The Thief by Clive Cussler (pocket ebook reader .txt) 📕

“Then we can presume it’s not a bomb?” Bell asked with a smile and sliced it open with his throwing knife. Inside was a wooden box. He opened it. Nestled in cotton packing was a small steel-colored tool.

“What is that, Mr. Bell?”

“Cutting pliers.” There was a note from Mike Malone, in a big, open scrawl. “Sorry it took so long. Small was the hard part. Hope you like them.”

“Never seen them that little,” said the front-desk man. “Think they work?”

Mike had included a short length of braided cable. Bell slipped the jaws around it and squeezed the handles. The wire parted with a sharp pop.

PAULINE GRANDZAU JUMPED OFF a freight train at the ancient fortress city of Metz, fearing the guards in the rail yard. She skirted the overgrown ramparts, shielded from policemen and busybodies by thick brush and tall trees, and followed on foot the ruins of an even older Roman aqueduct, which the brakemen’s map had shown paralleling the tracks all the way to the Moselle River. She covered many miles in the failing light, guided by square heaps of stone and occasional lonely rows of two, three, or more arches still standing.

Suddenly barking dogs charged from a Jouy-aux-Arches farmhouse. Terrified, she scrambled onto the Roman stonework to escape them and climbed to the top of the archway, where she gnawed the last of the cheese she had stolen in Koblenz, fell asleep, and woke at dawn, forty feet above the ground, with a long view across the river.

France, made bright red and gold by the sun rising behind her, looked like heaven.

Even the cold rain that pursued her across Germany had finally stopped, as if it would not dare fall within sight of the border. Perched atop the aqueduct, she saw a gently rolling landscape. The red-tile rooftops of Novéant-sur-Moselle clustered along the Moselle, then gave way to scattered farm fields, woods, and vineyards. A suspension bridge traversed the river. Farther west, beyond her field of vision, would be the town of Batilly, where she would find the French railroad station. With forty francs of Detective Curtis’s money to buy a ticket, she could dream of riding in comfort the two hundred miles to Paris.

Then she saw two flags run up the pole on the roof of a building at the far side of the suspension bridge. The red, white, and black rectangle of Imperial Germany and the swallowtail of the Customs Service marked Germany’s last outpost, a frontier customhouse. Anyone crossing the bridge by train or on foot or on a bicycle would have to show their papers.

She looked beyond the town, up and down the river and the farmland and woods around it. Flat floodplains bounded the Moselle. The plain on her side was broad. On the west side, where she had to go, it was narrower and rose abruptly to a line of hills. Atop the highest hill, a mile west of the Moselle, sprawled the grim stone parapets of Fort Driant, whose giant guns dominated the Moselle Valley. They were Metz’s first defense against French attack from the southwest and it struck her suddenly that she was abandoning her homeland to escape to the land of the enemy. But she wasn’t really escaping, nor was she abandoning her country. She was doing the job of a private detective, serving the agency and a client who deserved her help, and avenging Detective Curtis. But only if she made it to Paris.

What was the best she could imagine? What could she see?

On both sides of the river, the banks sloped gently to the water. Opa Grandzau, the grandfather who had taught her to ski in the Alps, had also taught her how to swim in icy mountain lakes. The Moselle looked warm and lazy by comparison. She picked a route across from her vantage, spotting the narrowest stretch of the river where she could walk unseen out on a wooded point of land that jutted into the water.

When Pauline had chosen her route, she worked her way down the stones of the aqueduct, marveling as she descended how she had survived the climb last night in near darkness. Fear, it seemed, could have the most wonderfully concentrating effect on both mind and body.

She headed west from the bottom of the arch, through the woods, keeping the dappled early sunlight on her back. She crossed narrow lanes rutted with wagon wheels, scrambled over the railroad tracks after making sure no trains were coming, and darted over open fields, praying no farmer would see her running.

She found the wooded point of land and pressed ahead, glimpsing water through the trees on both sides, and soon found herself on the gentle bank. Two difficulties not apparent from the top of the aqueduct were starkly evident at the water’s edge: the narrowing of the river made the water race fast, and the strong current would sweep her into the wider stretches downstream. And if someone were to look in her direction from the suspension bridge or the houses at the edge of the town, he might see her swimming.

She had to cross in the dark.

And she needed a raft.

She scoured the woods for fallen limbs, which were few and far between as the farmers probably gathered them for firewood. It took two hours to heap up enough fallen wood to make a raft big enough to cling to while she floated in the dark and big enough to carry her rucksack.

From her rucksack, Pauline took her extra socks. She explored them with her fingers until she found a break in the wool and then unraveled the yarn from which they were knitted, carefully coiling it so it would not tangle. Then she laid the wood out in a square, laid a second layer of branches criss-crossing the first, and lashed the pieces together at each intersection. She ran out of wool and had to unravel another pair of socks before she could finish. When she was done, she had an alarmingly