The Race by Clive Cussler (red white royal blue .txt) 📗

the air like two fists, and her wheels and skids banged hard on the grass.

The burning biplane slid for fifty yards. As it slowed, the fire spread, scattering flame. When she felt it singe the back of her helmet, Josephine jumped. She hit the ground and threw herself flat to let the machine roll past, then she sprang to her feet and ran for her life as flames engulfed it.

Harry’s butler came running. He was trailed by the gardener, the cook, and Harry’s bodyguards.

“Mrs. Frost! Are you all right?”

Josephine’s eyes locked on the pillar of flame and smoke. Marco’s beautiful machine was burning like a funeral pyre. Poor Marco. The steadiness that had gotten her through the ordeal was dissolving, and she felt her lips quiver. The fire looked like it was underwater. She realized that she was shaking and crying, and that tears were filling her eyes. She couldn’t tell if she was crying for Marco or herself.

“Mrs. Frost!” the butler repeated. “Are you all right?”

It was the closest by far she had ever come to getting killed in an aeroplane.

She tried to pull her handkerchief from her sleeve. She couldn’t get it out. She had to take her glove off. When she did, she saw her skin was dead white, as if her blood had gone into hiding. Everything was different. She now knew what it felt like to be afraid.

“Mrs. Frost?”

They were all staring at her. Like she had cheated death or was standing among them like a ghost.

“I’m O.K.”

“May I do anything to help, Mrs. Frost?”

Her brain was whirling. She had to do something. She pressed her handkerchief to her face. A thousand men and women had learned to fly since Wilbur Wright won the Michelin Cup in France, and until this moment Josephine Josephs Frost had never doubted that she could drive an aeroplane just as fast and as far as any of them. Now every time she climbed onto a flying machine she would have to be brave. Well, it still beat being stuck on the ground.

She mopped her cheeks and blew her nose.

“Yes,” she said. “Drive into town, please, and tell Constable Hodge that Mr. Frost just shot Mr. Celere.”

The butler gasped, “What?”

She glanced at him sharply. How surprised could he be that her violent husband had killed someone? Again.

“Are you quite sure of that, Mrs. Frost?”

“Am I quite sure?” she echoed. “Yes, I saw it happen with my own eyes.”

The butler’s dubious expression was a chilling reminder that it was Harry who paid his salary, Harry who paid for everything, and Mrs. Frost was now a woman alone with no one to count on but herself.

The bodyguards didn’t look surprised. Their long faces said, There goes our meal ticket. The butler, too, was already getting over it, asking as routinely as if she had just ordered a glass of iced tea, “Will there be anything else, Mrs. Frost?”

“Please do what I asked,” she said in a voice with a slight tremor as she stared at the fire. “Tell the constable my husband killed Mr. Celere.”

“Yes, madam,” he replied in a blank tone.

Josephine turned her back on the fire. Her hazel eyes were wont to shift toward green or gray. She did not have to look in a mirror to know that right now they reflected a colorless fear. She was alone and she was vulnerable. With Marco Celere dead and her husband an insane killer, she had no one to turn to. Then the thought of Preston Whiteway flowed into her mind.

Yes, that’s who would protect her.

“One more thing,” she said to the butler as he started to walk away. “Send a telegram to Mr. Preston Whiteway at the San Francisco Inquirer. Say that I will visit him next week.”

2

“Hoopla!”

ISAAC BELL, CHIEF INVESTIGATOR of the Van Dorn Detective Agency, thundered up San Francisco’s Market Street in a fire-engine red gasoline-powered Locomobile racer with its exhaust cutout wide open for maximum power. Bell was a tall man of thirty with a thick mustache that glowed as golden as his precisely groomed blond hair. He wore an immaculate white suit and a low-crowned white hat with a wide brim. His frame was whipcord lean.

As he drove, his boots, well-kept and freshly polished, rarely touched the brake, an infamously ineffective Locomobile accessory. His long hands and fingers moved nimbly between throttle and shifter. His eyes, ordinarily a compelling violet shade of blue, were dark with concentration. A no-nonsense expression and a determined set of his jaw were tempered by a grin of pure pleasure as he raced the auto at breakneck speed, overtaking trolleys, trucks, horse carts, motorcycles, and slow automobiles.

In the red-leather passenger seat to Bell’s left sat the boss, Joseph Van Dorn.

The burly, red-whiskered founder of the nationwide detective agency was a brave man feared across the continent as the scourge of criminals. But he turned pale as Bell aimed the big machine at the dwindling space between a coal wagon and a Buick motortruck stacked to the rails with tins of kerosene and naphtha.

“We’re actually on time,” Van Dorn remarked. “Even a little early.”

Isaac Bell did not appear to hear him.

With relief, Van Dorn saw their destination looming over its shorter neighbors: Preston Whiteway’s twelve-story San Francisco Inquirer building, headquarters of the flamboyant publisher’s newspaper empire.

“Will you look at that!” Van Dorn shouted over the roar of the motor.

An enormous yellow advertising banner draped the top floor proclaiming in yard-high letters that Whiteway’s newspapers were sponsoring the

WHITEWAY ATLANTIC-TO-PACIFIC CROSS-COUNTRY AIR RACE

The Whiteway Cup and $50,000

To be awarded to the

First Flier

To Cross America in Fifty Days

“It’s a magnificent challenge,” Bell shouted back without taking his eyes from the crowded street.

Isaac Bell was fascinated by flying machines. He had been following their rapid development avidly, with the object of buying a top flier himself. There had been scores of improved aerial inventions in the past two years, each producing faster