“He’s gone,” said Darbee.
Bell searched hopelessly. Three miles across the bay sprawled the dockyards of Brooklyn and beyond them low green hills. To his left, four or five miles to the northwest, Bell saw the tall buildings of lower Manhattan and the elegantly draped cables of the Brooklyn Bridge spanning the East River.
“Do you know where Catherine Slip is?”
Darbee swung his tiller. “What do you want there?”
“Dyname,” Bell answered. The fastest ship in New York, equipped with a telephone and a radio telegraph, and commanded by a high-ranking naval hero who could move quickly to rally the Navy against the spy’s submarine and radio the New Hampshire to rig torpedo nets before entering the port.
Darbee gave him a canvas pea jacket that smelled of mold. Bell stripped off his wet coat and shirt, dried out his Browning, and poured water out of his boots. The overpowered oyster scow covered the five miles to the Brooklyn Bridge in twenty minutes. But as they passed under the bridge, Bell’s heart sank. The battleship New Hampshire had already landed. It was moored to the pier closest to the way that held Hull 44. If 44 was O’Shay’s target, they were a pair of sitting ducks. Explosions on the floating ship would set the entire navy yard afire.
TO ISAAC BELL’S RELIEF, Dyname was at Catherine Slip.
He jumped from the oyster scow onto the nearest ladder, climbed onto the pier, crossed her gangway, and shoved through the door to Dyname’s main cabin. Captain Falconer was seated on the green leather banquette flanked by two of his yacht’s crewmen.
“Falconer. They’ve got a submarine.”
“So I am told,” said the Hero of Santiago with a grim nod at three Riker & Riker Protection Service gunmen who were covering the cabin with pistols and a sawed-off shotgun. Bell recognized the bodyguard, Plimpton, who had accompanied Herr Riker on the 20th Century Limited. Plimpton said, “You’re all wet, Mr. Bell, and you’ve lost your hat.”
53
HELLO, PLIMPTON.”
“Hands up.”
“Where’s O’Shay?”
“In the air!”
“Tell your boss that I owe him for an excellent emerald and I’m looking forward to paying him in person.”
“Now!”
“Do it, Bell,” Falconer said. “They’ve already shot my lieutenant and my engineer.”
Isaac Bell raised his hands, having stalled long enough to rate the opposition. Plimpton held a semiautomatic German Navy Luger like he knew his business. But the pretty-boy bruisers flanking him were out of their league. The elder, gingerly toting a sawed-off 20-gauge Remington, might pass for a small-town bank guard. The younger gripped his revolver like a bouncer in a YMCA. They were not on Falconer’s yacht due to a well-thought-out plan, Bell surmised. Something had gone wrong.
What had drawn them at the last moment to Dyname? Escape on the fastest ship in the harbor after O’Shay unleashed his torpedoes? But Dyname hadn’t the range to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Surely O’Shay had intended to take a liner to Europe, traveling with Katherine Dee under assumed names, or had booked secret passage on a freighter.
She was what went wrong, Bell realized. Katherine was wounded.
“Is the girl aboard?” he asked Falconer.
“She needs a doctor!” the boy with the shotgun blurted.
“Shut up, Bruce!” Plimpton growled.
“I’m aboard,” said Katherine Dee. She staggered up the companionway from Falconer’s private cabin. Disheveled, pale, and feverish, she looked like a child shaken from a deep sleep. Except for the hatred on her face. “Thanks to you,” she said bitterly to Bell. “You’re ruining everything.” She had held tight to her pistol when he had shot her in Barlowe’s jewelry shop. She raised it with a trembling hand and aimed it at him.
“Miss Dee!” said Bruce. “You shouldn’t be on your feet.”
“She needs a doctor,” said Bell.
“That’s what I’ve been saying. Mr. Plimpton, she’s got to have a doctor.”
“Shut up, Bruce,” said Plimpton. “She’ll have a doctor as soon as we get out of this mess.”
Hands in the air, boxed in by O’Shay’s gunmen, the tall detective searched her eyes, seeking some advantage, even as he braced for the bullet. He saw no mercy, no hesitation, only the deep, deep weariness of a person with a mortal wound. But she intended to kill him before she died. As she had killed Grover Lakewood and Father Jack and who knew how many others for Eyes O’Shay. How long before she passed out? Where, he wondered, was her “streak of God”?
“Did you know,” he asked, “that Father Jack prayed for you?”
“A lot of good his prayers did. It was Brian O’Shay who saved me.”
“What did Brian save you for? To hurl Grover Lakewood to his death? To shoot the priest?”
“Just like you shot me.”
“No,” said Bell. “I shot you to save the woman I love.”
“I love Brian. I will do anything for him.”
Bell recalled the words of train conductor Dilber on the 20th Century Limited. “Riker and his ward are completely on the up-and-up. Always separate staterooms.”
And O’Shay himself, speaking as Riker, had said, “The girl brings light into my life where there was darkness.”
“And what will Brian be for you?”
“He saved me.”
“Fifteen years ago. What will he do for the rest of your life, Katherine? Keep you pure?”
Her hand shook violently. “You-” Her breath came hoarsely.
“You kill to please him, and he keeps you pure? Is that how it works? Father Jack was right to pray for you.”
“Why?” she wailed.
“He knew in his heart, in his soul, that Brian O’Shay couldn’t save you.”
“And God could?”
“So the priest believed. With all his heart.”
Katherine lowered the gun. Her eyes rolled back in her head. The gun slipped from her fingers, and she folded to the deck as if she were a puppet whose strings had been cut.
“Plimpton, damn you!” Bruce shouted. “She’ll die without a doctor.” He gestured emphatically with his pistol.