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

“Let’s get to it. Isaac Bell is in charge of this investigation. When he speaks, he speaks with my authority. Isaac, tell them what you have in mind.”

Bell looked from face to face before he spoke. He had worked with, or knew of, all the heads of the western cities’ agencies: Phoenix, Salt Lake, Boise, Seattle, Spokane, Portland, Sacramento, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, and the other agents Van Dorn had rounded up.

Among the standouts were the immense, powerfully built director of the San Francisco office, Horace Bronson, and short, fat Arthur Curtis, with whom Bell had worked on the Butcher Bandit case, on which they’d lost a mutual friend in Curtis’s partner, Glenn Irvine.

“Texas” Walt Hatfield, a barbed-wire-lean former ranger who specialized in stopping railroad express-car robberies, would be of particular value on this case. As would Kansas City’s Eddie Edwards, a prematurely white-haired gent who was expert at rousting city gangs out of freight yards, where sidelined trains were particularly vulnerable to robbery and sabotage.

The oldest in the room were ice-eyed Mack Fulton from Boston, who knew every safecracker in the country, and his partner, explosives expert Wally Kisley, dressed in his trademark three-piece drummer’s suit with a loud pattern bright as a checkerboard. Mack and Wally had teamed up since the early days in Chicago. Quick with a joke or a prank, they were known in the agency as “Weber and Fields” after the famous vaudeville comedians and producers of burlesque musicals on Broadway.

Last came Bell’s particular friend, Archie Abbott from New York, a near-invisible undercover man, sidling through Miss Anne’s kitchen door, dressed like a tramp looking for a handout.

Bell said, “If someone detonates a bomb in here, every outlaw on the continent will be buying drinks.”

Their laughter was subdued. Texas Walt Hatfield asked the question that was on many minds, “Isaac, you fixing to tell us why we’re hunkered down in a sportin’ house like we was longhorns canyon-skulking on roundup morning?”

“Because we’re up against a saboteur who thinks big, plans smart, and doesn’t give a hoot who he kills.”

“Well, now that you put it that way—”

“He is a vicious, ruthless murderer. He’s done so much damage already and killed so many innocent people that the hobos took notice and nicknamed him ‘the Wrecker.’ His target appears to be the Southern Pacific Railroad Cascades Cutoff. The railroad is our client. The Wrecker is our target. The Van Dorn Detective Agency has two jobs: protect the client by stopping the Wrecker from doing any more damage and catch him with enough proof to hang him.”

Bell nodded briskly. A male secretary in shirtsleeves sprang forward to drape a railroad map over a picture of nymphs in their bath. The map depicted the western railroads from Salt Lake City to San Francisco that served California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, and Arizona.

“To pinpoint the railroad’s most vulnerable locations, I’ve invited Jethro Watt, superintendent of railway police, to fill you in.”

The detectives responded with derisive mutters.

Isaac Bell quieted them with a cold glance. “We all know the shortcomings of the railroad dicks. But Van Dorn hasn’t the manpower to cover eight thousand miles of track. Jethro has information we couldn’t learn on our own. So if anyone in this room says anything to make Superintendent Watt less than enthusiastically cooperative, he’ll answer to me.”

At Bell’s command, the secretary ushered in Superintendent Watt, who in appearance did not contradict the detectives’ low expectations of railway police. From the greasy hair pasted to the forehead above his ill-shaven, bad-tempered face to his grimy collar, wrinkled coat and trousers, to his scuffed boots to the bulges in his clothing that bespoke cannon-caliber sidearms, saps, and billy clubs, Jethro Watt, who was nearly as tall as Isaac Bell and twice as wide, looked like the prototype for every yard bull and cinder dick in the country. Then he opened his mouth and surprised them all.

“There’s an old saying: ‘Nothing is impossible for the Southern Pacific.’

“What railroad men mean by that is this: We do it all. We grade our own road. We lay our own track. We build our own locomotives and rolling stock. We erect our own bridges—forty in the new expansion, in addition to Cascade Canyon. We bore our own tunnels—they’ll be fifty before we’re done. We maintain our own machinery. We invent special High Sierra snowplows for winter, fire trains for summer. We are a mighty enterprise.”

With neither a softer tone nor the hint of smile, he added, “On San Francisco Bay, our ferry passengers crossing from Oakland Mole to the City claim that our machine shops even bake the doughnuts we sell on our boats. Like ‘em or not, they still eat ’em. The Southern Pacific is a mighty enterprise. Like us or not.”

Jethro Watt’s bloodshot eye fell on the ornate bar heaped high with a pyramid of crystal decanters, and he wet his lips.

“A mighty enterprise makes many enemies. If a fella climbs out of the wrong side of bed in the morning, he’ll blame the railroad. If his crop fails, he’ll blame the railroad. If he loses his farm, he’ll blame the railroad. If his union can’t raise his wages, he’ll blame the railroad. If he gets laid off in a Panic, he’ll blame the railroad. If his bank closes and can’t return his money, he’ll blame the railroad. Sometimes he gets mad enough to transact a little business with the express car. Robbing trains. But worse than robbing trains is sabotage. Worse, and harder to stop because a mighty enterprise makes a mammoth target.

“Sabotage by angry fellas is why the company maintains an army of police to protect itself. An enormous army. But like any army, we need so many soldiers we can’t pick and choose, and sometimes we must recruit what others more privileged might call the dregs . . .”

He glowered around the room, and half the detectives there expected him to whip out a blackjack. Instead, he concluded, with a cold,