moment Harry Frost’s thugs attacked. In fact, it could not be a coincidence. Frost must have somehow engineered it.
Bell saw from a distance that the Farman had crashed nose first. Its fuselage was sticking straight up in the air like a monument, a tombstone, to poor Eddison-Sydney-Martin, who, if Bell’s suspicions were correct, was the victim of a murder, not an accident. The baronet’s wife was standing beside the wrecked biplane. A tall man in a flying helmet had his arm around her as if to comfort her. He was smoking a cigarette. He leaned down and whispered in her ear. She laughed.
Bell circled so he could see their faces. The man was Eddison-Sydney-Martin himself. He was dead white in the face, with a trickle of blood seeping from a bandage over his eye, and he was leaning heavily on Abby. But, miraculously, the Englishman was standing on his own two feet.
Bell looked again at the =wrecked Farman, and asked, “Who was driving your machine?”
Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin laughed. “I’m afraid I attended the entire adventure in person.”
“Something of a miracle.”
“The framework tends to absorb the impact – all that wood and bamboo collapses in a cushiony manner, if you know what I mean. So long as one doesn’t tumble out and snap one’s neck, or one’s motor doesn’t jump its moorings and crush one, one has a fair shot at surviving a smash. Not that a chap is not immensely grateful for whatever part luck plays, what?”
“I’m sorry to see you’re out of the race.”
“I’m not out of the race. But I do need another machine straightaway.”
Bell glanced at his wife, wondering whether, as she wrote checks, she would risk sending her husband up in the air again. Abby said, “Some clever folk in New Haven are experimenting with a sort of ‘headless’ Curtiss that has a lot of go.”
“They’ve a license from Breguet, who make an excellent machine,” her husband added.
“What went wrong?” Bell asked. “Why did she go down?”
“I heard a loud bang. Then a wire stay shrieked past my head. It would appear that a counterbracer parted. Unsupported, the wing collapsed.”
“Why did the counterbracing stay break?”
“That is something of a mystery. I mean, one never encounters shoddy construction on a Farman machine.” He shrugged. “My chaps are looking into it. But it’s all in the game, isn’t it? Accidents do happen.”
“Sometimes,” said Bell, even more convinced that the Englishman’s accident was no accident. He stepped closer to the wreck, where Lionel Ruggs, the Farman’s chief mechanician, was removing parts to be salvaged. “Did you find the wire that broke?” he asked.
“Bloody little that didn’t break,” Ruggs retorted. “She hit so hard, she’s mostly splinters.”
“I mean, the wire that broke that caused the accident. The baronet said he heard one let loose.”
“I’ve laid them all over there.” He pointed at a row of wires. “So far, I find none broken. It’s Roebling wire. Same as was spun into the cables that hold up the Brooklyn Bridge. Virtually indestructible.”
Bell went to look for himself. A helper, a boy no more than fourteen, came and went with more wire. He was puzzling over one end of a strand when Bell asked, “What do you have there, sonny?”
“Nothing.”
Bell took a shiny silver dollar from his pocket. “But you’re staring like something struck you – here.”
The boy grabbed the coin. “Thank you, sir.”
“Why don’t you show this to your boss?”
The boy dragged the wire to the chief mechanician. “Look at this, Mr. Ruggs.”
“Lay it out with the rest, laddie.”
“But, sir. Look at this, sir.”
Lionel Ruggs put on reading spectacles and held it to the light. “Bloody hell. . Bloody, bloody hell!”
Just then, Dmitri Platov came running up. He shook his head at the remains of the Farman. Then he looked at Eddison-Sydney-Martin, who was lighting a fresh smoke. “Is surviving? Is lucky.”
Bell asked, “What do you make of this, Mr. Platov?”
Platov took the fitting in his fingers and studied it, puzzlement growing on his face. “Is strange. Is very strange.”
Bell asked, “Why is it strange?”
“Is aluminum.”
Chief Mechanician Ruggs exploded, “What the bloody hell was it doing on our machine?”
“What do you mean?” asked Isaac Bell.
Platov said, “Is something should not be. Is – how you say – link-ed weak.”
“This anchor at the end of the wire is made of cast aluminum,” Ruggs seethed. “It should be steel. There’s tons of tension on those wires, tons more when the machine moves sharply. The anchor bolt should be as least as strong as the wire. Otherwise, like Mr. Platov says, it’s a weak link.”
“Where did it come from?” asked Bell.
“I’ve seen it used. But not on our machines, thank you very much.”
Bell turned to the Russian. “Have you seen aluminum used this way?”
“Aluminum lightweight. Aluminum on struts, aluminum on crossing members, aluminum on framing. But counterbracing anchor? Only fools.” He handed it back to Lionel Ruggs, his ordinarily cheery face stern. “Is person doing should being shot.”
“I’ll pull the trigger myself if I find the bloody bastard,” said the mechanician.
11
ISAAC BELL RAN TO THE RAIL YARD, where Archie had set up a field office in a corner of Josephine’s hangar car. He scanned the reports that were coming in by telegraph, telephone, and Van Dorn messenger. Harry Frost was still on the run despite his wounds.
Or to put it more accurately, Bell had to admit, Harry Frost had vanished.
All hospitals had been alerted to look out for the wounded man. None had responded. Frost could be dying in a ditch or dead already. He could be hiding in the farmland around the racetrack. Or he could have made his way to Brooklyn, where gangsters would take him in, for a price, and provide midwives and crooked pharmacists to treat his wounds. He could have run east into rural Nassau and Suffolk counties. Or north to the vast, thinly populated Long Island hunt country, where the owners of great American fortunes rode to the hounds.
Bell telephoned the New York office. He ordered more agents sent out from Manhattan, and others to double the watch on the railroad and subway stations and the ferries. And he dispatched apprentices to hospitals with stern instructions not to engage but to call for help. When he had done all he could to encourage the manhunt, Bell left a dozen detectives with orders to stick close to Josephine and raced his borrowed Pierce to the Nassau Hospital in Mineola, where they had taken Archie.
Archie’s beautiful wife, Lillian, a young blond-haired woman of nineteen, was standing outside the operating room in a long duster, having driven from New York. Her astonishingly pale blue eyes were dry and alert, but her face was a mask of dread.
Bell took her in his arms. He had introduced her to Archie, sensing that the high-spirited only child of a widowed “shirtsleeve” railroad tycoon would bring particular joy to his friend’s life. He had been more than right. They adored each other. He had persuaded her crusty father to see Archie for the man he was and not a fortune hunter.
Bell watched over the top of her head as a surgeon came out of the operating room, his expression grave. When he saw Bell holding Lillian, relief flickered in his eyes as if the fact that a friend was comforting her would make it easier to tell her that her husband had died.
“The doctor is here,” Bell whispered.
She turned to the doctor. “Tell me.”
