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

“I won’t tell a soul,” said Mrs. McCloud. “I promise.”

Bill Matters kept shaking his head. He could not abide the woman’s fear. Mary McCloud’s scornful contempt had underscored the deadly threat of blackmail. But her fear pried open his heart. He did not doubt that most men were his enemies. But not women. Twice widowed, father of daughters given to him by women he loved, he heard himself whisper a coward’s confession.

“I don’t know if I can do this.”

“That’s what you have me for,” said the assassin.

16

When Isaac Bell got back from Washington, D.C., he borrowed a Stanley Steamer from a good friend of Archie Abbott, a well-off New Yorker who, as Archie put it, “passed his days in a quiet, blameless, clubable way.” He drove north of Manhattan into Westchester, passing through Spuyten Duyvil, Yonkers, and Dobbs Ferry. The road, paved with concrete in some sections, asphalted in others, graveled here and there, and along a few stretches still dirt, passed country clubs, prosperous farms, and taverns catering to automobilists from the city. He arrived in North Tarrytown in a traffic jam of farm wagons, gasoline trucks, and autos all packed with workmen.

It was Election Day, the town constable explained. The wagons, trucks, and autos were ferrying three hundred of John D. Rockefeller’s estate gardeners, masons, road builders, laborers, and house servants to the North Tarrytown polls to vote for Rockefeller’s choices of trustees.

“Will he win?” Bell asked.

“He always does,” said the constable, who surely owed his job to the incumbents. “But, this year, the butcher is waging a mighty campaign.”

He pointed Bell in the direction of the Rockefeller estate. Soon the bustle of the town was forgotten, dwarfed by vast building improvements—grading new roads, damming rivers, digging lakes, erecting stables and guesthouses, and laying out a golf course—that appeared to absorb the surrounding farms and entire villages. Rounding a blind bend, he saw an old tavern that stood alone in the sea of mud. A sign on the roof named it

SLEEPY HOLLOW ROADHOUSE

A hand-painted addition stated

NOT FOR SALE

NOT EVEN TO YOU, MR. PRESIDENT

Bell swerved off the road and stopped in front with a strong hunch that the proprietor of the Sleepy Hollow Roadhouse would be more than willing to tell him a thing or two about Rockefeller’s local activities. He ordered a glass of beer and got an earful.

“Retired, the man is lethal,” said the very angry tavern owner. “If the nation thinks that Standard Oil is an octopus, they should see him operate in Pocantico Hills—where, just so you know, my family logged and fished, and farmed those fields across the road, for two hundred years before that sanctimonious pirate pulled up stakes in Cleveland to foist himself on New York and, by extension, our small hamlet.”

Mine host paused for breath. Isaac Bell asked, “What makes him sanctimonious?”

“He’s a teetotaler. It galls the heck out of him that I’m selling drinks right outside his front gate. He put my competitor out of business by buying up every house in the hamlet that supplied his customers. But he can’t do that to me because my customers drive their autos up from the city like you.”

“So it’s a standoff.”

“As much as one man can stand off against an octopus. Who knows which way he’ll come at me next.”

“Is he here often?”

“Too often. Here all the time, now that he’s built his own golf course.”

“How big is the estate?” said Bell.

“Three thousand acres and counting. The man can drive for days on his own roads and never use the same one twice.”

Isaac Bell found the gates open and unmanned. The driveway swept through dense forest, open hayfield, and mowed lawns as green as any he had seen in England. Bridle paths, and carriage roads of crushed slate, crisscrossed the drive and disappeared under shade trees. Clearings at bends in the driveway offered sudden, startling vistas of the Hudson River.

He passed stables and a coach barn, guest cottages, gardens, both sunken and walled, a teahouse, and a conservatory under construction, its graceful framework awaiting glass. A powerhouse was hidden behind a stone outcropping with its chimney disguised by a clump of tall cedars. The drive climbed a gentle slope to a plateau that looked out on the river and circled a large mansion in the early stage of construction. Masons swarmed on scaffolds, buttressing deep cellar holes with stonework.

Bell was wondering in which of the older or newly built smaller buildings Rockefeller actually lived when he noticed below the plateau a canyon-like cut through a stone hill. He drove into it along a flat roadbed. Drill marks in the vine-tangled stone sides, ballast crunching under his tires, and chunks of coal glittering in the sun indicated it was an old railroad cut abandoned decades earlier. He emerged on the far side of the hill beside a cluster of weathered cow barns that appeared to be the remnants of a dairy farm subsumed by the estate.

Sturdy poles carried strands of telegraph, telephone, and electric wire into the biggest barn. Isaac Bell parked the Steamer and pressed a button at the door. A buzzer sounded inside.

John D. Rockefeller himself opened the door. He was dressed as he had been when Bell saw him last in Joseph Van Dorn’s office, in elegantly tailored broadcloth, winged collar and four-in-hand necktie, a silk handkerchief in his breast pocket and gold cuff links. His eyes were bleak.

“What exactly happened to Clyde Lapham?”

“You can answer that better than I,” said Bell.

“What do you mean?”

“Tell me why you sent Clyde Lapham to Washington.”

“What makes you think I did?”

“I know you did. I want you to tell me why.”

“How could you possibly know that I sent Clyde Lapham to Washington?”

“Van Dorn detectives make friends with local cops.”

“I thought you resigned your position.”

“Word of my resignation hasn’t reached my friends in the Washington police. Why did you send Clyde Lapham to Washington?”

“To give the poor