Clive Cussler - The Wrecker

Hennessy’s telegrapher handed Bell a wad of encoded messages.

No telegraph operator on the continent had been more closely scrutinized than J. J. Meadows had been by the Van Dorn Agency. “Honest as the day is long and beholden to no man,” was the verdict. But with the memory still fresh of the Wrecker’s renegade telegraphers shooting it out with Texas Walt Hatfield, Bell was taking no chances. All his Van Dorn correspondence was encrypted. He locked the door to his private stateroom, two cars back on the special, and decoded them.

These were the first results of the background reports Bell had ordered to ferret out the spy in the railroad president’s inner circle. Nothing in the record of the Southern Pacific’s head engineer suggested he was less than respectable. He was loyal to the Southern Pacific, loyal to Osgood Hennessy, and loyal to the high standards of his profession.

The same was said for Franklin Mowery. The bridge builder’s life was an open book studded with professional accomplishment. His many charitable deeds included serving as a director of a Methodist orphanage.

Lillian Hennessy had been arrested a surprising number of times for such a young and privileged woman, but only while demonstrating for the right to vote. The charges had always been dismissed. Testament, Bell assumed, to overzealous policing or the power of a doting father who happened to be president of the nation’s biggest railroad.

Of the two bankers Hennessy had named who might have deduced his plans, one had been convicted of fraud, the other named as a correspondent in a divorce. One of the attorneys had been disbarred in Illinois, another had amassed a fortune in railroad stock by buying with foreknowledge of the railroads’ intentions. On closer examination, the Van Dorn investigators reported, both bankers had transgressed in their youth, while the disbarred attorney had subsequently been readmitted. But the holder of the fortune, Erastus Charney, drew Bell’s interest, as he was clearly a man who traded on the power of knowing ahead of time which way the wind blew. Bell wired to dig deep into Charney’s affairs.

Bell was not surprised that the lively Mrs. Comden had lived a colorful life even before she became consort to the railroad magnate. A child piano prodigy, she’d made her concert debut with the New York Philharmonic at age fourteen, performing Chopin’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 2 in F Minor-“a bear to play at any age,” noted the Van Dorn operative. She had toured the United States and Europe, where she stayed to study in Leipzig. She had married a wealthy physician connected at the German court, who’d then divorced her when she ran off with a highborn officer of the First Guards Cavalry Brigade. They had lived together in Berlin until the officer’s scandalized family intervened. Emma then married a struggling portrait painter named Comden, only to be widowed within the year. Penniless, her concert-playing days behind her, the Widow Comden had landed in New York, drifted to New Orleans and San Francisco, and answered a newspaper ad to tutor Lillian Hennessy. Her nomadic ways continued on the luxurious special employed by the ever-moving Hennessy. On the rare occasions that the irascible Osgood appeared socially, the lovely Mrs. Comden was at his side. And woe, noted the Van Dorn operative, to the fortunes of the politician, banker, or industrialist whose wife dared snub her.

Charles Kincaid’s life had been far less colorful than Preston Whiteway’s newspapers led readers to believe. He had studied engineering briefly at West Point, switched to civil engineering at the University of West Virginia, done postgraduate work in civil engineering at the Technische Hochschule of Munich, and hired on with a German firm building the Baghdad Railway. The facts behind his “Hero Engineer” moniker were questionable. That Turkish revolutionaries had frightened American nurses and missionaries tending to Armenian refugees was likely. The Whiteway newspaper accounts of Kincaid’s role in their rescue were, the Van Dorn operative noted acerbically, “less so.”

Bell fired back two more queries: “Why did Kincaid leave West Point?” and “Who is Eric Soares?”

Franklin Mowery’s assistant was always at his side. Whatever special knowledge of Hennessy’s affairs that the bridge builder knew, young Eric would know, too.

Speaking of young assistants, what was taking James Dashwood so long to catch up with the blacksmith who had fashioned the hook that derailed the Coast Line Special? Isaac Bell reread Dashwood’s meticulously detailed reports. Then he wired the apprentice care of the Los Angeles office.BLACKSMITH STOPPED DRINKING.INQUIRE TEMPERANCE MEETINGS.

ISAAC BELL RECEIVED A report from the Kansas City office that Eric Soares was an orphan whom Franklin Mowery had sponsored through Cornell University and had taken on as his assistant. Soares was by some accounts a talented engineer, by others an upstart riding the coattails of a famously generous man.

Bell reflected upon the fact that Mowery did not have the physical stamina or agility to do fieldwork without help. Eric would perform duties that required physical activity, such as inspecting work done on the bridge. He telegraphed Kansas City to keep digging.

“Private wire, Mr. Bell.”

“Thank you, Mr. Meadows.”

Bell took the telegram to his stateroom, hoping it was from Marion. It was, and he exclaimed with pleasure when he read:DO NOT-REPEAT NOT-WISH TO JOIN PRESTONWHITEWAY CASCADE LODGE FOR PICTURE WORLDNEWSREELS. BUT ARE YOU STILL THERE? IF SO, WHAT DO YOU WISH?

Bell called on Lillian Hennessy. His schemes to extricate himself from the girl’s infatuation and rescue Archie Abbott from his mother seemed to be working. Since his return from New York, most of their conversations veered toward the subject of Abbott, and she tended now to treat Bell as an adored big brother or older cousin. After they spoke, he wired Marion back.COME! BE HENNESSY’S GUEST ABOARD SPECIAL.

While Bell pursued his investigation, and kept honing his efforts to protect the Cascade Canyon Bridge, the railroad forged ahead. Two days after the cutoff had crossed the canyon, the staging area on the far plateau had room and track to accommodate the endless strings of freight cars arriving with steel rail, spikes, ballast, and coal. A creosoting plant arrived in parts. It was assembled alongside the stockpiled crossties and was soon belching noxious black smoke as raw wood entered one end and floated out the other steeped in preservative.

Wagons that had delivered the ties down twisted mountain trails from the remote East Oregon Lumber Company now carried planks and beams. An entire trainload of carpenters hammered together tin-roofed roundhouses for the locomotives, powerhouses to shelter dynamos for electricity, blacksmith shops, kitchens, bunkhouses for the track gangs, stables for the mules and horses.

Holed through the last tunnel, connected to the bridge and linked by it to strategically positioned staging yards, Hennessy could now bring in men and material directly from California. The task of guarding the four-hundred-mile route as well as the bridge fell to Van Dorn detectives and Southern Pacific railway police. Isaac Bell urged Joseph Van Dorn to borrow U.S. Army troops to assist their thinly spread force.

EIGHT MILES UPSTREAM FROM the Cascade Canyon Bridge, the East Oregon Lumber Company’s forest rang from dawn to dark with the incessant bite of double-bladed axes. Modern high-lead winches snaked logs from the steepest slopes. “Steam donkeys,” powerful stationary steam engines, turned drums of wire rope that hauled logs to the mill on a corduroy skid road. Tie after tie was sawn and squared and sent down the terrible roads by wagon. When work stopped at night, the exhausted lumberjacks could hear the distant moan of locomotive whistles, a reminder even as they slept that the railroad craved more timber.