The Thief

by Clive Cussler

  “You heard Fritz. Business is booming.”

  “Yeah, except it weren’t the kind of shop you’d think. Dusty old place. Surly fella behind the desk looked more like the ‘floor manager’ in a saloon than a piano salesman. Hard to believe anybody ever bought anything there.”

  “Maybe you just stopped by on a bad day.”

  “Suppose.”

  GENERAL MAJOR CHRISTIAN SEMMLER, Imperial German Army, Division of Military Intelligence, hurried out of the Palmer House, basking in the drummers’ laughter and their warm farewells. As a child in the circus Semmler had learned from the clowns that an actor who inhabited an alias would never be caught out of character.

  There was a “Drummers’ Table” in every fine hotel in America. In this club, “Fritz Wunderlich,” commission salesman of organs and pianos, was a brother.

  “Fritz Wunderlich” could travel where he pleased.

  Christian Semmler, mastermind of the Donar Plan, never had to explain himself.

  ISAAC BELL AND CLYDE LYNDS CHANGED TRAINS at Chicago to continue across the continent on the Rock Island’s all-Pullman Golden State Limited to Los Angeles. Van Dorn detectives shadowed them so discreetly from the 20th Century’s LaSalle Street Station to the Golden State’s Dearborn Station that even Bell only spotted them twice.

  Once aboard the Golden State, he asked a Van Dorn agent costumed as a conductor if they’d been followed. He was assured, categorically, no. Bell figured it was quite likely true. Joseph Van Dorn had founded the agency in Chicago. The detectives headquartered in the Palmer House were top-notch and proud of it.

  THE GOLDEN STATE LIMITED WAS a transcontinental express that would stop only at major stations along a 2,400-mile run south and west on the low-altitude El Paso Route. A luxurious “heavyweight,” it consisted of a drawing room sleeper, a stateroom and drawing room sleeper, a stateroom car of smaller cabins—where Bell had again booked top and bottom berths—the dining car, and a buffet-library-observation car in the back of the train. Mail, baggage, and express cars rode at the front end directly behind the tender that carried coal and water for the Pacific 4-6-2 locomotive.

  Five minutes before its scheduled departure from Chicago, a slab-sided Bellamore Armored Steel Bank Car bearing the name of the Continental & Commercial National Bank rumbled on solid rubber tires into the Dearborn Station’s train shed. It stopped beside the Golden State. Shotgun-toting guards unloaded an oversized strongbox into the express car.

  The strongbox, as long as a coffin, was addressed to the Los Angeles Trust and Savings Bank at 561 South Spring Street. The destination, and the closemouthed guards who wrestled it into the express car, guaranteed that it was packed with gold, negotiable bearer bonds, banknotes, or a strikingly valuable combination of all three. A friendly remark by the express car messenger, that when he was recently in Los Angeles the bank’s building on South Spring Street was still under construction, was met with cold stares and a curt “Sign here.”

  The express messenger, Pete Stock, a cool customer with a well-oiled Smith & Wesson on his hip, was nearing retirement with every expectation of receiving a fine Waltham watch for brave service to the company. Having guarded innumerable shipments of specie, paper money, and ingots of silver and gold—and having shot it out more than once with gunmen intending to “transact business with the express car”—he checked carefully that the paperwork the brusque Bellamore guard handed him tallied with his manifest, and then he signed.

  ISAAC BELL SENT AND RECEIVED telegrams at every station stop.

  At Kansas City, Kansas, a wire from Marion, who never wasted money on telegraphed words, read:

  GRIFFITH AWAITS CLYDE.

  BRIDE MISSES GROOM.

  Griffith, similarly parsimonious as well as courteous, wired:

  EXPECTANT.

  Pondering the Acrobat, Bell wired Harry Warren in New York:

  MISSED A BET? BRUNO DIDN’T

  TELL BROTHER FRANK WHO HIRED

  HIM. BUT DID BRUNO TELL HIS GIRLFRIEND?

  Harry Warren’s response caught up with Bell the next night. The train was taking on an additional “helper” locomotive to climb the mountains, seventy miles east of the Arizona Territory border at Deming, New Mexico Territory.

  BRUNO TOLD GIRLFRIEND OF COAL STOKER LIKE APE.

  SOUND FAMILIAR?

  Familiar. And odd. The same man seemed to be everywhere, and it occurred to Isaac Bell that the Acrobat was an unusually deadly type rarely encountered in the underworld—a criminal mastermind who did his own dirty work. Whether outlaw or foreign spy, lone operators were elusive, being immune to betrayal by inept subordinates.

  Bell chewed on this while he watched a precision rail-yard ballet performed by the Deming brakemen coupling on the helper. A thought struck him like a bolt of lightning. Despite the military precision of the Acrobat’s attack that had almost succeeded in kidnapping Lynds and Beiderbecke off the Mauretania, if he was a soldier, the Acrobat was no ordinary soldier.

  Military men were not by nature lone operators. Soldiers accepted discipline from above and dispensed orders below. The Acrobat may have been a soldier once, but he wasn’t one anymore. Or if he still was, then he had carved out a unique and exclusive niche above and beyond the supervision and encumbrance of an army.

  Bell cabled Art Curtis in Berlin:

  ACROBAT? MAYBE CIRCUS PERFORMER? MAYBE SOLDIER?

  NOW? BUSINESSMAN WITH KRIEG RUSTUNGSWERK GMBH???

  Bell was painfully aware that it was expecting a lot to believe a one-man field office could unearth facts to support such vague speculation—even with as superb a detective as Art Curtis—so he wired the same message to Archie Abbott in New York. And then, just as the Golden State Limited sounded the double-whistle “Ahead,” Bell fired off another copy to Joseph Van Dorn in Washington.

  ATRAIN WRECKER WIELDED a track wrench by starlight. He was twenty-five miles west of Deming and ten miles from the Continental Divide, where the grade climbed steeply on the Southern Pacific line over which the Rock Island trains ran between El Paso and the West Coast. He was unbolting a fishplate that held the butt ends of two rails together.

  His partner was prying up spikes that fastened the steel rails to the wooden ties. With every bolt and spike removed, the strong cradle built to support hundred-ton locomotives was rendered weaker and weaker. Substantial weight on the rails would now spread them apart. The rails did not have to move far. A single inch would make all the difference between safe passage and eternity.

  But to ensure success, when the wreckers were done removing bolts and spikes, they reeved a longer bolt through a hole in the side of the rail that had carried a fishtail bolt and fastened it to the last link of a logging chain. They had already laid the chain out to its full length along an arroyo, a dry creek bed deep enough to hide the Rolls-Royce touring car they had stolen from a wealthy tourist visiting Lordsburg.

  They were just in time. A haze of locomotive headlamps was brightening in the east.

  A piercing two-finger whistle alerted their man, who was farther up the hill with the horses. The hostler whistled back. Message received—he would commence buckling cinches and loading saddlebags bulging with food and water for the long trek to Mexico.

  The wreckers started the auto and eased it ahead to take the slack out of the chain. Then they waited, the soft mutter of the Rolls’s finely turned motor gradually drowned out by the deepening thunder of twin Pacifics pulling in tandem. When the train was too close to stop even if the engineer happened to see his rail suddenly break loose, they throttled the Rolls-Royce ahead. The rail resisted. The tires spun in sand. But they only had to pull one inch.

  HAD THE GOLDEN STATE LIMITED been distinguishing herself at her usual mile-a-minute clip, the entire train would have jumped the tracks, rolled down the embankment, been set ablaze by the coals in her firebox, and burned to the wheels. But the wreckers were old hands in the sabotage line, and they had deliberately chosen the heavy grade rising up from Demings
toward the Divide. Even with her helper locomotive, the train was barely doing thirty miles an hour when they ripped the rail from under her.

  Locomotives, tenders, and the first express car crashed eight inches between the spreading rails and crunched along the ties, splintering wood and scattering ballast. For what on board the train seemed like an eternity, she skidded along in a cacophony of screeching steel.

  The coupler between the express car and the mail car parted. Electric cables, plumbing pipes, and pneumatic hoses tore loose. With air pressure gone, the rearmost cars’ air brakes clenched their shoes on the wheels. Slowed by the additional drag, the Golden State’s mail car, diner, and sleeping cars finally ground to a stop, half on the tracks and half on the ballast, still upright though leaning at a frightening angle, and plunged into darkness.

  WHEN THE LIGHTS WENT OUT, THE GERMAN whom Professor Beiderbecke had dubbed the Acrobat climbed out of the Continental & Commercial National Bank of Chicago strongbox. Express messenger Pete Stock had already located a flashlight, but he hesitated a fatal, disbelieving half second before reaching for the Smith & Wesson on his gun belt.

  The Acrobat spooled a thin braided cable from a leather gauntlet buckled to his powerful wrist, looped it around Stock’s neck, and strangled him. Then he went hunting for Clyde Lynds, confident that his people had everything in place to execute a swift and orderly escape: across the Mexican border on horseback, a special train to Veracruz, a North German Lloyd freighter, and home to Prussia, where the inventor would be persuaded to rebuild his machine.

  He jumped off the train and ran back toward the Pullmans, counting cars in the starlight as he loped past baggage, mail, diner, and two drawing-room stateroom cars and finally climbing up into the vestibule of the regular stateroom car where Clyde Lynds had just woken up to the chaos of derailment.

  ISAAC BELL MADE A PRACTICE OF sleeping with his feet to the front of a train. Awakened abruptly when his feet smashed into the bulkhead, he pulled on his boots and his shoulder holster.

  “What happened?” Clyde called sleepily from the upper berth.

  “She’s on the ground.”

  “Derailed?”

  Bell drew his Browning and chambered a round. “Climbing slowly on a straight track? Two to one, she had help.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Soon as I’m out the door, lock it. Let no one in, not even the conductor.”

  Bell stepped into the pitch-black corridor and shut the door behind him. As far as he could see, the corridor was empty. He could hear people shouting in their staterooms. They sounded more confused than frightened. Train wreck was never far from any traveler’s mind, but the Limited’s stop, while sudden, had not ended in the splintered wood, twisted metal, smashed bones, and burning flesh that got their names among the dead and injured in tomorrow’s newspapers.

  Bell stood still with his back pressed against the door. His eyes adjusted to the dark in seconds. The corridor was still empty. He could see the shapes of the windows on the opposite side of the narrow corridor outlined by the starlight that bathed the high-desert floor. Outside in the starlit dark he saw a flicker of motion. Were his eyes playing tricks or did he see horses clumped close together, a hundred yards from the train? It was too far and too dark to see if they were saddled, but wild animals so near the thundering derailment would have stampeded to the far side of the mountains by now. These were horses with men.

  Bell saw a flashlight at the head end of the car and, in its flickering back glow, the snow-white uniform of the Pullman porter, Edward, roused from a nap in his pantry. Bell closed one eye to protect his night vision. He sensed motion behind Edward. Before he could shout a warning, the porter crumpled silently to the floor. His flashlight fell beside him, arcing its beam along the corridor toward Bell.

  A stateroom door flew open, and a fat man in pajamas stepped out, shouting, “Porter!”

  More doors banged open. Passengers stumbled into the dark corridor, and Bell realized that the Acrobat’s plan had suddenly gone wrong. He saw the shadowy figure who had knocked down the porter move oddly, thrusting one arm out and folding the other across his face.

  Bell smelled a familiar scent and covered his eyes. He heard a champagne cork pop. A blaze of intensely white light flooded the corridor. Blinded, the passengers fell back into their staterooms, crying out in fear and dismay.

  No one stood between the Acrobat and Clyde Lynds’s door except Isaac Bell.

  Bell had remembered from his circus days the peculiar odor of flash cotton. The clowns loved the gag of igniting cloth impregnated with nitrocellulose to shoot fire from their fingertips, and he had recognized its smell in time to avoid being blinded.

  He charged into the dark straight at the starlit simian shape of the Acrobat.

  “I can’t see!” cried the fat man, stumbling back into the corridor. The tall detective slammed into the fat man. Both lost their footing, and the pair went down in a tangle. Bell somersaulted off and rolled to his feet. The fat man grabbed his ankle in a surprisingly strong grip.

  Bell wrenched himself loose and ran to the head of the car and through the vestibules into the next car. At the far end, flame from the spirit stove for brewing tea in that car’s porter’s closet illuminated a broad-shouldered, long-armed silhouette running past. That porter, too, lay on the floor, either out cold or dead. The tall detective raised his gun and did not waste time ordering the Acrobat to stop.

  Bell aimed for his legs and squeezed the trigger.

  Just as the weapon’s firing pin descended on the rim of the cartridge, detonating the charge within, Isaac Bell jerked the gun upward with all his might. A woman in a dressing gown that glowed white in the starlight had stepped out of her stateroom. She screamed and Bell saw her sleeping cap fly from her head.

  “Are you all right?” an aghast Isaac Bell cried. This was his nightmare: an innocent had stepped into his line of fire. He ran to her, feeling his way along the row of stateroom doors. Then he felt a stinging sensation in his hand—wooden splinters his bullet had gouged from her door—and he realized with enormous relief that no woman shot in the head could keep screaming that loudly. He confirmed that she was unhurt, guided her gently back to her berth, then charged after the Acrobat.

  UNLIKE ISAAC BELL, THE GERMAN was not slowed by confused and frightened passengers blundering out of their staterooms yelling for porters and demanding explanations. He smashed through them, knocking bodies to the floor and shattering glass as he pushed others through the windows. The derailment had extinguished the lights, so no one could see him—although at the moment his own wife would not recognize his face, so contorted was it by rage. Twice now Isaac Bell had upended an intricately planned and precisely executed operation.

  He ran toward the head of the train, and when he reached the mail car whose couplers had parted, he jumped to the ballast and ran past the express cars and the tender. He heard Isaac Bell pound after him. Seizing a golden opportunity to put a stop to Bell’s interference once and for all, the German climbed the side of the helper locomotive.

  Out of nowhere, a brakeman grabbed his ankle.

  The German laid him flat with a kick so powerful the man’s neck broke. But the impact caused him to lose his own balance. He started to fall backwards. Reacting coolly, with a cat’s economy of motion, he flipped his left hand forward. Launched from the gauntlet buckled to his wrist, the weighted end of the wire he had used to strangle the express messenger whirled around a handrail.

  ISAAC BELL SAW THE ACROBAT JUMP ONTO THE cylinder rod that connected the piston to the drive wheels of the helper engine, and he saw the shadow of a trainman who tried to stop him fall to the ground. For a second, Bell thought the Acrobat himself was falling off. Instead, his arm shot up in a peculiar overhead motion. Suddenly he appeared to fly from the connecting rod up past the wheel fender to a handrail above it. He gripped the rail and flipped backwards. The simian silhouette blurred the stars atop the big helper engine, and then
he was gone, disappearing like smoke.

  Bell scrambled after him. The locomotive was festooned with handholds and steps so workmen could reach every part that had to be oiled, greased, cleaned, and adjusted. The fender above the Pacific’s seven-foot-high drive wheels formed a ledge alongside the boiler. He jumped onto the connecting rod, hauled himself on the ledge, stood up, and reached for the handrail. Only after he had locked both hands on it and was clenching his arms to pull himself up did he see the shadow of a boot cannonballing at his face. The Acrobat had not fled, but was waiting on top.

  Bell whipped his head back and sideways, as if slipping a punch.

  The boot whizzed past his ear and smashed into his shoulder. The Acrobat wore boots with india rubber soles and heels, Bell realized. A kick that hard with leather soles would have shattered bone.

  The impact threw him off the locomotive. He fell backwards, tucking into a ball to protect his head. Tucking, twisting, he fought to regain his equilibrium in the air. If he could somehow land on the steeply angled side of the track bed instead of the flat top, he might survive the fall. The star-speckled sky spun circles like a black-and-white kaleidoscope. The dark ground rushed at his face. He hit the lip between flat and slope and skidded down the slope into a dry ditch.

  Bell sprawled there, the stars still spinning. He heard a drumming noise, like hoofbeats. He wondered if he had cracked his skull again. But he hadn’t. His head, in fact, was about the only part of him that wasn’t going to hurt for a week. Scrambling to his feet, ignoring sharp pains in his shoulders and both knees, he heard the sound fade in the distance. Hoofbeats, of course. He had seen horses in starlight. And horses were the fastest way out of rough country.