Clive Cussler - The Wrecker

WITH A CLANG OF cast iron on stone and the crackle of splintering ash, the Kalamazoo Velocipede tumbled down the railroad embankment.

“What the hell is that?”

Jack Douglas, ninety-two, was so old he’d started out as an Indian fighter protecting the first western railroad’s right of way. The company kept him on out of rare sentiment and let him act as a sort of night watchman patrolling the quiet Glendale rail yard with a heavy single-action Colt .44 on his hip. He reached for it with a veined and bony hand and began sliding it with practiced ease from its oiled holster.

The Wrecker lunged with shocking swiftness. His thrust was so efficient that it would have caught a man his own age flat-footed. The watchman never had a chance. The telescoping sword was in his throat and out again before he crumpled to the ground.

The Wrecker looked down at the body in disgust. Of all the ridiculous things to go wrong. Jumped by an old geezer who should have been in bed hours ago. He shrugged and said, half aloud, with a smile, “Waste not, want not.” Pulling a poster from his coat pocket, he crushed it into a ball. Then he knelt beside the body, forced open the dead hand, and closed the fingers around the crumpled paper.

Dark and empty streets led to where the Southern Pacific rails crossed the narrow tracks of the Los Angeles amp; Glendale Electric Railway. The big green streetcars of the interurban passenger line did not run after midnight. Instead, taking advantage of inexpensive electricity purchased in bulk at night, the railway carried freight. Keeping a sharp eye for police, the Wrecker hopped aboard a car filled with milk cans and fresh carrots bound for Los Angeles.

It was growing light when he jumped off in the city and made his way across East Second Street. The dome of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway’s Moorish-style La Grande Station was silhouetted against a lurid red dawn. He retrieved a suitcase from the luggage room and changed out of his dusty clothes in the men’s room. Then he boarded the Santa Fe’s flyer to Albuquerque and sat down to a breakfast of steak and eggs and fresh-baked rolls in a dining car set with silver and china.

As the flyer’s locomotive gathered way, the imperious conductor of the express passenger train came through, demanding, “Tickets, gents.”

Affecting the brusque attitude of a man who traveled regularly for business, the Wrecker did not bother to look up from his Los Angeles Times, which allowed him to keep his face down, concealing his features, as he wiped his fingers on a fine linen napkin and fished out his wallet.

“You’ve cut your finger!” said the conductor, staring at a bright red bloodstain on the napkin.

“Stropping my razor,” said the Wrecker, still not looking up from his newspaper while cursing again the drunken blacksmith he wished he had killed.

IT WAS STILL THREE IN THE MORNING WHEN ISAAC BELL bounded off the train before it stopped rolling onto the waterfront terminal on Oakland Mole. This was the end of the line for westbound passengers, a mile-long arm of rock that the Southern Pacific Railroad had built into San Francisco Bay. The pier reached another mile into the bay to deliver freight trains to seagoing vessels and boxcar floats to the city, but passengers transferred here to their ferry.

Bell ran for the ferry, scanning the bustling terminal for Lori March, the old farm woman from whom he always bought flowers. Nestled in the bottom of his watch pocket was a small, flat key to Marion Morgan’s apartment.

Drowsy newsboys with seeds in their hair from the hay barges where they slept were crying in shrill voices “Extra! Extra!” and waving special editions of every newspaper printed in San Francisco.

The first headline to rivet Isaac Bell’s eye stopped him dead. TRAIN WRECKERS DITCH COAST LINE

LIMITED AT GLENDALE

Bell felt as if he’d taken a bowie knife in the stomach. Glendale was seven hundred miles from the Cascades Cutoff.

“Mr. Bell, sir? Mr. Bell?”

Right behind the newsboy was an operative from Van Dorn’s San Francisco office. He didn’t look much older than the kid hawking the papers. His brown hair was pillow-flattened against his head, and he had a sleep wrinkle still creasing his cheek. But his bright blue eyes were wide with excitement.

“I’m Dashwood, Mr. Bell. San Francisco office. Mr. Bronson left me in charge when he took everyone to Sacramento. They won’t be back until tomorrow.”

“What do you know about the Limited?”

“I just spoke with the railway police supervisor here in Oakland. It looks like they dynamited the locomotive, blew it right off the tracks.”

“How many killed?”

“Six, so far. Fifty injured. Some missing.”

“When’s the next train to Los Angeles?”

“There’s a flyer leaving in ten minutes.”

“I’ll be on it. Telephone the Los Angeles office. Tell them I said to get to the wreck and don’t let anyone touch anything. Including the police.”

Young Dashwood leaned in close, as if to impart information not privy to the newsboys, and whispered, “The police think the train wrecker was killed in the explosion.”

“What?”

“A union agitator named William Wright. Obviously, a radical.”

“Who says?”

“Everybody.”

Isaac Bell cast a cold eye on the kaleidoscope of headlines that the newsboys were brandishing.

DEED OF DASTARDS

DEATH LIST SWELLS. TWENTY LIVES LOST

TRAIN WRECKERS DYNAMITE LOCOMOTIVE

EXPRESS PLUNGES INTO RIVERBED

He suspected that the closest to actual fact was EXPRESS PLUNGES INTO RIVERBED. How it happened was speculation. How could they possibly know the death toll of a wreck that happened just hours ago, five hundred miles away? He was not surprised that the lurid headline DEATH LIST SWELLS. TWENTY LIVES LOST was splashed on a newspaper owned by yellow journalist Preston Whiteway, a man who never let facts get in the way of sales. Marion Morgan had just started to work as the assistant to the editor of his San Francisco Inquirer.

“Dashwood! What’s your given name?”

“Jimmy-James.”

“O.K., James. Here’s what I want you to do. Find out everything about Mr. William Wright that ‘everybody’ doesn’t know. What union does he belong to? Is he an official of that union? What have the police arrested him for? What are his grievances? Who are his associates?” Staring down at the smaller man, he fixed James Dashwood in a powerful gaze. “Can you do that for me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s vital that we know whether he worked alone or with a gang. You have my authority to call on every Van Dorn operative you need to help you. Wire your report to me care of the Southern Pacific’s Burbank station. I’ll read it when I get off the train.”

As the Los Angeles flyer steamed from the piers, the fog was thick, and Isaac Bell looked in vain for the electric lights of San Francisco twinkling across the bay. He checked his watch that the train had departed on time. When he returned the watch to its pocket, he felt the brass key that shared the same space. He had planned to surprise Marion with a middle-of the-night visit. Instead, he was the one surprised. Badly surprised. The Wrecker’s reach extended much further than he had presumed. And more innocent people had died.

THE SHARP SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA noonday sun illuminated wreckage unlike any Isaac Bell had ever seen. The front of the Coast Line Limited’s locomotive stood pitched forward, intact, at a steep angle in a dry riverbed at the bottom of the railroad embankment. The cowcatcher in the ground and the headlight and smokestack were readily identifiable. Behind them, where the rest of locomotive should be, all that remained was a crazy spiderweb of boiler tubes, scores of pipes twisted at every angle imaginable. Some ninety tons of steel boiler, brick firebox, cab, pistons, and drive wheels had disappeared.