Clive Cussler - The Thief

“Semmler asked me to make sure that Marion is in the building tonight.”

“She’s here? She can’t be. She’s home.”

“I put her to work, last minute, taking pictures in the roof studio. She’s up there now. Where he wanted her. I am so sorry, Isaac, but my—”

Bell whirled away and ran full tilt down the block and around the corner. He saw an International truck pulling away from the gate in the wooden fence that surrounded the vacant lot behind the building. One of the uniformed lobby doormen was standing guard at the gate and moved to stop him.

“Where the hell you think you’re going?”

Bell hit him twice, continued through the gate, and ran past the temporary outdoor studio stages. He saw the life net in the light of a nearby window. The canvas was stretched between springy ropes, five feet above the ground. Bell ducked under it and found the trapdoor. Oddly, it was open.

Isaac Bell climbed into the hole and down a steel ladder affixed to a concrete wall. At the bottom, he saw light at the end of a narrow hall and ran toward it, drawing his Browning. The hall ended at a dimly lit narrow stairwell. Steps spiraled tightly upward into the highest reaches of the building. Bell bounded up them, the sound of his boots muffled by rubber tile.

At an abbreviated landing at the top of the first flight, he saw several twelve-inch-square doors set in the walls at head height. He jerked one open. It covered the judas he had suspected was there. The spy hole took in the lobby. He saw four doormen blocking the front door, the stairs, and the steps to the theater. The elevators were open, their lights off, out of service.

Bell opened the judas hole cover on the opposite wall. The film exchange was empty at this late hour, and a steel scissors gate was closed across the motorcycle messengers’ entrance. Irina had given him the only way to breach the building’s defenses.

He climbed another flight and ran face-to-face into Detective Tim Holian. Holian shambled past him, bleeding from bullet wounds in his arms and legs, white with shock, and muttering, “Hospital, hospital, gotta get to the hospital.”

Bell thought fleetingly that Holian had to be one of the luckiest men alive to survive a fusillade of gunfire with only flesh wounds.

“Where’s Saunders?”

“Dead. All dead.”

Bell pounded up the stairs. At the fourth flight, the wall had disappeared, having been slid aside into a pocket. He stepped through the opening and stared in horror. The recording studio was a slaughterhouse.

Larry Saunders lay dead on the floor. Two men Bell didn’t know lay dead, revolvers locked in their fists, slouch hats fallen beside them. A third man had been strangled and bore the bloody gouge around the throat that was the Acrobat’s signature. Then he saw Clyde Lynds sprawled on his back, his chest covered in blood, his face drained of color.

“Clyde?” Pistol in hand, Isaac Bell knelt beside him. He saw immediately that the brash young scientist was not long for this world, and he had a horrible feeling that he had let him down.

Clyde opened his eyes. “Say, Isaac,” he whispered. “You didn’t make the rescue this time.”

“I’m sorry I got you into this,” said Isaac Bell. “I wish I had insisted you take your chances with Edison.”

“At least Edison wouldn’t kill me.”

“Did they take your machine?”

Clyde answered slowly, in a whisper so faint that Bell had to move within inches to hear him. “They took a jury-rigged contraption I slapped together with baling wire. It will drive their scientists nuts. Joke’s on the Acrobat. I fooled him again. And I kept the new plans— Isaac!”

“What?”

“You have to take care of the plans.”

“I will.”

“You have to promise.”

“I promise. Where are they?” Bell asked.

“Right here.”

“Where?”

Clyde raised his hand as if to point at his head as Bell remembered he had on the Mauretania , claiming he held it in his mind and only needed time and money to finish Talking Pictures. A lot of good that would do. They would die with him this time. But instead Clyde was reaching to pat his chest, then hastily to cover his mouth. He coughed, a harsh sound that wracked his body head to toe. The cough ended abruptly with a sudden intake of breath and a long sigh, and before Clyde Lynds could tell Isaac Bell where he had put his plans, the young scientist was dead.

Bell closed Clyde’s eyelids and spread a handkerchief over his face. Mindful of his promise, he searched Clyde’s clothing.

“Looking for something, Detective?”

The Acrobat was speaking directly behind him. His English was fluent, his accent light.

“Place your pistol on his chest.”

Isaac Bell laid the Browning on Clyde’s chest and raised both hands. As his right hand passed his head, he whipped his derringer from his hat, spun around, and fired both barrels in the direction of Semmler’s voice. The slugs clanged through a tin acoustical horn.

The Acrobat laughed.

Now Bell saw him on the far side of the room, a man with hair as gold as his and green eyes bright as emeralds. He was standing behind a disc microphone mounted on a wooden box, smiling the “Fritz Wunderlich” smile that the drummers had raved about. The sketch had failed to capture the magnetic power of his presence. Nor were his thick brow and massive jaw monkey-like. Isaac Bell thought that Semmler, the Acrobat, looked like the work of a brilliant sculptor more enchanted by the structure within his stone than by the surface. The word “mighty” sprang to Bell’s mind. There was a quality to the man of power that made him seem larger than life.

Semmler returned Bell’s inquiring gaze, and his smile broadened and his eyes brightened. Bell was reminded of Art Curtis — though six inches shorter than Semmler and round instead of rangy, Art had possessed a similarly compelling smile. Art had been a fighting man, too, and his eyes could turn cold. But Semmler’s eyes were of a different order, as cold and empty as the stars.

His hands were hidden behind the box.

Bell could not see if he was holding a weapon.

“Clyde’s microphone is quite effective, don’t you think? You thought I sounded real.”

“You sounded like a murderer.”

“I am not a murderer,” Semmler replied, with such conviction that Bell knew he was confronting a madman. “I am a soldier for my country and my kaiser.”

Bell gathered his legs to spring. “That insults every soldier who ever served. You murdered eight men starting with your own accomplice on the Mauretania .”

“None would have died if you had not interfered,” Semmler shot back. “Every death is on your head.”

Bell surged to his feet and rushed the Acrobat in a burst of fluid motion.

Semmler raised a Webley automatic pistol and leveled it at Bell’s chest. “I load hollow-point.455s. I’m told that your friend Abbott will never fully recover from his encounter with a ‘manstopper.’”

Bell stopped, reluctantly.

“We will leave the building,” Semmler said. “Walk ahead of me. Lead the way downstairs.”

Bell had no choice but to do as the Acrobat demanded. But at least with every step down the stairs, he was drawing Semmler farther away from Marion. They descended four flights to the lobby and another to the cellar. Semmler indicated the narrow hall and switched positions when they reached the ladder to the trapdoor.

“I’ll go first,” he said, backing agilely up the ladder, covering Bell until, crouched under the life net, he beckoned with the Webley for Bell to come up next.