only place with more ghosts than a hospital or an asylum is a cemetery,
Drostan thought.
And none of them rest easy.

“Mr. Fletcher! To what do we owe your call?” Dr. Haverton was a tall, spare man in his middle years, graying at the temples, with a gold pince-nez framing intelligent gray eyes.

“Good to see you again, Doc,” Drostan replied. “I stopped by to see an old friend. Eli Carmody.”

Haverton gave Drostan a skeptical look. “Just happened to be in Kilbuck County and thought you’d drop in for a chat, did you?”