Archie had already anticipated the possibility. Before the reporters reached her, she was surrounded by detectives, who gave each and every journalist the gimlet eye.
“Smooth,” Bell complimented Archie.
“That’s what Mr. Van Dorn pays me so much money for,” Archie grinned.
“He told me he wonders why you work at all, now that you’re rich.”
“I wonder, too,” said Archie. “Particularly when I’m demoted to ‘classy’ bodyguard.”
“I asked specifically for you. You’re not demoted.”
“Don’t get me wrong, Josephine’s a crackerjack, and I’m glad to look after her. But the fact is, it’s a job for the PS boys.”
“No!”
Bell whirled about to look his old friend full in the face. “Don’t make that mistake, Archie. Harry Frost intends to kill her, and there isn’t a Protective Services man on the entire Van Dorn roster who can stop him.”
Archie was nearly as tall as Bell and as rangily built. Bell may have floored him in their long-ago college boxing match, but he was the only one who ever did. Archie’s easygoing style, handsome looks, and patrician manner concealed a toughness that Bell had rarely encountered among men of his class. “You give Frost too much credit,” he said.
“I’ve seen him operate. You haven’t.”
“You saw him operate ten years ago, when you were a kid. You’re not a kid anymore. And Frost is ten years older.”
“Do you want me to replace you?” Bell asked coldly.
“Try firing me, I’ll appeal straight to Mr. Van Dorn.”
They stared hard at each other. Men standing nearby backed away assuming punches would fly. But their friendship ran too deeply for fisticuffs. Bell laughed. “If he catches wind of us bull moose locking horns, he’ll fire both of us.”
Archie said, “I swear to you, Isaac, no one will hurt Josephine while I’m on watch. If anyone dares try, I will defend her to my dying breath.”
Isaac Bell felt reassured, not so much because of Archie’s words but because during their entire exchange he never took his eyes off her.
A HEAVILY LADEN, immaculately lacquered Doubleday, Page delivery van rolled into Belmont Park. The driver and his helper wore uniform caps with polished visors that were the same dark green color as the van. They pulled up at the grandstand service entrance and unloaded bales of World’s Workand Country Life in Americamagazines. Then, instead of leaving the grounds, they steered onto the stone-dust road that connected the train yard to the infield and followed a flatbed Model T truck that was carrying a Wright motor from a hangar car to the flying machine it was meant to power.
The gate that barred the way across the racetrack into the infield was manned by Van Dorn detectives. They waved the Model T through but stopped the Doubleday, Page van and regarded the duo, attired like trustworthy deliverymen, with puzzled expressions.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
The driver grinned. “I bet you wouldn’t believe me if I said we was delivering reading matter to the birdmen.”
“You’re right about that. What’s up?”
“We got a motor in the back for the Liberator. The mechanicians just got done with it and asked us to lend a hand.”
“Where’s their truck?”
“They had to pull the bands.”
“Joe Mudd’s my brother-in-law,” interjected the helper. “Knew we was delivering magazines. Long as the boss don’t find out, we’re O.K.”
“All right, come on through. You know where to find him?”
“We’ll find him.”
The green-lacquered van wove through the busy infield. The driver steered around flying machines, mechanicians, autos, trucks, wheelbarrows, and bicycles. Crammed in the back of the van, so tightly they had to stand, were a dozen of Rod Sweets’s fighters. Dressed in suits and derbies, they were a clear cut above the usual pug uglies in order to ensure the smooth flow of opium and morphine to doctors and pharmacists. They stood in tense silence, hoping their outfits would help them disappear into the crush of paying spectators when the clouting was over. No one wanted to tangle with Van Dorns, but the money Harry Frost had paid in advance was too rich to refuse. They would take their lumps. Some of them would get collared. But those who escaped back to Brooklyn intact wouldn’t have to work for months.
Harry Frost stood with them, watching Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s blue Farman biplane through a peephole drilled in the side. He felt strangely calm. His plan would work.
Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin was tearing up the sky, fighting to set a speed record for biplanes on an oval course marked by pylons fifteen hundred yards apart. The course was three miles. To beat the record, he had to circle twenty laps in less than an hour, and he was cutting the corners tightly by banking with great skill. But unbeknownst to the Englishman, every high-speed turn he hurled the sturdy Farman into could be his last. When the Jonas boys’ aluminum anchor failed under the terrific forces, the sabotaged wire tension stay would rip from the wing it counterbraced, and the wing would break. At that fatal moment, every eye in the grandstand and every eye in the infield would fly to the falling machine.
Frost had seen them fall. From five hundred feet, it took a remarkably long time to hit the ground. In that time, no one, not even the Van Dorns, would see his fighters emerge from the van. Once out, it would be too late to stop them. They would slash a swath like a football wedge, and he would charge through the cleared space straight at Josephine.
ISAAC BELL WAS ADMIRING how sharply Eddison-Sydney-Martin cut the corners when, thirty minutes into the speed record attempt, a wing came off. It seemed like an illusion. The engine kept roaring, and the biplane kept racing. The broken wing separated into two parts, the top and bottom planes, which remained loosely attached to each other by wire braces. The rest of the airship hurtled past them on a steep downward trajectory.
Thousands in the grandstand gasped. As one, they surged to their feet, blood draining from their faces, eyes locked on the sky. The mechanicians in the infield looked up in anguish. A woman screamed – Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s wife, Bell saw. The stricken aeroplane was falling nose down, when it began to spin. Terrible forces tore its canvas, and it shed ragged strips of fabric that trailed after it like long hair.
Bell could see Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin grappling with the controls. But it was hopeless. The biplane was beyond control. It hit the ground with a loud bang. Bell felt it shake the earth a quarter mile away. A collective moan rippled across the infield and was echoed by the crowd in the grandstand.
Bell heard another scream.
The tall detective’s heart sank even as he exploded into action. The English airman’s wife was running toward the wreckage, but it wasn’t Abby who had screamed. She held both hands pressed to her mouth. The scream, a hopeless shriek of terror, had come from behind him.
Josephine.
BOOK TWO
10
ISAAC BELL YANKED HIS BROWNING PISTOL from his shoulder holster and ran full tilt up the middle of a double row of flying machines.
The sight of a tall man in a white suit running toward them with a gun in his hand scattered the mechanicians who were staring at the wreckage behind him. At the end of the path they cleared for him Bell saw Josephine with her back to him. In front of her, the red-haired Archie Abbott was shielding her with his own body. In front of Archie, six Van Dorn detectives fought shoulder to shoulder to block a flying wedge of thugs charging with fists, clubs, and lengths of sharpened bicycle chain.
Behind the attackers stood a dark green Doubleday, Page delivery van with its back doors open wide. Harry Frost leaped through the doors with a gun in one hand and a knife in the other.