The Assassin

by Clive Cussler

  IB, reading over EMH’s shoulder, was just informed by EMH that nothing in our agreement says I cannot reveal Envoy Stone for the louse JDR is, so long as I don’t reveal his true identity. Although if IB were not so exhausted from his wonderfully successful efforts to keep us alive, he might have read further to see that I gave Envoy Stone his due, albeit grudgingly, admitting that Stone actually believes, truly believes, that he and his ilk deal, in his own oft-repeated phrase, ‘fairly and squarely and aboveboard.’ I base this conclusion on an interview granted by sister Nellie, who’s been stuck driving his Peerless all this time and arguing incessantly to no effect. Sister Nellie feels, as does this reporter, that the trouble comes by how differently we estimate the location of that board he purports to be above.

  For example, in the midst of today’s running gun battles—first with renegade Cossacks bent on relieving us of our vehicles, then gangs of Social Democrat revolutionaries who probably want our Maxim gun—the ‘envoy’ suddenly scampered into a railroad telegrapher’s hut. He was not trying to hide, not running from the fight, but trying to send another business cable to America. No one denies his bravery. (He gave his borrowed pistol to sister Nellie before running a gauntlet of bullets in his abortive attempt to communicate God-knows-what.)

  His elastic ethics don’t trouble him at all. He bald-facedly insisted to this reporter that because he was unable to send his cable, as the wires were cut, the contents do not fall under the terms of our agreement and therefore he does not have to admit them to me. It would take a herd of expensive lawyers to get around that one. Which, of course, has always been his specialty. He said, incidentally, that before the wires were cut the telegrapher had received reports of bigger fires, continued looting, and hundreds more murdered in Baku.

  Suddenly Edna heard what sounded like thunder and felt the ground shake. She stopped typing and looked up. Then she resumed typing, faster than ever, as if something was chasing her fingers.

  A boulder just rolled down the hill . . .

  Here comes another . . . They’ve started shooting again. IB can’t see them. He has abandoned the Maxim gun and is running up the road with his rifle . . .

  IB is shouting at EMH to close up her typewriter and take cover behind our “rock-solid, Cleveland-built machines.” EMH keeps typing because it beats being terrified. IB appears prepared to shoot EMH if she doesn’t close up her machine. But she can’t stop. She just keeps typing. She is not exactly hysterical. In fact, not at all. She’s typing because, against all logic, it feels like it makes her bulletproof.

  Isaac is retreating from the curve in the road where he was trying to see who was shooting. He is running back to the Maxim gun. Bullets pluck his sleeve.

  —

  Isaac Bell dodged rifle fire and a blizzard of stone splinters to vault into Wish Clarke’s Peerless so he could feed the belt into the Maxim gun. But Wish was pinned down under another car, from where he was shooting back with his pistol. Bell slid behind the Maxim, cocked it, and jerked the trigger, grinding out ten shots before the belt caught on the tripod.

  He untangled it and fired ten more at a flicker of movement atop the ridge that stared down at them. Three riflemen leaped up and fired back. Bell triggered the Maxim, trying to hit them before the belt caught. Eight shots, ten shots, and this time the belt did not hang up on anything. The pounding machine gun had cleared the top of the ridge before he realized why. Edna Matters had jumped in beside him and was feeding the belt as smoothly as a veteran of the Zulu Wars.

  “You could get killed doing this,” he said.

  “Beats getting killed doing nothing.”

  She stood up, thinking the fight was over. Feeding the belt into the gun had made her even more bulletproof than typing. She did not want to listen to the low voice in the back of her mind that nothing made anyone bulletproof except no bullets.

  “Look out!”

  Suddenly Isaac was roaring in her ear, “Down! Down! Get down!”

  28

  An immense boulder, triple the size of the others, flew at the auto.

  Isaac shoved Edna down. It cleared their heads by inches and hit the guard wall that stood between the edge of the road and a sheer drop. It smashed through the wall, scattering stones, and tumbled into the ravine. Shouts of triumph from the top of the slope announced another rolling at them.

  —

  “IB was both right and wrong last night,” Edna Matters typed in the morning.

  The air was bitter cold. A strong wind was blowing and the sky was full of dust clouds. Wish Clarke sat behind the Maxim gun. He was covering the ridge at the top of the slope. Isaac Bell was starting to climb it with field glasses around his neck and a revolver in his hand. He was hoping to spot Tiflis and a route on which they could make a run for the capital city.

  Thanks to taking cover under an overhang of rock. WC and Envoy Stone and sister Nellie were not flattened by giant boulders. IB and I were also extremely lucky where we shivered all the long, cold night. But the last boulder that thundered down the hill before it was too dark for our enemies to aim another smashed us dead center.

  We are down to two Peerlesses. We managed to rescue some of the water before the wreck fell into the ravine and was swept downstream in a furious torrent. But we could save none of the tinned food and none of the extra gasoline, which presents a serious difficulty as we very likely do not have enough gasoline left to reach Tiflis even though we believe it is close, just over the hills that we somehow got on the wrong side of when we got lost yesterday.

  Looking on the bright side, as Detective WC is wont to say, the renegade Cossacks, or Social Democrat revolutionaries, appear to have been thoroughly routed. Though whether that is true, we don’t really know, as the night had turned dark as a coal mine by the time the boulders stopped hurtling and the shooting had stopped. I am absolutely certain that this reporter is not the first from the civilized world to say, ‘Thank God for the Maxim gun.’

  Additional credit goes to IB, WC, and sister Nellie, who had refused to return Envoy Stone’s pistol. As we prepared to get under way in our remaining two autos, IB read over my shoulder and demanded edits. He asked me to write the following, which embarrasses me in its immodesty. He demanded I write that EMH was a dependable belt feeder who allowed him to employ our Maxim gun to great advantage.

  IB then demanded I change the word ‘dependable’ to ‘superlative.’ Everyone’s an editor. But to be fair, poor Isaac is reeling on his feet.

  My sister Nellie has fallen in love with him.

  Edna Matters stared at the page.

  Who had written that? If a typewriter could blurt, the machine had blurted it out.

  She glanced over her shoulder. Isaac had started up the slope. Suddenly he stopped. Something up the road had caught his attention. She raised her fingers to the keys and typed slowly.

  Nellie is not the easiest person to read. In fact, she is often a cipher, a blank slate behind her smile. But in this case, I can see that she has fallen hard for IB.

  Which creates quite a quandary as I have, too. Starting the night in New York he helped me through my other quandary. Which I believe means I fell first . . . However, being first on line won’t help me one bit. My dear Isaac is falling for her. He doesn’t know it yet. But I can tell. I wouldn’t call it love. But he is fascinated and, being a man, probably doesn’t know the difference—

  She stopped typing and cocked her ear to listen. Someone was shouting down the slope in broken English.

  —

  “They’re waving a white flag,” Isaac Bell called down to Wish Clarke.

  It looked like a dirty shirt tied by its sleeve to a rifle. The man waving stepped warily into view and Isaac Bell immediately recognized the black, wavy pompadour hair. It was Josef the Georgian chauffeur he had befriended in Baku. The one that the other chauffeurs claimed was an informer for the secret police.

  “What’s he yelling?” asked Wish.

  Isaac Bell strained his kee
n hearing to its utmost and heard, “You give gun. We let go.”

  He ran down the slope and joined Wish in the lead auto. “They want our Maxim.”

  “I would, too, in their position,” said Wish.

  “They’re welcome to it,” said Bell.

  “What?”

  “We’ll trade it for a cease-fire and directions to Tiflis.”

  “They’ll kill us,” said Rockefeller.

  “That thought occurred to me,” said Bell. He looked at Wish.

  Wish said, “Isaac, why don’t you talk to him? I’ll get the gun ready to travel.”

  Bell cupped his hands and shouted very slowly and clearly, “Tell your friends to come out where we can see them. All of them.”

  Josef shouted over his shoulder.

  Twelve men started down the slope. They were dressed in workmen’s clothes and they looked very sure of themselves. Bell counted only three rifles. The rest carried pistols. They descended to the road and started toward the autos, fanning out and covering one another with military discipline.

  “That’s close enough,” Bell called, stopping them at fifty feet.

  “You act suspicious,” said Josef.

  “I don’t like people who roll boulders at me.”

  “Not us. Cossacks. We chase them.”

  “So did we,” said Bell. From what he had seen, heavily armed Cossacks were not easily chased. If what the chauffeurs in the Hotel de L’Europe’s stables told him was true, then an Okhrana informer could arrange for the Cossacks to be called off or driven off by loyal troops if they were renegades. How had Josef found them here in the middle of nowhere? How had he known about the machine gun?

  “Who are you, Josef? Who are these men?”

  “Social Democrats.”

  “Aren’t they illegal?”

  Josef flashed his cheerful smile. “Reason we are wanting gun.”

  “Are you their leader?”

  “No, no, no. They ask me translating.”

  “But you just said ‘we.’”

  “Mistaking translating.”

  “Translate this: Guide us to a road to Tiflis. When we see the town, the gun is yours.”

  “Tiflis no safe. Much unrest.”

  “Pogromy?”

  “Politicals. General Prince Amilakhvari dead. Hateful Russian. Oppressing all Caucasia. Russians bringing for priests to pray on. People protest. Social Democrats protest. Police shooting Social Democrats.”

  “You want our gun to fight the police.”

  Josef’s smile disappeared. “Not your business.”

  “If he’s a translator,” muttered John D. Rockefeller, “I’m my old maid aunt Olymphia.”

  —

  The Social Democrat fighters led the way on foot. Wish Clarke covered them with the Maxim gun. Bell drove his Peerless. Rockefeller, Edna, and Nellie trailed in the second car. The wind continued high, buffeting them and blowing dust, and the sun grew hot.

  They climbed a steep road up a mountain. When they finally reached a broad plateau—an open brown steppe bare of vegetation and baked brown by the sun—their guides met up with a pair of horse-drawn phaetons. The men squeezed into the wagons and started across the flatter ground on a dusty track. After about four miles there were signs of recent roadwork, surveyors’ stakes, and the cutting of streets as if the area was to be developed.

  Quite suddenly the plateau ended at the rim of a cliff.

  Tiflis lay below them, one thousand feet straight down.

  Bell saw it was an ancient city growing large in modern times. An old town of church steeples, cathedral domes, and twisted streets hugged the curves of a river. A ruined fortress of jagged rock, abandoned walls, and ramshackle outbuildings crouched on a lower cliff. In the river floated what looked like mills, each with its waterwheel.

  A new city spread out from the center on a square grid of streets. Smoke drew Bell’s eye a mile or so from a big open square at the center of the old city. It was the railroad station where two weeks ago they had holed up for the night on their way to Baku.

  Beyond the station sprawled vast railyards with many rows of sidings. On every siding stood a train of black tank cars. Bell raked it with his field glasses. He saw no wreckage, none of the destruction they had encountered on the eastern stretches of the line. Switch engines and locomotives were expending the smoke that hung over the yard.

  “Trains are running.”

  “How are we getting down that cliff?”

  “Good question.”

  Just as suddenly as they had come upon the cliff, they saw the answer. Nellie was delighted by a perspective she would see normally only from a balloon. Her pretty face aglow, she erupted in a happy cry.

  “Funicular!”

  Two counterbalanced carriages, large enough to hold fifty people each and linked by a strong cable, rolled up and down a steep railroad between the top of the mountain that Bell and his people had just crossed and the city below. There was a bulge in the line halfway down the mountain, a way station where the tracks doubled to allow the two carriages to pass each other.

  “Any steeper,” said Wish Clarke, “and it would be an elevator.”

  Josef jumped down from his phaeton and strode toward them, gaze locked greedily on the Maxim gun. Wish kept his finger on the trigger.

  Isaac Bell said, “Josef, order your men to place their weapons around that rock.”

  Josef started to protest.

  Bell cut him off. “The Maxim is ours until they lay down their guns and we drive to the funicular.”

  Wish Clarke raised a water can in his free hand and called out in a friendly voice, “We just filled the barrel-cooling sleeve. Here’s more water when you need it.” He took a swig from the can and wiped his mouth. “You must remember to refill the sleeve every couple hundred rounds or the heat will steam it off and you’ll melt the barrel.”

  “We are knowing gun.”

  “I had an inkling you might.”

  Wish jumped to the road, gathered the heavy weapon in his arms, heaved it off the Peerless, and laid it gently on the ground. He left the one remaining ammunition belt, then he got back behind the steering wheel and drove after Nellie’s car.

  Bell watched with the Savage 99 braced against his shoulder. Before they reached the funicular station, Josef’s gang had pounced on the Maxim, loaded it into a phaeton, and whipped up their horses.

  —

  “What a pleasure,” said Wish. “The simple act of buying tickets compared to fighting across Azerbaijan and eastern Georgia while straying into stretches of Armenia.”

  Isaac Bell was looking forward to buying more tickets: The train to Batum. The steamer to Constantinople. The Orient Express to Paris. And an ocean liner home.

  The railway carriage from below climbed into the station. A smattering of tourists got off with curious looks for the road-weary, dust-caked travelers waiting to descend. Bell guided everyone into one of the passenger compartments and closed the door. The seats were pitched at an angle to keep them horizontal.

  The carriage started rolling down the embankment.

  “Isaac!” Nellie gripped his arm and pointed across the bare and rocky slope. With her sharp eye for terrain, she had spotted Josef’s phaetons struggling down a steep road a half mile away.

  “You’ll regret giving them that gun,” said Rockefeller.

  “We didn’t give it,” said Wish, “we traded it.”

  It took six minutes to descend the funicular railway’s nine hundred feet to the lower station.

  An electric tram waited at the bottom, which they rode through the old city to the big, central Erevan Square that Bell had seen from above. He sensed the instant he alighted that despite the presence of up-to-date shops, government buildings, and an enormous Russian bank, there was a palpable tension in the air. People walked hurriedly with their heads down and avoiding eye contact. There were many police and soldiers on patrol.

  “The faster we’re out of here, the better,” he
told Wish.

  Rockefeller spotted a telegraph office. “I must send a cable.”

  “Wait until we get to the train station.”

  They found another electric tram, which took them across the river and up through newer parts of the city to the Central Railroad Station.

  —

  Mobs of Georgians, Armenians, and Russians milled in the concourse.

  Rockefeller spotted the telegraph office and strode through them like a heavy cruiser parting the waves.

  Bell said, “Wish, keep an eye on him. We’ll be at the ticket windows.”

  The lines were long. Travelers shouted and gesticulated. Ticket agents shouted back and shook their fists.

  “Five one-way tickets to Batum.”

  “No trains.”

  “What do you mean, no trains? The yard is booming.”

  “No passenger trains.”

  Bell already had money in his hand. He slipped it across the counter. The agent wet his lips. It equaled a month’s pay. “Go to booking office. Ask for Dmitri Ermakov. Tell him I sent you. It will cost.”

  The booking office was next to the telegraph. Wish was at the door. “He’s still at it.”

  “We’ll be in here.”

  Dmitri Ermakov made them wait twenty minutes, by which time scores of people had stormed in and out of the office. At last Bell was ushered in. He held out three times as much money as he had given the ticket agent. “I need five tickets to Batum.”

  Ermakov took the money. “You must understand, sir, there are no passenger trains. Only oil trains.”

  “There must be one or you wouldn’t be talking to me.”

  “When fighting was feared to break out in Baku, Baku send many oil trains.”

  The result, Chief Agent Ermakov explained, was that so many oil trains had rushed out of Baku when trouble started that they were carrying more oil than the Batum refineries could cook and had to be held in Tiflis. Then revolutionaries cut the pipe line and suddenly stocks were running low in the refineries and shipping piers.