The Striker ib-6

by Clive Cussler

  “The brokers.”

  “Right. What do you know about them?”

  “I think Dad used them once or—”

  The train jerked, and he spilled whiskey over his shirt. “Dammit to hell. I will fire that engineer.”

  “He’s displayed a fine smooth hand up to now,” said Bell. “I wonder what’s got into him?”

  Kenny Bloom dabbed his shirt with a napkin. “Overpaid son of a bitch has probably been drinking.” The train picked up speed.

  “What do you know about Thibodeau & Marzen?” Bell asked again.

  “Old-fashioned old codgers.”

  “Are they honest?”

  Kenny dabbed his shirt some more, then poured another glass. He gestured with the bottle. Bell shook his head.

  “Are they honest?”

  “Honest as the day is long. Frankly, I don’t know how they survive on Wall Street.”

  Bell looked at their reflections in the night-blackened glass. Lights in a farmhouse raced by. Old and honest? Had Clay and his boss somehow tapped secretly into Thibodeau & Marzen’s private system?

  “We’re making time at last,” said Kenny. “Running fast and hitting the curves hard. Maybe I won’t fire him after all.”

  “What? Oh yes.”

  The train was highballing through the night, although the rate of speed was not that apparent. Their car was coupled between a stateroom car, which rode directly behind the tender, and the diner car at the back of the train. Thus anchored, it did not sway much, while thick insulating felt between the paneling and the outer walls muffled wind and track noise. Bell was surprised, as they passed a small-town train depot, how fast its lights whipped by.

  A sudden chatter broke the silence.

  Kenny darted to the telegraph key. They had picked up a message by grasshopper telegraphy, the signal relayed to the speeding train from the telegraph wires that paralleled the tracks through an Edison-patented electrostatic induction system. Fluent since boyhood in the Morse alphabet, Kenny cocked his ear and wrote furiously, then carried what he had written to Bell, his expression grave. Bell, who had listened intently, knew why.

  “For you,” said Kenny.

  “I told the boys I’d be on your train.”

  He read it, his brow furrowing.

  “Looks bad,” said Kenny.

  “Hellish,” said Isaac Bell.

  REGRET TOWBOAT CAMILLA EXPLOSION. CAPTAIN DIED.

  REGRET UNION HALL FIRE.

  BODYGUARDS FRIED.

  ENJOY YOUR RIDE.

  TRIPLE PLAY.

  43

  “Enjoy your ride?’” asked Kenny Bloom. “What the hell kind of joke is that supposed to be?”

  “A vicious joke,” said Bell, mourning Captain Jennings, murdered for helping the marchers, and Mike Flannery and Terry Fein, whom he had sent into action over their heads.

  “And what does ‘triple play’ mean?”

  The floor shook and the windows reverberated as the train thundered across an iron trestle bridge. “Where’s the conductor?”

  “I don’t know. Back in the diner.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Bell strode quickly to the back of the car and threw open the door into the enclosed vestibule. The wheels were thundering on the track, and the wind was roaring past the canvas diaphragm. Bell opened the diner door and stepped into the car. It was swaying violently.

  “Kux! Conductor Kux! Are you there?”

  The cook stuck his head out of the kitchen. “We’re going mighty fast, Mr. Bell. In fact, we’re going faster than I’ve ever seen this train go.”

  “Where’s Mr. Kux?”

  “I haven’t see him since we stopped for water.”

  Bell ran forward. Kenny was pouring a fresh drink. “We’re bouncing around like a yawl in a storm. What the hell is going on?”

  “First thing I’m going to ask your engineer.” Bell pushed into the front vestibule, heading for the locomotive. The door to the stateroom car was bolted shut. It was a steel express car door. There was no budging it short of dynamite.

  “Locked,” he told Kenny.

  “Something’s nuts,” said Kenny Bloom. “We’re doing ninety miles an hour.”

  The train hit a curve hard. Wheel flanges screeched on the rails.

  “‘Triple play,’” said Isaac Bell, “means we’re next. He shanghaied our crew and tied down the throttle.”

  “I’m stopping us!” Kenny lunged for the red handle of the emergency brake on the wall at the front of the car.

  Bell beat him to it and blocked his hand. “If we slam on the air brakes at this speed we’ll derail her.”

  “We’ve got to stop her. Feel that? She’s still accelerating.” Kenny, who had carried his glass with him, put it down. “Isaac, we’re heading for Pittsburgh at a hundred miles an hour.”

  “How drunk are you?” Bell asked.

  “I’m too scared to be drunk.”

  “Good. Help me out the window.”

  “Where you going?”

  “Locomotive.”

  Bell dropped the sash. A hundred-mile-an-hour wind blasted through the opening and sent everything not nailed down flying about the car in a tornado of cloth and paper. Bell tugged off his coat and thrust his head out the window. The rushing air hit him like a river in a flood. He wormed his torso out, sat on the sash, and attempted to stand. The wind nearly knocked him off the train.

  “I’ll block,” yelled Kenny. He yanked down the next window and squirmed his bulky chest and belly out the opening. Bell tried again. With Kenny blocking the wind with his body, he managed to plant his feet on the windowsill. But when he stood up, it took all his strength to hold on. If he let go either hand to pull himself onto the roof of the car, he would be blown away. Kenny Bloom, hanging on for dear life, saw that and shouted, “Wait!” Then he struggled to stand on his windowsill to shield Bell’s upper body so he could reach for the roof.

  “Don’t!” shouted Bell. “You’ll fall.”

  “I was just as good an acrobat as you,” Kenny yelled back. “Almost.”

  With a herculean effort that made his eyes roll into the back of his head, the rotund Bloom stood up. “Go!”

  Isaac Bell wasted no time pulling himself onto the roof. Kenny had been a pretty good acrobat in the circus, but that was back when they were kids and since then he had lifted nothing heavier than a glass to build his strength. The wind was even stronger on the roof. Bell slithered flat on his belly to the front of the car, over the canvas-covered frame of the vestibules and onto the stateroom car, and crawled forward into a blizzard of smoke, steam, and hot cinders spewing from the engine. Reaching the front of the car at last, he found a six-foot space between its roof and the tender. Coal was heaped in the front of the tender. The back, the steel water tank, was flat, and lower than the roof of the stateroom.

  The wind of their passage at one hundred miles per hour made it impossible to jump the space. Bell put his hands together and extended his arms, narrowing his body as if diving off a high board, and plunged. He cleared the back of the tender, and when his hands hit the steel tank, he tried to curl into a tight ball. He tumbled forward, skidded on the slick surface, and reached frantically for a handhold.

  He found one wrapping the edge, dragged himself forward, dropped onto the coal pile, scrambled across it, and found himself peering into an empty locomotive cab lit by the roaring flames of the firebox that gleamed through a crack in the door. He climbed down a ladder on the front of the tender and jumped into the cab, a hot, dark labyrinth of levers, valves, gauges, and piping.

  He was generally conversant with locomotives from avid reading as a child, schoolboy engine tours hosted by Kenny’s father, and leading a Yale Glee Club midnight excursion to Miss Porter’s School on an Atlantic 4-4-0 “borrowed” from the New Haven Railroad train yards. He left the Johnson bar reverser in the center notch and searched for the throttle.

  The throttle would not budge. He looked closely. The train wreckers
had screwed a clamp on to hold it in the wide-open position. He unscrewed the clamp and notched the throttle forward to stop the flow of steam into the cylinders. Tens of thousands of pounds of steel, iron, coal, and water just kept rolling. Gently, he applied the automatic air brakes on the cars behind him, reducing about eight pounds of pressure, which also set the locomotive’s brakes. Screeching steel and a violent bucking told him, Too much. He put on more air pressure, easing the brake shoes on the wheels, and tried a softer touch. At last the train began to slow until there came a point at about fifty miles an hour when Isaac Bell realized to his huge relief that he, more than momentum, was in command.

  Just in time. He had reduced the train’s speed to a crawl when he saw a red lantern ahead. A brakeman was standing on the tracks, swinging the Stop signal. A passenger train had stopped for a dispatcher’s signal and was blocking the tracks. “Ran back as fast as I could,” shouted the brakeman. “Good thing you saw me. Bumping into us at ten miles an hour, somebody might get hurt.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it,” said Bell.

  While he waited for the train ahead to get moving again, he checked his gauges for boiler pressure and water level and injected more water into the firebox and scooped coal into the fire. Then he followed the passenger train into Pittsburgh, tight on its tail to squeeze through the same switches. Crossing the Allegheny River, he saw a fire at the Point — the still-burning wreckage of the stern-wheeler Camilla. A bigger fire was shooting flames into the sky from the edge of the Golden Triangle. It looked as if the union hall fire had spread to surrounding buildings.

  * * *

  Wally and Mack were waiting at the specials’ platform. One look at Bell’s face and Wally said, “I see you already heard what happened.”

  “Henry Clay wired the news himself. Couldn’t resist bragging. And I just saw the fires from the bridge. Did the boys burn to death?”

  “Firemen I talked to think they had their heads bashed in first.”

  “I should have sent you two. You’d have seen it coming.”

  “Don’t start blaming yourself,” said Mack. “Terry and Mike were grown-ups.”

  “Just so you know, Isaac, they found another body, apparently the guy who set the fire. Papers in his wallet said he was on the Strike Committee.”

  “How come his wallet didn’t burn up?”

  “Smoke poisoning killed him, apparently,” said Wally. “Or so the cops say.”

  Mack said, “Whatever happened, the strikers will catch hell for it. The newspapers are putting on extra editions, howling for blood.”

  “What about Jennings’s steamboat?”

  “Similar situation,” Wally said. “Sheriff’s men shot a striker in a rowboat. It was nearby.”

  Mack said, “With all this in mind, we sent Archie to keep an eye on Jim Higgins.”

  Bell said, “But Jim Higgins is protected by armed strikers.”

  “So they’ll protect Archie, too.”

  Bell nodded. “Of course. You’re right. Thank you for looking after Archie.”

  “Now what?” asked Wally.

  “Any word from Research?”

  “Dead end.”

  Mack handed him a telegram from Grady Forrer.

  THIBODEAU & MARZEN PRINCIPALS UNNAMED, UNKNOWN, UNKNOWABLE.

  Bell had been counting heavily on the broker leading him to Henry Clay’s boss. He crumpled the telegram in his fist and flung it from him. Mack caught it on the fly, smoothed the paper, and handed it back. “Put it away for later. Sometimes dead ends turn around.”

  “Now what?” Wally asked again.

  “Where’s that black steamboat?”

  “Terry and Mike saw it tied up behind a mill at McKeesport.”

  “Which is probably what got them killed.”

  A bell clanged. A gleaming locomotive pulled a New York-to-Chicago limited into the train shed. Bell looked around the train platforms, which were deserted at this late hour. He wondered where Mary was. But he asked, “Where’s Jim Higgins?”

  “Forted up at Amalgamated,” said Mack. “He’s got trains blocked, trolleys blocked, and streets blocked. But the black boat is making them nervous.”

  Wally said, “The cops are gnashing their teeth.”

  “So’s the sheriff,” said Mack. “At least, according to my sources. Rarin’ to roust the strikers out of their tents.”

  “That would be a bloodbath.”

  Wally said, “The operators, and the Coal and Iron cops, and the Pinkertons, and the state militia wouldn’t mind a bloodbath one bit.”

  “But the mayor and some of Pittsburgh’s powers that be are afraid of a bloodbath,” said Mack, “account of all the women and kids. And with church ladies and progressives breathing down their necks. They’re hinting they’ll negotiate.”

  “At least ’til after the ball,” said Wally.

  “What ball?”

  “Pittsburgh Society ball. Big annual la-di-da. Industrialists looking for gentility. Swells steaming in on specials. The mayor knows the newspapers would have the real ball — tycoons dancing on workmen’s graves — so he’s trying to sit on the hotheads for a couple of days more. Meaning we have two days before this blows sky-high.”

  Bleeding steam, the limited from New York rolled beside a platform, and a big man in a voluminous coat bounded down before it stopped.

  Wally Kisley said, “Look out, Isaac! If you think you have problems now, here comes the Boss.”

  Joseph Van Dorn spotted Bell’s wave from across the tracks, strode into the station building, and doubled back to the private platform where his detectives were conferring. On the way he had bought an extra edition the newsboys were hawking inside. He waved it in their faces.

  “Couldn’t help but notice that the city’s on fire. Says here, we lost two men.”

  “Terry Fein and Mike Flannery,” said Bell. “And a steamboat captain who went out on a limb for us.”

  “Us?” Van Dorn demanded. “Who are ‘us’? Detectives or strikers?”

  “Both,” said Isaac Bell. “We ended up on the same side.”

  Instead of remonstrating with Bell, Joseph Van Dorn asked, “Driven there by Henry Clay?”

  “Explosives and arson are Clay’s hallmarks,” answered Bell. “Captain Jennings’s towboat was a dependable workhorse. Highly unlikely it would blow up without help. And even the cops say the union hall was arson.”

  “But conveniently blame a dead striker,” said Wally Kisley.

  Joseph Van Dorn looked Bell in the eye. “What’s your next move, Isaac?”

  Wally Kisley blurted, “Isaac’s next move? Aren’t you taking over?”

  Joseph Van Dorn’s hard gaze never left Bell’s face. He answered in a tone that invited no questions. “Isaac got us into this mess. I’m counting on him getting us out of it. What’s your next step, Detective Bell?”

  Now Mack Fulton protested, exercising the privilege of the Van Dorn Agency’s oldest employee. “It’s too much to put all on him, Joe.”

  And Wally chimed in, “It needs an experienced man with a bird’s-eye view.”

  Van Dorn asked, “What do you say to that, Isaac?”

  Van Dorn, Kisley, and Fulton were staring expectantly at him, and if Isaac Bell had any doubts left about his “bird’s-eye view” of the Striker Case, they were demolished once and for all when Kenny Bloom staggered off his train arm in arm with the cook.

  Both men were clutching highball glasses. Kenny raised his in salute.

  “The man of the hour. Gentlemen, I give you Isaac Bell, the hero engineer who saved the lives of a worthless plutocrat and his worthy cook. Whatever you want shall be yours.”

  Bell said, “It’s not all on me, I’ve got you gents. Here’s what I want— Wally, Mack, I want you two to keep trying to track down Henry Clay.”

  “I’ll track Clay,” growled Joseph Van Dorn.

  “No,” said Isaac Bell, “you can do better than track Clay.”

  “Clay is my fault. He’s m
y monster. I created him. I’ll kill him.”

  “No. If you fail — if Clay eludes you even for a moment — ten thousand people’s lives are at risk. You have to do more— You met the President.”

  “TR. What about him?”

  “Can you meet him again?”

  “Not easily. I’d have to go to Washington. It could take a week. What for?”

  “Go to Washington. We have to keep the strikers and the strikebreakers from killing each other until someone persuades cooler heads to negotiate. If we can’t stop Henry Clay, the President will be the only one who can even try.”

  “You want me to organize a fallback?”

  “If all else fails.”

  Before Van Dorn could formulate an answer, Bell whirled on Kenny and his cook.

  “Cook! I want a big breakfast laid on for twenty men. Kenny! I want a fresh locomotive and train crew.”

  “What for?”

  “I’m highballing your special back to Cincinnati.”

  “Why?”

  “We have only two days. There isn’t a moment to lose.”

  44

  Mary Higgins tipped a nickle-plated flask to her lips and tossed her head back. Her glossy black hair rippled in the thin sun that penetrated the smoke.

  “I was not aware you drank,” said Henry Clay.

  She was amazed how a man who could be so brutal was so prim. “My father had a saloon. I learned how when I was young.”

  “At his knee?” Clay smiled. She looked lovely, he thought, wearing a long coat she had borrowed from her new landlady and a wide-brimmed feathered hat that he had persuaded her to accept after most of her belongings had burned in the union hall. They had ridden the cable-powered incline up Mount Washington and were sitting in a little park with a murky view of the Golden Triangle and the Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio rivers. He was in business attire: frock coat, homburg, and a walking stick that concealed a sword.

  “Father always said a girl should learn to hold her whiskey.”

  “Didn’t you say he had a tugboat?”

  “The saloon was another time, in another city. He was always changing jobs.”