And fell.
Right into the cave, careening with the weight of a city’s dead, crashing through the earth and settling down somewhere below, farther than any of them could see when they scrambled after it to stare into the hole.
“Where is it?” Frankum asked, leaning over so far that Maria was tempted, for one nasty second, to give him a shove. The pirate soul she harbored within her corset objected to her decency, but now was not the time or the place. Like she’d told the captain, they had to play fair. After all, they were not alone. Soon, the world would be watching. And someone had to save it.
The captain said, “No idea. Too dark. Anyone have a light?”
“Just the lantern on the crawler, and I can’t pry that off without my tools,” Thomson told them.
Echoing up from below, the sound of failing machinery grew louder as it bounced and rose off the rocks.
Behind them they heard the telltale clomp and clatter of a horse’s hooves. Maria guessed that it was Evans with the dynamite, and it was indeed him, carrying a promising pack on his back.
“Hurry up with that!” the captain yelled, and Evans did his level best.
He yanked the horse to a sliding stop and dropped off the saddle to his feet, tossing the pack to the captain. “Wire it up, sir! I’ve got the line and pump in the saddlebags.”
The captain went to work immediately, with Frankum lending a useful hand—for once in his life, Maria added disparagingly in her head. But it was his life, too; his, and theirs, and everyone else’s. So he planted the sticks, threaded the wire, and ran with the rest of them back to the far side of the crawler—where Evans had already secured the horse, as far from the trouble as he could put the poor animal.
The captain paused while he checked the settings and connections on the pump, then set it on the ground.
Evans turned his nose to the air. “Sir … do you smell that?”
He did. He must be able to—Maria could smell it, even though her nose was so cold she couldn’t feel it when she wiped it with the back of her scraped-up hands.
It was a toxic smelclass="underline" rotten eggs and ruin, sharp death and troubled sleep. It stank of chemicals and poison, and it grew stronger while they sat there, mulling it over and wondering what could possibly smell that way?
The captain shook it off first, that numbing, stupefying creep of confusion and curiosity.
He shoved the plunger. A jolt went down the wire, along the ground, and into the hole.
And the earth exploded.
Twenty-one
The night ticked by in seconds, in minutes. In bullets, fired one-two-threefrom the woods and answered one-two-threefrom inside the house. It was not a stalemate, not exactly. From a second-floor window—the window almost directly above Abraham Lincoln in his library—Gideon watched the other men amass, and he knew that this relative peace could not hope to last the night. More men had joined the siege crew outside, and now they numbered fifteen by the scientist’s count … though, given the gloom outside, it was always possible that he’d missed a couple.
He always built some wiggle room into all his assessments and plans—not because he didn’t value precision, but because the universe was sometimes imprecise, and prone to hiding things.
He released the edge of the curtain and retreated to the hallway, pausing to duck into the Lincolns’ bedroom and peer out through the window beside a tall wardrobe. Outside it was nearly as dark as inside. He thought he saw motion, maybe a flash of a man running quickly from cover to cover, or maybe only a shift of moonlight on something smaller below. The night was full of raccoons and rabbits, after all.
Knowing this did not prevent him from assuming the worst.
Leaving the window, he carefully walked back to the hallway, where there was almost no light to give him guidance. He worked from memory, from the map in his head of a house he’d visited dozens of times before, though he’d rarely seen these private chambers upstairs, where the aging couple spent their quieter days.
At the end of the hall was an oversized dumbwaiter—or that’s what Gideon had jokingly called the thing when he and Wellers had installed it together last June. It was a closet with a floor built on a lift, an elevator large enough to hold Lincoln and his chair, and perhaps one other person. The structure of the house would permit nothing larger, unless Mary could have been persuaded to give up part of the kitchen pantry. And as it turned out, she could not.
The last room on the left before the elevator was the guest room. Gideon peered through the narrow slit in the curtains, but saw nothing he didn’t already know. Men in the woods. Shadowed figures, distinguished mostly by their movement—and occasionally by a glimmer of brass buttons, the hardware on a gun, or the glint of a spyglass lens.
The hints of spyglass worried him.
He could not tell if the glass was only for observation, or if it was affixed to the barrel of a weapon. Gideon fervently hoped that none of the new recruits were sharpshooters, but he couldn’t count on it; he couldn’t count on anything,not tonight. So he remained wary of any seams in the cloak of darkness they’d forced upon the house. He’d turned off all the gaslights and electric lights, and forbidden any torches—electric or otherwise. Any light within would tell the men without where they were, and offer up a target. It might be a vague target, but it’d be a direction in which to shoot.
Two more rooms to check—and then he was done, and the second story was clear. Back down the stairs he traveled, announcing himself with incautious footsteps, and then calling softly, “Mr. Grant? The upstairs is as tight as I can make it.”
“Good,” came the reply by the front door. But it sounded distracted.
Gideon kept his back to the wall until he reached the president; then he slid down into a sitting position beside him. “They’re collecting more men.”
“I know. And we’re not.”
“They know.”
“It’s only a matter of time, now,” Grant said, low and quiet, “until they come inside.”
“We can hold them off a while longer, put on a show for another hour or two.”
Grant nodded, scratching his salt-and-pepper beard. “I don’t suppose that big brain of yours has come up with any plans, has it?”
Only stalling tactics, but he offered them anyway. “We need to spread out. Put Polly and Mary upstairs, at opposite ends. Let them play sharpshooter, or at least make a lot of noise. By sound alone it’s hard to tell a couple of shooters from half a dozen or more. With them taking the second story and us on the first, we can mount a satisfactory defense that may look like a much better one. And, besides, it gets the women upstairs, where they’ll be marginally safer.”
“Any thoughts how we might send a message?”
“A few. None of them good. We can’t spare a runner right now, and even if we could, we’d be sending someone on a suicide mission … which is why you wouldn’t let Polly go in the first place,” he said, giving a voice to something he’d suspected. Grant didn’t contradict him, so he continued. “Wellers is willing to make a dash for it, but he’d never make it. Mary would have the best chance; she’s a little old lady, and a well-known one at that … but I don’t suppose that’s on the table.”
“No, it isn’t,” Grant said fast. Then, after a pause, “She’d do it if we asked her, though. We’ll work around it.”
“The cellar is a fortifiable position of a kind, but it’s a dangerous one. Only two ways in or out, but, once in, we’d never be able to mount any kind of response. It should be considered, but only as a last option. Not least of all because we’d have to carry Mr. Lincoln down those steps.”
“Doesn’t he have an elevator?”
“Yes, but it only goes between the first and second floors. Structural issues prevented us from sending it any lower or higher.”