Clive Cussler: The Assassin

Bell ripped the hoses from the steel hydrogen tanks and wrestled the heavy cylinders over the side, one after another, until they were gone. There wasn’t much else to throw, but he was still falling. He hurled the dragline out of the basket.

For a moment, he entertained the fantasy of landing in the woods, where springy treetops might slow him down. But the balloon was aiming at the farmhouse. The shade trees might slow him down, but it was soon apparent he was not on course for the shade trees either. Quite suddenly he was directly over a barn. In another instant, he was close enough to distinguish roof shingles. The weather vane on the peak was shaped like a rooster. The dragline touched. Did it slow him slightly? He grabbed the basket ropes and braced for the crash.

The basket hit the roof, splintering shingles, and blasted through them into the hayloft. Bales of hay had no effect on the impact. The loft floor collapsed. The basket hung up in the rafters and stopped, abruptly. In the still air, the near-empty gasbag settled down over the barn.

Isaac Bell dropped from the bottom of the basket to the floor.

He was reeling to his feet when a red-faced farmer burst into the barn.

Bell took out his wallet. “I will pay for your roof. May I use your telephone?”

“I don’t want women voting!” the farmer yelled.

“What?”

“My whole damned barn says Votes for Women.”

“Do you have a telephone?”

“No.”

“Rent me a horse that can make it to the nearest railroad station.”

Bell wired the New York field office

FIND NELLIE MATTERS?

GUARD ROCKEFELLER.

He caught a local train to New Haven and called the office on a Southern New England Company long-distance public telephone while he waited for an express. Nellie Matters, Grady Forrer reported, had escaped in another balloon.

“She can’t hide in a balloon.”

“Night is falling,” said Grady. “She can hide all night.”

“Guard Rockefeller,” Bell repeated.

“Rockefeller is safe. We’ve got an army around him.”

“I’ll be there soon as I can.”

Long before the express pulled into Grand Central, Isaac Bell had a very clear idea of what Nellie Matters believed John D. Rockefeller valued more than life. When he got to Manhattan, he rounded up every Van Dorn detective in the city and chartered steam launches to ferry them across the harbor to Constable Hook.

Hey, you!”

Nellie Matters closed her hand around the derringer in her pocket. She had almost made it home free to The Hook saloon.

“You! Stop right there!”

I belong here, she reminded herself. In the persona of her disguise, she had every right to be hurrying along this street that paralleled the chain-link refinery fence. But the man who shouted at her was sweating in the heavy blue, brass-buttoned uniform of a Constable Hook cop. She pitched her alto voice down to a range between a raspy tenor and a thin baritone.

“What’s up?”

The cop cast a sharp eye on her workman’s duds. Her wig, the finest money could buy, was a thick mop of curly brown hair barely contained by a flat cap. A narrow horsehide tool bag hung from her shoulder strap. A pair of nickel-plated side-cutting pliers protruding from an end pocket was supposed to be the finishing varnish coat on a portrait of a journeyman electrician. No one in the refinery city had challenged it until now.

“How old are you?”

I belong here! “How old am I?” she shot back. “Twenty-four next month. How old are you?”

The cop looked confused. She let go of the gun in her pocket and drew his attention to her tool bag by shifting it from her left shoulder to her right.

“Jeez. From behind, youse looked like a kid cutting school.”

“That’s a good one,” Nellie laughed. “I ain’t played hooky since they kicked me out of eighth grade.”

The cop laughed, too. “Sorry, bud. They stuck me on truant patrol.”

“Tell you what, pal. If your sergeant set a quota, I’m short enough to go in with you. But I can’t stay long. Gotta go to work.”

The cop laughed again. “You’re O.K.”

“I surely am,” she said to herself as the cop wandered off and she hurried to The Hook saloon. “I am O.K. as O.K. can be… And how are you, Isaac?”

Isaac Bell sealed off the Constable Hook oil refinery with armed Protective Services operators commanded by Van Dorn detectives. He put white-haired Kansas City Eddie Edwards in charge because Edwards specialized in locking out the slum gang train robbers who plagued many a city’s railroad yards. The company cops, whom the Van Dorns regarded as strikebreaking thugs in dirty uniforms, resented the invasion and resisted mightily until word from the Eleventh Floor of 26 Broadway reverberated across the harbor like a naval broadside.

“Mr. Rockefeller expects every refinery police officer to do his duty by assisting the Van Dorn Detective Agency to protect Standard Oil property.”

Even before Rockefeller knocked the refinery cops in line, Eddie Edwards was glad-handing the chiefs of the Constable Hook Police Department, the refinery’s private fire department, and the city’s volunteer fire department. These savvy, by-the-book moves bore immediate fruit. Cops were assigned to guard every high point in the city where a sniper might set up shop. Standard Oil transferred battalions of extra firemen from other refineries. The ranks of the Constable Hook volunteers were swelled by volunteers from every town in New Jersey. Standard Oil tugboats from its Brooklyn and Long Island City yards arrived equipped with fire nozzles and were soon joined by Pennsylvania Railroad and New Jersey Central Railroad tugs and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad’s fleet from St. George. Then a beat cop assigned to the high school truant squad reported encountering a short, slight, youthful electrician who fit one of the Van Dorn Agency descriptions of how the assassin might look disguised as a man.

“In the city,” Eddie Edwards told Isaac Bell. “So short and skinny, the cop thought he was a kid. Near the fence. Not inside.”

“Yet,” said Bell.

Bell questioned the cop personally and came away fairly certain he had seen Nellie. Her breakdown 99 would fit easily in the electrician’s horsehide tool bag the cop described. He wondered for the twentieth time whether she had gotten her hands on any of Beitel’s exploding bullets. A few well-placed shots would set six hundred acres ablaze. Her presence confirmed exactly what she had told him. She was out to avenge her father by destroying what Rockefeller loved most. More than life, more than money, the magnate loved what he had built, and the Constable Hook refinery was the biggest thing he had ever built.

“Isaac!” It was Wally Kisley, out of breath. “Found a duck.”

The cops exchanged baffled looks.

Bell and Wally headed into the refinery on the run. The Van Dorns blanketing the place under explosives expert Wally’s guidance had discovered the shooting gallery target on a twenty-thousand-gallon naphtha tank.

“She’s here,” said Isaac Bell. “This nails it.”

“With her sense of humor intact,” said Wally.

The duck was high up on the huge tank, near the top. This one was painted red and stuck to the metal wall with a magnet. Electrical wire attached to its rail bracket ran down the tank. Nellie had concealed the wire artfully by snugging it against the heavy copper cable that grounded the tank’s lightning rod.

“Can you disarm it without blowing us up?”

“I’ll answer that after I find what she hooked to the other end of this wire.”