Clive Cussler: The Assassin

“It’ll take your commission years, if ever, to change a damned thing,” Spike retorted. “But folks in Kansas are itching for a fight right now. We’ll beat the Standard in the State House — outlaw rebates and guarantee equal shipping rates for all. And if the Standard don’t like it, Kansas will build its own refinery — or, better yet,” he added with a loud laugh, “buy this one from me so I can focus my thoughts on my pipe line.”

Isaac Bell heard a false note in that laugh. Spike Hopewell was not as sure of himself as he boasted.

Could you snipe a man in the neck at seven hundred yards?

Ask the winner of the gold medal for the President’s Match of 1902.

Could you even see him a third of a mile away?

Read the commendatory letter signed by Theodore Roosevelt in which TR, the hero of San Juan Hill, saluted the sharpshooter who won the President’s Match for the Military Rifle Championship of the United States.

Doubt me?

Read about bull’s-eyes riddled at a thousand yards.

Did President Roosevelt shout Bully! the assassin smiled, when the champion took “French leave”?

But who’d have had the nerve to tell Teddy that the deadliest sniper in the Army deserted his regiment?

“Mr. Hopewell,” said Isaac Bell, “if I can’t persuade you to do the right thing by your fellow independents, would you at least answer some questions about one of your former partners?”

“Bill Matters.”

“How did you know I meant Matters? You’ve had many partners, wildcat drilling partners, pipe line partners, refinery partners.” Bell named three.

Hopewell answered slowly and deliberately as if addressing a backward child. “The commission that hired your detective agency is investigating Standard Oil. Bill took up with the Standard. He sits to lunch with their executive committee in New York. Lunch — Mr. Anti-Trust Corporations Commission Detective — is where they hatch their schemes.”

Bell nodded, encouraging Hopewell to keep talking now that he had gotten him wound up. His investigation so far had been a study in how the giant corporation fired imaginations and spawned fantasies. Standard Oil had been at the top of the heap since before most people were born. It seemed natural that the trust would possess mystical powers.

“Were you surprised?”

“Not when I thought about it. The Standard spots value. Oil, land, machinery, men. They pay for the best. Bill Matters was the best.”

“I meant were you surprised when Bill Matters changed sides?”

Spike Hopewell raised his eyes to look Bell straight in the face. Then he surprised the detective by speaking softly, with emotion. “You spouted the names of a few of my partners. But Bill and I were different. We started together. We fought men, shoulder to shoulder, and we beat ’em. Teamsters that made grizzlies look gentle. We beat them. We thought so alike, we knew ahead of time what the other was thinking. So when you ask was I surprised Bill went with the Standard, my answer is, I was until I thought it over. You see, Bill was never the same after he lost his boy.”

“I don’t understand,” said Bell. “What boy? I’m told he has daughters.”

“The poor little squirt ran off. Bill never heard from him again.”

“Why did you say ‘poor little squirt.’ An unhappy child?”

“No, no, no. Smiley, laughy little fellow I never thought was unhappy. But all of a sudden— poof— he was gone. Bill never got over it.”

“When did he leave?”

“Must be seven or eight years ago.”

“Before Bill joined the Standard?”

“Long before. Looking back, I realize that the boy running off broke him. He was never the same. Harder. Hard as adamantine — not that either of us was choirboys. Choirboys don’t last in the oil business. But somewhere along the line, Bill got his moral trolley wires crossed and—”

Hopewell stopped abruptly. He stared past Bell at the gasoline storage tank. His jaw worked. He seemed, Bell thought, to be reconsidering.

“But if you want to understand the oil business, Mr. Detective, you better understand that Bill Matters was not the first to give in to Standard Oil. Half the men in their New York office were destroyed by Rockefeller before he hired them. John D. Rockefeller, he’s the devil you should be after.”

“What if I told you I suspect that one of those newer men like Bill Matters can lead me to him?”

“I’d tell you that no man in his right mind would bite the hand feeding him like he’s feeding Bill.”

“Would you have switched sides if the Standard asked?”

The oil man drew himself erect and glared at Isaac Bell. “They did ask. Asked me the same time they asked Bill.”

“Obviously you declined. Did you consider it?”

“I told them to go to blazes.”

Bell asked, “Can’t you see that I’m offering you an opportunity to help send them there?”

He pointed down at the orderly rows of tanks and the belching furnaces, then across the forest of derricks looming over the roofs of what must have been a peaceful town. A gust of wind swept the smoke aside. Suddenly he could see clear to the farthest of the wooden towers.

“You built your refinery to serve independents. That’s where your heart lies. Wouldn’t you agree, sir, that you owe it to all independent oil men to testify?”

Hopewell shook his head.

Bell had one card left. He bet the ranch on it. “How much did the Standard pay for a barrel of crude when you drilled two years ago.”

“A dollar thirty-five a barrel.”

“How much are they paying now? Provided you could deliver it.”

“Seventy cents a barrel.”

“They raised the price artificially high, nearly doubled it, to encourage you to drill. You and your fellow wildcatters did the Standard’s exploratory work for them, at your own expense. Thanks to your drilling, they know the extent of the Kansas fields and how they stack up against the Indian Territory and Oklahoma fields. They suckered you, Mr. Hopewell.”

“More homework, Mr. Bell?” said Spike Hopewell. “Is that the Van Dorn Detective motto: ‘Do your homework’?”

“The Van Dorn motto is ‘We never give up! Never!’”

Hopewell grinned. “That’s my motto, too… Well, it’s hard to say no to a man who’s done his homework. And damned-near impossible to a man who won’t give up… O.K., put ’er there!”

Spike Hopewell thrust a powerful hand into Bell’s. “What do you want to know first?”

Bell stepped closer to take it, saying, “I’m mighty curious about those tricks up your sleeve.”

Hopewell stumbled backward, clutching his throat.

Still gripping the hand that Hopewell had extended, Isaac Bell heard a muted gunshot and realized that the sound was delayed by the time it took a bullet to fly an enormous distance. He pulled Spike down on the cornice’s narrow plank floor, behind the partial shelter of the railings. But it was too late to protect him. The oil man was dead. A slug had pierced his throat and torn out the back of his neck.

A second slug passed through the space that Bell’s own head had occupied a half a heartbeat earlier. It twanged against the steel crown pulley, ricocheted, and splintered oak. Bell looked for the source. The shot echoed crazily. It seemed to come from the west, where a plain riddled with gullies drained toward a creek. On the far side of the creek, low, wooded hills stretched to the horizon. He spotted a flicker of motion to the north. A figure was climbing down a derrick at an astonishing seven hundred yards’ distance.

Isaac Bell plunged three rungs at a time down the ladder.