The Assassin

by Clive Cussler

  Stunned and disbelieving, he did as he was told.

  “The other on the cable. Above, there, where it’s nailed to the wall.”

  “Hey, wait. It’s lightning outside! It’ll electrocute me.”

  “Better odds than this bullet,” she said. “Who knows if lightning will strike?”

  “It hit yesterday. Twice last week.”

  Nellie laughed. “Didn’t anybody ever tell you? Lightning can’t strike twice.”

  “It’s the highest building on the street, higher than the tanks. It gets hit all the time. Why do you think they have four separate rods?”

  “Bullet?”

  He gave a terrified groan and clicked the manacle around the cable.

  —

  Isaac Bell racked his brain, trying to figure out what Nellie was up to now. Having the house right next to the refinery was a powerful opportunity. How would she use it if not to shoot from this brilliantly situated observatory?

  Leaning a hand on the window frame as he gazed upon the storm, he felt a thick, rounded ridge on the sash. It looked and felt like it had been painted over and over for decades. But it was not made of wood like the rest of the room. Rope? No, cable. Metal cable. Still trying to winkle out Nellie’s deranged thoughts, he picked at it idly with his boot knife and saw a gleam of brass or copper. He traced it up to the ceiling, out the wall, under the gutter, and onto the roof. He flung open the window, thrust head and torso into the rain, and swung gracefully onto the sill. There he stood to his full height with his back to the four-story drop and traced the cable onto the flat roof, where it split into four separate strands. The strands went to the four corners. On each corner was a full-size bronze replica of a whaler’s harpoon.

  “Nellie,” he whispered, “I underestimated you.”

  Thunder pealed. Bell looked down and, as if he had conjured her with his voice, saw a slight figure hurry across Constable Street. It was her, carrying a tool bag long enough for her gun. Lightning flashed. Nellie stopped and looked up at the widow’s walk. Their eyes met.

  Bell shouted with all the power in his lungs to the Van Dorns at the gate, “Get her!” A thunderclap drowned out his voice. Nellie blew him a kiss, and a bolt of lightning wider than a man plunged from the heart of the sky.

  43

  Ten million volts of electricity stormed down the ground wire, electrocuted the bartender manacled to it, and raged out the sewer and under Constable Street. Fumes from spilled oil were trapped in the refinery storm drains. These the lightning ignited. Fireballs shot from the drain grates. At the far end of the cable Nellie Matters had strung, the electricity jumped through the air and drilled a hole in the steel wall of a naphtha tank.

  —

  Isaac Bell heard the Standard Oil fire whistles chorus ghostly screams.

  He staggered to his feet, vaguely aware that a thunderbolt had slammed him back through the windows. He had landed on the widow’s walk floor. He knew he hadn’t taken a direct hit; neither his skin nor his clothing was burned. But his heart was pounding, as if the immense surge of electricity passing so near had almost stopped it. His lungs felt half-paralyzed, hardly able to pump air, until he collected his spirit and demanded they get back on the job.

  His vision cleared. He saw columns of flame fringed with black smoke.

  In the refinery yard, fireballs danced jigs among the tanks.

  Bell scanned the chaos below for signs of Nellie and quickly realized that what looked like chaos was orderly chaos. Thanks to the Van Dorn advance warning, the men running up and down Constable Street and dashing in and out of the refinery gates were moving with purpose. The company’s firemen hurried through the yards, ringing bells and dragging hose. Blazing oil overflowed from a burning tank. Workmen moved swiftly to pump oil from tanks near the fire to distant empty tanks and into barges on the waterfront. Others dug trenches to divert burning oil from vulnerable tanks.

  Nellie was gone. But Bell was convinced that she would not run from the fires she had set. She would stay and finish what she had started. She would not find it easy. Prepared for the battle, the Constable Hook refinery she was trying to destroy was the best defended in the world. It was fighting for its life but not yet desperate.

  If Bell knew Nellie, that would not discourage her. The question was how would one woman alone continue to attack? He stayed on his widow’s walk vantage point to find the answer.

  A tank roof blew. Thick crude oil bubbled out. The side walls collapsed and a river of crude rushed down the hill. The black torrent split where the slope flattened. Some of it collected, forming a half-acre black lake. Shimmering in the heat, it roared spontaneously into flames. Globs of flaming tar flew in the air and landed on tank roofs. Firemen climbed the tanks with shovels and hoses. They extinguished the fires on all but one. It ignited with a roar and gushed smoke that the flames sucked in and flung at the sky.

  The crude that continued to rush down the hill was flowing toward the waterfront. The river split again suddenly and the main branch rampaged onto the docks, caught fire, and ignited stacks of case oil. Mooring lines and tug hawsers were set alight, and as the flames consumed them, they parted, sending ships and workboats adrift on a tide of burning oil. The ships caught fire and burned swiftly. Flames leaped up rigging faster than sailors could climb. Tugboats raced to the rescue and batted flames down with torrents from their fire nozzles.

  The second stream of oil veered below the docks and splashed against a three-story hotel and restaurant on a pier in the Kill with a roof board that read:

  GOOD NEWS CAFÉ

  ROW, FISH, EAT DINNER, AND DRINK A SOCIAL GLASS

  The oil ignited. Flame flashed up the restaurant’s wooden walls. A man and woman in cook whites ran out lugging a cash register and a glass case of cigars. The burning oil encircled the building and closed in on the couple from both sides. They ran toward the water on a path swiftly narrowing. The fire chased them onto the dock to the water’s edge, where they teetered, clutching their rescued treasures.

  If I hadn’t missed my shot at Nellie Matters, Bell thought, these people would be safe.

  A B&O railroad tugboat swooped against the dock. Deckhands pulled them aboard. But the burning oil chasing them splashed off the dock onto the water. Floating, still burning, it surrounded the tugboat with a ring of fire. Six tugs steamed to its aid, fire nozzles pumping water to confine the burning oil while their stricken sister steamed away and wetting down one another’s wheelhouses to cool paint bubbling in the heat. The tugs formed a cordon, spraying to prevent the fire from spreading on the water to nearby ships and piers.

  After Isaac Bell saw the burning oil encircle the restaurant, and then the couple, and then the tug, he suddenly realized how Nellie Matters would attack next. He turned around and looked up the hill. The slope was a shallow incline and The Hook saloon was tall. He climbed out the window again and onto the roof of the widow’s walk. From that vantage he could see over the city’s tenement roofs. The swiftly expanding oil refinery had continued building higher up the hill. Tank yards and kerosene and gasoline stills were everywhere, below, around, and up behind the city.

  Now he saw Constable Hook as Nellie saw it. He had dubbed her “heiress” to The Hook saloon, but, in fact, she was also heiress to her father’s dream of building on a hilly cape an ultramodern gravity-fed refinery with access to the sea. The refinery that her father had envisioned and the boomtown that sprang up with it were one in her mind. If Bill Matters couldn’t have the refinery, having lost it to Rockefeller, he would destroy it. Since he was locked in a jail cell, Nellie Matters would destroy it for him. By their way of thinking, the city it had nurtured and ultimately surrounded did not exist.

  He swung back in the window and raced down the stairs and across the street to the gates. Wally Kisley was there. “Did you see Nellie?” Bell asked.

  “No. I was just looking for you. You O.K.?”

  “We forced her hand,” Bell said. “This wasn’t her first choice,
setting it off down here.”

  “It’s gonna be a record breaker anyway. Good thing the company doubled up on firemen.”

  “If we hadn’t blocked the high ground, she’d have attacked from up there. You can’t see from here, but I saw it from the roof. A mammoth crude oil tank above the city.”

  Wally nodded. “Number 14. The first of the new crude storage tanks to feed the stills below. One hundred thousand gallons.”

  “That’s her goal—a Johnstown Flood of burning oil.”

  —

  Wally Kisley was incredulous. “Why attack the city?”

  “There is a deranged logic to her scheme,” said Bell. “While everyone’s trying to protect the city, she can concentrate on the refinery.”

  He borrowed a police sergeant and a squad of local cops from Eddie Edwards’ headquarters at the refinery gates. The cops led him and Wally on a shortcut past twisted ruins of burned-out tanks and through tank yards and stills. Firemen were deluging them with hose water to cool them. They entered the city streets, passing a school from which the children had been sent home and a hospital into which injured firefighters were stumbling.

  Bell spotted Edna Matters, somber in black. She had an Evening Sun press card in her hatband and was taking down in shorthand the words of the rail-thin, harried-looking chief of Constable Hook’s volunteer firefighters. “Gossip that we refused to fight Standard Oil’s fire is bunk. We are protecting twenty thousand people in our city—families, friends, and neighbors.”

  “Can you speak to the rumor that water is running so low that you won’t have enough pressure to fill your hoses?”

  “Bunk! We get our water direct from the Hackensack River and the Hackensack is wet yet.”

  Three fire horses galloped past pulling a steamer pump engine and the chief jumped on the back. Edna closed her notebook. “Hello, Isaac. Thank you for letting me see my father the other day.”

  “Have you seen Nellie?”

  “Of course not. If I had, I would have turned her in. What could make her do . . .” Her voice trailed off. “Whatever made Father do it, I suppose.”

  Bell said, “Be careful here, Edna. Don’t let the fire get above you.”

  The city streets ended abruptly at a shiny new chain-link fence. It had a gate manned by two cops. On the slope above the gate loomed Tank 14, which was painted white to reflect the heat of the sun.

  “How could she miss?” said Wally. “Big as the battleship Maine and twice as explosive.”

  Freshly poured concrete footings were laid on both sides of the tank. Sheets of steel were stacked next to them, awaiting assembly.

  “I need twenty strong men,” Bell told the sergeant.

  “There ain’t a man in The Hook not fighting the fire.”

  “O.K. Take four armed men, empty the jail, bring the prisoners here.”

  “I don’t think I’m allowed—”

  Bell cut him. “A champion sniper with a gun that fires exploding bullets is going to blast a hole in that tank by hitting it repeatedly in the same spot until one of them ignites a crude oil fire that will drown your city in flames. I need your prisoners to erect a barricade. Now!”

  The sergeant took off at a dead run. Bell removed his coat and said to the others, “Let’s get to work.”

  Wally asked him quietly, “You’re just guessing about those bullets, aren’t you? Who knows if the smith actually made them.”

  “I know,” said Bell. “I found one in his shop. It looked like he had set up to run a batch of them. My only guess is that Nellie got the first batch. Knowing her, she probably did.”

  “You found one? Where is it?”

  “In my rifle.”

  —

  When night fell, the fires lighted Constable Hook bright as day, from Tank 14 on its highest hill to the Kill Van Kull waterfront, where flames were eating through the piers, consuming the sheds, and burning the pilings down to the waterline. An entire warehouse of case oil was fueling a pillar of flames visible from every point of New York Harbor, and a burning barge of oil barrels glared at Staten Island like vaudeville limelights.

  Isaac Bell had still not seen a trace of Nellie Matters. But Tank 14 was shielded on all four sides by a hastily erected barrier of sheet steel. “Now she can’t pierce the tank by hitting it repeatedly in the same spot,” Bell told Joseph Van Dorn. “And since it’s on the top of the hill, there is no vantage point on the Hook—no hill, no building, no tree—high enough to shoot through the roof.”

  “She’ll shoot other tanks,” said Van Dorn.

  “She’ll start fires. We’ll put them out. Eventually, she’ll run out of ammunition and strength.”

  44

  Amanda Faire was bitterly disappointed.

  The redheaded keynote speaker for the Staten Island Suffragette Convocation at the Cunard estate on Grymes Hill had expected her usual packed house rapturously chanting her catchy watchword “Women’s votes are only Faire.” But despite her appearance being advertised in all the New York newspapers, and her arrival heralded by a magnificent scarlet balloon tethered on the lawn, half the chairs in the lecture tent were empty.

  “I’m afraid we lost some of our gentlemen to the firebug tourists,” apologized her mortified hostess. She gestured helplessly at the smoke-stained western sky. “New York, Jersey City, Newark, and the Oranges are all flocking to see the conflagration.”

  “Well,” Amanda said, bravely, “those who took the trouble to come deserve to hear me.”

  “I’ll introduce you.”

  “I’ll make my own introduction, thank you.” That was all she needed, a windbag driving the rest of the audience to the fire.

  Amanda, who had positioned her podium so that her balloon created a striking backdrop directly behind her, stood to thin applause. As she opened her mouth to begin her speech, she could not help but notice a restive stir in the seats. Now what?

  They were staring at her. Past her. Mouths were dropping open.

  A woman cried, “There goes your balloon.”

  —

  Nellie Matters never doubted the wind would be in her favor. Things always worked out that way. Just when she needed it, it had shifted south, blowing the red balloon north the short two miles from the Grymes Hill estate to Tank 14. From a thousand feet in the air, she could see what had burned in Constable Hook and what remained to burn. She was dismayed. The fires were going out. There was so much left untouched.

  On the bright side, the Savage’s magazine indicator read “5.” Five of Beitel’s exploding bullets. Her exploding bullets. She had thought them up. She was their creator. The gunsmith had only made them.

  Tank 14 would finish the job.

  She spotted it easily, a huge white circle on the top of the highest hill on Constable Hook at the point where the cape met the mainland, smack in the middle of Isaac Bell’s shield. Clever Isaac. But the thin roof of the tank was hers. She aimed dead center, adjusted for the balloon’s swaying, and fired. Through the telescope she saw the bullet explode in a red flash. It didn’t pierce the roof, but it must have weakened it. One or two more shots striking that precise spot should do the trick, and the little red flash would detonate the flammable gas in the top of the tank, which would ignite the ocean of oil below.

  She fired again.

  Bull’s-eye! It hit the scar from her first shot. The powerful telescope showed a crack emanating from the scar. The next would do it. Isaac, where are you?

  She looked about.

  There you are!

  He was leaning on the shield and pointing a rifle at her. Poor Isaac. I can’t shoot you. But you can’t shoot me either. What a pair we make. You better get away from the tank because it is about to explode.

  As if he had heard her thoughts, he suddenly ran, crouched low, clutching his rifle. No, he hadn’t heard her. The balloon was moving and he had to shift his field of fire.

  “What’s the use?” she whispered as she lined up her final shot. “We could never shoot each
other.”

  —

  Isaac Bell had one exploding bullet. He doubted that the impact of striking the balloon’s thin fabric skin would detonate the gas. Nor would passing through the gas and the fabric as it flew out. If the shell could be set off that lightly, what would have kept it from exploding in his fingers when he loaded the rifle?

  The only solid object on the balloon was the steel load ring at its mouth.

  He found it in the telescope. It was almost too easy. The telescope was so powerful and the rifle was so finely balanced and the balloon so steady in the light breeze. He could not miss even if he wanted to.

  He saw a red flash where the bullet exploded. In the next instant, thousands of cubic feet of gas billowed into flames above Nellie’s head. The balloon’s skin melted, but it did not fall, as if the heat of the burning gas somehow pinned it to the sky.

  Nellie looked up. Bell saw her whole body stiffen with terror.

  The burning gas snaked tentacles of flame down into the basket.

  He would not let her die that way.

  He found her beautiful face in the telescope. He exhaled lightly to steady his hand.

  He caressed the trigger.

  45

  ONE MONTH LATER

  THE EMPIRE STATE EXPRESS

  Archie Abbott barely made the train, running like crazy to answer a last-minute invitation from Isaac Bell:

  “I’ll buy you breakfast on the Empire.”

  When he entered the diner, Bell was already seated next to an exquisitely dressed gent about their age. Bell jumped up and intercepted him before he reached the table. “Thanks for coming.”

  “Of course I came. I’ve been worried. It’s been a while. Since . . . well, you know what since. How are you, Isaac?”

  “Keeping busy,” said Bell. “Best thing when you have a lot on your mind.”

  “Where’ve you been all month?”

  “Back and forth to Chicago. Practically living on the 20th Century. Would you do me a favor?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m stopping at Croton—appointment at Pocantico Hills. Would you help that gentleman onto the Ossining train?”