Clive Cussler - The Wrecker

When it was over and Dashwood saw no one in the dwindling crowd who resembled the blacksmith, he approached the dais.

“One more?” asked Captain Willy, who was packing up his notes. “Always time for one more pledge.”

“I’ve already pledged,” said Dashwood, flourishing a Total Abstinence Declaration registered four days earlier by the Ventura chapter of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. He had ten more in his suitcase, along with the train-wrecking hook fashioned from an anchor and a stack of the lumberjack’s sketches.

“I’m looking for a friend, whom I hope has taken the pledge but might have stumbled. He’s disappeared, and I fear the worst. A tall, strapping fellow, a blacksmith named Jim Higgins.”

“Blacksmith? Big man. Sloped shoulders. Dark hair? Sad and weary eyes.”

“You’ve seen him?”

“Seen him? You bet I’ve seen him. Thanks to me, the poor devil’s mended his ways. In the extreme.”

“How do you mean?”

“Instead of taking the pledge never to drink alcohol again, he’s pledged to give up everything a man could ever want.”

“I don’t follow you, Captain Willy.”

The speaker looked around, confirmed there were no women within earshot, and dropped a wrinkled lid over a bloodshot eye. “Gave up drink, gave up worldly possessions, even gave up girls. Now, I truly believe, brother, that drinking and drunkenness are inseparable evils. Our Savior Jesus Himself could not keep His customers sober if He ran a saloon. But never let it be said that Captain Willy advocates abandoning all earthly pleasures.”

“What did Jim Higgins do?”

“Last I heard, he became a monk.”

“A monk?”

“Joined a monastery, that’s what he’s done.”

James Dashwood whipped out his notebook.

“Which order?”

“Not sure about that. Order of Saint Somebody or other. I had never heard of them before. Not one of the regulars, sort of an offshoot… like you find in these parts.”

“Where?”

“Up the coast a ways. Understand they have a heck of a spread.”

“What town?”

“Somewhere north of Morro Bay, I believe.”

“In the hills or by the sea?” Dashwood pressed.

“Both, I heard. Heck of a spread.”

IT HAD BEEN FORTY years since the first transatlantic telegraph cable annihilated time and space. By 1907, more than a dozen stretched under the ocean between Ireland and Newfoundland. The latest could transmit a hundred twenty words per minute. As Isaac Bell rocketed west, a notable share of the cable’s capacity was taken up by the Van Dorn Detective Agency gathering information on the Wrecker’s European bankers.

Cablegrams poured aboard at every crew change and water stop. By the time he reached Buffalo in his chartered Atlantic 4-4-2-a high-wheeled racer born for the lakeshore water-level route-Bell had a suitcase full of paper. Van Dorn agents and research contractors joined him along the way, specialists in banking, and French and German translators. There were general reports, at first, on the European financing of railroads in China, South America, Africa, and Asia Minor. Then, as the agency’s contacts dug deeper, the reports grew more specific, with repeated references to Schane amp; Simon Company, a little-known German investment house.

Bell picked up a Pullman sleeper in Toledo for his growing staff and replaced the 4-4-2 with a more powerful Baldwin 4-6-0. He added a dining car in Chicago so the investigators could spread their work out on the tables as they sped through Illinois and Iowa.

They crossed Kansas, switching locomotives to the new, highly efficient Baldwin balanced compound Atlantics for speeding up the light but relentless grade of the Great Plains. They picked up wires at every stop. The diner’s tables were buried under their yellow paper. Isaac Bell’s operatives, accountants, and auditors named their special train the Van Dorn Express.

The Rocky Mountains came into view, blue as the sky, then hardening out of the mist into three distinct snowcapped ranges. The railroad’s Mountain Division superintendents, eager to help, wheeled out their best Prairie-type engines, with Vauclain compound cylinders, to suit the grade. So far on the cross-country run, a total of eighteen locomotives and fifteen crews had driven the Van Dorn Express at speeds that surpassed the previous year’s record time of fifty hours from Chicago.

Bell saw a pattern swirling around Schane amp; Simon, which was based in Berlin. Years ago, it had forged close ties with the German government through the powerful chancellor Otto von Bismarck. These ties had grown stronger under the current ruler, Kaiser Wilhelm. Van Dorn’s sources reported that the banking house appeared to have channeled government money to the builders of the Baghdad Railway secretly to maintain the fiction that Germany was not building the railroad to a Persian Gulf port to challenge British, French, and Russian interests in the Near East.

“Senator Charles Kincaid’s employer, I recall,” said one of the translators, who had served with the Department of State before Joseph Van Dorn lured him away.

“In his ‘Hero Engineer’ days.”

Bell wired Sacramento to look for transactions between Schane amp; Simon and members of Osgood Hennessy’s inner circle.

Charles Kincaid, of course, had remained foremost in Isaac Bell’s mind ever since his father had explained that foreign holding companies and their secret owner would be shielded by corrupt government officials. Surely, a U.S. senator could do much to promote the Wrecker’s interests and guard his secrets. But what motive would drive Kincaid to risk his already lucrative political career? Money? Much more than he got from Southern Pacific Railroad stock. Anger at Hennessy for not encouraging Lillian to marry him? Or was courting her a ruse, an excuse to hang around Hennessy’s ever-rolling headquarters?

But how did spying for the Wrecker jibe with his presidential aspirations? Or was he encouraging Preston Whiteway to launch the campaign merely to provide a smoke screen? Had Charles Kincaid surrendered political dreams to concentrate on accumulating an immense fortune in bribes? Or, as Bell’s father suggested, was he so arrogant as to believe he could get away with both?

EBENEZER BELL’S DEFINITION OF “beating the bushes” was broad and enterprising. The president of the American States Bank had started out querying trusted friends and associates in Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C., by telephone, telegraph, and private messenger. Learning what he could through lofty connections, he then delved deep into the middle of the country, paying particular attention to St. Louis, home of the burned-out Union Pier amp; Caisson Company. In the West, information he gathered canvassing the top bankers of San Francisco, Denver, and Portland led him to call in favors from smaller banks in California and Oregon.

A request from the patrician Boston banker prompted a private meeting in Eureka, a deepwater port serving the redwood timber industry two hundred twenty-five miles north of San Francisco. Stanley Perrone, the rough-and-ready president of the Northwest Coast Bank of Eureka, dropped by the office of up-and-coming lumberman A. J. Gottfried. Gottfried had borrowed heavily from Perrone’s bank to modernize the Humboldt Bay Lumber Company. His office overlooked his timber pier, which jutted into the rain-lashed harbor.

Gottfried pulled a bottle of good bourbon from his desk, and the men sipped whiskey for a while, chatting about the weather. That it was turning from awful to worse could be predicted by the sight of a red steam launch chugging purposefully between the moored and anchored lumber schooners.

“Son of a gun. Looks like we’re getting hit again.”