The Titanic Secret (Isaac Bell 11)

The rear door opened, and a slender Asian girl with a rope of black hair dangling down her back jumped out. Bell was expecting someone else and was startled. She regarded him languidly. She was pretty but had too much self-possession for one so young. She had a cynic’s eyes in a schoolgirl’s face.

“Min,” the captain yelled. “Get up here and go to the cabin.”

Two men grabbed Bell from behind. His plan had gone sideways before it had even launched. What were the odds of a second taxi arriving at the allotted time of the one he was expecting?

The girl scampered up the ramp and disappeared, the captain giving her a disquieting look. Bell was frog-marched up after her. Gly sported a Navy peacoat that looked like it had been fitted by tentmakers. His shoulders and arms strained at the wool cloth. He had a cigar going in the corner of his mouth, and his eyes were slitted against the smoke.

“Where’s the ore?” he asked, and stepped forward and rammed a fist so deeply into Bell’s gut it felt like Gly had punched the inside of his spine.

Bell would have collapsed had the two men not been holding him up. Gly backed away, pacing like a caged animal awaiting its meal, while Bell tried to reinflate his lungs by taking agonizing sips of air.

“Gone,” he finally wheezed.

“What do you mean gone?”

“What it sounds like, you ape.” Bell straightened as best he could. “Gone. I was onto Vern Hall from the beginning. I fed him false information so he’d pass it on to you. See that dark cloud way down the Channel? That’s the ship carrying the ore, Gly. It left dock at noon as scheduled and should arrive in New York to much fanfare on the seventeenth.”

A terrible blackness descended over Gly’s eyes as the realization struck home.

Captain Bougainville sensed it and stepped forward. “No killing on my ship, Gly.” His accent was an odd mash-up of French and something else. “You want to tear each other apart, do it on the dock.”

The huge Scot ignored him and ran at Bell with a full-throated roar of hatred. Bell kicked both legs up since his arms were being supported by Gly’s henchmen and struck outward just as Gly came into range. The dynamics of the strike saw Gly stagger back and the men holding Bell stagger back and lose their grip. In the confusion of the sudden reversal, Bell lifted the .45 from its holster and shot the closest man.

He swung right to line up on Gly, but the guard on his other side barreled into Bell at the last second and he was thrown against a tall, tuba-like air intake scoop. He leveraged an elbow free and slammed it into the man’s nose, breaking it.

Joel Wallace must have been watching much closer than Bell gave him credit for. He and his guys came up the gangway like a flying squad even as the echo of the single gunshot was fading to nothing.

Boots and fists flew in a mad scrum. Bell just saw flashes of it, like some stroboscopic effect. Faces leered at him and he struck out at them, punching with abandon, kicking where he could. For each time he was shoved, he pushed back twice as hard. All the whil

e he was looking for Gly amid the tangle of bodies. He had one round left in the Colt and he didn’t want to waste it.

But then he was taken from behind, arms with the strength of boa constrictors pinning his arms to his sides and beginning to crush his chest. Gly lifted him from the deck so that Bell’s feet wheeled uselessly. He tried to ram his head back into Gly’s face, but the Scotsman absorbed the blow as though it were a tap.

The crushing force seemed to double. A little air escaped Bell’s mouth, and Gly was there to make sure he couldn’t replace it with fresh oxygen. Men bumped into them, fighting around them, and yet the two stood still in the melee, Bell’s life slowly ebbing from his body as the pressure on his ribs doubled again.

He had just enough of an angle to shoot the two smallest toes off Gly’s right foot.

Gly released him out of surprise more than pain. Bell fell to the deck but didn’t remain still. He pulled his boot knife free and was rising fast to jam it up under Gly’s ribs when there was a shout of such command that he stopped. They all did.

“Arrêtez-vous immédiatement!”

A woman stood at the head of the gangway flanked by two men in overcoats carrying revolvers. She was stern-faced, with a nest of dark hair, and dressed severely in all black. Even had she not been one of the most famous women in the world, her presence would nevertheless command a room.

“What is the meaning of this?” demanded Madame Marie Curie. “Gly, what is going on here?”

The natural-born killer actually looked like a contrite schoolboy for a moment. Bell moved away from him as the two groups of fighting men also separated themselves. Most of the faces were bloodied and deeply bruised, though Joel Wallace’s boys seemed to have enjoyed themselves, judging by their newly gap-toothed grins.

“They tried to steal the byzanium, madame,” Gly said.

“And this gives you permission to act like an animal? Mr. Bell phoned me at my friend Hertha Ayrton’s in Portsea yesterday with news of how you’ve comported yourself. Is it true?”

Gly said nothing. Even he was no match for the Polish-born Laureate.

Bell had discovered, from a small article in the Birmingham paper he’d spotted that morning in the train station, that the famous chemist was in England recuperating from kidney surgery. The city council had extended her an invitation to speak at a symposium. He’d deduced early on that she was the logical benefactor of the Société des Mines’s mission to find the ore, so informing her of the lengths taken was the best course to get her to intervene.

Curie’s righteous anger came off her in waves. “I cannot bring myself to fathom that men have been killed on account of the byzanium. What were you thinking?”

“I had my orders,” Gly said, falling back on the excuse used by monsters for their actions since time immemorial. “I was told to get the ore at all cost and that’s what I did.”