Clive Cussler: The Assassin

Could he bow his head and accept Rockefeller’s invitation to join the trust?

Or could he pretend to bow his head?

What do you say, Hamlet? Make up your mind. Do you want revenge? Or do you want more? A tenth of Standard Oil’s colossal profits would make him one of the richest men in America. So what? How many meals could a man eat? In how many beds could he sleep?

A tenth of the Standard’s power would crown a king.

What do you say, Richard? How many plots have you laid? What secret mischief?

Even Richard was surprised how blind his enemies were.

Matters calculated the odds by listing his enemy’s weaknesses.

The all-powerful monopoly was like a crack team of strong horses. But seen through Bill Matters’ clear and bitter eye, those horses were blinkered, hobbled, and hunted: hobbled by fear of change; hunted by government prosecutors and Progressive reformers determined to break their monopoly; blinded by Standard Oil’s obsession with secrecy.

Could they be done in like Romeo and Juliet by the confusion of secrets?

The Standard’s systemized secrecy, the secret trusts and hidden subsidiaries that shielded the corporation from public scrutiny, bred intrigue. On the occasions he’d been summoned to the Standard’s offices, he had never been allowed to see another visitor. Who knew what private deals were struck in the next room?

Richard was the man to beat the Standard, the plotter of “secret mischiefs.”

But where were his henchmen? Who would help him? Who could he count on? Spike wouldn’t be worth a damn. His old partner was a two-fisted brawler, but no conspirator, and too sunny a soul to kill when killing entered the plot. He needed henchmen with hearts of ice.

A tall man in a white suit, with a handsome head of golden hair, an abundant mustache, and fierce blue eyes, stepped off an extra-fare limited at Union Depot and hurried forward to collect his Locomobile from the express car. He traded jokes with the railroad freight handlers easing the big red auto down the ramp, lamented Kansas City’s loss of first baseman Grady to the St. Louis Cardinals, and tipped generously when the job was done.

Could they recommend a fast route to Standard Oil’s Sugar Creek refinery?

Following their directions, he drove out of the rundown, saloon-lined station district, when two wagons suddenly boxed him into a narrow street. The men who jumped off were dressed more like prizefighters than teamsters. A broad-shouldered giant swaggered up, and he recognized Big Pete Straub, whom he had seen board the train at St. Louis.

Straub flashed a badge.

“Standard Oil Refinery Police. You Isaac Bell?”

Bell stood down from his auto. He was as tall as Straub, well over six feet, but lean as wire rope on a one-hundred-seventy-five-pound frame. A head held high and a self-contained gaze signified life at full tide.

Straub guessed his age at around thirty. “Go back where you came from.”

“Why?” Bell asked nonchalantly.

“There’s nothing for you in Kansas. We’ll fire any man who talks to you, and they know it.”

Bell said, “Move your wagon.”

A haymaker punch flew at his face.

He slipped it over his shoulder, stepped in to sink left and right fists deep, and stepped back as quickly. The company cop doubled over.

“Get him!” Straub’s men charged.

An automatic pistol with a cavernous muzzle filled Bell’s hand, sudden as a thunderbolt. “Move your wagon.”

They sold gasoline in the freight yards. A hardware store supplied spare tubes and tires, a towrope, cans for water, motor oil, and extra gasoline, a bedroll, and a lever-action Winchester repeating rifle in a scabbard, which Bell buckled to the empty seat beside him.

He stopped at a butcher to buy a beefsteak to grill on an open fire when he camped for the night, and a slab of ham, coffee beans, and bread for breakfast in the morning. Downtown Kansas City was jammed with trolleys, wagons, and carriages and fleets of brand-new steam, electric, and gasoline autos. Finally clearing the traffic at the edge of the suburbs, he headed south and west, crossed the state line into Kansas, opened the Locomobile’s throttle and exhaust pipe cutouts, and thundered onto the prairie.

No caress was gentler, no kiss softer, than the assassin’s finger on the trigger.

Machined by a master gunsmith to silken balance, the Savage 99 lever-action rifle would reward such a delicate union of flesh and steel with deadly precision. Pressure as light as a shallow breath would fire the custom-loaded, high-velocity smokeless powder round that waited in the chamber. The telescope sight was the finest Warner & Swasey instrument that money could buy. Spike Hopewell appeared near and large.

Spike was pacing the cornice atop an eighty-foot oil derrick that stood on the edge of a crowd of a hundred rigs operated by independent wildcat drillers. They towered over the remnants of a small hamlet at a remote Kansas crossroads forty miles north of Indian Territory. Since he had struck oil, a horde of newcomers seeking their fortunes had renamed the place Hopewell Field.

Houses, stables, picket fences, and headstones in the churchyard were stained brown from spouters that had flung oil to the winds. Crude storage tanks, iron-sided, wood-topped affairs eighty feet wide and twenty high, were filled to the brim. Pipes linked the tanks to a modern refinery where two-hundred-barrel stills sat on brick furnaces in thickets of condensing pipe. Their chimneys lofted columns of smoke into the sky.

A boomtown of shacks and shanties had sprung up next door to feed and entertain the oil workers, who nicknamed it Hope-Hell. They slept in a “rag town” of tents. Saloons defied the Kansas prohibition laws just as in Wichita and Kansas City. Housed in old boxcars, they were not as likely to be attacked by Carrie Nation swinging her hatchet. Behind the saloons, red brakeman’s lanterns advertised brothels.

Railroad tracks skirted the bustling complex. But the nearest town with a passenger station was ten miles away. Investors were selling stock to build an electric trolley.

The refinery reeked of gasoline.

The assassin could smell it seven hundred yards away.

A red Locomobile blazed across the Kansas plain, bright as fire and pluming dust.

Spike Hopewell saw it coming and broke into a broad smile despite his troubles. The auto and the speed fiend driving like a whirlwind were vivid proof that gasoline — once a notorious refining impurity that exploded kerosene lamps in people’s faces — was the fuel of the future.

His brand-new refinery was making oceans of the stuff, boiling sixteen gallons of gasoline off every barrel of Kansas crude. Fifty thousand gallons and just getting started. If only he could ship it to market.

The assassin waited for a breath of wind to clear the smoke.

You could not ignore wind at long range. You had to calculate exactly how much it would deflect a bullet and you had to refine your calculations as impetus slowed and gravity took its toll. But you couldn’t shoot what you couldn’t see. The old oil man was a murky presence in the telescope sight, obscured by the smoke that rose thick and black from a hundred engine boilers and refinery furnaces.

Hopewell stopped pacing, planted his hands on the railing, and stared intently.