"My friend," said Archie, "you're worrying too much. We have every base covered. We've been at it a week. Not a peep out of the Wrecker. The boss is tickled pink."

Bell knew that Joseph Van Dorn would not be tickled entirely pink until they arrested the Wrecker or shot him dead. But it was true that the powerful Van Dorn presence had already had the wonderful side effect of apprehending various criminals and fugitives. They had arrested a Jersey City gangster masquerading as a Jersey Central railroad detective, a trio of bank robbers, and a corrupt Fire Commission inspector who had taken bribes to overlook the dangerous practice of storing dynamite on steam radiators to keep it from freezing in the winter cold.

The powder pier worried Bell the most, even though it swarmed with railroad police. Isolated as far as possible from the main piers, it was still too close in Bell's opinion. And as many as six cars at a time were off-loading dynamite onto the lighters that nuzzled around it. Taking no chances, Bell had put in command of the railway police the seasoned Van Dorn agent Eddie Edwards, who knew well the rail yards, the docks, and the local gangs.

WONG LEE WALKED TO the Communipaw piers, his tiny frame bent nearly in half under the weight of a huge laundry sack. A railroad detective loomed over him, demanding where the hell chink boy thought he was going.

"Chop-chop, laundry for captain," Wong answered in the pidgin English that he knew the detective expected of him.

"What ship?"

Deliberately mispronouncing the /s and rs, he named the Julia Reidhead, a steel three-masted barque carrying bones for fertilizer, and the cop let him pass.

But when he got to the barque where Polish day laborers were unloading the reeking cargo, he plodded past and climbed the gangplank to a battered two-masted schooner in the lumber trade.

"Hey, chink?" shouted the mate. "Where the hell are you going?"

"Captain Yatkowski, chop-chop, clothes."

"In his cabin."

The captain was a hard-bitten waterman from Yonkers who smuggled bootleg whiskey, Chinese opium, and fugitives seeking friendlier jurisdictions across the river. Criminals who refused to pay up for passage to safer shores were found facedown in the Lower Bay, and word had gotten around the underworld never to cheat Captain Paul Yatkowski and his mate "Big Ben" Weitzman.

"What do you got, Chinaman?"

Wong Lee put down his sack and gently tugged open the drawstring. Then he felt carefully among the clean shirts and sheets and removed a round cookie tin. He was done speaking pidgin.

"I have everything I need," he replied. Inside the tin was a rack made of a metal plate drilled with holes into which fit copper capsules so that they could be stored and carried without touching one another. There were thirty holes, each filled with a copper capsule as big around as a pencil and half as long. From the sulfur plug in the top of each extended two insulated "leg wires." They were No. 6 high-grade mercury-fulminate detonators, the most powerful.