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

Oil’s industrial service firm. That’s their fancy name for refinery cops, strikebreakers, and labor spies. He smashed my pipe line back in Pennsylvania.”

“I bumped into Straub only yesterday in Kansas City.”

The older man shrugged, as if monumentally unconcerned. “Standard Oil has no monopoly on private cops and strikebreakers. You’ll find Big Pete’s bulldozing union labor in coal mines, railroads, and steel mills. For all you know, he’s on his way to Colorado to bust up the miners union. Heck, Rockefeller owns half the mines out there.”

“He’s not in Colorado. He’s in Kansas. Last time Straub visited Kansas, independent refiners bucking the Standard turned up dead in Fort Scott and Coffeyville.”

“Accidents,” Spike Hopewell scoffed. “Reed Riggs fell under a locomotive—drunk, if he held to pattern—and poor Albert Hill was repairing an agitator when he tumbled into a tank.” Hopewell shot Bell a challenging look. “You know what an agitator is, Mr. Detective?”

“The agitator treats crude gasoline distillate with sulfuric acid, washes away the acid with water, neutralizes it with caustic soda, and separates the water.”

Hopewell nodded. “You’ve done your homework. In that case, you know that the fumes’ll make you light-headed if you’re not careful. Albert tended not to be.”

“I’m not one hundred percent sure both were accidents.”

“I’m sure,” Hopewell fired back.

Bell turned on him suddenly. “If you’re not afraid, why won’t you testify?”

Hopewell folded his ample arms across his chest. “Tattling goes against my grain.”

“Tattling? Come on, Spike, we’re not schoolboys. Your work’s at grave risk, everything you built, and maybe even your life.”

“It’ll take your commission years, if ever, to change a damned thing,” Spike retorted. “But folks in Kansas are itching for a fight right now. We’ll beat the Standard in the State House—outlaw rebates and guarantee equal shipping rates for all. And if the Standard don’t like it, Kansas will build its own refinery—or, better yet,” he added with a loud laugh, “buy this one from me so I can focus my thoughts on my pipe line.”

Isaac Bell heard a false note in that laugh. Spike Hopewell was not as sure of himself as he boasted.

—

Could you snipe a man in the neck at seven hundred yards?

Ask the winner of the gold medal for the President’s Match of 1902.

Could you even see him a third of a mile away?

Read the commendatory letter signed by Theodore Roosevelt in which TR, the hero of San Juan Hill, saluted the sharpshooter who won the President’s Match for the Military Rifle Championship of the United States.

Doubt me?

Read about bull’s-eyes riddled at a thousand yards.

Did President Roosevelt shout Bully! the assassin smiled, when the champion took “French leave”?

But who’d have had the nerve to tell Teddy that the deadliest sniper in the Army deserted his regiment?

—

“Mr. Hopewell,” said Isaac Bell, “if I can’t persuade you to do the right thing by your fellow independents, would you at least answer some questions about one of your former partners?”

“Bill Matters.”

“How did you know I meant Matters? You’ve had many partners, wildcat drilling partners, pipe line partners, refinery partners.” Bell named three.

Hopewell answered slowly and deliberately as if addressing a backward child. “The commission that hired your detective agency is investigating Standard Oil. Bill took up with the Standard. He sits to lunch with their executive committee in New York. Lunch—Mr. Anti-Trust Corporations Commission Detective—is where they hatch their schemes.”

Bell nodded, encouraging Hopewell to keep talking now that he had gotten him wound up. His investigation so far had been a study in how the giant corporation fired imaginations and spawned fantasies. Standard Oil had been at the top of the heap since before most people were born. It seemed natural that the trust would possess mystical powers.

“Were you surprised?”

“Not when I thought about it. The Standard spots value. Oil, land, machinery, men. They pay for the best. Bill Matters was the best.”

“I meant were you surprised when Bill Matters changed sides?”

Spike Hopewell raised his eyes to look Bell straight in the face. Then he surprised the detective by speaking softly, with emotion. “You spouted the names of a few of my partners. But Bill and I were different. We started together. We fought men, shoulder to shoulder, and we beat ’em. Teamsters that made grizzlies look gentle. We beat them. We thought so alike, we knew ahead of time what the other was thinking. So when you ask was I surprised Bill went with the Standard, my answer is, I was until I thought it over. You see, Bill was never the same after he lost his boy.”

“I don’t understand,” said Bell. “What boy? I’m told he has daughters.”

“The poor little squirt ran off. Bill never heard from him again.”

“Why did you say ‘poor little squirt.’ An unhappy child?”

“No, no, no. Smiley, laughy little fellow I never thought was unhappy. But all of a sudden—poof—he was gone. Bill never got over it.”

“When did he leave?”

“Must be seven or eight years ago.”

“Before Bill joined the Standard?”

“Long before. Looking back, I realize that the boy running off broke him. He was never the same. Harder. Hard as adamantine—not that either of us was choirboys. Choirboys don’t last in the oil business. But somewhere along the line, Bill got his moral trolley wires crossed and—”

Hopewell stopped abruptly. He stared past Bell at the gasoline storage tank. His jaw worked. He seemed, Bell thought, to be reconsidering.

“But if you want to understand the oil business, Mr. Detective, you better understand that Bill Matters was not the first to give in to Standard Oil. Half the men in their New York office were destroyed by Rockefeller before he hired them. John D. Rockefeller, he’s the devil you should be after.”

“What if I told you I suspect that one of those newer men like Bill Matters can lead me to him?”

“I’d tell you that no man in his right mind would bite the hand feeding him like he’s feeding Bill.”

“Would you have switched sides if the Standard asked?”

The oil man drew himself erect and glared at Isaac Bell. “They did