The Assassin

by Clive Cussler

  It finally struck Isaac Bell that it was not a good idea to stand and he lay back and let his mind fix on his memory of the shooting. He was sure it was the assassin. He was also fairly sure that the bullet had been aimed at him, not at Rockefeller. The car stopping suddenly had thrown off the first shot. That was the one he heard crackle over the seat back. He had taken the second. A terrible thought pierced his whirling thoughts. Was he drawing fire at the man he was supposed to protect?

  Bell motioned to Bill Matters, one of the faces hovering over him.

  “Get Mr. R—Envoy Stone—under cover. I’ll catch up.”

  “You O.K., Bell?”

  Bell took inventory. Bloody as he was, there were no arteries spurting or he’d have bled to death by now. He tried to move his arm. That made his shoulder hurt worse. But he could move it. No bones fractured. The whirling in his head and a general air of confusion he blamed on the shock of impact from a high-velocity bullet.

  “Tip-top,” he said. “Get Envoy Stone under cover! Now!”

  Matters knelt to speak privately. “He says he won’t leave you here.”

  “Tell him I said to get under cover before he gets killed and I lose my only client. Explain to him that I don’t know what’s going on and I can’t help him at this moment.”

  They were still shouting for a doctor.

  One appeared, a sturdy, barrel-chested young man in a threadbare coat, who knelt beside him, opened his bag, and took out a pair of scissors. He cut away Bell’s blood-soaked coat and shirtsleeves, exposing a ragged tear through the flesh of his upper biceps. He reached for a bottle of carbolic acid and muttered something in Russian.

  “What?” asked Bell.

  “Is hurting. But important.”

  “Beats infection,” Bell agreed. He braced for the fiery disinfectant. For a long moment, the sky turned dark. Afterwards the doctor bandaged the wound, then took a hypodermic needle from its nest in a box padded with red velvet.

  “What’s in that?” asked Bell.

  “Morphine. You are feeling nothing.”

  “Save it for the next guy— What are those Cossacks shouting?”

  “What?”

  “Doctor, you speak English.”

  “I study at Edinburgh.”

  “I will pay you twenty rubles a day to be my translator. What are those Cossacks shouting?”

  The doctor’s eyes widened. On January’s Bloody Sunday, the workers gunned down at the Winter Palace had been demanding their pay be raised to a daily salary of one ruble.

  “What is your name?” asked Bell.

  “Alexey Irineivoich Virovets.”

  “Dr. Virovets, what are those Cossacks shouting?”

  “They are recognizing the captured guns as being looted from armory.”

  Bell levered himself onto his good elbow. He saw pistols heaped on a horse blanket but no sharpshooter’s weapons.

  “Now what’s he saying?” A Cossack officer was reporting loudly to a civilian dressed in top hat and frock coat. Bell pegged him for the governor’s representative or an Okhrana operative.

  “He blames the attack on revolutionaries,” said Virovets.

  “Help me up. We’re going for a walk.”

  “I am not recommending—”

  “Your objection is noted.”

  Twenty minutes later, with his arm in a sling, the sturdy Dr. Virovets at his side, and anxious oil company officials trailing them, Isaac Bell walked beside the Caspian surf breaking at the feet of the derricks until he found one that had been abandoned. As much as he wanted to climb to its parapet, he doubted he could with one working arm and a spinning head.

  The doctor climbed for him and reported back that he could see the Cossacks still clustered where the bullets had rained down on the Peerless. Bell was not surprised. Forging ahead before the others trampled the beach, he had spotted a single set of footprints in the sand that had approached the ladder from one direction and left in another.

  But it was puzzling. The derrick was less than five hundred yards from where the auto had been. How could the assassin have missed twice? The sudden stop could explain the first bullet going awry. But why hadn’t the second or third hit him in the head? Or the assassin’s favorite target, the neck?

  23

  Isaac Bell woke up stiff and sore the next morning to a slew of cipher cablegrams from New York. The first was from Grady Forrer, who continued to substitute as directing head of the case in his absence.

  FIVE POINTERS BLAME GOPHERS.

  Bell took that to mean that Van Dorn detectives had discovered that Anthony McCloud’s fellow Five Points gangsters did not believe he had fallen drunk into the East River but had been murdered. They naturally blamed their rivals the Gopher Gang. But whoever had killed him, and whatever the motive, it was a heck of a coincidence it happened the day of the fire that killed his mother.

  Bell cabled back

  INFORM NEW YORK CORONER.

  entertaining a slim hope that the city’s medical examiner could be persuaded to dig up Averell Comstock’s body to investigate for a cause of death other than old age.

  A cable that read

  HOPEWELL OFTEN NEW YORK.

  told Bell that Wally Kisley and Mack Fulton were grasping at straws about Spike Hopewell’s “tricks up his sleeve” inference. Any independent trying to build a refinery and pipe line would have to travel regularly to New York City to romance his Wall Street bankers.

  But the information that Forrer passed along from Dave McCoart resonated with hope of a breakthrough on the gunsmith front—clues that Joseph Van Dorn believed could lead them to the craftsman who smithed the assassin’s deadly weapon.

  THREE POSSIBLES.

  TWO HARTFORD.

  ONE BRIDGEPORT.

  BOSS AUTHORIZED DETECTIVES.

  Archie Abbott, on the other hand, still had nothing to report about sharpshooter Billy Jones.

  ARMY UNFRIENDLY.

  PURSUING FRIENDSHIP BRIGADIER GENERAL DAUGHTER.

  IS SUPREME SACRIFICE AUTHORIZED?

  Bell had just written in encipher on the cablegram blank

  AUTHORIZED ON THE JUMP.

  when Doctor Virovets arrived to change his bandage. The wound was clean, with no sign of infection, but they agreed on another dose of carbolic acid to be on the safe side. For distraction, Bell asked about the variety of languages he heard spoken in the streets. “Tatar,” the doctor explained, “Georgian and Russian.”

  “May I borrow your stethoscope?” Bell asked as the doctor was leaving.

  John D. Rockefeller walked in carrying a tray of milk and pryaniki, the Russian spice cookies of which Bell had grown fond.

  “I’m surprised to see you dressed, Mr. Bell. I presumed I would venture out alone today.”

  “I could use the fresh air.”

  A Renault limousine was waiting with its curtains drawn. At Bell’s insistence, the Cossacks had been replaced by plainclothes police detectives on foot. Some trotted alongside, huffing and puffing, as they pulled onto the avenue. Others rode behind them in an identical Renault, Bell having convinced the cops that similar limousines would confuse a sniper.

  He and Rockefeller sat in near darkness behind the curtains. Bell watched the streets through a split in the cloth, wondering whether a sense of shared danger might incline the reticent Rockefeller to open up further to him. He tested the waters with a joke.

  “I guess we can’t blame the assassin for slandering Standard Oil if he shoots at the president.”

  “He wasn’t shooting at me,” said Rockefeller. “He was shooting at you.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “You are the one with his arm in a sling, not I.”

  “Isn’t it possible he hit me when he missed you?”

  “The first report you filed when you came to work for me stated that he has missed his shot on rare occasions. And never by much. He was shooting at you.”

  “Sounds like you no longer need a bodyguard.”r />
  “Don’t worry, your job is not at risk. Baku is teeming with angry people primed to kill for every imaginable reason. I’m glad to have you with us.”

  “Are you free to tell me who we are calling on?”

  “In confidence. Please bear in mind this is not to be repeated. We are meeting a representative of the Shah of Persia.”

  “Has Mr. Matters gone ahead?”

  “Mr. Matters has other business.”

  “May I ask—?”

  Rockefeller’s eyes cut through the dimly lit passenger cabin like locomotive headlamps. “You have many questions today, Mr. Bell.”

  “Getting shot makes me curious about what to expect next. I was about to ask whether you are meeting this representative as Commercial Envoy Stone or as the president of Standard Oil.”

  “I am the retired president,” Rockefeller shot back.

  “I keep forgetting,” said Bell.

  That drew a stony silence. But minutes later, Rockefeller dropped his voice to a half whisper and confided, “I cannot answer your question, because I have not yet decided. I keep hearing a proverb in Baku. Perhaps you’ve heard it, too. ‘In Persia no man believes another.’”

  “They love insults,” said Bell. “Armenians are sharpers; Georgians are drunkards; Tatars simultaneously violent, unintelligent, and kindly; Germans dull, Cossacks vicious, Russians petty. All agree that Persians are liars. Which shouldn’t come as a surprise after centuries of tyranny and misgovernment.”

  Rockefeller favored Bell’s observation with a thin smile and the further confidence that the detective was angling for. “I don’t know yet whether I am dealing with liars. All I know is that I will begin as Envoy Stone. Whether I become Mr. Rockefeller will depend upon how much noise they make and how much dust they throw in the air.”

  The Renault stopped at a side entrance to the Astoria, one of the lavish new hotels near City Hall. They slipped in quietly, skirted the lobby, guided by a hotel functionary, to a service elevator that took them to a penthouse kitchen. A Persian secretary greeted Rockefeller in flawless English. “It is my pleasure to report, sir, that no one has marked your arrival. We are prepared for the private meeting you requested.”

  “You requested the meeting,” Rockefeller corrected him, politely but firmly. “I requested privacy.”

  “Then we are both happy, sir.” The Persian was slim and lithe as a cat, and as graceful, with large eyes in a narrow face.

  Rockefeller turned to Bell. “Wait here.”

  “I have to inspect the room where you are going,” said Bell.

  “It is perfectly safe,” said the secretary.

  “I still want to see it,” said Bell.

  “It is all right,” said Rockefeller, “I trust our hosts.”

  Bell said, “If I cannot see where you are going, I must insist that I wait directly outside. At the door in the next room.”

  “Insist?” The secretary’s eyebrows arched above a mocking smile.

  Bell ignored him. To Rockefeller he said, “By the terms of our contract, our agreement is voided if, in my opinion, you place me in a position that I cannot protect you. Under those conditions, the severance fee is calculated on the time it will take me to return to New York. The purpose of that clause is to make you think twice about straying too far from my protection.”

  “I recall,” said Rockefeller. He addressed the secretary, “Take us to the room where we are to meet. Mr. Bell will wait outside the door.”

  They put him in the foyer, which was exactly where Isaac Bell wanted to be. He waited until he was alone, closed the outer door, pulled a rubber stop from his pocket, and wedged it under the door. Then he untangled the stethoscope he had borrowed from Dr. Alexey Irineivoich Virovets, inserted the ear tubes, and pressed the chest piece against the thinnest of the wooden panels.

  The secretary was acting as translator for a Persian of very high rank, guessing by the secretary’s obsequious manner of speaking to him. Bell heard a round of elaborate greetings. Then Rockefeller got down to business.

  “Tell His Excellency that I have a gift for the shah waiting in my hotel stables.”

  This was translated and the answer translated back. “The shah is a great lover of horses.”

  “Tell him that this gift for the shah has many horses.”

  The translation back was a puzzled “How many horses?”

  Rockefeller, clearly enjoying himself, said, “Tell him many, many, bright red and shiny brass.”

  “Motors?”

  “The finest autos that Cleveland builds,” answered Rockefeller. “They’ll ride circles around Rolls-Royce. Now, tell him, let’s get down to brass tacks—that expression means ‘business,’ young fellow. Tell him the pipe line will cost the shah not one penny. I will pay for every foot of pipe from Rasht to the Persian Gulf. And I will build the tanker piers and a breakwater to protect the harbor.”

  The answer in Persian was long, and it took the translator a long time to craft a halting, vague reply.

  “By the terms . . . of certain . . . understandings . . . In the name of the most merciful and compassionate God, His Majesty the shah . . . prefers . . . to secure, please God, the agreement of certain . . . neighbors.”

  Isaac Bell gleaned from Rockefeller’s blunt reply that his “correspondents” had laid a lot of groundwork to get to this meeting with a personage who had the shah’s ear. The old man did not sound one bit surprised. Nor did he hesitate.

  “Tell him to tell the shah that I am prepared to pay off the neighbor’s loan.”

  After translation, there was a long silence. Finally, the Persian spoke. The secretary translated, “How much of it?”

  “Every ruble.”

  —

  On their way out, they had emerged from the service elevator and were halfway along the edge of the lobby when Isaac Bell suddenly shouldered Rockefeller toward a corridor that entered from the side.

  “What is it?” asked Rockefeller, resisting with his full weight. Pain shot through Bell’s wound.

  “Keep walking. Turn your face toward me.”

  Bell steered him down the corridor and into the first shop, a florist filled with giant sprays of out-of-season tulips and elaborate concoctions of roses. Before the door had closed behind them, he heard familiar ringing laughter.

  “Good lord. They make Pittsburgh look positively genteel.”

  Bell pressed against the window for a sharply angled view of the lobby.

  “What is it?” Rockefeller demanded.

  “Two ladies who will not be fooled by Special Envoy Stone.”

  —

  John D. Rockefeller was enraged, but he had held off saying anything until they were back at their own hotel where Bill Matters could be called on the carpet.

  “That newspaperwoman is here,” he railed. “Your daughter. What is she doing in Baku?”

  Bill Matters was genuinely apologetic. He looked completely baffled. “I had no idea either of my daughters was coming to Baku.”

  “She is the author of The History of the Under- and Heavy-handed Oil Monopoly.”

  “Yes, I know, sir, but—”

  Rockefeller whirled on Isaac Bell. “Mr. Bell, did you know that she was coming here?”

  “The first I knew,” Bell lied, “was when we saw her at the Astoria.”

  “Find out what she knows. No one must learn I’m here.”

  “Let me do that,” said Matters. “Please. She’s my daughter. She’ll confide in me.”

  Rockefeller looked at Bell, demanding his opinion.

  Bell said, “E. M. Hock has no reason to confide in me. I will call on her, of course, as we’ve become friends. And her sister. But no, I’m not the one to question her. Better for Mr. Matters to do it.”

  —

  Half the vast, dimly lit, high-ceilinged vault that housed the Hotel de l’Europe’s stables remained a house barn and carriage house. Half had been converted into a modern auto and limousine garage with gasoline pumps
and mechanics bays.

  Bell went there with Alexey Irineivoich Virovets in the event he needed a translator. He found the shot-up Peerless, with its windshield not yet repaired. They had parked it out of the way, at the back. Hidden behind it were two large wooden shipping crates covered in canvas. Bell lifted the cloth and looked under it. In the crates were two identical red Peerless autos, just as Rockefeller had told the Persians.

  Virovets translated the writing on various shipping stickers pasted to the crates. The autos had been originally sent to Moscow, then south on freight trains to Baku. It was strange, Bell thought, when he discussed the details of the trip with Bill Matters, the Pipe Line Committee director had never mentioned the autos. Had Matters thought them unrelated to a bodyguard’s concerns for Rockefeller’s safety? Or did he not know about them? It seemed, Bell thought, odd for Rockefeller to keep the autos secret from a colleague. But for whatever reason they were hidden, it was clear again that Rockefeller had planned this trip far ahead.

  —

  “Well, Father, here we are all three having tea as if we’re off to the theater in New York.”

  “I’m very surprised to see you.”

  “How could you be?” asked Nellie. “Edna writes about the oil business.”

  Edna was quietly watching their father and letting Nellie do the talking.

  Their father said, “I didn’t think that the Oil City Derrick had the means to send a reporter to Baku.”

  Nellie said, “Cleveland would be more their limit. Edna is writing for . . . May I tell him, Edna?”

  “It’s hardly a secret.”

  “The New York Sun! What do you think of that, Father? Your daughter is writing for one of the finest newspapers in the country.”

  “The Sun is no friend of Standard Oil.”

  “Fortunately for Standard Oil,” said Edna, “Standard Oil does not depend on the kindness of friends.”

  “And furthermore,” said Nellie, all excited with color high in her cheeks, “Baku could be the biggest thing to hit the oil business since Spindletop.”

  “In an opposite way,” Edna interrupted drily. “Cutting production in half instead of spouting gushers.”

  “I don’t know if the situation is that bad,” Matters said automatically. “The authorities seem back in control.”