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

time that Private Jones joined the Army seemed to cinch it.”

“What ‘item’ did he leave behind?”

“Ticket stubs from an opera house. Shakespeare shows. We traced them to Oil City, Pennsylvania.”

“Bill Matters lived in Oil City. He raised his daughters there before he moved to New York.”

“He still maintained a home in ’02. For all I know, still does. Anyway, I found him in Oil City.”

“Why did you go personally?”

“I would not put the officers under me in the position of offending a powerful man who might well have had no connection with the deserter other than the fact he was grieving for a missing son who had run off back in ’98 to enlist for the war.”

“Was the marksman Bill Matters’ son?”

Brigadier Mills looked Isaac Bell in the eye and Bell found it easy to imagine him as a young officer leading his men into a storm of lead. “I’m not proud of this,” he said, “but it was my job to cover things up. I went to Matters’ house. I spoke with him in private. He was alone there. I found him sitting in the dark. Mourning the boy.”

“In ’02? But that was years after he disappeared.”

“He still mourned him. I promised that nothing we discussed would leave the room. I made my case. The cross-grained SOB refused to believe me. He was certain—dead certain—that the marksman was not his missing son.”

Bell said, “Detectives run into similar denials by the parents of criminals.”

The general’s answer was uncharacteristically roundabout. “I’ve led men my whole life, Bell. Gettysburg. The west. Cuba. The Philippines. I can read men. I know what they’re thinking before they do. Bill Matters was telling the truth! The marksman Billy Jones was not his boy.”

“And yet?” Bell asked.

“And yet what?” Mills fired back.

“And yet I sense your, shall we say, disquiet? If not doubt?”

Angered, Mills looked away. He stared at his collection of weapons. He hesitated, face working, as if he was debating the merits of shooting Bell versus running him through. Finally, he spoke.

“Maybe you read men, too. You’re right. Something was off there. I don’t know what, but something was way off, out-of-kilter.”

“What?”

“Bill Matters knew that his boy was not the marksman. But he was not surprised that I had come calling.”

“What do you mean?”

“He was not surprised that I had connected him to the marksman who won the President’s Medal of 1902. Even as he sat there in the dark denying the theater stubs were his.”

“Maybe they weren’t.”

“I found him in a back parlor. He refused to leave the room or turn on the lights. So we talked in the dark. My eyes adjusted until I saw that the room was filled with toy theaters. You know what I mean?”

“Paper stage sets. You can buy them in New York theaters.”

“His parlor was full of them. But he sat there steadfastly denying that the theater stubs were his.”

Bell said, “You seemed to be suggesting that Matters knows who the deserter is.”

“I am not ‘suggesting,’ I am telling you that Matters knew beyond doubt that the marksman who deserted was not his missing boy.”

“Why?” asked Bell. “How could he know?”

“Either he knew exactly where his missing boy was in 1902 the day Billy Jones won the President’s Medal or—”

“Or he knows the marksman,” said Isaac Bell.

The brigadier said, “In my firm opinion, the deserter was not his boy. He is someone else.”

Isaac Bell was tumbling possibilities in his mind when he heard the old general say, “And now, sir, what are your designs on my daughter?”

“Helen? I’ve already proposed an offer.”

“Proposed? The girl is barely eighteen. She’s got college ahead of her.”

“I made every effort to convince her and she agreed to apply for an apprenticeship at the Van Dorn Detective Agency as soon as she graduates.”

“What the devil makes you think my daughter could be a detective?”

“Helen’s got a mean left hook . . . Could we go back to reading men, sir? . . . I believe something is still on your mind. Something you’ve left unsaid about the marksman.”

Mills nodded. “It’s only speculation. I can’t offer proof.”

“I’d still like to hear it.”

“I’d bet money that Matters was shielding him.”

35

Are you sure you want to blow this all to smithereens?” asked the assassin.

“Sure as I know my name,” said Bill Matters.

They were standing out of sight of the street in a glassed widow’s walk on the roof of The Hook saloon five stories above the Standard Oil Constable Hook refinery’s front gate. Originally erected by a sea captain who made his fortune in whale oil, the widow’s walk was festooned with wooden spires and elaborate bronze lightning rods fashioned like harpoons. Matters was safe here for a while, even with Isaac Bell closing in, for he owned the saloon lock, stock, and barrel.

He could see the gut-churning proof that the refinery had prospered just as he and Spike Hopewell had dreamed it would when they built the first stage on the neck of land that thrust into New York Harbor north of Staten Island. After stealing it, the Standard had enlarged it repeatedly on the same lines they had surveyed. Orderly rows of tanks and stills covered the hilly cape. Seagoing tank steamers lined up at the oil docks. And the village had grown these last six years from a raucous boomtown into a jam-packed city of tenements and factories, shops, churches, and schools—home to twenty thousand workers and their wives and children.

The assassin swept binoculars from the biggest naphtha tank across the city and up the tank-covered hill to the top of the tallest Standard Oil fire company tower, then back down the slope, over the rooftops, and back to the naphtha tank, which the red duck marked for a bull’s-eye.

The heat had intensified and the humidity had thickened. Old-timers were comparing it to the deadly temperatures of ’96, even the heat wave of ’92 that killed thousands in the seaboard cities. It was stifling inside