The Thief Read Free Page A

from our teeth,” grinned Lynds. “Sorry, Mr. Bell. You understand what I’m saying, don’t you? Not that we’re not grateful for you charging to the rescue.”
    Isaac Bell returned what could be judged a friendly smile.
    “Your gratitude does not have to take the form of giving away an important secret.” His mild answer disguised curiosity that would be best satisfied by biding his time. As Archie had noted, for the next four and half days on the high seas no one was going anywhere. “But I am concerned for your safety,” he added. “These munitions people mounted an audacious campaign with military precision to kidnap you from a British liner putting to sea. What makes you think they won’t try again?”
    “Not on a British liner,” Lynds fired back. “On a German ship we’d worry about the crew. That’s why we took a British ship.”
    “You mean they tried before?”
    “In Bremen.”
    “How did you happen to give them the slip?”
    “Got lucky,” said Lynds. “We saw them coming, so we made a big show of booking passage on the Prinz Wilhelm . Then we ran like heck the other way, to Rotterdam, and caught a steamer to Hull. By the time they figured out we hadn’t sailed on the Wilhelm , we were on the train to London.”
    Bell had many more questions, but they were forestalled by the arrival of the ship’s doctor. When the chief officer bustled in right behind the doctor, Bell emptied his whiskey glass into a spittoon before the officer could see and conspicuously poured another from the bottle.
    The chief officer listened with an increasingly skeptical expression as the Professor and Lynds described an attack by three men who subsequently fell overboard. Then, while the doctor examined Beiderbecke’s cut lip and Lynds’s swelling eye, the officer said quietly to Bell, with a significant glance at the whiskey in his hand, “One cannot help but wonder whether those two gentlemen had a falling out and covered it up with a tall tale of, shall we say, ‘piracy in Liverpool Bay’?”
    Isaac Bell sipped his whiskey. He intended to get to the bottom of the bizarre attack, as well as the nature of Beiderbecke and Lynds’s self-described secret invention, which had provoked it. But the kidnappers had drowned in the night, miles behind the ship. The Austrian and the American-raised German-Swede were the only sources of information available. And the Mauretania ’s officers were even less qualified than a small town police force to investigate the motive for the attack. They would only get in his way.
    “I say…” the chief officer went on. He had begun politely, almost diffidently, the model of the smooth company man unfazed by the peccadillos of wealthy passengers. Now he fixed Bell with a flinty eye practiced at terrorizing junior officers: “As no one jumped, fell, or was thrown overboard, I am curious how they induced you, Mr. Bell, to embroider their story.”
    “Sympathy,” Isaac Bell smiled. He touched the whiskey to his lips. “Poor chaps were so embarrassed by their behavior… and I had had a drink or two.” He peered into his glass. “Seemed like a good idea at the time…” He looked the officer full in the face and grinned sheepishly. “It felt jolly good to be a hero, even for a moment…”
    “I appreciate your candor, Mr. Bell. I am sure that you will agree that as soon as the surgeon has done his work it will be best if we all turn in for the night and let sleeping dogs lie.”

    “K RIEG RüSTUNGSWERK GMBH?” echoed Archie Abbott, who had traveled regularly back and forth to Europe his whole life. Most recently, in the course of an extended honeymoon, he had laid the groundwork for overseas Van Dorn field offices. “They’re a private munitions outfit with strong Army connections. As you’d expect of a cannon manufacturer gearing up for a European war.”
    Isaac Bell had joined him in the dining saloon moments after the breakfast bugle had blown. The Mauretania was