He answered modestly, “I’m an old wildcat driller. Good at guessing. Besides, I recall that in ’03 Mr. Rockefeller considered roping in St. Petersburg banks to buy Baku oil fields.”
“Are you sure you haven’t been eavesdropping on telephone calls?”
“Quite sure, Mr. Comstock.” According to Clyde Lapham, this was not the first time Rockefeller had set sights on the Caucasus. Back in ’98, Standard Oil sent geologists to survey for commercial oil reserves in Azerbaijan.
“Or tapping wires?”
“I wouldn’t know how to begin to tap wires,” Matters lied.
“What else have you ‘guessed’?”
Matters took his best shot. “What if I were to propose to you a plan to beat Sir Marcus Samuel at shipping case oil to Asia?”
Comstock glared. So-called case oil was kerosene shipped in gallon tins packed in wooden boxes. The Asian market was enormous. Chinese and Indians burned the oil in their lamps and used the wood and tin to build their huts, shingle their roofs, make cooking pots and pitchers. Sir Marcus Samuel, the all-powerful English distributor of case oil to India and China, had visited these offices in great secrecy in 1901 to negotiate some sort of partnership. Matters was gambling that Rockefeller and Comstock wished their talks had panned out.
“Mr. Rockefeller prefers knowing to guessing,” said Comstock.
Bill Matters stood his ground. “I am not guessing.”
Comstock was scornful. “Let me remind you that Standard Oil has not managed to beat Samuel in fifteen years. The conniving Englishman parlayed preferential treatment from the Suez Canal into the biggest tank steamer fleet to Asia.”
“I know how to beat Samuel,” Bill Matters shot back.
“How?”
“Bypass the Suez Canal.”
“Bypass the Suez?” Comstock turned more scornful. “Have you any idea how long it takes a tank ship to steam around Africa? Why do you suppose they dug a canal?”
“Bypass the Transcaucasus Railroad, too,” Matters shot back. “And Batum. And the Black Sea. And the Dardanelles, Constantinople, and the Mediterranean.”
“Poppycock! How the devil could we ship kerosene to India and China?”
“Build a pipe line from Baku to the Persian Gulf.”
“A pipe line?…” Comstock’s face was a mask. But his eyes grew busy. “Too ambitious. Persia is mountainous and bedeviled by warlords and revolutionaries.”
“No more ambitious than our pipe lines across Pennsylvania’s mountains to the Atlantic seaboard,” Matters answered, choosing his words carefully. His hated rivals had never built an inch of pipe line, themselves, but stolen his.
Comstock shook his head. “Great Britain will fight a Russian link to the Gulf every inch of the way.”
“Don’t you think Standard Oil should fight back for half the oil in the world and all the markets of Asia?”
Comstock’s face remained a mask. Eventually, he closed his hands in a double fist and gazed at Matters over his interlocked knuckles. “Were Mr. Rockefeller to approve a pipe line, he might invite you to join as a junior partner in the enterprise.”
Averell Comstock would of course be a full partner. Matters had braced himself to pretend humble acquiescence and he said, “I would be deeply honored.”
In fact, he was thrilled — not for a junior partnership but for the access he would gain to the president. Comstock may have his doubts, but he also sensed that the pipe line was a bold idea that Rockefeller would seize upon. In which case, Comstock feared the idea would get to the president from someone else unless he moved quickly.
Matters reminded himself not to get cocky. Older Standard Oil directors, who jealously guarded their power, were the smartest in American industry. There were wise men among them who might intuit Matters’ plot, might guess that for Bill Matters the pipe line was only the beginning.
As the assassin had proclaimed after shooting Spike Hopewell, those who get too close will be killed.
Bill Matters summoned the assassin to his private rail car.
“Word’s come from Texas that C. C. Gustafson did not die.”
“I’m not surprised. He was quick as lightning. I struck him twice, but neither shot felt right.”
“What happened?”
“Fate intervened,” the assassin said blithely, but, unable to abide a deep sense of failure, added in a voice suddenly dark, “I am mortified… I promise you that such a failure will never again occur. Never.”
“Don’t worry about Gustafson. The effect of the attack is the same as if he had died. They’ll blame Standard Oil.”
The assassin’s spirits continued to fall. “I have promised myself on my mother’s grave that I will never miss again. Never.”
Matters said, “I need something new from you. Something quite different.”
The assassin leaned closer, intrigued. “How different?”
“Some old ones must die.”
“Comstock?”
“Yes. He’s bringing my pipe line scheme to Rockefeller. After he does, I need him out of my way.”
“And old Lapham?”
“No, not Lapham.”
“God knows what Clyde Lapham remembers,” the assassin warned darkly. “But whatever he does remember will be too much.”
“Not yet! I need Lapham.”
“O.K. Only Comstock. For the moment. What is different?”
“His death must appear to be natural. No sniping. No suspicion of murder.”
“Miles ahead of you,” the assassin crowed — spirits soaring as suddenly high as a skyrocket — and whipped out of a vest pocket a red vial.
From Humble, Texas, Walt Hatfield wired Isaac Bell at the Washington field office.
C. C. GUSTAFSON VEXED STANDARD
WINGED NOT DEAD YET
SHERIFF’S SUSPECT DEAD
Isaac Bell raced to Central Station. The Washington & Southwestern Limited was fully booked, but a pass given him by a prep school classmate’s railroad president father got Bell into a seat reserved for friends of the company. Everyone, the conductor told him, seemed to be going to Texas.
In the smoker, he drank a Manhattan cocktail that was exactly the color of Edna Matters’ fine, wispy hair. And from what he had glimpsed of Nellie, hers too. He ordered another and raised the glass to salute Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, which the train passed by in the dying daylight. He ate a grilled rockfish in the dining car, and slept in a Pullman Palace sleeper that the Limited picked up in Danville, Virginia.
Twenty-seven hours later, a Van Dorn apprentice from the New Orleans field office ran into Union Terminal with another wire from Texas Walt.
SHERIFF’S DEAD SUSPECT CLEARED
C. C. GUSTAFSON AWAKE
Isaac Bell swung aboard the westbound Sunset Express.
BOOK TWO
POISON
9
Hummbuuulll, Texas!” bawled the conductor. “Humble, Texas! Next stop, Humble, Texas!”
Isaac Bell was first at the vestibule door, ahead of a crowd of excited speculators jostling behind him. The still-speeding train leaned into a hard bend in the tracks, and he glimpsed something that made him open the corridor window to lean out in the humid heat. He saw hundreds of oil derricks surrounded by giant crude storage tanks. A sprawling boomtown of fresh-built barracks, boardinghouses, hotels, saloons, and a “ragtown” section of tents crowded both sides of the main line tracks. The sidings and railyards were black with rows of tank cars.