Read The Dakota Cipher for Free Online Page A

to make money in our business.”
    “Our business?”
    “Bringing people together.” He laughed.
    “You’re very candid.”
    He shrugged. “Just half-drunk. And confident of your discretion.”
    “Because I’m a spy, too?”
    Now he looked at me seriously. “Of course not! You’re a man like me, American, able to see the value in what you’ve been told. You’d betray me in an instant just as I’ve betrayed Bonaparte, and count your thirty pieces of silver as I swing from a tree. No, no, don’t deny it…I’d do the same if our positions were reversed. This is the way of the world.” Lazily he raised his pistol. “So you’ll go to your grave with a secret! Ah, don’t touch your rifle!” He smiled. “You must realize by now that I was sent to find you , not Bonaparte. My true employers remember your crimes.”
    “True employers?”
    He pulled the hammer back. “Do you think the Rite forgets?” He aimed for my heart.
    So I shot him with my cork.
    He was a little too confiding and too confident, see. I’d seen reptiles like him before, so I got up some pressure in my bottle of bubbly and popped the cork just as he pulled to fire. The bottle gushed, cork and spray flying in his face, and it was enough of a surprise that the pistol jerked as I rolled. The ball whined past and thudded into the wall behind, raising a little puff of dust. He heaved up, pulling out a second pistol, but I beat him with a sidearm throw of my tomahawk. There was a crack as it struck between chin and teeth, enamel flying, and then I brought up my rifle. We fired at the same time, but it’s even harder to aim with a hatchet in your face. He missed, and I didn’t.
    The bullet slammed him backward and he jerked as he died. I reloaded as I watched, ready to club him, then yanked my tomahawk out of his face and cleaned its steel on his coat. His split lips were fixed in a snarl. It was a nasty business, but after the events of the past two years the extermination of his kind of vermin didn’t bother me overmuch.
    The Rite? Now I understood my own apprehension. I dragged him through his own blood to the doorway for better light and ripped open his coat and shirt. Burned into his chest was a small tattoo of a pyramid wrapped with a snake. Apophis, the snake god! I shivered. Was this spy in the same confederacy as my old nemesis Silano, another branch of the perfidious Egyptian Rite that had pursued me in Egypt? And now, thanks to this serpent, Napoleon was dividing his forces as the Austrians were massing. Even if I hurried back to Napoleon this instant, it would be too late to pull in Desaix and Lapoype. The French center would be overwhelmed.
    Damn Renato!
    No, there’d be no quick exit to Paris. I’m not exactly steadfast, but I’m no traitor either, even if it wasn’t my country. The only thing to do was to gallop after Desaix, who I faintly knew from Egypt, and get him hurrying back to the battle about to erupt in his rear. Itwould be a near-run thing, but if I rushed there might just be time enough!
    I glanced down at the lifeless body. As I said, don’t boast. And me? Not only was I occasionally useful, I might be developing integrity as well. By the saints, how had Napoleon guessed I might be worth betting on?
    The spy stared upward with the surprised gaze of the dead, his body in a widening pool of gore. I buttoned his bloody shirt to hide his mark and wearily mounted my horse to go off and save the battle. And did I see the flicker of someone else, sinking back into a hedgerow, from the corner of my eye?

Chapter 6
    T HE WHOLE WORLD KNOWS WHAT HAPPENED NEXT. I T DAWNED bright, the air scrubbed by recent rain, and by afternoon we had a high, hot Italian sun, the kind of weather that allows cavalry to actually charge, cannons to actually deploy, and dry muskets to actually fire. If you want to kill each other, there’s nothing like a sunny day.
    As Renato had predicted, the Austrians attacked in force at Marengo, long