The Wrecker by Clive Cussler (read the beginning after the end novel TXT) 📗

the audience enthusiastic, expecting salty passion from the gnarly, red-faced “Captain” Willy Abrams, Cape Horn clippermaster, shipwreck survivor, and reformed drunkard.

“That alcohol is not nutritious ...” Captain Willy thundered. “That it awakens a general and unhealthy physical excitement... That it hardens the tissues of the brain . . . is proven by every scientific analysis. Ask any ship’s officer what makes mutineers. His answer? Alcohol. Ask a police officer what makes criminals. His answer? Alcohol. Ask the prison warden. Alcohol. And think of the expense! How many loaves of bread could grace the kitchen table with the money spent upon intoxicating liquors? How many snug homes could that money build? Why, that money could even pay off the entire National Debt!”

Dashwood paused, momentarily distracted from scanning the men in the audience. Of the many temperance orators he had heard on his search for blacksmith Jim Higgins, Captain Willy Abrams was the first to promise relief of the National Debt.

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 & 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 & 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 & 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