The Assassin

by Clive Cussler

  “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.

  26

  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.”

  “Where are they?”

  “In our hotel stables.”

  “Let’s see if they’re not on fire yet.”

  —

  At a fast pace in tight single file, they headed back to the Baku Hotel.

  Bell led, with the ammunition belts draped around his neck and his Bisley in his good hand. He put Rockefeller between Edna and Nellie so the fit young women could keep an eye on the much-older man. Wish marched rear guard, with his Maxim gun over his shoulder and a single-action Colt Army revolver in his fist.

  The many who might have wished them harm gave them a wide berth, perhaps unaware that the Maxim, ordinarily manned by a crew of four, would be a cumbersome handful for two, or were afraid to test how cumbersome. The hotel was not on fire, the Tatars having concentrated their fury on the nearby neighborhood of the Armenians, whose burning mansions were lighting the night sky.

  Bell led his people past the hotel and down the driveway to the stables. The watchmen, who were gripping old Russian Army rifles, recognized him and “Envoy Stone.” Bell tipped them lavishly and closed the barn doors. It was not much quieter. Despite th
ick stone walls and the surrounding buildings, they could still hear the shooting in the streets, while, inside, nervous horses were banging in their stalls.

  Equally nervous chauffeurs watched the new arrivals warily. A few were tinkering with limousine motors. Most were slumped behind their steering wheels with hopeless expressions as if dreading orders to drive to their employers’ mansions and brave the mobs.

  Bell looked for Josef, the English-speaking chauffeur who had driven the Peerless and who could be valuable as a relief driver, mechanic, and translator. When he didn’t see him, he asked the other chauffeurs if he was around.

  “No, sir.”

  “No, sir.”

  They muttered among themselves. One man who spoke a little English whispered, “Revolutionary.”

  “Josef?”

  “Maybe revolutionary. Maybe police.”

  “Police?”

  The chauffeur shook his head. “Agent.”

  “Provocateur?”

  “Informer.”

  That Josef was a police spy, Bell had guessed. But a revolutionary, too? On the verge of hiring this man as driver and translator, Bell changed his mind and decided to trust no one. Better to go it alone.

  —

  The bullet-smashed windshield of the Peerless attacked at the Black Town refinery had not been replaced. The missing glass offered a clear field of fire, and Wish Clarke got busy mounting the Maxim gun on the Peerless’s backseat.

  The other two autos were as Bell had seen them last, still in wooden crates.

  “Hammers and bars,” said Bell, wrenching boards loose with his hand.

  Edna Matters returned with a blacksmith’s hammer. John D. Rockefeller found a crowbar. Nellie Matters pried boards loose skillfully with it, saying to Bell, “Don’t look surprised. Who do you think fixes balloons in the air?”

  Rockefeller swung the hammer like a man who had grown up chopping wood on a farm.

  Edna said, “I can’t fix anything. What shall I do?”

  Bell sent her in search of gasoline and oil and cans to carry it in. He gave her money to buy any cans and tools the chauffeurs would sell her. She came back with cans and tools and several maps.

  As the packing crates fell away, Bell was glad to see the autos were equipped with straight-side tires on detachable rims. Stony, wagon-rutted roads and camel tracks guaranteed many punctures. Up-to-date straight-side tires were easily removed from the wheel, reducing the holdup for patching them from an hour to a few minutes.

  Edna Matters had gathered cans to hold one hundred fifty gallons of gasoline and oil. Bell sent her, accompanied by Rockefeller and Nellie, across the stable yard to the hotel kitchen to buy tinned food and bottled water. He checked that the cars’ crankcases were filled with oil and poured gasoline into their tanks.

  Wish Clarke mounted the Maxim, fed in a fresh ammunition belt, filled its barrel-cooling sleeve with horse trough water. After he cleared his line of fire by removing the empty windshield frame, he gave Bell a hand cranking the Peerlesses’ motors. One of the new ones started easily. The other was balky, but eventually Bell coaxed it alive. The car Wish had commandeered for the Maxim gun coughed and smoked. They unscrewed the spark plugs, cleaned the electrodes, and filed them to sharper points.

  Outside, bursts of gunfire grew loud. A woman screamed. The chauffeurs stared fearfully at the doors. A man wept. From the hotel came the sound of the pianist still playing.

  By one o’clock in the morning, they had all three Peerlesses fueled and oiled and provisions stowed. Bell spread a map on the hood of the lead car to show everyone their route from the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea. They were heading west across Transcaucasia, between Russia’s Greater Caucasus mountain range to the north and Persia’s Lesser Caucasus range to the south.

  Their sixty-mile slot of river valleys between the mountains comprised the restive regions of Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia, “where,” the tall detective said, “they are actively trying to kill each other. First stop, Shemaha. About seventy-five miles. Any luck, we’ll make it before nightfall tomorrow.

  “Wish leads with the Maxim. I’ll cover the rear. Mr. Rockefeller, you drive the middle one.”

  “I don’t know how to drive,” said Rockefeller.

  “You don’t?”

  “I’ve only recently arranged to buy an auto. It will be delivered with a man to drive it.”

  “I know how to drive,” said Nellie.

  “You do?” asked Edna. “When did you learn?”

  “In California. A bunch of us realized that suffragists ought to know how to get themselves around. I must say, it’s a lot easier than your buckboard, not to mention my balloon.”

  Bell was dubious, to say the least, but had no choice and could only hope she wasn’t exaggerating her auto prowess. They needed all three cars to carry supplies and had to have a replacement if they lost one to a breakdown that he and Wish could not repair.

  “Nellie drives the middle car,” he said. “Edna sits in front, Mr. Rockefeller in back. Wish, do you have something to lend Mr. Rockefeller?”

  Wish Clarke pulled a pocket pistol from inside his coat and gave it to Rockefeller. The old man checked that it was loaded.

  Bell had already removed his derringer from his hat when no one was looking. He handed the two-shot pistol to Edna. “Ever shoot a derringer?”

  “Father taught us.”

  Bell was already wishing that they had Bill Matters with them, carrying the big Remington he had on the train. Thank the Lord for the Maxim. And thanks, too, for the assassin’s Savage in his carpetbag on the floor beside the steering wheel.

  “What about me?” asked Nellie. “Don’t I get a gun?”

  “You’ll have your hands full driving— Now listen, everyone. We will stay very close. No headlamps except for Wish. If you have any trouble with the auto, or something happens the others can’t see, honk on your horn.”

  “Isaac?”

  “What, Edna?”

  “Wouldn’t it be better if Mr. Rockefeller sat up front with Nellie and I sat in Wish’s car with the Maxim gun?”

  “Do you know how to fire a Maxim gun?”

  “I saw Mr. Rockefeller’s refinery police use them to frighten labor strikers. Anyone considering ambushing us will think twice if they see the gun manned—they won’t know I’m a woman.”

  She had a point, thought Bell, though he didn’t love it. Both women had caps pulled over their short hair and had changed into trousers when it was decided to run for it. But a bushwhacker just might shoot her from a distance to disable the Maxim. And yet she was right that a manned machine gun would look a lot more intimidating, which would forestall a lot of trouble before it started.

  “Wish, what do you say? Do you want her on your gun?”

  Wish didn’t love it either, Bell could see. Nonetheless, he said, “I’m afraid Edna’s right.”

  They shifted positions. Edna gave Bell’s derringer to Nellie and climbed in the back of the lead Peerless. “Try not to blow my head off,” Wish called over his shoulder.

  “Duck if you hear me shooting.”

  John D. Rockefeller climbed into the front of the middle car.

  Nellie Matters said, “This should be interesting.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Sitting side by side with the devil incarnate.”

  “You don’t seem that bad to me,” said Rockefeller.

  It was the kind of joke that Nellie Matters loved, and Bell expected her to let loose one of her big laughs, but all Rockefeller got was an angry glare. He looked at her sister, hunched over the Maxim behind him, and saw that Edna, too, had not even cracked a smile.

  “Looking on the bright side,” said Wish Clarke, “we’re driving brand-new, rock-solid, Cleveland-built machines.”

  “Turn left on the main road,” said Bell, attempting to fold the map with one hand. Failing that, he worked his arm out of the sling and stuffed it in his pocket. “Let’s go.”

  He op
ened the stable doors.

  The three red cars rumbled through the cobblestone yard and out the driveway onto streets nearly light as day. House fires nearby and oil fields and refineries burning far off lit the sky. They turned away from the fires, west, out of the city on roads clogged with refugees riding in carriages, work wagons, and rich men’s autos and plodding on foot.

  Isaac Bell saw that his one-day timetable to Shemaha had been wildly optimistic. They’d be lucky to make that first town in two days. Then seven or eight more towns and four hundred eighty miles to go.

  27

  Of the six longest, hottest days and freezing cold nights ever endured,” wrote Edna Matters, typing up her shorthand notes as she did every night when the autos finally stopped rolling, “today was the longest yet, and I’m afraid it is not over.

  This afternoon’s shoot-out, our third since escaping Baku, ended inconclusively. Those who were shooting at us are still out there. Neither IB nor WC are ceasing their vigilance. Neither has slept more than a catnap. The autos are circled, as tightly as the narrow cliffside clearing will allow, like a latter-day wagon train besieged by Indians, and we are watching the steep slopes and the fast-falling darkness.

  She looked around her. When they left the hotel stable in Baku, the Peerless autos’ tires had been white as snow. They were black now, blackened by the oily streets before they were even off the Absheron Peninsula, caked with road dust and marred by the pries used to work them on and off their rims to patch punctures. Wish Clarke was fixing one now. Nellie was helping him. JDR was stretched across a backseat, sound asleep. The plutocrat was the envy of all; he could sleep through anything. Isaac was draped over the Maxim gun, as still and watchful as a cat, the bag in which he carried his rifle in easy reach, as always.

  She typed.

  The roads are abysmal, verging on the nonexistent, except for the occasional better-graded stretch, which IB identifies as forty-year-old Russian military roads built to subdue the region. There are fortresses and barracks, some abandoned, some occupied by soldiers disinclined to venture out. Occasionally we trundle across handsome iron bridges the Army built over rushing rivers. The road often snakes beside the railroad tracks, on which we have not seen a single train moving, though we did pass a smoldering line of blackened oil tank cars set afire.