The Dakota Cipher by William Dietrich Read Free Book Online Page A

thighs nimble as scissors. We bucked and plunged like a Sicilian stagecoach, Pauline as hot as a Franklin stove, and I could happily have had her in a few more cellar nooks and crannies, sampling the vintages this way and that, if rough hands had not suddenly seized me and jerked me back like a cork popping out of a bottle.
    The indignity!
    It’s hard to fight back with your trousers about your ankles, and I was too surprised in any event to react. Damnation! Had General Leclerc come back from his cantonment after all? I could try to explain we were merely dusting the bottles, but I didn’t think he’d believe me, given that both Pauline and I were both more exposed than a Maine lighthouse in a howling nor’easter.
    “He assaulted me!” she shrieked, which was no more likely to be believed, given her amorous reputation.
    “You shouldn’t thrust yourself in where you do not belong,” one of my assailants said with an accent I couldn’t place, just before a clout to the head blurred my vision and buckled my knees. My manhood was wilting and my longrifle and tomahawk had been checked with my greatcoat in the anteroom upstairs. I have an all too fervent imagination of what various enemies might do to me and woozily tried to cross my legs.
    “I know what this looks like…,” I began.
    A gag went into my mouth.
    Instead of having my throat or something even more valuable cut, they seemed determined to truss me like a sausage. Ropes were thrown around me as they pummeled and kicked, and in my daze I had the wit to do only one thing: fetch a handful of the chocolates I’d filched from my waistcoat pocket and slip them into my shirtsleeve just as my wrists were being bound. Having been tied before, I’d spent time giving the problem some thought.
    I dimly saw Pauline was allowed to flee, pulling up and pushing down her filmy garment. One does not tie up Napoleon’s sister! Then, my own pants hauled up as well, I was dragged down a dark corridor to a cellar door that led to the gardens beyond. Given the situation, I didn’t expect her to call for my rescue.
    So I tried to reason my way out. Unfortunately, my gag reduced my logic to muffled mumphs and growls.
    “Save your breath, American. You don’t even understand what you’re involved in.”
    Hadn’t I been in the first consul’s sister? Or was this about something else entirely? I’d assumed I was being manhandled by the vengeful minions of Pauline’s husband or brothers, but perhaps some other retribution was going on. I tried to review who else might want me dead. Had someone really seen me leave that ruined Italian farmhouse, and was Renato just the first attempt at Egyptian Rite retribution, given that I’d incinerated Count Alessandro Silano? Had the Apophis snake cult from Egypt somehow trailed me to Paris? The British might be annoyed that I was once more with the French, like a shuttlecock in the wind. Then there were a few young ladies less than satisfied with the circumstances of our parting, a gambling victim or two, the occasional creditor, the entire Austrian army, the English sailors from HMS Dangerous whose pay I had taken in cards, the angry Muslims from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem….
    For someone as likeable as me, I’d acquired an astonishing list of potential enemies. I suppose it doesn’t much matter who kills you, given that you will be dead anyway. Still, one likes to know.
    I was dragged down a garden path like a log, thrown in a small, saucer-shaped coracle about as seaworthy as a leaf, and towed by rowboat across the château lake. I half expected to be weighted and tossed in the water, but, no, they beached our craft on the island where the fireworks were to ignite and bundled me past the shrubbery to where the combustibles were mounted. As near as I could tell, Despeaux had stockpiled enough incendiaries to light the Second Coming.
    “You always want to be at the center of things. Now you will end that way, too,” my