Читать онлайн «The Silver Bullet»
Автор Джим ДеФелис
Jim DeFelice
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Jim DeFelice
The silver bullet
Chapter One
Late May, 1777
Jake Stewart Gibbs stepped through the finely carpentered doorway and was immediately hooked around the neck. With a sharp yank, he was dragged inside the upstairs room of the small inn on the northern outskirts of Albany.
Taken by surprise but far from bested, Jake used only a portion of his strength as sham resistance until he could map a counterattack. It was soon done: Kicking the door closed to cut off any pursuers, he lunged forward. The momentum of his lean, six-foot-two frame pushed himself and his assailant face-first onto the large featherbed, which after all wasn't that horrible a place to be.
"So I see you've missed me," Jake said.
"You told me you'd be back in a week," answered his captor. "I've waited all this time. "
"Two years?"
"Nearly. "
"You never got my letters?"
"Not one," she said, a little too quickly to be believed.
"But I heard you were engaged. " Jake paused to take advantage of his situation with a kiss. He'd spent the entire day riding from Kingston, hoping Sarah Thomas' lips were as full and warm as he remembered.
They were.
"Oh, that wasn't a real engagement," said Sarah. "He was a Tory. I accepted his proposal as a diversion. It was a plot. "
"I see. "
"I was trying on your profession," she said, reaching up to unbutton the top of Jake's waistcoat. The round disks were cut into twelve-pointed stars that caught slightly as she slipped them between the vest's felt-faced holes. The buttons were not merely fashionable; their design was a clandestine signal to a small coterie of Patriots that the sharply dressed young man leaning on the bed was an officer of the special services — a spy, to use the vernacular, though the word covers but a tenth of the activities he pursued in the name of Liberty. Jake Gibbs' adventures in New York and the Jerseys this past month and a half alone were literally the equivalent and worth of three brigades: the first had been saved because his intelligence had helped it avoid an ambush, the second was not needed for his single-handed capture of a high-ranking British officer traveling behind the lines to Philadelphia, and the third had been freed from prison through his planning and leadership of a daring midnight raid on a small town near Brunswick.
Jake Gibbs' service to Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene, and through Greene to General Washington himself, had covered a wide swath of territory and circumstance since he joined the Rhode Islander after the disastrous 1775 winter campaign in Canada. But the only territory he was interested in exploring now sat immediately in front of him.
