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

Wish muttered, as they plunged across the crowded lobby to intercept Rockefeller, “Are you still sure you want to run together? The young ladies are primed to claw his eyes out.”

“Not my first choice,” said Bell. “But it’s our only choice.”

Rockefeller saw them hurrying toward him and said, “There you are. I was just paying our hotel bill.”

“Bill?” echoed Wish. “The town’s blowing up.”

“I pay my debts.”

The manager ran from his office and put the lie to that.

“Envoy Stone! If they reply to your cables, where shall I forward the answers?”

“New York.”

“Envoy Stone!” Isaac Bell said with the ice of cold steel in his voice. “We’re going—now. Stick close.”

—

The situation on Vokzalnaya deteriorated radically before they were halfway to the harbor. Here, too, the trolley had stopped. Suddenly Tatars were running up the middle of the street shooting pistols at well-dressed Armenians huddled in groups.

Russian Army soldiers wheeled up a Maxim gun on a heavy Sokolov mount. As the machine gunners propped it on its legs, the Tatars fled around the corner. The Armenians ran toward the station, mothers dragging children, young men and women helping their elders.

Pistol fire rained down on the Russian soldiers from above. The gunners tilted the water-jacketed barrel upward. The Maxim churned, and a stream of slugs blasted second-story windows.

From one of those windows flew a baseball-size sphere with a glittering tail of a burning fuse. Still in the air, it exploded with a flash and a sharp bang, and the street and sidewalks were suddenly littered with bodies. Wounded were reeling away when a second bomb exploded prematurely still inside the window. No one remained alive in the circle of the two explosions, not the Tatars, Armenians, or the Russian gun crew sprawled around the Maxim.

Isaac Bell and Aloysius Clarke charged straight at it. A Maxim gun and a thousand .303 rounds in trained hands would be their ticket aboard any ship running from the harbor. Wish heaved one hundred forty pounds of Maxim and Sokolov mount over his shoulder. Bell scooped up four canvas ammunition belts in his good arm and looped them around his neck.

“Go!”

They staggered toward the harbor, closely trailed by Nellie and Edna and Rockefeller. At the foot of Vokzalnaya, a mob of people was storming the passenger steamer pier fighting to get up the gangway of the one remaining ship. Ships that had already fled were far across the bay, lights fading in the sand haze as they steamed for the safety of the open sea.

“Mr. Bell!” cried Rockefeller. “Is that the Nobel lubricating oil refinery afire?”

The Standard Oil president’s eyes locked on the sight of a huge fire miles up the coast at Black Town. From the white-hot heart of it, flames leaped a thousand feet into the air.

“Looks like it,” said Bell, who was scanning the finger piers for a likely ship. They had toured that Russian refinery yesterday. Rockefeller was scheming to buy it, but the Moscow-based branch of the Nobel dynamite family had no intention of selling. Now the prize had gone up in smoke.

“Tramp freighter,” said Wish, swinging his shoulder to point the Maxim up the waterfront toward a steamer so old it still had masts. “They won’t be fighting to get on that one.”

Bell saw that the tramp was billowing smoke from its single stack. “He’s raising steam.”

They herded their charges toward it. But as they got close they saw Wish had been wrong. Crowds converging on its pier had forced their way onboard. Overloaded, the ship was heeling at a dangerous angle.

“Wait, there’s one coming in.”

A small ship showing no lights slipped out of the dark. It looked like salvation. Then they saw the Tatars. They were crowded on deck, as they had been on the schooner that landed earlier, a packed mass of angry men bristling with weapons.

“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