The Assassin

1

A tall man in a white suit, with a handsome head of golden hair, an abundant mustache, and fierce blue eyes, stepped off an extra-fare limited at Union Depot and hurried forward to collect his Locomobile from the express car. He traded jokes with the railroad freight handlers easing the big red auto down the ramp, lamented Kansas City’s loss of first baseman Grady to the St. Louis Cardinals, and tipped generously when the job was done.

Could they recommend a fast route to Standard Oil’s Sugar Creek refinery?

Following their directions, he drove out of the rundown, saloon-lined station district, when two wagons suddenly boxed him into a narrow street. The men who jumped off were dressed more like prizefighters than teamsters. A broad-shouldered giant swaggered up, and he recognized Big Pete Straub, whom he had seen board the train at St. Louis.

Straub flashed a badge.

“Standard Oil Refinery Police. You Isaac Bell?”

Bell stood down from his auto. He was as tall as Straub, well over six feet, but lean as wire rope on a one-hundred-seventy-five-pound frame. A head held high and a self-contained gaze signified life at full tide.

Straub guessed his age at around thirty. “Go back where you came from.”

“Why?” Bell asked nonchalantly.

“There’s nothing for you in Kansas. We’ll fire any man who talks to you, and they know it.”

Bell said, “Move your wagon.”

A haymaker punch flew at his face.

He slipped it over his shoulder, stepped in to sink left and right fists deep, and stepped back as quickly. The company cop doubled over.

“Get him!” Straub’s men charged.

An automatic pistol with a cavernous muzzle filled Bell’s hand, sudden as a thunderbolt. “Move your wagon.”

They sold gasoline in the freight yards. A hardware store supplied spare tubes and tires, a towrope, cans for water, motor oil, and extra gasoline, a bedroll, and a lever-action Winchester repeating rifle in a scabbard, which Bell buckled to the empty seat beside him.

He stopped at a butcher to buy a beefsteak to grill on an open fire when he camped for the night, and a slab of ham, coffee beans, and bread for breakfast in the morning. Downtown Kansas City was jammed with trolleys, wagons, and carriages and fleets of brand-new steam, electric, and gasoline autos. Finally clearing the traffic at the edge of the suburbs, he headed south and west, crossed the state line into Kansas, opened the Locomobile’s throttle and exhaust pipe cutouts, and thundered onto the prairie.

2

No caress was gentler, no kiss softer, than the assassin’s finger on the trigger.

Machined by a master gunsmith to silken balance, the Savage 99 lever-action rifle would reward such a delicate union of flesh and steel with deadly precision. Pressure as light as a shallow breath would fire the custom-loaded, high-velocity smokeless powder round that waited in the chamber. The telescope sight was the finest Warner & Swasey instrument that money could buy. Spike Hopewell appeared near and large.

Spike was pacing the cornice atop an eighty-foot oil derrick that stood on the edge of a crowd of a hundred rigs operated by independent wildcat drillers. They towered over the remnants of a small hamlet at a remote Kansas crossroads forty miles north of Indian Territory. Since he had struck oil, a horde of newcomers seeking their fortunes had renamed the place Hopewell Field.

Houses, stables, picket fences, and headstones in the churchyard were stained brown from spouters that had flung oil to the winds. Crude storage tanks, iron-sided, wood-topped affairs eighty feet wide and twenty high, were filled to the brim. Pipes linked the tanks to a modern refinery where two-hundred-barrel stills sat on brick furnaces in thickets of condensing pipe. Their chimneys lofted columns of smoke into the sky.

A boomtown of shacks and shanties had sprung up next door to feed and entertain the oil workers, who nicknamed it Hope-Hell. They slept in a “rag town” of tents. Saloons defied the Kansas prohibition laws just as in Wichita and Kansas City. Housed in old boxcars, they were not as likely to be attacked by Carrie Nation swinging her hatchet. Behind the saloons, red brakeman’s lanterns advertised brothels.

Railroad tracks skirted the bustling complex. But the nearest town with a passenger station was ten miles away. Investors were selling stock to build an electric trolley.

The refinery reeked of gasoline.

The assassin could smell it seven hundred yards away.

A red Locomobile blazed across the Kansas plain, bright as fire and pluming dust.

Spike Hopewell saw it coming and broke into a broad smile despite his troubles. The auto and the speed fiend driving like a whirlwind were vivid proof that gasoline — once a notorious refining impurity that exploded kerosene lamps in people’s faces — was the fuel of the future.

His brand-new refinery was making oceans of the stuff, boiling sixteen gallons of gasoline off every barrel of Kansas crude. Fifty thousand gallons and just getting started. If only he could ship it to market.

The assassin waited for a breath of wind to clear the smoke.

You could not ignore wind at long range. You had to calculate exactly how much it would deflect a bullet and you had to refine your calculations as impetus slowed and gravity took its toll. But you couldn’t shoot what you couldn’t see. The old oil man was a murky presence in the telescope sight, obscured by the smoke that rose thick and black from a hundred engine boilers and refinery furnaces.

Hopewell stopped pacing, planted his hands on the railing, and stared intently.

A breeze stirred. The smoke thinned.

His head crystallized in the powerful glass.

Schooled in anatomy, the assassin pictured bone and connecting fibers of tendon and muscle and nerve under his target’s skin. The brain stem was an inch wide. To sever it was to drop a man instantly.

Spike Hopewell moved abruptly. He turned toward the ladder that rose from the derrick floor. The assassin switched to binoculars to inspect the intruder in their wider field of vision.

A man in a white suit cleared the top rung and bounded onto the cornice. The assassin recognized the lithe, supple-yet-contained fluid grace that could only belong to another predator — a deadly peer — and every nerve jumped to high alert.

Instinct, logic, and horse sense were in perfect agreement. Shoot the threat first.

Reckless pride revolted. No one—no one! — interferes with my kill. I shoot who I want, when I want.

Isaac Bell vaulted from the ladder, landed lightly on the derrick cornice, and introduced himself to Spike Hopewell with an engaging smile and a powerful hand.

“Bell. Van Dorn Detective Agency.”

Spike grinned. “Detecting incognito in a red Locomobile? Thought you were the fire department.”

Isaac Bell took an instant liking to the vigorous independent, by all reports a man as openhearted as he was combative. With a knowing glance at the source of Spike’s troubles — a mammoth gasoline storage tank on the far side of the refinery, eighty feet wide and twenty high — Bell answered with a straight face.

“Having ‘detected’ that you’re awash in gasoline, I traded my horse for an auto.”

Hopewell laughed. “You got me there. Biggest glut since the auto was invented… Whatcha doing here, son? What do you want?”

Bell said, “The government’s Corporations Commission is investigating Standard Oil for violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.”

“Do tell,” said Hopewell, his manner cooling.

“The commission hired the Van Dorn Agency to gather evidence of the Standard busting up rivals’ businesses.”

“What’s that got to do with me?”

“Fifty thousand gallons of gasoline you can’t ship to market is the sort of evidence I’m looking for.”

“It’s sitting there in that tank. Look all you want.”

“Can you tell me how your glut filled it?”

“Nope. And I won’t testify either.”

Isaac Bell had expected resistance. Hopewell had a reputation for being tough as a gamecock and scrappy as a one-eyed tom. But the success of the Van Dorn investigation hinged on persuading the independent to talk, both in confidence and in public testimony. Few oil men alive had more experience fighting the monopoly.

Age hadn’t slowed him a bit. Instead of cashing in and retiring when he struck enormous oil finds in Kansas, Spike Hopewell had built a modern refinery next to the fields to process crude oil for his fellow independent drillers. Now he was in the fight of his life, laying a tidewater pipe line to ship their gasoline and kerosene to tank steamers at Port Arthur, Texas.

Standard Oil was fighting just as hard to stop him.

“Won’t testify? The Standard flooded the courts with lawyers to block your line to the Gulf of Mexico.”

Spike was no slouch in the influence department. “I’m fighting ’em in the State House. The lawmakers in Topeka know darned well that Kansas producers and Kansas refineries are dead unless I can ship their product to European markets that Standard Oil don’t control.”

“Is that why the railroad untied your siding?”

There were no tank cars on the refinery siding. A forlorn-looking 0-6-0 switch engine had steam up, but it had nowhere to go and nothing to do except shuttle material around the refinery. A quarter mile of grass and sagebrush separated Hopewell’s tracks from the main line to Kansas City. The roadbed was graded, and gravel ballast laid, and telegraph wire strung. But the connecting spur for the carloads of material to build the refinery had been uprooted. Switches, rails, and crossties were scattered on the ground as if angry giants had kicked it to pieces.

Hopewell said, “My lawyers just got an injunction ordering the railroad to hook me up again.”

“You won a hollow victory. Standard Oil tied up every railroad tank car in the region. The commission wants to know how.”

“Tell ’em to take it up with the railroad.”

A wintery light grayed the detective’s eyes. His smile grew cool. Pussyfooting was getting him nowhere. “Other Van Dorn operatives are working on the railroad. My particular interest is how the Standard is blocking your tidewater pipe line.”

“I told you, son, I ain’t testifying.”

“With no pipe line,” Bell shot back, “and no railroad to transport your products to market, your wells and refinery are worthless. Everything you built here will be forced to the wall.”

“I’ve been bankrupt before — before you were born, sonny — but this time, I just might have another trick up my sleeve.”

“If you’re afraid,” Bell said, “the Van Dorn Agency will protect you.”

Spike’s manner softened slightly. “I appreciate that, Mr. Bell. And I don’t doubt you can give an account of yourself.” He nodded down at the Locomobile eighty feet below. “That you think to pack a towrope to cross open country tells me you’re a capable hand.”

“And enough extra parts to build a new one to pull the old one out of a ditch,” Bell smiled back, thinking they were getting somewhere at last.

“But you underestimate Standard Oil. They don’t murder the competition.”

“You underestimate the danger.”

“They don’t have to kill us. You yourself just said it. They’ve got lobbyists to trip us up in the legislature and lawyers to crush us in court.”

“Do you know Big Pete Straub?” Bell asked, watching for Hopewell’s reaction.

“Pete Straub is employed by Standard 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 ask. Asked me the same time they asked Bill.”

“Obviously you declined. Did you consider it?”

“I told them to go to blazes.”

Bell asked, “Can’t you see that I’m offering you an opportunity to help send them there?”

He pointed down at the orderly rows of tanks and the belching furnaces, then across the forest of derricks looming over the roofs of what must have been a peaceful town. A gust of wind swept the smoke aside. Suddenly he could see clear to the farthest of the wooden towers.

“You built your refinery to serve independents. That’s where your heart lies. Wouldn’t you agree, sir, that you owe it to all independent oil men to testify?”

Hopewell shook his head.

Bell had one card left. He bet the ranch on it. “How much did the Standard pay for a barrel of crude when you drilled two years ago.”

“A dollar thirty-five a barrel.”

“How much are they paying now? Provided you could deliver it.”

“Seventy cents a barrel.”

“They raised the price artificially high, nearly doubled it, to encourage you to drill. You and your fellow wildcatters did the Standard’s exploratory work for them, at your own expense. Thanks to your drilling, they know the extent of the Kansas fields and how they stack up against the Indian Territory and Oklahoma fields. They suckered you, Mr. Hopewell.”

“More homework, Mr. Bell?” said Spike Hopewell. “Is that the Van Dorn Detective motto: ‘Do your homework’?”

“The Van Dorn motto is ‘We never give up! Never!’”

Hopewell grinned. “That’s my motto, too… Well, it’s hard to say no to a man who’s done his homework. And damned-near impossible to a man who won’t give up… O.K., put ’er there!”

Spike Hopewell thrust a powerful hand into Bell’s. “What do you want to know first?”

Bell stepped closer to take it, saying, “I’m mighty curious about those tricks up your sleeve.”

Hopewell stumbled backward, clutching his throat.

3

Still gripping the hand that Hopewell had extended, Isaac Bell heard a muted gunshot and realized that the sound was delayed by the time it took a bullet to fly an enormous distance. He pulled Spike down on the cornice’s narrow plank floor, behind the partial shelter of the railings. But it was too late to protect him. The oil man was dead. A slug had pierced his throat and torn out the back of his neck.

A second slug passed through the space that Bell’s own head had occupied a half a heartbeat earlier. It twanged against the steel crown pulley, ricocheted, and splintered oak. Bell looked for the source. The shot echoed crazily. It seemed to come from the west, where a plain riddled with gullies drained toward a creek. On the far side of the creek, low, wooded hills stretched to the horizon. He spotted a flicker of motion to the north. A figure was climbing down a derrick at an astonishing seven hundred yards’ distance.

Isaac Bell plunged three rungs at a time down the ladder.

His Locomobile was parked between the slanting legs of the derrick and the engine house. Still hot, the motor fired on the second spin. He leaped behind the steering wheel and thundered off in the direction the shot had come from, weaving a wild path through the densely packed oil derricks and skidding around drill machinery, pump houses, engines, and machine shops. When he burst out of the last row of derricks, he saw a big man on horseback galloping across the open plain that stretched beyond the oil field.

Bell raced after him.

The fleeing rider was well mounted on a strong, big-boned animal of fully seventeen hands. Bell shoved his accelerator to the floorboards and wrenched his steering wheel side to side as he plowed his big auto over rough ground, slewing around hummocks and dodging gullies.

Ahead of the horseman, the grassland ended abruptly at a thick wood. If he got inside the trees, he was free. Bell drove faster. The deep cut of the creek bed separated the grassland from the trees. Bell exulted; he had him trapped.

He yanked open his exhaust bypass for maximum power. Unimpeded by back pressure, the Locomobile’s four cylinders roared with all their might.

The horseman galloped straight at the creek and dug his spurs in. The horse gathered its legs and jumped. Its forelegs struck the far bank. Its left rear hoof slipped down the earthen wall of the creek. The right hoof dug into the grass, and the animal scrambled free and galloped for the trees.

Isaac Bell was forced to slam on the Locomobile’s anemic brakes and slide the auto into a sideways drift to stop before it tumbled into the creek. He yanked his Winchester from its scabbard buckled to the passenger seat. The horseman was already inside the woods, partially screened by the thinly scattered outer fringe of trees. Bell saw one chance and opened fire.

He worked the Winchester’s ejection lever in a blur of motion. Had a cartridge jammed, the pivoting lever would have snapped in his hands. The heavy rifle boomed repeatedly. The horseman’s hat flew in the air. He swayed and started to fall off. A flailing hand gripped his saddle horn and he stayed on his mount. Before Bell could fire again, horse and rider found the shelter deep inside the woods.

Bell heard a loud report behind him. Another gunman? It seemed to come from the oil derricks. It was followed immediately by a metallic clanging noise like a blacksmith’s hammer. Then he heard a sharp retort like a blasting cap or a quarter stick of dynamite.

A blinding light flashed from the refinery.

A hollow Boom! shook the air. The explosion blew the top off a crude oil tank that stood in the outermost ring of tanks. Shattered planking tufted into the sky. Black smoke pillared. The first explosion, Bell surmised, had ignited the natural gas that rose from the crude oil and collected in the top of the tanks. The gas explosion had set the oil itself to burning.

That it threatened to destroy Spike Hopewell’s entire refinery was evidenced by the sight of gangs of oil workers arriving on the run with shovels and picks to dig a trench between the burning tank and its neighbors. They converged from the derricks and the refinery, the rag town, and the saloons. A gang rolled out a cannon on a two-wheeled gun carriage.

A field gun would be a baffling sight had not Bell studied the oil business from top to bottom to prepare for the Corporations Commission investigation. Regular procedure for fighting an oil tank fire was to shoot holes in the tank below the liquid line to drain the oil that fed the fire. Artillery allowed the firefighters to stay outside the lethal range of explosions.

One of the gun carriage wheels slipped into a shallow gully and sunk axle-deep in the wet, spongy ground. Bell raced to help, driving the Locomobile across the prairie ground as fast as the clumped grass would allow. He could see at the base of the roiling smoke column a diamond-bright core of flame growing wider, taller, and brighter.

Bell heaved his steering wheel hard left and drove as close as he dared alongside the cannon while keeping his own wheels on firm ground. He threw the towrope he kept coiled around the spare tires. The gun crew tied onto the carriage trail. Bell accelerated the powerful auto and dragged the cannon out of the gully. Plowing ahead slowly enough to let the men guiding it run alongside, he pulled it into a position that gave them a clear shot at the burning tank.

The intense heat was making the crude oil boil and foam into a maelstrom of red flame, white steam, and black smoke. Already the heat was too intense for the ditching gang. The men backed away. Suddenly the boiling, foaming oil tank exploded. Tentacles of liquid flame shot into the sky and cascaded to the ground, falling on neighboring tanks.

The firefighters dropped their shovels and ran. They barely escaped. Two more explosions in quick time sent lids flying. Two more tanks gushed geysers of flame that fountained skyward and collapsed on tanks as yet unscathed. An explosion breached the wall of a tank. Oil spilled, tumbling over the ground, across ditches, and splashing against a burning shack, leveling the flimsy wooden structure, and igniting.

The fires spread, gaining speed.

The flames leaped the outer ditch around the refinery. Several buildings erupted into flame, and soon the fire was slithering past the refinery toward the biggest holding tank in Kansas, which Spike Hopewell had built to store his glut of gasoline.

The cannon crew exchanged frightened looks.

“Shoot!” said Isaac Bell. “On the jump!”

More frightened looks. Most scattered, leaving Bell with three brave men: an independent wildcatter sporting a boss’s knee-high riding boots and watch chain, a gray-bearded Civil War vet in a forage cap, and a young farmer in a battered slouch hat.

“Can’t shoot gasoline,” said the wildcatter.

“Too volatile,” said the vet. “It’ll blow that tank like a nitro shot. Kill everyone within a mile.”

“But if the cannon doesn’t set it off,” said Bell, “the fire will.”

He thought fast and pointed at the 0-6-0 switch engine idling on the refinery siding. “Who can run that locomotive?”

“Me,” said the bearded old soldier.

“Steam it to this end of the siding close as you can to the tank.”

Bell pointed at a giant spool of drilling cable. The other two understood his plan immediately. Terrified expressions on their smoke-grimed faces said they didn’t like it.

“It’s our only chance,” said Bell.

The spool was six feet high. They extracted the loose end of the cable from the coil, put their shoulders to the spool, and commenced rolling it to uncoil the cable. Men watching saw what they were up to and came to help.

A rigger ran up with a monkey wrench and a sack of cable clamps, nuts, and bolts. “You boys must be loco,” he shouted over the roar of fire. “Guess I’ll join the crowd.” He bent the loose end of the cable into a loop, clamped it together, and dragged it toward the locomotive, while Isaac Bell and the others dragged their end to the gasoline tank.

Tanks were burning behind them and to either side. Columns of smoke rose from the incinerated crude, swirling like tornadoes. They climbed swiftly, joined high overhead, and turned the sky black.

Pursued by the fire, Bell and his helpers pulled the cable to the foot of the gasoline tank. It was as high as a three-story house. A ladder led up its iron side. Bell slung the loop over his shoulder and climbed. The men below pushed the stiff cable up, trying to relieve him of some of the weight. He was breathing hard when he reached the top and swung onto the wooden roof. The farmer followed close behind carrying a crowbar and an ax.

“Can you run get me that monkey wrench?”

“What are you going to do?”

“Chop a hole in the roof,” said Bell, swinging the ax with all his might. “Run,” he said again. “In case I throw sparks.”

The fires were advancing quickly. Another oil tank exploded and thick burning crude flew through the air. With very little time to pierce the roof, he thanked his lucky stars for the Northwest timber case when he’d masqueraded as a lumberjack. Tar, wood chips, and splinters flew.

He chopped open a hole at the edge of the roof, just inside the iron wall. The fumes that suddenly vented were almost overwhelming. His head spun. The farmer came up the ladder again, gasping for wind. He passed Bell the monkey wrench.

“What’s it for?”

“Anchor,” said Bell, fastening the wrench’s jaws firmly around the cable. “Run while you can.”

He shoved the wrench and the cable loop through the hole and wedged it tightly with the crowbar and the ax. Then he signaled the Civil War vet, dropped down the ladder as fast as he could, and ran toward him.

A space of about two football fields separated the gasoline tank from the switch engine, which backed away, drawing the slack out of the drilling cable. When it was tight at a long, shallow angle between the top of the tank and the siding, Bell swung aboard the engine. “I’ll take her.”

“Welcome to it.”

Bell put his hands on the throttle and quadrant, admitted steam to the cylinders, and backed away smoothly. “Nice and easy, now.”

“Fine touch,” said the vet. “Where’d you learn it?”

Bell eyed the cable, which was tightening like a bowstring. “Borrowed a locomotive when I was in college.”

The drilling cable was strong enough to do the job. And the switch engine had the power. But would his makeshift anchor hold fast to the tank’s iron wall?

More steam. Bell peered through the smoke. Was the wall bulging or was that wishful thinking?

“Where’d you take the locomotive?”

“Miss Porter’s.”

“Girls’ school?”

“Young ladies.”

A little more steam. It looked like a bulge.

Suddenly the cable flew high in the air.

“The wire busted!” yelled the vet.

“No,” said Bell, “the wall.”

A section of the tank’s iron wall, a panel six feet wide, popped a row of rivets, peeled open like a sardine can, and bent toward the ground. Gasoline cascaded.

Isaac Bell held his breath.

One of two things would happen now and it was even money which.

With luck, the escaping gasoline would drown the sparks struck by clashing metal.

But if it didn’t — if the river pushed volatile gas fumes ahead of it — the sparks would detonate the fumes and blow the refinery, the oil field, the hamlet of wooden houses, the boomtown’s shacks, and the rag town’s tents to the other side of Kingdom Come.

4

A fifty-thousand-gallon river of gasoline surged through the hole Isaac Bell had ripped in the tank and spilled onto the ground. It flooded down the shallow slope that surrounded the tank and spread in a billowing torrent of rapids and whirlpools.

“Run!” said Bell and led the way.

That they were still alive meant he had prevented a catastrophic explosion. But there was no stopping the fire — not with globs of burning crude oil from the exploding oil tanks falling like brimstone. At least, he hoped, people had a chance to escape.

The gasoline ignited within seconds. It burned fiercely, tumbling great rollers of flame across the prairie. The rollers poured into the gullies and filled them with fingers of fire that raced toward the distant creek and set it ablaze.

Herding men ahead of it, plucking the fallen to their feet, Bell spotted Hopewell’s headquarters. It was a house he had converted into an office. What must have been its garden was now bracketed by a refinery furnace and a storage tank. Telegraph wires ran from it along the uprooted rail spur to the main line.

Bell pushed in the front door.

“Can you wire Washington?”

The telegrapher gaped at the cliff of flame engulfing the tank next door and jumped out the window. Isaac Bell took over the key and rattled out a message to Van Dorn headquarters as fast as he could send Morse code:

The key went dead under his hand.

He looked out the window. The telegraph poles that joined the Hopewell Field to the Western Union system along the main rail line were burning. The wires had melted. The last word never made it, but every detective in the Van Dorn outfit knew that urgent wires from Isaac Bell ended JUMP!

Valuable men arrived the next day on fast mail trains.

The volatile gasoline and kerosene had burned off in the intervening twenty-four hours, but the fires still rampaged, feeding relentlessly on the heavy crude oil. Bell brought the first arrivals up to date on what little he had discovered while they were en route and marched them through the destruction.

“I’m pretty much it for witnesses. Everyone was busy working before the explosion and running like the devil after. As for motive, the independents blame Standard Oil for the shooting and burning.”

“Anyone offering proof of a connection?”

“I ran into Big Pete Straub in Kansas City, and there are rumors ‘someone’ saw him yesterday in Fort Scott. The man whose hair I parted with my Winchester fit the ‘big’ part, but I never saw his face.”

The tall detective was hollow-cheeked and hoarse, having not slept since the killing and the fire. His eyes glittered an angry blue in a face black with soot. Quick thinking and decisive action had saved lives. No one had died after Spike Hopewell. But the fire would bankrupt Spike’s friends, the independents.

Damage ranged over both the field and the refinery. The heat had been so intense that it melted the stationary engines that powered the drills and twisted steel pipes. Wooden derricks and pump houses had burned to ash. Wells were ruined, with their casing falling into the bores. Of one hundred wells being drilled or already pumping, only a handful had survived with both derrick and pump house intact.

Van Dorn explosives expert Wally Kisley, who dressed like a traveling salesman in a three-piece checkerboard suit, gave a connoisseur’s whistle of appreciation. “You just can’t beat a refinery fire for utter mayhem.”

Redheaded Archie Abbott, a socially prominent New Yorker, a master of disguise, and Bell’s best friend, was not at all appreciative and in a foul mood. “I was impersonating a London-based jewel fence in Chicago and was one bloody inch from nailing Laurence Rosania when the Boss pulled me off the case.”

“This is a thousand times more important,” said Bell, “than a gentleman safe cracker robbing Chicago tycoons’ wives and mistresses. That Mr. Van Dorn pulled you off the case ought to give you a clue how crucial the Corporations Commission’s contract is to the agency.”

“We’ve got to catch Rosania before he accidentally blows someone’s house up along with his safe.”

“I let old Hopewell down,” Bell cut him off coldly. “I will not rest until his killer hangs.”

“You weren’t on a bodyguard job,” said Archie.

Bell stepped closer with a glacial stare.

Wally Kisley, their elder by many years, reckoned that Archie Abbott was stretching the limits of a friendship that had started in a collegiate boxing ring. He signaled Archie to shut his trap before it turned into a rematch and spoke before the fool made it worse.

“Ready when you are, Isaac.”

Bell said, “First question: Did the same criminals do the shooting and set the fires?

“Archie, I want witnesses. Someone must have seen the sniper either climb up that derrick or climb down. Carrying a rifle, maybe disguised as a tool. Someone must have seen his damned horse.

“Wally, I want you to look for any sort of delayed detonation: clockworks or a slow fuse. It’s likely a team of men attacked, though a timing device would allow one man to first prime an explosive, then pick up his rifle. But crack marksmen are specialists. Would such a sniper also know how to rig a timing device?”

“Any oil driller or refinery hand can turn firebug,” said Wally. “It’s the nature of refineries to explode. Lightning bolts blow them up regularly.”

“I paced the distance from the derrick where I saw the killer to where Spike was shot. Nearly seven hundred yards. How many common arsonists could shoot so accurately at extreme range? Such marksmanship would take a top-notch sniper, not the sort to dirty his hands and risk capture setting fires. Snipers prefer to operate far removed.”

“A delayed detonator can be far removed,” said Archie. “Time instead of distance.”

“Witnesses,” said Bell. “Find witnesses.”

Kisley interrupted whatever answer Archie was about to utter. “Fire’s cooling down. Isaac, can you point me toward the first tank to catch fire?”

Isaac Bell traced the rapid click-click-click of a typewriter to a wall tent pitched beside the burned-out ruins of Hope-Hell. It stood next to a buckboard wagon. The mule was out of its traces, grazing on a patch of grass that had escaped the fire. He rapped his knuckles on the tent pole.

“E. M. Hock?”

The typewriter kept going.

Bell ducked his head to pass through the canvas flaps and was astonished to see a woman hunched over the portable machine. She was typing in such a deep state of concentration that he doubted she had any idea he was five feet behind her. She had silky chestnut hair cut so short that Bell could see the graceful line of the nape of her neck. A pale shirtwaist with a high neck snugged close to her long, elegant back.

The tent contained a folding cot with a bedroll, a Kodak developing machine on the card table behind her, and a stack of typing paper. A straw hat was perched on the bedroll as if tossed there as she rushed to the typewriter. Bell read the top sheet of paper:

Bell asked, “How many wildcatters were backed by Standard Oil?”

“Put that down,” she called over her shoulder. “It’s not ready to be read.”

“I’m looking for E. M. Hock.”

“She’s busy,” said the woman and kept typing.

“I sometimes suspected that the mysterious E. M. Hock was a she.”

“What aroused your suspicion?”

“A higher than usual degree of horse sense in her reporting and a distinct shortage of bombast. What’s the E. M. stand for?”

“Edna Matters.”

“Why keep it secret?”

“To derail expectations. Who are you?”

“Isaac Bell. Van Dorn Detective Agency.”

She turned around, looked him over with severe gray-green eyes softened only slightly by the boyish cut of her hair. “Are you the private detective who just happened to be with Mr. Hopewell when he was shot?”

Her ears, thought Bell, were exquisite, and he was struck forcibly by how attractive a woman could be with the shortest hair he had ever seen.

“We’re investigating for the Corporations Commission.”

“Do you know anything about oil?”

“I’m an expert.”

A dark eyebrow rose skeptically. “Expert? How? Did you work in the oil fields?”

“No, Miss Matters.”

“Did you study chemical engineering?”

“No.”

“Then how’d you become an expert?”

“I read your articles.”

She turned away, poised her fingers over the typewriter keys, and stared at the sheet of paper in the machine. She banged away at the keys. A smile quirked the corner of her mouth and she stopped typing.

“O.K., we have something in common, Mr. Bell: Private detectives flatter their subjects as shamelessly as newspaper reporters to make them talk.”

“I sincerely meant to compliment E. M. Hock’s History of the Under- and Heavy-handed Oil Monopoly. You’re a wonderful wordsmith, and you seem to be in command of your facts.”

“Thank you.”

“Besides, I would not bore a beautiful woman by flattering her good looks, which she must hear every day.”

“Mr. Bell, do me the courtesy of leaving my ‘womanliness’ out of this conversation.”

That would be like discussing the nature of daylight without mentioning the sun — a concept Isaac Bell kept to himself in the interest of garnering evidence from a savvy newspaper reporter sent to cover the fire.

“Are you by any chance related to Bill Matters?”

“He’s my father.”

“Would that explain your sympathy for the independents?”

“Sympathy. Not bias. I believe that the independent business man gives American enterprise spine. Independents are brave, bravery is the foundation of innovation, innovation breeds success. That said,” she added with a thin smile, “I have no doubt that the vast majority of independents given half the chance would be as hard-nosed as Mr. Rockefeller.”

“That distinction shines through the articles,” said Bell.

“You do seem to want something from me, sir.”

Isaac Bell grinned. “I look forward to discussing that ‘something’ when I’m finished investigating murder, arson, and corporate lawbreaking. In the meantime, may I ask, do I understand correctly that your father was in partnership with Spike Hopewell before he joined Standard Oil?”

“Until six years ago. Is that what you were discussing with Mr. Hopewell when he was shot?”

“Did they part on good terms?”

“Didn’t Mr. Hopewell tell you that he was angry with Father for joining up with Standard Oil?”

Bell recalled Hopewell’s emotional telling of Matters’ son, this woman’s brother, running away, and said, “He did not. In fact, he spoke with some sympathy. How did they part?”

“Mr. Hopewell called Father a traitor. Father called Mr. Hopewell a stuck-in-the-mud fool. Mr. Hopewell asked Father was there anything lower than a Standard Oil magnate, except he pronounced the word as ‘maggot.’”

She cast Bell a smile. “Witnesses swore the first punches were thrown simultaneously.”

Bell asked, “Have they spoken since?”

“Of course. Six years is too long for old friends to hold a grudge, and, besides, they both flourished — Mr. Hopewell wildcatting in Kansas and Father managing the Standard’s pipe lines.”

“How will he take the news of Hopewell’s death?”

“He will take it hard. Very hard.”

Isaac Bell asked, “Would I find your father in New York, at 26 Broadway?”

“When he’s not traveling.”

Something thumped the canvas roof. Edna Matters looked up. A delighted smile made her even more beautiful, Bell thought. She brushed past him and out the tent flaps. He followed. A thick Manila hemp rope hung down from the sky. Three hundred feet over his head, a wicker basket suspended under a yellow gas balloon was dragging the rope, which hopped and skipped across the ground.

Edna ran after the dragline.

A canvas sack like a bank’s money bag slid down it and landed at her feet.

She waved it to the person looking down from the basket and hurried back to the tent, where she opened the bag and removed a sturdy buff-colored envelope. Inside was a tin cylinder of the type that contained Kodak roll film.

“Is that camera film?”

“My sister snapped an aerial photograph of the devastation.”

“Your sister?”

“Half sister. My real father died when I was a baby. My mother married my stepfather and they had Nellie.”

She stepped inside the tent and emerged with binoculars. “I got the impression you like beautiful women, Mr. Bell. Have a look.”

Bell focused on chestnut hair cut as short as Edna Matters’, a brilliant smile, and exuberant eyebrows. Edna’s fine features seemed magnified in Nellie’s face.

“If you find her appealing, Mr. Bell, I recommend you leave her beauty and womanliness out of your conversational repertoire.”

“Why?”

“Read.”

The yellow balloon had drifted on the light wind. Now that it was no longer directly overhead, Bell could read huge black letters on its side:

“A suffragette?”

“A suffragist,” Edna Matters corrected him.

“What’s the distinction?”

“A suffragette tries to convert men to the cause of enfranchisement.”

“I heard Amanda Faire at Madison Square Garden,” said Bell, recalling a statuesque redhead who had enthralled her mostly male audience.

“The fair Amanda is a shining example of a suffragette. A suffragist converts women. You’ll get further with Nellie if you understand that women will gain the right to vote when all women agree that enfranchisement is a simple matter of justice.”

“What about the men?”

“If they want their meals cooked, shirts ironed, and beds warmed, they will have no choice but to go along. Or so Nellie believes… And by the way, you’ll get nowhere if you ever mention Amanda Faire in her company.”

“Rivals?”

“Fire and ice.”

Archie Abbott hurried up, shielding his eyes to inspect the balloon. “Get ready for a speech if that’s Nellie Matters.”

“Do you know her?”

“I heard her in Illinois last fall at a county fair. Two hundred feet in the air, she delivered a William Jennings Bryan stem-winder that had the ladies eyeing their husbands like candidates for a mass hanging.”

“This is her sister,” said Bell, “E. M. Hock… May I present my good friend Archibald Angell Abbott IV?”

The redheaded, blue-blooded Archie whisked his bowler off his head and beamed a smile famous in New York for quickening the heartbeats of New York heiresses and their social climbing mothers and arousing the suspicions of their newly wealthy fathers. “A pleasure, Miss Hock. And may I say that rumors I have heard among journalists that you are a woman are borne out splendidly.”

Bell could not help but compare the chilly response when he uttered a similar compliment to the warm smile Archie received from Edna.

“How’d you happen to get here so quickly?” Archie asked her. “The fire is still smoldering.”

“I was passing by on my way back from Indian Territory.”

Archie stared at the buckboard. “In that?”

“Reporting on ‘oil fever’ takes me places the trains don’t visit.”

“I salute your enterprise and your bravery. Speaking of oil fever, Isaac — I’m sure you’ve heard this already, Miss Hock — the wildcatters are blaming Standard Oil for the fire.”

“Did you interview any witnesses who presented evidence to support their contention?” asked Bell.

“Mostly, like you said, they heard that somebody saw Straub, somewhere — that’s Big Pete Straub, Miss Hock, a Standard—”

“Mr. Straub was just promoted to refinery police superintendent,” Edna interrupted.

“Which means he travels anywhere he pleases,” said Bell. “Go on, Archie.”

“I did find one guy who claimed to see Mr. Straub renting a horse in Fort Scott.”

“Did he see the horse?”

“Said it was tall as a Clydesdale.”

“The one I saw was a mighty lean Clydesdale. Are your witnesses suggesting Standard Oil’s motive for setting the fire?”

“One school of rumor says Standard Oil wants to shut down Kansas production to raise the price of oil by limiting the product reaching market.”

Bell looked to see Edna’s reaction. She said, “The Standard is still heavily invested in the Pennsylvania and Indiana fields. They’re somewhat depleted, so the oil is more expensive to pump. The Standard will lose money if they don’t keep the price up.”

“What else, Archie?”

“Another rumor, a doozy, claims that Standard Oil is laying pipe lines straight through Kansas to tap richer fields in Oklahoma. After they connect those fields to their interstate pipe line, they’ll bypass Kansas oil completely and shut down Kansas production. Then when the producers are forced to the wall, the Standard will buy their leases cheap and lock the oil in the ground for the future. Their future.”

Bell looked again to Edna Matters.

The newspaperwoman laughed. “When you grow up with a father in the oil business, you learn that rumors about Standard Oil are always true. And JDR hears them first.”

“What about this one?” asked Bell.

“The Kansas part fits their pattern. Indian Territory and Oklahoma appear rich in new strikes. But the Standard’s pattern does not include shooting people and setting fires.”

“Exactly what Spike Hopewell told me.”

Edna Matters said, “Clearly, Mr. Hopewell was murdered. But there’s no evidence of the cause of the fire.”

“Yet,” said Bell. He conceded that the only crime that he knew for sure had occurred was the sniper killing of Spike Hopewell. If anyone could determine the cause of the fire, it was Detective Wally Kisley. But to get the best work out of Wally, he had to stay out of his way until he asked for a hand.

Archie asked, “How does John D. Rockefeller hear the rumors first?”

“When two men shake hands, JDR knows the terms of their deal before they report to their front offices.”

“How?” asked Bell.

“He pays spies to keep him ahead of every detail in business and politics. Refiners, distributors, drillers, railroad men, politicians. He calls them correspondents.”

“Does he pay newspaper reporters?”

Edna Matters Hock smiled at the tall detective. “He’s been known to ask reporters.”

“What do they say?”

“I can’t report on other reporters. There are confidences involved. Among friends.”

“Do you have any personal experience in what reporters say?” Archie asked, his most eligible bachelor in New York smile working overtime.

Edna smiled back. “Personally? I quoted my father’s old partner, poor Mr. Hopewell.”

“What did Hopewell say?”

“Why don’t you ask Mr. Bell? He was the last to speak with him.”

Bell said, “He told Rockefeller to go to blazes.”

“Actually,” Edna corrected, “he was paraphrasing. What he originally said, at least according to my father, was, ‘I’d join Satan first.’”

“How did Rockefeller respond to your preference for Satan?”

“I haven’t a clue. JDR does not ask in person. He sends people who ask for him.”

“He’s a famous negotiator. Did they come back with a counteroffer?”

Edna Matters answered Bell seriously. “They asked me to reconsider. So I did. JDR never gives interviews. I said, All right, I’ll fill you in on some things I learn if, in return, Mr. Rockefeller will sit down with me and my questions for a full day interview.”

“What happened?”

“I never heard back.”

“But it’s interesting,” said Bell. “That he doesn’t seem to hold your writing against your father. I understand he is a member of the inner circle.”

“My father is a valuable man, and JDR appreciates valuable men.”

“Even valuable men whose daughters are a thorn in his side? He can’t love your articles. You’ve exposed all sorts of behavior, both underhanded and outright illegal.”

Edna asked, “Doesn’t his willingness not to hold me against my father speak rather highly of Mr. Rockefeller?”

Wally Kisley hurried up, grease-smudged and reeking of smoke. He tipped his derby to Edna. “Isaac, when you have a moment…”

Bell said, “Be right there. Come along, Archie.”

They followed Wally toward the tank that had exploded first.

“Extraordinary!” said Archie. “A journalist who doesn’t reek of booze and cigars.”

“Hands off,” said Bell. “I saw her first.”

“If I weren’t almost engaged to a couple of ladies due to inherit steel mills, I would give you a run for your money.”

Bell said, “Keep in mind the sooner we arrest the marksman who shot Spike Hopewell, the sooner you can go back to catching your jewel thief.”

“What does that have to do with Miss E. M. Hock?”

“It means go find witnesses. I’ll deal with Wally.”

Archie made a beeline for the caboose saloon. Bell caught up with Wally Kisley at a heap of ash and warped metal where the crude storage tank had folded up like a crumpled paper bag.

Wally said, “It blew when you were down by the creek, right?”

Bell pointed. “Past that bend.”

“By any chance did you hear a second shot fired?”

“Not down there.”

“How about behind you? Back at the oil field.”

“I heard something. I don’t know if it was a shot.”

“Could it have been?”

“It could have been. There was a heck of a racket all at once. Why?”

“I found this,” said Wally. He was holding an oddly shaped, rounded piece of cast iron by a square bracket attached to the top. “Careful, it’s still hot. Take my glove.” He passed Bell his left glove and Bell held the metal in it.

“Heavy.”

He examined it closely. It was six inches high. On one side, the entire surface was pocked with minute indentations, as if a blacksmith had peened it with a hammer. “It’s shaped like an upside-down duck.”

“I thought the same thing, at first.”

Bell upended it and held it with the bracket under it. “It is a duck.”

“Shaped like a duck.”

“You know what this is?” said Bell.

“You tell me.”

Bell had apprenticed under Wally and his ofttimes partner, Mack Fulton, years ago, and one of the many things he had learned from the veteran investigators was not to voice an opinion until a second brain had an opportunity to observe without being influenced by the first.

“It’s a knockdown target. A shooting gallery duck.”

Wally nodded. “That bracket attaches to the target rail. The duck hinges down when a bullet hits it.”

“Where’d you find it?”

“Thirty feet from the first tank that blew.”

“What do you think?”

“The racket you heard right before the explosion could have included a rifle shot, a bullet smashing into this duck, and a blasting cap.”

“So while I was chasing the sniper on the horse, another marksman detonated the explosive that ignited the fire.”

“That’s my read. He shot the duck, which jarred a blasting cap.”

“Or,” said Bell, “the man I chased led me on a wild-goose chase while the real assassin stayed put to set the fire.”

“High marks for a sense of humor,” said Wally Kisley. “Using a shooting gallery duck for a target.”

“I’m not laughing,” said Isaac Bell. “But I will give them high marks for the nerve it took to set up the duck, the cap, and the dynamite right under everyone’s noses. I wonder why nobody noticed.”

“Oil fever. Too busy getting rich.”

5

Midnight was warmed by a slight breeze as a crescent moon inched toward the west. The assassin sat on a large barrel that had been cut into a chair in front of the switching office of the railroad freight yard. The interior was dark and empty since no trains were due to leave or arrive until late the next morning.

The assassin lit a Ramón Allones Havana cigar and retrieved from a coat pocket a leather pouch that contained a gold medal, a fifty-dollar bill, and a letter on heavy stock. The touch of wind dissipated an attempt at blowing a self-satisfied smoke ring.

The medal was as heavy as a double eagle gold piece. And the center was fashioned like a target, with concentric rings and a single dot in the precise center of the bull’s-eye. It hung from a red ribbon that was attached to a gold bar pin engraved “Rifle Sharpshooter.”

The fifty-dollar treasury note would have been just another bill of paper money except when you turned it over you saw that the president had signed the back — as if, the assassin often thought, the busy president had suddenly shouted, “Wait! Bring that back. I’ll sign it for that fine young soldier.”

It had to be Roosevelt’s signature because it matched his signature on the commendation letter that the president had typed, as he was known to do with personal letters, on White House letterhead. The assassin read it by the light of a globe above the switching office door for perhaps the hundredth time:

The assassin skipped some folderol about honoring the regiment and the value of volunteer soldiers — as if their eyes had sighted the targets and their fingers caressed the trigger. Fat chance. Then came the best part.

A sound of footsteps on gravel interrupted all thought. Quickly, everything went back into the leather pouch and was returned to the coat pocket.

“Why here?” Bill Matters grunted. “We could have met in the comfort of my private car.”

“Too ostentatious,” said the assassin. “I have always preferred a life of simplicity.” Before Matters could reply, the assassin motioned to another barrel chair with the cigar. “I admit they’d be more comfortable with seat cushions.”

Even in the dark Matters showed his anger. “Why in blazes — why in the face of all good sense — did you shoot Hopewell when the detective was with him?”

The assassin made no apology and offered no regret but retorted loftily, “To paraphrase the corrupt Tammany Haller Senator Plunkitt, I saw my shot and I took it.”

Bill Matters felt his heart pounding with rage. “All my kowtowing to those sanctimonious sons of bitches and you blithely undermine my whole scheme.”

“I got away clean. The detective never came close to me.”

“You brought a squad of Van Dorns to the state.”

“We’re done in this state.”

“We’re done when I say we’re done.”

Matters was deeply troubled. His killer, who was vital to his plan, operated in a world and a frame of mind beyond his control, much less his understanding: efficient as a well-oiled machine, with gun in hand, but possessed off the killing field by a reckless faith that nothing could ever go wrong, that fortune would never turn nor consequences catch up.

“I’m surprised by your disappointment.” There was a pause to exhale a cloud of cigar smoke. “I naturally thought you would celebrate your old friend’s departure.”

“Van Dorn detectives have a saying: ‘We never give up!’”

To Matters’ disgust, this drew another, even colder response. “Never? I have a saying, too: ‘Never get too close to me.’ If he does, I will kill him.” The assassin flicked an ash from the cigar. “Who’s next?”

“There’s a fellow giving me trouble in Texas.”

“Who?”

“C. C. Gustafson.”

“Ah!”

The killer nodded in vigorous agreement, admiring Bill Matters’ cunning. C. C. Gustafson was not merely a newspaper publisher and a thorn in Matters’ side but a vocal foe of Standard Oil and a firebrand instigator beloved by the reformers hell-bent on driving the trust out of Texas.

Matters said, “With a crackerjack Van Dorn private detective on the case — thanks to you — we’ve got to throw off suspicion.”

Nothing in the murderer’s expression indicated the minutest acceptance of blame. In fact, it looked as if the murder of Spike Hopewell under the nose of a Van Dorn had been completely forgotten while Matters’ inclusive “we” had kindled delight.

“May I offer you a fine cigar?”

Matters simply shook his head no.

“Brilliant! Public outrage expects the worst of Standard Oil. They’ll blame Gustafson’s killing on the bogeyman everyone loves to hate.”

“Can you do it?”

“Can I do it?” The assassin accepted the assignment with a dramatic flourish: “You may consider Mr. C. C. Gustafson’s presses stopped.”

Matters did not doubt they’d be stopped. A bullet through the head would take care of that. But what bothered him the most was how near was his private assassin to flying out of control.

6

Isaac Bell went looking for the coroner in Independence, the Montgomery County seat, not far from the Indian Territory border. The courthouse clerk directed him to the coroner’s undertaking parlor. A plumber repairing the refrigerating plant told Bell to try the jailhouse. Dr. McGrade was visiting the jailer in his apartment above the cells. They were drinking whiskey in tea cups and invited Bell to join them.

Like most Kansans Bell had met, Dr. McGrade was fully aware of the Corporations Commission investigation and hugely in favor of any action that reined in Standard Oil. Bell explained his connection.

“Glad to help you, Detective, but I’m not sure how. Didn’t the Bourbon County coroner conduct the autopsy on Mr. Hopewell?”

“I’ve already spoken with him. I’m curious about the death of Albert Hill.”

“The refinery fellow,” Dr. McGrade told the jailer, “who drowned in the still.”

The jailer sipped and nodded. “Down in Coffeyville.”

Bell asked, “When you examined Mr. Hill’s body, did you see any signs of bullet wounds?”

“Bullet wounds? You must be joking.”

“I am not joking. Did you see any bullet wounds?”

“Why don’t you read my report from the inquest.”

“I already have, at the courthouse.”

“Well, heck, then you know Mr. Hill tumbled into a still of boiling oil. By the time someone noticed and fished him out, about all that was left was his skeleton and belt buckle. The rest of him dissolved…” He paused for a broad wink. “Now, this wasn’t in my report: His belt buckle looked fine.”

“How about his bones? Were any broken?”

“Fractured femur. Long knitted. Must have busted his leg when he was a kid.”

“No holes in his skull?”

“Just the ones God put there for us all to see and hear and breathe and eat and whatnot.”

“And no damage to the vertebrae in his neck?”

“That I can’t say for sure.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t understand what this has to do with the Corporations Commission…”

Bell saw no reason not to take the coroner and the jailer into his confidence. If the word got around, someone might come to him with more information about Albert Hill. He said, “Seeing as how Mr. Hopewell was shot while I was discussing the commission investigation with him, I am interested in running down the truth about the deaths of other independent oil men.”

“O.K. I get your point.”

“Why can’t you say for sure whether the vertebrae in Mr. Hill’s neck suffered damage?”

“I didn’t find all of them. The discs and cartilage between them must have dissolved and the bones scattered.”

“That wasn’t in your report.”

“It did not seem pertinent to the cause of death.”

“Did that happen to the vertebrae in his spine?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did his thoracic and lumbar vertebrae separate and ‘scatter’ the way you’re assuming his cervical vertebrae did?”

The doctor fell silent. Then he said, “Now that you ask, no. The spine was intact. As was most of the neck.”

“Most?”

“Two vertebrae were attached to the skull. Four were still connected to the spine — the thoracic vertebrae.”

“How many cervical vertebrae are there in the human skeleton? Seven?”

“Seven.”

“So we’re missing only one.”

The doctor nodded. “One. Down in the bottom of the still. Dissolved by now, of course. Distilled into fuel oil, or kerosene or gasoline, even lubricants.”

“But…”

“But what, Mr. Bell?”

“Doesn’t it make you curious?”

“About what?”

“You say two cervical vertebrae were still attached to the skull. So the missing vertebra would be cervical number three, wouldn’t it?”

“Three it was.”

“Wouldn’t you love to get a gander at cervical two and cervical four?”

“Not really.”

“I would.”

“Why?”

“Let’s assume that instead of the disc cartilage dissolving, something knocked cervical three clean out of Mr. Hill’s vertebral column.”

“Like what?” asked the coroner, then answered his own question. “… Like a bullet.”

“You’re right,” said Isaac Bell. “It could have been a bullet… Aren’t you tempted to have a look?”

“The man’s already buried in the ground.”

Bell said, “I’d still be tempted to have a look.”

“I’m strictly against disinterring bodies. It’s just a mess of a job.”

“But this poor fellow was just a heap of bones.”

Dr. McGrade nodded. “That’s true. Those bones looked polished like he’d passed a hundred years ago.”

“Good point,” said Bell. “Why don’t we have a look?”

“I can lend you shovels,” said the jailer.

The coroner at Fort Scott, a railroad town where several lines converged, was a powerfully built young doctor with a chip on his shoulder.

Isaac Bell asked, “Did you see any bullet wounds?”

“Of course not.”

“Why do you say ‘of course not’?”

“Read my testimony to the coroner’s jury.”

“I have read it.”

“Then you know that Reed Riggs was mangled beyond recognition after falling off a railroad platform under a locomotive.”

“Yes. But—”

“But what?”

“Nothing in your written report indicates that you did any more than write down what the railroad police told you — that Mr. Riggs fell under the locomotive that rolled over him.”

“What are you implying?”

“I am not implying,” said Isaac Bell, “I am saying forthrightly and clearly — to your face, Doctor — that you did not examine Mr. Riggs’ body.”

“It was a mutilated heap of flesh and bone. He fell under a locomotive. What do you expect?”

“I expect a public official who is paid to determine the cause of a citizen’s death to look beyond the obvious.”

“Now, listen to me, Mr. Private Detective.”

“No, Doctor, you listen to me! I want you to look at that body again.”

“It’s been buried two weeks.”

“Dig it up!”

The coroner rose to his feet. He was nearly as tall as Isaac Bell and forty pounds heavier. “I’ll give you fair warning, mister, get lost while you still can. I paid my way through medical school with money I won in the prize ring.”

Isaac shrugged out of his coat and removed his hat. “As we have no gloves, I presume you’ll accommodate me with bare knuckles?”

“What did you do to your hand?” asked Archie Abbott.

“Cut it shaving,” said Bell. “What do you think of that water tank?”

They were pacing Fort Scott’s St. Louis — San Francisco Railway station platform where refiner Reed Riggs had fallen to his death. “Possible,” said Archie, imagining a rifle shot from the top of a tank in the Frisco train yard to where they stood on the platform. “I also like that signal tower. In fact, I like it better. Good angle from the roof.”

“Except how did he climb up there without the dispatchers noticing?”

“Climbed up in the dark while a train rumbled by.”

“How’d he get down?”

“Waited for night.”

“But what if he missed his shot and someone noticed him? He would be trapped with no escape.”

“You’re sure that Riggs was shot?”

“No,” said Bell, “not positive. There’s definitely a hole in his skull. In a piece of the temporal bone, which wasn’t shattered. But it could have been pierced by something other than a bullet. Banged against a railroad spike or a chunk of gravel.”

“What did the coroner think?”

“He was inclined to agree with my assessment.”

Bell and Archie took the train down to Coffeyville, a booming refinery town just above the Kansas — Indian Territory border. They located Albert Hill’s refinery and the tank in which Hill had died while repairing the agitator.

They looked for sight lines. They climbed to the roof of the boiler house, four hundred yards’ distance, then to the roof of the barrel house. Both offered uninterrupted shots at the tank. The barrel house had its own freight siding to receive the lumber trains that delivered wood for the staves.

“Rides in and out,” said Archie.

“I’d go for the boiler house,” said Bell. “They’d never hear a shot over the roar of the furnaces.”

“If there was a shot.”

“I told you,” said Bell. “Albert Hill’s number two cervical vertebra appeared to have been nicked.”

Archie said, “Based on how he killed Spike Hopewell, the assassin is capable of hitting both Hill and Riggs. But he’s one lucky assassin that no one saw him. Or coolly deliberate in choosing his moment.”

Isaac Bell disagreed. “That may be true of Albert Hill. But when Riggs was shot, the timing was dictated by the approach of the locomotive. In both cases, the shots were fired by a marksman as calculating and accurate as the killer who shot Spike Hopewell.”

“If there were shots fired at all,” said Archie, and Wally Kisley agreed, saying, “There could have been shots, and shots would explain how the victims happened to fall, but they could have just as easily fallen as Spike Hopewell suggested to Isaac: one drunk, one overcome by fumes.”

Bell said, “I have Grady Forrer looking into their backgrounds.” Forrer was head of Van Dorn Research.

Isaac Bell went looking for Edna Matters Hock and found her loading her tent onto her buckboard. He gave her a hand. “Where you headed?”

“Pittsburgh.”

“In a wagon?”

“Pittsburgh, Kansas.”

“I was going to ask could you print me that aerial photograph your sister snapped, but you’ve packed your Kodak machine…”

“Actually, I made an extra. I thought you’d ask to see it.”

She had it in an envelope. She handed it to Bell. “Oh, there’s a second photograph that Nellie took before the fire. So you have a before the fire and an after.”

“She flew over before?”

“By coincidence. She was hoping to address a convention in Fort Scott, but the wind changed and the balloon drifted over here. I hope the pictures help.”

Bell thanked her warmly. “Speaking of coincidence,” he told her, “my father served as an intelligence officer in the Civil War and he tried to take balloon daguerreotypes of Confederate fortifications.”

“I’ve never seen an aerial of the Civil War.”

“He said that the swaying motion blurred the pictures. When the wind settled down, a rebel shot the camera out of his hands.”

“Quite a different war story.”

“Actually,” Bell smiled, “he rarely talked about the war. The very few times he did, he told a humorous tale, like the balloon.”

“I really must go.”

He helped her onto the wagon. “It was a pleasure meeting you. I hope to see you again.”

Edna Matters Hock gave him a long look with her gray-green eyes. “I would like that, Mr. Bell. Let us hope it happens.”

“Where are you going next?”

“After Pittsburgh, I’m not sure.”

“If I were to wire the paper sometime, perhaps they could put us in touch.”

“I’ll tell them to,” she said.

They shook hands. “Oh, please say good-bye to Mr. Abbott.”

Bell promised he would. Edna spoke to the mule and it trotted off.

Bell took the photographs to Wally Kisley. Wally gave a low whistle.

“Fascinating. I’ve never had a look like this before.”

The photograph Nellie Matters had snapped after the fire looked like raindrops on a mud puddle. All that was left of the storage tanks were circular pockmarks in the ground. The brick furnaces of the refinery stood like ruined castles. The steel pots were warped, staved in, or completely flattened. The remains of the derricks looked like bones scattered by wild animals.

The picture she had taken before the fire was shrouded in smoke, but Spike’s refinery still looked almost as orderly as an architect’s blueprint. What stood out was the logic of Hopewell’s design to efficiently move the crude oil through the process of brewing gasoline.

“Now you see, Isaac, they couldn’t have picked a better tank to blow. Look at this.”

“But their target was the gasoline tank. Why didn’t they blow it first off?”

“Couldn’t get to it. Out in the open like it was, in plain sight, there’s no way to lay the explosives and set up the target duck. But look here. They could not have chosen a tank better positioned for the first explosion to start things rolling. Someone knows his business.”

Ice-eyed Mack Fulton, an expert on safecrackers, arrived from New York dressed in funereal black. He had news for Archie Abbott. “Jewel thief the New York cops are calling the Fifth Avenue Flier sounds a lot to me like your Laurence Rosania, in that he’s got an eye for top quality and beauty.”

That caught Archie’s interest because Rosania was known to leave ugly pieces behind regardless of value. They compared notes. Like the discriminating Rosania, Mack’s Fifth Avenue Flier robbed safes on mansions’ upper floors.

“New York cops think he’s scaling walls, but I’m wondering if he’s talking his way upstairs, romancing the ladies and charming the gents, like your guy.”

“How’d he get there so fast?” asked Archie. A recent robbery in New York had taken place less than a day after a Rosania-sounding job in Chicago.

“20th Century Limited?”

“If he’s pulled off half the jobs we think, he can afford it.”

“He gets to play the New York and Chicago fences off each other, too. Bargain up the price. That reminds me, Isaac. I brought you a note from Grady Forrer.”

Bell tore open the envelope from Research.

But to his disappointment, Forrer had not discovered any special connections between Spike Hopewell, Albert Hill, and Reed Riggs — no mutual partners, no known feuds. All they had in common was being independent oil men. Even if all of them were shot, the shootings were not related on a personal level.

“O.K.,” said Bell. “The only fact I know for sure is that Spike Hopewell was shot. Two questions, gents. By whom? And why?”

Archie said, “Hopewell had an enemy who hated him enough to kill and just happened to be a crack shot at seven hundred yards.”

“Or,” said Mack Fulton, “Hopewell had an enemy who hated him enough to hire someone to kill him who happened to be a crack shot at seven hundred yards.”

“Or,” said Wally Kisley, “Hopewell had an enemy who hated him enough to hire a professional assassin to kill him whose weapon of choice was a rifle with an effective range of over seven hundred yards.”

Bell said, “I’m betting on Wally’s professional.”

“That’s because a professional makes it more likely that your other two victims were actually shot. But, oh boy, Isaac, you’re talking about amazing shooting.”

“For the moment, let’s agree they were shot. Who’s the mastermind?”

“All three independent oil men were battling Standard Oil.”

“Was Hopewell a Congregationalist by any chance?” Wally Kisley asked. He grinned at Mack Fulton. The joke-cracking partners were known in the Van Dorn Agency as “Weber & Fields,” for the vaudeville comedians.

“Presbyterian.”

“Too bad,” said Wally. “We could have arrested Rockefeller if he was.”

The newspapers were full of stories about a Congregationalist Convocation in Boston that had turned down a million-dollar donation by John D. Rockefeller because Rockefeller’s money was “tainted.”

“That money sure is tainted,” chorused Wally and Mack. “’Tain’t yours! ’Tain’t mine!”

“Listen close,” said Bell, grinning. “The last words Hopewell said to me was that he had what he called tricks up his sleeve to build his tidewater pipe line. Wally and Mack, talk to everyone in Kansas who knew him. Find out his plan.”

“You got it, Isaac.”

“Archie? Run down Big Pete Straub. Find out where he was when Spike was shot. Find out if maybe I winged him with my Winchester. But watch yourself.”

“Thank you, Mother. But I think I can handle him.”

“That’s your call,” Bell shot back firmly, “if he’s alone. But if he’s running with a bunch, get ahold of Wally and Mack before you brace him. I’ll be back soon as I can.”

“Where you going, Isaac?”

“Washington, D.C.”

“But you don’t have anything to report.”

“I’m not going to report.”

“Then what are you going for?”

“To shake up the Boss.”

7

By 1905 the Van Dorn Detective Agency spanned the continent, with field offices in major cities and many towns. It maintained national headquarters at the Palmer House in Chicago, where Joseph Van Dorn had founded the fast-growing outfit. But Van Dorn himself — gambling that a private detective agency with a national reach could profit by contracting its services to a federal government ill-equipped to hunt modern criminals across state lines — spent more and more time in his Washington, D.C., field office.

It was at the new and unabashedly lavish Willard Hotel, two blocks from the White House, and Isaac Bell noted that it had grown by several more rooms since his last visit. He credited the Boss’s warming friendship with President Roosevelt, his industrious courting of the powers who ruled the Justice Department and the U.S. Navy, his honest name, his colorful reputation, broadcast in Sunday supplement features, and his Irish charm.

Van Dorn’s private office was a sumptuous walnut-paneled inner sanctum designed to make bankers, industrialists, senators, and cabinet secretaries feel at home. It was equipped like the nerve center of a great railroad, with numerous telephones, voice tubes, an electric intercom, a self-winding stock ticker, and a telegraph key for the agency’s private wire. Windows on two sides offered a preview of clients and informants arriving on Pennsylvania Avenue or 14th Street, and it had a spy hole for sizing up prospects in the reception room.

The Boss was a large, solid man in his forties with a friendly smile that could turn cold in a flash. He was bald, his skull a shiny, high dome, his cheeks and chin thick with red whiskers. Bristly brows, red as his beard and sideburns, shaded his eyes. Only when he opened them wide to stare a man full in the face did he reveal enormous intelligence and colossal determination. He could be mistaken for a well-off business man. Criminals who made that mistake, and they were legion, were marched off in handcuffs.

Van Dorn glanced up at Isaac Bell with genuine affection.

He was leaning over the mouthpiece of one of the three candlestick telephones on his desk, with one meaty fist pressing the earpiece to his ear. The other gripped a voice tube into which he issued a terse request. He replaced the voice tube stopper, roared orders into the telephone, banged the earpiece back on its hook, snatched up another telephone and purred, “Senator Stevens, I cannot recall such hospitality as was extended by you and Mrs. Stevens this past weekend…”

A secretary, in vest, bow tie, and shoulder-holstered, double-action Colt, hurried in, placed a typewritten letter on the desk, exchanged cylinders in the DeVeau Dictaphone, and hurried out with the full one.

“… Thank you, Senator. I hope you can join me for lunch at the Cosmos Club… Oh, yes, I belong. I can assure you that no one was more surprised than I when they tapped me to join. Who knows what the membership committee was thinking… I look forward to seeing you next week.”

He returned the earpiece to its hook and signed the letter on his desk.

“Good to see you, Isaac.”

“Good morning, sir. You’re looking prosperous.”

“Busy as a one-armed paperhanger. What brings you back from Kansas?”

“What may sound, at first, like a strange request.”

“I’ll judge what is strange. What do you want?”

“I want you to inveigle John D. Rockefeller into hiring the agency to arrest the marksman who murdered Spike Hopewell.”

Van Dorn sat back and regarded the tall detective speculatively.

“That is strange… even by your standards. Why would Rockefeller do that? He knows we’re investigating him for the Corporations Commission.”

“I brought you the latest newspapers from Topeka and Kansas City.”

Bell spread the Kansas Watchman, the Kansas City Journal, and the Kansas City Star on Van Dorn’s desk and showed him the headlines about the murder of Spike Hopewell. Then he opened them to the editorials.

Van Dorn read quickly. “They’re howling for Rockefeller’s hide. They’re practically claiming that Rockefeller pulled the trigger. Do they know something about the president of Standard Oil that we don’t?”

“Rockefeller did not shoot anyone, of course. But the killing is making him look even worse than the people of Kansas thought he was. And since Standard Oil locked up their pipe lines and their tank cars — and they were already mad as hornets about crude dropping to seventy cents a barrel and kerosene jumping to seventeen cents a gallon — they equate him with the devil.”

Van Dorn looked dubious. “You’re suggesting that if we catch the killer at Rockefeller’s behest, it will improve his reputation.”

“According to E. M. Hock, he has a slew of publicists on his payroll to improve his reputation. Being blamed for murder can’t be making their job any easier.”

“It’s a thought,” Van Dorn said cautiously. “I’ll mull it over.”

Bell knew from experience that Van Dorn’s mulling could take a long time. He immediately said, “We, too, would come out smelling like roses.”

“How so?”

“Mr. Rockefeller’s fellow magnates and tycoons watch his every move like hungry wolves. They will note the good work the Van Dorns do for him and remember us the next time they need a detective agency. As will your friends at the Justice Department. And the Navy. Even the Treasury Department — if I recall correctly, Senator Stevens chairs the Committee on Finance.”

“True,” Van Dorn nodded. “All true. I’ll see what I can do. I’ll have to think on which wires to try and pull.”

“I have an idea for a different approach,” Bell said.

Van Dorn’s high brow beetled. “I’m belatedly gaining the impression that you came here loaded for bear.”

“Rockefeller pays so-called correspondents to spy for him. You can bet he’s got plenty in Congress, and probably even some deep inside the Corporations Commission. In addition, he is able to ‘listen in’ on telegrams carried on his pipe lines’ private wires.”

“I am aware that Rockefeller understands the power of information more than any other business man in the country. The War Department and the Secret Service could take lessons from his book. What’s your ‘different approach’?”

“What if we were to cause the word to drift back to him that people are convinced the assassin works for Standard Oil?”

“How?”

“We could have people pass rumors to his correspondents. We could even insert false messages on the private lines.”

“All that to give Rockefeller the impression that the public believes that Standard Oil hired an assassin?”

“At which point we ask for the job of catching the assassin. And while we’re hunting him, we will also be in a position to collect evidence for the commission from inside the Standard.”

“Like a Trojan horse?” asked the Boss.

Isaac Bell smiled. “I could not put it better myself.”

Big Pete Straub was not easily impressed. His sheer size awed most men. They crossed the street when they saw him crowd a sidewalk, backed up when he entered a room, ran when he reached for a pick handle. He was accustomed to their fear and it made him scornful. What set him apart from saloon brawlers, and raised him high above their ranks, was his ability to distinguish those few men of unusual power or ability that he should not frighten. He knew how to say yes, sir, to a man who could help him and sound like he meant it.

The little guy with the rifle was one of those. He seemed rich. Or rich enough. He paid generously, ten times what Pete earned from the Standard’s industrial service firm. In gold, the minute the job was done. He spoke rarely and never loudly — one whispered word instead of two — and never if a gesture would do. He was as alert as a wolf, intensely aware of what was going on around him. He was patient; he could sit all day waiting for a shot. And when things flew apart, he never lost his nerve.

But what made the assassin so special to the hulking Standard Oil thug was that he was something to watch. In his hands, the sleek, hammerless Savage 99 looked deadly as a rattlesnake. There were times, Big Pete thought, you could not tell where his fingers stopped and the blue steel began. He wore gloves, black gloves, tight as a second skin, with a tiny patch cut out where his finger touched the trigger. He wore a hat with a slightly abbreviated brim, which Straub was sure he had had specially made so it would shade the eyepiece of the telescope but not get in his way. He wore a dark scarf, like a cowboy bandanna, around his throat that covered his neck and his chin.

And could the guy shoot! He could kill people Straub couldn’t even see. Sure, he had a telescope, but it was more than the powerful glass, more like something out of a magic show. When his bullet left the gun, it traveled sure as a flier on the rails, a certain connection between his trigger finger and his target’s head.

The assassin gestured for Big Pete to fire first. His eyes were empty, his rifle steady.

This was the first time Big Pete had fired alongside the marksman. In the past he had covered the escape route to throw off pursuit, if there was any, and draw fire as he had when the Van Dorns chased him in Hopewell, Kansas. But here in Southeast Texas, in the boomtown of Humble, they were crouching side by side on a flat roof behind the false front of a tall saloon. Planning step-by-step as always, the assassin had chosen shooting holes in the curlicue-carved top of the ornate front.

Straub’s job was to fire first to break a window. His hands were steady, but he could feel his palms getting wet. He was a decent shot. The bolt action Springfield ’03 was a good weapon. And his target was fully two feet square.

C. C. Gustafson — editor of the Humble Clarion, who’d been making a career of criticizing Standard Oil practices in Texas and provoking the legislature to expel the trust from the state — was standing behind the window setting type.

Big Pete aimed at the blood-red dot of his bow tie.

“Don’t try to hit him,” whispered the assassin.

“I know,” said Straub. “Just break the glass.” How had the assassin known where he was aiming? The guy missed nothing. Straub shifted the rifle and sighted dead center in the window. He heard the assassin take a shallow breath and hold it.

“Now!”

Big Pete squeezed his trigger.

The Springfield boomed.

Glass flew.

The editor looked up, wasted a half breath staring, then tried to dive behind the press.

The assassin’s Savage gave a sharp crack. The editor tumbled backward. Then, to Straub’s surprise, the assassin fired again. Next second, they were running, crouched, across the roof, then down the ladder to the alley behind the saloon.

“Good shot!” Straub exulted.

“Missed,” said the assassin, his voice emotionless.

A man stepped around the corner. He had unbuttoned his fly as if about to urinate on the wall. Squinting around for the source of the gunshots, he saw two men running toward him with rifles.

“Kill him,” said the assassin.

Straub broke his neck.

The assassin gestured.

Straub slung the body over his shoulder and they ran, following the escape route they had rehearsed. After they had put distance between them and the saloon, the assassin gestured to drop the dead man beside a rain barrel on top of Straub’s Springfield.

Grady Forrer of Van Dorn Research sent Isaac Bell a telegram to alert him to a shooting in far-off Texas that might possibly pertain to his investigation. Bell had known Forrer since Joseph Van Dorn had hired him to establish the Research Department and trusted his judgment. He immediately wired Texas Walt Hatfield, the formidable Van Dorn detective — a former Ranger, raised by the Comanche — who operated as a one-man field office for the biggest state in the Union.

8

Bill Matters read and reread a dozen newspaper reports about a transatlantic cable John D. Rockefeller had sent from Cannes, France, to his Fifth Avenue Baptist Church Sunday school class. The New York and Cleveland papers had published the cable back in January when he was abroad, and it had been printed and reprinted through the spring as paper after paper used the great man’s wisdom to inspire the devout and fill space.

“Delightful breezes. I enjoy watching the fishermen with their nets on the beach, and gazing upon the sun rising over the beautiful Mediterranean Sea. The days pass pleasantly and profitably.”

It was an open secret at Standard Oil headquarters that publicists scheming to furbish up Rockefeller’s reputation planted stories in the newspapers. But Matters suspected there was much more to this cable than polishing the public image of a greedy tycoon into a glowing example of the pleasant old age everyone looked forward to. A deep feeling gnawed his gut that Rockefeller had transmitted coded messages to his elderly partners about a secret deal he was negotiating overseas under the cloak of a retiree traveling around Europe.

Whatever the pirate was up to, Matters wanted in on it.

Matters himself was no stranger to coded messages. He communicated with his assassin with cryptic instructions in the want ads of daily newspapers. He felt so strongly that this cable was big — something huge, the sort of deal the supposedly retired president had time to pursue thanks to underlings like him taking over day-to-day operations — that he decided to risk consulting a clandestine partner he had cultivated among his fellow managers.

Old Clyde Lapham, an early Standard Oil partner, was losing his grip to dementia. When the others realized he was no longer striking a high batting average, they had begun excluding him from private deals. Lapham knew, or sensed enough of what was happening to accept, warily, the kindness and respect that the much-younger, vigorous Matters pretended to offer.

Lapham said he suspected a secret deal, too, when Matters broached the subject. Stung that he had not been invited to partake, he translated the basics of the message over a supper Matters invited him to at Mcdonald’s Oyster House up by Bleecker on the Bowery, where no one would recognize them. Matters ordered wine to loosen him up. Lapham’s vague eyes kept locking on the empty littleneck clamshells as if they held some secret. He had a thin voice.

“‘Delightful breezes’ means big changes are under way,” he reported matter-of-factly. “‘I enjoy watching the fishermen with their nets on the beach’ means that Mr. Rockefeller is spying on competitors.”

But the old man was baffled by “gazing upon the sun rising over the beautiful Mediterranean Sea.” Pawing purposefully across the table, he picked up an empty clamshell and examined it closely.

“Sir Marcus Samuel’s father got his start selling these.”

“Selling what?”

“Seashells. Old Marcus Senior imported oriental seashells, sold them to people decorating their houses. Where did you think Junior got the money to invent his goddamned oil tankers?”

Sir Marcus Samuel, who had pioneered a fleet of bulk-oil-carrying steamers, commanded their powerful English competitor, Shell Transport and Trading. The richest distributor of refined oil, in cans packed in wooden cases, to India and China, Samuel had run circles around the mighty Standard for more than a decade and had recently increased his sales force by forming the Asiatic Petroleum Company with the Royal Dutch Company.

Matters regained Lapham’s attention, with some effort, and coaxed him to concentrate on “The days pass pleasantly and profitably.”

Lapham finally said that he believed that “The days pass pleasantly and profitably” meant that Rockefeller was laying groundwork for his next move. He picked up another shell.

“What move?” Matters asked.

Lapham shrugged. “The sun rising over the beautiful Mediterranean Sea rises in the east.”

Of course! The rich Baku oil fields on the Caspian Sea that pumped half the world’s oil were in the east. Chaos threatened Baku. January’s Bloody Sunday massacre at the Russian czar’s Winter Palace in St. Petersburg had inflamed revolutionary unrest and Muslim — Christian hatred simultaneously. Civil war threatened the oil fields.

In that instant, Bill Matters had to restrain himself from lunging across the table to kiss Lapham’s wrinkled hand. The looney old man had done him a huge favor and ripped the scales from his eyes. He had been thinking too small. Way too small. He suddenly saw the world as Rockefeller did.

That it was definitely code galvanized Matters. He made an educated guess based in part on the six years he’d been circling the rim of the inner circle of the Standard Oil Gang and based in part on a perceptive analysis by the assassin who speculated that Rockefeller sensed an opportunity to break the stranglehold that his overseas enemies — the Nobel and Rothschild families and Sir Marcus Samuel — had on Russian oil.

How could Rockefeller not be tempted by the spoils? Fighting and destruction in Baku would shut down half the world supply and the price of oil would double or triple to two, to three, to four dollars a barrel, prices that hadn’t been seen in decades. American oil men would cheer. But John D. Rockefeller was no ordinary oil man.

Wouldn’t he imagine much-richer spoils than a temporary jump in price? Wouldn’t he see the chaos of civil war as an opportunity to displace the Rothschilds, overthrow the Nobels, sink Shell, and own it all?

Bill Matters knew in his gut that this was the chance he had been working for. Something this big would never come again. Whatever Rockefeller was scheming in the east, Matters had to make himself part of it.

His success thus far, since joining the Standard — his growing wealth and power within the corporation, though still not in the inner circle — proved he had been right to bank on the secrecy that pervaded the trust. Secrets had given him room to operate, as had the madcap distraction of everyone from Rockefeller on down who were busy getting richer.

Business was roaring. New markets were enormous: fuel for ships and power plants, gasoline to feed the automobile boom. But supply, too, was growing; vast new oil fields in Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Mexico, and California surpassed the old Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana fields. It was becoming impossible for the Standard to control production to keep prices high. Competing producers — Gulf Oil and the Texas Company — were springing to life even as the monopoly came under increasing fire from Progressive reformers determined to break up the trust. Rockefeller himself was distracted by the government prosecution and equally by his attempts to repair his reputation by becoming a philanthropist.

The pressure was on the old president to do something.

Thus the Baku push.

Bill Matters approached white-haired Averell Comstock, a charter member of the “gang” who often profited from private deals. “I have a scheme for a joint adventure.”

“What sort of scheme?”

“A private partnership with you and Mr. Rockefeller to persuade the Russian government to let Standard Oil build new, modern refineries and refurbish the old ones owned by Rothschild and Nobel.”

Comstock was immediately suspicious.

“Where did you get that idea, Bill? It’s as if you read our minds.”

Matters felt his spirits soar. He had guessed right about a lot of things.

He answered modestly, “I’m an old wildcat driller. Good at guessing. Besides, I recall that in ’03 Mr. Rockefeller considered roping in St. Petersburg banks to buy Baku oil fields.”

“Are you sure you haven’t been eavesdropping on telephone calls?”

“Quite sure, Mr. Comstock.” According to Clyde Lapham, this was not the first time Rockefeller had set sights on the Caucasus. Back in ’98, Standard Oil sent geologists to survey for commercial oil reserves in Azerbaijan.

“Or tapping wires?”

“I wouldn’t know how to begin to tap wires,” Matters lied.

“What else have you ‘guessed’?”

Matters took his best shot. “What if I were to propose to you a plan to beat Sir Marcus Samuel at shipping case oil to Asia?”

Comstock glared. So-called case oil was kerosene shipped in gallon tins packed in wooden boxes. The Asian market was enormous. Chinese and Indians burned the oil in their lamps and used the wood and tin to build their huts, shingle their roofs, make cooking pots and pitchers. Sir Marcus Samuel, the all-powerful English distributor of case oil to India and China, had visited these offices in great secrecy in 1901 to negotiate some sort of partnership. Matters was gambling that Rockefeller and Comstock wished their talks had panned out.

“Mr. Rockefeller prefers knowing to guessing,” said Comstock.

Bill Matters stood his ground. “I am not guessing.”

Comstock was scornful. “Let me remind you that Standard Oil has not managed to beat Samuel in fifteen years. The conniving Englishman parlayed preferential treatment from the Suez Canal into the biggest tank steamer fleet to Asia.”

“I know how to beat Samuel,” Bill Matters shot back.

“How?”

“Bypass the Suez Canal.”

“Bypass the Suez?” Comstock turned more scornful. “Have you any idea how long it takes a tank ship to steam around Africa? Why do you suppose they dug a canal?”

“Bypass the Transcaucasus Railroad, too,” Matters shot back. “And Batum. And the Black Sea. And the Dardanelles, Constantinople, and the Mediterranean.”

“Poppycock! How the devil could we ship kerosene to India and China?”

“Build a pipe line from Baku to the Persian Gulf.”

“A pipe line?…” Comstock’s face was a mask. But his eyes grew busy. “Too ambitious. Persia is mountainous and bedeviled by warlords and revolutionaries.”

“No more ambitious than our pipe lines across Pennsylvania’s mountains to the Atlantic seaboard,” Matters answered, choosing his words carefully. His hated rivals had never built an inch of pipe line, themselves, but stolen his.

Comstock shook his head. “Great Britain will fight a Russian link to the Gulf every inch of the way.”

“Don’t you think Standard Oil should fight back for half the oil in the world and all the markets of Asia?”

Comstock’s face remained a mask. Eventually, he closed his hands in a double fist and gazed at Matters over his interlocked knuckles. “Were Mr. Rockefeller to approve a pipe line, he might invite you to join as a junior partner in the enterprise.”

Averell Comstock would of course be a full partner. Matters had braced himself to pretend humble acquiescence and he said, “I would be deeply honored.”

In fact, he was thrilled — not for a junior partnership but for the access he would gain to the president. Comstock may have his doubts, but he also sensed that the pipe line was a bold idea that Rockefeller would seize upon. In which case, Comstock feared the idea would get to the president from someone else unless he moved quickly.

Matters reminded himself not to get cocky. Older Standard Oil directors, who jealously guarded their power, were the smartest in American industry. There were wise men among them who might intuit Matters’ plot, might guess that for Bill Matters the pipe line was only the beginning.

As the assassin had proclaimed after shooting Spike Hopewell, those who get too close will be killed.

Bill Matters summoned the assassin to his private rail car.

“Word’s come from Texas that C. C. Gustafson did not die.”

“I’m not surprised. He was quick as lightning. I struck him twice, but neither shot felt right.”

“What happened?”

“Fate intervened,” the assassin said blithely, but, unable to abide a deep sense of failure, added in a voice suddenly dark, “I am mortified… I promise you that such a failure will never again occur. Never.”

“Don’t worry about Gustafson. The effect of the attack is the same as if he had died. They’ll blame Standard Oil.”

The assassin’s spirits continued to fall. “I have promised myself on my mother’s grave that I will never miss again. Never.”

Matters said, “I need something new from you. Something quite different.”

The assassin leaned closer, intrigued. “How different?”

“Some old ones must die.”

“Comstock?”

“Yes. He’s bringing my pipe line scheme to Rockefeller. After he does, I need him out of my way.”

“And old Lapham?”

“No, not Lapham.”

“God knows what Clyde Lapham remembers,” the assassin warned darkly. “But whatever he does remember will be too much.”

“Not yet! I need Lapham.”

“O.K. Only Comstock. For the moment. What is different?”

“His death must appear to be natural. No sniping. No suspicion of murder.”

“Miles ahead of you,” the assassin crowed — spirits soaring as suddenly high as a skyrocket — and whipped out of a vest pocket a red vial.

From Humble, Texas, Walt Hatfield wired Isaac Bell at the Washington field office.

Isaac Bell raced to Central Station. The Washington & Southwestern Limited was fully booked, but a pass given him by a prep school classmate’s railroad president father got Bell into a seat reserved for friends of the company. Everyone, the conductor told him, seemed to be going to Texas.

In the smoker, he drank a Manhattan cocktail that was exactly the color of Edna Matters’ fine, wispy hair. And from what he had glimpsed of Nellie, hers too. He ordered another and raised the glass to salute Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, which the train passed by in the dying daylight. He ate a grilled rockfish in the dining car, and slept in a Pullman Palace sleeper that the Limited picked up in Danville, Virginia.

Twenty-seven hours later, a Van Dorn apprentice from the New Orleans field office ran into Union Terminal with another wire from Texas Walt.

Isaac Bell swung aboard the westbound Sunset Express.