The Explosionist (28 page)

One of the guards who’d checked them in appeared and took Mr. Petersen aside for a quick word. When he came back, he looked worried, though not excessively so.

“Will you excuse me, ladies?” he said. “I must take a telephone call. Many apologies.”

Fortunately the women of the NTWSA were so thoroughly immersed in learning about working conditions and the inequalities of pay between men and women that they hardly minded his going, particularly when one of the managers offered to take the next part of the tour.

“Sophie, would you mind coming with me?” Mr. Petersen said to Sophie while nobody was listening.

“If you like,” said Sophie, suddenly very nervous.

What was all this about?

T
HE GUARD LED THEM
around an obstacle course of hills and outbuildings to a place called the communications room. It struck Sophie as an awfully fancy name for a hut with a telephone switchboard, until they got inside and saw the row of telephone operators, girls as slick and professional-looking as one could imagine.

“Our telephonists are trained by the General Post Office in Glasgow,” said the guard, sounding very proud.

But Sophie thought they had that look, the look that said IRYLNS, and she shrank away from their glossy sameness.

“Your call should come through in about ten minutes,” said one of the operators, giving Sophie and Mr. Petersen an impersonal smile. “Perhaps you’d like to wait in the lounge
next door. Can I fetch anyone a coffee?”

She showed Sophie and Mr. Petersen to the small lounge opening off one side of the shed, then brought them each a cup of coffee.

“I must admit this was a ploy on my part,” said Mr. Petersen once they found themselves alone together.

“What do you mean?” Sophie asked.

“I didn’t lie when I said we needed to come here to receive a phone call,” said Mr. Petersen. “But I’m afraid I was a bit cavalier with the truth, Sophie. The telephone call’s not for me. It’s for you.”

Sophie felt the blood pound in her ears.

“It’s not—,” she began, then couldn’t think how to say it. “That is—”

“What?” said Mr. Petersen, setting down his coffee cup and looking at her with concern. “What’s wrong, Sophie?”

“It’s not a telephone call from a
dead
person, is it?” she asked.

Mr. Petersen looked startled.

“Why would you think I’d put you on the line with a dead person?” he said, sounding rather wary.

“It’s just that I seem to have had an awful lot of spirit communications recently,” Sophie confessed. “I thought this might be another one.”

Mr. Petersen did a double take.

“You mean the drawing that came over the pantelegraph wasn’t the only one?”

“Far from it,” said Sophie. It struck her that she could speak to him now almost as one adult to another. No trace of that painful crush remained. “At least the others made a bit more sense. The drawing—well, let’s just say I don’t have a clue as to who sent it or why.”

A little old lady in a flowered coverall came in and cleared away their cups, giving the table an aggressive wipe.

“We’ll have to look into this,” said Mr. Petersen. “I want to hear more about it, but now simply isn’t the time. Sophie, assuming the operator is able to put the call through, you’re about to receive a person-to-person call from Mr. Alfred Nobel.”

“Alfred Nobel?” said Sophie, now more perplexed than frightened. “You’re pulling my leg, Mr. Petersen, aren’t you? When people say
Nobel
, they mean the company, not the man. If Alfred Nobel were alive today, he’d be over a hundred years old. And in any case, alive or dead, what could he possibly want with me?”

The charwoman had come back in during Sophie’s speech—she must have been cleared by security, or Mr. Petersen would have prevented Sophie from saying anything in front of her—and she now surprised both Sophie and Mr. Petersen by looking up from polishing the side table and
saying, “Oh, he’s not alive, dearie, not really. They say it’s his brain, sitting in a very superior jam jar somewhere in the countryside in Sweden!”

Mr. Petersen gave her a repressive look and she subsided, but not before a picture flashed into Sophie’s head of a brain in a jar, rigged up to a speaking trumpet from which the pronouncements of Alfred Nobel were broadcast to his underlings.

“I suppose the truth’s not so far off,” Mr. Petersen admitted.

Would he have said anything if the old woman hadn’t brought it up?

“Alfred Nobel exists in a kind of limbo,” the teacher continued. “He is highly selective these days about what business he attends to, but there are a few things he won’t let go of, including his dream that one day weapons will have become so advanced that two armies may mutually annihilate each other in a second. At that time, of course, the civilized nations will recoil with horror and disband their armies, which will in turn lead to world peace. Here’s the thing, Sophie: The scientists who work for him are probably only months away from creating precisely the explosive he’s dreamed of, a bomb so powerful that the world’s great powers may abjure war for once and for all.”

Sophie had never quite accepted Theodor Herzl’s famous
proposition that the man who discovered a terrible explosive would do more for peace than a thousand of its milder apostles, but Mr. Petersen certainly seemed to believe what he was saying. Could it be true? Why was Mr. Petersen telling her about it
now
?

“What does all this have to do with me?” she asked. “Me in particular, I mean, not me as a person who in general might like there to be world peace?”

“I’ve been privileged to serve as one of Mr. Nobel’s personal assistants,” said Mr. Petersen. “He has sworn an oath that he won’t die until certain conditions have been fulfilled, and my job is to help bring about those conditions, for Mr. Nobel is tired of life, Sophie, or rather of the half-life he now has. Without your help, nothing can go forward.”

“That’s ridiculous!” Sophie said.

“Sophie, what do I have to say to persuade you that your potential to affect the course of events in the Hanse is simply enormous?”

The girls and boys who experienced untoward events in storybooks always pinched themselves to make sure they were awake. Sophie gave herself a hard pinch now—somehow it was almost impossible to give oneself a really painful pinch—and found it altered nothing.

“Why me rather than anybody else?” she persisted. “There’s nothing special about me.”

“I was sent by Mr. Nobel to teach you and to protect you,” Mr. Petersen repeated. “Also to persuade you that you must leave Scotland for the next stage of your education.”

“You were
sent
?” Sophie said, seizing on the part of the pronouncement that made the least sense of all. Leaving Scotland, now, well,
that
sounded like an extremely sensible idea…. Was he really going to help?

Mr. Petersen sighed.

“Sophie, I really must apologize to you. Because of Miss Rawlins’s poor judgment, you’ve already gathered that I obtained my position at school under false pretenses. I’d been asked to do whatever was necessary to get the position, at the behest of my employer, Mr. Nobel.”

“Wouldn’t you have been more useful to him doing your real job than messing about teaching us chemistry?” said Sophie. Something about the way he spoke of Mr. Nobel annoyed her; it was almost
worshipful
. “Why did he want you in Edinburgh?”

“Why do you think?”

“To help the police prevent any more bombings?” Sophie guessed.

“At least you’ve given up the idea that I was the éminence grise running the Brothers of the Northern Liberties! You know, I was on the verge of telling you all this that day weeks ago before we were caught in the blast from the Canongate
explosion, but I thought the better of it.”

It all would have been much easier if he’d told her everything then, but there was no point regretting it. Sophie didn’t believe in looking back and wishing things had gone differently. If only she had known Mikael’s real last name, she would have realized much sooner that Mr. Petersen could be trusted. All this put her in mind of the most urgent question. “Mr. Petersen, do you think you can get me an exit visa?”

“It may not be necessary,” said Mr. Petersen, looking mysteriously pleased with himself. “The main reason Mr. Nobel sent me to Edinburgh was to persuade you to come with me when I leave the country.”

“Me?” Sophie asked, by now completely stymied. She hadn’t even explained yet about IRYLNS, and here he was anticipating her request! “Why would he care about me? How did he even know I existed?”

“I still can’t tell you that, Sophie. But the telephone call we’re waiting for will reveal more. You’re about to talk to Mr. Nobel himself. It’s a very great honor—he hardly communicates with anyone outside the organization these days.”

At that moment one of the operators appeared and beckoned to Sophie to follow.

She looked back at Mr. Petersen as the young woman led her toward the main room, but he simply settled down more
comfortably in his chair, crossed his arms across his chest, and smiled.

“Go on, Sophie,” he said. “It’s just a telephone call. It can’t hurt to talk.”

W
HEN THE FOLDING DOOR
closed and she found herself alone in the mahogany-lined telephone booth, Sophie felt a wave of claustrophobia so intense she thought she might actually pass out. She leaned her forehead against one side of the booth—an electric light had come on overhead when the doors closed—and tried to collect her thoughts.

It was just a telephone call. What was she afraid of?

She picked up the receiver and held it to her ear.

“This is Sophie Hunter,” she said into the mouthpiece, hearing nothing but a mild hissing on the line. “Is anybody there?”

“Sophie,” a voice whispered. “I am so very glad that we are finally in touch with each other.”

Nobel’s voice sounded familiar, but she couldn’t think from where. Had she heard a speech of his on the radio? As she cast about for the memory, he continued to talk.

“I do not have much strength, and so we will not speak long. There is much, in any case, that I cannot say to you until we meet in person. My enemies have a long reach, and even a secure telephone line presents risks. When you come to me in Sweden, we will be able to talk freely.”

The country’s name gave her the clue she needed. She was so surprised, she blurted the words right out.

“You spoke to me already! Yours was the spirit voice that came through Mrs. Tansy that night in Heriot Row. You told me to be careful and to keep my own counsel, and you promised me a journey over water! How—? Why—?”

“I had my own reasons for contacting you in that way,” said the voice, sounding wearier and less hopeful than anything Sophie had ever heard in her life. “Reasons I mustn’t reveal until we meet in person. I spoke to you that night under quite peculiar circumstances. Obviously I am not dead, though I find myself in an equivocal state of embodiment these days. One of my agents—indeed, it was your Mr. Petersen—paid Mrs. Tansy a substantial sum to ingratiate herself with your guardian, serve as the medium for that night’s séance, and make sure you were involved from start to finish.”

“That was why she asked for me to come and see her
checked beforehand!” Sophie said, the pieces of the puzzle falling into place.

“You were known to be skeptical about the manifestations of the spirit world,” said the voice. “I thought that would be the best way of inclining you toward belief. The medium had no idea, though, that I actually meant to use her body as a vessel through which to communicate with you.”

“But I still don’t see what you wanted with me!” Sophie said, almost more confused than before.

“My life’s work has been to give the world peace,” said the voice. “Fifteen years ago, we were on the verge of making what I’d dreamed of, a weapon so powerful that the very threat of its use would cause grown men to quake in their boots: the holy grail of deterrence and the necessary precursor, or so it seemed to me, of world peace.”

The voice fell silent. It was still hard to think of it as belonging to Alfred Nobel; Sophie was trying not to concentrate on the whole “brain in a jar” end of things.

“What happened then?” Sophie asked.

“A tragedy,” said the voice. “The work had been conducted in the utmost secrecy in an enclave within a Russian munitions factory. For security reasons, there were no records outside the facility of the key mechanism; even I myself had only a vague idea as to how the thing worked. And then the factory blew up, destroying all records and
killing its creator, along with many others.”

“Fifteen years ago,” Sophie said slowly. “Was that—”

The voice cut her off. “Yes, Sophie. That was the factory explosion that killed your parents, and your father was the inventor of the miraculous weapon. All these long years, I have believed there to be no way of recovering what was lost. But recently I learned that a second set of plans survived the blast. We must lay hands on it before it can be used by the wrong people, people who wish to dominate the world rather than give it peace.”

Sophie’s head whirled with a million questions. She didn’t know where to start.

“I will tell you more,” said the voice, “when you arrive at my estate. Petersen will instruct you about the journey. Meanwhile, I ask you to give him your complete confidence. Au revoir, Sophie.”

“Wait!” Sophie shouted.

But the voice had gone.

When the operator came on the line to ask if she needed to place another call, Sophie put the receiver back in its cradle and slumped onto the shelf at the side of the booth, head in her hands.

A knock came at the door.

Sophie opened it partway and saw Mr. Petersen peering through the gap.

“Well?” he said.

Sophie shook her head and glared at him. “I can’t believe you’ve been keeping all this from me,” she said.

“I was afraid you’d feel like that,” said Mr. Petersen. “All I can do is apologize and say—”

But at this juncture they were interrupted by the same guard who’d appeared to summon Sophie and Mr. Petersen for the telephone call.

They could see at once that something was wrong.

“Sir?” he said, his face pale and sweaty.

“What is it?” said Mr. Petersen, sounding annoyed.

Sophie crossed her fingers and prayed there hadn’t been an accident. Surely they would have heard the explosion?

“We’ve got a, well, a
situation
,” the man said.

“A situation?”

“Well, what I’d call a situation, sir.”

“Can’t you be more specific? What kind of a situation?”

“There’s an intruder in the dynamite house.”

“What sort of intruder?”

“We don’t know yet,” said the guard, “but it doesn’t look good. The ladies had just got to that spot on the tour, so we’ve got a high civilian presence even beyond the workers.”

Mr. Petersen turned to look at Sophie. “Every bone in my body’s telling me to get you away safely out of here, but I’m going to do you the courtesy of treating you as an adult.
Do you want to come with me?”

Sophie nodded.

They raced outside and hopped into one of the carts for transporting people and goods. En route, Mr. Petersen told Sophie what to expect in the dynamite house, a long wooden cabin where liquid nitroglycerin soaked into the porous siliceous earth called kieselguhr to become dynamite. The mixture was transported in a wooden box on a handcart known as a bogie to the mixing area at the other end of the building. There the young women would give the boxes another stir and then tip the blend into smaller boxes with brass sieves in them, rubbing the dynamite through small holes in the sieve. The loose, crumbling, coffee-colored dynamite went next to the cartridge houses, where the workers pulled pump handles to force rods through hoppers, jamming the dynamite down brass tubes at the bottom. A parchment square was wrapped around the bottom of each tube, folded off at the lower end, and tamped down. Each three-inch cartridge had its top folded over and was then dropped through a slide in the wall, where it rolled into a box of finished cartridges. The five-pound boxes would be grouped into fifty-pound wooden cases and taken by bogie down to the beach, where the narrow-gauge lines ran straight to the sea. From the jetty at the southeast end of the peninsula, the cases would be loaded into boats and then into the company’s own steamers
for shipment all over the world.

Still a few minutes short of their destination, Mr. Petersen showed no sign of stopping his bizarre account of how dynamite was manufactured.

“Why are you telling me all this?” Sophie said finally.

“Oh, gods,” said Mr. Petersen. “I’m sorry, Sophie. I suppose rambling on like this is the way I calm myself down in times of trouble. What I wouldn’t do right now for a cigarette! But obviously that’s out of the question….”

“What are we going to do when we get there?” Sophie asked.

“Whatever we can,” said Mr. Petersen, suddenly sober.

Inside the dynamite house, they could see at once that the situation had escalated. This wasn’t a simple question of an unidentified intruder. The unexpected arrival—of all people in the world!—was Nicko Mood. He had a gun in his hand, his clothes were disheveled, and in short he looked remarkably like a man about to blow up hundreds of people (including himself) without a second thought.

“Sophie Hunter!” he said when he saw her.

On the other side of the room, all the workers and lady visitors stood with their hands on their heads.

Mr. Petersen pushed Sophie behind him, but Mood wrenched her arm almost out of her socket and dragged her to his side.

Great-aunt Tabitha looked on dispassionately as he held his gun to Sophie’s head.

“It’s still possible for you to escape with your life,” Sophie’s great-aunt told Mood. “If you commandeered one of the ships at the jetty, you could be away in no time. Even if you don’t give a fig for the rest of us, surely you’d rather live than die?”

“It may be hard for you to believe, Tabitha, but I have nothing left to live for. The deal you cut with Joanna leaves no place for me. She has forced me to write a letter of resignation, and made me promise to retire from the public eye. Life as I know it is over, and with my career ruined, I don’t know that I care much for the little bit of living that’s left to me. I might as well take a few of you with me when I go.”

Mr. Petersen was making faces at Sophie while Nicko looked in Great-aunt Tabitha’s direction. His gestures and her own common sense told Sophie they should try to keep the man talking to spin things out as long as they could. It would take Mr. Petersen quite a while to come back with help.

As the teacher crept away, Mood fell silent.

“What I want to know,” Sophie said hastily as Nicko Mood began fiddling with his gun (it had just occurred to her that a bullet puncturing a tank would be enough to set off an explosion), “is why you thought you’d be able to get away with the murders on top of everything else. When you hired
the Veteran to kill Mrs. Tansy, you left a trail of evidence that any halfway decent investigator could have uncovered. How did you think you’d ever get away with it?”

Nicko looked angry, but at least he stopped waving the gun around.

“The plan was flawless but not foolproof,” he said. “The Veteran was supposed to frame Nobel’s man for the medium’s murder, but he flubbed the business, as he fouled up everything he put his dirty little hands to.”

So that was how Mr. Petersen’s knife had ended up at the hotel!

“We had set up all the evidence to implicate Europe in the terror attacks,” Nicko said. “All I had to do was wait for a discreet interval to pass, and the minister would have had the whole government in the palm of her hand. But your wretched great-aunt has foiled me! Joanna will stay in office, and I will serve as scapegoat.”

“One of you was always going to have to pay the price,” said Great-aunt Tabitha, coming forward and giving him a scornful look. Her courage was heartening. “How did you think you would get away with it?”

“Once the Veteran was found dead in his cell,” said Nicko, “all traces of our part in the affair were gone.”

“Nonsense!” said Great-aunt Tabitha.

Nicko bristled, and Sophie wished her great-aunt would
approach the conversation with a bit more tact. If the man got really annoyed, he was capable of blowing them all up at any moment—or of shooting Sophie in the head!

“Miss Grant and I had already assembled a dossier,” Great-aunt Tabitha continued, “and you can be assured that we would have been able to demonstrate your involvement in the murders as well as the bombings. I don’t know why you thought the minister wouldn’t cut you loose at the least sign of trouble; it was bound to happen. Of course I believe her when she says that she had no idea at the time what you were doing out of that misguided impulse to protect her.”

Miss Grant took over the narrative. “It was only after Tabitha witnessed the attack on Waterloo Day that we really became suspicious again and started to dig around,” she said. Her words seemed to cut into Nicko, who visibly slumped as he listened. “The less said about the minister, the better—but you’d left your fingerprints all over the business, metaphorically speaking.”

“All I needed was a little more time!” Nicko cried. “I almost pulled it off!”

He tucked the revolver under his arm—Sophie wished she thought she could get the gun away from him, but it wasn’t worth the risk, not with the chance of a stray bullet blowing them all to kingdom come—and felt in his pocket for his cigarette lighter. He flicked it on and held the flame up high.

The women of the NTWSA and the dozen scarlet-clad young women who worked in the hut gazed at him with horror.

Out of the corner of her eye, Sophie saw Mr. Petersen moving toward them from about twenty feet away, silently but frantically gesturing for her to keep Mood talking. Fanned out behind him were a half dozen guards.

“How did you manage to get past the searchers,” Sophie asked, desperate to fend off the explosion, if only for a few more seconds, “without them finding the gun and the lighter and taking them away from you?”

“It was child’s play,” Nicko boasted, preening. His responsiveness to flattery was the only thing that helped Sophie hope they might after all escape with their lives. “I showed them my identification from the ministry—it hasn’t yet been taken away from me; Joanna gave me a week to straighten out my affairs. And that’s precisely what I’m here to do. I’m not sorry, either, Sophie, to take you with me as well as your wretched great-aunt; you and your little friend gave me considerable anxiety, and it was only a matter of time before you’d have had to be put out of the way.”

Mr. Petersen and his men slunk a little closer.

Sophie crossed her fingers and prayed. All things being equal, she really would prefer not to die in an explosion.

“Those searchers are extraordinarily careless,” Nicko
added with satisfaction. “I can’t think why they don’t get properly qualified people to do the job.”

“Don’t you have any qualms,” Sophie asked, trying very hard not to look in the direction of the guards, “about taking all these innocent people with you? What about sending away some of the women who work here before you blow us all up? None of them ever did anything to hurt you.”