Shapeshifters Anonymous by J. A. Konrath

Author:J. A. Konrath [Konrath, J. A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2010-12-31T05:00:00+00:00

Panama

November 15, 1906

“Where is it?” Theodore Roosevelt asked John Stevens as the two men shook hands. Amador, Shonts, and the rest of the welcoming party had already been greeted and dismissed by the President, left to wonder what had become of Roosevelt’s trademark grandiosity.

Fatigue from his journey, they later surmised.

They were wrong.

The twenty-sixth President of the United States was far from tired. Since Stevens’s wire a month previous, Roosevelt had been electrified with worry.

The Canal Project had been a tricky one from the onset—the whole Nicaraguan episode, the Panamanian revolution, the constant bickering in Congress—but nothing in his political or personal past had prepared him for this development. After five days of travel aboard the Battleship Louisiana, his wife Edith sick and miserable, Roosevelt’s nerves had become so tightly stretched they could be plucked and played like a mandolin.

“You want to see it now?” Stevens asked, wiping the rain from a walrus mustache that rivaled the President’s. “Surely you want to rest from your journey.”

“Rest is for the weak, John. I have much to accomplish on this visit. But first things first, I must see the discovery.”

Roosevelt bid quick apologies to the puzzled group, sending his wife and three secret service agents ahead to the greeting reception at Trivoli Crossing. Before anyone, including Edith, could protest, the President had taken Stevens by the shoulder and was leading him down the pier.

“You are storing it nearby,” Roosevelt stated, confirming that his instructions had been explicitly followed.

“In a shack in Cristobal, about a mile from shore. I can arrange for horses.”

“We shall walk. Tell me again how it was found.”

Stevens chewed his lower lip and lengthened his stride to keep in step with the Commander-in-Chief. The engineer had been in Panama for over a year, at Roosevelt’s request, heading the Canal Project.

He wasn’t happy.

The heat and constant rain were intolerable. Roosevelt’s lackey Shonts was pompous and annoying. Though yellow fever and dysentery were being eradicated through the efforts of Dr. Gorgas and the new sanitation methods, malaria still claimed dozens of lives every month, and labor disputes had become commonplace and increasingly complicated with every new influx of foreign workers.

Now, to top it all off, an excavation team had discovered something so horrible that it made the enormity of the Canal Project look trivial by comparison.

“It was found at the East Culebra Slide in the Cut,” Stevens said, referring to the nine mile stretch of land that ran through the mountain range of the Continental Divide. “Spaniard excavation team hit it at about eighty feet down.”

“Hard workers, Spaniards,” Roosevelt said. He knew the nine thousand workers they had brought over from the Basque Provinces were widely regarded as superior to the Chinese and West Indians because of their tireless efforts. “You were on the site at the time?”

“I was called to it. I arrived the next day. The—capsule, I suppose you could call it, was taken to Pedro Miguel by train.”

“Unopened?”

“Yes. After I broke the seal on it and saw the contents…”

“Again, all alone?”

“By myself, yes.

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