The Cutthroat Read online

  “Why are you mucking about with a saber? If you really intend to arrest me, where’s your gun?”

  “I lost it in a canyon.” Bell spread his arms. There was no room in his skintight costume for a gun. “If you resist arrest, I will slice you worse than you sliced women in your maniacal murder spree.”

  To add to the horror of the moment, Jack the Ripper, alias Barrett, removed his makeup with his cape, revealing a bruised eye, and uttered a loud, nauseating laugh that echoed throughout the tunnel above the exhaust from the wind machine.

  There were no niceties, no respectful salutes. Like a bolt of lightning, the Ripper attacked like an ancient predator. Bell was prepared. He knew Barrett’s intent by a slight shift in his footwork. It came as an advance lunge. Bell parried and deflected the encounter with a sharp feint.

  “Thank you,” said Isaac Bell. “I was hoping you’d resist.”

  The production crew watched the engagement in awe. As the fight progressed, it gained momentum. The contact between blades seemed to come in microseconds, as the speed of the sabers flashed under the Cooper Hewitt lights. It became obvious to the crew that the two duelists were in a brutal fight to kill one or the other.

  Bell drove the Ripper back into the tunnel, past the second camera and beyond the weird gleam of the lights. Visually, it was stunning, because the wind machine had kicked up a small cloud of dust that swirled under the lights.

  Concerned when Bell was out of sight, Marion used her megaphone to amplify her voice over the roar of the wind machine. “Isaac!” she shouted. “Come back! You’re out of the light.”

  The Ripper recovered the initiative and fought back hard, using speed, strength, and extraordinary point control to put the tall detective on the defensive.

  Bell used his retreat to discover the Ripper’s methods, his skills and tricks. They both fought as though they were fighting for their souls.

  Jack the Ripper had developed the precision of hand that Italy’s masters were famous for. But, in actual fact, he was more predictable than any Italian. The monster enjoyed butchering his victims, favoring to shed blood than land internal wounds. To lose to him would be to suffer a slow death. But the open blows that he delivered in his desire to cut were also an invitation for an opponent to run him through.

  Jack the Ripper fell back, but the tall, blond detective had to battle for every foot gained. The Ripper left no opening untested. In a parry-thrust, he wounded Bell by a cut in the bicep. Luckily, it barely broke the skin, but blood trickled down his arm, threatening to wet his weapon’s grip and make it slippery. Bell squeezed his shirtsleeve to absorb it.

  Now Bell realized how Jack the Ripper could overwhelm the women he killed and startle them into defending themselves in ways he could predict.

  The way to beat him was to be unpredictable. And no attack was more unpredictable than the back attack Bell devised with his naval friend.

  Isaac Bell struck the Ripper’s thrust aside and lunged past. Inside the arc of his saber, Bell suddenly switched it to his opposite hand and plunged the tip all the way across his stomach and around the back of his waist toward the Ripper’s left lung. He felt it scrape a rib that kept the saber from going deep.

  Now ten feet from the whirling propeller, warned by the increased strength of the wind against his costume, Jack the Ripper exploded in a counterattack. He started with a feint rather than a thrust. Then a fake thrust, and a fake feint.

  Bell parried and retreated past Marion, who was on the right side of the cave, where rocks had been piled. In the split second he saw her, the Ripper feinted left, spun around and grabbed Marion with his free hand, using her as a shield by wrapping his arm around her body and pulling her close to his chest. Bell’s eyes went wild.

  “You sewer scum, don’t even think of hurting her,” he roared like a lion that took a bullet to save his mate.

  “I’m leaving,” said the Ripper. “And your talented wife is coming with me.”

  “Take your bloody hands off her.”

  “Maybe I will and maybe I won’t,” the Ripper said with hideous malignity.

  The Ripper again felt the force of the wind on his back and began to advance. Bell could do nothing but retreat, knowing he could not put Marion in any worse danger. But while the two men were distracted with each other, Marion lifted her foot off the ground and stomped with all her strength on the Ripper’s toes. In almost the same instant, she rammed both her elbows into his ribs and twisted free of his grasp. Bell dropped his sword and took hold of Marion, as they watched Barrett struggle. The cameraman, Davidson, who had long since stopped filming, had followed Marion as she had closed the gap with the duelists.

  Stunned and thrown off balance, the Ripper stumbled. His balance and sense of direction lost for a brief instant, he backed away from Bell and closer to the wind machine. The propeller caught the Ripper’s cape, his hand was thrown up and his sword swallowed by the blade as it pulled him into the wind machine. His cape and shirt ripped from him as he was thrown forward. Multiple crescents carved deeply in his back. His saber lost, the Ripper, wild-eyed, in pain and fear, turned and ran toward the tunnel opening past the wind machine.

  Davidson took Marion by the hand. Bell leapt forward, following the Ripper out of the tunnel. Just as Bell rounded the outside of the propeller, he tackled the Ripper and took him down. The Ripper twisted out from under Bell and, as Bell recovered, the Ripper kicked out at him. Bell grabbed his boot and twisted the Ripper. Bell was able to stand quickly and square off with Barrett. The force of the air being pulled into the blades made it difficult to keep their balance, but Bell got off three jabs to Barrett’s wounded chest and then an upper cut that sent the Ripper reeling backwards. The wind machine’s turbulent slipstream that sucked into the tunnel was too much. Generated by the tremendous torque of the huge propeller, it seized Jack the Ripper. He grabbed on to the engine and screamed in agony when the red-hot aluminum exhaust manifold seared his hands.

  With nothing to hold on to, he shrieked in despair.

  In less than two seconds, Jack the Ripper disappeared before Isaac Bell’s eyes. Chunks of flesh and bone flew into the rear of the tunnel as a fine mist of blood sprayed the walls.

  Marion, unable to see who had been cut to pieces, in panic started to run to the tunnel opening. Davidson reached her and restrained her. Desperate, she lamented in a pitched wail, “Isaac!”

  Alone, with the roar of the engine and the horror of the moment, Bell threw the switch. As the propeller blades started to slow, Isaac made his way around the wind machine and saw Marion running toward him, tears flooding her cheeks. He reached out and held her tight in his arms. She was trembling, shivering, as if frozen in a wintry wind.

  “I thought you’d died!”

  Bell kissed her lightly on the forehead, and said softly, “Not yet. Not for another fifty years.”

  EPILOGUE

  NEW YORK, 1955

  “Grandma!” came a howl from the next room of a sprawling apartment on Central Park West. “Your name’s on TV.”

  “Just a minute, dear. Grandpa is holding me.”

  “That’s putting it mildly,” said Isaac Bell, tightening his grip when Marion attempted, halfheartedly, to slip off his lap.

  “Grandma!”

  They were visiting the New York branch of what had become a large family of private detectives. This bunch descended from dark-eyed offspring of Harry Warren, with dollops of Millses, Dashwoods, and Abbotts.

  “I better see what’s happening.”

  “I’ll back you up,” said Bell.

  In a book-lined room filled with toys and children, the TV was tuned to Channel 9, a local New York station that showed old movies. Film credits were flickering oddly, frozen on the screen.

  “Look, Grandma.”

  It looked to Bell like the projectionist was on his coffee break. Marion said the f
ilm-chain’s pull-down claw had ripped through adjacent sprocket holes. A transparent “fire door” was keeping the hot projector lamp from melting the stuck film, and wasn’t it wonderful they had transferred flammable nitrate film to safety stock.

  “Grandma!”

  “Marion, what time did you say the Abbotts were coming to pick up all these little urchins?” Bell asked. “They’re taking all of them ice skating in the park, aren’t they?”

  “They’ll be here by three.”

  “Look, Grandma,” called a persistent voice.

  Marion found her glasses and looked at the end credits still shivering in place.

  “Oh, it’s Jekyll and Hyde. Did you like it, children?”

  “Yeah, it was neat.”

  “Yes, it was fun to watch?”

  “It wasn’t fun to make,” said Bell.

  “Isaac!”

  “See, Grandma? It says ‘Marion Morgan Bell.’ That’s you.”

  “Why’s your name on the movie, Grandma?”

  “Because I made it.”

  “You did? It was really scary, Grandma.”

  “Really spooky,” added a little boy, who had climbed the back of the chair and was now seated on Bell’s shoulder. Another started climbing the tall detective’s leg.

  “Grandma, did you know Grandpa when you made the movie?”

  “Look down in that corner. Can you read that?”

  The frame was jumping and reading it was difficult.

  “‘Special’ is the first word,” she prompted.

  “‘Special . . . thanks—to Isaac Bell.’ That’s Grandpa!”

  “The one and only,” said Marion Morgan Bell.

  “With the scars to prove it.”

  “Isaac, what a terrible thing to say.”

  “Well, it’s true.”

  “Isaac, really,” Marion replied, with a shake of her head.

  The little boy clinging to the back of the chair interrupted, “Was there really a Jack the Ripper?”

  “Yes, he truly existed,” Isaac said. “A very evil man who was far more nasty than Grandma could show in the movie.”

  “But you socked him good, didn’t you, Grandpa?”

  “He certainly did, and then some.”

  “Marion, it’s just . . .” Isaac paused as he rose from the chair. “It’s what I said all those years ago.”

  Marion gave him a quizzical look.

  “‘A renewal.’ Let’s open a bottle of Billecart-Salmon Brut Rosé. Just you and me, after Archie and Lillian pick up the children.”

  Marion smiled at her silver-haired hero.

  “I promised you another fifty years. Let’s celebrate to many more.”

  Then swept her into his arms and kissed her.

  About the Authors

  Clive Cussler is the author of more than fifty books in five bestselling series, including Dirk Pitt, NUMA Files, Oregon Files, Isaac Bell, and Fargo. His life nearly parallels that of his hero, Dirk Pitt. Whether searching for lost aircraft or leading expeditions to find famous shipwrecks, he and his NUMA crew of volunteers have discovered more than seventy-five ships of historic significance, including the long-lost Confederate submarine Hunley, which was raised in 2000 with much press publicity. Like Pitt, Cussler collects classic automobiles. His collection features more than eighty examples of custom coachwork. Cussler lives in Arizona and Colorado.

  Justin Scott’s novels include Rampage and The Shipkiller; the Ben Abbott detective series; and modern sea thrillers published under his pen name Paul Garrison. He is the coauthor with Clive Cussler of nine Isaac Bell novels. He lives in Connecticut with his wife, filmmaker Amber Edwards.

  clive-cussler-books.com

  cusslerbooks.com

  facebook.com/CliveCussler

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