Free The Thief by Clive Cussler, Justin Scott

Bill Chambers and Parnell Hall let go of their wheelbarrows and made the sign of the cross. The man they knew as the German was in a fighting class by himself.
    As the poet said, plague and famine ran together.

    T HROUGH HIS R EGAL S UITE bathroom door, Hermann Wagner listened to the leader of the Donar Plan wash off the coal dust in the needle-spray shower affixed to his porcelain tub.
    “Turn around,” Donar called through the door. Earlier, he had warned in a cold voice that left no doubt of the consequence, “Never look upon my face.”
    Wagner stepped into the parlor and turned his back. His throat hurt since the man had nearly squeezed the life out of him.
    “Order your dinner in your suite tonight so you may stand guard while I sleep.”
    Wagner, who sang in his church choir and had an ear for voices, heard something slightly off-key in Donar’s High German accent. While smooth and guttural, with the expected educated flair, now and then the tones of the Prussian upper crust roughened like a peasant’s. “Shall I order food for you, too?”
    “Don’t be ridiculous. One passenger doesn’t eat two meals.”
    “I meant so you might have dinner, too.”
    “I’ll eat yours.”
    “Yes, of course. I see.” He heard Donar walk from the bathroom into his bedroom.
    “Wipe up that coal dust before the bath steward sees it.”
    Hermann Wagner got down on his hands and knees to scrub his own bathroom, something he had not done since he was twelve years old, in the strict boarding school his father had sent him to “make him hard.”
    He did not mind. It was an honor to be among the elite diplomats, bankers, and merchants drafted into the Donar Plan. Admittedly, he was no soldier. Nor was he privy to the details of the military scheme. But he could travel freely in the United States of America while conducting legitimate business and mingle in the highest echelons.
    Der Tag was coming. Victory depended not only on soldiers. There would be no victory unless a patriot like Hermann Wagner did his part to persuade Americans to join the war on Germany’s side—or at least stay out of it while Germany destroyed Russia, France, and Britain.

A T DAWN THE NEWLY WED I SAAC B ELL SLIPPED silently out of bed, kissed his sleeping bride softly on her brow, dressed quietly, and went out on the promenade deck. It was bitter cold, and the sea was making up again. Long, evenly spaced rollers marched out of the northwest. The sky was clear but for jagged clouds stacked on the horizon like ice-capped mountains. The wind was strong, and the smoke from Mauretania ’s tall red funnels streamed flat behind her.
    He went straight to the point on the starboard side that the man who jumped from the boat deck would have passed as he fell. Somehow, Bell suspected, he had managed to land safely on the promenade deck—although that did not seem possible, as the boat deck was not set back and the promenade deck did not thrust farther out. But Beiderbecke had called him an acrobat.
    Bell paced the area, his eyes roaming. Assume, he thought, that the Akrobat was a real acrobat. Assume he was a trained circus tumbler or trapeze artist. Assume he was extraordinarily strong, astonishingly agile, with no fear of heights and nerves of steel.
    Bell smiled, suddenly gripped by a fond memory. He had run away from home to join the circus when he was a boy. Before his father caught up with him in a Mississippi fairground, he had befriended animal tamers, clowns, horseback performers, and especially the acrobats, whom he revered for their bravery and their strength.
    Assume this Akrobat possessed every power of a professional big top performer who had honed his skills since childhood, as circus stars did. Surely, from what Bell had seen the night they sailed, the man was indeed strong and agile, with no fear of heights and nerves of steel. Was it possible for such a man to jump off the boat deck, drop ten feet down the sheer side of the ship, and swing