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

“That was understood from the beginning,” Hennessy growled. “What the hell are you asking?”

“Who might have known of your plan to acquire a controlling interest in the New Jersey Central Railroad?”

“No one.”

“No one? No lawyer? No banker?”

“I had to play it close to the vest.”

“But surely a complex endeavor demands the help of various experts.”

“I’d sic one lawyer on one portion of the arrangement and another on another. Same with bankers. I put different devils on different aspects. If the word got out, J. P. Morgan and Vanderbilt would fall on me like landslides. The longer I kept it quiet, the better my shot at roping in the Jersey Central.”

“So no one attorney or banker understood the entire picture?”

“Correct ... Of course,” Hennessy reflected, “a really sharp devil might put two and two together.”

Bell took out his notebook.

“Please name those bankers and attorneys who might have known enough to surmise your intention.”

Hennessy fired off four names, taking care to point out that, of them, only two were actually likely to have understood the broader picture. Bell wrote them down.

“Would you have shared knowledge of the impending arrangement with your engineers and superintendents who would take charge of the new line?”

Hennessy hesitated. “To a certain extent. But, again, I gave them only as much information as was necessary to keep them on track.”

“Would you give me the names of those who might have parlayed the information to understand your intention?”

Hennessy mentioned two engineers. Bell wrote them down and put away his book.

“Did Lillian know?”

“Lillian? Of course. But she wasn’t about to blab it.”

“Mrs. Comden?”

“Same as Lillian.”

“Did you share your plans with Senator Kincaid?”

“Kincaid? Are you joking. Of course not, why would I?”

“To procure his help in the Senate.”

“He helps me when I tell him to help me. I don’t have to prime him.”

“Why did you say ‘Of course not’?”

“The man’s a fool. He thinks I don’t know that he’s hanging around me to court my daughter.”

Bell wired for a Van Dorn courier, and when he arrived handed him a sealed letter for the Sacramento office, ordering immediate investigations of the Southern Pacific’s head engineer, Lillian Hennessy, Mrs. Comden, two bankers, two attorneys, and Senator Charles Kincaid.

30

A SOUTHBOUND WORK TRAIN, RETURNING HUNDREDS OF exhausted men for three days’ recuperation after four straight weeks of work, was sidelined to let a northbound materials train through. They were waiting to climb the Diamond Canyon Loop, a sweeping switchback curve fifty miles south of Tunnel 13. The siding had been gouged out of the canyon wall at the foot of a steep slope, and the sweep of the switchback allowed a clear view of the tracks running parallel high above them. What the men saw next would haunt them for the rest of their lives.

The locomotive hauling the long string of boxcars and gondolas was a heavy 2-8-0 Consolidation. She was a mountain-climbing workhorse with eight drive wheels. On this light grade, etched from the side of the canyon, the coupling rods that linked her drivers were a blur of swift motion as she entered the curve at nearly forty miles an hour. Few of the weary slumped on the hard benches of the sidelined work train below took much notice, but those who did look up saw her smoke flatten behind her as she raced high above them. One even remarked to a dozing friend, “She’s highballing like Old Man Hennessy’s got his hand on the throttle.”

The 2-8-0’s engine truck, the short, stabilizing front wheels that prevented swaying at such speed, screeched as they pressed against the curve. Her engineer knew the run to the cutoff like the back of his hand, and this particular bend on the lip of Diamond Canyon was one spot he did not want to hear the screech of a loose rail. “Don’t like that noise one bit,” he started to say to his fireman. In the next millisecond, long before he could finish the sentence, much less throttle back, the one-hundred-twenty-ton locomotives’s lead drive wheel hit the loose rail. The rail parted from the ties with a loud bang.

Free of the wooden ties that held them a hard-and-fast four feet eight and a half inches apart, the tracks spread. All four drive wheels on the outside of the curve dropped off the steel, and the locomotive charged straight ahead at forty miles an hour, spraying crushed stone, splintered wood, and broken spikes.

To the men watching from the work train sidelined at the bottom of the canyon, it looked as if the freight hurtling overhead had developed a mind of its own and decided to fly. Years later, survivors would swear that it soared for an amazingly long way before gravity took charge. Several found religion, convinced that God had intervened to help the freight train fly just far enough that most of it overshot the work train when it tumbled down the mountain. At the time, however, what most saw when they looked up at the terrible thunder was a 2-8-0 Consolidation locomotive toppling off the edge of a cliff and rolling at them with fifty boxcars and gondolas that swept trees and boulders from the slope like a long black whip.

Most remembered the noise. It started as thunder, swelled to the roar of an avalanche, and ended, hours later it seemed, in the sharp, rending clatter of steel and wood raining down on the stationary work train. None forgot the fear.

ISAAC BELL WAS ON the scene within hours.

He wired Hennessy that the wreck was very possibly an accident. There was no evidence that the Wrecker had tampered with the rails. Admittedly, the heavy Consolidation had so battered the point where she jumped the track that it was impossible to distinguish for sure between deliberate removal of spikes or an accidental loose rail. But meticulously filed Southern Pacific Railway police reports indicated that patrols on horseback and handcar had blanketed the area. It was unlikely, Bell concluded, that