Alston quickly confessed. The orders had come from the Pinkerton's Chicago headquarters. He was to cooperate with a nine-man team from the black market, sent to eliminate Henry. Four of them had already arrived; the other five were due to arrive at the safe house today.
Henry questioned him further, gathering what intelligence he could on the Pinkerton's Chicago leadership. When he was finished, he ignored the man's desperate pleas and put a wet towel over his face.
He found Alston's secret safe and emptied it of its contents: $12,000 in cash, a thousand ounces of gold bars, and five property deeds.
When he was done, he removed the towel.
"It was you, wasn't it? Mr. Henry?" Alston gasped. "I have no quarrel with you! I was just following orders! Let me go…"
Henry's fist shot out, crushing the man's windpipe. He then snapped his neck and stored the body.
He went downstairs. He set a fire in the third-floor intelligence center, then went to the second floor and set another in the warehouse, and a third on the ground floor. He then went outside to the guardhouse, doused it with kerosene, and set it ablaze as well.
He fled into the darkness.
Three minutes later, from a safe distance, he raised a Sharps 1874 rifle and fired a single shot into a third-floor dormitory window. He fired a second shot into a fourth-floor window.
The massive, .50 caliber rounds tore through the walls, the sound of the impacts waking the men inside. They smelled the smoke, saw the raging inferno, and scrambled for their lives.
Henry then disappeared into the night.
Twenty minutes later, he was back near the Astor House hotel. He found the three possible surveillance points the detective had described. The first was empty.
At the second, he found two men with two horses, hidden in the shadows. They saw his tall frame and immediately recognized him, their hands flying to their guns.
Four throwing knives flew from the darkness, and the two men collapsed without a sound. Henry searched them, found their Pinkerton badges, and stored their bodies. He left their horses. He was running low on storage space.
He went to the back of the hotel, below the balcony of his own suite. He threw his grappling hook, the iron claws catching perfectly on the cast-iron railing nine meters above. He ascended the rope, climbed onto the balcony, and slipped back into his room.
The Pinkerton building was now a roaring inferno, the flames lighting up the night sky. But thanks to his warning shots, no lives had been lost. The agents and guards had all escaped, though with nothing but the clothes on their backs. They also soon realized that their chief, Alston, and the six guards from the ground floor were all missing.
Henry took a shower, then sat with a cup of hot coffee and reviewed the night's events.
He had killed seventeen men and gained a handful of pearls. One of them, from the assassin Phillips, had yielded a new talent: Self-Healing LV 1. A powerful, life-saving gift.
The assassination attempt had also taught him something valuable. The combination of his LV 2 Precognition, his LV 2 Super Vision, and his LV 2 Super Reflexes now made him effectively immune to long-range gunfire in daylight. If a bullet took more than a second to reach him, he could simply step out of its path.
His warning shots at the Pinkerton building were a calculated move. He had no quarrel with the rank-and-file detectives. His fight was with their leaders. The men he had killed were the ones who had been directly involved in the plot against him. This was a warning.
But he knew it was a warning they were unlikely to heed. Men of power do not learn respect until they are staring into the abyss.
The next morning, Henry sent a telegram to Mayor William, informing him that his plans had changed and that he would be returning to Frisco a few days later than Alice. He then had the carriage take him to 59th street, the border between Midtown and the wilderness of Central Park.