Doom Weapon

T
he rogue scientists Dobbs had read about always hid out in the West, though there were a few who went to South America where women were as plentiful as wine.

But now that it was 1885, now that there was transcontinental train travel, now that even small cities out West boasted the beginnings of electrical and telephone service…now it would be tolerable for a city man to live there. Safe for a rogue scientist like himself to live there…

The thing was to get away from the Army lab before anybody figured out what he was up to.

The arms merchants who had contacted him had assured him that there was nothing to worry about. They told him what to say in his retirement announcement, they told him how much money would be waiting for him out in Junction City, Colorado. They even told him how to invest the bulk of his money so he could enjoy his life no matter how much longer he lived.

But he, for his part, didn’t tell them about the federal agent he’d come to know. The only one in the whole deal there he trusted.

He didn’t tell them because they wouldn’t like it. But
he had a sense that as soon as he handed over the materials they wanted, they’d kill him.

But they wouldn’t kill him with his friend the federal investigator on hand. If anything, the investigator would kill them and then he and the scientist would have a lot of money—more money than either man had ever even dared dream of—and they would still have the materials, too. Which, as the investigator suggested, they could sell over and over again. Get the money, kill the buyer. They could probably do this four or five times before it got too dangerous.

These were some of his thoughts as he sat in his train seat looking out the window at the unfolding panorama of the West. He’d heard talk that the buffalo had been killed off but he’d sure seen plenty of buffalo in his first three days. He’d also heard talk that though the Indian wars were substantially over, there were still many fierce bands of Indians prowling the prairies, too angry to settle on reservations. But the Indians he saw from his window were disappointing as far as ferocity went. They were old and shabby and shambling, defeated people dragging themselves along the railroad tracks in search of anything the white people in the train cars might have tossed out or dropped.

He wasn’t a drinker but he drank. He wasn’t a brave man and every once in a while a wave of terror would overwhelm him. If anything went wrong—despite the bravado of his friend the investigator about how safe it all was—he would be in prison or dead. Hard to know which would be worse.

The drinking stilled the fear.

But no matter how much he imbibed, he couldn’t silence the one word that haunted him like no other: treason.

No matter how he tried to justify it to himself, that
was what he was committing there. Even if their scheme worked and they never actually gave the plans and materials to agents of other governments, that was how any court in the United States would view what he’d done.

He had committed treason…

And so he drank and stared out the window at the snow-peaked mountains and the desert areas that were an alien if beautiful mauve color at dawn and at all the fuss and drama of train stops where exuberance of the new West put jubilation on nearly every face…

But not his.

No jubilation for a man who committed treason.

For a man like him there was just the money.

He prayed that that would be enough for him.

PART ONE

Chapter 1

The Regal Hotel
Junction City, Colorado
Room 207
12:07 a.m.
March 23, 1885

“I
knew you’d wake up eventually, Mr. Ford. I put a little sleeping powder in the coffee the maid brought up.”

“You seem to have a knife at my throat.”

“It’s dark, Mr. Ford. It’s really a straight razor.”

“Ah.”

“My name’s Molly Kincaid, in case you want to know. And if it wasn’t so dark, you’d be able to see that I’m a very beautiful woman.”

“Any particular reason you want to cut my throat? It’s a messy business for a beautiful woman, you know.”

“Don’t worry. I’ve had plenty of practice at cutting throats and I’m very careful. I don’t get a drop on me. Ever. And as for why I’m here, it’s very simple. I want you to trust me.”

“Well, we’re off to a good start.”

“I’m proving something to you. I’m proving that you
can trust me. I could kill you in just a few seconds here, Mr. Ford. If I wanted to.”

“I’m sure you could. What is it you want exactly?”

“Oh, c’mon now, Mr. Ford. You know what I want. I want to know where Grieves is.”

She cut me then. I jerked in the rocking chair where I’d fallen asleep looking out the hotel room window.

Warm blood sliding down my neck. A nasty sting from the sliced flesh.

“You see how easy it would be, Mr. Ford? Now, you’re a federal agent just like Grieves is a federal agent. That means you know what he knows. Am I right?”

It’s never easy knowing what to say when somebody’s got a razor pressed against your throat.

Chapter 2

A
ll this happened—I’m referring of course to the blade held against my throat—because an agent named Arnold Grieves had gone missing while working on a case in Junction City, Colorado. Grieves was a very good agent except for the times he got distracted by women and liquor. Then he tended to disappear, sometimes for weeks. He was a man of strong constitution where vices were concerned.

Now, I’ll admit that I didn’t come to Junction City in the best of moods. Something had been mentioned in a telegram about one Noah Ford going on vacation but then Grieves seemed to be lost somewhere so Ford had to forget his vacation until his fellow agent was found.

I was hoping to find him in the town and then quickly find one of those legendary mountain streams where the fish are practically suicidal.

This was my mood as I approached the City Limits sign that was mostly lost in the dirty, dank fog. What the hell ever happened to clean white fog? But this was mining country and the air was never what you’d call pure. As one silver millionaire had put it, “If you got people walkin’ around coughin’, you know you’re makin’ money.”

It was the fog—as well as the rain, snow, ice, and the rain again—that had contributed to my sullen mood. I wasn’t old but I wasn’t young and between the rheumatism and the occasional arthritis, eight days riding in and out of mountain towns was taking its toll on my usual angelic manner.

The previous night, trying to get some sleep in a tiny cave while the snow whipped in the entrance, I even had the thought that maybe I’d give up. Just wire Washington, D.C., and the lizards who manned the desks, and tell them that I hadn’t had any luck and was now heading for the beaches of California.

That was the dream, anyway, that California sun and that blue blue water. But dawn and coffee and frozen beef jerky took the dream away. Whatever else I was, I was a professional, a military investigator and a federal agent, and even though I hadn’t been any good at drinking, marriage, the free enterprise system, or being a desk lizard, I was a passing fair tracker of the human being.

Now I had to see if my tracking skills could turn up an agent named Grieves.

It was a mountain town, all right, Junction City, most of it fashioned hastily out of raw lumber blackened with the residue of various mining procedures, silver being the table stakes there. There were some mansions, of course; you could feel them sneer at the lowly worker houses below. The mansions were actually a bit too splendid for their own sake—minarets and captain’s walks and a dormer every three feet—impressive if you didn’t have any taste, like fat harlots strutting the boulevard in garish clothes.

The one odd note was that the mine was silent. Mines usually ran two, three shifts a day. Not there, I guess.

Unlike too many towns of this kind, Junction City had made the transition from a raw camp to a real town. You could tell that by the cleanliness of the streets and the general condition of the buildings. From what I’d been able to read about it, the town council held corruption to a minimum and had a very serious program for controlling the worst ravages of prostitution and gambling. You’d find them there but they were strictly controlled.

Another factor was the town council’s determination to oversee the diligent pickup of garbage, fines for anyone who kept unsightly yards and that bane of many towns, the speedy collection of wild dogs.

The five straight blocks where goods were sold and money changed hands were the most imposing aspect of the place. Now, at cold hard dusk, the blocks looked like a fortress against the night itself. Oil lamps still burned in business offices; the saloons at the far eastern end of downtown poured forth the vile wonderful music of drunks and whores; and even the three church spires, normally not anything that would warm an agnostic like myself, lent me the pleasant notion that just maybe, just possibly, just hopefully, there was some kind of divine being overseeing this whole mess after all. There were three pretty fancy casinos for those who chose to spend their hours in other than churchly pursuits.

Nobody paid me much attention when I rode through the business area. Everybody was too burrowed down in their tall collars and winter coats to pay anybody else much mind. The ragged mountain winds were without mercy. The calendar said that spring had arrived. I wanted to complain to the management.

I spent half an hour registering at a hotel and hauling
my saddle and other gear up to the room. In the old days I would have traveled with three pints of rye. And the first thing I would have done inside my room was get a hot basin of water for my frozen feet and sit next to the window and watch the human parade spread out below me there on the second floor. And I would’ve gotten drunk in a way I couldn’t on horseback. When you’re riding those lonely miles by yourself you get a glow on but you don’t let the liquor take you completely. It’s dangerous enough out there without losing control of yourself.

I got the scalding water in the basin; I got the chair by the window and a pretty good look at all the sad human follies below—stumbling drunks; poor little kids trying to drag their fathers home from the saloons; a shotgun deputy dragging some troublemaker to jail.

The water stung and I let it sting. I’d changed into warm clothes and wrapped a blanket around me. And from downstairs an old lady brought me a cup of coffee as hot as the water for my feet.

I smoked three cigarettes, laid my head back against the rocking chair for what I thought was a rest, and didn’t wake up again until I felt something cold and sharp pressing against my throat.

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