ALSO BY CLIVE CUSSLER DIRK PITT® ADVENTURES Havana Storm (with Dirk Cussler) Poseidon’s Arrow (with Dirk Cussler) Crescent Dawn (with Dirk Cussler) Arctic Drift (with Dirk Cussler) Treasure of Khan (with Dirk Cussler) Black Wind (with Dirk Cussler) Trojan Odyssey Valhalla Rising Atlantis Found Flood Tide Shock Wave Inca Gold Sahara Dragon Treasure Cyclops Deep Six Pacific Vortex! Night Probe! Vixen 03 Raise the Titanic! Iceberg The Mediterranean Caper FARGO ADVENTURES The Eye of Heaven (with Russell Blake) The Mayan Secrets (with Thomas Perry) The Tombs (with Thomas Perry) The Kingdom (with Grant Blackwood) Lost Empire (with Grant Blackwood) Spartan Gold (with Grant Blackwood) ISAAC BELL NOVELS The Bootlegger (with Justin Scott) The Striker (with Justin Scott) The Thief (with Justin Scott) The Race (with Justin Scott) The Spy (with Justin Scott) The Wrecker (with Justin Scott) The Chase KURT AUSTIN ADVENTURES Ghost Ship (with Graham Brown) Zero Hour (with Graham Brown) The Storm (with Graham Brown) Devil’s Gate (with Graham Brown) Medusa (with Paul Kemprecos) The Navigator (with Paul Kemprecos) Polar Shift (with Paul Kemprecos) Lost City (with Paul Kemprecos) White Death (with Paul Kemprecos) Fire Ice (with Paul Kemprecos) Blue Gold (with Paul Kemprecos) Serpent (with Paul Kemprecos) OREGON FILES ADVENTURES Piranha (with Boyd Morrison) Mirage (with Jack Du Brul) The Jungle (with Jack Du Brul) The Silent Sea (with Jack Du Brul) Corsair (with Jack Du Brul) Plague Ship (with Jack Du Brul) Skeleton Coast (with Jack Du Brul) Dark Watch (with Jack Du Brul) Sacred Stone (with Craig Dirgo) Golden Buddha (with Craig Dirgo) NONFICTION Built for Adventure: The Classic Automobiles of Clive Cussler and Dirk Pitt The Sea Hunters (with Craig Dirgo) The Sea Hunters II (with Craig Dirgo) Clive Cussler and Dirk Pitt Revealed (with Craig Dirgo) G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS Publishers Since 1838 Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) LLC 375 Hudson Street New York, New York 10014 USA • Canada • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China A Penguin Random House Company Copyright © 2015 by Sandecker, RLLLP Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cussler, Clive. The assassin / Clive Cussler and Justin Scott. p. cm.—(An Isaac Bell adventure ; 8) ISBN 978-0-698-16967-8 1. Bell, Isaac (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Private investigators—Fiction. 3. Assassins—Fiction. I. Scott, Justin. II. Title. PS3553.U75A93 2015 2015000642 813'.54—dc23 Endpaper and interior illustrations by Roland Dahlquist This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, or locales is entirely coincidental. Version_1 Contents Also by Clive Cussler Schematic Title Page Copyright PROLOGUE BOOK ONE | BULLETS Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 BOOK TWO | POISON Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 BOOK THREE | GAS Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Chapter 38 Chapter 39 Chapter 40 BOOK FOUR | THUNDERBOLT Chapter 41 Chapter 42 Chapter 43 Chapter 44 Chapter 45 EPILOGUE PROLOGUE 1899 PENNSYLVANIA “Do I hear a train?” asked Spike Hopewell. “Two trains,” said Bill Matters. The heavy, wet Huff! of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s 2-8-0 freight locomotives carried for miles in the still night air. “They’re on the main line, not here.” Spike was nervous. It made him talkative. “You know what I keep thinking? John D. Rockefeller locked up the oil business before most people were born.” “To hell with Rockefeller. To hell with Standard Oil.” Bill Matters had found their Achilles’ heel. After thirty years fighting the “Standard,” thirty years of getting driven into the mud, he was finally going to break their pipe line monopoly. Tonight. Under a sky white with stars, in a low-lying hayfield in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains. Wooded slopes ringed the field. Pennsylvania Railroad tracks crossed it, bridging the dip in the hills on a tall timber trestle. Spike Hopewell was going along with the scheme, against his better judgment. Bill had always been susceptible to raging brainstorms that verged on delirium, and they were getting worse. Besides, when it came to driving independents out of business, John D. Rockefeller had personally invented every trick in the book. “Now!” Bill drew his big old Remington six-cylinder and fired a shot in the air. Whips cracked. Mules heaved in their harness. Freight wagons full of men and material rumbled across the field and under the train trestle—a framework of braced timbers that carried the elevated tracks above the low ground. Pipe lines that Matters and Hopewell had already laid stopped just inside the woods at either edge of the field. The west trunk stretched two hundred miles over the Allegheny Mountains to Pennsylvania’s oil fields. The east continued one hundred eighty miles to their seaboard refinery in Constable Hook, New Jersey, where oceangoing tank steamers could load their kerosene. Pumps and breakout tanks were installed every thirty miles, and all that remained to join the two halves was this final connection on land they had purchased, under the railroad. Spike would not shut up. “You know what the president of the Penney said? He said, ‘Imagine the expense I would save on locomotives, Pullman cars, and complaints if only I could melt my passengers and pump them liquefied through pipes like you pump oil.’” “I was there,” said Matters. In Philadelphia, at Pennsylvania Railroad headquarters high above the Broad Street Station, asking, hat in hand, to lease a right-of-way. The president, high-toned owner of a Main Line estate, had looked down his Paris-educated nose at the oil field rowdies. “I envy you gentlemen. I would love to own a pipe line.” Who wouldn’t? Just ask Rockefeller. Shipping crude direct from the well to the refinery beat a train hands down. Instead of laboriously loading and unloading barrels, barges, and tank cars, you simply opened a valve. And that was just the beginning. A pipe line was also a storehouse; you could stockpile crude in your pipes and tanks until supply dropped and the price rose. You could lend
