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.

23

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.”