Night Probe!

by Clive Cussler

  Heidi's initial surprise quickly turned to scorn. "What hole did you crawl from?"

  He could see her face flush with anger. "I can't deny it was a cold, calculated seduction. For that, I'm sorry."

  "All in the line of duty," she said sarcastically. "Bedding down a woman to extract information and then using it to murder twelve innocent men. In my book, Mr. Shaw, you stink."

  He was silent for a moment. American women, he mused, have an entirely different way of expressing themselves from that of British women. "A regrettable and completely senseless tragedy," he said. "I want you, and especially Dirk Pitt, to know I was not responsible for what happened."

  "You've lied before. Why break your streak?"

  "Pitt will believe me when you tell him it was Foss Gly who set off the explosives."

  "Foss Gly?"

  "Pitt knows the name."

  She looked at him skeptically. "You could have stated your case with a phone call. Why are you really here? To pump more information out of me? To learn if we recovered the treaty copy from the Empress of Ireland?"

  "You did not find the treaty," he said with finality. "You're shooting in the dark."

  "I know that Pitt left Washington for New York and the search on the Hudson River still goes on. That's proof enough."

  "You haven't told me what you want," she persisted.

  He looked at her, his eyes intent. "You're to deliver a message from my prime minister to your president."

  She glared back at him. "You're crazy."

  "Not the least. On the face of it, Her Majesty's government is not supposed to be aware of what yours is about and it's too early in the game for a direct confrontation. Because the situation is too delicate for two friendly nations to go through ordinary diplomatic channels, all communications must be handled in a roundabout fashion. It's not an uncommon practice; in fact, the Russians are particularly fond of it."

  "But I can't just call up the President," she said, bewildered.

  "No need. Just relay the message to Alan Mercier. He'll take it from there."

  "The national security adviser?"

  Shaw nodded. "The same."

  Heidi looked lost. "What do I tell him?"

  "You're simply to say that Britain will not give up one of its Commonwealth nations because of a scrap of paper. And we will conduct a strong military defense against any incursion from outside the nation's borders."

  "Are you suggesting a showdown between America and . . ."

  "You'd win, of course, but it would be the end of the Atlantic Alliance and NATO. The Prime Minister is hoping your country won't pay that high a price to take over Canada."

  "Take over Canada," she repeated. "That's ridiculous."

  "Is it? Why else are your people pulling out all stops to find a treaty copy?"

  "There must be other reasons."

  "Perhaps." He hesitated as he took her hand in his. "But somehow I don't think so."

  "So the train lies buried under the fallen bridge," said Pitt. Glen Chase nodded. "Everything points in that direction."

  "The only place it could be," added Giordino.

  Pitt leaned over the railing of the catwalk that hung across the beam of the salvage barge. He watched the long projecting arm of the crane arc around and release a dripping mass of rusting girders into the main hold. Then it swung back and dipped its claw back into the river.

  "At this rate it will take a week before we can probe the bottom."

  "We can't excavate until the debris is out of the way," said Giordino.

  Pitt turned to Chase. "Have one of your men remove a few fragments from the original truss connections with a cutting torch. I'd like to run them by an analytical chemistry lab."

  "What do you expect to find?" Chase asked.

  "Maybe why the bridge failed," Pitt replied.

  A man with a hard hat held up a portable loudspeaker and shouted over the noise of the crane's diesel engine: "Mr. Pitt, you're wanted on the phone."

  Pitt excused himself and entered the barge's command office. The call was from Moon. "Any news?"

  "None," Pitt answered.

  There was a pause. "The President must have the treaty copy by Monday." Pitt was stunned. "That's only five days away."

  "If you come up empty-handed by one o'clock in the afternoon on Monday, all search activities will be canceled."

  Pitt's lips pressed together. "Dammit, Moon! You can't set impossible deadlines on a project like this."

  "I'm sorry, that's the way it is."

  "Why such short notice?"

  "I can only tell you that the urgency is critical."

  The knuckles of Pitt's hand clenched around the receiver turned ivory. He could think of nothing to say.

  "Are you still there?" queried Moon.

  "Yes, I'm here."

  "The President is anxious to hear of your progress."

  "What progress?"

  "You'll have to do better than that," Moon said testily.

  "Everything hangs on whether we come across the train and the coach Essex was riding in."

  "Care to give me an estimate?"

  "There's an old saying among archaeologists," said Pitt. "Nothing is found until it wants to be found."

  "I'm sure the President would prefer a more optimistic report. What should I tell him the chances are of having the treaty in his hands by Monday?"

  "Tell the President," said Pitt, his voice like ice, "he doesn't have a prayer."

  Pitt reached the Heiser Foundation analytic labs in Brooklyn at midnight. He backed the pickup truck against a loading dock and switched off the ignition. Dr. Walter McComb, the chief chemist, and two of his assistants were there, waiting for him. Pitt said, "I appreciate your staying up so late."

  McComb, fifteen years older than Pitt and about seventy pounds heavier, hoisted one of the heavy bridge fragments without a grunt and shrugged. "I've never had a request from the White House before.

  How could I refuse?"

  The four of them manhandled the steel scrap into a corner of a small warehouse. There the lab people used electric saws with moly steel blades to cut off samples which were soaked in a solution and cleaned by acoustics. Then they filtered away to different laboratories to begin their respective analytic specialities.

  It was four in the morning when McComb conferred with his assistants and approached Pitt in the employees' lounge. "I.think we have something interesting for you," he said, grinning.

  "How interesting?" Pitt asked.

  "We've solved the mystery behind the DeauvilleHudson bridge collapse." McComb motioned for Pitt to follow him into a room crammed with exotic-looking chemistry equipment. He handed Pitt a large magnifying glass and pointed at two objects on the table. "See for yourself."

  Pitt did as he was told and looked up questioningly. "What am I looking for?"

  "Metal that separates under heavy stress leaves fracture lines. They're obvious in the sample on the left."

  Pitt looked again. "Okay, I see them."

  "You'll note that there are no fracture lines on the sample from the bridge to your right. The deformation is too extreme to have come from natural causes. We put specimens of it under a scanning electron microscope, which shows us the characteristic electrons in each element present. The results revealed residue from iron sulfide."

  "What does it all mean?"

  "What it all means, Mr. Pitt, is that the DeauvilleHudson bridge was cleverly. and systematically blown up."

  "A grisly business," Preston Beatty exclaimed with an odd sort of pleasure. "One thing to butcher a human body, but quite another to serve it for dinner."

  "Would you care for another beer?" asked Pitt.

  "Please." Beatty downed the final swallow in his glass. "Fascinating people, Hattie and Nathan Pilcher.

  You might say they came up with the perfect solution for disposing of the corpus delicti." He motioned around the bar, which was busy with the early evening two-for-one drinks crowd. "This tavern
we're sitting in rests on the very foundations of Pilcher's inn. The townspeople of Poughkeepsie burned down the original in 1823 when they learned of the ghastly deeds that had gone on behind its walls."

  Pitt gestured for a barmaid. "What you're saying is that the Pilchers murdered overnight guests for their money and then put them on the menu."

  "Yes, exactly." It was clear that Beatty was in his element. He recited the events with relish. "No way to take a body count, of course. A few scattered bones were dug up. But the best guess is that the Pilchers cooked between fifteen and twenty innocent travelers in the five years they were in business."

  Professor Beatty was considered the leading authority on unsolved crimes. His books sold widely in Canada and the United States and had on occasion touched the nonfiction best-seller lists. He slouched comfortably in the booth and peered at Pitt through blue-green eyes over a salt-and-pepper beard. His age, Pitt guessed from the stern, craggy features and the silver-edged hair, was late forties. He looked more like a hardened pirate than a writer.

  "The truly incredible part," Beatty continued, "is how the killers were exposed."

  "A restaurant critic gave them a bad review," Pitt suggested.

  "You're closer than you know." Beatty laughed. "One evening a retired sea captain stopped overnight.

  He was accompanied by a manservant, a Melanesian he'd brought on board his ship many years before in the Solomon Islands. Unfortunately for the Pilchers, the Melanesian had once been a cannibal and his educated taste buds correctly identified the meat in the stew."

  "Not very appetizing," said Pitt. "So what happened to the Pilchers? Were they executed?"

  "No, while awaiting trial they escaped and were never seen again."

  The beers arrived and Beatty paused while Pitt signed the tab.

  "I've pored through old crime reports here and in Canada trying to connect their modus operandi with later unsolved murders, but they passed into oblivion along with Jack the Ripper.

  "And Clement Massey," said Pitt, broaching the subject on his mind.

  "Ah, yes, Clement Massey, alias Dapper Doyle." Beatty spoke as if fondly recalling a favorite relative.

  "A robber years ahead of his time. He could have given lessons to the best of them."

  "He was that good?"

  "Massey had style and was incredibly shrewd. He planned all his jobs so they looked like the work of rival gangs. As near as I can figure, he pulled off six bank holdups and three train robberies that were blamed on someone else."

  "What was his background?"

  "Came from a wealthy Boston family. Graduated Harvard summa cum laude. Established a thriving law practice that catered to the social elite of Providence. Married a prominent socialite who bore him five children. Elected twice to the Massachusetts senate."

  "Why would he rob banks?" Pitt asked incredulously.

  "For the hell of it," Beatty replied. "As it turns out, he handed over every penny of his ill-gotten gains to charity."

  "How come he was never glamorized by the newspapers or old pulp magazines?"

  "He had vanished from the scene long before his crimes were tied to him," Beatty replied. "And that came only after an enterprising newspaper reporter proved that Clement Massey and Dapper Doyle-were one and the same. Naturally, his influential friends and colleagues saw to it that the scandal was quickly covered up. There wasn't enough hard evidence for a trial anyway."

  "Hard to believe that Massey was never recognized during a holdup."

  "He seldom went along," Beatty laughed. "Like a general directing a battle behind the lines, he usually stayed in the background. All the jobs were pulled out of state, and even his own gang didn't know his true identity. Actually, he was recognized on one of the few occasions he directed a robbery at first hand.

  But the witness' testimony was scoffed at by the investigating marshal. After all, who could believe that a respected state senator was a closet bandit?"

  "Odd that Massey didn't wear a mask."

  "A psychological turn-on," said Beatty. "He probably flaunted himself just to experience the excitement that comes from crowding your luck. A double life can be a super challenge for some men. And yet deep down, they want to get caught. Like a husband cheating on his wife who throws lipstick covered handkerchiefs in the family laundry hamper."

  "Then why the Wacketshire depot robbery? Why did Massey risk everything for a paltry eighteen bucks?"

  "I've spent more than one night staring at the ceiling over that enigma." Beatty looked down at the table and moved his glass around. "Except for that caper, Massey never pulled a job that paid less than twenty-five grand."

  "He disappeared right after that."

  "I'd get lost too if I was the cause of a hundred deaths." Beatty took a long swallow of his beer.

  "Because he ignored the stationmaster's plea to stop the train and allowed women and children to plunge into a cold river, he became enshrined in the annals of crime as a savage mass murderer instead of a Robin Hood.

  "How do you read it?"

  "He wanted to rob the train," Beatty answered matter-of-factly. "But something went wrong. There was a bad storm that night. The train was running late. Maybe he was thrown off schedule. I don't know.

  Something screwed up his plans."

  "What was on the train for a robber?" asked Pitt.

  "Two million in gold coin."

  Pitt looked up. "I read nothing about a gold shipment on the St. Gaudens twenty-dollar gold pieces struck in nineteen fourteen at the Philadelphia mint. Bound for the banking houses in New York. I think Massey got wind of it. The railroad officials thought they were being clever by rerouting the gold car over half the countryside instead of dispatching it direct over the main track. Rumors were, the car was attached to the Manhattan Limited in Albany. No way to prove anything, of course. The loss, if there was a loss, was never reported. The bank bigwigs probably figured it better suited their image to hush the matter up."

  "That may explain why the railroad nearly went broke trying to salvage the train."

  "Perhaps." Beatty became lost in the past for a minute. Then he said, "Of all the crimes I've studied, in all the police archives of the world, Massey's penny ante robbery at Wacketshire intrigues me the most."

  "It smells for another reason."

  "How so?"

  "This morning a lab found traces of iron sulfide in samples taken from the DeauvilleHudson bridge."

  Beatty's eyes narrowed. "Iron sulfide is used in black powder."

  "That's right. It looks like Massey blew the bridge."

  Beatty appeared stunned by the revelation. "But why? What was his motive"

  "We'll find the answers," said Pitt, "when we find the Manhattan Limited."

  Pitt drove mechanically on the return, trip to the De Soto. A thought forced its way through the others: one he had ignored. At first he gave it a negative reception, but it refused to be shelved away. Then it began to come together and make sense.

  He stopped at a phone booth in the parking lot of a supermarket and rang a number in Washington. The line buzzed and a gruff voice came on.

  "Sandecker." Pitt didn't bother identifying himself. "A favor."

  "Shoot."

  "I need a sky hook."

  "Come again."

  Pitt could almost imagine the mouth as it clamped another notch on the cigar. "A sky hook. I've got to have a delivery by tomorrow noon."

  "What in hell for?"

  Pitt took a breath and told him.

  Villon eased the executive jet to the left of an afternoon cumulus cloud, the control yoke barely moving beneath his hands. Through the copilot's window, Danielle watched a carpet of Canadian pines glide past below.

  "It's all so beautiful," she said.

  "You miss the scenery in an airliner," Villon replied. "They fly too high for you to enjoy any detail."

  She was in a deep shade of blue, a snug sweater and cotton knit skirt that circled around her knees.

&n
bsp; There was a sort of savvy look about her that could never quite overcome the feminine warmth that flowed under the surface.

  "Your new plane is beautiful too."

  "A gift from my well-heeled supporters. The title isn't in my name, of course, but no one touches it but me.

  They sat in silence for a few minutes as Villon held the jet on a steady course over the heart of Laurentides Park. Blue lakes began to appear all around them like tiny diamonds in an emerald setting.

  They could easily make out small boats with fishermen casting for speckled trout.

  Finally Danielle said, "I'm happy you invited me. It's been a long time."

  "Only a couple of weeks," he said without looking at her. "I've been busy campaigning."

  "I thought perhaps . . . perhaps you didn't want to see me anymore.

  "Whatever gave you that idea?"

  "The last time at the cottage."

  "What about it?" he asked innocently. "You weren't exactly cordial."

  He tilted his head lightly, trying to recall. Nothing materialized and he shrugged, writing it off to womanly touchiness. "Sorry, I must have had a lot on my mind."

  He set the plane on a wide sweeping bank and dropped in the autopilot. Then he smiled. "Come on, I'll make it up to you."

  He took her hand and led her from the cockpit.

  The passenger cabin stretched twenty feet to the lavatory. There were four seats and a sofa, a thick carpeted floor, a fully stocked wet bar and dining table. He opened a door into a private sleeping compartment and bowed toward a queen-sized bed.

  "The perfect love nest," he said. "Intimate, secluded and far from prying eyes."

  The sunshine poured through the windows and spread over the bedsheets. Danielle sat up as Villon padded from the passenger cabin and passed her a drink. "Isn't there a law against this sort of thing?" she asked. "Sex at five thousand feet?"

  "No," she said between sips of a Bloody Mary. "Letting an airplane fly around in circles for two hours without anybody in the cockpit."