Timpanogos (6 page)

“Ouch!”

“True,” Poe admitted.
 
He set the mouse’s bones on the Danite’s chest too, one by one, in a
circle around the tiny skull.
 
“It’s easy to make the mistake of thinking that the solution with the
most engineering incorporated into it is the best one.
 
Sometimes, what is most effective is
the simplest solution.
 
The knife,
the poisoned cup, the wire around the throat.”

Hickman looked down at the bones.
 
Uneasiness showed in his face, so Poe knew he was getting
into the man’s head.
 
“So… what do
you want?”

Poe placed the brass beetle on Hickman’s sternum.
 
“Who says I want anything?” he asked.

Hickman grinned.
 
“I know all kinds of good shit,” he said.
 
“I got information.”

“How delightful for you,” Poe told him.
 
He dug a second beetle out of the
canister and laid it on Hickman below the first.

“I… hey!... don’t you want to know what’s going on
here?
 
What, with the… kidnapping
and everything?”

Poe placed a third scarab over Hickman’s belly button, and a
fourth just below it.
 
“Should I
want to know?” he asked.

“Yeah!”
 
Hickman
struggled against his bonds and against Rockwell’s iron grasp, but he was
pinned fast.
 
“Hell yeah, you
should!”

Poe placed a fifth and final scarab, balancing it carefully
right on the crotch of Hickman’s denim trousers.
 
He stood, and held one finger conspicuously close to the
attack
button inside the canister’s lid.

“You’ve almost found the man’s chakras,” Burton
gruffed.
 
“Not quite, but you’re
close.”

“I can find his chakras easy enough, need be,” Rockwell
growled.
 
“They hang the same place
on a man as on a bear, more or less.”

“So tell me,” Poe said.
 
“Tell me what you think I want to know so badly.”

“Lee did it!”

“You mean John Lee,” Poe prompted the Danite.
 
“Brigham Young’s adopted son, the
Danite leader.”

“Yeah.
 
He’s
behind the kidnapping.”

“That’s interesting,” Poe mused.

“Yeah?
 
What’s
interesting about it?”

“What’s interesting is that I happened to be in the
Tabernacle when Mr. George Cannon introduced Lee to the congregation.”
 
Poe spoke slowly and deliberately and
kept his eye fixed on Hickman.
 
He
let his words hang when he’d finished, to see what they would flush out of the
prisoner’s guilty conscience.

They flushed out nothing.
 
“Yeah, that’s him.”
 

Poe kept a straight face.
 
Was Hickman too clever to be baited, or too stupid?
 
“As I recall, they both gave the
distinct impression that President Young was dead.”

Hickman’s splayed eyes quivered.
 
“I guess they was mistook,” he suggested weakly.

“Perhaps,” Poe agreed, “but I can think of other
hypotheses.”

Hickman sulked.

“Boss,” Coltrane whispered loudly.
 
“He may not know what
high posse trees
are.
 
Just tell him you’re going to hang him, if that’s the point.”

Poe nodded calmly, resisting both the Scylla of laughter and
the Charybdis of irritation.
 
“Let
me propose this explanation,” he said, watching Hickman closely.
 
“Lee had you kidnap the President, but
then announced his death to all of Deseret.
 
He is holding Brigham Young in reserve in case affairs go
awry, and then, if need be, he can resurrect the man at his convenience.”

“Yeah, that sounds right.” Hickman’s answer was quick.
 
Too quick.

“But then Lee has hung you out to dry,” Poe probed.

Hickman shrugged.

“If he brings Brigham Young back to life,” Poe continued,
“someone will have to take the fall for the kidnapping.
 
That can only be you, Mr. Hickman.”

Hickman shrugged.
 
He didn’t seem very concerned, which must mean Poe was on the wrong
track.

“There could be other explanations, of course,” Poe thought
out loud.

“The explanation is that John D. Lee figures it’s about time
he was made king over everybody,” Hickman insisted.
 
“I guess he must a been sick of everybody lording it over
him all the time, just ’cause he was a frontier man, and not some fancy English
feller.”
 
He shot a look of
resentment at Richard Burton.
 
“And
I reckon he’s got the right idea.”

“You’re not a stupid man, Mr. Hickman,” Poe lied.
 
He coughed, and the force of it in his
lungs took him by surprise.
 
The
consumption was getting worse, he thought.
 
He wondered how long he had.
 
He spat into the dust at his feet.

“No, I ain’t.”

“You wouldn’t let yourself be set up to take the fall for
John Lee.”

“I wouldn’t,” Hickman agreed.
 
“And I ain’t.”

“You’ve got John Lee right where you want him.”

“Yeah, I… what?
 
No, I’m Lee’s man.
 
He sent
me to kidnap Brigham Young, and I done it.”

“He sent you to
kill
Brigham Young, and you double-crossed him.”
 
Poe saw truth-induced hesitation in the other man’s face, so
he kept going.
 
“You were supposed
to kill Clemens, too, or at least capture him, but finding Rockwell and the
Ambassador as well was entirely serendipitous.”

Hickman stared sullenly at the line of scarabs.

“He means catching Rockwell and Armstrong was just plain
dumb luck,” Sam Clemens interpreted.

“Thank you, Mr. Clemens,” Poe said.

“I was raised in Missouri,” Clemens grinned.
 
“I speak idiot.”

“Of course, as long as you kept them all alive, you could
release them later, and minimize the damage.
 
President Tubman might be angry, but you calculated that if
her Ambassador were alive, she couldn’t be
too
angry.”
 
Hickman wouldn’t
meet Poe’s gaze.
 
“Maybe you could
even take cover behind Lee, or get him blamed for it and say you were only
taking orders.
 
And in the
meantime, you could hold them over Lee’s head.”

Hickman said nothing.

Rockwell held the blade of his knife against Hickman’s
belly, careful not to disturb the beetles.
 
“Fess up, you filthy little gutworm, or lose your chakras.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
 
The words, and the shifty expression
that accompanied them, were as good as a confession for Poe.

“And of course,” Poe pressed on, “you kept the opportunity
to play it the other way.
 
You
could free President Young.
 
Maybe
you could convince him that you had been acting under threat of violence when
you kidnapped him, and that freeing him was a risky and heroic act.
 
He’d reward you for your courage and
sacrifice.
 
Or you could convince
him you’d been playing a double game all along, to flush Lee out.
 
What kind of medals do the Danites give
out for personal heroism, Mr. Hickman?”

“There ain’t no medals,” the Danite grumbled.

“Or maybe you were aiming for a more sordid sort of traffic,
a simple dirty bargain.
 
You could
simply offer to betray Lee and free President Young, in exchange for whatever
it is you hope to get out of all this.”

Hickman sulked.

“So what is it that you’re playing for, Hickman?
 
How much of the pie do you want?
 
Are you tired of being looked down on
because you’re the Jim Bridger type, and not the Daniel Webster sort, not a
fancy Englishman?”
 
Poe jerked his
head at Absalom Fearnley-Standish, with his scalloped-brim hat.
 
He coughed again, and choked himself
quickly before the coughs turned into a prolonged fit.

“I say,” Fearnley-Standish objected mildly.
 
He pulled a small metallic notebook
from his pocket, then seemed to think better of whatever his intention had been
and put the notebook back.
 
“You
make us sound like a nation of snuff-pinchers.
 
We did stop Napoleon, you know.
 
And settle America, if that’s worth anything.”

“Joo English weren’t the first people to come to the Nuevo
Mundo,” Master Sergeant Jackson reminded him, with a grin that was both fierce
and affectionate.

Hickman kept his mouth shut.

Poe waited, letting the Danite stew.
 
He bent over to tidy the line of
beetles, then straightened up and sighed.

“I’m not sure that it matters,” he said, “but I admit to
curiosity.
 
Does
Lee
answer to Orson Pratt, or do
you
answer to the Madman?”

Hickman’s face surprised Poe with a look of pure
astonishment.
 
Even more surprising
was the expression of complete discombobulation that passed over Sam Clemens’s
face before he recovered, sweeping it under his mustache.

So Hickman knew nothing about Orson Pratt’s machinations,
and Sam Clemens… maybe Clemens did.
 

Poe decided to probe a little harder.

“Come, Mr. Hickman,” he continued.
 
“Aren’t you the
Boatman
?”

“I don’t know what in the hell you’re talking about,”
Hickman whined.

Sam Clemens jerked a cigar from out of his inside jacket
pocket and bit into it, hard.

“We’ll leave that for the moment.”
 
Poe shook the open canister of scarab beetles like a maraca
as he paced around Hickman and thought.
 
“What if Lee’s plan had gone as he’d intended?” he asked.
 
“What would he have done next?”

“It
did
go as he
intended,” Hickman insisted.

“The Third Virginia Cavalry is here to support Lee in
power.
 
There is no United States
target worth striking within their range.
 
What is Lee’s plan for supporting his fellow-conspirators in the
South?
 
Will Mormons invade the
Wyoming Territory?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“But what I see here doesn’t look like a standing army to
me, so much as a militia.
 
Or even
just an armed citizenry.
 
Effective, maybe, for deterring invasion or oppression, but not the sort
of force that invades its neighbor.”

“There you have it,” Hickman agreed.

“So I think the attack will be aerial.”

Hickman’s evasive look was confirmation enough.
 

“Perhaps an attack upon Chicago.”
 
Poe considered.
 
“Though of course, one advantage of an airborne military force would be
the ability to attack behind enemy lines.
 
Pittsburgh?
 
New York
City?
 
Perhaps the war will
commence with an assault upon Boston, to remind the overweening Yankees of the
celebrated Tea Party?”

Hickman shrugged.
 
“I don’t know,” he mumbled.
 
“I ain’t never been much for tea.”

“The delivery of a team of Danite assassins to President
Buchanan’s White House?” Poe proposed.
 
“I’d hate to give you any good ideas, but of course, you are clever men,
and you know your own weapon’s capabilities much better than I ever could.
 
All I can hope to do is second-guess
you.”

“That ain’t my part in it,” Hickman grumped.
 
“I ain’t much of a planner.”

“No…?
 
I suppose
not.
 
What about…” Poe let a little
suspense build.
 
“What about the
phlogiston guns?
 
Why rely on
assassins at all, when you could just burn the White House to the ground?”

“What, just the one gun?” Hickman snorted.
 
“It ain’t all that impressive, not all
by itself.”

“Why just one gun?” Poe asked, and then guessed at another connection.
 
“Why one gun, when there are four
ships?”

Four ships, Poe thought.
 
He knew that Orson Pratt had built four ships because
Captain Jones had told him so.
 
It
didn’t seem to be uncommon knowledge.
 
But now the number stuck in the back of his mind like a morsel of food
he could not swallow.
 
What was
there about the number four that bothered him so?

“Hell if I know.”

“Rubies,” Roxie said.
 

Sam Clemens looked like he’d bit off and swallowed part of
his cigar.
 
It might have been the
result of his standing right between the blue and the yellow lanterns, but he
looked positively green.

“What about rubies?” Poe asked her.

She shook her head impatiently.
 
“I don’t know the details.
 
The phlogiston gun works on rubies, but Deseret doesn’t have
any.”

Poe examined Hickman’s face.
 
He didn’t think the kidnapper had any idea what they were
talking about, and he had a sudden and terrible insight into why the number
four tickled his memory so.
 
He
started coughing, tried to stop and found that he couldn’t.
 
He pulled a handkerchief from his
pocket.