“And what do you know about these angels of yours that makes them as anxious to find you as you are to find them?”
“I have even less idea of that,” I said truthfully.
“You’ve come alone?”
“I have some friends, waiting in a safe place.”
“No place is safe in Palestine. This is a pestilential country. Our friend Conte has devised elaborate wagons to transport more siege artillery from Egypt, since the perfidious British captured our guns at sea, but it’s been a running skirmish to get them here. These people don’t know when they are beaten.”
If Napoleon was expecting big guns, time was short. “What happens at Mount Nebo?”
Monge shrugged. “If you’d confide in your fellow savants, Gage, perhaps we could illuminate your future with more precision. As it is, you keep your own counsel, and end up in trouble. It’s like your goose chase over the Pascal’s triangle that was inscribed on your medallion—say, did you finally get rid of that old toy?” t h e
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“Oh yes.” Monge had become convinced my medallion in Egypt had been a modern fraud. Astiza, out of his hearing, had called him a fool. He was not a fool, but burdened by the certainty that comes with too much education. The correlation between schooling and common sense is limited in the extreme. “There’s nothing to confide. I was simply conducting electrical experiments when you sent this ring over our walls.”
“Experiments that killed my men.”
The voice made me jump. It was Bonaparte, moving out of the shadows! He seemed to be everywhere, always. Did he sleep? He looked sallow, restless, and his gray eyes cast their cold hold, as they did toward so many men— like a master to his steed. Again I marveled at his knack of seeming bigger than he is, and how he exuded a sense of seductive energy. “Monge is right, Gage, your proper place is on the side of science and reason—the revolution’s side.” We were enemies, I had to remind myself. “So are you going to try to shoot me again?”
“That is what my army was trying to do yesterday, was it not?” he said mildly. “And you and your electrical sorcery helped best us.”
“After you tried to shoot or drown me at Jaffa at the advice of that madman Najac. There I was, facing eternity, and when I look up you are reading cheap novels!”
“My novels are not cheap, and I have an interest in literature as I do in science. Did you know I wrote fiction as a youth? I had dreams of being published.”
Despite myself, I was curious. “Love or war?”
“War, of course, and passion. One of my favorites was called
“What happens?
“The hero’s dreams are doomed when he’s blinded in battle, but to keep his affliction secret he covers his face with a mask of brilliant silver. He tells his men he had to cover his face so the Mahdi’s radi-ance wouldn’t blind those who look upon him. They believe him. But 1 7 0
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he cannot win, and pride will not allow surrender, so he orders his men to dig a gigantic trench to swallow the enemy charge. Then he invites his followers to a feast and poisons them all. He drags the bodies into the trench, sets fire to the corpses, and runs into the flames himself.
Melodramatic, I admit. Adolescent morbidness.” This was the imagination at work in the Holy Land? “If you don’t mind me asking, what was your point?”
“‘The extremes to which the mania for fame can push a man’ was my closing line.” He smiled.
“Prophetic as well.”
“You think my story was autobiographical? I’m not blind, Ethan Gage. If anything, I’m cursed by seeing too well. And one thing I see is that now you
I could order you shot, but it’s more delicious to let the three of you solve your mystery, don’t you think?”
I sighed. “At least you seem more genial than when we last met, General.”
“I have a clearer sense of my own direction, which always settles one’s mood. I haven’t given up seducing you, American. I still hope we can remake the world for the better.”
“Better like the slaughter at Jaffa?”
“Moments of ruthlessness can save millions, Gage. I made clear to the Ottomans the risk of resistance so this war can end quickly. If not for fanatics like Smith and Phelipeaux, traitor to his own nation, they would have surrendered and no blood would be shed. Don’t let yourself be trapped in Acre by their folly. Go, learn what you can with Silano and Astiza, and then make a scholar’s decision of what to do with it. I’m a member of the Institute myself, remember. I will abide with science. Won’t I, Gaspard?”
The mathematician gave a thin smile. “No one has done more to marry science, politics, and military technology, General.”
“And no one has worked harder for France that Doctor Monge t h e
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