Page 57 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm (An Isaac Bell Adventure #15)

B ell called the Van Dorn office from the Staten Island Ferry Terminal in lower Manhattan using a nickel he’d borrowed from Grey.

The few dollars in his pocket to pay for the cab ride he’d soon take to Midtown had also come from the legendary writer.

If Grey took Bell up on his offer about chartering the Alice N.

for the rest of the summer, this was little more than chump change.

“Van Dorn Detective Agency, how may I help you?” a young woman answered when the call went through.

“Betsy?”

“Yes,” she replied warily.

“Bets, it’s Isaac Bell.”

“Oh, hi, Mr. Bell,” she said, her voice going up an octave.

“Has anything unusual happened recently, anything about a German battleship?”

“No, sir. People are talking about the Zimmerman telegram—”

Bell cut her off. “Listen, I want you to call up a team. I need Archie, James Dashwood, and Eddie Tobin, if he’s back. Have them come into the office pronto. Has there been any communications from Franklin Roosevelt? The assistant secretary of the Navy?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Bell. I only answer the phones at night and rarely talk to the others.”

“Never mind that. I also want you to send a telegram to Lullenden Manor.” Bell forgot to get the phone number.

“It’s in Surrey, England, and belongs to one Winston Churchill.

The Western Union man can get the address.

Marion is there. Tell them I am back in New York.

No sign of my quarry, but I’m still hunting. Got all that?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Bell. You can count on me.”

“On the jump, Betsy, I’ll be there soon.”

Bell hung up. From a ferry terminal concession stand, Bell ordered a hamburger steak, but rather than eat it on a plate with breadcrumbs, he asked the counterman to put the patty between two pieces of toast and add some mustard and extra onion.

He drank two glasses of water while he waited for his food, the first that hadn’t tasted stale and a little briny since leaving the Azores.

He was handed his burger in a pocket of folded newspaper. He liked tuna as much as the next guy, but nine days in a row was well past his limit. The first bite of beef made his salivary glands work overtime.

He was still munching away when he reached the head of the taxi line outside the bustling Beaux-Arts terminal on South Street.

He told the attending valet his destination, which was relayed to the driver in the front seat of a Model T.

The liveried man held the rear door for Bell and received a quarter tip for his troubles.

Bell usually overtipped, but his funds were limited.

Traffic was light, allowing them to make it to the Knickerbocker Hotel in a little over fifteen minutes, faster than the subway, even.

He paid off the cabbie and rushed into the hotel lobby.

There were just a few guests about, two reading quietly on one of the deep sofas and a couple dressed for the theater talking about how much they didn’t like the play they’d seen.

Bell nodded to the hotel detective, who was in fact a Van Dorn agent, as were most in-house security personnel at the city’s better hotels.

In long-legged strides, he climbed up to the second floor and let himself into the Van Dorn’s New York office.

It was all so familiar, the large wood-paneled bullpen that was usually a hive of activity during the day, the back wall of offices, one of which was his, the smell of cigarette smoke, and the easy glow of shaded desk lamps.

It felt like he hadn’t been there in months, but at the same time he was almost sure he’d just been away a few moments.

“Mr. Bell.” Betsy Singer had been at her desk in one corner of the large room and sprang to her feet. “Mr. Abbott and Mr. Dashwood are on their way, and the telegram has been sent.”

“What about Eddie Tobin?”

“I talked to Diane from the day shift. She told me Mr. Tobin has returned from England, but he didn’t answer my call. I’ll keep at it every fifteen minutes until he does.”

“No need for him to come in, but I need to talk to him. I’m running upstairs for a few minutes.”

“Yes, sir.”

Bell had lost his keys somewhere in France and so grabbed a spare set from his office and took the elevator to his floor.

The rooms he and Marion occupied looked out over Times Square, but were high enough to filter out most of the noise.

They were tastefully appointed, neutral for the most part, but with some pleasing feminine flourishes that made it feel like home.

Bell stripped out of his clothes and stuffed them into a trash can in the bathroom.

He’d have room service empty it as soon as he was finished.

He could almost see the odor wafting off of them.

He took his first shower in days, soaping his lean body and lathering his hair twice in order to cleanse himself of salt and the stench of fish oil and bad cooking.

He dressed in a pair of casual herringbone slacks and a black cashmere pullover.

From a drawer of various holsters and weapons tack, he grabbed a shoulder rig for his spare Browning automatic pistol.

Since the weather appeared unseasonably mild, he covered it up with the lighter of his two leather flying jackets.

He was back down in the office within fifteen minutes.

Bell went through the correspondences on his desk that had grown into an impressive stack during his absence.

He was dismayed that there was nothing from Franklin Roosevelt.

Surely he’d gotten the cable he’d sent from Churchill’s country estate concerning the possibility of an attack on New York.

At least there should have been a receipt that he’d received the cable, but there was nothing.

A creeping sense of horror filled the pit of Isaac Bell’s stomach.

His race across the Atlantic had been for nothing.

It had all been for nothing. He was more than willing to do whatever it took to stop Rath from carrying out his attack, but he’d worked off the presumption that the Navy would have the primary task of destroying Rath’s ship.

He’d been thinking of his team in the secondary role of apprehending Balka Rath, Karl Rath’s brother, while on the streets acting as a spotter.

The phone rang out in the bullpen and Betsy called to him that it was Eddie Tobin.

“Thank you,” he called back and picked up his phone as Betsy jacked in the line. “Eddie, glad you’re back safe and sound. How was the crossing?”

“No problem,” the grizzled investigator told him. “What about you?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“With you, I’d believe anything.”

“Listen, there’s no time for small talk. I believe there is a captured German battleship on its way to bombard New York.”

“Huh?”

“You heard me right. It’s a dreadnought-style ship sporting eleven-inch guns. She was taken by a group of very motivated anarchists, and I believe their mission is to shell the city.”

“You’re not one for elaborate jokes in the middle of the night, so I’ll bite. What do you want from me?”

“Reach out to all your contacts, every pirate, fisherman, smuggler, scow captain, anyone you can think of. I need to know when the ship is approaching New York.”

“Okay, then what?”

“I don’t know. Up until a few minutes ago, I thought the battleship would be the Navy’s problem and not ours. Bloodhound this for me, Eddie. A lot of lives are at stake.”

Bell dropped the microphone onto its cradle and called out to Betsy again. “Can you call Joe Marchetti over at the Brooklyn Naval Yard? I—”

“Helen Mills’s fiancé?”

“I thought you said you didn’t talk to the others.”

“Not about work, but gossip is always fair game.”

Bell rolled his eyes. “Tell Joe I need him here. Tell him to go AWOL if he has to. It’s that important.”

“On it.”

Marchetti was a young Navy officer who’d been invaluable on a case the year before involving German spies operating in and around New York.

He was smart, kind, and to everyone in the office’s delight, he’d caught the eye of Helen Mills, one of the few female agents currently on staff in Manhattan.

They’d announced their engagement at last year’s Christmas party.

Bell leaned back in his chair, his fingers laced behind his head.

He looked calm, relaxed even, but his mind was a kaleidoscope of ideas forming, changing, and vanishing only to pop up again in a slightly altered form.

He was of the mind to break down complex problems into manageable parts, solve them individually, and then fit it all back together again to formulate a master plan.

It wasn’t really a revolutionary technique, but it had given him the edge over countless criminals in his storied career and he approached a plan to deal with the Rath brothers and their threat to the city in the exact fashion.

“You asleep?” Archie Abbott asked, his broad shoulder leaning against Bell’s office doorframe.

Bell didn’t open his eyes. “Didn’t it bother you that Roosevelt never responded to my cable containing a warning?”

“Not even for a second. The Navy is under no obligation to inform a civilian firm of their intentions even if said firm provided them the warning.”

“I still think it’s odd he didn’t leave even a simple message of receipt.”

“Mr. Bell,” Betsy called from the outer office again. “Joe Marchetti would like to talk to you before he agrees to go AWOL.”

“Patch him through.” Bell picked up his phone. “Joe, are you guys under any kind of alert right now?”

“Not that I should divulge Navy secrets, but no we’re not. Why?”

“Any idea where Franklin Roosevelt is?”

“I believe he’s with Navy Secretary Daniels. It’s a big inspection tour of the naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, before they plan to expand it.”

“In Roosevelt’s absence, who responds to his communications, things like telegrams?”

“I’m sure he has a secretary of his own, but I have no idea who, a confidant no doubt. Why? What’s this all about?”

Marchetti was a no-nonsense type of guy and so Bell laid out his case as plainly as he could.

When Bell finished and Joe had a taken a few seconds to process the information, he said, “If Roosevelt had gotten your cable on time and convinced Daniels of its veracity, they might have been able to get some assets to New York to counter a ship like you’ve described.

But right now all we have here at the Yard are a couple of twenty-year-old destroyers that are about as toothless as a day-old infant and a battleship that’s only halfway through construction. ”

“Then it’s up to us,” Bell said, already including the lieutenant in his plans.

“What are you thinking?”

“Since there’s nothing we’ve got that would penetrate the Saarland ’s protective armor, we sneak aboard and blow her up from the inside.”

“Is that even possible?” Archie asked, having overheard Bell’s side of the conversation.

“How about it, Joe?” Bell said into the handset. “Is it possible?”

“A bomb placed anywhere near the powder magazine would open her up like a tin can,” Marchetti replied with confidence.

“The problem is getting away. That means a long timer, which increases the chance of the bomb being discovered. Also if we’re spotted, even if we get away, they will know what we were up to and find our bomb. ”

“So we give them exactly what they expect to see,” Bell said cryptically. He then said, “Listen, Joe, I don’t need you on this mission, but you’ve got more explosives training than any of my people. We’ve got all the gear, but I would appreciate if you assembled the bombs.”

“Do you know your way around a modern battleship?” Marchetti asked a little hotly.

“I don’t even know my way around an old battleship,” Bell admitted.

“That settles it. I’m coming with you. No argument. This is my decision, so not another word.”

“Thank you, Joe. I think I could manage this myself, but having you along just tripled the odds. Do you know the police armory on Eighth?”

“No, but a cabbie will.”

“We rent out part of it and keep a lot of equipment and arms there, including some dynamite. I’m sending an agent to meet you. He’ll have our key.” Bell gave him some specific instructions and told him to wait at the armory for additional instructions.

“You’re really going to sneak aboard a battleship?” Archie asked with a skeptically raised eyebrow.

“That’s probably the least crazy thing I’ve done in the past few weeks. What about you? Where are you with finding Balka Rath?”

“Thanks for assigning an impossible task, by the way,” Archie said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “So much to go on. Really handsome, maybe dark eyes and hair, probable foreign accent. Give me a break.”

“So you got nothing?”

“Did I say that? In what only can be described as brilliance on my part, I found a girl who’d met him on the night he killed a courier who’d just gotten off a boat from Europe.

Hanna Muntean is her name. She’s a waif who runs errands for criminals, mostly Romani as near as I can tell.

She’s all but admitted to being in love with Rath, but turned against him recently.

Again a guess on my part but I don’t think she realized how dangerous he was until he hurled the courier out a tenement window.

She’s been helping me find the truck Balka is using along with her brother. ”

“Where is she now?”

“My place.”

“Is that wise? She may be a waif as you say, but even street kittens have claws.”

“Relax. Everything of real value is in the safes. She never leaves the house without an escort and someone from the staff is always up and about no matter the hour. And since she’s set eyes on Master Dashwood of the quick smile and flashing eyes, she’s been on her best behavior.”

“Fickle little thing.”

“At that age, everyone is.”

“No luck locating the truck, I take it.”

“Big city, few hundred miles of roads, the odds were long, but I needed to keep her safe since she’s on Rath’s list of loose ends and she needs to feel she’s maybe putting her old life behind her.”

“I’m actually surprised he left her alive when he killed the courier,” Bell remarked. “But don’t worry, you’ll get your chance to nab him if we’re too late and the Saarland opens fire. Balka will have to drive close to the targeted firing sites in order to radio adjustments back to the ship.”

“And by nab you mean…?”

“Arch, even if we stop Karl Rath from leveling the city, I won’t consider this a success if Balka escapes. He’s worse than his brother according to a woman who knew them both. You get the chance, you put him down like a rabid dog.”

“Woof woof.”