The Assassin

“Wish leads with the Maxim. I’ll cover the rear. Mr. Rockefeller, you drive the middle one.”

“I don’t know how to drive,” said Rockefeller.

“You don’t?”

“I’ve only recently arranged to buy an auto. It will be delivered with a man to drive it.”

“I know how to drive,” said Nellie.

“You do?” asked Edna. “When did you learn?”

“In California. A bunch of us realized that suffragists ought to know how to get themselves around. I must say, it’s a lot easier than your buckboard, not to mention my balloon.”

Bell was dubious, to say the least, but had no choice and could only hope she wasn’t exaggerating her auto prowess. They needed all three cars to carry supplies and had to have a replacement if they lost one to a breakdown that he and Wish could not repair.

“Nellie drives the middle car,” he said. “Edna sits in front, Mr. Rockefeller in back. Wish, do you have something to lend Mr. Rockefeller?”

Wish Clarke pulled a pocket pistol from inside his coat and gave it to Rockefeller. The old man checked that it was loaded.

Bell had already removed his derringer from his hat when no one was looking. He handed the two-shot pistol to Edna. “Ever shoot a derringer?”

“Father taught us.”

Bell was already wishing that they had Bill Matters with them, carrying the big Remington he had on the train. Thank the Lord for the Maxim. And thanks, too, for the assassin’s Savage in his carpetbag on the floor beside the steering wheel.

“What about me?” asked Nellie. “Don’t I get a gun?”

“You’ll have your hands full driving— Now listen, everyone. We will stay very close. No headlamps except for Wish. If you have any trouble with the auto, or something happens the others can’t see, honk on your horn.”

“Isaac?”

“What, Edna?”

“Wouldn’t it be better if Mr. Rockefeller sat up front with Nellie and I sat in Wish’s car with the Maxim gun?”

“Do you know how to fire a Maxim gun?”

“I saw Mr. Rockefeller’s refinery police use them to frighten labor strikers. Anyone considering ambushing us will think twice if they see the gun ma

She had a point, thought Bell, though he didn’t love it. Both women had caps pulled over their short hair and had changed into trousers when it was decided to run for it. But a bushwhacker just might shoot her from a distance to disable the Maxim. And yet she was right that a ma

“Wish, what do you say? Do you want her on your gun?”

Wish didn’t love it either, Bell could see. Nonetheless, he said, “I’m afraid Edna’s right.”

They shifted positions. Edna gave Bell’s derringer to Nellie and climbed in the back of the lead Peerless. “Try not to blow my head off,” Wish called over his shoulder.

“Duck if you hear me shooting.”

John D. Rockefeller climbed into the front of the middle car.

Nellie Matters said, “This should be interesting.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sitting side by side with the devil incarnate.”

“You don’t seem that bad to me,” said Rockefeller.

It was the kind of joke that Nellie Matters loved, and Bell expected her to let loose one of her big laughs, but all Rockefeller got was an angry glare. He looked at her sister, hunched over the Maxim behind him, and saw that Edna, too, had not even cracked a smile.

“Looking on the bright side,” said Wish Clarke, “we’re driving brand-new, rock-solid, Cleveland-built machines.”

“Turn left on the main road,” said Bell, attempting to fold the map with one hand. Failing that, he worked his arm out of the sling and stuffed it in his pocket. “Let’s go.”

He opened the stable doors.

The three red cars rumbled through the cobblestone yard and out the driveway onto streets nearly light as day. House fires nearby and oil fields and refineries burning far off lit the sky. They turned away from the fires, west, out of the city on roads clogged with refugees riding in carriages, work wagons, and rich men’s autos and plodding on foot.

Isaac Bell saw that his one-day timetable to Shemaha had been wildly optimistic. They’d be lucky to make that first town in two days. Then seven or eight more towns and four hundred eighty miles to go.

27

Of the six longest, hottest days and freezing cold nights ever endured,” wrote Edna Matters, typing up her shorthand notes as she did every night when the autos finally stopped rolling, “today was the longest yet, and I’m afraid it is not over.

This afternoon’s shoot-out, our third since escaping Baku, ended inconclusively. Those who were shooting at us are still out there. Neither IB nor WC are ceasing their vigilance. Neither has slept more than a catnap. The autos are circled, as tightly as the narrow cliffside clearing will allow, like a latter-day wagon train besieged by Indians, and we are watching the steep slopes and the fast-falling darkness.

She looked around her. When they left the hotel stable in Baku, the Peerless autos’ tires had been white as snow. They were black now, blackened by the oily streets before they were even off the Absheron Peninsula, caked with road dust and marred by the pries used to work them on and off their rims to patch punctures. Wish Clarke was fixing one now. Nellie was helping him. JDR was stretched across a backseat, sound asleep. The plutocrat was the envy of all; he could sleep through anything. Isaac was draped over the Maxim gun, as still and watchful as a cat, the bag in which he carried his rifle in easy reach, as always.

She typed.

The roads are abysmal, verging on the nonexistent, except for the occasional better-graded stretch, which IB identifies as forty-year-old Russian military roads built to subdue the region. There are fortresses and barracks, some abandoned, some occupied by soldiers disinclined to venture out. Occasionally we trundle across handsome iron bridges the Army built over rushing rivers. The road often snakes beside the railroad tracks, on which we have not seen a single train moving, though we did pass a smoldering line of blackened oil tank cars set afire.

IB, reading over EMH’s shoulder, was just informed by EMH that nothing in our agreement says I ca