The Thief Clive Cussler (freenovel24 TXT) 📖

“Oberst Christian Semmler, as our German friends addressed him.”

“I don’t have German friends.”

“Lately,” said Archie, “I’ve been dropping mine. Semmler has been promoted several times since the South African War. He is currently a general major.”

Strone abruptly dropped all pretense of ignorance. “Yes, I know.”

“He is plotting in America.”

“Plotting what?”

“We don’t know.”

Strone’s jaw tightened. “He is a slippery, nervy bastard. He was as cold-blooded an operator as any we encountered, harassing our columns, sniping our pickets. And God help the scouts he waylaid. He made the Boers seem sweet as schoolboys.”

“Would you recognize him if you saw him?”

“I only saw him once. And only through a glass at a great distance.”

“Lillian?” said Archie.

Lillian pulled a notebook from her long duster and opened it to the sketch of Fritz Wunderlich.

“Did he look like this man?”

Strone took wire-frame spectacles from the folds of his shooting clothes and studied the copy of the salesman’s sketch. “This man is older,” he said at last. “Of course it’s been, what?”

“Nearly ten years,” said Archie. “How far away was he?”

Strone looked across the marsh in silence, his mouth working, his eyes bleak.

Archie and Lillian exchanged a glance. Archie gestured for her to say nothing.

“One thousand yards,” Strone answered at last. “We thought we were safe from his rifle at that range and that we could ride closer. And, of course, he was just one man alone… What made you come to me?”

“Isaac Bell had a feeling you were more than you appeared to be. He was right. When we dug deeper, we learned that you were decorated in that action.”

Strone flushed angrily. “Ruddy nonsense.”

“What do you mean, nonsense? You received the Distinguished Service Order.”

“I mean nonsense. Semmler lured us onto a bridge he had mined with dynamite. He sniped the wounded with rifle fire. My DSO was awarded to the only man that murderous swine missed.”

ISAAC BELL ROUNDED UP TEXAS Walt Hatfield and Larry Saunders and a crew of Saunders’s handpicked men for a powwow.

“Information from Art Curtis and his Berlin apprentice, expanded upon by Archie Abbott and the Research department, proves that the murderer we called the Acrobat, the drummer Fritz Wunderlich, and German Imperial Army General Major Christian Semmler are all one and the same. In addition, Mr. Van Dorn has established that General Major Christian Semmler is not only Krieg Rüstungswerk’s agent, but also a principal. To put it bluntly, he married the boss’s daughter.

“Semmler’s alias, Fritz Wunderlich, flew the coop when he caught wind of our visits to his shops and my calling on his hotel in Denver. Before we congratulate ourselves on Wunderlich’s loss of a string of shops that gave him and his accomplices safe passage around the continent, remember that the German consulates offer General Major Semmler even safer places to hide, get money, rest, eat, and sleep. Tracking Semmler will not be like tracking an ordinary criminal to his hideout. As much as we might enjoy it, we cannot smash open the doors of a sovereign nation’s consulates.

“I had already expressed copies of this ‘Wunderlich’ picture to every field office covering a German consulate in New York, Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, and the vice-consul’s office here in Los Angeles. Now I’ve informed them it’s a likeness of Semmler.”

“ISAAC BELL’S VOICE RESONATES with confidence,” said Christian Semmler. “Listen!”

He thrust the telephone earpiece at Hermann Wagner.

Wagner, sick with fear, took it with a trembling hand. The Berlin banker had seen the Donar leader’s face for the first time tonight. He had speculated that the mysterious leader might be Semmler, mainly because of rumors about the kaiser’s affection for the officer they called the Monkey. The heavy browridges, the massive protruding jaw, and the gangly arms were frightening confirmation. The leader was indeed the kaiser’s favorite, General Major Christian Semmler. For some reason Semmler had allowed him to see his face, and Wagner feared that Semmler intended to kill him when he was done.

“Listen to him!”

Wagner pressed the telephone to his ear.

He and Semmler were hunched across from each other over a table in the cellar of Germany’s Los Angeles vice-consul’s mansion. The vice-consul was upstairs, aware in only the most general terms of the use they were putting his building to, and probably deeply relieved that he had been forbidden entry to his own cellar.

The telephone was one that Christian Semmler had had connected via the vice-consul’s private line to a microphone he had stolen from Clyde Lynds and had paid an electrician to hide in the Van Dorn Detective Agency. Like an innkeeper tapping a keg of lager, Semmler had laughed as he explained the eavesdropping system to the disbelieving Hermann Wagner.

It seemed like a miracle. More than a miracle, it seemed impossible. But Wagner could actually hear Isaac Bell speaking to his private investigators even though a full two miles separated the Van Dorn Detective Agency from the German consulate.

“You hear?”

“A little. Not very well.”

“I know that!” snapped Semmler. “Lynds’s microphone is not thoroughly perfected yet. But he’s on the right track, and if you listen closely, you can hear the confidence in Bell’s voice. Why shouldn’t he sound assured? He’s learned so much these past several days.”

“Yes, he has,” Wagner agreed nervously.

“Events do not always unfold as we plan them,” said Semmler. “It is the nature of plans, and events.” He looked up and his green eyes sparkled with amusement. “I recall one night on the high veldt, when three British Tommies cornered me, my escape went according to plan. But no sooner had I killed them than I was seized by my arm and dragged to the ground. I could hardly believe it. I was attacked out of nowhere by a lion! A lion! The beast was attracted by the scent of the Tommies’ blood.”

Semmler reached across the table and laid a powerful hand on Hermann Wagner’s arm. “Relax, Herr Wagner, you look terrified.”

“I am terrified,” the banker admitted. “You warned me on the Mauretania never