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

“Bank.”

“What bank?”

“First Silver. What are you going to do to him?”

“We already done him. Just wanted to make sure we got the right bunkie.”

They lowered Eric Soares’s face into the stream again and he knew it was for the last time.

THEY SEARCHED THE PULLMANS, but no one could find Franklin Mowery’s assistant. Isaac Bell dispatched railroad police to search Cascade and the boomtown downriver called Hell’s Bottom. But he doubted they would find him. A foreman had vanished too, along with several Union Pier & Caisson laborers.

Bell went to Osgood Hennessy. “You better inspect the bridge piers,” he said, grimly. “That’s what he worked on.”

“Franklin Mowery’s already down there,” Hennessy replied. “He’s wired Union Pier all morning. No reply yet.”

“I doubt he’ll get one.”

Bell wired Van Dorn’s St. Louis office. The answer came back immediately. The headquarters of the Union Pier & Caisson Company had burned to the ground.

“What time?” Bell wired back.

The return wire was a testament to the Wrecker’s inside information. Adjusting for the difference between Pacific and Central time zones, the first alarm for the fire had been turned in less than two hours after Bell had confronted Franklin Mowery with his suspicions about Eric Soares.

Bell had seen Emma Comden with Hennessy when Mowery reported his concerns about the piers. But within minutes, Hennessy had summoned a dozen cutoff engineers to access the potential for disaster that Mowery feared. So Emma was not the only one aware. Still, Bell had to wonder whether the beautiful woman was playing the old man for a fool.

Bell went looking for Mowery and found him in one of the guard shacks protecting the piers. There were tears in the old man’s eyes. He had blueprints spread out on the table where the railroad cops ate supper and a folder of reports filed by Eric Soares.

“False,” he said, thumbing through the pages. “False. False. False. False... The piers are unstable. A flood of water will cause them to collapse.”

Bell found it hard to believe. From where he stood in the guard shack, the massive stone piers supporting the airy towers that held the bridge truss looked solid as fortresses.

But Mowery nodded bleakly out the window at a barge tied alongside the nearest pier. Tenders lifted a diver out of the water and unhinged his faceplate. Bell recognized the new Mark V helmet. That the company spared no expense was yet another indication of the importance of the bridge.

“What do you mean?” Bell asked.

Mowery fumbled for a pencil and drew a sketch of the pier standing in the water. At the foot of the pier, he scratched the pencil point through the paper.

“We call it scour. The effect of scour occurs when the water scoops a hole in the riverbed immediately upstream of the pier. All of a sudden, the footing is not supported. It will plunge into this hole or crack under the unequal forces... We have built our house on sand.”

42

ISAAC BELL WALKED ACROSS THE CASCADE CANYON BRIDGE.

The span was dead silent. All train traffic had been stopped. The only sounds Bell could hear were the click of his boot heels and the echo of the rapids far below. No one knew how unstable the bridge was yet, but the engineers all agreed it was only a matter of time and water flow before it fell. When he reached the midpoint between the lips of the gorge, he stared down at the river tumbling against the flawed piers.

He was staggered by the Wrecker’s audacity.

Bell had wracked his brain to predict how the Wrecker would attack the bridge. He had guarded every approach, guarded the piers themselves, and watched the work gangs with an eagle eye. It had never occurred to him that the criminal had already attacked it, two full years ago, before they started building the bridge.

Bell had stopped him in New York City. He had stopped him on the rails. He had stopped him all the way through Tunnel 13 right up to the bridge. But here, under this bridge, the Wrecker had proved his mettle with a devastating long-term counterthrust in case all else failed.

Bell shook his head partly in anger and partly in grim admiration for his enemy’s skills. The Wrecker was despicable, a merciless killer, but he was formidable. This sort of planning and execution went far beyond even the New York dynamite attack.

All that Isaac Bell could say in his own defense was that when the Cascade Canyon Bridge fell into the gorge, at least it would not come as a surprise. He had uncovered the plot before the catastrophe. No train loaded with innocent workmen would fall with it. But though no people would die, it was still a catastrophe. The cutoff, the vast project he had vowed to protect, was as good as dead.

He sensed someone walking toward him and knew who it was even before he smelled her perfume.

“My darling,” he called without turning his bleak gaze from the water, “I’m up against a mastermind.”

“A ‘Napoleon of crime’?” Marion Morgan asked.

“That’s what Archie calls him. And he’s right.”

“Napoleon had to pay his soldiers.”

“I know,” Bell said bleakly. “Think like a banker. That hasn’t gotten me very far.”

“There is something else to remember,” said Marion. “Napoleon may have been a mastermind, but in the end he lost.”

Bell turned around to look at her. Half expecting a sympathetic smile, he saw instead a big grin filled with hope and belief. She was incredibly beautiful, her eyes alight, her hair shining as if she had bathed in sunlight. He could not help but smile back at her. Suddenly, his smile exploded into a grin as broad at hers.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Thank you for reminding me that Napoleon lost.”

She had set his mind churning again. He scooped her exuberantly into his arms, winced from the lingering pain of Philip Dow’s bullet to his right arm, and shifted her smoothly into his unscathed left.

“Once again I have to leave you right