Clive Cussler - The Assassin

“Looks like it,” said Bell, who was scanning the finger piers for a likely ship. They had toured that Russian refinery yesterday. Rockefeller was scheming to buy it, but the Moscow-based branch of the Nobel dynamite family had no intention of selling. Now the prize had gone up in smoke.

“Tramp freighter,” said Wish, swinging his shoulder to point the Maxim up the waterfront toward a steamer so old it still had masts. “They won’t be fighting to get on that one.”

Bell saw that the tramp was billowing smoke from its single stack. “He’s raising steam.”

They herded their charges toward it. But as they got close they saw Wish had been wrong. Crowds converging on its pier had forced their way onboard. Overloaded, the ship was heeling at a dangerous angle.

“Wait, there’s one coming in.”

A small ship showing no lights slipped out of the dark. It looked like salvation. Then they saw the Tatars. They were crowded on deck, as they had been on the schooner that landed earlier, a packed mass of angry men bristling with weapons.

“Where’s Mr. Rockefeller?”

The old man had disappeared.

“He was with us a second ago.”

Bell hurried along a row of shuttered storefronts, businesses that catered to the steamship passengers, past postcard shops, a fruitier, a milliner, souvenirs, Kodak cameras, and shoved through the door of a telegraph office. A frightened telegrapher had his coat and hat on and was eyeing the door as he pounded his key.

“I’ll be right there, Mr. Bell,” Rockefeller said without looking up. “I am sending an important cable.”

“We agreed our lives were more important. Let’s go.” Bell took his arm. Rockefeller tried to shrug him off. The tall detective squeezed hard and exploded angrily, “What the devil is more important than the lives of two women depending on us?”

“Nobel’s lubricating oil factory is destroyed. The low specific gravity of Baku crude makes Russian lubricating oil the best in the world, so the Nobels had a nice melon to cut all these years. The best we’ve got is refined at the Winfield plant in Humble, Texas. Not as good as the Russian lubricating oil, but a lot better than no lubricating oil.”

Clearly, thought Bell, John D. Rockefeller could keep his head when all others were losing theirs. Juggling two balls in the air — the Baku refineries and the Persian pipe line — suddenly he tossed up a third, seizing his chance to profit by the fires. But as Spike Hopewell had said about his old partner Bill Matters, somewhere along the line he had gotten his moral trolley wires crossed.

Isaac Bell shook the magnate like a terrier. “You are risking our lives to cable New York to buy the Winfield refinery?”

“Russia will never get that market back from me.”

“Done, sir,” said the telegrapher, jumping from the key.

Wish and the Matters sisters pushed in the door as the telegrapher ran out, and Rockefeller shut his mouth like a bear trap. Wish dropped the heavy Maxim on the telegraph counter and the women put down their bags. Though still calm, they looked frightened, a tribute, thought Bell, to their common sense.

Wish coolly shifted the gun muzzle toward the door and drew his revolver.

“Isaac, old son. We need a plan.”

“First,” said Bell, addressing Rockefeller, “get this straight. I am running this like a military operation. There is one leader. Me. Wish is second-in-command. Whatever we say, goes. Is that clear, Mr. Rockefeller? No more dashing off on your own. You’ll get us all killed.”

“O.K.,” said the richest man in America. “I accept your terms. But not before we resolve another question.” He leveled a long finger at Edna. “I will not allow this woman newspaperman to report my business like public news.”

Edna Matters answered in a voice as cold as it was determined.

“John D. Rockefeller controls half the oil in the world. He is trapped in the burning city of Baku, which produces the other half. That is extraordinary news. This ‘woman newspaperman’ reports the news.”

“I have news for both of you,” said Isaac Bell.

Our only hope of getting out of this city alive is to pull together. I am not asking you to team up. I am laying down rules. The first rule is, Mr. Rockefeller is not here.”

“Not here?” Edna looked at him, eyes wide and angry. “What do you mean, not here?”

“You can report on anything that happens, provided we survive. But not his presence.”

“I cannot agree to that.”

“You must. To make it out of here alive, we have to pull together.”

“How will you stop me?”

“I will ask for your word.”

“And if I don’t give you my word?”

“Looters are robbing shops,” Isaac Bell answered without the trace of a smile. “I will join them. I will steal a Persian carpet and roll you up in it. I will unroll you when I have delivered you safely back to Newspaper Row.”

“How Cleopatric!” said Nellie.

To Bell’s immense relief, her joke made Edna smile. She looked at the others who were watching closely. “O.K.! If Mr. Rockefeller promises not to slow us down stopping to cable orders to his head office, I promise not to write about him.”

“Done,” said Rockefeller.

“But when he breaks that promise — which he surely will — he must tell me the contents of the cable.” She extended her hand to Rockefeller. “I give you my word. Is it a deal?”

“You’re a good negotiator, young lady. It’s a deal.”

She turned to Isaac Bell. “You, sir, will find some way to make this up to me.”

“It’s a deal.”

A bullet ricocheted off a lamppost and smashed a window.

“The question remains,” said Wish Clarke, “how are we getting out of here if we can’t take a ship or a train?”

“We can drive by auto back to Batum,” Rockefeller ventured. “Then a Black Sea steamer to Constantinople.”

“What auto?” asked Bell, intending to get Rockefeller to reveal how the Peerlesses he had hidden in the hotel stables served his scheme.

“My Peerless Tonneau car.”

“Impossible. Batum is six hundred miles over hard country.”

“Tiflis is halfway to Batum, and trains are safer in Georgia.”

Bell shook his head emphatically. “We can barely all squeeze in the car, much less stow the gasoline, oil, food, water, tools, and spares for crossing open country.”

“And let us not forget Mr. Maxim,” said Wish, patting the weapon he had propped on the telegrapher’s desk, “without whom no one in their right mind would venture on the so-called roads to Tiflis.”

“We would need three autos as sturdy as a Peerless,” said Bell.

“We have three,” said Rockefeller.

“Three?”

“I had three Peerless Tonneau cars shipped ahead.”

“Why?”

Rockefeller hesitated before he answered, “Gifts.”

“For whom?” Bell pressed.

Rockefeller clamped his mouth shut.

Bell said, “Mr. Rockefeller, Miss Matters agreed not to reveal your business. You , in turn, agreed — fairly and squarely and aboveboard, sir — that we’re all in this together.”

Rockefeller’s jaw worked. His piercing eyes, rarely readable, turned opaque.

Gunfire roared, and it did the trick.

“Very well! The English presented the Shah of Persia with gifts of autos. I would outdo their gifts with solid, Cleveland-built American autos. Show him who needs Rolls-Royce? Who needs England? Who needs Russia?”

Isaac Bell exchanged a fast grin with Edna Matters and another with Nellie: yet another reminder that John D. Rockefeller heard the rumors first. The secretive magnate had planned far ahead for his journey toward “the sun rising over the beautiful Mediterranean Sea” where “the days pass pleasantly and profitably.”