groin. While he was gasping, paralyzed with pain, they tied his ankles, picked him up, and carried him out of the building. He felt himself slung over a saddle, felt his hands and feet looped under the horse. He yelled through the sack. They hit his head again, and he lost consciousness.
He awoke as they untied his hands and feet, jerked his arms behind his back, and tied his hands again. They removed the sack and shined a light in his eyes. The two men were hulking shadows behind the light. He smelled water and heard it running. They were in some sort of cellar with water in it. Like a mill, he thought, with a stream racing through. The lumberjacks leaned in from the shadows.
“What is the name of your old bunkie from the orphanage?”
“Go to hell,” said Eric Soares.
They grabbed his feet, jerked him into the air upside down, and lowered his head into the ice-cold stream. He was so startled, he didn’t have time to take a deep breath. He ran out of air, struggling frantically. He struggled so hard, his glasses unhooked from his ears. He couldn’t stop himself from breathing in. Water filled his nose and mouth. They lifted him out of the water and held him, still upside down, with his face inches from the stream.
“The name of your bunkie from the orphanage.”
“Why do you . . .” he started to ask, even though he knew exactly why.
He had misread the Senator. Kincaid had turned out to be no patsy.
The lumberjacks dropped him headfirst in the water again. He had had time to suck in air, and he held it as long as he could. Arching his back, he tried to rise out of the water. They pushed him in deeper and held him until he had to breathe in. Water filled his nose and mouth. He struggled, but his strength was failing, and his whole body gradually went limp. They pulled him up. Coughing and gasping, he vomited water and finally sucked in air. As he caught his breath, he could hear them speaking. He began to realize they had pulled him out so they could ask again.
“The name of your bunkie from the orphanage.”
“Paul,” he gasped.
“Last name?”
“What are you going-”
He hesitated. After lights-out in the orphanage, he and Paul had stood back-to-back, fighting off anyone who tried to attack them. He felt their hands tighten around his ankles. “No!” he screamed, but he was already underwater again, raw throat and nose burning, vision fading to pink, then to black. When they finally pulled him out, he yelled,
“Where does he live?”
“Denver,” Soares gasped.
“Where does he work?”
“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 amp; 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 amp; 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,
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.
