Clive Cussler dp-6

by Night Probe!

  "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 Deauville-Hudson 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 Deauville-Hudson 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 Deauville-Hudson 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. 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."

  "You going to turn me in?"

  She stretched back seductively on the bed. "I can see the headlines now: NEW PRESIDENT OF QUEBEC CAUGHT IN FLYING WHOREHOUSE."

  "I'm not President yet." He laughed. "You will be after the elections."

  "They're six months away. Anything can happen between now and then."

  "The polls say you're a shoo-in."

  "What does Charles say?"

  "He never mentions you anymore."

  Villon sat down on the bed and trailed his fingers lightly across her belly. "Now that Parliament has handed him a vote of no confidence, his power has evaporated. Why don't you leave him? Things would be simpler for us."

  "Better I remain at his side a little while longer. There is much I can still learn of importance to Quebec."

  "While we're on the subject, there is something that concerns me."

  She began to squirm. "What is it?"

  "The President of the United States is speaking to Parliament next week. I'd like to know what he intends to say. Have you heard anything?"

  She took his hand and moved it down. "Charles talked about it yesterday. Nothing to worry about. He said the President was going to make a plea for an orderly transition of Quebec independence."

  "I knew it," Villon said, smiling. "The Americans are caving in."

  Danielle began to lose control and reached out for him.

  "I hope you filled the fuel tanks before we left Ottawa," she murmured in a slurred voice.

  "We have enough for three more hours' flying time," he said, and then he came down on top of her.

  "There is no mistake?" Sarveux said into the phone.

  "Absolutely none," replied Commissioner Finn. "My man saw them board Mr. Villon's plane. We've tracked them on air force radar. They've been circling Laurentides Park since one o'clock.

  "Your man is certain it was Henri Villon."

  "Yes, Sir, there was no doubt," Finn reassured him.

  "Thank you, commissioner."

  "Not at all, Prime Minister. I'll be standing by."

  Sarveux replaced the receiver and paused a moment to rally his senses. Then he spoke into the intercom. "You may send him in now."

  Sarveux's face tensed in the first conclusive moment of shock. He was certain his eyes were deceiving him, his mind playing tricks with his imagination. His legs refused to respond, and he could not gathe
r the strength to rise from behind the desk. Then the visitor walked across the room and stood looking down.

  "Thank you for seeing me, Charles."

  The face bore the familiar cold expression, the voice came exactly as he had known it. Sarveux fought to maintain an outward calm, but he suddenly felt weak and dizzy.

  The man standing before him was Henri Villon, in the flesh, completely at ease, displaying the same aloof poise that never cracked.

  "I thought…... I thought you were…... were campaigning in Quebec," Sarveux stammered.

  "I took time out to come to Ottawa in the hope you and I might declare a truce."

  "The gap between our differences is too wide," Sarveux said, slowly regaining his composure.

  "Canada and Quebec must learn to live together without further friction," said Villon. "You and I should too."

  "I'm willing to listen to reason." There was a subtle hardening in Sarveux's voice. "Sit down, Henri, and tell me what's on your mind."

  Alan Mercier finished reading the contents of a folder marked MOST SECRET and then reread them. He was stunned. Every so often he flipped the pages backward, attempting to keep an open mind, but finding it increasingly difficult to believe what his eyes conveyed. He had the look of a man who held a ticking bomb in his hands.

  The President sat across from him, seemingly detached, patiently waiting. It was very quiet in the room; the only sound was an occasional crackle from a smoldering log in the fireplace. Two trays of food sat on the large coffee table that separated the two men. Mercier was too engrossed to eat, but the President consumed the late dinner hungrily.

  Finally Mercier closed the folder and solemnly removed his glasses. He pondered for a moment, then looked up.

  "I have to ask," he said. "Is this mad plot for real?"

  "Right down to the period in the lase sentence."

  "A remarkable concept," Mercier sighed. "I'll give it that."

  "I think so."

  "I find it hard to believe you took it so far in all these years without a leak."

  "Not surprising when you consider only two people knew about it."

  "Doug Oates over at State was aware."

  "Only after the inauguration," the President acknowledged. "Once I possessed the power to put the wheels in motion, the first step, the obvious step, was to bring in the State Department."