Archibald Angel Abbott IV was too well known to work covertly. He had always been a big deal in the blue-blooded society set—New York’s most eligible bachelor. Then the newspapers had made him famous when he married the daughter of the railroad tycoon Osgood Hennessy. She stood to inherit it all. Frost wondered why the hell Abbott hadn’t traded his guns in for golf clubs.
That question pierced Harry Frost’s seething skull like a lightning bolt.
Archibald Abbott had the right idea, continuing to work for the Van Dorn Detective Agency for a measly few bucks after he married rich. Retiring was a mug’s game. Harry Frost had learned that too late. He had lost his edge. From the time he was eight years old, Harry Frost had dreamed of not having to work to survive. He had achieved his dream. And what did it get him? Being made a monkey of. That was how he had been taken by Josephine and Marco—bunco artists he would have smoked in a flash in the old days.
Frost fingered his weapons. Josephine still had her head in the motor. He could seize her by the throat, let her see that it was him, then cut her heart out. But the awful truth was that he could not get near her. There were too many Van Dorns masquerading as mechanicians. He couldn’t kill them all. They would gun him down first. He was not afraid to die. But he was damned if he would die in vain.
He needed help.
He hurried back to the train terminal and boarded an electric to Flatbush, where he entered a Brooklyn savings bank. Fleeing poverty, riding the rails as a child, begging for pennies for food, he had vowed never to be caught short anywhere ever again. As he flourished—as he plowed the profits of the distribution empire into stocks that returned fortunes—he had banked money in states across the continent.
He withdrew three thousand dollars from an account that held twenty. The bank manager counted it out personally in his private office. After Frost picked it up, the banker casually laid on his desk a wanted poster similar to those Frost had seen at the racetrack.
This poster was tailored to bankers. It warned them to be on the lookout for Harry Frost, or someone who looked like Harry Frost, drawing from his account. Frost acknowledged the banker’s loyalty with a brusque nod. They both knew that it was the least the banker could do. If Frost hadn’t covered his losses on an ill-advised scheme involving other men’s money, the banker would be serving time in Sing Sing.
A trolley took him to the waterfront.
He walked to a Pennsylvania Railroad stockyard pier. Tugboats were shoving car floats alongside. Trainloads of cows, sheep, and pigs were herded from the freight cars into cattle pens. Frost headed for the pier building and pushed through a door that said “No Admittance.” Thugs masquerading as railroad police tried to stop him. Frost knocked both men down with his open hand and pushed through another door at the back of the building into a stable. A dozen beef cattle, each with a distinctive Mexican brand burned on its flank, were tethered to posts set in the floor.
There were two men with the cows. One was seated at a table on which were scattered cow horns. The other was removing a horn from one of the tethered animals by turning it in his hands, unscrewing it from a threaded rod that had been drilled in the base of the horn. Rod Sweets, the man at the table, didn’t recognize Harry Frost in his beard. He pulled a pocket pistol.
“Don’t,” said Frost. “It’s me.”
Sweets stared. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
“You will be if you don’t put that gun away.”
Sweets shoved it hastily back his vest. “Don’t tell me you’ve developed a taste for dope.”
The cow horns—sawn from the steers in Mexico, hollowed out, and fitted with threads—had been stuffed with Hong Kong opium before being screwed back on. Sweets smuggled hundreds of pounds of raw opium yearly into New York in this manner and presided over a vast refining and distribution network that supplied morphine to thousands of druggists and physicians. Protecting such an enterprise took an army.
“No dope,” said Frost. “I want to hire a crew.”
Rod Sweets’s men would not care that he hated Josephine for buncoing him nor that he hated Preston Whiteway for seducing her. Money was all they cared for. And money, he had plenty of.
Frost made arrangements with Sweets quickly. Then he hurried to the Red Hook saloon where could be found the brothers George and Peter Jonas, who specialized in tampering with the brakes and gasoline tanks of newspaper-delivery trucks. Again, money was all that was needed, and the saboteurs were falling all over themselves trying to persuade him that it was even easier to smash a flying machine than a motortruck.
“It’s all in the wires that hold ’em together,” said George, and Peter finished his brother’s thought: “A wire lets go, the wing falls off, down she goes.”
Harry Frost had spent many a long hour watching his wife at air meets. “The birdmen know that. They check their wires every time they go up.”
The brothers exchanged a quick glance. They didn’t know much about flying machines, but they knew the logic of machines in general, which was all they really had to know to break one.
“Sure, they check ’em,” said George. “They look for nicks, for kinks, for weak spots.”
Peter said, “So, like you says, Mr. Frost, we’re not going to sneak up on ’em with a hacksaw.”
“But,” said George, “they don’t always check the fittings that anchor the wire to the wing.” He glanced at his brother, who said, “We pull a steel anchor bolt.”
“We replace it with a cast-aluminum anchor bolt that looks just the same but ain’t so strong.”
“They don’t see it.”
“They go up.”
“They jerk hard in the air.”
“The anchor lets go.”
“The wing falls off.”
“They’re
