The Spy

by Clive Cussler

  “No, no, no, I’m not some tourist you take around the park. If I wanted to drive out of my way through the park, I would have instructed you to go out of the way through the park. Return to Fifth Avenue immediately!”

  The driver slammed on the brakes, throwing Abbington-Westlake off his seat. When he recovered, he found himself glaring into the cold eyes of a grim-visaged Isaac Bell.

  “I warn you, Bell, I have friends who will come to my aid.”

  “I will not deliver a well-deserved punch in your nose for selling me down the river to Yamamoto Kenta if you answer a question.”

  “Was that you who killed Yamamoto?” the English spy asked f earfully.

  “He died in Washington. I was in New York.”

  “Did you order his death?”

  “I am not one of you,” said Bell.

  “What is your question?”

  “Whoever this freelance spy is, I believe he is acting strangely. Look at this.”

  He showed Abbington-Westlake the note. “He left this on the body of my detective. Why would he do such a thing?”

  The Englishman read it in a glance. “Appears to be sending you a message.”

  “Would you?”

  “One does not indulge in childish exercises.”

  “Would you kill my man for revenge?”

  “One does not indulge in the luxury of revenge.”

  “Would you do it as a threat? Believing it would stop me?”

  “He should have killed you, that would put a stop to it.”

  “Would you?”

  Abbington-Westlake smiled. “I would suggest that successful spies are invisible spies. Ideally, one copies a secret plan rather than stealing it so one’s enemy never knows that his secret was stolen. Similarly, if an enemy must die, it should seem to be an accident. Falling debris at a work site might crush a man without raising suspicion. A hatpin piercing his brain is a red flag.”

  “The hatpin was not in the newspapers,” Bell said coldly.

  “One reads between the lines,” the Englishman retorted. “As I told you at the Knickerbocker, welcome to the world of espionage, Mr. Bell. You’ve learned a lot already. You know in your gut that the freelance spy is not first and foremost a spy.”

  “He doesn’t think like a spy,” said Bell. “He thinks like a gangster.”

  “Then who better to catch a gangster than a detective? Good day, sir. May I wish you happy hunting?” He climbed out of the cab and walked toward Fifth Avenue.

  Bell hurried back to the Hotel Knickerbocker and corralled Archie Abbott.

  “Get up to the Newport Torpedo Factory.”

  “The Boston boys are already-”

  “I want you. I’m getting a strange feeling about that attack.”

  “What kind of feeling?”

  “What if it wasn’t sabotage? What if it was a robbery? Stay there until you discover what they took.”

  He walked Archie to the train at Grand Central and returned to the office, deep in thought. Abbington-Westlake had confirmed his suspicions. The spy was first and foremost a gangster. But he couldn’t be Commodore Tommy. The Gopher had lived and fought within the narrow confines of Hell’s Kitchen his whole life. The answer must lie with Louis Loh. He could be the tong. He could even be the spy. Perhaps that was what he had noticed was different about Louis: he acted like he had a purpose. It was time to put the question to him.

  Bell collected Louis Loh from the Brooklyn Navy Yard brig late at night and handcuffed his wrists behind his back.

  Loh’s first surprise came when instead of putting him in a truck or an auto, Bell walked him toward the river. They waited at the water’s edge. Hull 44 loomed behind them. The wind carried the sounds of ship engines, slatting sails, whistles, and horns. Blacked out but for running lights, Lowell Falconer’s turbine yacht Dyname approached in near silence.

  Deckhands guided Bell and his prisoner aboard without speaking a word. The yacht backed into the river and headed downstream. It went under the Brooklyn Bridge and passed the Battery and picked up speed on the Upper Bay.

  “If you’re planning to throw me overboard,” Louis Loh said, “remember I know how to swim.”

  “Wearing those manacles?”

  “I assumed you would remove them, being above torture.”

  The helmsman increased speed to thirty knots. Bell took Loh into the darkened cabin, where they sat in silence sheltered from the wind and spray. Dyname crossed the Lower Bay. Bell saw the lightship flash by the porthole. When Dyname’s bow rose to the first Atlantic comber, Louis Loh asked, “Where are you taking me?”

  “To sea.”

  “How far to sea?”

  “About fifty miles.”

  “That will take all night.”

  “Not on this ship.”

  The helmsman opened her up. An hour passed. The turbines slowed, and the yacht settled down. Suddenly it bumped hard against something and stopped. Bell took Louis’s arm, checked that he hadn’t jimmied open the cuffs, and led him out on deck. Silent deckhands helped them onto the wooden deck of a barge. Then Dyname wheeled about and raced off. In minutes, all to be seen of her was the fiery discharge from her stack, and soon she vanished into the night.

  “Now what?” asked Louis Loh. Creamy whitecaps shone in the starlight. The barge rolled with the movement of the sea.

  “Now we climb.”

  “Climb? Climb what?”

  “This mast.”

  Bell directed Louis’s gaze up the cage mast. The airy structure rose so high that its swaying top seemed to brush the stars. “What is this? Where are we?”

  “We’re on a target barge anchored in the U.S. Navy Atlantic Firing Range. Test engineers have erected on the barge this one-hundred-twenty-five-foot cage mast, the latest development in dreadnought spotting masts.”

  Bell climbed two rungs, unlocked Louis’s right cuff, and locked it around his own ankle.

  “Ready? Here we go.”

  “Where?”

  “Up these ladders. When I raise my leg, you raise your arm.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s a test scheduled for dawn to see how the cage mast fares in battle conditions when bombarded by 12-inch guns. Any spy worth his salt would give his eyeteeth to watch. Let’s go.”

  It was long climb to the spotting top, but neither man was breathing hard when they reached the platform. “You are in excellent condition, Louis.” Bell removed the cuff from his ankle and locked it to the tubing that formed the mast.

  “Now what?”

  “Wait for dawn.”

  A cold wind sprang up. The mast swayed as it sighed aound the tubing.

  At first light, the silhouette of a battleship took shape on the horizon.

  “New Hampshire,” said Bell. “You recognize her, I’m sure, by her three funnels and old-fashioned ram bow. You will recall that she carries 7- and 8-inch guns in addition to four 12s. Any minute now.”

  The battleship emitted a red flash. A five-hundred-pound shell roared past like a freight train. Louis ducked. “What?” he screamed. “What?” Now the sound of the gun rumbled their way.

  Another flash. Another shell roared closer.

  “They’ll have the range soon!” Bell told Louis Loh.

  The 12-inch gun flashed red. A shell struck in a shower of sparks fifty feet below. The mast shook. Louis Loh cried, “You’re a madman.”

  “They say this helix design is remarkably strong,” Bell replied.

  More shells roared by. When another hit, Louis covered his face.

  Soon there was enough light in the sky for Bell to read his gold watch. “A few more single shots. Then they’re scheduled to blast salvos. Before they finish up with full broadsides.”

  “All right. All right. I admit I am tong.”

  “You’re more than tong,” Isaac Bell replied coldly. He was rewarded by an expression of surprise on Louis’s ordinarily immobile face.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Sun-t
zu on the art of war. If I may quote your countryman: ‘Be so subtle that you are invisible.’ ”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You told me on the train, ‘They think we’re all opium addicts or tong gangsters.’ You sounded like a man with a broader point of view. Who are you really?”

  A salvo thundered. Two shells ripped through the structure. Still it stood, but it was swinging side to side.

  “I am not tong.”

  “You just told me you are. Which is it?”

  “I am not a gangster.”

  “Stop telling me what you aren’t and start telling me what you are.”

  “I am Tongmenghui.”

  “What is Tongmenghui?”

  “Chinese Revolutionary Alliance. We are a secret resistance movement. We pledge our lives to revive Chinese society.”

  “Explain,” said Isaac Bell.

  In a rush of words, Louis Loh admitted that he was a fervent Chinese Nationalist plotting to overthrow the corrupt Empress. “She is strangling China. England, Germany, all Europe, even the U.S., feed on China’s dying body.”

  “If you are a revolutionist, what are you doing in America?”

  “Dreadnought battleships. China must build a modern fleet to fend off colonial invaders.”

  “By blowing up the Great White fleet in San Francisco?”

  “That wasn’t for China! That was for him.”

  “ ‘Him’? Who are you talking about?”

  With a fearful glance at the New Hampshire, Loh said, “There is a man-a spy-who pays. Not in money but in valuable information about other nations’ dreadnoughts. We, Harold Wing and me, pass it along to Chinese naval architects.”

  “And you pay for it by doing his bidding.”

  “Exactly, sir. Can we go down now?”

  Bell knew this was a major breakthrough in the case. This was the freelance whom Yamamoto had tried to betray in exchange for a clean escape. Louis had gotten him close again.

  “You are working for three masters. The Chinese Navy. Your Tongmenghui resistance movement. And the spy who paid you to attack the magazine at Mare Island. Who is he?”

  Another freight train of a shell roared by. The structure trembled. “I don’t know who he is.”

  “Who is your intermediary? How does he give you orders and information?”

  “Mailboxes. He sent information, orders, and money for expenses in mailboxes.” Loh ducked another shell. “Please, let us go down.”

  Across the water, sparkling in the first rays of sunlight, all the New Hampshire’s guns traversed toward the cage mast. “Here comes a broadside,” said Bell.

  “You must believe me.”

  Bell said, “I feel a certain affection for you, Louis. You held off shooting me until I jumped from the train.”

  Louis Loh stared at the battleship. “I was not sparing your life. I didn’t have the guts to pull the trigger.”

  “I’m tempted to let you down, Louis. But you haven’t told me all you know. I don’t believe that everything came in the mail.”

  Louis Loh cast another fearful gaze at the white battleship and broke down completely. “It was Commodore Tommy Thompson who told us to attack the magazine at Mare Island.”

  “How did you hook up with the Gopher Gang?”

  “The spy bribed the Hip Sing to allow us to approach Commodore Tommy Thompson in their name, pretending we were tong.”

  Bell handed Louis Loh a snowy white handkerchief. “Wave this.” He led Loh down the mast. When they reached the barge, apoplectic Test Range officers raced up in a boat. “How did you-”

  “Thought you’d never stop shooting. We were getting hungry up there.”

  “I DON’T BELIEVE for a moment that Commodore Tommy is the spy,” Isaac Bell told Joseph Van Dorn. “But I’m willing to bet Tommy’s got a good idea who he is.”

  “He better,” said Van Dorn. “Raiding his territory is costing a carload of money for the cops and some very expensive favors to keep Tammany Hall from protesting.” The tall detective and his broadchested boss were overseeing preparations for the raid from inside a Marmon parked across from Commodore Tommy’s Saloon on West 39th Street.

  “But the railroads will love us,” said Bell, and the boss conceded that several rail tycoons had already thanked him personally for cutting back the worst depredations of the Gopher Gang. “Looking at the bright side, after this the spy’s ring will be a lot smaller.”

  “I’m not counting on that,” said Isaac Bell, mindful of learning about the explosion at the Newport Torpedo Factory while on the train to San Francisco.

  A dozen railroad cops led the attack, battering down the saloon door, breaking up the furniture, smashing bottles, and staving in beer kegs. Shots rang within. Harry Warren’s boys, standing by with handcuffs, marched a dozen Gophers into a Police Department paddy wagon.

  “Tommy’s holed up in the cellar with a bullet hole in his arm,” Harry reported to Bell and Van Dorn. “He’s all alone. He may listen to reason.”

  Bell went first, down wooden steps into a damp cellar. Tommy Thompson was slumped in a chair like a mountain brought low by an earthquake. He had a pistol in his hand. He opened his eyes, looked up blearily at Bell’s weapon pointed at his head, and let his pistol fall to the earthen floor.

  “I’m Isaac Bell.”

  “What’s wrong with the Van Dorns?” Tommy was indignant. “It’s always been live and let live. Pay the cops, stay out of each other’s business. We got a whole system at work here, and a bunch of private dicks screw it up.”

  “Is that why you put one of my boys in the hospital?” Bell asked coldly.

  “That wasn’t my idea!” Tommy protested.

  “Wasn’t your idea?” Bell retorted. “Who ramrods the Gophers?”

  “It weren’t my idea,” Tommy repeated sullenly.

  “You’re asking me to believe that the famous Commodore Tommy Thompson, who’s killed off every rival to command the toughest gang in New York, takes orders from someone else?”

  Resentment boiled behind Tommy’s tough façade. Bell played on it, laughing, “Maybe you are telling the truth. Maybe you are just a saloonkeeper.”

  “Goddammit!” Tommy Thompson erupted. He tried to get out of the chair. The tall detective restrained him with a warning gesture. “Commodore Tommy don’t take orders from no one.”

  Bell called out, and Harry Warren and two of his men trooped down the stairs. “Tommy says it wasn’t his idea to beat up little Eddie Tobin. Some fellow made him do it.”

  “Some fellow?” Harry echoed scornfully. “Did this ‘some fellow’ who ordered you to beat up a Van Dorn happen to be the same fellow who ordered you to send Louis Loh and Harold Wing to blow up the magazine at Mare Island?”

  “He didn’t order me. He paid me. There’s a difference.”

  “Who?” Bell demanded.

  “Bastard, left me to stick around and face the music.”

  “Who?”

  “Goddamned Eyes O’Shay. That’s who.”

  “Eyes O’Shay?” Harry Warren echoed incredulously. “You take us for jackasses? Eyes O’Shay is dead fifteen years.”

  “No he ain’t.”

  “Harry,” Bell snapped. “Who is Eyes O’Shay?”

  “Gopher kid, years ago. Vicious piece of work. A comer, ’til he disappeared.”

  “I heard talk he was back,” muttered one of Harry’s detectives. “I didn’t believe it.”

  “I still don’t.”

  “I do,” said Isaac Bell. “The spy’s been acting like a gangster all along.”

  A STREAK OF GOD

  42

  JUNE 1, 1908

  NEW YORK

  ISAAC BELL ASKED, “WHY DID THEY CALL HIM EYES?”

  “If you got in a fight with him, he’d gouge your eye out,” said Tommy Thompson. “He fit a copper pick over his thumbnail. Now it’s made of stainless steel.”

  “I imagine,” said Bell, “he didn’t get in many fights.�
�

  “Not once word got around,” Tommy agreed.

  “Other than that, what is he like?”

  Tommy Thompson said, “If I’m going sit here yapping, I want a drink.”

  Bell nodded. The Van Dorns produced an array of hip flasks. Tommy took long pulls from a couple and wiped his mouth with his bloody sleeve. “Other than gouging eyes, what’s Brian O’Shay like? He’s like he always was. A guy who can see around a corner.”

  “Would you call him a natural leader?”

  “A what?”

  “A leader. Like you. You run your own gang. Is he that kind of a man?”

  “All I know is he’s thinking all the time. Always ahead of you. Eyes could see inside of people.”

  “If you’re telling us the truth, Tommy, that O’Shay is not dead, where is he?”

  The gang leader swore he did not know.

  “What name does he go by?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “What does he look like?”

  “He looks like anybody. Clerk in a store, guy owns a bank, bartender. I hardly recognized him. Duded up like a Fifth Avenue swell.”

  “Big man?”

  “No. A little guy.”

  “Compared to you, Tommy, most guys are little. How tall is he?”

  “Five-eight. Built like a fireplug. Strongest little guy I ever saw.” Bell continued conversationally, “He didn’t need the gouge to win a fight, did he?”

  “No,” said Tommy, taking another slug of whiskey. “He just liked doing it.”

  “Surely after he reappeared out of nowhere and paid you all that money, you had him followed.”

  “I sent Paddy the Rat after him. Little bastard came back short one eye.”

  Bell looked at one of the detectives, who was nodding agreement. “Yeah, I seen Paddy wearing a patch.”

  “Disappeared, just like when we was kids. Vanished into thin air that time, too. Never thought we’d see him again. Thought he got thrown in the river.”

  “By whom?” asked Bell.

  The gang leader shrugged.

  Harry Warren said, “A lot of people thought you were the one who threw him in the river, Tommy.”