The Assassin by Clive Cussler (epub ebook reader .txt) 📕

“Flying,” said the assassin. At his signal, the two men lifted Lapham off his feet and threw him headfirst out the window.

Startled by the wind rushing past his head, Clyde Lapham soon found his attention fixed placidly on the granite blocks racing by like a long gray train of railroad cars. He had always liked trains.

—

In the passenger hall of the Baltimore & Ohio Depot, the public telephone operator signaled a successful long-distance connection to New York.

The assassin closed the door of the soundproofed booth.

“I have accomplished the mission.”

“Mission?” asked Bill Matters. “This is a weak line. I can’t hear you.”

“I have accomplished the mission.”

“What mission?”

“When the New York papers get the news, they’ll flood the streets with extras.”

Even through a weak connection, Matters heard the overblown exuberance that could mean trouble. “What news?”

“Clyde Lapham leaped to his death from the Washington Monument.”

“What?”

“As you requested, his death will seem innocent.”

“No.”

“The poor man was deranged. He jumped from the top of the Washington Monument.”

“No!”

“You could tell that he planned it a long time. He brought a barn jack to force open the bars wide enough to slip through. He arranged for the window to be blocked off from public view. He anticipated every detail. Apparently, an artist was painting views for the Army—the Army runs the monument, you know. Dementia is a strange affliction, isn’t it? That a man could be simultaneously so confused and so precise.”

“No! No! No!”

“What’s wrong?”

Bill Matters raged. He clamored he still had use for Lapham. He had not ordered him killed. He was so angry that he shouted things he could not mean. “Are you insane?”

The assassin hooked the earpiece back on the telephone, paid the clerk at the operator’s desk, and strolled out of the station and up New Jersey Avenue until the incident was forgotten.

13

Isaac Bell walked across E Street, peering into shopwindows, and turned down 7th, where he propped a boot on a horse trough and mimed tying a nonexistent shoelace. Then he continued along Pennsylvania Avenue, skirted the Capitol, and turned down New Jersey. Ahead stood the Baltimore & Ohio Depot.

The clock tower was ringing his train.

He collected a ticket he had reserved for the Royal Blue passenger flier to New York. The clerk warned that it was leaving in five minutes. Bell hurried across the station hall, only to pull up short when an ancient beggar in rags, a torn slouch hat, and white beard deeply frosted with age shuffled into his path and extended a filthy hand.

Bell fumbled in his pocket, searching for a coin.

“Rockefeller’s detectives are still on your tail,” the beggar muttered.

“Skinny gent in a frock coat,” said Bell without looking back. “He took over from a tall, wide fellow on 7th Street. Any more?”

Joseph Van Dorn scratched his powder-whitened beard and pretended to extract a louse. “They put a man on the train dressed as a priest. Good luck, Isaac. You’re almost in.”

“Did the boys manage to follow Mr. Rockefeller?”

Van Dorn’s proud grin nearly undid his disguise.

“Right up to the back door of the Persian embassy.”

“Persia?” Edna called Rockefeller the master of the unexpected. She had that right. “What does he want with Persia?”

“Play your cards right and you’ll be in a position to find out.”

Bell dropped a coin in Van Dorn’s hand. “Here you go, old-timer. Do your friends a favor, spend it at a bathhouse.”

He showed his ticket and headed out on the platform, hurried the length of the blue-and-gold train, peering through the gleaming leaded-glass windows, and boarded the Royal Blue’s first car. Then he worked his way swiftly through the cars. The locomotive, a rocket-fast, high-wheeled Atlantic 4-4-2, whistled the double ahead signal.

Four cars back, he spotted the Standard Oil detective dressed like a priest. He clamped a powerful hand around his dog collar. The locomotive huffed steam, gently for a smooth start, and the drivers began turning. Bell lifted the priest out of his seat by the scruff of his neck. Passengers stared. Bell marched him off the train.

“Tell Mr. Rockefeller he’s wasting his money and my time shadowing me with amateurs.”

“What are you talking about?” the detective blustered. “How dare you assault a man of the cloth.”

The train was rolling, the side of a coach brushing Bell’s shoulder. “Tell the thin man in the frock coat and his fat friend in the derby next time they follow me, I’ll punch both their noses.”

Bell ran to catch up with the Royal Blue.

“And that goes double for the clergy.”

—

Voices were raised when Isaac Bell walked into the club car looking for a well-earned cocktail. The loudest belonged to a red-faced United States senator in a dark sack suit, a florid necktie of the type President Roosevelt was making popular, and a hawser-thick gold watch chain draped across his ample belly. He was hectoring the only woman in the car, Nellie Matters, who was wearing a white shirt, a broad belt around her slim waist, a straight skirt to her ankles, and a plain straw hat adorned with a red ribbon.

Bell ordered a Manhattan and asked the perspiring bartender, “What is going on?”

“The suffragette started it.”

“Suffragist,” Bell corrected. “Seems to be enjoying herself.” Her eyes were bright, and she had dots of high color in her cheeks. Bell thought he had never seen her quite so pretty before.

“They were debating enfranchisement, hammer and tongs, before we even got rolling.” The bartender filled his glass. “We don’t often see a lady in the club car, it being a bastion, shall we say, of ‘manliness.’”

“The gents appear willing to make an exception for a looker.”

“But the senator prefers an audience to a looker.”

“Yet another reason not to trust a man who enters politics,” said Isaac Bell.

The senator loosed a blast of indignation. “I read in the newspapers, Miss Matters, you intended to fly your balloon over the Capitol and drop torpedoes on the Congress! And would have dropped them if the wind had