Isaac Bell shot awake from his first full night’s sleep since he had left New York. The berth was tilted forward, and he did not have to look out his stateroom window to know that they had crested the Sierra Nevada and were beginning the descent to the Sacramento Valley. Five hours to San Francisco. He got up and dressed quickly.
Had he missed a bet?
“Days ago,” he muttered to himself.
He had not once questioned the novelist Arnold Bennett’s role as Harold’s and Louis’s protector. What if the opposite had occurred? What if the writer was also a British spy? Like Abbington-Westlake, hiding behind a scrim of upper-crust, above-it-all mannerisms and a witty tongue?
The train pulled into Sacramento. Bell bolted to the telegraph office and sent a wire to New York. Was Bennett the one who recruited the tong hatchet men and dressed them up as divinity students? Talk about hiding in plain sight. For all he knew, Bell realized, Arnold Bennett was the spy himself, the leader of the ring.
KATHERINE DEE cursed aloud.
Like a sailor, she laughed, giddy on little sleep and lots of dust. Cursing like a sailor. Wind and spray were playing hell with the cocaine she was sniffing from an ivory vial to stay awake on the final night of her voyage from Newport. She could not see the coast, but the thunder of the surf told her she had she veered too close.
She had sailed the heavily laden catboat down the southern coast of Long Island, timing her passage from Montauk Point to enter Fire Island Inlet at first light. She steered, unseen except by some fishermen, through the opening in the barrier beach. Once inside, out of the ocean swells, she followed a channel marked with stakes and watched for her landmark on the Long Island shore five miles across the bay. When she spotted it, she crossed the choppy waters of the Great South Bay steering for a white mansion with a red roof. Stakes marked the mouth of a newly dredged creek bulkheaded with creosoted wood.
The catboat glided up the glassy creek.
The boathouse was clad in new cedar shingles. The roof was tall, the opening high enough to accommodate the low mast. Katherine Dee lowered her sail and let the boat drift. She had timed it just right. It stopped close enough for her to toss a looped line around a piling. Pulling on the line, directing her strength with economy, she eased the heavily laden boat stern first into the shadows under the roof.
A man appeared through the back door that opened to the land.
“Where’s Jake?”
“He tried to kiss me,” she answered in a distant voice.
“Yeah?” he said, as if to say, You’re a girl, what do expect alone on a boat in the middle of the ocean? “So where is he?”
She looked him full in the face. “A shark jumped into the boat and ate him.”
He considered the way her smile stiffened her mouth, the iceberg grimness in her eyes, and the people she knew, and decided that Jake had gotten what he deserved, and he was not at all interested in how it had happened. He held up a wicker basket. “I brought you supper.”
“Thank you.”
“I brought enough for two. Not knowing that-”
“Good. I’m starving.”
She ate alone. Then she spread her sleeping bag on the canvas cushioning her cargo and slept secure in the thought that Brian O’Shay would be proud of her. The explosion at the torpedo factory had masked the theft of four experimental electric torpedoes that had been imported from England for research. Armed with TNT by the brilliant Ron Wheeler, they were ten times more powerful than the English had made them. And no one at the Newport Naval Torpedo Station realized that they had not been blown to smithereens.
38
THERE YOU ARE, BELL! JOLLY GOOD, WE DIDN’T MISS saying good-bye.”
Bell was surprised when he reboarded the train as it pulled out of Sacramento on the last ninety-mile leg to San Francisco that Arnold Bennett and the Chinese, who were ticketed through to San Francisco, had their bags packed and in the corridor.
“I thought you were going to San Francisco.”
“Changed our mind, inspired by all these orchards and berry fields.” The train was passing through strawberry fields crowded with fruit pickers in straw hats. “We’re hopping off early at Suisun City. Decided to catch a train to Napa Junction. An old school chum of mine is farming up St. Helena way-started a vineyard, actually, stomping grapes and all that. We’ll recover bucolically from the rigors of our travels-splendid as they were-before pressing on to San Francisco. I’ve a mind to cobble up an article for Harper’s on the subject while the boys enjoy some fresh air in the country before carrying the Word of God home to China.”
Bell thought fast, envisioning the long, sprawling bays of San Francisco enclosed from the Pacific Ocean by the San Francisco Peninsula and the Marin Peninsula. From Suisun City, the main line continued southwest seventeen miles to the Benicia Ferry that carried the train across the narrow Carquinez Strait to Port Costa. Then the final thirty-mile run beside San Pablo Bay to Oakland Mole, where a passenger ferry crossed San Francisco Bay to the city.
Twenty miles north of the city, up San Francisco Bay and across San Pablo Bay, was the Mare Island Naval Shipyard. It was the U.S. Navy’s Brooklyn Navy Yard of America’s West Coast, with a long history of building, repairing, and refitting warships and submarines. Napa Junction, connected to Suisan City by a local branch line to the west, was only five miles north of the shipyard.
Bennett and the Chinese would be a short train or electric trolley ride from Mare Island, where the Great White Fleet would put in from its voyage to refit, replenish food and water, and load fresh ammunition from the magazines.
“Isn’t that a coincidence?” said Isaac Bell.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m taking that very same train.”
“Where are your bags?”
“I travel light.”
The Overland Limited pulled into Suisun City ten minutes late. The train to Napa Junction was blowing its whistle. Bell snatched a handful of wires waiting for him at the telegraph office and hurried to board. It was a two-coach local, with a gaily striped awning sheltering its back platform. There were a half dozen passengers in the rear car, Arnold Bennett in their midst and starting to tell a story. He interrupted himself to indicate an empty seat. “Come let us talk you into tromping grapes with us at St. Helena.”
Bell waved the telegrams and headed back to the platform to scan them in private. “Join you in a minute. Orders from the front office.”
Bennett laughed jovially, calling over his shoulder, “But you already know they’re only instructing you to sell more insurance.”
The train was crossing salt marshes, and the cool, wet wind that swirled under the awning smelled of the sea. The wind rattled the emergency-brake handle that swung from a short rope rhythmically against the wall and buffeted the flimsy yellow telegraph paper.
Research had no word yet from Germany on the identity of the schoolgirl who was Riker’s ward-that it was taking so long was proof that Joe Van Dorn was right to expand field offices into Europe.
They had unearthed additional details about the death of Erhard Riker’s father in South Africa in 1902 during the Boer War. Smuts, the Transvaal leader, had led a sudden raid on the copper-mine railroad from Port Nolloth, where the senior Riker was searching for a rumored deposit of alluvial diamonds. He was taking refuge in a British railroad blockhouse when the Boers attacked with dynamite hand bombs.
The third wire was from James Dashwood.
RIKER ARRIVED LA.
NOW EN ROUTE TO SAN DIEGO.
BODYGUARD PLIMPTON SUSPICIOUS.
JD MISTOOK FOR TIFFANY JEWEL AGENT.
BODYGUARD PERSUADED JD ITINERANT TEMPERANCE SPEAKER.
Bell grinned. Dash had the makings of becoming a character. His grin faded abruptly. The last wire in the stack started with the warning initials YMK.