Free Pyramid: A Novel (Jack Howard Series Book 8) by David Gibbins Page A

death of General Gordon, from his
neglect
, I say
neglect
, will see our triumph as his apotheosis, as proof that he was in Khartoum for a higher purpose, not only to succor the people of Sudan but also to safeguard the clues to a discovery that will be for the enlightenment of mankind. I have little doubt that on my return I will be called to the House of Representatives, even the Senate. You should come with me, Jones. America is a place for a man like you. There are railways to be built, rivers to be dammed. With my connections and good word, I can propel you on a path to riches and fame, unfettered by the barriers of class and etiquette of your own country that keep men like you in the gutter.”
    Jones turned to watch Guerin’s bubbles, the detonator cord still slack in his hands. The lofty intentions, the talk of taking the world by storm, of business collaborationswith Guerin, could all be a smoke screen, a play by a man who when the time was right, when the discovery was certain, could as easily sweep others aside and take all the glory for himself. Jones did not know whether the style of the man in front of him was that of a true gentleman or merely a veneer of decency. He had seen what war did to men, and civil war was the worst, war that pitted brother against brother, men who after that could plumb no greater depths. The America that Chaillé-Long spoke of was a place where ambition might know no bounds, but only in the shattered morality that was the aftershock of the Civil War. He had heard stories of latter-day robber barons carving out fiefdoms for themselves in the West with the Colt and the Winchester. It would be an easy matter on a night like this when the time was right for a man like Chaillé-Long to use that revolver beneath his cloak to dispose of them all—a British army deserter long thought dead, an obscure French inventor who seemed intent on keeping his very existence secret, a Nile riverboat captain and his boy—adding a few more to the cargo of unidentifiable corpses swept down annually by the Nile into the swamplands of the delta.
    Jones too had been hardened by killing, but not at the expense of his own soldierly brand of morality. As a soldier he had been a maverick, constantly pressing against authority, an enlisted man with the wayward thinking allowed only to officers. Yet not for the first time he found himself missing the army, the moral certainty of those who worked and fought for one another. Out here, in the world beyond the army, he had discovered that the only person you could rely on was yourself, but in so doing all your flaws and weaknesses became sharply defined, and the personal demons kept at bay in the army rose up to do battle for your soul and mind when there were no others to discipline and protect you.
    But he had laid a smoke screen of his own, and had not told Chaillé-Long everything. In the last eight years he had learned to move in the shadow lands, to bend thetruth to his purposes. He knew what had happened to Mayne; he had guessed who had ordered it. Chaillé-Long was right: Gordon had become a liability, but so too would be the one ordered to carry out the deed, a deed so shocking to public sentiment that word of it must never be allowed to leak out. And Mayne had not gone to Khartoum alone, but with his friend, his blood brother from their service together years earlier on the Red River expedition in Canada, a voyageur named Charrière. After Jones had left the crocodile pool with Kitchener, they had ridden out into the desert to join the route back from Khartoum to the Egyptian border, and Jones had been astonished one night to see a form he recognized as Charrière slip by, heading north. Jones followed him to Wadi Halfa, where he had seen Charrière go alone into Lord Wolseley’s tent. It was then that he knew what Charrière had done. Wolseley had been a patron and benefactor to the Mohawk Indians since he had first employed their services in Canada;