The Watchmaker’s Hand

“Underground. For a while, at least. With Lincoln’s death, there’ll be people after me.”

She said, “Always happens with a public target.”

“You?”

“A kill. College town. No one connected to the school. An OC informant. But I’ll use the faculty as a cover. I’ll be a poet.”

Hale couldn’t fathom how the wheels and springs of that plot would work.

Simone eased onto her back and tugged the sheet up to her armpits. Not from modesty, but because the trailer was drafty. “You must have hundreds of clocks and watches. Is there a favorite?”

“Always the next one, the one I’m working on at the moment.”

She nodded; she understood this too.

“But of those I’ve made in the past? A clock made out of meteoric iron.”

She said, “Kamacite and taenite. Alloys of nickel and iron. For one job, I had to be a geologist.”

“The only naturally found metallic form of iron on earth. Meteorites.”

She was considering something, eyes on the ceiling. “But... springs? Iron wouldn’t have elasticity.”

“No springs. I used a weight escarpment. I carved a small chain out of the iron. Another favorite? Not one I made. I acquired it. Made out of bone. It does have some metal. But I think you could make a tension device from bone that could power it.”

“Human bone?”

“I don’t know. I suppose it could be tested. Maybe there’s some DNA left.”

“Who made it?”

“A prisoner in Russia. Political prisoner. He was on a work detail and they let him have tools. It took him a year. He made it as a bribe for one of the guards to let him escape. It could be sold for thousands. In dollars. You couldn’t carry enough rubles to buy it.”

“Did it work?”

“The clock worked fine. His plans didn’t. The guard took it and shot him.”

“How do you know the story?”

“The horology world is small.”

“All the clocks you’re talking about are analog. Wheels, springs, weights, chains. No interest in digital ones?”

“I respect them but, no, not really. Other than one. The atomic clock.”

“I’ve heard of it. It sets universal time, right?”

He nodded.

“Even when working perfectly, mechanical and electric and electronic clocks’re affected by temperature, solar flares, magnetic fields, altitude changes. The highest level — nearly faultless — are ones that measure time according to the resonant frequency of atoms. In the U.S., the National Institute of Standards and Technology uses cesium atoms cooled to near absolute zero.”

“Nearly faultless?”

“They lose or gain one second every three hundred million years.”

“Does life need to be that accurate?”

“Business meetings, luncheon dates, theater curtains, weddings, no. Airline scheduling, trains, timing of radiation bursts in cancer treatments, yes. Outer space? A timing error of a billionth of a second can mean nearly a twelve-inch positioning error on reentry. And your spaceship disintegrates. Atomic clocks are being replaced by optical. Even more accurate. Do you collect anything? Poetry, I suppose.”

“And miniature steam engines. They run on alcohol.”

“Don’t know that I’ve ever seen one.”

“I find them hypnotic. The blue flame, the smell of the fire.”

“What do they do?”

“Turn wheels and belts, spin governors. There are a few that’re practical. One can run a generator in a safe house I have that’s off the grid. Steam can do just about anything electrons can. Charles Babbage had a design for a steam-powered computer, the Analytical Engine, he called it — 1834. It was never finished, but I’ve always thought I might like to get the plans and do it myself. Were there ever any steam-powered clocks?”

“One, also the eighteen hundreds, Birmingham, England. It was essentially a promotion piece for the values of steam. Here and there nowadays, some tourist attractions.”

“Are they accurate?”

“As accurate as the escarpment. The steam doesn’t turn the hands. It lifts weights that drive the wheels. There’s one in the Midwest. Instead of chiming the hour, it blows a whistle.”

“Why do you want Rhyme dead?”

“When a horologist builds a clock or watch, the rooms are as clean as scientists making a space telescope. Not a single bit of dust or a hair or grain of sand. The room I use, in Europe, has negative pressure.”

“Like a biohazard lab.”

“Lincoln is a grain of sand that keeps ending up in my wheelworks. We’ve been on a collision course for years. There was a job I wanted, last year. An oligarch. London. Highest security in the city. More than for the king.”

“Dmitry Olshevsky.”

“That’s him. Five million.” He felt the irritation once again. “I was passed over. Pierre LeClaire got the job. The buyer didn’t say, but I think it was what Lincoln had done to my reputation.”

“And you’re his grain of sand. Because he may have stopped some projects, but you’re still free.”

True. But little consolation.

Hale happened to glance at the security camera monitor. Someone — a man, he believed — stood at the mouth of the cul-de-sac just on the other side of the chain barring entry. Had the man gotten closer, the alarm would have sounded.

This was not unusual. People were curious about the demolition site.