Page 58 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm
“Je suis désolé.I am sorry. I talk too much, according to Magdalena. When they were ready to leave my café, they would always toast a man. He sounded important to them, like they worked for him. If you can find him, maybe he can lead you to that…savage.”
“And the name?”
“Joaquim Marques Lisboa. Does it mean anything to you?”
“Not at all. Sounds Portuguese.”
“I do not know, but they all seemed to respect him a great deal. I know it is not much, but I hope it helps.”
As he did with the man’s daughter, Bell didn’t let his disappointment show on his face. The lofty-sounding name of some foreigngentleman wasn’t exactly a hot tip. “Thank you,” Bell told him. “In my line of work, one never knows where a clue will lead.”
They shook hands, and the Belgian ambled back to his quiet little tavern in an unimportant little town in the middle of the greatest war mankind had ever fought.
30
Bell ate his dinner ata café near the small train station. It was potato and leek stew that was unsurprisingly watery. He washed it down with a pale Belgian beer that was remarkably good, if a little sweet for Bell’s American taste. He chuckled at people’s priorities. Thin gruel all day, every day is fine so long as it’s accompanied by a decent beer. He assumed the people in France weren’t scrimping on their wine, either.
He considered dumping his luggage in the trash at the station—the attaché of ball bearings weighed the better part of twenty pounds—but decided to keep his salesman’s cover until he was back in the Netherlands.
The train pulled into the station right on time and Bell found a seat in the first-class carriage. He stowed his two cases on the overhead shelf and got as comfortable as he could. The sun had set, though there was still light in the sky. Bell tipped his hat brim lowover his eyes and tried to shut down the constant swirl of ideas and insights that kept his brain firing at all hours of the day and night.
An hour after crossing the border back into Germany, Bell roused himself to use the facilities at the end of the passenger car. He heard loud voices coming from the next car. It sounded like quite a party. Instinct told him to go back to his seat and sit until the train pulled into his transfer station sometime after dawn, but he was bored and restless. This trip had been a waste of his time, and his investigation into Karl Rath had cratered before it even started. He felt he deserved a consolatory drink.
He passed through the windy vestibule between the two cars and entered the next one up the line. The back half of the carriage was a dining/bar car with white-jacketed waiters and an upright piano against one wall. The group was mostly men in gray/green high-collared army uniforms, with tall black boots and matching belts around their waists. Each one was armed, and judging by the length of their holsters they carried the fabled P-08 Luger pistol.
There were a few women in dresses, likely the wives of the handful of civilian men toasting their army officers.
Bell was only a few paces into the car when he knew he’d made a mistake. Not that he had anything to hide, but mingling with high-ranking German soldiers while he was technically in the country as a spy wasn’t his smartest move.
Not knowing if anyone was paying him any attention, he acted like he realized he’d forgotten something, patted his pockets as if to verify it wasn’t there, and was about to turn on his heel and return to his seat.
Bell knew exactly one German, so the odds of being recognized were low, but not precisely zero. Afterward, when he had a chanceto reflect, it wasn’t all that coincidental. This was the only train running in this part of Germany and it looped westward after leaving Belgium, which made it the logical mode of transportation back home from the castle German intelligence had made their sector HQ.
Deiter Kreisberg was at the far end of the car, effectively screened by the crowd. He had noted Bell’s entrance, and for reasons his conscious mind didn’t understand at first, he couldn’t take his eyes off the newly arrived civilian. In the blink of an eye he realized he knew the man, but couldn’t place from where. It was just as the stranger was about to turn away that the synapsis in the major’s brain produced the spark of recognition.
He almost dismissed the thought as being too ridiculous, but his memory was one of his better assets. Itwasthe American calling himself Abbott, the man who had escaped the castle and killed scores of men, who had put such a black mark on Kreisberg’s reputation that he would likely never be promoted again. As it stood, he was lucky not to be court-martialed for the debacle.
Bell had turned and was a step away from opening the car’s connecting door when a German shouted a terse order behind him.
“Stop that man!” Kreisberg bellowed in German while fumbling with the holster flap securing his Luger.
Most people would have frozen in that moment, at least for a second or two. It’s why police yell vocal orders when trying to apprehend a suspect. A quirk of human evolution makes people pause to better process where the threat is coming from before reacting to it.
Not so Isaac Bell. Even before he registered that he recognized Kreisberg’s voice from their meeting in the German castle, he was flinging open the vestibule door as his shoulders hunched to reduce his size as a target. He was through the door before a quick-acting young lieutenant swiped at his arm, but failed to get a grip.
Bell tore open the door to his car just as the fair-haired soldier started after him in pursuit. Bell reached his compartment and hooked an arm against the open door so that his momentum threw him into the compartment while slowing him down. His hand locked around the handle of his attaché case just as the German reached him. Bell swung the case like an Olympic hammer thrower. The confines were tight and the target close, but Bell had enough power behind his swing to batter the side of the soldier’s head and drop him unconscious to the compartment floor.
Bell lost seconds looking for the man’s gun, only to find he was one of the few in the bar car not strapped with Germany’s signature 9 millimeter.
Bell looked back down the length of the car to see Deiter Kreisberg bull through the interconnecting vestibule with a savage look on his face. Unlike the soldier at Bell’s feet, the German officer had a pistol clutched in his right hand. Bell caught a break as a passenger opened his compartment door to see what the fuss in the hallway was all about.
Kreisberg used his left hand on the man’s face to shove him back into his compartment. It was a small distraction, a couple of seconds at best, but Bell made the most of it. He’d unsnapped his case’s clasps and unhooked the inner cover. Like he was at the lanes near the Knickerbocker Hotel, Bell released the contents of his case in an easy underhand roll.
The companionway was narrow, and so the thousands upon thousands of various-sized ball bearings made a virtual carpet across the entire floor that shifted with each tiny motion that transferred up from the tracks through the train’s wheels.
Bell turned to flee as more men poured into the car to aid their comrade running after who they assumed was a thief, deserter, orspy. Kreisberg fired off a snap shot that shattered the oil lamp sconce just above Bell’s shoulder.
The oil caught fire as it fell to the floor in an incandescent cataract that spread when it hit the floor. The curtain of flames temporarily shielded Bell from his pursuers, but wouldn’t last long, as there was little easily combustible material to help the fire grow, nothing like curtains or a cloth suitcase.
