The Wrecker by Clive Cussler (book club reads .TXT) 📕

jacket and eyeglasses, Kincaid might have passed for a retired banker or even a university professor were it not for the scars from his miraculous escape from the Cascade Canyon. A shattered cheekbone flattened the left side of his once-handsome face. His left arm ended abruptly just below his elbow. His expression mirrored his scars. His eyes were bitter, his mouth twisted with disappointment. But the sight of Isaac Bell seemed to invigorate him, and his manner turned mocking and scornful.

“You can’t arrest me. This is Germany.”

“You’ll stand trial in the United States.”

“Are your ears failing with age?” Kincaid mocked. “Listen closely. As a loyal friend of the new government, I enjoy the full protection of the state.”

Bell pulled handcuffs from his ski jacket. “It would be easier for me to kill you than bring you in alive. So keep in mind what happened to your nose last time you tried to pull a fast one while I put the cuffs on you. Turn around.”

Covering Kincaid with his pistol, he clamped one cuff around his whole wrist and the other tightly above the elbow of his maimed arm. He confirmed that Kincaid could not slip it over the protruding joint.

The sound of the cuff locking seemed to paralyze Charles Kincaid. Voice anguished, gaze dull, he asked Isaac Bell, “How did you do this to me? The German Geheime Staatspolizei intercept everyone that comes within twenty miles of my castle.”

“That’s why I came alone. The back way.”

Kincaid groaned as he abandoned all hope.

Bell looked his prisoner in the eye. “You will pay for your crimes.”

The music stopped abruptly, and Bell realized that it had not been a phonograph but an actual piano. He heard a door open and a rustle of silk, and Emma Comden glided into the apartment in a stylish, bias-cut dress that appeared sculpted to her curves. Like Kincaid, her face revealed the years, but minus the scars and the bitter rage that ravished his. Her lines of age, her wrinkles and her crow‘s-feet, traveled the route of smiles and laughter. Though tonight her dark eyes were somber.

“Hello, Isaac. I always knew we’d see you one day.”

Bell was taken aback. He had always liked her, before he knew she had been Kincaid’s accomplice. It was impossible to separate the spying she had done for the Wrecker from the men he had murdered. He said coldly, “Emma, fortunately for you I have room for only one or you’d be coming with me, too.”

She said, “Rest easy, Isaac. You will punish me by taking him from me. And I will suffer for my crime in a way that only you could understand.”

“What do you mean?”

“As you love your Marion, I love him ... May I say good-bye?”

Bell stepped back.

She stood on tiptoe to kiss Kincaid’s flattened cheek. As she did, she slid a small pocket pistol toward Kincaid’s cuffed hand.

Bell said, “Emma, I will shoot you both if you pass him that gun. Drop it!”

She froze. But instead of dropping the gun or pointing it at him, she jerked the trigger. The shot was muffled by Kincaid’s body. He went down hard, landing on his back.

“Emma!” he gasped. “Damn you, what’s going on?”

“I cannot bear to think of you dying in prison or executed in the electric chair.”

“How could you betray me?”

Emma Comden tried to say more, and when she could not she turned beseechingly to Isaac Bell.

“She hasn’t betrayed you,” Bell answered bleakly. “She’s given you a gift you don’t deserve.”

Kincaid’s eyes closed. He died with a whisper on his lips.

“What did he say?” asked Bell.

“He said, ‘I deserve everything I want.’ That was his worst belief and his greatest strength.”

“He’s still coming with me.”

“The Van Dorns never give up until they get their man?” she asked bitterly. “Alive or dead?”

“Never.”

Emma sank to her knees, sobbing over Kincaid’s body. Despite himself, Bell was moved. He asked, “Will you be all right here?”

“I will survive,” she said. “I always do.”

Emma Comden retreated to her piano and began to play a sad, slow rag. As Bell knelt to hoist Kincaid’s body onto his shoulder, he recognized a melancholy improvisation on a song she had played long ago on a special in the Oakland Terminal, Adaline Shepherd’s “Pickles and Peppers.”

Bell carried the Wrecker’s body down the stairs and out the tower door and into the snow. Across the courtyard, he opened the single bolt he had left in place, pushed through the massive gate and along the wall to where he had left the sled. He strapped it into the canvas litter, put on his skis, and started down the mountain.

It was a somewhat easier run than the long, brutal slog across the valley, three miles of steep but regular slopes. And though the snow fell thicker than ever, navigation was a simple matter of going downhill. But, as Hans had warned him, the slope tilted suddenly much more sharply for the last thousand yards to the village. Tiring, starting to lose control of his legs, he fell. He got up, righted the sled, and got close enough to see the railroad station lights before he fell again. Back on his skis, the sled upright, he descended the last two hundred yards without incident and stopped behind a shed a short way from the station.

“Halt!”

A man was watching from the doorway. Bell recognized the trench coat and high officer’s visor cap of the Geheime Staatspolizei.

“You look straight out of vaudeville.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” said Archie Abbott. “And I’ll take our friend to the baggage car.” He wheeled a wood coffin from the shed. “Do we have to worry about him having enough air to breathe?”

“No.”

They heaved Kincaid, still wrapped in the litter, into it and screwed the lid shut.

“Train on time?”

“It takes more than a blizzard to delay a German railroad. Got your ticket? I’ll see you at the border.”

A halo of snow whirled by a rotary plow in front of the train sparkled in the locomotive’s headlight